The Sunday Gentleman (74 page)

“In order for the geisha and their world to survive the ever-changing realities of the present in this country, they will have to concentrate on cultivating their art accomplishments so that they can claim to be retainers of the traditional cultural assets of Japan. Otherwise, with modernization, the social meaning of their existence will be lost.

“I think the challenge to the geisha world today must be more or less the same as the one faced by the Kabuki play. Their survival will depend on how they succeed in handing down the excellent cultural heritage of the nation while, at the same time, acting up to the tastes of contemporary people.”

And then, Mrs. Akamatsu added:

“By the way, about the matter of calling the geisha union by the term of ‘guild’—a Shimbashi Guild official felt that the term ‘guild’ suggested something very feudal, and that it was no longer a fit term for the present setup, and he suggested that you use ‘Shimbashi Geisha Association’ instead. Can you do this?”

Yes, I can. I will agree to call the girls members of a progressive association if, in turn, they will do something for me—never let me catch them in shirttails and slacks, dancing the cha-cha-cha or watusi, with bearded beatniks in a Tokyo discotheque.

PART FOUR

THE

SUNDAY GENTLEMAN

ON MONDAY

21

The Chair

in the Oval Office

I stood beside the vacant chair, stared down at it, and was strangely moved.

It was a black leather, high-backed, executive swivel chair, further padded in the seat with an ordinary striped cushion, and it rested behind the aged carved oak desk, known as the Buchanan desk, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. It was the chair that belonged to the President of the United States, who, that balmy mid-September afternoon nine weeks before a journey to Dallas, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Someone had come up beside me. It was Pierre Salinger, press secretary to the President.

“Go on, sit down in it,” he said. “You’re here to write a novel about how it
feels
to be President, so sit down in it, and make believe, and I’m sure you’ll find what you’re after.”

And so I sat down in President Kennedy’s chair, and although I did not fit it for size, I knew instantly that Salinger was right. He had said that I would feel something, and I did. What I felt that moment, I have felt frequently in moments of the days since, and I believe that feeling will continue to recur until the day I die. It is a feeling I would wish for every American alive.

With my bulk occupying the chair in the Oval Office, I crossed my arms on the small green blotter that was centered on the desk and contemplated what was immediately before me. First, I saw a long desk lamp with a fluorescent light. On one side of it was a cluster of gadgets, knickknacks, souvenirs, some reflecting personal high spots in the President’s life, or the lives of his family, others obviously the gifts of visiting dignitaries from far lands. On the other side of the lamp were six books held upright, one of them written by the President himself. And then my eye was caught by something resembling a menu holder in which had been inserted a card bearing the typewritten heading the president’s ENGAGEMENTS, and beneath these words were typed the hours and appointments for that day.

At my right elbow lay a manila folder bulging with papers to be studied, and perhaps signed, and next to it war green-matted writing board. At my left elbow stood a green telephone console with eight punch keys. Then I became aware of the other telephones-there were two or three—and the simple black one, such as most of us possess in our homes, which was described to me as “the famous hot line.”

This was the immediate world before the President’s chair. Beyond, and all about, there was more. Riding the swivel chair, I decided to let my gaze make one unbroken orbit of the President’s office, a room first brought into use in 1909. To my left was the door to the President’s engagements secretary’s office. Then there was an open door with a chain across it, and behind the chain, in the tiled corridor, a Secret Service agent sat at a desk, a White House policeman standing beside him, and both were watching me, while engaging themselves in conversation.

Wheeling slowly, I could see, directly across the desk and the expanse of the quiet office, its cane back to me, the padded Presidential rocker, flanked by two upholstered sofas each holding three extra pillows. And breaking the far wall was the fireplace, two three-masted ship models on its mantel, and a naval painting of the sea battle between the American
Bonhomme Richard
and British
Serapis
above. A door near the fireplace led to the tiny office of the President’s personal secretary, an efficient, cautious, loyal woman married to a Veterans Administration officer.

Revolving slowly to the right, I could see through the three French doors, one of them open, that led onto the colonnaded walk along the magnificent Rose Garden. Beyond the garden, in a second-floor bedroom of the White House, above the hoary magnolia trees, President Kennedy lay dozing, taking his after-lunch nap. From studying his shaded window, my eyes dropped to two Secret Service agents, young, athletic, conservatively suited, their shoulder holsters hidden, at guard on the colonnaded walk.

I swung completely around to take in the rear of the Oval Office, behind the swivel chair. There was a table with a half-dozen newspapers—I could make out
The New York Times
, the Washington
Post
, the Baltimore
Sun
—and there was a metallic gray Dictaphone machine. On either side of the table rose a flag, one the American flag, the other the Presidential flag, and off through the three green-draped windows, I could see a police guardhouse, and past it, on the South Lawn, the putting green Eisenhower had used, and among the trees the swings, slides, and square white playhouse used by the Kennedy children.

I came around, and I was back where I had started.

My visual orbit had been fleeting, and yet, I sensed, for me it had been unforgettable. It had been an inspiration of my maturity.

There was activity now in the Oval Office. Several famous aides came poking in and out. A secretary crossed hastily. Then, more Secret Service agents. To all of this I was almost oblivious. Sitting in President Kennedy’s chair, I tried to define my emotion.

I thought: This chair was, in a sense, manufactured by a group of wigged men who rode in buggies to a place in Philadelphia to declare their independence from tyranny and to declare a democracy of men where all would be equal under the law of God. Today, this chair had become the center of the world, the seat of freedom to which all Americans elevate one of their own to represent them in their continuing yearning for peace, security, absolute individual liberty.

I pushed myself out of that black leather chair, and once more stood beside it, staring down at it with feelings I had not known I still possessed. As we grow older—and I had enjoyed and suffered forty-seven years of living when I stood beside that chair—we become more cynical about our fellow men and their promises, more disenchanted by the possibilities of each new day, and often we are either too bruised by life’s trials, or too worldly and sophisticated, for the old words and dreams we no longer believe can be true.

I’m not sure that I felt that way before that moment, but however I felt, it was not as I felt when I left the chair in the Oval Office. My skepticism about the wheeling and dealing in and around the White House, about the bartering and politics, about the gossip inevitably surrounding all our leaders and high places, had fallen away from me. I felt renewed by my vision of the goodness and purpose of our nation and its way of life. The meaning of the chair, Everyman’s chair and no one’s throne, was clear to me. My youthful patriotism, my belief in the rightness and practical possibilities of virtue in our system, was entirely restored.

As I slowly walked away from that chair, and from the Oval Office itself, I was moved by a powerful emotion. It was as if I knew that the community of men and women in which I lived, of which I was a part, the ones who made the chair in the Oval Office possible and gave it its meaning, was the best community yet devised by the mind of man, and could be better and would be better still and that I would do my part.

Suddenly, I felt less selfish, intolerant, narrow, helpless. Suddenly, I fully understood my citizenship, my allegiance to the cause of freedom, and my role in the community. I counted as an individual. My neighbors counted. Because that chair counted.

All of us, I thought, must make an effort to keep that chair in the White House not only a chair of strength and decision, but a chair of wisdom and justice. I wondered: What col be done by each of us? Participate in government, vote, I h;. long been taught. Good, I thought, but not good enough. And then I knew what was demanded of us—that each of us, in his way, must work as an individual to abolish hatred, violence, intolerance, hypocrisy, despair, inequality in the United States. To abolish these blights in our land, each of us, I knew, would have to abolish the evils within his own self.

And what else must be done? Well, I had come to Washington, D.C., to the White House, to the Oval Office in the West Wing, and finally to the President’s chair because I wanted to write an intimate and difficult fictional book about the Presidency. At no time, before sitting in that chair, had I been certain I could or would write this book. But then, after rising from the chair, I knew that I must write it, and that I was ready to write it, at last. And so, for better or for worse, I wrote it, because I now believed in my fellow men and my country and our system more than I ever had before, and because I wanted to become better than I was, and perhaps move others as I had been moved.

The journey to that remarkable moment in the chair in the Oval Office was hesitant, roundabout, slow—yet adventurous. It consisted not of dramatic physical adventures such as certain people we read about have. It consisted of smaller inner adventures such as men who dream—or write are more likely to have.

For me, it began on the midnight of a Saturday in June, 1963, as I was scanning the next morning’s newspapers with all their calamitous news about civil rights strife in altogether too many of the fifty states of the United States. For several years, I had wanted to write a novel about this racial conflict, and had considered and rejected a number of ideas. Now, suddenly, I sat up. I had the idea I had been searching for. I had it whole. It had come to me as a question: What would happen to all of us if a Negro congressman, because of a sudden accident and the law of succession, became President of the United States for an unexpired term? What would happen to the United States? How would the event affect nations and peoples abroad? What would happen to the Negro President himself? And to those whites, men and women, whose lives converged upon his life? To find the answers, I would have to write a work of fiction, a novel with a factual background, a novel to be called
The Man
. That was it, for me a story that must be told, if I could tell It—if I had the perception, sensitivity, stamina and, above all, the courage.

Uncertainly, I fumbled forward in the days and weeks that followed, trying to convert dream into reality. I researched in Los Angeles and New York. Under the shading umbrella of an outdoor cafe on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, I worked out the characters and story. In hotel rooms of Frankfurt and Juan-les-Pins, I wrote scenes. By the time I reached Home, I had come to a halt. I was not sure I could make the background—mainly scenes in the White House—authentic enough to be believable. Perhaps I did not fully understand Its role in our lives.

In numerous visits to Washington in the past, I had, as a plain tourist, taken the limited morning tour of the East Wing of the White House. But while what I had seen was impressive, I retained the memory of a museum. A real President worked in the downstairs West Wing offices, and lived as a human being in the upstairs second-floor apartments, both areas barred to tourists. To go forward, I knew that I must see what others could not see. My project hung in the balance.

I wrote to several friends in Washington, and asked how I could go about living inside, getting the real feel of the White House for a week or two. Soon, I had one reply from a friend in the State Department. At a reception given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, this friend had run into the President’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and he had relayed my wishes. Salinger had replied,“Tell Mr. Wallace I’ve read a couple of his books—and I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

At once, I wrote to Salinger and outlined my needs. He responded instantly: Come to Washington, call him, and he would do what he could.

On September 16, 1963, I arrived at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the White House. After being cleared by two policemen, I walked up the curving driveway and entered the West Wing lobby or Reading Room, teeming with perhaps one hundred newspapermen. As I came in, Salinger, his amiable round face, cigar, white shirt visible in the midst of the reporters, was answering questions on the savage slaying of the children in that Birmingham church. Finishing, Salinger saw me, recognized me somehow, and called out, “See you in five minutes!”

In five minutes, I was sitting across the desk from Salinger in his large, cluttered office. I explained the theme of my novel, and what I would need to go on. He challenged me on several points, but was otherwise intrigued by my idea. I told him, “I don’t want to go through here as a tourist I want to go through the offices and private apartments making believe I am President, which is what the hero of my novel will be.” Salinger agreed to cooperate. Visiting the President’s Oval Office and the rooms around it would not be difficult since President Kennedy usually napped or rested in his private quarters upstairs from two-thirty in the afternoon to four-thirty. However, visiting his private living quarters presented some obstacles. The Kennedys felt that their private living area should not be turned into a goldfish bowl. Still, Salinger thought that since I was writing fiction, something might be done.