ii
After BJ And Wellington had both left in BJ’s official chauffeur-driven brown Chevrolet, Uncle Joe took Evelyn aside and said, “Let’s talk about this Paris trip.” Bradford was closeted with Howard, as usual, so they had some time to themselves.
“Let’s go outside,” she said. “I hate to be cooped up in the house all the time when we have such nice weather.”
So they walked in the garden. It was Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of June, and the Paris trip was scheduled for Friday. Uncle Joe had reluctantly agreed to the idea last month, when it was first suggested, and when Bradford had reminded him that he’d obeyed Joe’s orders and cut down severely for the last few months on his speech-making, his party conferences and the granting of interviews to the press. For having been so good, Bradford had pointed out, he deserved a reward: the Paris trip.
So Joe had agreed, with great reluctance, and had been out to the house twice since then to give Bradford additional examinations and repeat his orders about what Bradford should and should not do. He hadn’t hidden his doubts about the wisdom of the trip, but Evelyn had at one point heard Bradford say to him, “I would rather be useful and in danger than useless and safe.” It was a point of view that couldn’t be argued with, so Uncle Joe was reduced to fretful attempts at preventive medicine.
And he was also reduced to repeating himself. Nothing he said to Evelyn now as they walked amid Dinah’s flowers was new; he’d given her the same instructions several times before. Bradford should attempt to avoid over-stimulation, if possible. If his insomnia should strike — during his active political career he had frequently suffered from insomnia during periods of crisis — he should under no circumstances take any sedation; the deeper the sleep, the better the conditions for a stroke, and sleeplessness was better than the risk of either another ischemic attack or the real thing. If another attack did occur, Evelyn was to get in touch at once with the Parisian specialist Uncle Joe had told her about, a man Joe knew and trusted and who had been sent a long detailed letter by Joe to prepare him in the event of an emergency. Should there be such an emergency, she was also to cable Joe immediately. During Bradford’s Parisian stay, his blood pressure should be taken at least once a day — for this an ordinary doctor would do, the specialist wasn’t needed — and if it started to climb, corrective measures should be taken, up to and including postponement of Bradford’s meetings with the Chinese. “If he starts with that useful-useless stuff,” he added, “tell him I said there’s nothing much more useless than a corpse.”
“I’ll tell him,” she promised. She turned to look at the house, and little Dinah was at a second floor window. When she saw her mother looking up at her she waved, and Evelyn waved back. Should she ask Bradford if she could bring Dinah along? No, of course not, that would be silly. The child would be better off at home than stuck in some Parisian hotel room with nothing to do.
Uncle Joe had also seen Dinah, and he said, “You know, if I’d had a daughter, that’s the one I would have wanted.”
“I haven’t been giving her enough of my attention,” Evelyn said. She was still waving, but something inside the house suddenly attracted Dinah’s attention and she disappeared from the window.
Uncle Joe gave a surprised laugh and said, “Who have you been giving it to?”
She dropped her arm and reluctantly looked away from the window. “What?”
“Who’s been getting your attention, if not Dinah?”
“Oh, myself, I suppose. And of course, Bradford.”
“Of course.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? But why should there be? Particularly when he immediately added, “Especially in Paris. I’m counting on you there.”
“I’ll do my best,” she promised.
iii
The first press conference had been at Kennedy International Airport in New York, and the second one was at Orly International Airport in Paris, but except for the language difference they might both have been taking place in the same location. The sites were strikingly similar, both long bare naked rooms with linoleum floors, bare cream-colored walls, and ceilings covered with acoustical tiles. Both rooms contained one long wall consisting mostly of large windows looking out at the taxiways, high-nosed planes rolling ponderously and silently back and forth out there, their keening silenced by the shut windows and the pervasive hush of the air-conditioning.
The major difference was in the time of day. The flight had taken five hours, in addition to which they had lost five hours in crossing the time zones, accelerating the day like a record played at the wrong speed. The windows in the Kennedy conference room had faced east, and a 9:00 A.M. sun had streamed through to touch the standing group of reporters with yellow and white. And now, five hours later, they were in an identical room, but with westward-facing windows, so that a 7:00 P.M. setting sun painted orange and red another group of reporters, these too standing, notebooks in hand, their faces and their clothing and their questions all the same as the first group, an ocean away.
Bradford’s answers were the same, too, with slight variations in the phrasing. “As some of the more elderly among you may remember, as President I never much went in for what is called personal diplomacy. I didn’t believe in it, I thought it smacked of grandstanding and rarely had any but the most temporary of effects. My attitude hasn’t changed. I am not here now to engage in personal diplomacy, I’m not really here to engage in diplomacy at all. My only purpose here is to try to keep open one of the thin slender conduits of communication between ourselves and the people of Communist China.”
He reminded them, as he had reminded their twins back at Kennedy, that he was still the only American President to have had an actual face-to-face meeting with an official of the Red Chinese government. That meeting had been of extremely limited scope, but out of it had developed a personal relationship with the Chinese official that had been maintained over the years through intermittent correspondence. “I wouldn’t say we were friends precisely, nor that we’ve found much to agree on, but we are a bit more than acquaintances, and the one thing on which we are in agreement is that our respective countries must learn to live together on the same planet. And it won’t happen without communication.”
The official lines of communication, he reminded them, for the most part truly didn’t exist. There was no organization, from the UN down to a copyright convention, to which both nations belonged. Neither had any sort of diplomatic staff on the soil of the other, nor was there any real communication possible through such neutral nations as Sweden or Cambodia, since the Chinese tended to distrust the neutrality of Caucasian nations and the United States tended to distrust the neutrality of Oriental nations. Communication wasn’t even possible through the Soviet Union or any of the Warsaw Pact nations, since the Chinese were frequently also at odds with them.
“The key to world peace, in my opinion, is the curing of paranoia. The arms race was and is the result of paranoia. Several of the bush league brushfire wars we’ve gotten ourselves entangled in these last two decades have been directly or indirectly the result of paranoia, in fact the whole domino theory that directed our Asian policy for so long was entirely paranoid in character. Now, paranoia will continue to exist as long as men continue to exist, but it can be kept within bounds. Our national paranoia about the Soviet Union has eased considerably in the last ten to fifteen years, and so has theirs about us. At the moment, the only large nation, the only nation of global importance that exists almost totally in a state of paranoia is Communist China, which doesn’t find one single nation on the face of the earth worthy of its trust. It is China’s paranoia which is keeping the pot boiling more than any other single factor, and it is China’s paranoia which may someday result in the pot boiling over and destroying us all.