A Shade of Difference (53 page)

“Well, then,” Tommy Davis said triumphantly, “don’t sigh at me when I’m being helpful. It makes me feel unwelcome. I don’t like it.”

“I’m sorry. What do you want us to do about Orrin?”

“What were you planning to do?” Mr. Justice Davis shot back promptly. The executive director of the
Post
shook his head in a puzzled fashion that he was glad the Justice could not see. The Justice, for all that he had gone into a spell of deep depression following the tragic outcome of his involvement in the attempt to bring Brigham Anderson into line on the Leffingwell nomination six months ago, had snapped back with remarkable vigor in the past few weeks. Now he was his old self again, lecturing his colleagues on the Supreme Court, fighting publicly with the Chief Justice, advising the
Post
and anyone else who would listen on how to conduct the affairs of the world. He was one of the few major participants in the crucible of the Leffingwell business who seemed to have come through it with an unshaken certainty in his own righteousness. The executive director of the
Post
suspected that a good deal of this was on the surface and that underneath the busy little Justice still felt moments of horrified doubt and unhappiness about Senator Anderson’s suicide; but for the practical purposes of the working day, he seemed to be quite himself again. The executive director of the
Post
wished the same could be said for everyone who had been involved. Certainly
he
had been badly shaken by the experience, and he still was.

“My dear boy,” Tommy Davis chided from the other end of the line, “stop brooding and answer my question. What are you planning to do about Orrin?”

“Probably the same thing you would do in the same position. Let him have it.”

“Right between the eyes, I hope,” Justice Davis said with some spite. “The utter gall of attempting to appropriate the liberal position on the racial issue! How dare he, my dear boy; really, how dare he?”

“He didn’t get where he is by reticence.”

“Who does he think he’s fooling?”

“No one, when we get through with him, I trust.”

The Justice made a pleased little encouraging sound.

“Good! I am so glad to hear you say that, my dear boy. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder about you lately.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“It has seemed to me that your devotion to the liberal position has been somewhat—tentative—in the last six months. I don’t think the paper has been swinging as hard as it should on some of these clear-cut issues.”

“Since when has there been a clear-cut issue?” the executive director of the
Post
inquired. “I don’t recall one, of late.”

“Never admit it, my dear boy!” Justice Davis ordered. “No true believer can afford to admit that there might be two sides to a question. That destroys our whole position. It lets
Them
get the advantage. Surely I don’t have to tell the
Post
that, with all your fine record along those lines!”

“We appreciate your compliments, Tommy,” the executive director said dryly. “But right now there is a rather delicate problem involved. How do we handle Cullee Hamilton, for instance? What do we do about LeGage Shelby? Is Orrin really involved the way we think, or isn’t he? After all, we only have Seab Cooley’s word to go on. I never thought we’d rely on Seab to justify our position on anything.”

“Never hesitate!” the Justice said sternly. “Never doubt! And why worry whether it’s Seab or someone else? It suits the purpose, doesn’t it? Anyway, we both know it’s true, whoever says it. Orrin Knox has only one motivation in this, only one. He wants the Presidency, he’ll do anything to get it, this is only one more phase of it, and he’s got to be stopped, my dear boy. He’s simply got to be stopped!”

“I agree with you there. But it seems to me we have to proceed with some care, considering our traditional position on racial matters and the fact that Cullee is so directly involved.”

“If there’s anything I despise,” the Justice said sharply, “it’s these Negroes who play the white man’s game. Really!”

“You seem to approve of some of them,” the executive director said mildly.

“Why wasn’t he down there in Charleston doing the only proper thing any self-respecting Negro could do after I handed down my injunction? The law of it was on my side; not even Charleston’s attorneys challenge that. He should have leaped at the chance to follow through. Instead he left it to a foreigner! Prince Terry had to do it for him. I should think he’d be ashamed!”

“Maybe he is. Maybe that’s why he’s decided to take this action in the Congress now.”

“Only because Orrin put him up to it,” the Justice said triumphantly. “So there we are again, back to Orrin.”

“Yes. Back to Orrin.”

“Do let him have it,” Tommy Davis urged. “Write the editorial yourself, and let him have it. Anything that can stop him from becoming President is all to the good, my dear boy, you know that. In the face of stopping Orrin, all else pales. It really does, my dear boy. Furthermore, most of the press seems to think so, too. I hear there have been several editorials already pointing out the truth about this.”

“You get around, don’t you?”

“I have my spies,” the Justice said with satisfaction.

“What’s next in Charleston, by the way?”

“They’re coming back with another appeal tomorrow, but I won’t entertain it. The injunction stands until the whole thing comes up to us from below through the regular court channels again. It will take some time.”

“Well,” the executive director said, “I’ll see what can be done about Orrin from here.”

“I know you’ll think of a way to separate him from Cullee.”

“Even though we agree entirely with what he and Cullee are trying to do?”

“You can do it, my boy!” Tommy Davis said with great confidence. “The
Post
knows how!”

But the world this morning, the executive director thought with a sigh as the bustling little voice went off the wire, was not so simple a proposition as that. Indeed, it was becoming less and less simple as time went by. Old certainties were being shaken, the old righteous—and self-righteous—positions were being challenged by the rush of events. The world was no longer the happy, open-and-shut proposition it used to appear to be when viewed through a certain highly-publicized angle of the ideological eyeglass; the comfortable assumptions that had once been accepted without question, the pleasantly rigid certainties that formed so comforting a foundation for a shaky universe were no longer so valid. The smugly arrogant denials of intelligence and honor to one’s opponents, which had for so long characterized certain notable companions in the cause, were shattered now a dozen times a day upon the hard rocks of a world in disarray.

Now it was no longer enough to cry with a high, ringing certainty, “This is their position, down with it! This is our position, up with it!” There was too much inter-blending, too much commingling, too much of the one in the other. Now the United States had been brought to a position of peril all around the globe, and on both sides, he knew with an unhappy inner honesty, men must share equal blame for it.

But of course it would never do to admit it. On that point the Justice was always and eternally right. The slightest concession to fairness and They, as Tommy called them, would indeed swarm over you. The comfortable slogans, the automatic thinking, the shielding, protective certainties that did away with the necessity for unsettling objectivity and did so much to make the world seem secure—they might be withering away in your mind and heart, you might even be subject to a certain genuine terror now as you realized how much you might have shared, however idealistically, in bringing your country to her present desperate position—but it would never do to admit it in public. That would indeed be abandoning the lifeline; that would indeed be throwing away the anchor. That would demand a courage and a character that were really too much to ask in times like these.

He pulled his typewriter toward him with an impatient yank and felt the gradual, warming surcease of doubt, the reassuring, womb-like return of certainty, as his practiced fingers began to fly over the keys:

“Despite our solid endorsement and support of the purposes of the resolution offered by Rep. Cullee Hamilton in the House yesterday, we cannot overlook the strong suspicion that it may, in essence, be nothing more than a stalking-horse for Secretary of State Orrin Knox in his incessant—and interminable—campaign to win the Presidency.

“We do not blame Rep. Hamilton for being taken in by the shrewd ambitions of a practiced politician. Inexperience is no man’s fault, and we wish his resolution well.

“Even so, we cannot escape the conclusion that …”

And so, the President thought as he walked slowly along the arcade beside the Rose Garden toward his office in the gentle air, one faced decisions and one made them, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, more often, perhaps, with uncertainty and doubt and a prayer that subsequent events might prove them to be right. He had wanted LeGage off the delegation and Cullee on, he had given LeGage enough rope, and it had come about as he had planned. Now it remained to be seen whether this was the right course, when all was said and done.

Apparently, thanks to Orrin and his missionary work with the Congressman from California, it was. The resolution had gone into the House hopper as planned, the change in the delegation had caught the critics between wind and water—for, of course, it was difficult for them, even though supporting the chairman of DEFY, to condemn his replacement with another Negro of Cullee’s stature. There was a subtlety of distinction between the two men too great to explain to the public, so the critics must perforce go along with it. The new line, of course, would be an attack upon Orrin while attempting to salvage what Cullee had done. He had heard it already on the morning news roundups, not too blatant, not too harsh, just a casual turn of phrase, a bland implication that planted the seed of suspicion in the public mind about the Secretary’s motives and Cullee’s co-operation with them. By nightfall the weed would be flourishing, and at 11 p.m. when the final big television newscasts were delivered to the country, the whole thing would be solidly rooted in the form it would have forever after in all the media of communication—as the crafty plan of a shrewd politician using the legitimate aspirations of the Negro race and the international needs of the United States to advance his own ambitions.

Well: certainly he would not deny that Orrin was a politician, or that he wanted to be President. By the same token, he was aware and had always been of a deeper motivation, a fiercer and more genuine dedication. It had not been so easy for the Senator from Illinois to leave the forum of his power and move downtown to the State Department in the wake of the defeat of Robert A. Leffingwell. He had done it, basically, for just one reason: because he, the President, had asked him to. It had been for the President the quickest and most efficient way out of the immediate political dilemma, and it had also been the chance to bring into his Administration in its principal office a man whose character, loyalty, and devotion he had seen tested on many occasions. He had never regretted that decision—he did not know, truthfully, what he would do without Orrin’s counsel in the many moments of terrible challenge that he had to face in this era when no man knew with certainty whether the free world would go under, or survive.

For Orrin himself, it had been a period of testing and change, a time of reassessment and reappraisal of many policies most vigorously defended and many beliefs most vigorously held.

Six months ago in the Senate, for instance, the President could not conceive of Orrin Knox being a party to what was, in effect, a major apology by the United States to a minor African dignitary—even though that apology was also a greater apology, of much deeper and more serious import, to its own Negro citizens. Even knowing these implications, he doubted that Orrin would have supported it; or at least, he would not have supported it at first, but would, in his characteristic fashion, have proposed many qualifications and provisos before it was modified enough to suit him. Now Orrin as Secretary of State had initiated a clear-cut proposal that the United States say to the whole world, “We were wrong,” and extend the admission even further, to its own citizens of the colored race.

He himself had regarded this project with some misgivings, particularly the language offering further apologies to the M’Bulu and the offer of $10,000,000 to help Gorotoland. He did not like the idea of further apologies to Africa’s irresponsible glamour boy; nor did he think it entirely wise to offer aid to an area, which was, after all, still under the British Crown. There had been no official reaction as yet from London, but he could imagine that this was only a temporary hesitation as to the best means of expressing displeasure. It was, in fact, quite irregular—assuming this was an age in which regularity of procedure meant anything any more, which it was not—and perhaps if Orrin had consulted with him more fully before working out the resolution with Cullee, he might have suggested some more diplomatic way to go about it.

But he had, in this instance, made the initial decision to back Orrin’s judgment. Therefore, he was prepared to go along with the result. Orrin was in charge of this, and he would support him to the hilt.

So much for that, he told himself as he paused for a moment at the side door to his office and looked across the immaculate lawn and stately trees to the line of tourists beyond the distant iron fence, waiting to tour the public rooms of the White House. When would the weather turn? he wondered suddenly. The long warm autumns of Washington sometimes changed in an hour, driven away by the scudding winds and heavy-laden clouds that blew in from the Middle West across the
Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge, or pushed down over New York and New England from Canada. He shivered in anticipation, though the prospect before him still was warm and lovely.

Winter was coming—perhaps the winter of the world was coming. Who could tell?

He turned and went in to face his secretary’s waiting face and lifted pencil, the calls to be made and received, the decisions to be studied and rendered, the endless round of problems, the unceasing challenge of the days.