“This time, I do,” Bradford said grimly, and when George looked at him in surprise he said, “I think it’s important, George, I think people should read this book. Not the first three, they’re dead as the Pharaoh, but The Temporary Peace is about what’s starting to happen all over again right now. The same clampdown that occurred twenty, twenty-five years ago is coming right back, repression under the guise of protection of our institutions.”
“Wait till I get you in front of a camera,” George said, having seen interviews die more than once because the interviewee talked himself out before the cameras even started to roll. “I don’t want you to say it all ahead of time,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Bradford said. “I can’t run dry on this topic.”
iii
INTERVIEWER: Your new book, The Temporary Peace, concerns itself with the decade immediately following the Second World War, does it not?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Directly, it does. Indirectly, it concerns itself with any time when the people become too afraid to take a chance on freedom.
INTERVIEWER: Afraid of what?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: They don’t know. Communists, they said back in 1950. Some of them still say Communists. Today, most of them say black revolutionaries or student revolutionaries. Some of them say they’re afraid of fluoride, or sex.
INTERVIEWER: Um. Yes. You were in the Senate during the period covered by The Temporary Peace, weren’t you?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Yes, I was. And today I’m not much of anything at all, which is a pity, because I think I can warn my fellow Americans about a mistake it looks like they’re getting ready to make all over again. Whether they’ll listen to an old fogey like me or not I don’t know.
INTERVIEWER: Is this, uh, warning about the future included as a part of the book?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: It’s implicit. This volume is concerned with hysteria and paranoia at one particular point in American history, and it tries to show that American ideas of freedom cannot co-exist with hysteria and paranoia. The book leaves the reader to draw any parallel he wishes with what’s going on today. In talking about the book, I draw the parallel myself, out loud.
INTERVIEWER: I see. And you—
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: I never did at the time, you know. None of us did. In both parties, we just sat around and waited for Eisenhower to do something, and he never made a move. We would have been brave, every last one of us would have been brave, but only if somebody else was brave first, and the somebody else had to be Eisenhower.
INTERVIEWER: Yes. Well, of course, no one knows better than you yourself the complexity of—
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: The reason none of us said anything then was the same as the reason you don’t want to say anything now. We had jobs, we had careers, we didn’t want to throw it all away in a lost cause. Hysteria and paranoia were in the air, and the wise man kept his head down.
INTERVIEWER: Well, of course, you did speak out at the time against—
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: I didn’t do a tenth what I wanted to do. None of us did. History is made by good Germans, and we were good Germans. This isn’t in the book — I don’t know why I didn’t put it in there — but if I’d done what I wanted to do in the late forties and early fifties I never would have been elected President. I never would have been nominated. I wouldn’t even have kept my seat in the Senate.
INTERVIEWER: Is that why you would say you weren’t reelected to a second White House term? Because you did follow your convictions?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: No. The people threw me out because I made two very large blunders, one foreign and one domestic. I was in the process of correcting them both when the election came along, but they threw me out anyway, and it could be they were right. But that’s a different book, I haven’t written that one yet.
INTERVIEWER: Is that the next in the series?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: No, the next is The Coming of Winter, about the Cold War. If The Temporary Peace is about national paranoia, The Coming of Winter will be about international paranoia, in our relations with the Soviet Union. Another current parallel is our relationship with Communist China. We’re so afraid of them and they’re so afraid of us I’m surprised we haven’t blown ourselves all up just by shaking so hard.
INTERVIEWER: Then the volume after The Coming of Winter will be concerned with your Presidency?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Yes. The Servant of the Nation. A pretentious title, but it expresses the ideal of the Presidency. All Presidents fall short to one degree or another. Of recent Presidents, I would say I fell farther short than Kennedy, not as far as Johnson.
INTERVIEWER: Yes. Uh, which leaves one more volume?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Two.
INTERVIEWER: Two? I’m sorry, I understood there were to be seven volumes in all. The Temporary Peace is the fourth to be published, then The Coming of Winter and The Servant of the Nation. Doesn’t that leave one more?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: It did. Toward Tomorrow, a sort of book-length farewell address. Watch out for this and that. My opinions about the future of this country, if any. But now there’s another volume to go ahead of that one, after The Servant of the Nation. It’s to be called The Final Glory.
INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, I should have been briefed, I hadn’t heard of that title.
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: No one has. This is the first I’ve mentioned it to anybody.
INTERVIEWER: Ah. And what will, uh—
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: The Final Glory.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, thank you. What will The Final Glory be about?
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Let’s wait and see, shall we? No use spoiling the suspense.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, uh — Well, then, let’s return to The Temporary Peace, shall we? Apart from the lessons for today, I imagine those were exciting years to be in the United States Senate.
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: Not particularly. We kept our heads down, most of the time. Joe McCarthy kept showing us two-headed calves and other marvels. It takes an Irish Catholic to think up a carnival where no one has a good time.
INTERVIEWER: Um.
(The interview continued, circling the same topics for another eighty-five minutes, and concluded:)
INTERVIEWER: Well, thank you, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT LOCKRIDGE: You’re entirely welcome, George.
iv
“Good God,” George said. He was sitting in a brown Naugahyde chair in the reception room. One of the staff men had handed him a paper cup containing tepid Jack Daniels half-and-half with tepid water, and he had taken a quick deep swallow that had made his eyes burn. But that wasn’t why he’d said good God, or why he said it again, twice more.
Bradford was gone, he’d shaken hands all around and left right after the taping, with Evelyn and — who was he? Her new boy friend? Robert Pratt.
George had other things to think about besides the purpose or role of Robert Pratt. He wasn’t even concerning himself right now with whether or not Marie was approving of the way he sat, what he said, how he behaved.
George’s co-producer from Coe-Stark came in and sat down in the Naugahyde chair facing him and said, “Well.” He also looked stunned, but not as stunned as George.