The one-hundredth Senate member in the room sat erect behind his mahogany desk, arms folded across the desk.
“Mr. Watson,” the Chief Clerk called out.
Abrahams watched him, throat and lungs near bursting, eyes strained wide, watched the old gentleman unfold from his seat, grip his birch cane, watched his white thatched head, wrinkled phlegmatic face, rise with his aged body.
Chief Justice Johnstone hesitated, perhaps himself slowed by the weight his question would place on the senior senator’s bent shoulders.
“Mr. Senator Watson, how say you? Is the respondent, Douglass Dilman, President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor, as charged in this Article?”
Senator Hoyt Watson did not reply. It seemed an eternity as he stood there, cane in his knobby hand, gazing up silently at the bench.
Watson’s somber voice last night, in the privacy of the Oval Office, his words to Dilman last night, rang in Abrahams’ ears: “I cannot judge in your favor now, simply in knowing my daughter perjured herself and the House was misled… I must judge you tomorrow on your merits… if you acted as an American President or as a Negro President.” All of this Abrahams heard now. Then, he wondered, what did Senator Watson hear now? Did he hear the thousands jamming the streets of Baraza and every democratic city of Africa, cheering the American flag? Did he hear the ancient cacklings of beloved ancestors, good colonels with good slaves, and did he hear the chant of the million in his state, who had carried him on their cheers into the Senate for twenty-four years, made him the bright white shield of their purity and safety against the ignorant niggers trying to threaten their accommodations, education, prosperity?
What did Senator Hoyt Watson hear these fleeting, suspenseful seconds while the Senate, the House, the White House, the South, the United States, the wide world waited?
The Chief Justice, standing before his carved chair on high, bent forward, and as if to shake another old man from his reverie and have today’s history written and done with, he spoke.
“Mr. Senator Watson, how say you?” he repeated. “Is the President guilty or not guilty as charged in this Article?”
“Mr. Chief Justice, I vote the President not guilty of any high crimes or misdemeanors!”
Nat Abrahams fell back in his chair, limp with disbelief.
The galleries, the occupants of the floor, sat dumb, as if stunned into muteness by the fall of one giant mallet on their collective skulls.
A half dozen, then a dozen senators, foremost among them Hankins, were leaving their desks, surrounding Hoyt Watson, their irate heads bobbing, their angry arms waving, as Watson stood stonily in their midst, clutching his cane and listening.
From above, almost indistinctly now, Nat Abrahams could hear the Chief Justice intoning, “Upon this fourth Article, sixty-six senators vote ‘Guilty’ and thirty-four senators vote ‘Not Guilty.’ Two-thirds not having pronounced guilty, the President is, therefore, acquitted upon this Article!… Silence! Silence!… Mr. Senator Bruce Hankins, are you requesting the floor?”
“I am!” shouted Senator Hankins above the rising hubbub of excitement. He hobbled forward to the rostrum. “Mr. Chief Justice, I have conferred with the learned Senator Watson, and with the leadership among my honorable colleagues. It appears that all are adamant in their opinions, that no ‘Not Guilty’ votes will be changed during this day, and that continued voting on the remaining three lesser Articles will result in an even larger tally and judgment for acquittal. Therefore, setting aside my personal feelings, and out of respect for the judgment passed, concerned only with preserving what we can of the unity and well-being of our beloved country, I hereby move that the Senate, sitting as a court of impeachment, does now adjourn sine die-that is to say, permanently-permanently. I ask for yeas and nays on this motion.”
The Chief Justice gazed out over the churning Senate floor. “Who says yea?”
“Yea!” The concerted shout was thunderous and unanimous, and it went on and on, “Yea!… Yea!… Yea!”
The Chief Justice roared, “Unanimous! The Senate, sitting as a court of impeachment for the trial of Douglass Dilman, upon Articles of Impeachment presented by the House of Representatives, stands adjourned sine die! The President stands acquitted on all four Articles!”
Hardly anyone except Abrahams heard the Chief Justice, and not even Abrahams distinctly heard the last. For Tuttle, Hart, Priest, were climbing all over him, hugging him, choking him, pummeling him, and senators and press correspondents were all around, wringing his hand.
Beyond the circle of humanity pressing in on Abrahams, there was bedlam. The Senate had become a carnival of whooping, cheering, laughing revelers, whose celebrations drowned out the scattered boos and catcalls. Pandemonium engulfed the galleries and the floor, and spilled into the outer rooms.
Desperately, Abrahams tried to reach Senator Watson, to thank him, but it was impossible. Watson was caught in a crush of reporters and announcers. Abrahams heard someone yell, “Senator Watson, how could you repudiate your lifetime record to support Dilman? Why did you decide to vote not guilty?” And Watson, bewildered by the attention, replied firmly “Two reasons-two. First, like Edmund Ross who cast the decisive vote for Andy Johnson, I decided that the executive branch of the government was on trial, and if its occupant were drummed out in disgrace on such flimsy political evidence, our nation would no longer be a democracy but what Ross called ‘a partisan Congressional autocracy.’ And second, I decided even before President Dilman had proved his patriotism and intelligence by saving Baraza and Africa for us, that if I could cease judging him as a Negro person and judge him solely as a fellow human being, I could then judge his true merits as a President. I judged Douglass Dilman as a man, and found him worthy of the Presidency. Coming here, rising to announce my vote, I fully realized that he was guilty of nothing except the accident of his colored skin. So I voted not guilty, and I am proud to have done that, and I hope and pray each and every one of you is proud of yourself today. For President Dilman has shown us he is a man-and now, perhaps, the nation has shown him and the entire world that it, too, has reached maturity at last.”
Nat Abrahams felt soft arms encircling him, feminine hands touching his neck and cheeks, and there was Sue, aglow and laughing through her tears, pressed to him, kissing him, kissing him again and again.
Then, holding her close, he was leading her past the celebrating crowds toward the exit.
“Come on, Sue, I want to go to the White House and tell him-”
“Oh, darling, he knows, he knows.”
Abrahams smiled. “He knows he was acquitted of four Articles. I want to tell him he was acquitted of five.”
THE snow had begun to fall on New Year’s Eve, and it fell all the night, and now, on this bright, fresh morning of New Year’s Day, the capital city was blanketed in white.
The snow lay like a silvery imperial mantle on the dome of the United States Capitol, clung to the Corinthian marble columns of the United States Supreme Court, covered the flat roof of the Department of Justice. The frosted, pearly flakes sparkled from the cupola of the Jefferson Memorial, the branches of the dogwood trees surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, the five outside walls of the Pentagon Building, the iced surface of the Potomac River, the square mosque of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Stars and Stripes of the flag at full mast above the President’s House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
From the broad center window of the Yellow Oval Room, on the residential second floor of the White House, President Douglass Dilman could make out, more clearly than ever before, the white marble shaft of the Washington Monument. It might have been a trick of the dazzling morning, but to Dilman the soaring monument seemed less distant than it had been four months ago, less distant and less intimidating.