Memories of the Ford Administration (25 page)

Buchanan, whose mother used to put him to bed with pious stories of Washington’s glorious deeds, took in breath to make a courteous protestation, but thought better of it. This other man’s force was like that of a river which frothingly redoubles its fury wherever a rock would pose an obstacle. By choice, we Americans are not the enjoined and harmonized
servants of a king who is God’s earthly appointee but instead form a contention of free wills and selfish interests, set loose in a wilderness to survive or fail. General Jackson, out of some compassionate or edificatory impulse, was trying to urge upon his deferential inquisitor a guiding philosophy.

“Young man,” he said, a wheeze beginning to declare a certain weariness, “ye mistake where the power in this country lies. It’s not in the wits of the politicians, and never was in such a set of weasel holes. Mark my words: any bargain Clay and Adams strike’ll be the ruin of ’em both. When ye’ve passed through to the other side as I have, and slaked yer appetite for hollow flattery from those around ye, ye’ll know where the power lies in God’s own country: it lies in the passions of the people.” With the vigorous arm once marked for amputation he thumped not his breast but lower down along the lapels of his greatcoat, toward the softer part of his abdomen. “It lies in their guts. They can smell ye out, false or true. With the people in yer belly, ye can do no wrong. Otherwise, wriggle as ye will, ye can do no right. Take your stand on principle, Mr. Búchanan, and never fear to make yerself enemies.”

Seeing the Senator at last decided to leave him, Buchanan bowed, and ventured a pleasantry. “I shall not so fear, General Jackson, as long as you are never counted among them.”

[But, as we historians know, in 1826, even as Buchanan in weasel fashion was attempting to slip the inconvenient Federalist label, under which he had won his fourth term in Congress, and to create in Pennsylvania a so-called Amalgamation party of Federalist German farmers from the east and Scots-Irish frontiersmen from the west, all strongly pro-Jackson, the “bargain and sale” controversy tainting Adams’s Presidency mounted to include that open-air conversation with
Jackson nearly two years earlier. Buchanan received in October a letter from Duff Green, John Calhoun’s campaign manager, bristling with friendly menace:
The part taken by you on the occasion referred to, is known to me; and a due regard to your feelings has heretofore restrained me from using your name before the public. The time, however, is now approaching when it will become the duty of every man to do all in his power to expose the bargain which placed the Coalition in power. Will you, upon the receipt of this, write to me and explain the causes which induced you to see Genl. Jackson upon the subject of the vote of Mr. Clay & his friends a few days before it was known that they had conclusively determined to vote for Mr. Adams; also advise me of the manner in which you would prefer that subject to be brought before the people
. The people! Buchanan took four days to frame a circumspect reply, fending off this inimical ploy by the pro-Calhoun, anti-Clay, and anti-Jackson forces, which in his own state were centered in the “Family” party, of rich and interrelated eastern Pennsylvanians, who in their correspondence spoke vindictively of
Mr. Buchanan, who has for some years past been fond of being considered a Democrat in the liberality of his principles, whilst he desired the support of the federalists as their Magnus Apollo
, and who dreaded the possible day when
Mr. Buchanan would have “bestridden our narrow world like a Colossus” with the patronage and power of Pennsylvania at his feet
. His reply to Green invoked the people:
I must therefore protest against bringing that conversation before the people, through the medium of the Telegraph or any other Newspaper. The facts are before the world that Mr. Clay & his particular friends made Mr. Adams President, & that Mr. Adams immediately thereafter made Mr. Clay Secretary of State. The people will draw their own inferences from such conduct & from the circumstances connected with it. They will judge the cause from the effects
. But the issue of his conversation
as an aspect of the “bargain and sale” kept surfacing. The following year, Jackson himself stated, in a public letter to Carter Beverly of Virginia, that a Congressman had sought to make a corrupt bargain with him in Clay’s behalf. He did not name the Congressman, but soon must, as Samuel Ingham of the Family party gloatingly wrote to Buchanan in July of 1827:
Shd Clay demand of Genl Jackson his author he will have no alternative, nor could he have had from the first.… You will therefore be joined into the battle under a fire,—but I see no difficulty in the case if you take your ground well and maintain it boldly
. This was irony, no doubt, since Buchanan was not known for boldness and from his point of view the case presented nothing but difficulty. His alternatives appeared to be confessing involvement in a bargain attempt or calling General Jackson a liar. A week after Ingham’s letter Jackson was writing Buchanan, saying,
I have no doubt when properly called on you will come forth & affirm the statement made to Major Eaton,
‖
then to Mr. Kreamer
[
sic
]
^a
& then to me, & give the names of the friends of
Mr. Clay who made it to you
. Less than a month later Jackson named Buchanan as the propositioning Congressman in an address in Cincinnati, and Buchanan on the 8th of August composed for the Lancaster
Journal
a detailed account of his conversation that morning of December 30, 1824, upon which my own account above is largely based, save for the General’s descant upon his life and philosophy, which is my invention. In that curious way of fiction and reality, it came to life as nothing in the reported conversation did, save possibly Jackson’s sudden claim that
these were secrets he would keep to himself—he would conceal them from the very hairs of his head; that if he believed his right hand then knew what his left hand would do on the subject of appointments to office, he would cut it off, and cast it into the fire
. This leaps out with an unreal force, as vehement beyond the needs of the occasion. Composing history is like packing a suitcase with objects that persist in overflowing, or underfilling the space. Buchanan ventured to contradict the General only very mildly:
I do not recollect, that General Jackson told me I might repeat his answer to Mr. Clay and his friends; though I should be sorry to say he did not. The whole conversation being upon a public street, it might have escaped my observation
. His critical statement was:
I called upon General Jackson, upon the occasion which I have mentioned, solely as his friend, upon my individual responsibility, and not as the agent of Mr. Clay or any other person
. His letter to the editor continued,
I have never been the political friend of Mr. Clay, since he became a
candidate for the office of president,
as you very well know
. Jackson, accustomed to having soldiers risk death at his command, seems oblivious of the fact that to bear him out Buchanan would have to incriminate himself as a conspirator with the Clay forces. Contemporaries remarked variously upon the contretemps.
It places Jackson in a most awkward predicament
, said a letter received by President Adams.
But what surprises me more than anything else is the situation in which the General places
his friend
.… Buchanan is ruined if anything can ruin a man who is a partisan in party times
. William Rawle of Philadelphia confided to his diary that
Jackson appears to great disadvantage unless we discard all that is asserted by Buchanan
. Henry Clay avowed vindication and said,
I could not desire a stronger statement from Mr. Buchanan
. John Calhoun wrote that
Mr. B. it is clear feels the awkwardness of his situation;
hence his attempt
to give a character of innocency to the whole affair
. Buchanan vented his own irritation to Ingham:
You will have seen General Jackson’s letter to the Public in which he has given up my name. It will at once strike you to be a most extraordinary production so far as I am concerned
. But his pacificator’s temper strives for control:
I have not suffered my feelings to get the better of my judgment but have stated the truth in a calm & temperate manner. If General Jackson and our editors should act with discretion the storm may blow over without injury
.

[It appeared to. In 1828 Buchanan, running as a Jackson Democrat, won his fifth term in Congress, and Jackson swept Adams aside in the Presidential election. In the spring of 1830, Buchanan, his Amalgamation party split by patronage disputes and threatened by the rising tide of anti-Masonry, while the Family party boasted control of the Governorship, both Senate seats, and, with Ingham Secretary of the Treasury, a post in Jackson’s Cabinet, announced his retirement
from politics—which he had entered, remember, ten years before only
as a distraction from
[his]
great grief, and because
[he]
saw that through a political following
[he]
could secure the friends
[he]
then needed
. But did he mean it? With the dissolution of the entire Cabinet—at Van Buren’s suggestion, as a way to end the painful Peggy Eaton affair—there was talk of a Cabinet post for Buchanan, and even of him as Vice-President for Jackson’s second term, now that Calhoun, like Spiro Agnew on the eve of the Ford era, had resigned this office. But what forthcame from Andrew Jackson was a poisoned sweet: Buchanan was invited to become Minister to Russia,
a distinct letdown
, according to Klein,
since this assignment was a sort of genteel exile for those political figures who could neither be ignored or trusted
.]

Between the two acts of
The Belle of Amherst
, I seem to remember, Genevieve fainted: returning from the lobby where we had chugged down two three-dollar plastic cups of so-called champagne, she murmured to me, “Darling, I’m going to throw up.” As I recoiled from her, she leaned all the more heavily upon me, so heavily that her body tilted like a motorcycle going around a curve and I had to hold her with both arms to keep her from falling beneath the trampling feet of the intermission crowd, anxious to resume its seats and see Julie Harris emote some more. I managed to drag her—she had become remarkably dense and inert, though petite; when we made love she felt as weightless as an acrobat or one of those newly idolized child gymnasts from behind the Iron Curtain—toward the ladies’ room, against the exiting surge of perfumed, “freshened” women there. The painted eyes of these women flared with horror as I barged in with my burden,
but then, like a swarm of ants adjusting itself to the sudden fall of a breadcrumb in its midst, they took over. Genevieve was laid upon a rose-colored couch in their facility’s silken anteroom; I discreetly retreated to the doorway, where I could observe, over the shoulders of her multiplying caretakers, that the Perfect Wife looked magnificent—she had become her own effigy in glossy, colorless wax. Her precise, decisively marked features had been transposed to a plane of perfect peace. She was wearing a high-necked brocaded gray dress in the Chinese style, and she later claimed that it was the dress, and the claustrophobia-inducing qualities of Emily Dickinson’s world, that made her faint. But in fact a medical exam, a week later, revealed that she was harboring a duodenal ulcer which had, under the accumulating stress of leaving Brent and waiting for me to disentangle myself from Norma, begun to bleed. No more champagne for her—Maalox and skimmed milk, rather. I felt guilty, of course. But at the moment I was struck by the grandeur of her sudden unconsciousness, so much purer than her restless, grabby sleep. Smelling salts were produced. In memory I lean forward, the more deeply to inhale their bitter ethereal scent amid the compressed perfumes of the other women, there in that silken foyer faintly redolent of female urine and fair bodies overheated by the excitements of the theatre. I am proud, I remember, proud of Genevieve, proud to be her escort. Frighteningly, I seem, bending forward, to dip beneath the anesthesia of daily events into the divine and dreadful gravity of life—this lovely woman laid low, and both of us far from home, matter in the wrong place, here in New York, if that’s where we were.

Speaking of theatre, Wayward had a Drama Society that put on plays in the fall and spring. Let me, patient
Retrospect
editors, set the scene.
Time:
Spring in New England, with
cleansing winds, and nodding jonquils and asphalt roads still whitened by winter’s salt.
Place:
The Student Center, our newest building, erected in what retrospectively seemed the boom times of Lyndon Johnson, a five-story structure with a colonial-brick outside and a Bauhaus-cement inside. The ground floor was a kind of mall, with the campus bookstore, some shops offering such rudiments of attire and furniture as hadn’t been brought from home, a combination grocery and drugstore, and a pizza parlor with six round metal tables that ventured out onto the cement paving in imitation of a European sidewalk café. On the second floor, reachable by several broad, neo-fascist flights of outdoor steps as well as by interior stairways and elevators, was the college dining hall, offering three square cafeteria meals a day, and on the third floor—the hot center of student nightlife—a combination lounge and amusement gallery, a central array of already exhausted and seam-split sofas and chairs surrounded, at a distance in the barren open space, by recreational resources—a darkened gallery of chirping video games, a coffee-and-snack shop that stayed open until midnight, a row of sleepless junk-food-vending machines, and a room holding abused Ping-Pong and billiard tables, both perennially short of balls. Our girls gathered here, not all six hundred at once but many, some with male dates but not many: even on Saturday nights the lounge was what my father’s jocosely male-chauvinist generation would have called a hen party—a gynous concentration, in torn jeans, sloganned T-shirts, and grubby salt-and-slush-soaked sneakers, emitting a high-pitched babble and a subliminal scent that bombarded my pheromone receptors with as much radiation as if I were a Ukrainian peasant on the day Chernobyl let loose.