A Shade of Difference (54 page)

High on the beautiful terrace of the State Department Annex overlooking Washington, the Secretary was entertaining many of the same thoughts as he walked slowly up and down, all alone, in the thinning autumn sun. He had not even bothered to stop in his office but had come directly up in his private elevator to the eighth floor, gone through the enormous empty state dining room, drab and dejected as all dining rooms are in the cold light of morning, and out onto the tiled esplanade with its gorgeous view over the Potomac, Virginia, and the pleasant reaches of the city stretching to the Capitol on his left. Toward this last he turned now, walking as far as he could, to the Twenty-first Street end of the terrace, until he faced full-on the distant building, dominant and gleaming on the Hill.

Below him in all the conglomeration of concrete-and-glass caverns known as State and New State, the life of his department moved along on its appointed rounds, some of its work a genuine contribution to the betterment of the world, some a precise and precious exercise in dead-endism that furnished jobs and position to people who would be lost with real responsibilities and so clung with a frantic tenacity to what they had.

At least 50 per cent of the department’s laborings, he told himself with a melancholy irony, was devoted to the science of how to make mountains out of molehills that didn’t matter, and molehills out of mountains that did. Bright young men, growing somewhat gray and elderly now, educated in the years after the Second World War to accept the idea of their country as not-quite-best, labored with a suave and practiced skill to gloss over the anguish of unnecessary decline. Experienced in the glib rationalization of failure, the smooth acceptance of defeat, they found cogent arguments and reasonable explanations for each new default of will on the part of their government and could always be found hovering at the elbows of those officials, like himself, who still held firm to some vision of America more fitting and more worthy than that. There they smoothly offered their on-the-other-hands and their let’s-look-at-it-from-their-point-of-views and their but-of-course-you-must-realize-the-people-won’t-support-its. Meanwhile the Communist tide rolled on, explained and rationalized, possibly, but not stopped.

Yet somehow there still emerged at times, through all the red tape and flagging determination and conflicting egos, some thread of reasonably consistent policy, sometimes forceful and effective, sometimes far out of contact with the harsh realities of the struggle for naked power going on in the world. Secretaries and Under Secretaries came and went, but as in the Pentagon, which he could see squat and powerful across the river, few ever exercised any real influence upon the day-to-day operations of their departments. There was a strength in institution far beyond the power of men to change, however determined and forceful they might be. He or the President could determine upon a policy, but somewhere along the channels of fiercely jealous authority beneath his feet it would run aground, be snagged upon some incompetent clerk or devious official, be changed and modified and turned into something quite different by the time it reached the knowledge of the world. It was a wonder to him that foreign policy ever got made at all, so many were the administrative pitfalls that awaited it at every turn; and he sometimes did not find it surprising that the information on which high officials must of necessity base their decisions should come to them in a form dangerously inconsistent with the facts, and the nation’s desperate needs in the light of those facts.

This he had come into office determined to correct, but he could not say that in six months’ time he had been able to do much about it. He wondered if he would ever have that feeling of sure control here that he used to have in the distant Capitol now tantalizing him in the misty morning. Probably not: probably he too would sooner or later settle for what most Secretaries, of whatever department, sooner or later settled for. He too, in time, perhaps, would say the hell with it, forget about the administrative operations of the department where so many worthy hopes were smoothly talked away, and concentrate instead upon the trips, the speeches, the attempts to sway Congress, the big, dramatic gestures that might win men’s minds and appeal to their beliefs in a threatened time. Perhaps he too would abandon the rest and live almost entirely in the hope and determination that eventually he in his turn might move to 1600 Pennsylvania and make his own attempt to change the terrifying pattern of drift and frustration.

Except that this, too, was in a sense self-defeating, for unless a man could be sure that his orders were being carried out, what in the long run could he be sure of? And in a Cabinet department of thirty-nine thousand employees, or an Executive Branch of three million, if it came to that, how could he possibly know what was being faithfully carried out, what was being lost in paper shuffling, and what was being deliberately thwarted by those who preferred the death of the mind to the disciplines of remaining free?

For the moment, he was relieved that the battle had moved back to the arena with which he was most familiar. It gleamed whitely before him, lately scrubbed and sandblasted so that every pillar, arch, and window stood forth clear and sharp. There was his challenge and his problem at the moment, and he studied it with an appraising gaze and a million memories as he thought of the personalities and pressures revolving within.

The idea which he and Beth had arrived at almost simultaneously by different paths of reasoning was now before the Congress, thanks to the cooperation of Cullee Hamilton, with a sponsorship that made it much less vulnerable than it might have been as a frankly-sponsored Administration project or as something with the wild backing of Fred Van Ackerman. It was true that he had passed the idea along to Cullee during their talk here in the Department, but the Congressman had contributed his own definite ideas and some of the language. He had expressed great contempt for Terry, but the $10,000,000 grant to Gorotoland had been his idea, and so, of course, had been the pledge of increased speed in improving the conditions of his race within the United States.

Orrin had been wary of the tone of this final section of the resolution, but Cullee had said simply that anything less would satisfy neither world opinion nor American Negro opinion. In fact, he had said finally, he would not introduce the resolution at all unless that language were in.

The Secretary had been forced to yield, though he had deemed it his duty to explain to Cullee exactly the problems he was inviting for himself.

“Do you think Seab Cooley and the rest of them would like it any better if it was milder?” Cullee asked. “I don’t. I think they’d be against it under any conditions. So we might as well make it honest and let them shout.”

“They’ll shout all right,” Orrin had said. “They may kill it in the Senate, too, if they shout long enough.”

“Let them, if they want to make the United States look even worse than it does already.”

“We don’t want that to happen.”

“We don’t,” Cullee agreed. “Maybe they’d better think of how the United States looks to the world, for a change.”

“Seab won’t think you’re such a fine young man, I’m afraid,” the Secretary said with a touch of irony. The Congressman, whose air of self-possession and control had renewed itself steadily as they talked, had shot him a quizzical look.

“Comes a time when the old ways change. It’s only a miracle he’s lasted this long.”

“Try not to hurt him too much,” Orrin said, beginning the remark with a continuation of irony but surprised to find that he really meant it, and startled that he should actually be asking charity for Seab Cooley from anyone, let alone a Negro. Cullee apparently considered it equally fantastic, for he gave a skeptical laugh.

“Times change, but I don’t think they’ve changed that much. I think you’d better ask him to go easy on me, not the other way around. I’ll be lucky to get out with my scalp before he’s through with me.”

But he had insisted on this strong language in the resolution even so, and the result had been that it was fully as much his project as it was Orrin’s. The Secretary, remembering the closed-off, stubborn look and the ultimatum he had received when Cullee thought he wasn’t going to have his own way, was moved to smile as he thought of the broadcast implications that the Congressman was his stooge. He knew better than most that Cullee wasn’t anybody’s stooge. He only hoped that Cullee wouldn’t let himself be shaken by assertions that he was, though of course certain professional guardians of the conscience of mankind would do their best to drive a wedge between himself and Cullee if they could.

Essentially, though, this was not his major worry as he stared across the lovely city at the great Capitol floating against the autumn sky upon its russet hill. For all that some strange little unexpected quirk of sentiment or foreboding enabled him to imagine Seab as weak, the man they had to beat was of course the senior Senator from South Carolina. The Secretary thought he could get the Speaker’s support, he knew he had Bob Munson’s, but Seab he would have to beat because there could be no compromise on this for Seab, for Cullee, or for him. Particularly since Seab had already thrown down the gauntlet in his attack upon Orrin in the Senate yesterday and in his remark in his talk with Bob, which Bob, as instructed, had faithfully passed along.

He and Seab had come, perhaps finally, to a parting of the ways, and he realized it with a real regret, remembering the many legislative battles they had fought together, the many long years of their association and close friendship in the Senate, the way they had stood together only six months ago on the nomination of Bob Leffingwell.

But politics was politics, people were people, the needs of the country and the imperatives of the age wrought their own iron changes upon men. Yesterday’s companion was today’s opponent, and Seab would have to take a licking. There was simply no alternative now, though he would try to make it as painless as possible for the old man. Seab had done great things in his day, and in many ways had served his country well; he had the right to a graceful defeat, and, if Orrin could manage, he would have it.

Of all the people who might have been surprised and amused to learn of these wistful musings of the Secretary of State as he left the terrace and the lovely city and the Capitol upon its hill and went down to his office on the floor below, the one who would have been most amused was at that moment making his way slowly, with his trudging, sloping gait, along the corridors of the Old Senate Office Building on the way to his private hideaway in the Capitol to do some telephoning.

Angered he would have been, first, possibly, but then truly and honestly amused; for it would not have occurred to the senior Senator from South Carolina at this early stage of it that he had much to worry about in this nonsense being generated in the House by Cullee Hamilton. He had endured this kind of thing before, the little gnats had nibbled him, as he liked to put it, but he had always overcome them. And, he was calmly certain at this moment, he would overcome them now.

Not, of course, that it was going to be a breeze. He was too old and experienced a warrior to minimize either his opposition or the problem posed by it. Just as he sensed the changes in his own state that threatened his Senate seat after all these long and controversial decades, so he sensed the changes in the world that would make of this a battle as fierce and unyielding as any his fierce and unyielding old heart had ever had to carry him through. The bearing of the one upon the other was direct and inescapable: He could no more afford to have it said in South Carolina that he had allowed Cullee’s resolution to pass the Senate than he could accept in his own mind a condition of affairs in which Cullee’s resolution made either sense or justice. He could not permit the one; he could not conceive of the other. There was nothing for Seabright B. Cooley to do but go full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes, and confound his enemies if he possibly could.

That this would automatically bring down upon his head all the outraged condemnations of those who had, unsuccessfully, condemned him before, he was fully aware. As a matter of fact, he told himself as he poked the elevator button with a Senator’s impatient three rings and the car obediently shot up from the basement to get him and take him down to the subway cars, he couldn’t care less. He had taken the measure of that sleazy crowd time and time again, and he was quite confident he could take it now, especially since he had already thrown it a bone in his speech in the Senate yesterday.

Seab was rather proud of that speech as he thought back upon it, for it had brought the issue foursquare before South Carolina, the Senate, and the country even before it had really had time to get started in the House. And it had served to give notice to the President, and to Orrin as well, that they hadn’t fooled him one little bit by getting a nice young darky to do their work for them. He had made the situation clear to his own people and he had also picked up an extra dividend from the liberal crowd by doing exactly what they loved, which was to flush Orrin out in the open and pin his ears back. If in the process he had virtually ignored the author of the resolution, that was both political strategy and native instinct.

He was not about to admit that a colored man could have been clever enough to think of anything like that, even an intelligent colored man like young Cullee. He had meant it when he had asked Orrin to convey the word that he wished the Congressman well; but there were limits to what he could imagine as the intelligence behind Cullee’s dignified and well-spoken exterior.

Thus the concentration on Orrin and the President, and the careful avoidance of Cullee’s name in his speech yesterday. And thus, too, the bitter scorn Seab had poured upon the Administration for its apparent intention to bow to the worldwide clamor of what he had chosen to delineate, in another of the impromptu inspirations that often won him appreciative laughter and sometimes won him votes, as “all the little tarbabies of this world, Mr. President, all the little tarbabies of this world.”