The 45th, page 24
“You were going to tell me a story - a great story is the way I think you put it,” remarked Ismael, laughing in advance as he tried to anticipate the way Julian would somehow manage to connect this long digression with the story he had not even started to tell.
Julian’s eyes flashed with recognition. “When Louis was working as a young assistant to Bob Griffin he had a friend, a Democrat, who was working for Phil Hart, and that is how Louis heard it. A few years after Harry Truman left office he spoke at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Detroit. The Democratic national committeeman took him around for the few days he was in Detroit. On the last night, before he said goodbye to Truman at the hotel, he told him what an honor it had been for him, that, like everyone else, he had never forgotten how on election night in l948 when everyone thought he had lost the election to Dewey, Truman had gone to bed like it was any other night and woke up the next morning to discover that he had been elected to another term, how everyone remembered the huge smile on Truman’s face in that famous photograph in which he is holding up the front page of the Chicago Tribune with the headline: ‘Dewey Wins!’” Julian tossed back his head and rubbed his hands together, relishing the story he was about to finish. “Truman looked at him for a moment and then, as if he were revealing a deep secret, said ‘I’m an old man, and old men have to get up in the middle of the night to take a leak.’
“So the whole story - the one everyone believed, the legend of a president so calm, so confident, going to bed, sleeping through until morning - was a lie. Or was it?” asked Julian, the sparkle in his eyes growing brighter, and deeper, with each word. “Years later, years after Truman told this story in his hotel room, David McCullough wrote a biography of Truman. Truman did not get up in the middle of the night to take a leak; Truman never went to bed. With reporters camped out in front of his house in Independence, Missouri, Truman turned out the lights, went out the back door to an alley where a car was waiting to take him to a hotel outside of town where along with some of his closest advisors he spent the night getting the returns. Now,” said Julian with a sudden, sharp look, “what did we learn from this? That Truman told a lie? He didn’t. He did not say he got up in the middle of the night to take a leak; he said that old men do that. Did Truman ever say that he went to bed that night? Everyone just assumed he had. It is the difference between telling a lie and not telling everything you know about the truth. It is the difference between knowing the facts and understanding what the facts mean; and knowing, more importantly, which facts have any meaning at all. And that is the reason why there are no more historians, none worth reading. They can assemble facts, they can fit them together the way a child puts blocks back into empty spaces, the way a child in India strings beads on a chain, but give you a sense, a feeling, of what someone was really like, how they thought, why they acted how they did, why they made one decision instead of another - ! They can’t do it because they never had to do any of what they are trying to describe, and they have never been close enough to anyone who has, never been close enough to understand what someone in a position of power was trying to do. Read a historian today - What is it but hearsay, what someone else said, what someone else wrote, about people and events.”
Julian checked his watch. Twenty more minutes. He shook his head, burdened with the knowledge that his life was about to change, and, changing, would never change back. He, looked down at his black polished shoes, clenched his teeth and then, shrugging his shoulders as if there were nothing more to be done, slowly raised his eyes.
“Tell me,” he said, turning to Ismael who was sitting, fascinated, the other side of the room. “Something I’ve always wanted to know: How did you get your name? Why Ismael? Were your parents religious?”
“Would you like to trade? It isn’t the nicest thing you can do to a child, give him a name that will make him an object of ridicule on every playground and in every classroom until he is out of school.”
“And an object of serious appraisal and regard when his classmates are old enough to think for themselves,” Julian replied with a broad, generous smile. He moved away from the window and took the chair at the end of the coffee table closest to the end of the sofa where Ismael was sitting. “Was it the Bible, or Moby Dick?”
“Moby Dick,” laughed Ismael, with a look of wonder and no inconsiderable pride in his small, round eyes. Even now, after all these years, he remained a little astonished at how his name had been chosen. “It was an act of defiance by my mother; gentle defiance, let me add. She loved my father, but my father was a direct descendant of James Fenimore Cooper, and, as if that weren’t enough, taught English and American literature. He had it in his head to call me Fenimore. She would have done anything for him, and he knew it - but not that. She told him he could choose the name if it was a girl, but she was going to name a boy. He damn near died when she chose Ismael. She told him that, one, she thought the name pure elegance, and that, two, she could have named me after Moby Dick’s author and called me Herman. There are certain benefits. When someone asks what they should call me, I can answer ‘They call me Ismael,’ and tell immediately if they are a serious reader. The usual reply is to ask me to spell it.”
Ismael Cooper leaned back and studied Julian with a new interest.
“Your father taught ancient and medieval history at Michigan. I remember something…,” he mused. He paused to let Julian fill in the blank, but Julian stayed silent, daring him, as it were, to try the hazard of his own memory. A vague recollection of something he had once heard mentioned began to become clearer. His mouth tightened as he moved from doubt to something close to certainty.
“Julian, the emperor, the one who tried to destroy Christianity, the one who tried to bring back the ancient gods of Rome. That was your father’s…?”
“Yes, but that was not the reason.”
“Not the reason?”
Julian laughed. “It wasn’t because of what Julian tried to do; it was because of what Julian was, perhaps the greatest mind since Plato and Aristotle, in some ways the last great mind of antiquity, the student who even as a boy taught his teachers.”
“I used to hear the same thing said about you,” said Ismael, with a searching glance. “When you were in the House, when everyone - and not just Louis - thought you would one day wind up being president. They all thought you the smartest guy they had ever met.”
Julian smiled with regret at the world’s mistake; and then, quick as light, his eyes opened wide and the smile, changing, flashed with a kind of gleeful self-mockery.
“No one who thought that ever read Ammianus Marcellinus!”
“Ammianus…?”
“The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus. What I said a moment ago, that there weren’t any historians worth reading today. Ammianus Marcellinus was a great Roman general when the Roman Empire was on the very verge of collapse. He knew Julian, served under him, understood him in a way few others ever did. And the care with which he writes! He lived through the greatest change that had taken place in the long history of Rome, the change from a martial empire in which the gods were in the service of the state, to an empire guided and controlled by a religion that disparaged the very things - discipline and courage - that had made Rome great, a religion that was as ruthless as any secular power when it came to those who refused to consent to what it taught or stood between it and power. Marcellinus wrote the history of Rome, but he wrote it after Rome was finished, weakened by Christianity to the point that everyone understood that it was only a matter of time before the barbarians would come. I only wish there were someone like him now to write our history, the decline and fall of the great nation we could have been.”
“Could have been? You don’t think…?”
“That we’re a great nation anymore? There is a difference between power and greatness, a difference between strength and wisdom. All we talk about is freedom; all we have done is make ourselves slaves, slaves to what in an older tradition were called the needs, the desires, of the body. No one talks about the soul, or the mind; or if they do happen to mention the mind it is in the context of the need to train enough good minds so we can lead the word in technology, innovation. Did you ever read Plato? - Julian, emperor of Rome, spent all day on the business of the empire, governing and making war, and half of every night writing letters, messages and orders, commentaries, even dialogues, all concerned with what he wanted Rome to become again. And then, after all that, every night a few hours studying, reading Plato in a way scarcely anyone now would know how to do, remembering everything, each word, each sentence, noticing how the meaning changes, realizing the importance of each character, seeing it all as if he were there himself watching every gesture, hearing each turn of phrase, noticing how the conversation always leaves out something of importance, how every dialogue abstracts from something essential and how that becomes the key to understanding what is really at issue. Julian filled his head up with this, understood it as well as he understood himself. Everyone who has ever read The Republic, if they remember nothing else remember two things: the story of the cave and that strange suggestion that the only remedy for the evils of the world is if philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. Julian was exactly that, a philosopher, that rarest of all human beings, a man who could see straight into the heart of things, and who, because of that, knew how to conceal what he saw.”
With a look of thoughtful cynicism, Julian brooded for a moment over what, as he well understood, no one else knew, much less cared about. For most people ancient history began and ended with their grandparents, if it extended even that far back in time.
“Julian became emperor in 362 A.D. and died - was killed - twenty-two months later. The world was full of him then, loved by those few fortunate enough to know him, those like Ammianus Marcellinus who lived to write about him, and hated as few others have ever been hated, by the priests and apologists for Christianity as the apostate who was certain to spend eternity in Hell. And now, today…?” A strange, fugitive smile creased the corners of his mouth. “Julian did not want to become emperor, but he knew that if he did not, Rome would be ruined and he would be destroyed. He did what he had to do, arranged things so that it would seem that the army had forced it upon him. Do you see the genius in that, the double deception involved? He would have preferred a private life, studying Plato, to a life in politics. He pretended to be a Christian so he would be left alone. Constantius, the emperor who had killed, among others, his own brother, Julian’s father, decided he could trust Julian precisely because he had no political ambition.
“Julian did not want power, power was thrust upon him. He had never been a soldier and became one of the greatest commanders Rome had known. Suddenly, Julian seemed a threat, which meant Julian was in danger. If Julian had not been a scholar, he would not have been given power in the first place; if he had not been a scholar, someone who could grasp in an instant what most people could never understand, he would not have known what to do when power was given him. And now, in a sense, history repeats itself, doesn’t it? If I had not read, and studied, certain great writers of the past; if I had written nothing more than an ordinary speech….”
The sentence went unfinished. Whatever had happened in the past, whatever Julian had done to start the chain of events that had led to this, there were limits, limits of chance and opportunity, to how much of the future could be written in advance. Dreams of greatness, almost always the stuff of tragedy in the end, were, despite that knowledge, irresistible when fate made plain the need. Suddenly restless, tense, unable to sit or stand still, Julian began to pace nervously around the room. He laughed at his own discomfort.
“I wish it would not happen; I wish that the telephone would ring and instead of the loser’s call of congratulation someone would tell me that I lost.” He flashed a quick, self-deprecating grin. “And then I wish I did not have to wait two months, that I could start tonight, just walk across the street and begin all the work I want to do.” He stopped at the window and gazed again at the White House. The lights were on in all the windows. “They’re all watching television,” he said, with a careless shrug. He looked back at Ismael. “You and I may be the only two people in the country who aren’t.”
“Do you want me to turn it on?” asked Ismael. “It feels a little strange, not knowing.”
“Remember Harry Truman.”
“I remember what you told me.”
“Remember how much credit he got for seeming to be that much in control of himself, that confident in what would happen.”
“And what should I tell the press when they ask what you were doing, how you spent the evening of your election to the presidency?”
Shoving his hands deep into his pockets, Julian gave him a rueful, sideways glance.
“Tell the truth; tell them we spent the evening in conversation. Tell them we talked about politics, tell them we talked about Roman history, tell them….” Julian’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Tell them we discussed certain passages in The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.”
“You don’t really want…?”
“Sure. Why not? Even if it wasn’t true, it would be a good thing to say. There might be a few people who when they hear that will want to know what possible relevance something like that could have,” remarked Julian, with an ambiguous smile. “Someone once wrote a remarkable line about Nietzsche, that he ‘sought by a new beginning to retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’ It is not impossible that someone may someday write something similar about me. But don’t worry, that day is, I think, still a long way off. In the meantime…. Did you ever read Nietzsche? The last philosopher. Really. There is no one after him. Some say Heidegger, but without Nietzsche, Heidegger is impossible. Nietzsche questioned everything about modernity - and antiquity as well. Modern science, the religion of the modern world, what everyone believes will solve all our problems, what has in fact created most of the serious problems we have - Nietzsche said it was ‘one way to see the world,’ i.e. not the only way, not the best way.”
Julian was speaking faster the longer he spoke, the words coming now in an endless flow, speaking as if he were all alone, listening to himself say things he would never say in front of anyone else, the private, late night musing of a solitary soul. Ismael had come almost to expect it, the way that on a sudden some otherwise random, unremarkable thought would lead to a long digression into things that no one beside Julian knew anything about or had the slightest interest in hearing. He was, thought Ismael, like a character out of Shakespeare, forever explaining things to people who, if you read the plays, existed only in his mind.
“Science,” continued Julian, “is the prejudice of the modern age. It is fascinating the way everyone thinks that if you can trace things back to a beginning, instead of trying to understand the end toward which something is made to move, you have everything you need to know. Science looks back and insists that the only scientific, that is to say knowledgeable, men in antiquity were some of the pre-Socratics philosophers like Democritus who thought the world was made up of atoms and that atoms were organized by chance. Socrates, and those who came after him like Plato and Aristotle, were by that reckoning garrulous fools who did not understand anything. What does science tell us about the human condition? - That we evolved from lesser species. Evolution. No one seems to notice that evolution and revealed religion share a common belief in a beginning. No one takes seriously the possibility - which was more than a possibility for every important thinker - that there is no beginning, that the world is eternal.” Julian started to laugh. “If I had said that in that speech I gave, the only thing certain is that we wouldn’t be sitting here, waiting to find out if I have just been elected president of the United States.”
The telephone began to ring with a lonely, strident insistence. They looked at each other, certain, each of them, what it meant. Standing straight, his shoulders square, Julian picked up the receiver and listened in silence.
“You conducted yourself with grace and courage. You have much to be proud of. I hope we have the chance to talk things over sometime in the next few weeks. And thank you, thank you for your kind words of encouragement.”
He put down the telephone and for a brief moment stared down at it, pondering what he had heard.
“She’s more interesting when she isn’t working off someone else’s script, when she isn’t trying to convince everyone that she’s exactly what they want.” He looked at Ismael with mock despair. “And now I get to go downstairs and try to convince everyone that they haven’t made the worst mistake of their lives.”
He started for the door, hesitated, and then turned around.
“There was something in her voice. She was forcing herself to sound cheerful, confident, only interested in wishing me well. But, my God, this has to be devastating for her, the one thing she has wanted for years, the chance to be the first woman elected president. And now, to have it all taken away, the last chance she’ll ever have. The years, the effort, the constant, unremitting attacks, the…. I kept hearing in the back of my mind the words of Adlai Stevenson when he lost the second time to Eisenhower: ‘I’m too old to cry and it hurts too much to laugh.’”
