THE PETITION

...Max was in, but Bert never got to talk to him...

...The government grew more and more remote...

...both the Army and the AEC are executive agencies...

...Simmons and Ches-ney are identified only as "White House aides...

...Miss Stewart's final suggestion was —as it had been when Bert first called —that he leave the petitions and the letter with the copper at the entrance to the White House...

...the legislative branch has surrendered the most fatal of all the powers of government into the hands, ostensibly, of the weakest President since Grant, actually into the hands of the men with whom the Miss Stewarts try unsucessfully to "set something up" for the citizens...

...Bert would then deliver them to his old buddy, the President...

...But that is not the way it happens...

...When Bert got to Washington, the FCNL told him they had been trying for several days to arrange an appointment for him with Maxwell Rabb or with any other official who could properly receive the petitions and the letter to the President...

...Johnson "released" the letter to the press the next day, and Johnson wrote to his two Senators, Messrs...

...they straggled...

...Most of the signatures were from the New England and Northern California areas, where the regional offices of the American Friends Service Committee had circulated it...

...It petitioned President Eisenhower to "take vigorous steps to effect a ban on the testing of nuclear bombs...

...Johnson told him about the Messrs...

...But Congress shall make, and has made, no law abridging the right of the people to petition the government...

...You remember Bloody Sunday...

...Russell Johnson, the Peace Education Secretary of the AFSC in New England...

...Chuck said that neither he nor Max —that's Maxwell Rabb, the man Bert tried to talk to—knew whether the petitions had been delivered...

...Why President Eisenhower was afraid to receive such a mealy-mouthed petition, I can not imagine...

...What the militarily unenlightened people think—the people who petition the government for a redress of such grievances as the government's dissemination of leukemia—is of no consequence...

...government uses piratical violence against four of its own citizens to keep them off the high seas...

...But the petitions are undeliverable—the President is busy autographing baseballs, presenting a bouquet to the oldest living Elk, or holding a reception for a Latin American tyrant—and unless an "aide," a Rabb, a Stewart, a Simmons, or a Chesney, is able to call his attention to the matter via a newspaper clipping, assuming that the matter appears in the newspapers, he is protected against the knowledge that his countrymen have a grievance...

...Something like thirty million Japanese have signed petitions against nuclear tests...

...But now there's a copper at the entrance to the White House...

...Just a copper...

...Bert, who was still steeped in sin in those days, had commanded a destroyer on sea while Ike was commanding the destroyers on land...

...After one 'hold,' she informed me that 'official practice and policy' did not allow personal presentation of petitions, that if 'they' did it for the American Friends Service Committee, they would have to do it for others...

...On Bloody Sunday a great mass of the starving poor in St...

...Most of my talks," he reported later, "were with a secretary, a Miss Stewart...

...This denouement did not satisfy Mr...

...This," a learned man told me in Germany after the war, "is what really happened here in the Third Reich, and nobody noticed it...

...Both had gone on to higher things, Ike to the White House and Bert into Christianity...

...They carried ikons...

...On January 30 Sherman Adams, the Assistant to the President, wrote to Senator Saltonstall, pursuant to the Senator's request for information, that Mr...

...It was a Madison Avenue phony, a form letter, personalized at the happy-go-lucky taxpayers' expense—the same taxpayers whose wristwatches were killing them...

...The letter from Chairman Strauss was that same letter received by everybody else who had written to the government, or to any employee thereof, high or low, on the subject...

...On January 17 they were delivered and accepted, not by Mr...

...In that area, this month, the United States government, i.e., the executive branch thereof, will explode more nuclear ammunition, adding to the world's leukemia, bone cancer, and two-headed babies of a few generations hence...

...Two weeks later Mr...

...As it was, in spite of its mealiness, it did not have many signatures...

...Max is a public servant, and I am the public...

...I forgot to say earlier that the Czar turned out not to have been at the Winter Palace at all on Bloody Sunday...

...The democracy, like the dictatorship, does not have to be afraid of the people...

...It was now December...

...But if the petition had read like that, it wouldn't have had many signatures...

...Bert then decided he would call Max himself and find out what to do...

...some of them crept, some crawled...

...These four persons will be there, unless their boat sinks en route or the U.S...

...The difficulty is historical...

...On one of the four occasions he was informed icily—it was the 31st of December—that "Mr...

...It's different here...

...It would not worry a dictator...

...Rabb's time is not his own...

...The legislative branch of the government, in the person of the Massachusetts Senators, responded to its weighty constituent, Johnson, but there was no one except the executive branch to respond to the petitioners across the country, and the executive did not respond...

...Chairman Strauss, acknowledging receipt of yrs., etc., could assure the sender that there was nothing to worry about...

...Bert should have replied, "Of course not, it's mine...

...Nobody knows who ever got them...

...Bert took the petitions—and the letter to the President—back to the FCNL office and left Washington a sadder but a better informed about Amendments, Article 1, man...

...The government consists of bureaucrats in unimaginable numbers, all hierarchized and all unknown to the people, the Rabbs, Stewarts, et al...

...This was the closest he could get, as a representative of the American Friends Service Committee, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to anybody in the executive branch of the United States Government...

...M Meanwhile Johnson had written ahead to the FCNL in Washington to make an appointment for Bert with Maxwell Rabb, Secretary of the Cabinet...

...In 1955 the President was empowered to go to war in defense of Formosa and the Pescadores...

...They didn't march, of course...

...End of story...

...It's like my kids' right to wish I'd give them fifty dollars every Thursday afternoon—a right I recognize as inviolable...

...During the calls she assured me that they were trying to 'set something up.' Several times I was asked to 'hold'—once for almost four minutes and once, during the last call, for more than ten minutes...

...Johnson replied gratefully, adding that he hoped that the "appropriate officials" would deliver the petitions and letter to the President...

...Nobody pays any attention to them, and their number is thirty million out of seventy or eighty, not 27,511 out of one hundred seventy million...

...Four is still short of the two thousand or so who, carrying ikons, tried to petition to the Little Father in St...

...Constitution, Amendments, Article 1. But it doesn't say that the people have a right to deliver the petition...

...But the determination to go on exploding nuclear ammunition is the executive's...

...There had been promises to call back, but no call had ever come...

...Earle Ches-ney...

...The "tyrant" turns out to be a nice fellow, just like the rest of us, who likes to play golf and read an occasional Western when he's confined to his bed...

...But Bert is too nice a fellow to talk like that...

...It was not much of a petition, and it did not get going very far...

...There was no way to approach it...

...Petersburg, and I don't mean Florida, marched to the Winter Palace to petition their Little Father, the Czar, for relief from their suffering...

...Many men have lived a long time, but none that I know of has ever lived as long as that...

...Kennedy and Saltonstall of Massachusetts, asking them if they could find anybody home at the White House for him...

...He called Max at 10:45, 11:15, and 11:50 a.m., and at 12:15 and 12:50 p.m...

...She offered to try to "set something up" for Bert to meet somebody on Thursday, January 2. Bert reminded her that she had known all along that he had come to Washington only for the day...

...All communciation became one-way communication—from the government...

...Petersburg, but it is four more than none at all...

...Senator Kennedy wired Johnson that he had "contacted" the White House and that a Mr...

...And "the people" turn out to be, not the people, but the 27,511 persons who happen to and dare to sign a mealy-mouthed petition...

...So Johnson called a council of peace with his joint chiefs of staff, and it was decided that Bert Bigelow would go to Washington and pick up the rest of the petition sheets, with 17,477 signatures on them, at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, where, with a covering letter to the President, they had lain moldering for many months...

...Simmons and Chesney and expressed the hope that the petitions and the letter might be called to the President's attention...

...So Bert Bigelow, who couldn't get to see Max or Ike or anyone else, got in a 30-foot ketch, along with three other persons, and set sail, and I mean sail, from San Pedro in February into that immense area of the high seas which the democratic government of the United States has piratically declared "dangerous to all ships, aircraft, and personnel...

...The nuclear tests—if they are tests, are not merely demonstrations to the Russians that our old man can lick their old man—are made in the name of military necessity...

...The noise made by the petitioners, in the process of circulating the petitions, is educational...

...he would, indeed, point to it with pride, as I do at home...

...In the name of military necessity there is no protection against dictatorship and no limit, as Hitler showed, to the severity of the dictatorship...

...The world we will die in is not the world the Founding Fathers intended...

...The total was only 27,511, but Congress shall make no law abridging the right of 27,511 people to petition the government, and it had not done so...

...No dice...

...No flailing sword...

...Last summer a petition got going around the country...

...Article 1 is, in a word, a joker...

...Bert and the President had been buddies in the Armed Forces, all members of the Armed Forces being buddies...

...What is going on here...

...He could have received it, read it, and said, "That is precisely what Secretary Dulles and I are trying to do, twenty-four hours a day...

...And it would be no more meaningful in a dictatorship than it turns out to be in a democracy...

...His hot Mediterranean temper was aroused by the brush-off, or snowbank treatment, that the first batch of the petitions received at the frigid Scandinavian hands of Chairman Strauss...

...One of these days, I am going to stop signing petitions and put myself, instead of my name, on the dotted line...

...Colson said he agreed that they should be and promised to do something about it and let Johnson know...

...This was shortly after 1 p.m...

...Then they would look in on Bert's wartime buddy, the President...

...Miss Stewart indicated that while I was 'holding,' and between calls, she was relaying upward the persuasive reasons I had presented to her for arranging the acceptance of the petitions and the letter addressed to the President...

...Four persons, petitioning not with their signatures, but with their lives...

...Bert's mother, unlike Ike's, may not have been a pacifist, but Bert had come around to thinking that it was more important that your daughter be a pacifist than your mother...

...The Bonus March of 1932 and General MacArthur's white horse at Anacostia Flats may remind you, very distantly, of Bloody Sunday...

...William Simmons there would accept the petitions...

...Now tell me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that this little incident supports the blackly pessimistic view that petitions—even mealy-mouthed petitions—are as meaningless in Washington in 1958 as they were in St...

...There is left, in these melancholy circumstances, the person...

...Bert thought he would talk over with Max (an acquaintance of his in Massachusetts Republican politics) the presentation of the petition, just how the President would want the ceremony staged, television, news-reels, and so on...

...The radiation was no worse than that from your wristwatch...

...Bert thought maybe he'd better hotfoot it to Augusta and deliver the petitions to the President directly, but it seems that the President had left his Augusta retreat for a rest at Gettysburg...

...Of course the Japanese government is not making the tests, but neither does it fall because of its failure to fight them...

...Indeed, the determination of war and peace are now the executive's...

...in 1957 in defense of the Middle East...

...The first batch of the petition sheets, with 10,034 of the signatures, was taken to the White House by Western Union messenger in July...

...No horse...

...Chuck sent this on to Johnson, saying that he, Chuck, knew that the Senator was "pleased to have been of some assistance...

...In August the Cambridge office of the Service Committee got a letter from Chairman Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, written in behalf of the President...

...Chuck Colson, Senator Saltonstall's secretary, replied to Johnson's letter by telephone...

...The Founding Fathers thought that the tyrant in the White House would oppress all the people, if he could, and that all the people, called "the people" in the First Amendment, might have a grievance against him...

...But we can not get the Russians to agree to doing it...

...If the petition had petitioned the President to ban the testing by the United States, whose chief executive he is, he might have had good reason for ducking it...

...William Simmons but by Mr...

...That will be just as soon as I get rich enough and happy enough and tired enough of living...

...Times, as you may have noticed, have changed...

...Petersburg in 1905...

...What is going on is the rapidly growing remo-tion of the government from the people to whom, in a democratic constitution, it is supposed to minister...

...Chesney, still unidentified, had received the petitions, which "are now in the hands of the appropriate officials and will, of course, have consideration...

...The Messrs...

...indeed, the democracy less so, because there the people in part oppress themselves and in part are unable to discover the identity of their oppressor in the government...

...At the end of Bert's first four calls, Miss Stewart promised to call Bert back in ten minutes...

...At this point she informed him—for the first time— that the White House was closing for the day...

...Their right to petition was in no wise abridged that day, but when they tried to deliver their petition, the Cossacks on horseback cut them to pieces...

...At their head was a priest...

...Bert waited, and then he called her...

...And Congress has made no law...