“There’s one thing I learned in the five years I served in the Army out there,” President Eisenhower said, shaking his head dumfoundedly, “we can never figure out the working of the Oriental mind!”
Foster stared dully at the President over the tops of his spectacles a moment, then turned back to his latest communiqué, while others around the table picked up on this newest theme of Oriental inscrutability. I participated in these discussions as usual, making occasional observations on detail, crisp and to the point, avoiding generalizations and speech-making, and so keeping up a certain reputation, but my mind was on the excitement outside, the demonstrators and counterdemonstrators, the Supreme Court now or soon to be in session, the trial and the executions, and those dreams last night, those memories of an unspent youth which had left me feeling so edgy and reckless. I developed the ability long ago to do this, to say or do one thing while thinking of another. It’s a political expediency, like appearing to answer a question emphatically while in fact evading the whole point of the question, or learning to repeat verbatim questions from the floor in order to have time to think of answers. I leaned forward and said that, bad as things were, they nevertheless all but assured the passage of our foreign-aid bill through the House today, but I was thinking: What are all those people doing out there? Why has Uncle Sam let this thing get so out of hand? What are the dirty pictures that they’re all joking about? Why is George Humphrey laughing so loudly — are the others feeling what I’m feeling, too? Why is old Foster sitting so hunched over, why is Oveta’s throat so flushed, what’s Ezra Benson doing with his hands in his lap? Why is the President humming “One Dozen Roses”? “We mustn’t forget,” I said, “that the principal enemy in Korea is still Communism.” The General glanced up sharply. I realized that he had just said this himself. “Like the President says,” I said. Around the table, the others nodded solemnly. Charlie Wilson, sitting beside the President, gazed straight at me, his eyes crossing with sleep.
The President reminded us—“bear in mind,” he said, wagging a finger at us — that South Korean forces at this moment held two-thirds of the United Nations line in Korea. If Rhee ordered them to attack, what could we do to stop them? How could we prevent this near-truce we’d come to from collapsing into a full-scale resumption of hostilities? We could hold back ammunition, but that would only mean that the attack would flounder and the inevitable Communist counterassault would overrun the remaining U.S. troops. Likewise, if Rhee pulled his forces back altogether, the rest of us could not hold the line. We simply had to get Rhee back in the harness. Much of this was directed at me. I’d had the job all winter of winning over the Asia-first hardliners on this truce idea — they kept calling it a “peace without honor”—and so Rhee had put me in a bind, too.
I pretended a certain personal frustration — everyone knew I’d taken a public stand with those who wanted to liberate the captive nations of Europe, unleash the democratic forces of Chiang Kai-shek on the Chinese mainland, and press for total all-out victory in Korea, hitting them, if necessary, with everything in the bucket — but to tell the truth, I was secretly relieved that being Eisenhower’s Vice President put limits on me. I could use a word like “liberation,” for example, and get read a thousand ways at once — I’m a rhetorician, not a general, and for me that’s power. But today, all those shades of meaning demanded a certain gloominess, my best face in fact, so no one at the table could be surprised I was wearing it.
“It’s one of the lessons of politics,” I said grimly. “Those one thinks are his best friends often turn out to be the heaviest cross he has to bear.” A few heads bobbed up around the table to glance at me suspiciously — I gazed steadily at each of them. Which of them would challenge me, I wondered? Which would stand in my way? I knew that those who reached the top had to develop a certain tough realism as far as friendships and loyalties were concerned — there are no enduring loyalties in politics excepting where they are tied up in personal interests. “What happens any place in the world affects our freedom,” I said, “and it might affect the peace of the world. I think that we can keep our freedom, and I think that we can win the struggle against slavery and for freedom throughout the world. I think the way to have peace is to be strong and be prepared to resist those who threaten peace.” Amazingly, they all listened to this without batting an eye. I wish I had a friend, I thought. One real friend. I took out my handkerchief and mopped my brow. Then, with a shudder, I realized I’d used it to wipe that little kid’s snot, and I stuffed it back in my jacket pocket. I was still very sweaty and shaken from my encounter with that mob — CHAPFALLEN, as it said in the Times crossword puzzle: Weary to an extreme. The only sensation I could recall like it was when Pat and I had got caught up in the crush of the crowd celebrating V-E Day in Times Square in 1945.
Now, in the Cabinet meeting, in fact, they had started talking about Times Square. I didn’t know how they’d got there, it was just the way these meetings went. Sinclair Weeks was complaining about the shambles up there. I tried to tune into this because I knew that a man was at his best in a crisis when he was thinking not of himself but of the problem at hand. Weeks’s problem at hand was that his son was getting married tonight as part of Uncle Sam’s in-depth campaign to reaffirm the social order in the face of the Phantom’s disruptions, and he was therefore quite naturally distressed about what was going on: could we hold the stage or couldn’t we? We’d all complimented Weeks on this marriage tactic right after the prayer this morning, and I’d wished for a moment that I’d had a daughter old enough to give myself. Weeks was bald-headed like a lot of guys around this table. LIFE had said it: “Ike likes them balding.” Benson. Brownell. Humphrey — the first time the General saw George, he threw his arm around his shoulder and said: “I see you part your hair the same way I do!” He’d never greeted me that way. I sat between Brownell and Humphrey at the Cabinet table, feeling like the Hairy Ape. I ran my hand through my thick hair, tracing the scar there and wondering: What is it suddenly about baldness? That image of Bob Taft’s glowing pate as he turned to walk away from me yesterday in the Capitol flashed to mind. This was something all recent Presidential candidates had in common, I realized, even Adlai. Some personal vanity on Uncle Sam’s part? Or did it make the transformation easier somehow? It didn’t matter, Uncle Sam surely knew that I’d pluck it all out if it came to that. Weeks’s son, of course, was not alone in this endeavor tonight — literally thousands of America’s sons and daughters had been pledged to this nationwide ritual of sanctification, including the son of a deceased Republican Congressman, who was marrying the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller himself.