Irving Wallace - The Man

She took her neat, two-paragraph letter of resignation to President Dilman back from George, coughed wretchedly, since her cold had settled in her chest, and said, “It’s expected of the whole staff.”

“Flannery told us President Dilman was keeping on T. C.’s entire staff. And there’ll be an announcement he’s keeping on the Cabinet, too. Just like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson did, at first.”

“George, it’s impossible. How can I work for him after working for T. C.?”

Murdock’s eyes became even smaller. “Is that the reason, Edna?”

“I don’t know,” she said quickly. “He has his own secretary over in the Senate Office Building. She’s colored. She’d understand him. It-it would be so difficult for me.”

George Murdock shook his head. “No, it would be wrong, Edna. You know this job. The other girl doesn’t. Give him a break. You admitted you didn’t even know him. You haven’t even talked to him today.”

“He’s been locked up in the Cabinet Room for hours, with Eaton and Talley and everyone. Even if I did know him, it would be-”

She halted, and listened. She could hear the tread of many feet leaving the Cabinet Room for the tiled corridor outside.

She said, “They’re breaking up now, George. You’d better leave me. He might come in, and it wouldn’t look right.”

George Murdock came to his feet and so did she, and she was pleased that she was no taller than he, even if it was, as she suspected, because he wore lifts in his heels. He started for the corridor door. “Think twice, Edna, before you quit. You can help him. It might be better for both of us, you being busy right now. See you tonight.”

Alone with her letter of resignation, she reread it, then, with a pen, supplied a missing comma. George, she knew, was wiser than she, and she was attentive always to his counsel. But this time he was wrong because he could not see the turmoil inside her, and there had been no time to talk it out. Yet George had perceived what was at the bottom of her discomfort. He had doubted that she wanted to resign because of her loss of T. C. He had forced her to confess that she thought a colored secretary could serve a Negro President better.

She wondered now what her admission had meant. Why did she think Dilman should have a colored secretary? She had never possessed strong feelings for or against Negroes. In fact, throughout her career she had had no close contact with them. To her they were not people, but a controversial issue that had swirled about T. C.’s Oval Office these last two years and that had gone in and out of her typewriter as a civil rights problem. Like T. C., she had been for them. Like Lincoln, she did not believe in slavery or discrimination or prejudice. She had always considered herself open-minded and progressive, and wanting the right thing.

She had never been faced with the problem of knowing a Negro really well, or working for one really closely. Last night the problem had come to her, and all through the hectic and emotional day she had tried to evaluate it. Without precisely defining why, she had come to the conclusion that she must resign. She had drafted several versions of her letter, when she could find the time, and at last it was typed. She had called George in from the West Wing lobby, where the members of the press were crowded about for every news flash, but the two of them had had only five minutes together.

She wondered if she would see President Dilman at all today. He had arrived at the West Wing entrance late in the morning, had been hurried past the television and radio microphones outside, stopping just long enough to speak, brokenly, no more than thirty words of his grief over the nation’s loss, and to promise that the continuity of orderly government would not be impaired and that a formal statement would be forthcoming.

After that, he had spent the entire afternoon in the Cabinet Room, flanked by Secretary of State Eaton and Governor Talley, seeing Congressional leaders and several ambassadors, approving funeral arrangements, signing a more elaborate proclamation of a period of mourning, preparing a statement to the nation. There had been, as far as Edna had been able to make out, only one change in plans. She had scheduled the members of the Cabinet to see him, one after the other, separately. Apparently Dilman had insisted upon seeing them as a group for five minutes. Talley had emerged to tell her, and Edna had made the arrangements. The first Cabinet meeting had lasted seven minutes, and, according to Tim Flannery, President Dilman had requested one minute of silent prayer for T. C. and MacPherson, and then he had made a little impromptu speech promising that he would try to serve the country, try to carry out T. C.’s programs with their help, and he had concluded by pleading with all of them to stay on in their posts.

She heard muffled voices in the corridor, and then the tramp of footsteps toward the Oval Office, followed by lighter footsteps. Her intuition told her that President Dilman was on his way to his desk for the first time in his first day in office, followed, no doubt, by his Secret Service bodyguards.

She wanted to make certain.

She went quietly to the thick door that separated her room from the Oval Office. In the middle of the heavy door, at eye level, was a minute peephole with a magnifying glass inside it. Very few visitors, even members of the government, were aware that this peephole existed. Occasionally, with glee, T. C. had pointed it out to distinguished foreign guests. He had liked to say, to Edna’s embarrassment, “My wife Hesper had the hole drilled, so that Miss Foster can keep an eye on me. We have a lot of pretty secretaries here, you know.” Actually, as Edna knew from the first day, the peephole was there so that a President’s personal secretary could unobtrusively peer inside, to make sure that the Chief Executive was not occupied with visitors, before she entered or dared to disturb him.

Edna Foster stood on tiptoe and placed her right eye to the peephole.

The magnifying glass enlarged T. C.’s elaborate desk, made up of the oak timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute , a ship turned over to Queen Victoria by American Minister to Great Britain James Buchanan in an effort to aid the British search for a lost Arctic expedition. Years later Queen Victoria had returned a portion of the rescue vessel to President Hayes in the shape of this White House desk. And forever after it had been known as the Buchanan desk.

Clearly visible to Edna’s eye now, as she studied the venerable desk, were the numerous knickknacks and gadgets surrounding the green blotter, all favors that emissaries from Japan and Ecuador, Italy and Baraza, had brought to the President. Almost visible, too, were the silver-framed portraits of T. C.’s wife and adolescent son.

Dropping her gaze, Edna could make out the center of the room, even to the Presidential seal woven into the green carpet. Shifting her eyes to the right, Edna could see T. C.’s cushioned antique captain’s chair, set between the two curved sofas.

Beyond the furnishings, the Oval Office was empty.

Suddenly the open doorway to the corridor was filled by a Secret Service agent, the one named Beggs, who was unfastening the chain. A moment later President Douglass Dilman came into the room. No one followed him.

Knowing that this was his first visit, as Chief Executive of the land, to what was now his office and had been the office of every President since 1909, Edna Foster watched with fascination.

Douglass Dilman had come to the middle of the room hesitantly. He simply stood there as if uncertain where to turn, what to do, like one who was not sure that he had found the right address. Edna examined him. Although the peephole brought him closer, made him larger, he appeared smaller than she remembered him to have been last night. His broad black face reflected confusion. He rubbed one side of his flaring nostrils and slowly pirouetted, staring at the three windows behind the desk, at the two standing flags, the American flag and the Presidential flag. Then he stared down at the desk itself.