Irving Wallace - The Man

The Judge tugged his chair around, directly toward Dilman. His eyes were hard. “What decision?” he demanded.

“Whether or not to undergo this excruciating trial before the Senate and the world, to go through the personal agony of it, permit my poor dead wife’s miserable history of alcoholism to be paraded before all eyes, permit my one son, with all his emotional problems, to be tortured for his alleged and fictional affiliation with anti-white terrorists, to let the one woman I love in the world, a decent, innocent woman, be marked for life as no better than a prostitute-to decide if it is right and humane to undergo all of this myself, to let all of this happen to the ones I hold dear, out of selfish anger and vanity, knowing all the while that inevitably I’ll be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the White House and into the street. I’ve got to decide whether to do that or accept the one alternative that Eaton and Miller and their gang offered me, and that is to give in, meekly quit my post, resign, save myself the indignity of defeat, spare those dear to me the scandal, protect my country from a trial that can only, ultimately, intensify racial hatred. Shall I turn the Presidency back to the white majority who want it for their exclusive club? That’s the decision I must make today.”

The Judge filled his corncob with a practiced hand. His eyes stayed on Dilman. “Okay. How say you?”

“Judge,” said Dilman, “I intend to resign from the Presidency.”

The Judge’s pipe was halfway to his mouth, but now it hung in midair. “Resign?” he said. “You’re going to quit?”

“I have no choice.”

“The hell you haven’t!” the old man roared. His corncob clattered to the table, and so quickly and vehemently did he jump to his feet that Dilman backed against the wall. The Judge was upon him like an angry, pecking rooster, waving his finger under Dilman’s nose. “You resign, you slink out of that greatest office in the world, you give up the best opportunity a President and a minority citizen ever had to improve this country, and I swear-Dilman-I swear on the Missus, and on my niece and her kids, you’ll never set foot in my presence again. I’ll receive and respect any race of man on earth-black, white, yellow, purple-but I won’t receive and respect a puling, wailing coward.”

“Wait a minute-”

“You shut up!” shouted The Judge, vibrating from head to toe. He glared at Dilman, hands on his hips. “You came here for advice, and goddamit to hell, you’re going to get it, like it or not. I’m through coddling your self-pity. I’m through exchanging intellectual statistics with you. What you need is a good boot in the behind, and I got seniority in that Oval Office, so I got the right to give it. Young fellow, you hear me out. I don’t care if they were putting you before a firing squad tomorrow unless you resigned, you still couldn’t resign. No President of the United States who’s marched into that Oval Office either by popular acclaim or by accident ever quit under pressure. You’re not going to degrade the office, be derelict in your duty, thumb your nose at the Constitution, by being the first. No sir, young fellow, no sir! Resigning from the Presidency is the real high crime, not being tried for a pack of partisan lies. Resigning from your opportunity to show a Negro can lead would be the real crime, not being found guilty of adultery and incompetence. If you quit because you’re a Negro President who’s scared stiff, if you go down that way, it’s not only your race that loses, it’s the Missus and me and every decent white person in this democracy that loses, because it shows us and the world we got a country where a Negro is afraid to perform as a man, act as a man, live as a man, because he’s scared we won’t let him do it. Well, goddamit, Dilman, if you know it or not, in the eyes of the Lord and our Saviour and the Constitution, you are a man, not a Negro, not a Baptist, not a Rotarian, not a war veteran, but a human mammal who is a man under God in heaven before he is anything else. You can be a bald man, or a long-nosed man, or a crippled man, or a colored man, or a dago man, or a kike man, but first,last, and always, you are a oneheaded, two-legged man, whose complexion happens to be black and whose Social Security file says he is President of the United States.”

The Judge was livid, gasping for breath, punching the air with his right hand. Frightened, Dilman held to the wall, watching him advance, nostrils dilated, nose quivering with indignation.

“For a half minute there, while you were working in the White House,” the ex-President went on in his nasal rasp, “I thought, ‘Maybe that fellow’s going to find out what he is.’ That was when you had the guts to veto that foul-smelling Minorities Rehabilitation Program Bill. I thought you were standing up for your principles as a man equal to any other man, and more, as a leader who wanted good for his people. Now I see I was bamboozled. You vetoed it as a single act of spite, and out of vanity, to show the ones kicking you around that they better let up once in a while, just once in a while. But that was all it meant, ’cause now I see you’re so afraid of being kicked around some more, and kicked out, that you’re ready to get down on all fours and crawl away voluntarily. Hell and tarnations, fellow, stop crawling. Stand up on your two hind legs like a man, and when somebody kicks you, boot them right back in the ass. You believe in the Republic. You’ve got ideas for this country. You’ve got the most important desk in the nation, full up with unfinished business. Don’t let any man force you to walk out because you think he is a man and you know he thinks you’re not. You’ve got too much to do. Like President Lyndon Johnson said back a time, ‘Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skin, Emancipation will be a Proclamation but not a fact.’ That’s one piece of your unfinished business, Dilman-to make it a fact, and to make it a fact not as a Negro who is President but as an American man who is President. And that’s only the beginning of what you’ve got to do. Don’t tell me they won’t let you, won’t give you a chance. If they obstruct you, you knock them aside. If they charge you with crime and misdemeanor, you answer them and you charge them with ignorance and medievalism, and you battle them as their equal, knowing you’re a human being, and as their superior, knowing you’re still the legal holder of the highest-ranking office in the land. The way President Kennedy wrote in that fine book of his on courage-it’s the most admirable of human virtues, courage is-he knew, ’cause he owned enough of it for ten men-and the way he said-compromise is okay in its place, but only compromising on issues, not your principles-but nowhere did I read in that book of his any praise or defense of quitting, turning tail and running, under any circumstances. You came for my advice and-”

The Judge suddenly stopped, bent his head sideways, listening. The front doorbell was ringing insistently.

The Judge cursed under his breath, glared once more at Dilman, and said curtly, “A grown man’s got to decide for himself.”

He strode from the dining room into the parlor, and Dilman slowly followed him. The Judge had opened the door, and the Missus appeared. “You locked me out,” she said crossly, then peered over his shoulder at Dilman. “Mr. President, there’s somebody important to see you, and Mr. Flannery says you have to see him.”

Dilman had come forward. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know-somebody just flown in from Washington.” She had turned around to beckon to the person. “Right in here, sir, the President will see you.”