Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Buchanan sat at his desk stiffly, as if the pressure of events were inflating his clothes from within, and freezing his joints with arthritic discomfort. The eager petitioners surrounded him like a gelatinous, vested wall, smelling of male sweat and the fumes of good living. “Gentlemen,” he responded at last, in a lawyerly voice squeezed up to an especially wheedling pitch, “put whatever you wish to recommend in writing. I warn you, I intend to collect the federal revenues in Charleston at all hazards. I am determined to obey the laws and fulfil the duties of the chief executive wherever these are unambiguously defined. I am bitterly grieved, let me confide to you, at your disposition to desert the Union before you have been in any particular injured, and when all the means of the defense of states’ rights lie in the Constitution and in the legislature as constituted; though this election gave us a Republican President, the Republicans are minorities in both houses and powerless by themselves.”

Keitt, impatient of passionless arguments he had heard a hundred times from the denatured wafflers of this artificial city, stepped forward to the edge of the President’s well-used black-walnut desk and demanded, “Tell us this, then: do you intend, grieved or no, to use force in collecting revenues in Charleston?”

Stung by his tone, Buchanan tremulously replied, looking up at Keitt with a cocked head and uncertain focus, “I will obey the laws. I am no warrior — I am a man of peace — but I will obey the laws.”

[This embroiders as much as was reported. But you and I know, Retrospect eds., how much more conversation, false starts and probes, idle courtesies and amiable chitchat, there must have been. Gone, gone into the air and the dust. The events of Buchanan’s final months were lit by the glare of hyperexcited newspaper coverage and retrospectively by the memoirs of Buchanan, Black, Stanton, Holt, and Trescot — even relatively late and minor members of the Cabinet like Philip Thomas and John Dix left accounts. And still we don’t know exactly what happened: Buchanan’s state of mind varies from hysterical to coolly determined depending on the source and slant; a crucial document like the rejected final letter of the South Carolina Commissioners is missing; more basically, the quotidian fluff, the living excelsior in which every event is packed, has evaporated, leaving old bone buttons and yellowing papers nibbled all over by silverfish. The past is as illusory as the future, and we exist in the present numbly, blind to the cloud formations, deaf to the birdsong. Yet there is something sacred about life that leads us to keep trying to resurrect it.]

The visit of the South Carolina Representatives left the President rattled and depressed; later that same day, he sought comfort from his closest Cabinet associate, Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, by saying, “The hottest fires burn out quickest. South Carolina has indulged herself in defiance before, and been isolated. What happens in Charleston Harbor little matters if Georgia holds firm — is that not so, my dear Howell?”

The short rotund man, with his appealing, well-oiled smoothness of movement and address, appeared uneasy, and wore the sallow glaze of sleeplessness. He began, “Mr. President, you know with what devotion I have furthered your advancement and advised your administration.”

“And you know, Mr. Cobb, with how much affection I have received your support and enjoyed your company. Though I have been honored with an acquaintanceship as wide as half the world, intimacy has been a rarity in my life, and I have leaned perhaps too heavily upon your friendship. My spies tell me that Mrs. Cobb more than once complained of the long hours during which the President demanded your attendance. I believe it was even said that while she was in Athens no wife could have been more watchful of your time than I.”

And yet, Buchanan acknowledged within, there had never quite been the magical fraternal affection — each speaking the other’s thoughts, or leaving their shared thoughts unspoken — that had existed between himself and Colonel King. King had taken the rôle of the older brother, such a sheltering, guiding brother as Buchanan, elder in fact, had never known; and Howell Cobb that of a younger, whose dependent role was already overfilled by the never-grateful, ever-demanding Reverend Edward Buchanan. Though none of his advisers had been fiercer than Cobb in mocking Douglas and keeping alive the rift between Douglas and the administration, Buchanan now sensed in the man, emanating from him in palpable waves like those of heat from a pot-bellied stove, something of the Little Giant’s egoistic, anarchic ambition — the ambition of short men, ever needing to prove themselves. Had Cobb not been unwilling to take the second Cabinet post with a man his own age in the first, Robert J. Walker instead of Cass could have had the State Department, a capable man instead of an obstructive relic.

Cobb responded graciously, “Mrs. Cobb knew that by serving you I was serving the nation, and with the nation our children’s future. However, sir,” he continued, at a lowered pitch, with an evasive sideways glance, “times are changed. Mrs. Cobb has returned to Georgia to await her confinement. My entire family there has mounted the blue cockade. My brother Thomas gives secessionist speeches that last for five hours, and my uncle John lets out that ‘resistance to oppression is obedience to God.’ ” He tried one last jest. “Squire, you know kin, they’re as hard to herd as chickens in a whirlwind.”

Buchanan failed to smile. A spark of fresh calculation lit up his lopsided gaze. He cocked his head to give Cobb a terminal beam of attention.

“I had hoped,” Cobb asserted, doing a small black-shod dance step on the Persian carpet imported by Harriet from London and already worn threadbare by the hordes seeking Presidential favors, “to persuade the people of Georgia to remain in the Union until March 4th, so that I could man my post in your Cabinet to the end. But — ”

“But, Howell,” Buchanan cut in, “opportunity calls, in the perfidious new nation that is breeding, and your financial embarrassments have been mysteriously eased by a spate of philanthropy from your disunionist brother-in-law.”

Howell Cobb was impressed, as often before, by his chief’s ability to obtain and retain gossip; those who have lived life the least, perhaps, have the freshest curiosity. “Sir, let me finish. I have long proclaimed you to be the truest friend to the South that ever sat in the Presidential chair. But as you dealt with those gentlemen from South Carolina, and refused them satisfaction, I saw that you and I have parted in policy, and so must part in fact.”

Sea-change . On the wax-bedabbled desktop Buchanan saw his own hand trembling, like an unpleasant white animal, eyeless, with wrinkled white skin and an excess of feeble limbs. “The South has been a friend of mine,” he stated, “and I have long sought to preserve for it and its institutions those guarantees which our wise founders wrote into the Constitution. I have leaned over backwards to keep the balance between it and the North in these fearful and unsettled times. But I cannot give away national property and my right to defend it.” The President sighed, and removed his hand, suddenly ghastly in his eyes, from his field of vision. “Go, then, Cobb. I cannot bless your departure, nor can I prevent it.”

“A word more. Attorney General Black more than once has to my face impugned — ”

“No more words. Black and I are left to deal with the wreck of policies you helped create. I deeply trusted you. We shall not speak again,” the President said, less as a threat than as a prophecy, uttered soliloquizingly.