Memories of The Great and The Good (3 page)

But to most people on the outside who never met him and inferred his private character from his writing, he was a riddle. A young Scottish professor, being invited to lecture on Shaw, replied that she would have to confine her remarks to the plays, for which she had “a great curiosity and respect. As for the man's character, I give up: he is an enigma.” What baffled everybody was the inexplicable contradiction between the human being you could meet and see and hear and the public character who was at once a shrewd capitalist, a dedicated Communist, and a defiant admirer of both Hitler and Stalin. This gentle, seemingly reasonable man would certainly hesitate to bruise a gnat but he professed to accept the necessity of liquidating (i.e. murdering) whole regions of peasants for the sake of a long-term political program. Yet the same man could feel excessive guilt for offending a nonentity: a young aspiring writer in the suburbs sent Shaw, evidently for comment, the manuscript of a children's book and its accompanying illustrations. Shaw lost the lot. He subsequently wrote a flock of apologetic letters to the forlorn young man, gave him a part in
The Doctor's Dilemma
and sent him a pair of new boots, a cardigan, an autographed copy of
Man and Superman
, a book on Karl Marx and, for no explained reason, the sum of fifteen pounds, ten shillings.

To the complaint of a London critic that a “wrinkled” Eleanora Duse was appearing in London in a role much too young for her, Shaw retorted: “Her wrinkles are the credentials of her humanity.” After unloosing this lance of chivalry and good sense, he was then ready to release a fatuous manifesto proclaiming that vaccination killed more children than it protected.

But the central, and most bewildering, contradiction of his private and public character was that between his personal generosity, courtliness even to the humblest people (his optician remarked to a neighbor—”Oh, that Mr. Shaw! A nice old gentleman, never any trouble at all”), and his lifelong oscillation between maintaining that Stalin's twilight signatures on orders to massacre, torture, exile or “liquidate” were a Tory invention or that they were measures necessary to prevent the Soviet Utopia from sinking into the “debauchery” of democracy.

At the end, I see him leaving Broadcasting House on a late spring morning, a fedora shading his crinkled eyes and white beard, his hands deep in a top coat, marching with his wide tread down Upper Regent Street, occasionally looking over his shoulder for his bus, then deciding the day was balmy enough for walking all the way home. He might pause in one of the leafy London squares to sit on a bench and eat his delicious mid-morning lifesaver of a parsley sandwich. Then on down the Strand to the river and up to his apartment in the Adelphi and reunion with his only friend, wife, companion: the ever-virginal (by mutual agreement in the marriage contract) Charlotte Payne-Townshend. And there, after much meditation, and a lifetime of feeling “the joy in being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one,” he would sit down and write his will and leave his entire fortune to the mighty purpose of—Simplified Spelling.

On
a warm April night in southern Florida, in 1951, two United States senators and a man from Missouri were asleep as holiday guests in the house of a wealthy American statesman, in Hobe Sound, an exclusive strip of land on the ocean, fenced in from the plebs by towering Australian pines and highly cultivated bits of real estate with an asking price of about a hundred thousand dollars
^*
a lot.

Just as the dawn was coming up over the sea and the blue herons that stand motionless in the neighboring lagoons, a telephone startled this silent house and it was answered by the man from Missouri. He was struck dumb by what he heard and he pattered off in his pajamas to the next room and tapped on the door.

The man from Missouri simply said, “I just had it on the phone from Washington—Harry Truman's fired MacArthur.” The senator from Texas came upright, as on a hoist, and sat on the side of the bed and pondered the appalling news: that MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific war, the most Roman of all American generals, had been—as the order said—”stripped of all his commands.”

The visible eyeball of the senator from Georgia rolled over the bedsheet and a high southern voice came out from under. “Hitch up yo' pants, Lyndon Johnson,” it said, “and let's get the hell back to Washington and get that investigation started or they'll have a posse out for us before noon.”

It was a sound instinct. Before the recriminations got started, the three men were back in the capital; and the senator from Georgia began the famous hearings that took many months and, I believe, three million words to affirm the judgment of the president of the United States and to confirm the original prejudices, one way or the other, of its people.

This anecdote is very typical of southern politicians, of their wariness, their healthy respect for the shifts and terrors of public sentiment, their relaxed assumption that pending Judgment Day something practical can be done about almost any catastrophe, from the loss of an election to an earthquake.

It came back to me the other evening when we learned that down on the Mexican border, in Uvalde, Texas, a former vice president of the United States had died. He was John Nance Garner, called “Cactus Jack” after the burning and barren landscape that weaned him. Of all public men today he was the last link between the America of the Civil War and the America of the nuclear age. He would never himself have claimed the title of statesman, and, for that matter, he never earned it. “An elder statesman,” he once told Harry Truman, “is a retired politician.” He would not have claimed to understand or sympathize with the trouble in the cities, the missions to the moon, or the turn of American life much after 1934. Roosevelt's New Deal was the end of the road for him. And when, at the end of Roosevelt's second term, he stepped down from the vice presidency, he went home to Texas and swore he would never again cross the Potomac River. And he never did. He was cashiered, you might say, by his origins and his prejudices. The Depression overwhelmed him and many more of his breed who had been raised to believe that there was nothing an American couldn't face and overcome if he rolled his sleeves and gritted his teeth and sweated it out.

Today this bluster may sound quite fatuous. But it was a central conviction of the men who tamed the frontier, from the Cumberland Gap to the American River. And John Nance Garner was a fascinating faint echo of it. He was remarkable not for any great gifts of mind or character but for his intense typicality of one aspect of the frontier character: its fatalism, physical hardiness, cynicism, tooth-sucking humor, its humdrum pragmatism in the face of death, disloyalty, and disaster. A Texas judge like Garner demonstrated to perfection the quality once ascribed to W. C. Fields: “He had the greatest reverence for his colleagues, with the usual reservations and suspicions.” It is easy to imagine him, a little quiet stoat of a man, hearing the shocked cries of the onlookers at the severed head of an Indian and glancing down and snapping out, “A flesh wound.”

Garner was the son of a Confederate cavalry trooper, and he was born in a muddy cabin, one room wide— what they called in the Red River Valley a shotgun house. Almost all the neighbors lived on farms. The black soil produced cotton and the red clay soil produced corn, and there were little sawmills in the clearings of the shortleaf pine. This was 1868, only three years after the war was over, but not before the Apache raids were over in his part of the country. His horizon was alive with flying squirrels and timber wolves, and his life was bounded by what the farmers called “work-a-crop” parties, by planting and plowing, box-and-pie suppers and fiddlers' contests on Saturday night; and on Sundays by camp meetings, and the whole neighborhood chanting:

He was a small chunky man with slant eyes and he was neither pious nor studious. In his
Who's Who
entry, which he kept down to five lines, he put down “limited school advantages,” and it was an understatement. But he learned poker from mustered-out soldiers and it stood him in good stead in Washington, where he often in one year won more from his fellow legislators than the ten thousand dollars of his congressional salary. He looked like a cross between a fox and a mole and had many of the more engaging habits of each. He somehow picked up a college education of sorts and at nights he started to read law. This was as practical a calling as any on a frontier which was riddled with army deserters, cattle thieves, claim jumpers, and strangers who came in and settled down to a farm on the general presumption of their neighbors that they had shot an uncle or sired an untimely baby someplace in Tennessee or the Carolinas. I well remember (the week, by the way, that Truman fired MacArthur) sitting at the bedside of a very aged lady in Alpine, Texas. She would have been about ten or fifteen years Garner's senior, but she talked with that intense concreteness of the very old when they are recalling their childhood and youth. She talked about the feuding families and the silent types who settled in the Davis Mountains; and she spoke with contempt of an expansive jolly man who came through in the 1870s, was full of praise for the bare landscape and said he meant to settle there for the reason that he liked the people and thought it was great farming country. Evidently, he had not shot or ravished anybody. “From then on,” said the old crone, “he was a suspicious character.”

There was a lot of preaching on the frontier, but it was reserved for Sunday meeting and left to one man, a professional. By weekday, you dealt with your fellow man, agile fly-by-nights, and rustlers and crooked lawyers and people who poisoned crops and dynamited wells. And from time to time there was an Indian raid. One of the first cases tried by the twenty-five-year-old Garner, when he was a countyjudge, was a gang of men who had been systematically cutting down pasture fences. Barbed wire was a comparative novelty, an omen of the coming of law and order; it fenced off the open range and said, This land is mine. Marauders who liked to make the most of the chaos of the range burned pastures, cut the wire, and left warnings to anyone who replaced it. Garner, in this case, bypassed the finer points of the law. He simply turned the Texas Rangers on them.

In his early twenties, by 1890, Garner had moved four hundred and fifty miles southwest, but still in Texas, to Uvalde, which grows pecan nuts and harvests a fine crop of mohair from land that only a goat can thrive on. This was where John Nance Garner hung out his shingle as a lawyer. Pretty soon he was in the Texas legislature and in 1902 he went to Congress, a small farmer's, railroad-hating Populist who burrowed his way into power through the channels he knew best: the back room, the small office, the poker game, the little chat with worried men. All his life he distrusted orators, “crooners” as he used to call them. Politics was doing the best you could for the people you knew best; and that meant wheedling bills through a reluctant Congress. He was a tireless wheedler, and he once said that “a snort of bourbon is a better persuader than the Twelve Apostles.” Whenever a sad man came to him complaining he was getting nowhere with a local bill he'd sworn to sponsor, Garner would shuffle him off to his small office. “Come,” he'd say, “let's go and strike a blow for liberty.”

Such new forces as organized labor were as strange to him as space men in science fiction. And labor reciprocated, in the words of the miners' John L. Lewis: “He is a poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, labor-baiting, evil old man.” The vice president couldn't have cared less about this kind of attack. The vice presidency itself he thought a mistake, a highfalutin step into the robes of power, not power itself.

No other president and his vice president have spanned such a gamut in their upbringing, social status and experience of American life. Garner, dirt-poor in barren Texas, had, as a child, known a woman who had been scalped. His early staple diet was fat-back pork and watered rot-gut whiskey. And yet the grandeur of the vice presidency was not worth “a spit in a pot.”

Roosevelt was such a precious young scion of the Hudson Valley squirearchy that his mother shielded him for as long as possible from association with such rough-hewn types as Ivy League teenagers. But once in politics, this legendary dude of the establishment soon learned that most political decisions in a democracy turn on the judgment of men (mostly) born closer to Garner's America than to FDR's. Roosevelt always confided his more romantic political fantasies to the wary mind of the man from the goat country. And when he was assailed and ridiculed for his lapse into the naïveté of proposing to retire all the Supreme Court justices over seventy and supplant them with six (!) true New Deal objectivisms, FDR asked Garner what was likely to happen.