Robert Coover - Public Burning

Maybe inquiry, self-consciousness, impeded the process. Maybe Uncle Sam needed vacuity for an easy passage. Certainly, the President never risked clogging the mechanism with idle curiosities of the intellect. He’d had to lean all his life on his little brother Milton whenever it came to thinking (which was something of a closet problem for the Republican Party, Milton having rubbed shoulders with old Henry Wallace during the New Deal days), and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind. The only TV program he was known to watch was “The Fred Waring Show,” which he took to be a classical-music program. He sometimes liked to take in a movie in the White House basement, but generally snored through them, High Noon being one of the few that seemed to keep him awake. More or less awake: he tended to doze off during the kissing scenes (did he resent it that the wife was a Quaker?), then would wake up snorting: “What time is it?”—meaning, Is it noon yet? There was a motto inscribed on a small black piece of wood on his desk, SUAVITER IN MODO FORTITER IN RE, which he thought was Spanish and pronounced like a Texan. Of course, it was true, he had taken up painting of late, and the room across the hall from his bedroom, I was told, had even been converted into a studio, but other people generally drew the pictures and he just filled in the colors — he was always lamenting that he knew nothing about the chemistry of paints, next to nothing about anatomy (he would wink slyly over my head at some crony or other), and draftsmanship was the one subject that nearly got him flunked out of West Point. He was happiest with eight or ten buddies, broiling steaks and roasting corn in their husks on the grill up in the solarium on the White House roof, or else having some old cronies over for a stag dinner of pheasant in the State Dining Room, then sitting around in a circle in his oval study after, talking about fishing or women or war.

I was not included in these parties. He didn’t really like me. I was a “politician.” American adversary politics, the kind I knew how to fight and fight well, was nothing better than a childish gutter-brawl to Eisenhower: “If it takes that kind of foolishness to get elected, let them find someone else for the job!” Yet it was I, not he, who had whipped Adlai Stevenson last fall — Eisenhower won the election, because he couldn’t help it; but it was I who beat the other guy. Slogans of his like “Heart, Determination, and Productivity” did no harm — indeed they put people to sleep, and in this day of the hovering Bomb we could all be grateful for that — but people don’t vote for things, they vote against them, take it from W. C. Fields, and when they went to the polls it was my K 1C 3formula they remembered, scrawling their X’s against “Korea, Communism, Corruption, and Controls.” (If some people were reminded of the old Klan slogan “Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics,” it was not necessarily an accident; Eisenhower wasn’t the only campaigner who knew how to stir up a little useful nostalgia for the primitive and virtuous village life of the past.) Ike had come home from his imperial life abroad, picked up the cross, and launched his “Great Crusade,” but I was the poor sonuvabitch who had had to get down in the ditches and fight the Turks. He seemed to think there was something shameful about this, about being a shameless politician, and always gazed at me as though he saw shit on my face. Yet at the same time he expected me to keep the politicians in Congress in line and got annoyed with me when they deserted him to cater to the home-town vote. His program over on the Hill was faltering. Even his Defense Department reorganization bill was under attack — and if a General didn’t know about defense, then what the hell was he good for? That “bunch of clowns” in Congress was concentrating on headline-grabbing investigations instead of constructive legislation, as he liked to call it, something which amazed and confounded this Living Legend — a man rich from birth astonished by thieves. And somehow all this was my fault. He maybe even thought I was betraying him. He was a Superhero, wasn’t he? Then why weren’t they doing what he asked them to do? Somebody must be messing with the message on its way over there. Thus, he didn’t even understand his own role. In a real sense, I was the old man, he the boy. Even Stevenson saw this.

This is an irony I have learned to live with. Old men, liking me, tended to make the paradoxical assumption that I could win votes among the young and women voters, the province of happy-go-lucky studs like Eisenhower — just as it had been my experience, and not Ike’s, that had kept our Party’s professionals, the old boys, from bolting the ticket last fall. They had made the obvious surface choices at the Convention last summer: Eisenhower was the candidate of the Eastern Establishment, so a Westerner was needed for balance. Eisenhower was old and easy-going and had lived much of his life abroad, he needed a sidekick who was, as Herb Brownell described me, “a young aggressive fellow who knew the domestic issues — the President could be presented to the country as one who would stand up against the Communists in the international sphere, and Nixon would lead the fight in the discussion of the domestic issues.”

But in fact, though all too few understood this, it went much deeper than that. Likable Ike’s open-faced friendliness and easy smile won a lot of votes, but some people began to suspect he might be a little simple. Any man on the street past thirty knows there’s a lot more to politics — at home and abroad — than plain talk and friendly handshakes. Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy. We all know this: politics is a dirty, combative, dangerous game, it’s not something to grin at like a doped monkey. A beloved leader is no leader at all. Gregariousness is a liability if you live close to the center. Crusaders all make one mistake: they leave home. Optimists buy the wrong used cars, take it from a guy who’s sold them. And never trust any man who’s “clean as a hound’s tooth”: it’s clear he’s never been out in the real world when the shit’s hit the fan.

So everybody liked Ike, that casual straightforward bumbler — me they called Tricky Dick. I hated this at first, it was a brutal thing to fight, but eventually I discovered it won votes. Uncle Sam probably didn’t like being called Yankee Doodle at first either, but eventually he stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. And as these plays on my name got filthier, I even started picking up some votes among women and young people. I’m not very interested in the philosophy of any gimmick or policy, only its efficacy. It’s not the content that counts, but the impact — and that attitude itself is efficacious at the polls. Ike was so accustomed to being loved, even apathy offended him. When some guy up in Racine, Wisconsin, borrowing from the 1948 campaign, invented the phrase “Phewey on Eisenhewey!”, the General was genuinely upset and wouldn’t associate with Tom Dewey for days. If the Democrats had hit him hard enough, portrayed him as a pompous disloyal fraud and something of a helpless moron to boot, if they’d ridiculed his cronies and dragged old Mamie through the mud as they should have, he’d have probably quit. In fact, I knew he could still quit, any day, he was already losing interest.

“I believe the United States is strong enough to expose to the world,” he was saying now, “its differing viewpoints, from those of what we call almost the man who has Socialist leanings to the man who is so far to the extreme right that it takes a telescope to find him, but that is America and let’s don’t be afraid to show it, to the world, because we believe that form of government, those facts, that kind of thinking, that kind of combination of things has produced the greatest system of government that the world has produced, that is what we believe, that is what I am talking about.”