“Which way Marie?”
“We’ll find her on the way out.”
George started to his feet and lost his balance. Howard had his left arm, so when he fell back he fell crooked and landed on his right arm, painfully. “God damn it!” he said loudly, and looked up at Howard with amazement and irritation. “I’m drunk!”
“That’s just what you are. Come on, I’ll do the driving on the way back.”
“Marie is going to be upset.”
“Worry about that tomorrow. Come on.”
George came on. With Howard’s help he managed to get to his feet, and then insisted on walking unaided. He didn’t want Marie to see him shambling along on Howard’s shoulder. The result was, he ran painfully into the door jamb on the way out.
People worry about their images too much, he thought, and shuffled down the hall rubbing his shoulder and wondering how many ways he’d meant that.
5
THE TEMPORARY PEACE. By Bradford Lockridge. 564 pp. New York: Random House. $11.95.
by Albert J. Rutherford
Bradford Lockridge is a supremely political man, a politician the way Ernest Hemingway was a writer or Picasso a painter or Clarence Darrow an attorney, a man who sees virtually all of life within a political framework. This is both his strength and his weakness, because it could be said with some justice that his well-developed political instinct both carried him into the White House and then carried him back out again. The moments in life when something more than political skill is needed are rare, but they are critical.
The current book (the fourth in Lockridge’s careful and valuable series of memoirs) is not concerned with the Lockridge Presidency, but with an earlier (and equally critical) period in American life, the transition in the decade between 1945 and 1955 from a post-war to a pre-war stance in America, the gradual development of the Cold War. Lockridge Was senior Senator from Pennsylvania during those years, and the emphasis in The Temporary Peace is quite naturally on the role of Congress in that decade in shaping the attitudes and fears of Americans. Senator Joe McCarthy is paraded before us once again, in his by-now-familiar guise of dancing bear, Lockridge being unable to resist (along with most other commentators on the period) the opportunity to have at McCarthy now that the dread Minnesotan is dead and buried and in no position to fight back.
The Temporary Peace is a valuable book in just the same way that the three earlier volumes in Lockridge’s memoirs have been valuable. Politics is most clearly seen by a politician, and most honestly seen by a retired politician. Much of the intrigue of the Senate cloakroom in the postwar decade is clarified here, frequently in asides from the main thrust of Lockridge’s tale, as though he himself doesn’t realize exactly what he’s saying. But Bradford Lockridge always knows what he’s saying, and this manner of representing intrigue as though the representation itself were also intrigue adds a spice and liveliness to deals and discussions a quarter century old.
It is disappointing, in a man who occupied the White House for four years, to find such little comment on the two occupants during the years under discussion. Surely Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower also had a great deal to do with the character of that decade, perhaps at least as much as Congress, but both men are severely slighted in this book. A man in Bradford Lockridge’s position has a unique standpoint from which to view the actions (and lack of actions) of his predecessors and give us his opinion of the correctness of their decisions as well as what he believes his responses might have been in specific situations. That he doesn’t do so is doubly disappointing considering the incisive portrait of FDR drawn in the earlier The Politics of Hunger, the volume of Lockridge memoirs concerned with the Depression years.
Of course, this decision not to explore Truman and Eisenhower as he had earlier explored Roosevelt is itself an indication of the instinctively political animal that Bradford Lockridge still is. The Depression is, after all, ‘history’ now, whereas the Cold War is still very much with us. (The portraits of FDR and Truman in Lockridge’s volume on the Second World War, The Trumpets of War, were already skimpier, as Lockridge made the transition from the safely historical to the controversially-recent past.) There was a rumor going the rounds in Washington this past summer that Lockridge was considering running once again for his old seat in the House of Representatives, thus being the first ex-President in the House since John Quincy Adams. Like most political rumors, this one turned out to have no basis in fact, but that such a rumor could still circulate about a man who stepped down from public office nine years ago is itself the clearest indication of how totally political a person Bradford Lockridge is. (It’s still possible that the rumor will turn out to be self-fulfilling, another frequent event in Washington, and though such a move back into the political arena would be a bit bolder than Lockridge’s usual style it would be a supremely political move, which for a man like Lockridge might be enough in itself to recommend the step to him.)
Great men — and though Lockridge will never be a statesman, he is without question one of America’s great men — are not necessarily great writers, but so long as ghost writers are impecunious this needn’t be much of a problem. The writing in The Temporary Peace, like the writing in the three volumes preceding it, has the bland anonymity of a TV dinner, the smoothness of a stone touched by many hands. There are advantages in this — one’s attention is never distracted by an awkward phrase or a botched description — but there are disadvantages as well, chiefly the loss of the individual flavor of an individual mind.
One comment about errata, from which no book of this scope could hope to be entirely free. The Temporary Peace is more careful about detail than most books of the type, but here and there a few errors do creep in. The ‘D. J. Houghton’ mentioned in chapter seven, for instance, is probably M. F. Houghton, who was in Washington at that period. The Army post variously called ‘West Lake’ and ‘West Gate’ in chapter three seems not to exist. And the index, while generally quite good, commits two or three howlers of which the third entry under ‘Hydrogen’ is the most striking.
Albert J. Rutherford, junior Senator from New Jersey, is author of Versions of Victory.
ii
Evelyn was composing A Letter To The Editor at four o’clock that afternoon, when a maid came to tell her she was wanted on the phone. She was furious, and transferred the fury to the interruption, demanding, “Who is it?”
“I believe it’s Mr. Pratt, Miss.” Robert was well known around here by now.
The fury drifted, suddenly robbed of its destination, and Evelyn looked uncertainly at the sheet of paper in her portable typewriter. She had been composing an enraged letter, dripping with scorn for Albert J. Rutherford, The New York Times Book Review and the world in general. She had known she would never mail it, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, for years she had used this method to relieve her feelings whenever what seemed to her a particularly unfair attack had been mounted against Bradford in the public prints, writing an angry letter of protest which never managed to get mailed. But the writing itself eased the pressure of her outrage.
Now she was being asked to interrupt the letter in the middle, and she had the troubled feeling that once she broke the concentration of her rage she’d never pick it up again. A letter completed but not mailed would ease her feelings, but a letter cut off in mid-boil might simply leave her more angry and frustrated than before.