(1964) The Man (91 page)

He came to his feet, smiling. “I’ve already done it, Sue. I called him an hour ago and told him he had his attorney. I told him we were in this together, sink or swim, from tonight on. I thought he’d—he’d cry.” He encircled her with an arm. “Well, it’s done. I don’t know if I can help him, but one thing I do know. I didn’t do it for him alone, Sue, I did it for us.”

She kissed him, and she whispered, “I love you so.” And when he released her, he could see that her face had never been more alive with excitement. “Nat, let’s call the children, and then let’s celebrate with dinner up here, and then—then let’s love each other, tonight and forever, and never stop.”

He reached for her again, but she laughed and slipped away and went to change into her robe. Only at the bathroom door did she hesitate and half turn to him, her sweet face grave and troubled. “Nat, can you save him? You must. I want this to be the kind of country we’d like to leave for our children to grow up in, one where they can live unafraid, one they’ll be proud of. That would be the best thing we could leave them—not a farm, not a hundred farms or a million dollars—but a country like that.”

A
s the time for combat drew closer, Douglass Dilman had taken to rising earlier each morning. He was living, he found, two wholly separate lives: in one, he continued to perform the endless exacting duties of the Presidency; in the other, he strenuously prepared for the criminal trial that would determine if he was fit or unfit to perform those duties.

He sought and found extra hours he had not previously known existed. Sometimes it astonished him how many there were of these, stolen from sleep, from daydreaming, from inconsequential engagements. Amazingly, these hours he subtracted from himself, for himself, seemed to cost him little loss of energy or hope. It was as if he had discovered, and tapped, a new reservoir of stamina. His single-minded determination to fight back gave him a vigor he had never before enjoyed. His ceaseless activity left him no time to brood about the prosecution that awaited him or to anticipate its likely results.

This morning—because it was the morning of one of the most crucial days in his life—had begun earlier than any other.

Beecher had entered the Lincoln Bedroom at six-thirty, awakened him, opened the drapes to the dark, ominous sky, and then had drawn his bath. After that, attired in the blue terry-cloth robe that Wanda had given him one Christmas, Dilman had padded through the West Hall to the sitting room of the private apartments so many other Presidents had used, and where he had only this week begun to eat his breakfast.

Eight newspapers, among them the New York
Times
, the New York
Herald Tribune
, the Washington
Post
, the Washington
Star
, were piled high beside his place mat. He took pride in the fact that one of the eight was Zeke Miller’s scurrilous Washington
Citizen-American
, and that his ego was sufficiently reinforced by the knowledge of injustice being done to him to read it, and he was prouder still that one week ago he had again subscribed to the Washington
Afro-American
. Beneath the pile, he knew, like an intelligence report on the enemy camp less than two miles away, lay the
Congressional Record
.

This morning, he had been too preoccupied with ideas for the forthcoming and final meeting with his legal defense staff, and then too devoted to the folder with the label “Application for Executive Clemency re Jefferson Hurley, Petitioned by Mrs. Gladys Hurley (Mother) and Mr. Leroy Poole (Friend)” to open a newspaper.

After breakfast, having gathered the newspapers under one arm, still reading the petition for commuting Hurley’s sentence from death to life imprisonment, he had gone up the corridor, meaning to change into his clothes. But then he had wandered into the Monroe Room, next to his bedroom, and dumping his newspapers on the pedestal table, he had sat in a Victorian chair and read on through the folder submitted by the Department of Justice.

It was there that Nat Abrahams and Nat’s associates had found Douglass Dilman at seven forty-five, his petition laid aside, his newspapers strewn about him on the carpet, still in his terry-cloth bathrobe, absorbed in the fantasies of the
Congressional Record
.

Dilman had read that the House of Representatives had named five of its most forensically able members to the task of trying him, with Representative Zeke Miller the chief prosecutor. He had read that the Senate, after the formality of converting itself from a legislative body into a high tribunal of justice, had voted upon sixteen rules of parliamentary procedure to govern its behavior as a court of impeachment. He had started to read about other arrangements being made for the Roman holiday scheduled to commence at one o’clock sharp this afternoon, when Nat Abrahams, pipe streaming smoke, had arrived, followed by Felix Hart, Walter T. Tuttle, and Joel Booker Priest.

Dilman gestured toward the chairs around the table, and apologized for his bathrobe. Then, as they unstrapped and unlatched their briefcases, Dilman became conscious of the chamber in which they were about to confer.

“Isn’t it strange I wound up in this room?” he said. “I wonder what compelled me to come into the—into this room—the Treaty or Monroe Room, it’s called. I’ve never used it for a meeting before.”

“What’s so strange about it?” Felix Hart, Abrahams’ young Chicago partner, inquired.

“Look at the inscription over the fireplace,” Dilman said.

Felix Hart scurried over to the white fireplace and, bending slightly, read the mantel inscription aloud. “ ‘This Room Was First Used for Meetings of the Cabinet During the Administration of President Johnson.’ “He looked up, awed. “I assume that means Andrew Johnson, not Lyndon.”

“It does,” Dilman said. “Maybe this is a good omen. I hope I get off as lucky as he did in his trial.”

Without glancing up from the sorting of his notes, Nat Abrahams said. “That was a one-vote acquittal, Mr. President.” Dilman was once again disconcerted by his friend’s formality. Ever since his legal associates had been brought in, Abrahams had taken to addressing him as Mr. President, instead of Doug. Then Abrahams added, “We’ve simply got to do better than that. . . . Ready, gentlemen? We don’t have much time. Let’s review the whole business again, before heading up to the Hill.”

Promptly, they plunged into the last-minute summary of Dilman’s defense. For Dilman, the discussion was comforting. These were attorneys, and he was an attorney, and their language had the mathematical precision of Law School and his legal practice of long ago, so dear to his memory. The talk was rooted in tradition and precedent, and great names of the American bar, some heroes, some rascals, all geniuses in their fashion, were evoked. Dilman listened to the names of Webster, Choate, Stanbery, Darrow, Steuer, and many more.

Dilman gave his complete attention to his four managers—even the title “managers,” as applied to attorneys in a Senate impeachment trial, had a comforting ring, as if these were men who not only defended, but controlled, guided, administered, directed their respondent, who might otherwise be helpless. Dilman heeded every exchange, as they examined the Articles of Impeachment point by point, sentence by sentence, and even word by word. They were trying to anticipate the course that Zeke Miller’s prosecution might take, and foresee what damaging evidence the House’s witnesses, signed affidavits, submitted exhibits, might present.

Then they reviewed one more time how the House’s case could best be refuted.

In replying to Article I, they appeared to be confident they could show that Wanda Gibson had never been privy to any government top secrets that she could have passed on to her Communist employers. They had other former Vaduz employees standing by to swear that Miss Gibson’s connection with Franz Gar was no more than that of secretary to employer, and that she had never been heard speaking to him about matters that were not concerned with her immediate job.

Dilman’s managers displayed little concern about Article II. Their interrogation of Julian Dilman had convinced them that he had never been a member of the Turnerite Group, and that even if he had been, there could be no proof that the President had conspired with his son and the subversive Negro organization to obstruct the Department of Justice.

However, Dilman was surprised at the massive dossier his managers had assembled in an effort to knock the underpinnings out from under Article III, an omnibus of scandalous accusations. They had put such extra effort into their rebuttal of this charge not because they believed the charge had legal substance, but because they saw that it might have effective propaganda value for the prosecution. First, they had investigated Sally Watson’s entire erratic history, but apparently Senator Hoyt Watson’s long influential arm had thwarted them at every turn.

As to answering Miller’s allegation of the President’s extramarital affair with Miss Gibson, the success or failure of the defense would depend entirely on how Miss Gibson conducted herself testifying and under cross-examination on the witness stand. In replying to the House charges of Congressional contempt, Negro favoritism, alcoholism by Dilman, once more the defense managers were ready to rest their case entirely on the impression made by their own eye-witnesses and expert deponents.

It was Article IV, Dilman observed, that continued to disturb his managers the most. This would resolve itself into a battle over the constitutionality of the New Succession Bill, and the degree to which Congress might ever be permitted to limit the powers of the executive branch.

To reinforce his rebuttal of Article IV, Nat Abrahams had, the morning after accepting Dilman’s defense, insisted that the President make a new appointment to the office of Secretary of State, thus replacing Eaton. After hours of indecision, Dilman had finally settled upon Jed Stover, the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, as the career diplomat best qualified to succeed Eaton. Happily, Stover had been enthusiastic about permitting his name to be used in this token gesture. Not unexpectedly, the Senate, without seriously considering Stover’s appointment while in committee, had rejected the replacement with a heavy vote. Then, to put their rebuke of the President indelibly on the record, the Senate had again declared Dilman’s removal of Arthur Eaton illegal, and had sustained Eaton as Secretary of State (and next in line to the Presidency) until the disagreement could be resolved during the trial of impeachment. As a gesture, Abrahams had submitted the issue of the unconstitutionality of the New Succession Bill to the Supreme Court, aware that it could not be considered before the impeachment trial ended.

Fort forty minutes, Dilman heard out the give-and-take on these points among his managers, offering only an occasional comment himself. Now, glancing at the marble-encased clock, with its time-piece, calendar, barometer, a clock that went back to the time of Ulysses S. Grant, Dilman could see that it was almost a quarter after eight.

As the morning’s vital strategy session approached its conclusion, Dilman studied the men whose clever minds, vast legal experience, honest interest in justice would represent him before the bar.

Dominating the four, of course, was Nat Abrahams himself, chestnut hair rumpled, seamed profile drawn, long frame slouched into the heart-backed Victorian chair, as he chewed the hard rubber stem of his briar pipe and listened. His trusted junior partner, a brilliant graduate of the University of Chicago School of Law, was animatedly speaking. Felix Hart was deceptively callow-looking, cherubic, ebullient, imitative of Nat’s careless manner of dress—deceptively, because his easy outer aspect hid a pertinacious, clawlike, investigative brain. It was he who had supervised and directed the dredging up of all of Dilman’s earlier life in the Midwest, trying to pinpoint what might be harmful to their case and at the same time watch for what might be useful.

Listening, also, was the elder statesman of the quartet, the renowned Walter T. Tuttle, a onetime Attorney General during The Judge’s administration, whom The Judge had rousted out of recent retirement to join the defense team. A courtly old-school gentleman in his late seventies, Tuttle had a countenance as American as any that had been sculptured on Mount Rushmore. The opaque eyes screened a slow but direct mentality. The tone of his utterances was dry, yet often tart. Tuttle’s affectation was not that he was a country squire, which he was, but that he was a farmer in citified clothes, which he was not. He had been widely quoted for a remark made during his service in The Judge’s Cabinet, that he “always avoided any dinner where there were three forks beside the plate.” His specialty was constitutional law, and as a youngster he had sat behind his father, an eminent attorney turned congressman, when his father had been one of the House managers trying Judge Halsted L. Ritter before the Senate during the Seventy-fourth Congress, in 1936. Judge Ritter had been impeached, like Dilman, on four articles. Acquitted on all but one charge, which was that of “misbehavior” in office, he had been found guilty by the Senate and removed from office.

Speaking now was the fourth of Dilman’s managers, a slight, pensive attorney still in his thirties named Joel Booker Priest. Conservative and immaculate, Priest had attended every meeting with his slick, shiny hair smoothly in place, his person exuding a pine-scented cologne, and his body always garmented in one of his costly single-breasted suits. Joel Booker Priest was a Negro, of dark tan complexion, who now and then had handled special cases for Spinger and the Crispus Society. His law firm was in Washington, and quietly, but with the eager persistence of a bird dog, he had retraced Dilman’s life in the capital city and had attempted to ferret out what Miller, Wickland, and the other opposition managers were planning to present to the Senate.

Observing Joel Priest this minute, as he tried to surmise the House’s case in support of Article IV, and as the others hung on his every word, Douglass Dilman was incredulous at how much he himself had changed in short days. Not long ago, the very thought of a Negro defending him in any action would have been frightening. It was Spinger who had suggested Priest’s services to Abrahams, and Abrahams who had then studied the Negro lawyer’s career and met him. And when Abrahams had recommended him, surprisingly, Dilman had asked only one question, “Why do you want him, Nat, because you think it might look good to have someone of my own color on the team?” Nat had snorted, “I want him because he’s
good
.” And Dilman had replied, without reservation or hesitancy, “He’s hired.”