The 45th, page 33
Matson was left in a state of amused impatience: anxious to learn what the president was going to do next, but sharing some of Ismael’s apparent pleasure in the secret he would not tell. Ismael knew he would. He remembered, as he stood outside, waiting to catch a cab, what a remarkable thing Matson had done, arranging things so that he, who had once lost his seat in the House could now become a member of the senate, and he remembered that his old mentor and friend lived alone. When a cab pulled up, he shook his head, and went back inside to invite him to dinner. He found Louis Matson slumped over his desk, gasping for breath.
“It’s nothing,” he insisted, in a harsh, choking voice. He reached for the top right hand drawer, but his hand was shaking and Ismael had to open it instead. There was a pill bottle, which he quickly opened, took one out and put it directly into Matson’s mouth. Matson swallowed it and then sank back down in to his leather chair.
“Don’t - not to anyone, especially Julian. Never! - You understand? Not a word - I’m all right; I’m not dead yet.”
Those last four words told Ismael all he needed to know, the reason Matson was going to resign, the reason for the urgency to settle on his replacement. The only thing that could be done now was to follow the old man’s lead in whatever fiction he wanted to invent. Death was an intimacy on which no one not involved should intrude.
Ismael took Louis Matson home and did not leave the senator’s side until almost midnight. He listed to all the stories Matson wanted to tell; stories, some of them, he had never told before; stories about the secret lives of politicians he had known and, some of them, despised; stories, a few of them, about men he had admired.
“It’s what we do, isn’t it?” he asked at one point, far into the night. “Tell stories about what we have done, what we have heard. When you think about it, that’s really all we do, tell stories, give an account, give some meaning to what goes on around us; explain what - if we were ever to tell the whole, unvarnished truth - is just the result of chance. Nixon, Johnson - devious bastards, both of them - but Nixon was the better man. No one believes that now: Watergate, impeachment, resignation in disgrace. But in 1960, when the Democratic machine in Chicago stole the election for Kennedy, Nixon refused to allow an investigation. He thought it would hurt the country to have a contested election for the presidency. Johnson - the reason they called him Landslide Lyndon was because it took some stuffed ballot boxes from down in Duval county, where more votes were cast than they had voters, to get him elected to the senate from Texas with fewer votes than almost anyone in history. No one remembers anything anymore, and what they think they remember that have all wrong. Jerry Ford, everyone joked about how awkward, how stiff he was, a mediocre congressman from Grand Rapids who could put you to sleep before he had finished two sentences. But he was, next to Woodrow Wilson, the best educated president in the twentieth century: University of Michigan undergraduate, Yale law school. And then you have Jimmy Carter, that sanctimonious son of a bitch. He could lie to your face and then deny he ever did it even when you proved it! Let me tell you a story. Years ago, back in the seventies, maybe a year before Carter became president, when no one knew who the hell he was. I was working for Bob Griffin and I had a good friend who was working for Phil Hart. Griffin is a Republican, Hart a Democrat, but they got on great together. Anyway, my friend tells me about this young woman, tall, blonde, great looking. She was working for someone running for congress, if I remember right. She tells this friend of mine that the guy she is working for doesn’t have a chance and that she’s been asked to join the presidential campaign of this guy, the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Well, my friend starts to laugh, asks her why she wants to jump from one sinking ship to another. So she tells him she knows some of his people who are running things. She tells him wherever Carter goes, someone always has to find some woman to keep him company. This was before hardly anyone outside George had ever heard of the guy. And then she pulls out a letter from one of the people close to Carter she had been talking about and reads how aroused the governor got when he was told she might be coming on board. Christ! He admitted - and it got a lost of attention at the time - that he had ‘lusted in his heart,’ and he admitted it only because it is what every liar does who is afraid of getting caught: admit to something that seems not worth admitting at all so that no one will think to ask about something worse. Worst hypocrite I ever knew. Least trustworthy bastard ever held the office, except maybe Clinton.”
Matson kept talking, each memory bringing back another. It seemed to Ismael that he was trying to knit together all the most important things he had done, all the most important people he had known, connecting everything on a central thread by which chance would be removed and something like fate take over. Finally, sometime close to midnight, his voice fell to a whisper and then, a short while later, his voice fell silent and he was asleep. Ismael was not sure what to do: cover him with a blanket and leave him there, in his chair, or wake him up and help him into bed. Nor was he sure, either way, whether he should leave him there alone in his apartment. He could not stay there with him; he had to get back to the White House. He wondered if he should call an ambulance to take him to the hospital, which is where he ought to be, but Matson would never forgive him if he did that. He called Rachel Good.
“I know its late, but I’m over at Louis Matson’s place and -”
“Is he all right?” she asked. Her voice told Ismael that she knew.
“Yes, but he’s asleep in his chair, and I’m not sure what to do. I was with him in his office. I left then decided to go back, and when I walked in, he….”
“I’ll be right over. Can you wait until I get there? It shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”
She was there in less than fifteen minutes, full of assurances, insisting there was no reason for Ismael to stay, that she could take care of everything.
“I’ll sit here with him, and when he wakes up, I’ll make sure he gets to bed. In the morning, I’ll get him to his doctor.” She gave Ismael a look of intense curiosity. “You know, don’t you - that he’s dying? Cancer. I don’t know how long he’s known - he would not tell me that - but quite a while, certainly before he sent you to find Julian Drake and ask him to write that speech he never intended to give himself.”
“Never intended…? Did Louis tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. I knew it - maybe almost as long as you did.” She glanced across the small darkened room, crowded with books and papers, to where Louis Matson slept in his chair. “I would have married him, years ago, if he had ever thought to ask. He thinks I’m only making it up when I tell him I would have gone out with me if he had only asked a second time.” She laughed quietly, and with regret. “I didn’t want to seem easy, so instead I seemed, to Louis Matson’s then surprisingly innocent eyes, impossible.”
It was nearly one in the morning when Ismael drove up to the White House gate. The guard, a black officer who moved with the agility of a man half his enormous size, greeted him with a knowing grin.
“The president asked if you wouldn’t mind stopping by. That is the way he put it, just like that: ‘if you wouldn’t mind.’ And no, it doesn’t matter how late it is,” he added, his large eyes luminous with the sheer pleasure of proximity not just to power but to someone who deserved to have it. ‘Whatever time it is, one thing you can always count on, he’s still working. Good evening, Mr. Cooper,” he said, waving him through.
One o’clock, two o’clock, three in the morning, time did not matter; or, rather, time was the only thing that did, time in which to work, to study, to finish, if you could, what you set out to achieve, what, in this instance, you had promised the country you would try to accomplish. Sleep was darkness, sleep was death, sleep and death both necessities, but nothing, neither one, to look forward to, not while there was still time to do something important, something that gave meaning, that justified, if you will, the fact that you had been born.
Ismael found Julian in the small room just off the Oval Office where presidents and their vice-presidents sometimes met for lunch and where Julian worked at night. He was wearing khaki pants and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He never went into the Oval Office without a coat and tie. Ismael started to say something, but Julian, hunched over the table, held up his left hand while he finished scribbling what he was writing on a long white lined pad in front of him.
“There,” he said, still holding the fountain pen in his hand. “Not too bad.”
He looked up at Ismael, so eager to tell him what he had been doing that he did not notice the worried expression, the deep distress, in his eyes. He fumbled through the pages of a notebook in which he jotted down things he wanted to remember: bits and pieces of conversation, a line or two, sometimes whole paragraphs, from something he had read.
“Here it is. Why are you still standing there? Never mind. Sit down, listen to this. I was trying to think about a way to explain, to describe, how we have changed, how we see things differently - well, to be blunt about it - how we have become less intelligent than we were.” His eyes danced from side to side, moving quick step through everything he knew he was going to say. He often took delight in the absurdity of things. “I remembered reading somewhere - or maybe someone once told me - that Kennedy’s favorite books were Lord Melbourne by David Cecil and Pilgrim’s Way by John Buchan. I’ve read them both. Melbourne was prime minister in the first years of Queen Victoria. She was still just a girl. Melbourne - Do you know this? - was Charles Lamb. His wife, Lady Anne Lamb, is the one who ran off with Byron. Melbourne had to live through the disgrace of it, and - this is what is remarkable - he did it in a way that made him one of the most admired men of his time. The other book, Pilgrim’s Way….I’ll come back to that in a minute.”
Leaning back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, he stroked the side of his chin. He seemed to draw back inside himself, as if to consider more fully exactly what he wanted to say, or, rather, what he had learned.
“I looked it up, Kennedy’s favorite books; I knew there had to be more than just the two. There were close to two dozen, nearly all of them histories: biographies of Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay; the speeches of Daniel Webster. And not just American history, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all seven volumes - Do you think anyone reads that anymore? - And Churchill’s biography of his ancestor, The Duke of Marlborough.” Julian flashed a smile full of nostalgia. “When I was in law school, at Chicago, I used to sit in on classes in the graduate school. There was one teacher who taught me more than all the others combined. He had been there when Leo Strauss was still teaching. He told me something I never forgot. Strauss never discussed in class any current political events. He taught political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche - those were his contemporaries. The only time he ever spoke at any length about a contemporary was in l965 when Churchill died. He came to class - a seminar on one of Plato’s dialogues - and, reading from two paragraphs he had written out by hand, said among other things that Churchill’s Marlborough was the greatest work of history written in the 20th century. I’ve read it, twice, four volumes, two thousand pages, and it was one of Kennedy’s favorite books. And his favorite work of fiction? - The Red and the Black, by Stendhal.” Julian threw up his hands and laughed. “Gibbon, Churchill, Stendhal, the speeches of Daniel Webster. And now? But wait,” he said, reaching for a large, paperbound book that lay on top of an official looking report. “Pilgrim’s Way. There is a reason I wanted to come back to it,” he mumbled, as he thumbed through the pages, looking for the passage he wanted to read to Ismael.
“Buchan studied classics at Oxford at the end of the 19th century. He knew almost everyone who played an important part in British politics through the l930s. At the end of it, after everything that had happened, the first world war, or the Great War, as if was called - after all the changes, after all that science, applied science, had produced, his nightmare, as he put it, was not a return to ‘barbarism, which is civilization submerged or not yet born, but to de-civilization, which is civilization gone rotten.’ And what is a civilization gone rotten? Listen to this: ‘In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part of the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement.’”
Julian looked at Ismael and shook his head, as if there was nothing he could do but laugh at the insanity of the world. But there was also, just beneath the surface of that apparent surrender, a kind of eager defiance. Faced with a problem few others knew existed, a problem that, to the contrary, nearly everyone thought a mark of progress - the comfort, and the diversions, the modern world provided - he had a clear understanding of what needed to be done.
“This was written in l939! Kennedy read it. It was one of his favorite books. Listen to the kind of future he read about: ‘It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life would be death at the heart….Men would go anywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. On the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality would in truth have killed that personality. In such a bagman’s paradise, where life wold be rationalized and added with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair, with Mr. Talkative as the chief officer on the town council.’”
Julian stopped, weighing in the balance the last line he had read. “Mr. Talkative….Yes, that’s good. But, now, listen to the way it finishes, what it says about what has happened: ‘The essence of civilization lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe.’ - Even with his critique, as devastating as it is, Buchan remains under the influence of modern science - ‘It makes no difference that a mechanized universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.’”
Carefully, as if in respect for what a serious author had written, Julian put down the book, setting it, not exactly where it had been before, on top of an official looking report, but just next to it. He picked up his fountain pen, tapped it gently against the pad on which he had been writing and shook his head again.
“That is what Kennedy read - along with those other works of history. And what does this generation of leading politicians read? I found a list of Hillary Clinton’s favorite books. Almost all of the fiction, and, with the exception of The Brothers Karamazov, which she read in college, all of it contemporary stuff: mysteries, thrillers, popular fiction. The only history, Citizens of London, about prominent Americans who played a part in the Second World War. Two political memoirs, one by George Bush, the other by John McCain. She apologized, in one story, for never have read Proust, mistranslating the title so that instead of ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ it became something like ‘Remembering Time Lost,’ so she could then joke that she had never found the time!
“Buchan was right: There aren’t many serious people anymore. Well, perhaps we can do a little to change that. It’s what I have been working on,” he explained, nodding toward the scrawled pages on the desk. He stood up and stretched his arms and then crossed them loosely over his chest as he stared down at what he had written. “The universities teach each new generation what they should know, what the universities think they should know. The interesting question is who teaches the universities. Where is it they learn what they teach?” He gave Ismael a shrewd, penetrating glance. “Set up a dinner, make it a public event, honoring the leading institutions of higher education. Say it is for the top fifteen or twenty - the number doesn’t much matter - but include the presidents of all the major private universities - Harvard, Chicago, Yale, Princeton - all of them, especially those who have expressed their unwillingness to do what we’re asking public universities to do, give four years tuition for four years service. In addition, invite….”
Ismael was looking down at his hands, his mind somewhere else.
“What is it?” asked Julian, feeling suddenly quite guilty for not having noticed earlier that Ismael was preoccupied with some problem of his own.
“Louis,” replied Ismael, slowly raising his eyes. “He has cancer, he’s dying. I left his office, then decided I ought to invite him to dinner. He was almost in a state of collapse. I took him home, and he talked, talked about a lot of things….”
“He told you he wants you to take his place when he leaves, this summer; that he had talked to me and that I agreed there was no one else?”
“Yes, but I don’t….As I say, I took him back to his apartment, and, finally, he fell asleep in his chair, and I called Rachel Good - She told me she would have married him, years ago, when he was first in Congress. I never knew they were - or had been - that close. She came at once. She’s staying with him tonight. I don’t know how long he’s got, but it can’t be very long.”
When Julian only smiled, Ismael was not sure what to make of it. Julian understood his confusion.
“He won’t die before he’s finished here, before he has managed to get through Congress everything we have asked for. Someone told me once - a nurse, a doctor, I don’t remember - that people in nursing homes seldom died when they had a birthday coming up. It was something to look forward to, something they could still achieve. He won’t die, not so long as he still has work he think important that he hasn’t finished.” He looked at Ismael with a different sympathy. “He made you promise not to tell me, didn’t he? Remember something: If it was the other way round, if I were dying, Louis would have never forgiven you if you hadn’t told him. If he remembers the promise, he’ll remember that he felt honor bound to force you to make it, and that you had no choice but to do what you have done. Now you better get some sleep.”
