Memorial Bridge (55 page)
An usher recognized them and led the Dillons up the long aisle, directly to reserved seats in the fourth pew on the epistle side, well in front of Cabinet secretaries and national politicians, including the two senators Kennedy. Others already seated in the fourth pew included the former vice president, the heavy-browed Richard Nixon, Martin Donne, the wealthy Irish contractor who had built the Shrine and numerous other buildings for the archdiocese, and former mayor Robert Wagner of New York. Richard noticed that after genuflecting his father glanced back several rows at Secretary McNamara, who did not acknowledge him. To Richard it seemed that his father had just been snubbed, but that made no sense.
The first two pews were occupied by far more ordinary-looking people than the illustrious VIPs next to and behind the Dillons, and Richard sensed that they were the archbishop's relatives. The third pew, the one immediately in front of the Dillons, was vacant.
The organ was playing softly.
Cass sat holding each of her men by the hand. Behind them, well back along the aisle, mourners continued to file into the pews.
Finally, all was still except for the organ, and soon it too fell silent. The vast church, thronged by more than two thousand people, was hushed. Nothing to do but float into the luminous eyes of the mammoth Savior. Richard became impatient for the procession to begin, but the
sudden commotion came then not from the distant rear, where the clergy and pallbearers had gathered with the casket, but from the small doorway to the left of the Dillons' pew. Three men in dark suits came swiftly in, each darting down a different aisle. Two others entered, taking up positions in front of the first pews, staring out over the congregation with such undisguised hostility that Richard thought the show of it must be part of their strategy.
An ear-splitting blast of trumpets, coming on the heels of the arrival of the Secret Service, made many in the congregation jump. The trumpets sounded almost angry, and they were followed on the organ by an agitated liturgical flourish, which led into the first bars of "Veni Creator Spiritu."
The congregation's attention flowed backward in a wave toward the long line of clergy and the coming casket. Everyone in the church stood like one huge stirring animal. Richard continued to watch the small side door, and it was just then, as most heads had turned away, that two more agents came in, leading the President and one of his daughters. They slipped into the vacant pew and moved toward the aisle until they were in front of the Dillons. The girl, the convert to Catholicism, knelt down for her brief prayer, but the President turned as others had, to face the rear. He seemed to draw all the color in the surrounding space to himself, even that of the towering mosaic behind him, as if he were a Technicolor figure having intruded by mistake on the set of a black-and-white movie. Johnson's blue suit, his red tie, his tanned skin and the tiny American flag in his lapel all shimmered brilliantly. Richard had never seen him this close before, or any President, and he felt ambushed by the power of the man's presence. Johnson's lachrymose expression, reminiscent of the one he used on television to talk of the war dead, revolted Richard, but when his eyes and the President's met for an instant, Richard nodded, an act of pure, instinctive, affirming subservience for which he instantly hated himself.
Sean Dillon had his own reaction to the President's arrival. He did not stare. All through the procession and the first part of the liturgy he found it possible to act as if the man in front of him were nobody, but inwardly Dillon felt the knot of his frustration twisting, and from his own deep irrationality he heard, as if it came from someone else, a cry of, Now! Now! Now's your chance to tell him!
When concelebrating bishops and priests had taken their seats in the
sanctuary and the congregation had settled down for the readings, Dillon let his eyes park on the back of Johnson's head. While verses from Isaiah and from the letter of Paul to the Ephesians rolled out with soothing meaninglessness into the vast air above them, Dillon composed his own epistle.
"You are not getting the whole story, Mr. President."
Not an epistle but a speech, one he had been composing for months without knowing it. The reel of his mind spun it off, as if the back of Johnson's head were a prompting device.
"Mr. President, here, behind you. Listen to me. I'm on your side, Sir. I am one of your loyal officers. I'm trying to help you. Listen to what I have to say."
Sean Dillon thought of Johnson as a rational man, as a good man, but also as a man tortured by an inability to make crucial things happen, which was like Sean's own inability, Sean's own torture.
"Here is what is wrong," he imagined himself saying. "By the time intelligence estimates work their way to Washington the rough edges on all the numbers, the pits and flaws and imperfections, have been removed. And by the time they get to you, they are perfectly polished. But it is the pits and flaws and imperfections in those numbers that are killing us. When are you going to get angry at what we're telling you? You keep sending our kids over there, three hundred and twenty-two thousand of them now, and then we turn around and tell you it isn't quite enough. When are you going to ask us why we keep doing that to you? When are you going to get angry at what we are not telling you? Ask us, Mr. President, what the problem is! Demand to know! And some of us will admit we have one. We will explain it."
Dillon's impulse was to sit on the edge of his pew and touch Johnson's shoulder and whisper, "Mr. President, may I see you for a moment after?"
But if Johnson were to turn his face toward him, Dillon realized it would be uncomprehending, and he would have to add, "I'm your director of DIA. I'm one of the men who never gets near you. I put queries beside half the numbers I'm obliged to send you, but I know those indications of doubt are removed before you see them. You deal in summaries, but the summaries never include the questions that nag at men lower down the line or the dissenting footnotes of the few skeptics that are left at my level or even the cautiously expressed misgivings of
men who are on the fringe of your circle. So the summaries on which you base your decisions—four hundred thousand now, five hundred thousand next? six hundred thousand?—never include the most important part, the fact that no one really knows what's going on in Vietnam. Between you and the real war stands a bureaucracy that blocks out that humiliating brutal truth. Well, for once no bureaucracy stands between us, Mr. President, so here it is."
Dillon's one fist was clenched at his side. His other was squeezing his wife's hand so hard it hurt her, but he did not know that. He did not know for certain, either, that he had not begun to speak these words aloud. They came with the fluidity of a crafted speech, not because his mind ordinarily worked that way, but because, in his unconscious, he'd been working these words over for a long time. The words unscrolled as on a prompter, and indeed, his lips were moving. If anyone noticed, perhaps they thought he was praying.
"I am presiding over the production of bad intelligence. My basic job for you, unlike CIA's or NSA's, is to count the enemy. That is the essential function of military intelligence, and I confess I am not doing it. I don't know how to do it. I would admit failure and resign, but no one else knows how to do it either, and I would be replaced by a sycophant general who regards the dogged skepticism of those below him as bad morale, instead of as a clue that must be followed.
"I used to think we were producing mere guesses for you, but lately I'm suspicious even that overstates what we are doing. We produce wishes for you in the form of data, wishes about the number of enemy dead and wishes about the numbers of enemy soldiers coming in from the North. Wishes that make you happy when you first hear them, but more and more, Mr. President, they've been making me nervous. What happens when they explode?
"In that light will we see that all our numbers had more to do with what we all thought you wanted than with what was actually out there in the jungle?
" 'Suspicious,' I said. I used to be a cop. In the Pentagon they still refer to me behind my back as a cop, but I've never considered it an insult. I'm talking about a cop's feeling now, Mr. President, a set of unshakable intuitions about evidence, but my colleagues tell me you are not interested in suspicions or ominous intuition but only in facts. Everything else is defeatism and cowardice. Maybe so. Unfortunately I
can't make this feeling of mine a fact. I've tried and tried but I can't get it into a form in which you or even I can use it. Someone else can, though, and someone else does. The kid from Sacramento or from Duluth or from Selma makes it a fact when he gets killed by an NVA soldier who by all our estimates does not exist. Then the fact we have is designated 'hard,' Mr. President, and why isn't it reason enough then to look again at our main assumptions: that we can seal off the South and win the war there; that we can do without full mobilization; that we can ignore the endless lines of Russian and Chinese supply, especially through Haiphong; or, the most basic assumption of all about this war, that we have to fight it. Asking such questions is not my job, but it should be someone's. Doesn't anyone tell you something else to do about that dead boy from Sacramento than to send his brothers over from Duluth and Selma, changing nothing else, so that they can become hard facts too?"
Dillon paused, as if the President were going to turn now and answer him. When Johnson did nothing of the kind, Dillon let his eyes drift up to the face of the mosaic Christ. It had never seemed so stern to him, and unforgiving. "Cowardice," Dillon repeated to himself.
His trance was broken when the congregation, cued by a gesture of the master of ceremonies, stood up for the reading of the Gospel passage. The choir intoned the alleluias with the forced joyflilness that marked the recently revised funeral liturgy. When Cass squeezed his hand Dillon knew she was thinking how the archbishop would have hated the new form of the Mass. The Dies Irae was gone, and so were the macabre black vestments, and so was the Latin.
The Gospel reading was about the Lord's raising of his beloved Lazarus from the dead, a happy proclamation of the good news if ever there was one. But Sean Dillon—defeatist?—seemed condemned to rebut everything with his doubt, and he found himself wanting to cry from the pew, "But Lazarus died again, didn't he? Where was Jesus then?"
Dillon did no such thing, of course. He sat demurely in his place throughout the liturgy, saying nothing, for that was what the situation required. And Sean Dillon, perhaps despite himself and certainly without fully meaning to, had become over the years the perfection of a man who did what was required. Silence and decorum; as the stages of the Mass progressed he experienced it as a sacrament of his entire life. The
President of the United States was four feet away from him for more than an hour, and Dillon was powerless to reach him with his urgent questions. Sean Dillon had become one more of President Johnson's many underlings whose silence and decorum were efficiently and inexorably making Vietnam an American disaster. If he was different from the others, it was because he knew it.
"I repent myself..." Like an old refrain the line from Genesis began to roll by on the spool of Dillon's mind. Not in years had he thought of it, God's curse on his own creation, or had he felt it addressed so directly at himself. "...of ever having made him."
After communion, when those few in the congregation who received had returned to their places, there was a lull in the ceremony. Ordinarily the celebrant, having wiped the chalice clean, would say the last prayer and offer the blessing, and the recessional would begin. But the celebrant sat down instead. The others on the altar, bishops, priests and servers alike, did the same. For some moments nothing happened.
Then the master of ceremonies moved a lectern to the center of the topmost step, adjusted the microphone and then walked down the half-dozen stairs to the center gate of the communion rail, which he opened. He nodded toward the President, who stood, left his pew, crossed to the communion rail and followed the MC up the stairs. President Johnson turned at the lectern, faced the congregation and began to speak.
Richard heard the President's words as if he were imprisoned in the crypt of that church; they were that unreal to him, that lost, in the stone echo of his own confusion. The President was saying something about his having come to this great church one night alone with Archbishop Barry, where they knelt in prayer together for guidance.
It took Richard a moment to realize he was actually talking about the war. He was talking about a decision he'd had to make about the bombing. President Johnson was talking—and later Richard would realize that this was what had made him snap—about how pained he, the President, was by the killing, about how he suffered with it more than anyone and about how his dear friend the archbishop understood and bore the burden of his pain and suffering with him. And now that our boys had turned the last corner in Vietnam...
Richard had no sense of making an explicit decision to stand up. His act was purely automatic. All that he was conscious of doing was extricating his hand from his mother's. He never looked at her. If he had,
he realized later, he would never have stood or slipped into the aisle or, just as the Secret Service agent tensed, turned away from the President or begun the long walk out of the packed church.
He became aware of what he was doing only in doing it. It took forever. The lugubrious, despicable voice of the unaffected President followed him, but what pounded in Richard's ears was the defiant sound of his own footsteps. The people in the pews stared at him, horror on their faces, and hatred. He felt very small, vulnerable and afraid, but also he felt free. Soon his movement down the length of the nave was not like walking at all, but like flying, and Richard thought of himself for a moment as the sparrow soaring through the great hall, the story his father had told him years before. The eerie glow of the votive candles struck him again as he recalled his father's description of the sparrow's flight—human life—as an interval of light between the two great spheres of darkness.