Hollywood (7 page)

“Have you seen Mr. Bryan?”

Burden shook his head. “I think he’s in Florida.”

“The Speaker?” Wilson stared at Burden out of the corner of his eye, a disquieting effect. But then they were embarked upon a disquieting subject. The speaker of the House, Champ Clark, was the
de facto
heir of Bryan. He had opposed Wilson at every turn and he had been, in 1916, a serious candidate for the presidential nomination. Had it not been for the maneuvering of such Wilsonian Bryanites as Burden, Champ Clark might now be enjoying a chill in the Lincoln bed.

“The Speaker’s Southern. Southerners—Southwesterners—tend to peace at any price—in Europe, anyway.”

“I know. I’m one, too. That’s why I’m far too proud to fight.” Wryly, Wilson quoted himself. This single phrase had enraged every war-lover in the land, particularly the war-besotted Theodore Roosevelt, who sounded no longer sane. Wilson picked up the papers. “I tell you, Mr. Day, I have done everything a man could possibly do to stay out of this terrible business. I’d hoped Germany would be sufficiently intelligent not to force my hand—to allow us to go on as we are, neutral but helpful …”

“To England and France.”

The President was not tolerant of interruptions. He had taught others for too many years: ladies at Bryn Mawr and gentlemen at Princeton; and at neither place had the students been encouraged to interrupt the inspired—and inspiring—lecturer. “England and France. But also there is—was—cotton to the Central Powers, at the insistence of the anti-war ten-cent cotton senators …”

“Of which I am one.”

“Of which you are one.” Although Wilson smiled, his mind was plainly on the set of papers which he kept distractedly shaking as if to dislodge their message. Burden noted that two of them were tagged with red seals. “It is curious that if I am impelled to go to war, it will give pleasure to the Republicans, our enemies, and pain to much of our party.”

Burden was still enough of a lawyer to seize upon a key word. “Impelled,” he repeated. “Who impels you?”

“Events.” Wilson gazed vaguely out the window, toward a row of lights
where his clerk-like secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was, no doubt, busy doing clerkly things, so unlike his predecessor, the Great Commoner, who was incapable of clerkdom or indeed of anything less mundane than Jovian thunderings for peace.

“I know that many of you thought I was … uh, striking a bargain during the last election. That you would get out the vote because I had kept us out of war, despite so much provocation. Well …” He had either lost his train of thought or he was preparing to indulge himself in the presidential privilege of abruptly abandoning a potentially dangerous line of argument. “Someone asked me the other day—an old colleague from Princeton—what was the worst thing about being president.” Wilson looked directly at Burden, the face solemn but the eyes bright behind the pince-nez. “Luckily, he didn’t ask me what the best thing was. I might never have thought of an answer to that one. Anyway I could answer what was the worst. All day long people tell you things that you already know, and you must act as if you were hearing their news for the first time. Now Senator Gore tells me,” there was plainly a bridge from repetitions of the obvious to Oklahoma’s blind senator, whose opposition to the war had set in motion a series of parliamentary maneuvers designed to smoke out the President’s intentions, “that I owe my re-election entirely to his efforts for me in California.”

“But you do owe your majority to California.”

Wilson had gone to bed on election night thinking that his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, had been elected; so, indeed, had “President” Hughes. The next day the Far Western returns came in and Wilson was narrowly re-elected. Burden knew that this might not have happened if that professional spellbinder Gore had not been persuaded to leave his sulky seclusion in Oklahoma City and go to California and take the stump for Wilson. Gore had done so on condition that he could guarantee that Wilson would continue to keep, as he had kept, the peace. On election night Gore had wired Tumulty the exact figure by which Wilson would carry California.

Now Wilson was faced with his own less than courageous record. At various times, he had managed to be both war and peace candidate. This sort of thing never troubled the public, whose memory was short; but senators were constitutionally endowed with long memories and, often, mysterious constituencies as well. Some were obliged to follow the prejudices of their pro-German constituents. Others saw themselves as architects of a new and perfect republic, and their leader was La Follette of Wisconsin, far more dangerous in his idealism than any of the Bryanites, who were bound to be
swayed by popular opinion, a highly volatile substance produced, often at whim, by William Randolph Hearst in his eight newspapers, not to mention all the other publishers, to a man for war. Thus far, Hearst was still the voice of the Germans and the Irish; and his papers in the great Northern cities played shamelessly to that city mob which he still counted on to make
him
president in 1920.

“I expected to be a reformer president.” Wilson sounded wistful. “There was so much to do right here at home, and we did do so much, so fast.”

Burden agreed, without reserve. The sort of reforms that Roosevelt had always spoken of with such transcendent passion Wilson had actually accomplished with gentle reason, combined with the subtle twisting of congressional arms. But then, as he liked to say, anyone who could master the Princeton faculty
and
the alumni association would find a mere Congress easy to deal with. Was it Senator Lodge who had said, “But he never did master them. That’s why politics was his only escape?”

“What position will they—will
you
take if I were to ask for war?” Wilson had collected himself.

“It will depend on what your reasons are. I always thought you missed your chance—if war is what you want—when the Germans sank the
Lusitania
, and so many American lives were lost. The public was ready for war that day.”

“But,” Wilson was cool, “I was not. It was too soon. We were—we are—not prepared.”

“Two weeks ago,” Burden was enjoying the game, “when you sent Ambassador Bernstorff home, the people were ready, again. Now comes the Zimmermann business.…” Although Burden was most sensitive to Wilson’s aversion to advice of any kind, he knew that he had been invited to the President’s sickbed to give him a reading of the Senate’s mood. He took the plunge. “The time has come. The thing is here. You can’t wait much longer. The press is doing its work. Gallant little Belgium. Raped nuns. Devoured children. The Hun is the devil. If there is to be war, prepared or unprepared, now is the time.”

Wilson stared at the papers in his hand; and waited.

Burden proceeded. “Isn’t that why you’ve called a special session? To ask us to declare war?”

“If I do, how many would oppose me? And on what ground?” Wilson’s usual Presbyterian moralizing and cloudy poetic images tended to evaporate when faced with a political problem. He was now very much the political manager, counting heads.

Burden named a dozen names, the leaders. “Actually, there is a clear but weak majority in each house that is against war, and nothing will stir them unless you have some new example of Hunnishness.”

Wilson took off his pince-nez; rubbed the two indentations on either side of his nose—like red thumbprints. “I do believe that the Germans must be the stupidest people on earth. They provoke us. Sink our ships. Plot with Mexico against our territory. Then—now—they have done it.” He held up the red-tagged papers. “Today three of our ships have been sunk. The
City of Memphis
. The
Illinois
. The
Vigilancia.
”

Burden experienced a chill as the names were read off. “I have tried—I
believe
with absolute sincerity, but who can tell the human heart? least of all one’s own—to stay out of this incredibly stupid and wasteful war, which has so suddenly made us, thanks to England’s bankruptcy, the richest nation on earth. Once we are armed, there is no power that can stop us. But once we arm, will we ever disarm? You see my—predicament, or what was a predicament until the Kaiser shoved me this morning.” The President’s face looked as if it had just been roughly brought forth, with chisel and mallet, from a chunk of gray granite.

“Why,” asked Burden, “have you taken so long when it’s been plain to so many that your heart has always been with England and the Allies?”

Wilson stared at Burden as if he were not there. “I was three years old,” he said at last, “when Lincoln was elected and the Civil War began. My father was a clergyman in Staunton—then, later, we moved to Augusta, Georgia. I was eight years old when the war ended and Mr. Lincoln was killed. In Augusta my father’s church was a … was
used
as a hospital for our troops. I remember all that. I remember Jefferson Davis being led a captive through the town. I remember how he … My family suffered very little. But what we saw around us, the bitterness of the losers in the war and the brutality of the winners … well, none of this was lost on me. I am not,” a wintry close-lipped smile divided for an instant the rude stone face, “an enthusiast of war like Colonel Roosevelt, whose mentality is that of a child of six and whose imagination must be nonexistent. You see, I can
imagine
what this war will do to us. I pray I’m wrong. But I am deathly afraid that once you lead this people—and I know them well—into war, they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. Because to fight to win, you must be brutal and ruthless, and that spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life. You—Congress—will be infected by it, too, and the police, and the average citizen. The whole lot. Then we shall win. But
what
shall
we win? How do we help the South … I mean the Central Powers to return from a war-time to a peace-time basis? How do we help ourselves? We shall have become what we are fighting. We shall be trying to reconstruct a peace-time civilization with war-time standards. That’s not possible, and since everyone will be involved, there’ll be no bystanders with sufficient power to make a just peace. That’s what I had wanted us to be. Too proud to fight in the mud, but ready to stand by, ready to mediate, ready to …” The voice stopped.

There was a long silence. If the sun had not set, it had long since vanished behind cold dense clouds; and the room was dark except for the single lamp beside Wilson’s bed and the fading coals in the fireplace. Although Burden was used to the President’s eloquence, he was not entirely immune to its potency. Wilson had the gift of going straight to the altogether too palpitating heart of the business.

“I am calling Congress back two weeks earlier. On April second. I shall …” He put the dangerous documents on the table beside the bed. “How ironic it is!” He shook his head in wonder. “After all the work we’ve done to control big business, guess what will happen now? They will be more firmly in the saddle than ever before. Because who else can arm us? they’ll say. Who else can administer the war?”

“Who else?” Burden had had much the same thought. If ever anyone benefited from an American war it was the trusts, the cartels, the Wall Street speculators. “We shall revert to the age of Grant.”

Wilson nodded bleakly. “Then, if the war should be a long one, and we be weakened, there is the true enemy waiting for us in the West. The yellow races, led by Japan, ready to overwhelm us through sheer numbers.…”

Edith Wilson entered the room and switched on the lights, dispelling the apocalyptic mood. As Burden got to his feet, he noticed a number of Chinese works of art arranged on tables and in bookcases, no doubt an on-going reminder of Asia’s dread hordes. “From my house,” said Edith, aware of Burden’s interest. “This is not the easiest place to make livable.” She gave the President a sheet of paper. “From Colonel House. I’ve decoded it for you.” Then she caught herself. “Oh, dear,” she turned to Burden, “you’re not supposed to know such things.”

“That Colonel House writes in code to the President? I’d be surprised if he didn’t. He’s in Europe now, isn’t he?”

Wilson nodded. Then he glanced at the letter; looked up at Burden. “Well, he thinks we should recognize the new Russian government. The Czar
has abdicated. But Russia is still in the war, and so …” He stopped; and stared at Edith, plainly not seeing her, mind elsewhere.

“We need every ally now, I should think.” Burden was diffident; he was also intrigued at the thought of a president’s wife decoding high secret papers from the President’s unofficial emissary to Europe, the rich and secretive Texas Colonel House.

“Yes. That’s my view. Our ambassador is very enthusiastic about this revolution. So like our own, he tells me. He thinks we should lead the way, and recognize them.”

“Henry Adams predicted all this twenty years ago.” Burden suddenly recalled the joy with which Henry Adams had spoken of wars and revolutions and the certain fall of civilization.

“Is he still alive?” Wilson pressed a buzzer.

“Very much so. But he never goes out, never pays calls. Still lives across the street there.” Burden pointed in the direction of Lafayette Park, as Wilson’s Negro valet, Brooks, entered. Then Burden shook the President’s hand. “You will get,” he said, “whatever you want on April second.”

“How many will vote no?”

“Ten at the most.”

“You encourage me, Senator.”

“You inspire me, Mr. President.”

“That was my aim.” Again the wintry smile. “Now I only wish I could inspire myself.” With the help of Brooks the President got out of bed.

Edith showed Burden to the lift. “He does not sleep well,” she said.

“Neither would I, at a time like this.”

A maid came toward them, carrying a basket of pecans. “They just came, Miss Edith. The silver service brought them.”

“Thank you, Susan. Take them in to Mr. Wilson.” Edith opened the door to the elevator. “There are still things to laugh at,” she said. “Susan’s been with us twenty years, but we lived such a quiet life that she’s still in shock, living here. She’s made up her mind that the Secret Service are really the ‘silver service,’ and there’s no correcting her.” Edith started to say more; then said, “Good-by.”