Robert Coover - Public Burning

“How did it happen, Mr. Hoover…the first time?”

He’d given me a strange look then, pity maybe, or envy, I didn’t know what it was, but it had seemed somehow unbecoming for a former President of the United States. “I’d, uh… I’d rather not say, son,” he’d said.

Anyway, he was pleased to make the introductions that day at the Bohemian Grove, and had even tossed a few familiar superlatives about me Eisenhower’s way, saying my election to the Senate would be “the greatest good that can come to our country”—but I don’t think the General even saw me during that handshake. A bright friendly twinkle in his blue eyes, but they were restless, took in everything at once, and nothing. What was he looking for? Comradeship? A way out? He laughed so easily. Everything he said was dumb, yet somehow attractive. And he seemed completely in awe of politicians, held his expletives in check as though among priests, made fun of his own political ignorance. “What does an old soldier know about such things?” he grinned. He’d be hell to beat in a poker game, I thought.

Actually, I’d seen him before — but from a distance — five years earlier, and then my impression of him had been that of every other American: he was not only a great hero, but also a real good guy in the best tradition of the American heartland. It was just after V-E Day and I was still celebrating my own survival: I couldn’t complain, in spite of the exile I’d had a fairly soft tour — even enjoyable at times and wildly free from the restraints of home — and now, sane and whole and with a pocket full of poker winnings, there I was, just thirty-two years old, about to become a father for the first time, and the whole wide world spread out before me. I was finishing out my Naval duty by negotiating settlements of terminated war contracts in the Bureau of Aeronautics office in New York City, and from a twentieth-floor window of that dreary building I’d watched General Eisenhower go motoring by, standing up in the back of his car, both arms raised high over his head. Instinctively, I’d raised my own: it had felt good. That’s a terrific gesture, I’d thought then. Churchill raises two stubby fingers, a Texan raises both his arms. But even from that distance, I could see that this man was no intellectual giant. No man who thought seriously about things could smile like that.

For the past year and a half now, since my historic trip to his SHAPE headquarters in Paris, I’d got to know him a lot better. After all, we’d suffered the rigors of a tough campaign together, had won an election and now ran the country together, we were a team. Yet that San Francisco luncheon seemed to have set the tone and conditions of our relationship ever since: he was the General, I was the deferential junior officer; I was the professional lawyer and politician, he was the reluctant amateur, acknowledging my know-how but skeptical of its source; he was the Old Man, I the son he was surprised by once a week at Sunday dinners. He had his cronies, old and new, people like General Clay and George Humphrey, and he laughed and snorted with them, but not with me. Whenever I drew near, they stifled their laughter, interrupted their conversations, broke their back-slapping huddle, turned to give me their attention, scarcely concealing their impatience and disapproval. He liked people around him who were confident and cheerful, and I could never be both at the same time. The trouble was, most of those smug pals of his didn’t know shit from Shinola around here — politics is a science and a skill like any other, and I was one of the best professionals in the business, but he never seemed to give a damn about my opinions, only asking me for them because he’d been brought up in the military to do that, consult your juniors so they don’t get too restless. Everyone always admired how hard I worked, but Eisenhower seemed to accept this like he accepted everything else: he measured my capacity and then took it for granted, as a fact he could work with. Typically overeager, though, I’d tried to take on the world during those early days and so had set a standard for myself I could never live up to and survive. When overstretched, I needed praise or pity to keep going, but I learned very early not to seek it from the Old Man — nothing turned him off faster. I had to go to Bill Rogers or Bert Andrews or Pat instead. I learned to move at the periphery of his vision, in profile as it were: self-assured, intense, preoccupied, businesslike. He watched me as though from another room, somewhat amused.

Maybe, taking a few chances, I might have cracked through this condescension and made out with him on some deeper, more intimate level — but I couldn’t take those chances, I couldn’t take any chances, not now: I was waiting for the big one, and I couldn’t risk blowing it. There are people who do not wish to surrender to the Incarnation, who do not wish to he possessed by Uncle Sam, be used by him, moved by him, who do not wish to feel his presence pushing out from behind their own features, distorting them, printing them on the blank face of the world, people who fear the forces leaking out their fingertips, the pressure in the skull, the cramp in the groin. Let me say right here that I was never one of them. It’s true, sometimes I envied these people: they were free of constraints I too had once been free of, they could blaspheme and grow beards, trade wives and mink coats, go on a bender, be emphatically inconsistent — the paradox of power: to lead a nation of free men is to be the least free among them. Jefferson once said that when a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. Property! Jefferson knew how to choose his words. To lead a land of free-enterprise entrepreneurs was to be their communal socialized possession. But this was what I wanted and so to that extent I was free: if these were chains, I chose them.

Eisenhower, who thought himself free, was in fact the real captive, much more the victim than I would ever be in his place. Because — and this was the central truth about Dwight David Eisenhower and that by which his whole role in world history must be judged, far more important than his deviousness, his lack of sophistication, his gregariousness, his selfishness, his bumbling style or calculating ambition — he was unconscious. Oh, alert, yes, and he wasn’t stupid — our best historian and mathematician, his classmates at Abilene High had called him back in 1909, bad as his grades had been — but in any larger sense, he was simply unconscious. He didn’t know what was going on. And maybe in fact this was why we all liked him. He really supposed he’d done his duty to God, country, and Abilene, won the war in Europe for all the good guys, treated his juniors and Mamie fairly and squarely, and now led his people as their President by holding these weekly bull sessions in the Cabinet Room, their team captain and cheerleader. He even thought that people were listening to him and doing the things he suggested they do! He sat in the Oval Office, signed bills, received ministers, set the barometer, and kept his desk clean, and he didn’t even grasp what it was he was doing, people had to explain it to him. Whenever Uncle Sam shazammed himself hack into the General, the General would blink, glance around in amazement, then shrug and say something like: “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing.”

I’d been a witness to an occasional transformation as that stern old steel-fisted top-hatted Superhero submerged himself into Dwight D. Eisenhower: there was always a certain broadening of the nose, softening of the mouth, hair falling out, elongation of the ears, slumping of the shoulders. And then back again the same way. It looked easy, and as far as I could tell, Eisenhower didn’t suffer at all, though there was a perceptible aging each time. I’d tried it myself, at home, alone — except for Checkers, who, it seemed to me, was closer than I was to making it — but nothing had ever happened. Ever since the Checkers speech, I’d had the feeling I could do it if I tried hard enough, and I’d crouch in front of the bathroom mirror and grunt and push, but all that ever came of it was that I’d get Checkers overexcited, and he’d start barking his damned head off, wake the whole house up. “What are you doing to that dog, Dick?” Pat would scold sleepily from the bedroom. I often wondered if it was bad luck to live on a street named after Sam Tilden. The neighborhood had jinxed Kefauver and Sparkman, after all… I’d have to think about this.