Timothy Culver - Power Play

“I’ll tell him,” she promised. She turned to look at the house, and little Dinah was at a second floor window. When she saw her mother looking up at her she waved, and Evelyn waved back. Should she ask Bradford if she could bring Dinah along? No, of course not, that would be silly. The child would be better off at home than stuck in some Parisian hotel room with nothing to do.

Uncle Joe had also seen Dinah, and he said, “You know, if I’d had a daughter, that’s the one I would have wanted.”

“I haven’t been giving her enough of my attention,” Evelyn said. She was still waving, but something inside the house suddenly attracted Dinah’s attention and she disappeared from the window.

Uncle Joe gave a surprised laugh and said, “Who have you been giving it to?”

She dropped her arm and reluctantly looked away from the window. “What?”

“Who’s been getting your attention, if not Dinah?”

“Oh, myself, I suppose. And of course, Bradford.”

“Of course.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? But why should there be? Particularly when he immediately added, “Especially in Paris. I’m counting on you there.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised.

The first press conference had been at Kennedy International Airport in New York, and the second one was at Orly International Airport in Paris, but except for the language difference they might both have been taking place in the same location. The sites were strikingly similar, both long bare naked rooms with linoleum floors, bare cream-colored walls, and ceilings covered with acoustical tiles. Both rooms contained one long wall consisting mostly of large windows looking out at the taxiways, high-nosed planes rolling ponderously and silently back and forth out there, their keening silenced by the shut windows and the pervasive hush of the air-conditioning.

The major difference was in the time of day. The flight had taken five hours, in addition to which they had lost five hours in crossing the time zones, accelerating the day like a record played at the wrong speed. The windows in the Kennedy conference room had faced east, and a 9:00 A.M. sun had streamed through to touch the standing group of reporters with yellow and white. And now, five hours later, they were in an identical room, but with westward-facing windows, so that a 7:00 P.M. setting sun painted orange and red another group of reporters, these too standing, notebooks in hand, their faces and their clothing and their questions all the same as the first group, an ocean away.

Bradford’s answers were the same, too, with slight variations in the phrasing. “As some of the more elderly among you may remember, as President I never much went in for what is called personal diplomacy. I didn’t believe in it, I thought it smacked of grandstanding and rarely had any but the most temporary of effects. My attitude hasn’t changed. I am not here now to engage in personal diplomacy, I’m not really here to engage in diplomacy at all. My only purpose here is to try to keep open one of the thin slender conduits of communication between ourselves and the people of Communist China.”

He reminded them, as he had reminded their twins back at Kennedy, that he was still the only American President to have had an actual face-to-face meeting with an official of the Red Chinese government. That meeting had been of extremely limited scope, but out of it had developed a personal relationship with the Chinese official that had been maintained over the years through intermittent correspondence. “I wouldn’t say we were friends precisely, nor that we’ve found much to agree on, but we are a bit more than acquaintances, and the one thing on which we are in agreement is that our respective countries must learn to live together on the same planet. And it won’t happen without communication.”

The official lines of communication, he reminded them, for the most part truly didn’t exist. There was no organization, from the UN down to a copyright convention, to which both nations belonged. Neither had any sort of diplomatic staff on the soil of the other, nor was there any real communication possible through such neutral nations as Sweden or Cambodia, since the Chinese tended to distrust the neutrality of Caucasian nations and the United States tended to distrust the neutrality of Oriental nations. Communication wasn’t even possible through the Soviet Union or any of the Warsaw Pact nations, since the Chinese were frequently also at odds with them.

“The key to world peace, in my opinion, is the curing of paranoia. The arms race was and is the result of paranoia. Several of the bush league brushfire wars we’ve gotten ourselves entangled in these last two decades have been directly or indirectly the result of paranoia, in fact the whole domino theory that directed our Asian policy for so long was entirely paranoid in character. Now, paranoia will continue to exist as long as men continue to exist, but it can be kept within bounds. Our national paranoia about the Soviet Union has eased considerably in the last ten to fifteen years, and so has theirs about us. At the moment, the only large nation, the only nation of global importance that exists almost totally in a state of paranoia is Communist China, which doesn’t find one single nation on the face of the earth worthy of its trust. It is China’s paranoia which is keeping the pot boiling more than any other single factor, and it is China’s paranoia which may someday result in the pot boiling over and destroying us all.

“That is why the few tenuous links we do have with the Communist Chinese must be maintained, why the lines of communication, scant as they are, have to stay open. The Chinese, for their own good and the good of all mankind, must cure themselves of their paranoia, and they cannot possibly do that in isolation and ignorance.”

He was asked if the current meeting had been his idea, a question he’d already answered several times in the last two weeks, but he patiently answered it again: “No. Kwong Lan Quey requested it, in his last letter to me. He did not say what purpose he wished the meeting to serve, but he did say that the request was not an official act and was not made at the instruction of his government.”

This conference was taking longer than the one at Kennedy. It wasn’t that it was covering more ground, but that extra time had to be taken for translation between French and English of everything that was said. Evelyn, watching Bradford’s face, saw that he was getting tired and she moved forward to put a hand on his elbow. When he turned his head she said softly, “Uncle Joe would tell you to stop now.”

He considered revolt, she saw it in his face, but then she saw him also remember that an airport press conference was nothing to risk one’s health for. He nodded, and faced the reporters again, saying, “One more question, ladies and gentlemen, and I think that will be all.”

The last question was, “Given that yours is only one voice, and that the number of voices reaching China are few, what is the likelihood of this Chinese paranoia ever being cured?”

“Well, it must be,” Bradford said. “That is the next major world goal, and I insist I am not being melodramatic when I say that our future depends on our reaching that goal. I don’t mean what type of future we will have, or our children will have, I mean whether or not we will have any sort of future at all. China is a global power, an industrial nation with a huge land mass, vast untapped resources, and one-quarter of the entire world’s population. She is also a nuclear power, and from what Chinese politicians and scientists have been saying since the early sixties, she is the only nuclear power with no true understanding of just how lethal nuclear power really is. She is also an isolated power, with scant practice in the arts of diplomacy and very little reason to like or trust Caucasians. It’s an explosive combination, quite literally. Either we break through China’s isolation, her pride, her mistrust and her paranoia, or the day will come when a Chinese tantrum destroys us all.”