Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Black went to Stanton’s office and in a long memorandum the two men revised Buchanan’s reply to suit themselves. Nevins, rejoicing in this hardening of the administration line, crows, Seldom if ever have the advisers of a President administered, even by implication, so severe a rebuke .

The softer-hearted Auchampaugh says of this period, No President in American history ever spent so terrible a ten days .

This same Sunday, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, on the turncoat Trescot’s advice, made one more Southern appeal to the President, proposing that Pickens abandon Moultrie so that Anderson could be restored. Hunter emerged from the interview and reported to Trescot, Tell the Comm [issioners]: it is hopeless. The President has taken his ground — I cant repeat what passed between us but if you can get a telegram to Charleston, telegraph at once to your people to sink vessels in the channel of the harbour .

Buchanan rewrote his letter, mostly by editing out sections that Black and Stanton had resisted, and dispatched it to the Commissioners the next day, the last day of this fateful year. The message rehearsed the circumstances of the harbor and the unofficial negotiations and concluded, more ringingly than Buchanan’s usual style, It is under all these circumstances that I am urged immediately to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that without this negotiation is impossible. This I cannot do; this I will not do . Always a strict accountant, the President cited the seizure of the arsenal by South Carolina, estimated the worth of the arsenal as half a million dollars, and stated it as his duty to defend Fort Sumter, as a portion of the public property of the United States, against hostile attacks, from whatever quarter they may come .

The next day, Buchanan held his customary New Year’s Day reception at the White House, braving assassination rumors and enduring snubs from secessionist guests. For the last time, the Southern flower of Washington society savored what Nevins evokes as the contrast between the tall, snowy-haired, black-garbed old President, standing with head slightly awry, and the statuesque, golden young woman by his side . On the second day of the new year, a reply was received from the Commissioners which the Cabinet, even Thompson concurring, found violent, unfounded and disrespectful . There had been a number of unpleasant letters in Buchanan’s life — that from Dr. Davidson to his father concerning his misbehavior at Dickinson College, for example, and the lost letter from Ann Coleman breaking their engagement, and the preserved letter of his own, begging to attend her funeral, which was returned unopened, and the letter from Duff Green in 1826 asking, Will you, upon the receipt of this, write to me and explain the causes which induced you to see Genl. Jackson upon the subject of the vote of Mr. Clay & his friends a few days before it was known that they had conclusively determined to vote for Mr. Adams; also advise me of the manner in which you would prefer that subject to be brought before the people . That letter had had to be answered; it was Buchanan’s pleasure to return this one to the Commissioners, with the endorsement, This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it .

Philip F. Thomas, the Marylander who with Thompson composed the dwindling Southern contingent in the Cabinet, remembered in 1881 Buchanan’s saying, of the letter, “Let it be returned” but did not hear him say, “Reinforcements shall now be sent.” Holt, Toucey, Stanton, and Buchanan himself (in his letter to Thompson of January 9, 1861) testified that the President, once the decision to return the letter had been reached, then said audibly, “It is now all over, and reinforcements must be sent.” But Thompson, like Thomas, didn’t hear him say it, and resigned with considerable show of indignation when he discovered, on January 8, 1861, that the light-draught (in order to pass over the sunk vessels blocking the harbor) steamer Star of the West had, to quote his letter of resignation, sailed from New York on last Saturday night with Two Hundred and fifty men under Lieut. Bartlett, bound for Fort Sumter .

“It is now all over, and reinforcements must be sent.”

It was now all over. The South and Buchanan had parted.

The last thing I remember about the Ford Administration is sitting with my children watching, while a New England January held us snug indoors, a youngish-seeming man walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with one hand in his wife’s and the other waving to the multitudes. Washington City was bathed in telegenic white sunlight and Carter was hatless, in pointed and rather embarrassing echo of Kennedy fourteen years and four Presidents ago. A hundred years after the end of Reconstruction and the one indisputably fraudulent Presidential election in American history, a son of the South had risen, without benefit of (cf. Truman, Tyler, and the two Johnsons) another President’s demise. The youngish, hatless man’s smile was broad and constant but not, absolutely, convincing; we were in a time, as in the stretch between Polk and Lincoln, of unconvincing Presidents. But Polk and Lincoln, too, had their doubters and mockers and haters by the millions; perhaps it lies among the President’s many responsibilities to be unconvincing, to set before us, at an apex of visibility, an illustration of how far short of perfection must fall even the most conscientious application to duty and the most cunning solicitation of selfish interests, throwing us back upon the essential American axiom that no divinely appointed leader will save us, we must do it on our own. Of all the forty-odd, handsome Warren Harding was in a sense the noblest, for only he, upon being notified that he had done a bad job, had the grace to die of a broken heart.

In the three fuzzy heads around me — no, I miscounted, there can be only two, Andy is off at college by January of 1977, he is eighteen and in his freshman year; he chose to go to Duke, to put a bit of distance between himself and his wayward parents — there was, if I can be trusted to read the minds of children, a dubiety not unlike my own at the sunny spectacle being beamed to us from the District of Columbia. No other President had ever seen fit to walk back from the inauguration to the White House. It made him, we felt, a bit too much like the circus clown who, with painted smile, jesting now in this direction and now in that, leads the parade into the big tent — the acrobats and the jugglers, the solemn elephants of foreign policy and the caged tigers of domestic distress.

“Showoff,” Buzzy said, in his manly baritone, which I was still not quite used to.

“Suppose he gets shot?” Daphne asked. She had been in my lap, up in our apple-green home at Dartmouth, a few months old, the Sunday that Lee Harvey Oswald had been plugged for his sins on national television. She had been weaned, you might say, on assassination.

However much Carter wanted to be liked, we could not quite like him: the South couldn’t quite like him because he was a liberal and an engineer, the Northeast liberals couldn’t because he was a Southerner and a born-again Christian, the Christians were put off because he had told Playboy he had looked upon a lot of women with lust , and the common masses because his lips were too fat and he talked like a squirrel nibbling an acorn. Blacks liked him, those blacks who still took any interest in the national establishment, but this worked in his disfavor, since the blacks were more and more seen as citizens of a floating Welfare State concealed within the other fifty, and whose settled purpose and policy was to steal money from hard-working taxpayers. Carter and the other liberal Democrats were white accomplices to this theft, this free ride. Furthermore he told us things we didn’t want to hear: We should turn our thermostats down and our other cheek to the Iranians. Our hearts were full of lust, we were suffering from a malaise . All true, but truth isn’t what we want from Presidents. We have historians for that.