A Thing of State, page 18
“You bet I would,” El Barnes said. “I’d like to kill the bastard with my own bare hands, if you’d let me.”
“You remember what Sidi pointed out last time we were in this room,” the President said with an indulgent chuckle as though he were dealing with a recalcitrant child. “Our law won’t let you. So there we are. How about that language, Eulie? Let’s throw it open and kick it around a bit. How far do we want to go, how tough do we want to be? Bearing in mind always that the chances are one hundred to one that he is going to back down and we may be able to bring him under control without too much extra pressure. In which case, it might be better to be diplomatic. What do the rest of you think?”
There followed what Eulie described to Ray later as “one of his soften ’em up and talk ’em around” sessions, in which they all indulged their finely honed talents for nitpicking and word-changing, each according to personal prejudices and/or fears about the basic dangers of US toughness or lack thereof.
What finally emerged was, as she disgustedly felt and bluntly expressed, almost a slap on the wrist. “A warning,” the President insisted. “A tentative admonition,” she countered.
They couldn’t even agree at that point on whether or not to dispatch the two carriers. “This,” as El Barnes remarked with scathing sarcasm, “is presidential decision-making at its most profound and best.” They took their cue from the President, who laughed comfortably at that one.
They were nearing the end of their discussion, prodded by El’s impatience to get off to the airport, tired and snappish after almost three hours of argument, when the phone rang.
The national security adviser took it and heard the lilting tones of the Eunuch calling from Greater Lolómé City.
Jaime’s face became blank—then shocked—then angered. He said nothing in response to the Eunuch for several long minutes. Then he simply said tersely, “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” and hung up.
“We might as well have saved our breath,” he told them bitterly. “Do you know what that bastard has done?”
Half an hour later it was on television. An hour after that the bulldog edition of the Post had it on the streets:
Sidi Claims 4 A-Bombs, Threatens Immediate Lesser Lolómé Strike
Defies US, UN “Satanists,” Calls Muslims to World Jihad
It was not, as El Barnes remarked dryly as they left the Roosevelt Room, America’s finest hour.
Two
1
But of course it had to be portrayed that way, to the media, to the country, and to the world.
“We have now arrived at another of those things which is known as ‘the moment of truth,’” wrote that stubbornly independent thinker Tim Bates, in a thumb-sucker sent out to the 313 client newspapers of the Washington Inquirer syndicate.
“Watch the stirring drama unfold.
“There will now come into play the basic, overriding, implacable principle of the present-day American government:
“The President must always be made to look good.”
“This doctrine, begun almost inadvertently in post-World War II years as instant communications made instant impression the most important part of any event, has become refined and institutionalized into an ironclad rule as communication has first linked, then shrunk, then completely taken over, the world.
“In the past three administrations, particularly the last, the necessity to make the President look good has become the defining element of every event, every action, every decision. From the President himself on down, every clever mind in the White House now has one single, all-consuming aim: the creation, care, and tender nurturing of presidential image. Mistakes are never admitted, uncertainties never acknowledged. The reality of human imperfection, while it sometimes cannot be completely concealed, is never allowed to divert or subvert the basic purpose of the executive branch of the American government: to maintain the psychological, if not always the factual, picture of human perfection behind the desk in the Oval Office.
“‘Spin’ is all.
“Poor, battered Truth lags far behind.
“So, as with all his immediate predecessors, the current President will now be concentrating his efforts on protecting the public perception of himself as the shrewd, all-knowing, all-controlling manager of affairs. He will now be busy salvaging his reputation from Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi’s appalling defiance—for it is indeed appalling.
“For the first time in many a decade, if ever, a foreign leader is treating the United States and its President with utter, jeering contempt.
“Sidi has apparently been warned. And Sidi just doesn’t care. The contempt is beyond jeering—it is fearless. Somebody just isn’t afraid of the United States any longer. The world has abruptly crossed, in this open defiance from a small desert dictatorship, a profound psychological divide: on yesterday’s side, a United States the threat of whose displeasure was enough to make the world’s evil ones hesitate and reconsider—on today’s side, the threat falling, ridiculed, on empty air.
“To reestablish the credibility of American power is now the most important task facing the President. Many are the past architects of the gradual decline of American credibility. Only one architect, the one now in office, has the present responsibility of restoring it. Hype for the incumbent is not the answer.
“Behind the President’s efforts and those of his staff to make him look good, the harsh realities will march on unimpeded. All that, it is devoutly and desperately hoped at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, will be concealed by the rosy glow cast by a leader portrayed to be in full command of a chaotic and increasingly insane world.
“It is not enough.”
So wrote that tough-minded soul Tim Bates, still able at almost eighty to be savagely indignant about what he perceived to be the shortcomings of his government. Anna Hastings, founder, publisher, and sole owner of the Washington Inquirer and its child, the Inquirer syndicate, was as usual blunt and direct in her appreciation. One of her terse little notes came over his fax within the hour after his piece had gone in to the copy desk: “Timmy: Great stuff. Let him have it! A.”
As for the syndicate’s clients, there was the usual split between genuine conservatives and phony conservatives, genuine liberals and phony liberals. On balance it appeared that there was a deep skepticism concerning the President’s ability to pull this one off. Editorial reaction was deeply divided but leaning, on balance, toward Tim’s general view.
Meanwhile at the White House, at State, Defense, and wherever Cabinet members or other high appointees of the administration had, or were able to arrange, opportunities to speak, the spin went on.
For the first two days after the issuance of the formal response of the government, the President did not communicate. Unlike that of his immediate predecessor, his face was not omnipresent on every screen and every scrap of newsprint. There were actually moments when his voice did not reverberate from television and radio twenty-four hours a day. He had long ago learned the lesson that some in politics never learn, that silence can actually on occasion be more effective than sound, and that absence sometimes actually does make the public heart grow fonder.
“I’m going to lie low for a while,” he told them when the second emergency NSC meeting finally broke up, and true to his word, he vanished behind the protective screen of the White House, which can be either concealing or revealing as its spinmasters decree. Offscreen and out of media view, he rallied his departments and embarked in private upon a busy week. The machinery of the executive branch went into defensive high gear.
Cabinet members fanned out across the country. Audiences that had contracted days, weeks, months previously to hear the Secretary of Labor, say, were startled to learn how closely the successful thwarting of Sidi was tied into the fate of America’s declining trade unions. Members of the chamber of commerce of Cleveland were surprised to hear from the US trade representative how closely their support for the administration’s handling of Sidi was vital to the ever-rankling question of the trade balance with Japan. The Secretary of Health and Human Services told her audience in San Francisco that welfare reform could not possibly go forward unless Sidi’s sinister schemes were defeated. The Surgeon General, in a dazzling verbal sleight of hand, somehow managed to link Sidi with sex education for grammar school children, the distribution of free condoms to teenagers, and the ongoing investigation of the pros and cons of legalizing drugs. The stability of the dollar, the Secretary of the Treasury warned solemnly, hinged on Sidi. The director of the Environmental Protection Agency warned darkly that the fate of titmice in the Arizona desert might well depend upon what happened with Sidi.
Finally, raising it all to the highest levels, James Van Rensselaer Burden accepted a commission from the Times Sunday magazine to write a piece for the upcoming issue entitled “Here We Go Again? Pride and Prejudice Clash Anew in the Desert.” The Secretary of State agreed to appear with Senator Wilson and Congressman Jones on Sally Holliwell’s Capitol Perspective. And the President, who when the occasion called for it could act as down-home-to-the-max as his immediate predecessor, agreed to appear on Able Montague’s WorldView and answer the phone-ins of his countrymen.
Some of this solemn thunder made sense, some of it was nonsense; but the drumbeat went on. Behind the public foofaraw, the President and those most closely associated with him in foreign affairs, particularly the Secretary of State, did the best they could to meet the ugly threats to world stability posed by The Wearer of the Two Hats, President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé.
Across the country, America reacted as America always reacts—or at least as its noisier and more self-consciously “involved” citizens react.
From Bonnie Terhuitt, president of CCA—Concerned Citizens Against—to Drs. (academic) Random Cruikshank of Harvard and Feemahle Jackson-Washington of Yale, co-chairs of WP—We Protest—they were on the screen, on the air, in print, or seated at their fax machines spewing forth their statements, manifestos, letters to the editor, petitions to White House, Senate, and House. What Tim referred to as “letterhead liberals” and “copy-machine conservatives”—the minuscule groups, often no more than two or three individuals, who possess a telephone, a typewriter or word processor, a fax, a copying machine, a post office box, and several thousand letterheads solemnifying themselves as the Alliance for This, the Coalition for That—also raised their clamor. National news programs and national publications that would never print a release from a major political group without thoroughly checking its background, members, and financing, dutifully publicized these letterhead fly-by-nights without ever bothering to confirm their authenticity—as long as they supported the programs’, or the publications’, points of view.
Overwhelmingly, these itches on the body politic were conspicuously not in favor of doing anything about Sidi. Within three days they had generated such a furor in Washington, been quoted solemnly so many times by national programs and publications, that hurriedly taken polls were able to report that 71 percent of the 1,230 Americans questioned out of approximately 280 million were against any attempt to intervene in what one prominent pollster characterized catchingly as “the ever-roiling, ever-boiling, always hopeless Middle East.”
In the face of all this, the humor at the White House tended to be somewhat grim.
“How about a swim upstream against public opinion?” the Secretary of State inquired.
“Be my guest,” said the President of the United States.
But for the time being they were determined to respond somehow, some way, to the latest demarche from Greater Lolómé City. That way, they were convinced, lay a return to stability, a recapture of public support, a reestablishing of America’s reputation for consistency and strength which the President of Greater Lolómé—backed by his secret friends, whoever they might be—was obviously determined to destroy if he could.
Their determination lasted roughly a month. If the pattern of its gradual fading away seemed familiar, it was because American diplomacy in recent years seemed to have become frozen in a sort of foredoomed dance toward failure whose successive steps had become as stylized as kabuki.
Nonetheless, the effort had to be made. It involved most of the world before it was over, and put upon the Department of State burdens it perhaps was not really equipped to handle in the present Age of Disintegration, which the more determinedly optimistic chose to call the Age of Change.
You could not, however, have convinced Ray Stanley and his colleagues in foreign policy of that. They acted with considerable inner trepidation but with the basic conviction that America, though possibly blundering at times, would still emerge triumphant. After all, it always had—or rather, remembering Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Cuba, North Korea—it mostly always had, anyway.
At two-thirty in the afternoon after Sidi’s announcement, the President reconvened the National Security Council for its third emergency meeting on the matter.
This time the greatest possible publicity was sought to emphasize the gravity of the occasion. Members arrived openly at the north portico, worried, grim-faced, silent. An air of crisis hung about their arrival. It was made clear to waiting cameras and reporters that the matter of Sidi was portentous, and a thing of state.
When they were regrouped around the table in the Roosevelt Room, the President entered with his quick, determined step. There was a slight tension apparent in his manner, but on the surface—and, they felt, inside as well—he appeared to be his usual sardonic, confident self.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, with the slightly ironic emphasis that conveyed the impression that it was smashing of them but they didn’t really have to, which of course they did. “Obviously we’ve got to respond with a formal statement. With all respects, Eulie, our work of last night is out the window and all your fine efforts are meaningless. What do you suggest now?”
“Make it twice as strong, if possible,” she responded tartly, and the debate was on.
Three hours later, after many suggestions, amendments, deletions, corrections—after defining, as Eulie remarked with even sharper tartness toward the end, “the real number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin”—they came up with a statement that pleased no one entirely but commanded the public support of all simply because it had to.
“We don’t have much choice,” noted Eldridge Barnes, disgruntled because he had been forced to cancel his trip to Greater Lolómé and order Creed Moncrief s body sent home accompanied only by a white-faced, deeply unhappy Regina Gates.
The statement was released to the world an hour later by the President himself, flanked by the Secretaries of State and Defense. They appeared in the East Room of the White House before more than 250 members of the media in an evening time slot cleared for them by all the major networks. All three looked grim.
The President read the statement in a slow, deliberate voice:
“The Government of the United States notes with serious concern [Eulie and El Barnes tried to swing the Council to ‘notes with the gravest concern,’ but failed] the statement issued by the President of Greater Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi.
“Coming as it does fast upon the murder [originally ‘death’—Eulie and El won that one] of Creed Moncrief, a member of the staff of the United States embassy in Greater Lolómé City, it assumes, in this Government’s estimation, even graver import. This Government cannot emphasize too strongly the seriousness of the situation that now confronts the world.
“This Government holds the Government of Greater Lolómé [Eulie and El proposed adding ‘and its President,’ but were thwarted by Ray Stanley and the President, who said they should not antagonize him too much personally—‘I may have to have him to lunch next week,’ the President remarked with wry exaggeration] responsible for the brutal and totally unprovoked murder of Mr. Moncrief. We demand immediate, full, and unconditional reparations to Mr. Moncrief’s family and this Government [‘unconditional reparations, including a formal apology by the Government of Greater Lolómé,’ argued Eulie and El, but again were overruled by the argument that this would be ‘not diplomatic’] for this wanton and deliberate violation of international law and the mutual protection of diplomatic personnel that must exist between civilized governments if the comity of nations is to be preserved.
“This Government further views with concern [‘views with the utmost gravity,’ Eulie and El suggested, but again were overruled] the statement of the President of Greater Lolómé claiming that he and his Government are in possession of four atomic bombs and the means to deliver them. We believe that this claim, if true, should arouse [not ‘must arouse,’ the Secretary objected; ‘some may not feel the same urgency we do’] the intense concern of the entire world community.
“Possession of atomic bombs by Greater Lolómé would create a threat [‘Not a major threat,’ Arlie McGregor objected to Eulie’s suggestion; ‘we don’t want to give the guy too much importance.’ ‘Which Defense would have to respond to,’ she shot back] not only to the region but to world stability itself.
“Therefore this Government intends to consult at the earliest opportunity with other concerned Governments to seek support for an early meeting of the United Nations Security Council [Eulie and El: ‘to consult with other concerned Governments to demand an immediate meeting, etc.’—overruled] to explore the possibility of requesting [‘to demand’—overruled] that the Government of Greater Lolómé agree to the inspection of its military facilities [‘all’ its military facilities; Eulie and El, overruled] by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“To this end I am directing the Secretary of State to consult with the Secretary-General and other interested powers on the date and time of such a meeting of the Security Council, which should be held as promptly as possible so that inspection by the IAEA may start as soon as possible [‘at once,’ final proposal from Eulie, over and out].”
