“Sure.” Truman opened his eyes. The girl held up a mirror so he could admire her handiwork. “Doggone!” he said. “It still looks like me. I thought I’d end up with Clark Gable’s mug there.”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he hoped he hadn’t hurt her feelings. She was too pretty for him to want to do that. But she sassed him right back: “The mustache and the ears take a while to grow in.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “I bet they do!” Then he had to fight his features back to sobriety. One thing he hadn’t expected was going in front of the cameras with a case of the giggles.
That assistant director stuck his head into the dressing room. “Two minutes, Mr. President! You just about ready?”
“You betcha, Eddie,” Truman answered, and the makeup girl nodded. Eddie stared at her, too, so Truman wasn’t the only one with an active imagination. She took it all in stride. Her manner said she was used to it, and might even be offended if you didn’t notice her.
Into the press room Truman went. There were the cameras. There was the lectern, with mikes for TV and for radio as well. Here was the typescript for the speech, in a manila folder in his left hand. He knew what he was going to say. So did Bess, and their daughter Margaret. So did George Marshall and Dean Acheson. The Secretaries of Defense and State needed to be apprised ahead of time.
As far as the President could tell, no one else knew. Well, Marshall wouldn’t have told his mother his own name if she hadn’t tagged him with it. And Dean Acheson was also pretty good at keeping his mouth shut. People in the press wondered why Truman had asked for radio and television time, but no enterprising reporter had put the substance of his speech in the paper before he could deliver it. In Washington’s incestuous world, that was right security.
He took his place behind the lectern and opened the manila folder. The lectern would hide his turning pages. He looked into the cameras and waited for the red lights to go on. Bit by bit, he was getting used to the rituals of television.
There they were! Most of the United States could see him. In a moment, the whole world would hear him. Maybe his crack about Clark Gable wasn’t altogether silly. He had an audience even a movie star would envy.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am sorry to have to tell you that the war goes on. Our offer to our foes of peace with the borders in place before North Korea invaded South Korea has been ignored. The United States cannot and will not accept anything less than that.
“Now, some have claimed that I am fighting the war the way I am to make my chances for reelection look better. For a long time, I thought that notion was too stupid for anyone with an ounce of sense, or even for Senator McCarthy, to take seriously. But we are getting close to 1952, and 1952, like it or not, is an election year.
“Since it is, I aim to make my political plans for the coming year as clear as I possibly can. I can do no better than General Sherman did in 1884, and so I will repeat what he had to say: ‘I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.’ That is what he really said. You usually hear it as ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.’ They mean the same thing.
“And, because I will not run for reelection next year, I am free to carry on the war for freedom as seems best to me until my successor, whoever he may be, takes the oath of office. I do not want my own political career to become an obstacle to victory or to peace. Thank you, and good night.”
The red lights went out. No reporters tonight to shout questions. He’d wanted to speak directly to the people who’d sent him back to the White House after he had to set up shop here when Roosevelt died. Now that he’d done it, he felt…He tried to decide what he felt.
It was over. That was all there was to it. He’d worked very hard for a very long time. Everyone, without exception, had to step aside sooner or later. Better to do it on your own terms than to get tossed out on your ear. Much better to do it that way than to have the Grim Reaper set the terms for you.
Wasn’t it?
Part of him, and not such a small part, wanted to stay in the saddle as long as he could. A very big part of him wanted to stay in the saddle till he mounted Joe Stalin’s head on the Oval Office wall, with Mao’s on one side and Kim Il-sung’s on the other to keep it company. Well, he still might manage that. He’d be here till January 1953.
If he couldn’t do it by then…Maybe Uncle Joe would have nailed his head to the Kremlin wall instead. Except there were no Kremlin walls any more. American B-29s had taken care of that.
His press secretary burst into the press room. Joseph Short bore an astonished, goggle-eyed expression, as if someone had slapped him in the chops with a big dead salmon. “You’re- You’re not going to run?” he choked out.
“Nope. I’m not gonna run.” Saying it again made it seem realer to Truman.
“You could have told me,” Short said reproachfully. “You should have told me.”
“Sorry, Joe.” Truman more or less meant it. He would have told Charlie Ross, who’d died the year before. But then, he’d gone to high school with Charlie, while Joe Short was a longtime Washington press-man. Charlie, characteristically, had had a heart attack or a stroke while holding a press conference, and from what the docs said was gone before he hit the floor.
Truman hadn’t told Joe Short because he didn’t trust him the way he’d trusted poor Charlie. It was that simple. Most of the time, you wanted somebody like him for your press secretary. But a press secretary naturally spent much of his time chinning with the press. Truman wasn’t a hundred percent sure Short wouldn’t blab, the way he had been with Charlie Ross.
“What will the country do without you?” Short exclaimed.
“The country will do fine. If it did okay after FDR died, it won’t miss me even one little bit,” Truman said. “I’m not Stalin, thank God, and this isn’t Russia. We have a government here, not a dictator.”
“That may not last if the Republicans pick McCarthy,” Short said.
He’d hit Truman’s biggest fear, too, but the President said, “If they’re dumb enough to pick him, and if the people are dumb enough to elect him, they almost deserve what happens to them after that. I don’t think it’ll happen.” He didn’t tell Short he worried that McCarthy was likelier to beat him than some other Democrat.
“It’s the end of an era,” the press secretary said.
“Eras end. That’s what makes them eras,” Truman said. “Pretty damn quick, whoever comes after me will start looking like a dinosaur, too.”
–
As usual, the speaker in Smidovich’s sorry little square blared out reports from Radio Moscow. Vasili Yasevich paused to listen. Snow crunched under his felt boots. He’d already seen that it got colder here than it did in Harbin, which was really saying something.
“American President Truman has taken the coward’s way out by refusing to stand behind his war of capitalist aggression,” Roman Amfiteatrov declared in his cowlike southern accent. “By contrast, the great and beloved Stalin will persevere until victory is won and true Communism established, as the historical dialectic assures us it must be.”
Vasili nodded. He wanted to be seen to nod, so people believed he believed all the nonsense that came out of that speaker. Three or four others were also nodding. For the same reason? He wouldn’t have been surprised.
Someone set a hand on his shoulder. He spun around, ready for anything. If it was Papanin or one of the pricks who followed him…But it wasn’t. It was one of the handful of town militiamen. The guy looked startled and alarmed at the speed of Vasili’s reaction.
“You’re Yasevich, right?” The militiaman’s voice shook as he asked the question.