A Shade of Difference (4 page)

At the villa they were informed that the Russians would be expecting them at 10 a.m. the next morning at the Palais des Nations. The President sent word back that they would be there at 3 p.m., and after a little desultory small talk and a nightcap with several very nervous officials of UN/Geneva, they bade one another good night and went off to bed.

Off to bed and, in his own case, Orrin remembered, right off to sleep. He had been interested to find next morning that the others had done the same. Bob Munson explained it simply enough: “I don’t know whether it was the bonfires, or what, but suddenly last night I got the conviction that this is going to work out all right. If so many nice people think so highly of us, how can we fail?”

They had all agreed; but of course, the Secretary thought as he watched the delegate of Ghana coming into First Committee with Vasily Tashikov, the gorgeous M’Bulu, and a pallid little man from Hungary, the world did not run on such simple lines. It took more than the good wishes of nice people to carry on the affairs of humanity: it took guts and character and tenacity, and now and again a flair for the dramatic, which the President, again to their surprised relief, presently proved that he had.

Ranging back now over their two meetings with the Soviets in Geneva, while First Committee filled up and gradually began to get under way, in true UN fashion, half an hour late, Orrin Knox could see that Harley’s strategy from the first had been exactly right for the situation that confronted him. His offhand dismissal of the Russian demand that the Americans appear at 10 a.m. had of course given him the world’s headlines immediately, and he had never once let them slip away from him thereafter. He had held a press conference at 11 and another at 2 p.m. At each, with calm good nature, he had proceeded to reduce the Soviet position to one, essentially, of bad manners, and rather ridiculous bad manners at that. He had been confident but not boastful about the progress of the American moon landing, respectful but not overawed by the Russians’ parallel endeavor. The whole confrontation here in Geneva, he had implied, was rather unnecessary and not a little stupid. Simply by his manner, tone, and general deportment, he had managed to convey to the world a picture of a man not in the slightest hurried, harried, intimidated, or upset.

It was no wonder that when they arrived in the gorgeous spring afternoon at the Palais des Nations amid the screaming sirens and sputtering exhausts of their motorcycle escort, the Soviets should have been awaiting them with obvious impatience and a steadily mounting anger. But when the Chairman of the Council of Ministers came down the steps to meet the car, advancing slowly in his dour, slab-sided, and characteristically suspicious way, the President shook hands with an almost absent-minded cordiality and then commented on the weather.

“What a beautiful spring day, Mr. Chairman!” he exclaimed. “I am so glad you offered me the opportunity to see Geneva for the first time, and in such a lovely season of the year. I am quite glad now that I decided to come.”

At this Tashikov, with whom Orrin supposed he would have to deal with very shortly, as the delegate from Yugoslavia, rapped the gavel for First Committee to come to order, had leaned forward and muttered something harshly in the Chairman’s ear. The Chairman had nodded in the grimly thoughtful fashion familiar from a million photographs and television glimpses and snapped out, “
Da,
it is beautiful!” and turning on his heel had trudged doggedly up the steps. The President waved to the cameras with a broad smile and wink that amused all but the Soviet photographers, shrugged elaborately, beckoned to his companions, and started, in a deliberately leisurely fashion, to follow.

His host, if that was the proper designation, had disappeared down the hallway when the American party entered the building. With another shrug and a humorous look about, the President continued past the long line of guards standing at attention and the massed flags of the two nations intermingled with exact mathematical equality by the UN/Geneva protocol office, until he came to the heavily-guarded bronze doors of the Assembly Hall and there found some three hundred reporters clamoring without success to get in. He then precipitated the crisis of the day.

“I don’t know where the Chairman has gone to,” he said to Tashikov, who was waiting at the door, “But you can tell him that my predecessor accepted this invitation on the sole understanding that this meeting would be open to the press, radio, and television of the world. I agreed to honor his acceptance on the same understanding. Is the meeting to be open?”

“Mr. President,” the Soviet Ambassador began coldly, “my government felt it would save you embarrassment in the eyes of the world if—”

“Is it!” the President snapped, and Tashikov snapped back, “It is not!”

“Very well,” the President said without a moment’s hesitation. “Come along, gentlemen.”

And he had swung about and led them, startled but having the sense to conceal it, back to the entrance, back to the steps, back to the waiting limousines, and so, with a roar and a flourish and the inevitable scream of sirens, back along the dazzling blue lake in the gleaming bright sun and the warm whipping wind to the villa.

There he collapsed into an enormous overstuffed chair with a little grunt of satisfaction and a happy smile.

“Now,” he said with what was for him a surprising use of profanity, “let’s see what the bastards make of
that.
”

“My God, Mr. President,” Bob Munson had said, and not entirely joking either, “hadn’t you better check and see if Washington is still there?”

“Washington is still there,” the President had responded in the same vigorous vein. “Washington will be there a damned sight longer than these sons of bitches. Have a drink, everybody. I’m perfectly happy, but you all look as though you might need it.”

“Yes,” Orrin Knox agreed, “I think we do.”

Now, as he put on his earphone for the simultaneous translation in First Committee and switched the dial over the six channels to English on Channel 2, he could remember with satisfaction Tashikov’s appearance when he came to the villa at 6 p.m. The Soviet Ambassador had been white-faced and quivering, both at the situation and at the Secretary’s insistence on meeting him in front of the press in the villa’s ballroom. Under the anger, Orrin could sense an uneasy and growing uncertainty. It had not been alleviated, he knew, when he informed the Ambassador tersely that the President had given orders that he was not to be disturbed for the rest of the night.

“I thought he was entertaining the Chairman at a state dinner at 9 p.m.,” Tashikov had said angrily. “And the Chairman will entertain him tomorrow night. That was the agreement.”

“Agreements can be broken,” the Secretary had taken some satisfaction in pointing out, “as you have already proved this day. Anyway, I think it’s just as well to get away from this standard nonsense about how much everybody loves everybody at these international conferences. You didn’t ask us here to be friendly. You thought you would bring us here to destroy us. Well: you haven’t; nor will you. Now, state your business, and if it’s worthwhile, I’ll tell the President. That’s my function.”

“We cannot possibly agree to open the conference to the press!” the Ambassador said.

“We can’t possibly agree to attend unless it is open,” the Secretary replied. “Tell the Chairman. Good night.”

And taking a leaf from the President’s book, he turned on his heel and went back to the private quarters where the White House communications center had set up an enormous bank of transmitters and receivers, over which he could hear the frantic commentators of his own country telling the world how horribly dangerous the American delegation’s behavior was and how irresponsibly it jeopardized the world’s hopes for peace.

Watching Tashikov now as he launched into another of his high-pitched tirades against the United States, translated word for word and smug inflection for smug inflection by the UN translator, Orrin Knox recalled with a grim amusement the Ambassador’s three subsequent visits to the villa that night: at 8 p.m., at 11, and, finally, at 1 a.m. Each time their conversation had been roughly the same, and each time it seemed to be briefer; and yet the Secretary of State had the growing conviction that all he had to do was stand firm and presently he would win out. At the last he had gestured to all the cameras, the reporters, and the television gear before which they were standing. “Do you know what you’re doing, Mr. Ambassador? You’re making yourself utterly and completely absurd.”

“Very well,” Tashikov had said with a black anger that sounded, at last, completely genuine, “if that is your attitude, your blood be on your own heads, Americans!”

But at 3 a.m., after they had all gone to bed, a courier had come and awakened the Secretary: the Russians would meet them at the Palais des Nations at 3 p.m., and the conference would be open.

“Imperialist colonializers … oppressing the just aspirations of the peoples for freedom … destroyers of human rights … enemies of justice …” The idealistic phrases of the liberty-loving friends of Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, East Germany, and the Baltic states came to him in violent precision over the earphone as he watched the Soviet Ambassador pounding and gesticulating across the curved horseshoe of seats in First Committee. He had heard it all so many times before—so infinitely many times. But never, he was sure, with quite the ominous and portentous contempt with which it had been hurled at the President and his companions by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers as he delivered his three-hour denunciation in Geneva.

After one or two futile attempts to interrupt, the President had sat back with an expression both amused and bored while the torrent of invective flooded in upon them through the same UN earphones and apparatus of translation. In fact, it could have been the same translator: there was the same precise rendering of emphasis and inflection, a mimicry so perfect as to border, unconsciously or perhaps not, on parody. The gist of the first two and a half hours of it differed little from what had been coming out of Moscow ever since the Soviets began their calculated campaign of world imperialism at the end of the Second World War. “I don’t think they like us,” Bob Munson had confided at one point, leaning across to Orrin behind the President’s chair. “I’m saddened,” the Secretary had replied with a cheerful amusement that caused an uneasy little ripple through the ranks of the Soviet delegation.

In the final half hour, however, the Chairman, looking about with his angry scowl and customary hostile expression, had gotten down to business. It was not a pleasant prospect that he laid out before the world; although it was, as Warren Strickland remarked later, no different from the prospect presented so often in the past by his late predecessor before that worthy’s abrupt and unexpected demise. It just sounded uglier, reduced to bald essentials and stripped of the grins, the proverbs, and the bouncy banging-about.

“Gospodin!”
he had begun, giving to that word, as versatile as the French
alors!,
a fateful and somber inflection: “Gentlemen, attend me well. You have come here at the direction of the Government of the U.S.S.R., after great and overpowering gains by the U.S.S.R., to hear what the U.S.S.R. requires of your country in the interests of world peace. It is this:

“You will at once abandon the imperialist military alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and will assist with all possible speed in the liquidation of the NATO armed forces. This to be accomplished not later than one month from today.

“You will abandon all military and naval bases of whatever nature on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, South and North America, exclusive of the United States, retaining only those bases not more than ten miles from the shores of the continental United States. This to be accomplished not later than one month from today.

“You will terminate at once all missile and space exploration projects of the United States, transferring immediately to the U.S.S.R. control of all such projects and their personnel.

“You will terminate at once the experimental programs of the United States in the field of nuclear, thermonuclear, chemical, germ, and other super-weapons, transferring immediately to the U.S.S.R. control of all such projects and their personnel.

“You will reduce the Army of the United States to one hundred thousand officers and men, effective two months from today.

“You will reduce the Navy of the United States to ten battleships, five destroyers, and thirty supporting vessels, with suitable complements. You will discharge all other naval personnel and transfer to the United Nations Security Council tide and control of all other vessels presently in the United States Navy.

“You will immediately destroy, under supervision of the United Nations Security Council, all nuclear-powered submarines in the United States Navy and immediately discharge their personnel.

“You will immediately disband and destroy, under supervision of the United Nations Security Council, the Air Force of the United States and most particularly the Strategic Air Command.

“You will abrogate at once all treaties of alliance, mutual assistance or defense, between the government of the United States and other governments.

“You will take immediate steps to make certain that persons friendly to the U.S.S.R. are brought into the Cabinet of the President and other high offices of your government, and you will take steps also immediately to assure a friendly attitude toward the government of the U.S.S.R. on the part of the press, radio, television, and motion picture industries of the United States.

“You will prepare to receive in Washington not later than one week from today commissioners of the U.S.S.R., who will advise you on carrying out this agreement.

“You will appoint immediately two representatives to sit with the representatives of the U.S.S.R., the Afro-Asian States, the People’s Republics of Europe, the People’s Republics of the Caribbean and Latin America, and a representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to supervise the carrying-out of all the terms of this agreement.”