Capable of Honor (16 page)

“The President says, ‘I rejected’ suggestions by some of his advisers that he make the appeal to the United Nations that would have been the only honorable, civilized course. Obviously, then, it was his decision alone, overriding the grave doubts and objections held by many who participated in last night’s fateful conference at the White House.

“For this grave crime against humanity Harley M. Hudson will have to answer to history, as will the man who clearly urged him on, Secretary of State Orrin Knox.

“The President talks of his ‘warning’ to the People’s Free Republic of Gorotoland. Did he really believe that any self-respecting government, seeking the full dignity and freedom of its long-suffering, colonially suppressed people, would do anything but reject such a humiliating ultimatum? How could it, and still hold up its head among the nations?

“It was, in effect, an invitation to do exactly what has been done—to punish the United States and so give proof, to those foolish, irresponsible, and shortsighted men who still need proof that in this forward-marching century the world cannot be run by ultimata from Washington. The response was exactly what could have been respected. And history, it seems likely, will say it was exactly what was deserved.

“What, now, of Peking and Moscow? Are we to assume that they will sit idly by and let the United States work its will in Central Africa? Rightly they fear renewed imperialism, justly they think they see a new attempt to re-established colonial control. Are they, whose entire modem histories have been devoted, at least in principle, to the battle to spread freedom and peace throughout the world, to do nothing while the world’s latest torch of freedom is wantonly and ruthlessly put out by superior force?

“The President and his war-happy principal adviser are sending American boys to die many thousands of miles from home, in an inconvenient and inaccessible terrain that cannot be either easily captured or adequately defended if it is captured. He is throwing away your sons and your money in pursuit of a purpose no decent man can defend, engaging American fortunes and forces in a hopeless war far away at a time when the nation’s domestic needs are crying for solution. All this he is doing in the name of the honor of the United States.

“Never has it been so sadly misjudged or so dreadfully defended.

“War is what the President and the Secretary of State are committing in Gorotoland. World war is what trembles on the edge of what they do, waiting only the slightest misstep to unleash its awful nuclear horrors upon a helpless world.

“My fellow Americans, pray for your country. It needs your prayers as never before.”

And never before, Walter told himself with an iron satisfaction, had he written truer words than those. And never had he been more confident of their soundness or more certain that he should send them forth to the world. It was insanity that the President and Orrin were engaged upon, the dreadful insanity that can end nations and end worlds.

It was up to him, he realized as he trudged out through the heavy drifts to the car where Roosevelt waited to drive him to the airport, to him and to all other decent men and women in America, to stop it if they could. Helen-Anne thought he never got really angry, did she? Well, this time she’d find out—they’d all find out—that he could.

A thin, bitter line settled around his lips and stayed there. Roosevelt, normally sunny and chatty, made no attempt to talk as they passed slowly over the slippery, drifted roads to the capital in the sparkling morning that had succeeded the world’s dark night.

Far below on the East River the barges, tugboats, and freighters maintained their ceaseless commerce; across on Long Island the world was a smudgy gray, clean snow contending with drab buildings, drab buildings winning out. But when he had entered the shimmering glass monolith of the UN Secretariat Building to take the elevator to his office on the thirty-eighth floor, the air had been crisp and clear, the sun had been steadily warming. Winter’s last storm would not lie too long on the land. Spring, at any moment, would be here.

And what a spring it promised to be, the Secretary-General thought sadly as he let his black, knobbled old hands rest idly on his desk and stared out the window, not really seeing the lovely day that was developing. What a spring, and how would men survive it to see summer, or the autumn that would follow, or another winter after that? Somewhere along the way in the next few months or weeks or days or hours someone would do something to make it impossible, the flywheel would spin out of the creaking machinery, the whole great game would end, the centuries’ old pretense that man could determine his own destiny would collapse in one final, obliterating NO brought on by man himself. Man could determine his own destiny—if that destiny were destruction. That was clear enough. It was beginning to seem increasingly unlikely to him that man could exercise the slightest control if the destiny were to be anything else. That apparently lay entirely with the God or gods to whom man prayed, when he remembered to pray.

Thinking of all the raucous, brawling, undisciplined nations and non-nations that snapped and snarled in the Security Council, the General Assembly, the committees, and the conference rooms that lay below his fragile and impotent aerie, the S.-G. gave a heavy sigh, the sigh of an old man who has seen too much and accomplished too little, in his own estimation, to have made it all worth the struggle. He had come to his office with such high hopes, had learned so soon that the Communists had no intention of permitting him to exercise any real influence upon events, had found himself attacked by his fellow Africans and Asians for his decision to be fair to the white nations, had found all hopes dissipated in the conflicting hatreds and suspicions that swirled constantly like a sickening and fatal gas through all the handsome chambers below. The UN was dying, it had been dying for years, and why had it been given to him, he wondered bitterly, to preside over what might well be its final agonies?

There lay before him on his desk the latest earnest pamphlets of all those well-meaning and good-hearted American organizations which still insisted, in the face of all the evidence, that the raddled organization was a strong and effective force for world peace. He had also seen on their television screens and heard over their radio the defensive, anguished pleas to believe in a dream whose guardians had wrecked it long since. THINK WHAT YOU WOULD DO WITHOUT IT! they urged; DON’T LET THE SKEPTICS TELL YOU IT ISN’T WORKING! Well: he was its Secretary-General, and he knew. Every honest observer in the world knew. Yet here were the Americans, pretending with a desperate anguish to the end, that somehow by sheer incantation and appeal they could put life back into something that was already, insofar as its original purpose of being an effective peace-keeper was concerned, a corpse putrescent and overdue for burial. This was the fact, and not all the desperate pamphlets and all the defensive statements and all the indignant outpourings of scorn upon those who acknowledged the fact could change it in the slightest. Long, too long, after the UN had been weakened and dragged down by its own members into a howling shell of what it could have been, powerful groups in America were still pretending that it was the vigorous and hopeful organization of their long-ago dreams.

The Secretary-General could not understand this on the basis of reason, though he could understand it on the basis of fear. They were so dreadfully afraid of what the world would be like without the shaky symbol, however empty, of their hope of peace. They were so frantically unsure of themselves when confronted by the possibility of a world in which they might have to stand on their own feet, take the consequences of their own acts, be unable to avail themselves of this comforting fiction to which to pass the buck for their own errors. They wanted the UN propped up and kept there so that they could run to it like children and hide their faces in its skirts. But the skirts were empty, the sought-for womblike comfort long gone, if it had ever really existed after the first ten minutes of the organization’s life. They knew it, as he did, but they would not give up the pretense. They were too afraid.

Not so, ironically, the Africans and Asians who had done so much, with their exaggerated fears of the colonial past, to bring the UN down. It was the greatest thing in the world for them to be able to come to New York, all expenses paid, usually by American money, and live in luxury while they went to the Assembly or the Security Council every day and denounced America to the accompaniment of fine, approving notices in the American press. To use one of those skeptical, ironic, knowing American phrases that so often went to the heart of things, they never had it so good back in the bush. But they did have, back in the bush, the comforting assurance that no matter how irresponsible they were, no matter what they said or did, the UN would continue to exist as long as the Americans could possibly preserve it—a free and protective shield from behind they could spit out their hatreds of America and make a bitter mockery of its earnest, awkward, well-meaning hopes that somehow, sometime, somewhere the world might discover dignity and peace.

And now America had finally given them real cause for hatred, and most of them, he knew, would be in a manic frenzy when the Security Council met at three this afternoon. The President had called him last night near midnight, waking him from a deep yet troubled sleep in which he had been chasing, with dragging feet and arms so dreadfully heavy that he could not raise his spear, some impossibly bright and golden lion in his native Nigeria. He had known at once that something of dreadful import must have occurred. He had also realized that the call was a great courtesy, for he need not have been informed; few others bothered to inform him. His gratitude increased when he realized that the President was actually asking his advice, as much as Presidents ever could.

The President had told him what had happened and had asked what he should do. Did the Secretary-General think that any purpose other than a futile and foredoomed attempt to appease the vague phantasm “world opinion” would be served by refraining from stern and direct action? Did he see any hope of affirmative support in the Security Council or the General Assembly if the United States should go through the procedure of submitting the issue?

“You answer a first question with a second, Mr. President,” the S.-G. had said. “We both, I think, know the answer to the second. Therefore the first need hardly have been asked, do you think?”

“Probably not,” the President said. “But I felt it should be, out of respect to you.”

“Thank you,” the S.-G. said, feeling flattered. “I think, in any event, that you need have no doubt that the issue will be submitted to the Council, as it is already seized of Prince Obifumatta’s complaint against your ultimatum.”

“Call it what you will,” the President said, “I felt it had to be done.”

“I am afraid Obifumatta, too clever, like his cousin, did not foresee that you were laying the foundation for future action.”

“I am afraid Obifumatta has not foreseen many things. Very well. I am sorry to have disturbed you, but I wished you to know what to expect and I also wanted you to have the opportunity to go on record, if you so desired, as being opposed to what I am about to do should I decide to do it.”

The Secretary-General had permitted himself a wry chuckle.

“Opposed to what you
will
do
should
you do it,” he repeated. “Mr. President, even if I were warning you against it—”

“Are you?” the President asked quickly.

“Each of us must act as his fate decrees.”

“I thought as much. Understand me on one thing: I do not minimize the consequences at all. They may be ultimate. But I feel we have no choice.”

“The world is becoming full of no choices,” the Secretary-General said sadly. “Daily the choices diminish. It is a world of no choices.”

“And Obifumatta and his friends have just reduced them further,” the President said grimly.

“As they no doubt thought you did with your ultimatum,” the Secretary-General ventured. The President sighed.

“There is one-millionth of a chance that they sincerely believe they are in the right. But I do not believe it. I think their actions always spring from the most abysmal cynicism and the most utter contempt for human decency as we understand it. I think this is the essential fact underlying all the others … Thank you again. My advisers are waiting for me to tell them what they may advise me to do. May all go well until we meet again.”

“Which will be?”

“Who can say? I may address the Assembly myself before this is over. Though not for a while, yet. Events must develop for a time, first. Nothing would be gained now.”

“If that is your opinion,” the Secretary-General said, “When you are ready—”

“I shall let you know.”

“May all go well with you, too, Mr. President,” the Secretary-General said, moved by a strange combination of sympathy, understanding, pity, and fear.

“My thanks. Good night.”

“Good night.”

The S.-G. had rolled back into his pillows, though not to sleep for several hours. Always there was the fear that the United States might be provoked too far; always there was the possibility that her patience, which usually was sufficient to withstand any amount of attack, opposition, disparagement, and contempt, might abruptly snap; always there was the awesome possibility that she might explode into some violent and drastic action whose consequences could not be foreseen, much less controlled. It had happened in Asia, it could happen in Africa. Apparently this was to be one of the times.

Nothing but disaster lay ahead for anyone, as the Secretary-General saw it. He knew that in the morning he would have to receive a constant stream of visitors from the rooms below, all furious, all shouting, all demanding that he do something. Do something! He had done all he could, though he would not admit it to them. He had in effect told the President to go ahead, for he agreed with the President; though he knew the ultimates of the decision might be dreadful beyond imagining.