Overdrive (21 page)

Well, it worked. The audience was calm, and appreciative. But what a lot of
work
. Pat Moynihan, who that same year had had an experience at the University of Pennsylvania equivalent to mine at Vassar, called me up when he read about my withdrawal to say grouchily, "Do those little bastards [the demonstrators] think we have nothing else to
do
with our Sunday afternoons?"

I write my friend that I will need to know that the invitation incorporates accepted procedures of student democracy at the University of South Carolina. Hell, it's their commencement.

We have pulled into my driveway, the weeping willow trees on my right, the scrubby little apple trees on my left, and Jerry stops, as ever, opposite the garage study, which is where I leave my papers. He then drives on to the main house with the bags, and I walk there. As I climb the stone steps the sea becomes fully visible, looking gray and gusty. Burlap bags cover Pat's huge pots and the plants they harbor. I open the main door and feel the warmth of the heating and of my home, and David Niven bounds over and we embrace, French-style, and gabble on as we walk into the sunroom.

Though the talk is full of levity, all is not well. David was last here three weekends ago. He had set out the following Monday on a pretty grueling ten-day trip to promote his novel
Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly
, just published by Doubleday, already a best-seller in England and destined for best-sellerdom in the United States. I had noticed then that he wasn't in full control of his speaking voice. Saturday night we showed him the tape made the preceding spring when he appeared as master of ceremonies at the fine two-hour Hollywood tribute to Fred Astaire. We had seen him in Switzerland before and after the Astaire business, and he had told us he had had a most fearful time controlling his voice, so much so that at one point he was not sure he would be able to go on. So we listened intently as we viewed the videocassette, in David's company (he had never seen it), and although he did sound a little laryngitic, the problem was not distracting to the viewer. But three weekends ago he'd had clear difficulty in enunciation, and was so worried about it that he reduced his liquor consumption from his normal three glasses of wine per day to a single glass; this, though, had made no difference. He had told Pat and me that the doctor in London had deduced that it was a plain matter of physical fatigue (he had been working very long hours on a movie) and that after the lecture tour was over he was heading for Acapulco and there, as a guest of Loel Guinness for ten days, he expected to recuperate fully. So now I listened to him attentively as he described his travails on the promotion circuit, to see whether in fact he had licked the problem. He hadn't; and soon we were speaking about that frankly, and inquisitively; such an exchange as is possible between close friends.

At that moment the bell rang, and Sam and Jo Vaughan came in. Sam is incapable of arriving anywhere without great parcels of gifts, which he now distributed, including the first copy of my new novel,
Marco Polo, If You Can
. Pat had come down, and in the bustle we managed to hang the coats, and the lot of us went back, through the living room, to the sunroom. Sam is David's publisher as well as my own and, a description I used once in
Cruising Speed
about another friend, quite simply a bird of paradise. It is not known how anyone can manage to be as attentive as Sam is to his friends and authors, and not infrequently one qualifies as both. His notes are bright, cheerful, witty, inventive. He is, for his authors, a
presence
. There is nothing more important to an author; and David, who went from another publishing house to Doubleday in part on the strength of the liking he took to Sam, agrees. David hadn't before met Jo, petite, pretty, bright, easily amused, attentive in just that winning way that permits nuanced conversation. She has been suffering from a bad back. I have chronic sinusitis, Dupuytren's contracture, and skin cancer, so I suggest that we devote three minutes to our several physical complaints, and then shift to sublime subjects, like David's and my books. Pat celebrates this by distributing bloody marys, which she makes with one-half bloody mary mix, one-half beef broth (necessarily Campbell's beef broth, even when Jack Heinz is being served). And at just that moment Van Galbraith comes in, apologizing that wife Bootsie can't come. Van and David and I have experienced years of each other's company in the Gstaad area, to which Van began bringing his family for skiing vacations over ten years ago, and so it is in the nature of a reunion. The company was already hearty, but the supplement of Van Galbraith raises it very nearly to the level of hilarity, and the conversation bubbles along.

Van leaves tomorrow for Paris, where he will be the freshly invested United States ambassador. Three weeks ago he paid me a nice compliment and his expression of the favor was conveyed with marvelous obliqueness. He told me that the swearing-in ceremony at the State Department had now been fixed for November 13, that about one hundred friends and family were coming in for it, that the ceremony would take place in "one of those ornate places over there," that the procedure was that Bill Clark, Deputy Secretary of State, would preside (Al Haig would be out of town); Lee Annenberg, the chief of protocol, would administer the oath. "Then there's a speech given about me, a personal speech, and I wonder if you'd give it, although don't go out of your way, maybe the date's no good." I checked and it was okay. Ten minutes on Van Galbraith . . .

A year ago I had sat through the three and one-half hours of raw film taken by Mark Dichter and his assistant, who had accompanied Van and me and four other friends on a sailboat. We sailed from the Virgin Islands to Bermuda, and then on to the Azores, and to Spain. But the cinematographers were with us only on the first leg (the idea was to produce a documentary). I dimly remembered that two or three minutes of the two hundred I had seen depicted Van in an argumentative mood with Dick Clurman on the matter of working for the government, Van going on about the sheer futility of the exercise. So I called Mark. Mark, would you do me a
great
favor . . .

It took a great deal of arranging, and the State Department people were at first a little sluggish, but soon got into the spirit of the thing. Unknown to any of the fifty-odd government officials and hundred-odd guests of Van, when they promenaded into the elegant Franklin Room, was that a huge television screen had been hidden behind an oriental screen in the corner of the large room. Hidden also was a television videocassette player into which the three minutes of incriminating film had been inserted. So that when the signal was given by me from the lectern, the lights would suddenly dim and the crowd, standing, would hear Van's voice, turn around, and see him sitting, dressed in shorts and polo shirt, in the cockpit of a sailboat, barreling over the Atlantic Ocean, and giving his views of government service in language appropriately salty. Oh, the thought of it that day was almost too wonderful to endure. When I arrived at the State Department, Van greeted me, while his aide, in on the plot, winked, which meant everything was going well; and we went and chatted with Bill Clark for a few minutes until the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

It was all very solemn, and before my eyes my old friend suddenly became, by act of Congress and of the President of the United States, ambassador to France, successor to Benjamin Franklin. I was then introduced for the traditional personal tribute . . .

Secretary Clark, Jim [brother James, Under Secretary] , Ambassador Galbraith, ladies and gentlemen.

It is characteristic of the personal courage of Ambassador Galbraith that he should have deputized me to speak on this solemn occasion. Courageous because I have known him for many years, and very well.

But then I have been told that the ceremony here today, to the extent that I figure in it, is
intended
to be highly personal. This was said to me by no fewer than three State Department officials, from which I deduce that there was some active concern in these parts that I might take the occasion to recite my
Weltanschauung
. To do so would be in the tradition of those journalists who do not report events without giving historical background. We recall that the lead sentence in the London
Times
announcing the declaration of war against the Kaiser began: "Back in 1870. .

Well, if it is to be personal history, so be it.

Back in 1947, it happened that I won the only election I ever won. I remember having called my brother Jim, at the time a student at the Yale Law School, while I was a freshman in the undergraduate school. I had expected that the voting for the chairmanship of the
Yale Daily News
, which election was traditionally carried out one year before assumption of office, would be close. Since Jim had been an officer of the newspaper, I asked him whether it would be ethical for me to vote—in the unsigned ballot we each would insert into the basket —for myself. Jim, then as now, believed in deliberation; but told me that Yes, he thought this could be done discreetly, and in good conscience. And so the following day I folded the piece of paper with my own name written on it and dropped it in with the other twenty or thirty. A few minutes later the incumbent chairman emerged, and announced that I had been elected the chairman of the
Yale Daily News
for 1948. He paused dramatically and smiled, adding, "I am pleased to report that Bill was elected unanimously."

We moved, a few of us, from that chamber to the nearest watering hole, which was Deke fraternity house, and there a blond, heavyset fellow sophomore accosted me to ask, with what I came to know as characteristic curiosity and ebullience, just what was the hilarity all about? It is something of a poetical miracle that exactly thirty-five years later, I should be involved in a situation that calls for at least as much hilarity. The similarities are almost perfect. It is rumored that Van voted for himself. And the President has told me that the vote for Van was unanimous.

I have not confided to the President, or to Secretary Clark, or to anybody, I guess, my special knowledge of the general and orderly deliberation given by Van Galbraith to the hypothetical possibility of joining the government.

It happens that in June a year and a half ago, when the President was still only a candidate for the Republican nomination, Van and I were together, as I am happy to say we have often been, on a sailboat. I have in mind a conversation we had about two hundred miles south of Bermuda, heading first for that island, then on to the Azores, then to Spain. There were six of us doing the sailing and the navigating. The day was blue, the wind brisk; we were an entire happy day removed from a sloppy and emetic little storm that had dogged us for forty-eight hours. As we were eating lunch, one of our company, Dick Clurman—former head of correspondents for Time-Life, and former Commissioner of Parks and Cultural Affairs in New York City—was arguing the nobility and inspiration of public service. As I remember I was somewhat skeptical, adhering to a rather dogmatic position that there was a deep and instinctive antagonism between service in the private and in the public sectors. Van, if I remember, joined in expressing skepticism of a sort, reminiscing briefly about his single experience in public service, as aide to a Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration. If memory serves, the conversation was not extended, lasting only for three or four minutes, but the banter did indicate something of the mood of the freshly installed Ambassador to France, back in the long ago, when there was another President in the White House, and when the only immediate problem Van Galbraith faced was whether the navigator would succeed in guiding the boat to Bermuda. . . .

[At this point the videotaped section came on the screen. It showed the ketch in full sail, Clurman and Galbraith heatedly arguing in the cockpit, Galbraith insisting that working for the government was generally pointless. He recalled his own experience as a legal aide to the Secretary of Commerce under the Eisenhower administration. The last words the audience heard him utter were: "Don't you understand, Dick, most of the people in Washington are
assholes."
The crowd roared, the screen went blank. . . .]

For the first years of their marriage, Van and Bootsie lived in Paris. They came back, briefly, to America for a year in New York, after which they were gone again, this time to London, where for a number of years he pursued his professional career [as a banker-lawyer], traveling frequently to New York and spending his vacation periods for the most part in Switzerland, where on his first visit I took him skiing for the first time. As I think back on it, if I were to add the distances we have sailed together to the distances we have skied together, it is probably safe to say we have, by wind and gravity, circled the globe.

It was at law school at Harvard that Van first interested himself in the politics that make the world go round, so very eccentrically. Soon he became conversant with the principal engines of political behavior, and with those forces that have pockmarked this century. I remember once, in 1957, when we found ourselves in Baltimore to serve as ushers at the wedding of a friend, and in the morning I thought impulsively to visit Whittaker Chambers in Westminster, one hour away. One would not take just anyone to that reclusive eyrie in western Maryland, but I took Van there with full confidence, and we stayed two hours. A few days later I had a letter from Chambers. He began it, "I liked Galbraith at sight. This happens so seldom with me that I wondered why it happened. As I listened to him laugh, watched him study the titles of my books, watched his mind fasten on one or two points of no great importance in themselves, but somewhat as an ant, at touch, clamps on the rib of a leaf that may be littering its path, I liked him better. I decided that what I liked was a kind of energy, what kind scarcely mattered. One of our generals was once being ho-ho-hearty with the ranks, as I understand generals are sometimes, especially if newsmen are present. He asked a paratrooper, 'Why do you like to do an insane thing like jumping out of airplanes?' The paratrooper answered: 'I don't like to, sir, I just like to be around the kind of people who like to jump out of airplanes.' I felt something like the paratrooper about Galbraith. . .

His friends, for whom I speak, would agree that his qualities are special. Everyone who has known him is more cheerful for the experience of having known him. The French will find him, in his official capacity, in no sense different from how they found him in private life fifteen years ago. He is hospitable to every kind of ambiguity, charitable in his constructions of human behavior, but entirely convinced that the Lord has provided man with a fundamental apparatus by which we distinguish between what is right and what isn't; and convinced that the challenge to right thought and right conduct was never in history more menacingly threatened. I can imagine no presence in Paris more distinctively American than Van's, because jaded and worldly men will see in him the storybook American, the man of spontaneity and steadfastness, of innocence and wit, of flexibility and purpose. It may seem somehow wrong, in these circumstances, to congratulate the French people, but exactly that far I am prepared to go, confident as all of us who have known him over the years are, as also those of you in government who have known him over the years or have come recently to know him—Al Haig, Bill Clark, Bill Draper, Tom Clausen, Tom Enders, Jim Buckley, Jack Maresco, my son Christopher—that his presence as his country's ambassador will inform and refresh, yet another installment in the apparently endless repayment of the debt we incurred when, as a young and struggling republic, we welcomed the arrival of Lafayette. I join you all in wishing him and Bootsie a great and fruitful adventure, in the service of our beloved country.