The Shadow Cabinet (46 page)

Tom Foster's son a history perfessor? Well, I be. I knowed he was cut out to do something had to do with readin' an' writin
'.…

The chairman's deep voice revived him. “Try moving the microphone a little closer, Dr. Foster. We're almost done now.…”

Four congressmen flanked him along the raised bench of the hearing room, which seemed to Foster less a court of chancery than a tribunal of the inquisition. The paneled committee room was horribly bright from the television lights that were just being turned on. The spectator chairs had only been half-occupied until just three minutes earlier, when the next witness had entered, the senior State Department spokesman for Latin America, accompanied by his legal adviser, two deputy assistant secretaries, and an aide carrying a voluminous briefing book. This entourage was followed by a score of journalists, television reporters, interested congressional aides, and foreign diplomats, all avidly awaiting the administration's latest policy utterance on El Salvador and Latin America.

Dr. Foster had heard the bustle, the murmuring voices and the scraping chairs, and knew that what he feared most had come to pass. The klieg lights came on. A moment later, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the overflow of spectators, now spilling along the walls and into the chairs immediately behind him. The committee chairman banged his gavel. In the time it took for the commotion to dim and the room to settle into silence, Foster was sickeningly aware of how enormous his audience had become.

At the end of the second row, Dr. Foster's roommate—a slight wispy research librarian from the National Archives—was overcome by the same sudden vertigo that had stricken Foster. He slipped from his chair and fled up the aisle. With that alacrity for which he was noted, Shy Wooster quickly left the wall near the door to occupy the vacated seat, forcing a matronly reporter from a Midwestern news service who'd moved toward the same seat to retreat to the rear.

As the din subsided, Foster felt the blush rise from his armpits, ascend to his neck and cheeks, and begin to ring in his ears. Naked before the tribunal, he was aware of the enormous hole in the toe of his right sock, the gaping cavity in his right rear molar, and the frayed elastic band of his drooping shorts, pressing against his chubby back. Quite suddenly he saw himself not as a scholar, a psychohistorian, or a Soviet expert at all but as a fraud—a plump, frightened, middle-aged homosexual sitting in his yeasty underwear before this hoary inquisitional court, these black-suited heterosexual parsons from the hinterlands, sitting in sanctimonious judgment over all that gave substance and passion to his life. Could John Donne ever get a sonnet read here? William Byrd perform a motet? Jefferson engage in philosophical discourse, Tillich discuss his tormented sexual life, Niebuhr publish an essay? No, these were the same canting philistines who'd pursued him all his life, who had driven him out of Iowa, out of graduate school, out of government, and out of teaching … these same dull, sanctimonious, coarse-faced bigots—

“Dr. Foster, are you gonna answer the question?” the congressman drawled with a trace of impatience.

Foster's mind teetered backward, his damp eyes swooned back in his skull, his shoulders swayed, and he was on the brink of fainting dead away when a sudden angel of deliverance danced across his hot eyelids—a plump, pink-clad coquette in tights, tiptoeing seductively across the stage of the rapt State Department press room; and behind the Spanish fan and false eyelashes he recognized Henry Kissinger as Carmen, doing his Waltz of the Toreadors for a lovesick Washington press corps.

“That's not precisely what I meant,” Foster found himself saying, miraculously revived.

“Maybe you could explain it, then.”

“What I meant to say was that we can't have it both ways. By ‘we' I mean the United States,” he added hastily, suppressing the innuendo.

“Both ways? I don't follow you.”

You wouldn't
, Foster thought stupidly, gazing at the repellent heterosexual face. “What I mean is that we can't continue to claim that our system, our way of life, offers the best hope for others in the world while we continue to support stability over justice and oppression over reform.” He was reading again, his face still flushed, but his voice stronger.

“That's what you said in your statement,” the congressman interrupted wearily, lifting a copy of Foster's prepared statement from the notes in front of him. “You already said that, but what I want to know is how we do it. How do we handle all of this Communist subversion in Latin America if we don't give them military help?”

“By not aligning ourselves with their oppressors,” Foster replied, but the words seemed so trite that he blushed again.

“Give the Russians an inch and they'll take a mile,” his interlocutor rumbled on. “We've gotta deal with that. So far you haven't told us how. If you wanna know what the Russians are doing down there in Latin America, you ought to come around to some of our classified briefings, see what we see.”

The congressman's reference to details not available to the general public, like any references by a high priesthood to their occult mysteries, whether in the Masonic order, Skull and Bones, or the Vatican's bank accounts, carried a note of moral superiority. Dr. Foster hesitated a moment, unable to think of any reply except the obvious one:
Show me
. “I'm not really sure what the Russians are up to,” he began evasively, but then, conscious of his own voice, added hastily, “Behavior often gets terribly muddled. Confused, I mean.” But that too wasn't quite right. “Perceptions, I meant to say, not so much behavior.”

“You'll have to explain that one to me, Doctor,” the congressman declared, grinning as he watched Dr. Foster mop his brow. “I'm just a plain ole country boy.”

“I meant to say that we often flaunt an idealistic view of our own actions,” Foster answered, aware that he was straying from his script, “but take a much more cynical view of Soviet behavior.”

“Can't trust 'em, that's why,” the congressman said, recognizing his opening. “You mean to sit there and tell me you don't know that?” He smiled for the benefit of those spectators who'd sighed audibly at the doctor's naiveté.

“I think you've described the very problem I'm trying to get at,” Foster said guiltily, departing even further from his text. “That very bias—”

“
Bias?
” The congressman leaned forward. “Bias? What kind of bias?”

“Our own biases, I'm afraid,” Foster offered without conviction. This was the section of his presentation that Haven Wilson had deleted at the Center, convinced that the committee would make short work of it. “I mean by that that we use one set of ideals or attitudes to defend our own actions and another set entirely to judge the Russians or for that matter any regime we find objectionable. I'm talking about the double standard.”

The hearing room was silent. Troubled that the subcommittee was being led into a cul-de-sac, the chairman leaned back to confer with the counsel. The congressman was still bent forward intently, glowering at Foster.

“I sure wish I knew what you meant by that,” he said.

“I mean that we take an idealistic or anthropomorphic view of our own motives,” Foster replied, licking his dry lips, “and a much more cynical or ratomorphic view of the Russians. It's almost as if their cerebral cortexes were totally different.”

The congressman continued to study Dr. Foster's flushed face as he silently digested this strange scrap of scientific information. Then he seemed to understand. “You saying the Russians act like rats?” he asked with that histrionic acuteness that was the despair of his opponents and the delight of the Oklahoma prairie towns. A murmur of laughter lifted from behind Foster. “He said it, I didn't,” the congressman drawled as he leaned back, lifting his huge hands from the dais in helpless innocence. “He said the Russians are ratomorphic, they act like rats.” The laughter came again and he leaned forward over his folded arms to exploit his advantage. “Is that what you study over at that research center of yours, running rats around all day to see how they act like Russians?” He lifted Dr. Foster's prepared statement to read aloud the Center's full name. “The Center for Contemporary Studies—is that what you call it?” he asked, having given the title the full benefit of his Oklahoma drawl, the same kind of heavy sarcasm used by Foster's high school history teacher back in Iowa—but first and foremost, the football and basketball coach—to announce to a snickering class the latest title of one of young Foster's history essays.

“I'm afraid you misunderstood me,” Foster said weakly.

“Well, maybe you ought to explain it to me, explain it to all of us.” Foster cleared his throat and brought the microphone nearer, opened his mouth to begin, but then realized that he hadn't the slightest idea of how to commence. They waited. “Take your time, son,” the congressman chided, with a tolerant smile, winking at the audience. “That's a whole lot of learning you're carrying around in your head and it's not all gonna come jumping out on the table at the same time, like a bushel of bullfrogs, if that's what you're scared of.” The audience laughed. “We're ready when you are.”

“Thank you, Congressman.” Foster spoke very slowly, the words found only with great effort. “What I meant to say was that while we credit ourselves with very complex human attributes—love, loyalty, generosity, intelligence, empathy, compassion, and so on—we do less for others. We assign the Soviet Union or the Soviet leadership, for example, a far cruder or primitive character, that of rats or pigeons. Less mammalian than reptilian. As if they didn't have sons or daughters, homes or birthdays, and so forth—”
Birthdays?
he thought too late, lulled asleep by his own sonority. Where in God's name had that come from? He cleared his throat again. “That is the behaviorist view—the ‘ratomorphic' view I spoke of. What it means is that in our foreign policy choices, we treat the Russians the same way behaviorist psychologists treat the rats and pigeons in their laboratories. By that, I mean that they are thought to respond to only the most primitive stimuli—”

The laughter had come again. Shy Wooster, seated two rows behind Dr. Foster, immediately took out his pocket notebook.

“Come again?” said the congressman. “You got me a little confused, Doctor. Sounds like you've got a lot of folks confused.”

Very loudly, as if to dispel any misunderstanding that might have been caused by his soft, quavering voice, Foster said: “We claim that we act only out of idealistic and humanitarian motives, but not the Russians. We claim we act logically and reasonably at all times, but not the Russians. We believe, in short, that we are guided by lofty principles, but the Russians, base ones, and that as a result they must be disciplined as one disciplines rats and pigeons in a behaviorist laboratory. Pain or pleasure, you see, penalties or rewards.” Dr. Foster paused, aware for the first time of the stunning effect his amplified voice had had on the committee members. “This is what I call the ‘ratomorphic' view of Soviet character,” he said in conclusion, his voice sliding away like a frightened boy's.

In his notebook, Shy Wooster was writing:
There is a scientific basis to Russian cunning and deceit. It has been proven in the scientific laboratory in experiments with rats
.

“That's very interesting,” the congressman declared, making a few notes himself, “very interesting. And what are you saying, that it's scientific or not scientific?”

“Pseudoscientific, of course,” Foster replied weakly. “It's a very primitive tool for trying to cope with quite complex events, like Afghanistan or Poland. We believe we can control Soviet behavior by quantitative techniques, the way we condition the reflexes of rats and pigeons. It doesn't take mind or idealism, if you will, into account. But it's a primitive, mechanistic view, behaviorism is—a nineteenth-century view, which is now being applied to foreign policy. That's what Dr. Kissinger's version of détente was. And that's why it didn't work.” His hand reached for the water glass. His mouth was growing dry again.

“Hold on a minute, Doctor,” the congressman broke in. “You're getting me all mixed up. You say détente didn't work or couldn't work? I don't understand what you're saying. Are you for it or agin it?”

“What I'm saying is that Dr. Kissinger and others interpreted détente in a very limited way,” Foster said. “They saw it as a kind of behaviorist box within which they could confine the Soviet policy animal and then manipulate him the way the behaviorist manipulates his laboratory creatures.”

The dais was silent, like the room behind him. Foster was reluctant to continue, but then the committee chairman nodded to him impatiently. “The underlying assumption behind all this,” Foster resumed, “is that Soviet policymakers have an intelligence quotient similar to rats and pigeons and can only be trained like such creatures, conditioned by their own brute, primitive reflex. Appetite, you see; aggression. Unless so contained, the Soviet Union will continue to be aggressors. You can't change them any more than you can teach rats or pigeons to think or tie their shoes; therefore they must be conditioned by the application of penalties and rewards, a kernel of corn or an electric shock. That was our old version of détente—”

“And it won't work?” the congressman asked.

“It's inadequate,” Foster offered. “It's too primitive to explain Soviet policy choices. In any case, the U.S. is incapable of playing the role of an omniscient, omnipresent global laboratory scientist, able to keep the world in his behaviorist box. That's quite impossible.”

“But we did it,” a congressman intruded loudly from the far end of the bench, “we did it. We've done it since '45—kept the Russians right at home, kept them from overrunning Europe, Korea, the Middle East. We did it because we had the military power, because we had the bomb, and that's what it'll take to keep them there. That's what this new defense budget is all about.”