A CITIZEN AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Mayer, Milton
A Citizen at the White House by MILTON MAYER Iwent to the White House the other day to tell the President how to run the country. If I thought that he knew how to do it, you may believe me that I...
...Cooper was in orbit...
...What's your title...
...A. J. wanted to say that that wasn't the point, but Mr...
...Cooper's filibuster...
...I had an impulse to run, not walk, to the nearest exit...
...Cooper was not clear how civil rightists related their cause to Vietnam, and we said that we thought that our government, which properly opposes the use of violence to achieve free elections in Alabama, should not use violence to achieve free elections in Vietnam, if, as Mr...
...and so is the United Nations...
...Cooper had been made far enough in advance to give J. Edgar Hoover's gumshoes all the time they needed to trace my ancestry back to Eden (where the Communists had control for a while...
...What else emerged, by dint of impolite and invariably interrupted interruption, was as follows: 51 Mr...
...Cooper, fueled by the purity of our motives, was streaking for the moon when the bell rang...
...I had to identify myself in the lobby...
...What was the good of it all, and what did I spend my $20.30 for...
...His articles have appeared in many publications and have won him the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism...
...With two minutes to go we fired A. J. at Mr...
...By the time this is printed, it may be Mr...
...Cooper and pondering the surrender by officials, not of their souls, but of their very identity...
...and he is as good a man as I am, and may be a darned sight better...
...Cooper alone, and I suppose that nobody, including Mrs...
...The fact that the public opinion polls show that forty-three per cent of the American people oppose the Vietnam policy did not bother him much...
...Cooper would appreciate hearing a few words from A. J. A. J. said that he was just back from the Communist World Peace Council in Stockholm, where the Chinese position had carried the day completely against the Russian...
...It showed, in Mr...
...he said...
...Nobody does...
...The trick is to run through the Table of Organization and find out just where to move in...
...Cooper said, it was free elections that were wanted...
...The President is a Table of Organization...
...Cooper was not content to explain the government's position to us...
...The Special Assistants were supposed to have a passion for anonymity, and, the way things are going in Vietnam, I can imagine that some of them still have it...
...George Bundy about Vietnam without ever discovering that McGeorge Bundy is steering the President wrong because he, McGeorge Bundy, is being steered wrong...
...Cooper said he felt sorry for people who had no faith in our government...
...When Dean Rusk, the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, denounces the intelligentsia and asserts "the gullibility of educated men," he is not far from cracking...
...Maybe it is the towel man who is steering Cooper, and therefore Bundy, and therefore the President, wrong...
...Since the half-life of thermonuclear carbon 2156 will kill a horse after 90,000 years, it looked to me as if the Messrs...
...Cooper is a nice fellow, and so are we—no heat...
...The first thing I learned about the Table in re Vietnam was that I did not want to see Dean Rusk...
...I surveyed the long, long trail of industrial and residential ruin that constitutes the American East Coast...
...Whom," I said, adding, "I'm not with, I'm against...
...The Executive Office turns out to be the Old State Department, and not the White House at all...
...nor is Mr...
...Everybody in the place, and it is a big place, seemed to be a Special Assistant to the President except the towel man...
...There were, it seemed, only two choices to be considered: Either the government was inept or the intellectuals were unintelligent...
...The American people have never been intellectual, and these intellectuals are now called upon to fan the fires of anti-intellectualism...
...Now this was all supererogatory because my appointment with Mr...
...Cooper, and to him, in the White House, I went...
...A man with a bad case does not want to hear about it...
...5) We asked Mr...
...Cooper leaped right off the launching pad and said that whatever else "our" policy may or may not have done, it had certainly widened the rift between the Russians and the Chinese...
...He went further than that, being a nice fellow, and said that perhaps some of the fault was on the government's side...
...We interrupted when we could, all except A. J. Muste, who was supposed to be our spokesman...
...But the President is not a man like (or even unlike) me (or you...
...The walls of the place were plastered with air raid instructions, one of which, having to do with the Real Thing, said, "Stay in shelter until official instructions indicate that radioactive fallout is no longer dangerous...
...Cooper, Bundy, and Johnson might find themselves in office for a long time...
...Cooper had, and has, a bad case...
...Bundy, formerly of Harvard (and, maybe, one of these days having to go back there...
...My overcover agents informed me that it is Mr...
...We had never heard of each other, any more than either of us, six months ago, had ever heard of Mr...
...and the Rusks and the Bundys and the Coopers have got to foul their own nests to clear themselves...
...and I'd have spent the $20.30 on something no better, if not worse, than seeing Mr...
...but you still say "White House" when you go there, and it is right next door to the dorm itself...
...I wasn't seeing Mr...
...And those are supposed to be police states, and I am supposed to be an imperialist aggressor there...
...Kum-quat who represents the people, and Mr...
...With five minutes left to go, one of us broke in like a breathless bullet and said that we knew that Mr...
...But the supererogation wasn't ended...
...Cooper said that Alabama was not Vietnam, and we said that Alabama was indeed subject to our national law and our national police power, as Vietnam is not...
...The good of it may have been— you never know about pressure, and it can be the ruin, as it is the opportunity, of democracy—that we helped keep the pressure on Mr...
...51 Professor Gordon Christiansen of our party could not accept the U.S...
...but by this time Mr...
...and other Communist countries, with appointments to see people like Mr...
...Three years ago it had been the other way around, and just as completely...
...There is no heart for the war in Vietnam, and no illusion...
...What was the good of it...
...I wanted to say that some of my best friends are Jews, but there was no breaking into Mr...
...His most recent book is "What Can a Man Do...
...He then copied the wrong address from my expired driver's license...
...Funny, I have been in the White Houses of the U.S.S.R...
...It's hard lines for an American in America these days unless he stays in the consensus and out of the subway and the White House...
...for next week, or even now, "our" policy will have been reversed (it had better be) and Mr...
...The way not to hear about it is to take the initiative and keep it...
...Well, I saw the last of the cherry blossoms...
...Cooper, who never closed, opened by telling us that his daughter picketed the White House for civil rights and that he had served in the infantry (U.S., I suppose, but J. Edgar would know) in China and had known many Quakers...
...Cooper might recall, on which our government's assertions had been proved false...
...And the American people are more sophisticated than they were on June 27, 1950, when Mr...
...Cooper cross-fired that our motives were different from those of the French, and A. J. tried to ask him how he, or we, or especially the Vietnamese could be sure of that, but Mr...
...There has been—one may still be engineered in Washington or Peking—no Lusitania and no Pearl Harbor to produce the fatal consensus that "politics ends at the water's edge...
...I wanted to move in on Vietnam...
...Cooper, ever does...
...Cooper adverted, in our meeting, to his "surprise" and "amazement" that so many academics were uttering "gibberish" and fostering "emotionalism...
...He became so intent on explaining ours that, after our allotted hour elapsed, he canceled a meeting ("at the State Department") to go on explaining it to us...
...Cooper, when we met, confessed some, competence in the matter of Vietnam...
...Cooper, and nobody has ever done anything but say, "Who shall I say is calling...
...I showed the man my expired driver's license with the wrong address on it...
...Cooper if the President's willingness to engage in "unconditional discussions" did not, in fact, involve one condition, namely, no cease-fire...
...If I thought that he knew how to do it, you may believe me that I should not have gone, for he and I are both busy men...
...I was tagging along with A. J. Muste and half a dozen other people, including a couple of professors and parsons, two Nigras (from CORE and SNCC), and one woman, Miss Kay Boyle, my pinup girl of humane letters...
...We wanted to tell the President how to run the country in, or, specifically, out of, Vietnam, and the trip cost me $20.30 round trip steerage from New York on the Pennsy, the last full measure of devotion for a peacenik...
...Truman could hogtie the United Nations with a "police action" after the fact...
...He turned out to be a policeman looking for carnal weapons...
...The pols are bitter...
...This "Special Assistant" bit came in years ago...
...He is a nice man...
...A third—that the policy was bad—was more than Mr...
...but he could assure us that the assertions were true...
...Cooper will be explaining the new one just as volubly as he did the old, or find himself in the street...
...he explained ours, too...
...But when we asked him how that could be, since the government had all the information and access to the channels of communication, he went back to national security and faith...
...Quat, the Chief of State of South Vietnam, who Mr...
...The man who is said to be steering the President wrong on Vietnam is named McGeorge Bundy,' and many's the clodhopper who goes to see McAAILTON MAYER, author and lecturer, is now on his way to Europe for six months of writing and study...
...The four-million-dollar-a-day question—that's what we are now said to be spending to kill the Vietnamese—is: Who is steering McGeorge Bundy wrong...
...he is, he said, poll-proof, and many people did not even know where Vietnam was...
...Nobody left of the far right says a word about saving the world (least of all South Vietnam) for democracy...
...f As to Mr Eisenhower's assertion (in his memoirs) that the United States betrayed its promise of a free election in Vietnam in 1956 because it was convinced that the Communists would win, Mr...
...We wanted to know what Bao Dai or anybody else had to do with "our" opposition to free elections, and to say that if Bao was worse than Diem our support of him was all the more shameful...
...Somebody is...
...The pols can stand the heat, which is how they got to be pols in the first place...
...Cooper said that he would be very candid with us: There are some things "in the world of the mid-Sixties" that no government, even ours, could disclose for reasons of national security...
...Cooper wanted us to understand that that election involved the French "regent" Bao Dai, and that against Bao Dai of course the Communists would win...
...Sic transit anonymity...
...Bundy, and therefore on the President...
...Cooper said that he felt sorry for people who had no faith in our government...
...Cooper was talking again...
...I," I said, drawing myself up to my full five feet two inches, "am the American Sovereign...
...Cooper says really represents the people of that happy land...
...Cooper could even entertain in that great big office in the White House...
...The non-intellectuals, the real pols, from the President down, are confronted by a country further from consensus than it has been since 1916 and 1941...
...A man came along and said he wanted to see what I had in my briefcase...
...But Mr...
...No light and—for Mr...
...I had none—that he could see...
...A nice fellow, as aren't we all, or nearly all, but I am told that this is the invariable technique of these Special Assistants on Vietnam...
...He said, "Who are you with...
...The pressure is intense, and intensely felt, and Mr...
...Each of the Special Assistants has a big suite of big offices in the Executive Office of the President...
...Again and again Mr...
...What he couldn't see was my abandoned and malignant heart, the deadliest weapon a man can carry...
...I hold the only permanent public office in the United States...
...Mistaking him for a publisher, I opened my briefcase with alacrity...
...Quat as well as each other...
...Cooper has the anonymity without the passion...
...In an hour-and-three-quarters "confrontation" he talked for an hour and twenty minutes by his own electric clock...
...But he has the refreshing compulsion to use the first person singular in a declarative sentence...
...It showed something else...
...His title seems to be Special Assistant to the President, or maybe Consultant...
...And that was the way it went...
...Cooper's manner, in his treatment of the issues, and in his treatment of us, that the government is bitterly defensive and bitterly split...
...Cooper and I will both have forgotten Mr...
...My title is Citizen...
...White Paper's assertions on infiltration from the North without supporting evidence, and Mr...
...further than it was in 1916 or 1941...
...Cooper paused for the first and only time during our meeting, and then said, "As of now—yes...
...I survived a ride on the dread Pennsy...
...What is more impressive is the bitterness of the non-pols, the Special Assistants and Consultants, with academic backgrounds or connections...
...Cooper again, and A. J. wanted to know exactly why and exactly how we thought we would succeed in Vietnam where the French had failed...
...51 We wanted to know if we had to accept our government's assertions on faith, and Mr...
...The pols hold them responsible for the colossal resistance of the campuses, for indoctrinating the students...
...But don't be impressed—by him or by me...
...Rusk is a dead duck, and is just waiting for Medicare so that he, like the rest of us, can take it easy on the Western Slope...
...The professors can't...
...When we asked him if this category included academics, he said he did not doubt "your" sincerity, and when Kay Boyle asked him to tell her precisely in what respects she, as an intellectual, was "muddle-headed" and "naive," he said that there was a terrible failure of communication "somewhere...
...Cooper's filibuster showed it...
...Bundy has the passion without the anonymity...
...We said we did, too, but there were some recent occasions, which Mr...
...Cooper, and therefore on Mr...
Vol. 29 • June 1965 • No. 6
