In Washington I was put in a room with thin walls.
A great killer was being entertained in the next room. From time to time laughter was audible through the wall, but the wall was not so thin that you could hear the conversation and know what the laughter was about. I am certain, nevertheless, that the laughter was civilized, and not about killing, for afterwards I went into the corridor and looked at the members of the party, and they were cultivated men.
Washington, after all, is not Chicago. Although it is a city of great killers, its great killers are cultivated men. You can walk into the corridor and stare at them without fear.
This particular great killer was no great shakes. Washington has plenty of bigger ones. This one was not even very famous. His name would probably not mean a thing to you. It is unlikely that many of his victims had ever heard of him.
One could become mawkish about this aspect of it, could argue that being done in by a man you have never heard of is unfair. “But why should this particular man in faraway Washington have been the agent of our deaths?” the slain might ask. “Is it not unfair for such final effect to have no recognizably human cause?” In this instance, however, there is a rough justice, for the author of their dispatch would think it unfair to be thought a killer. Thus is unfairness compounded in the great world at Washington’s disposal.
My killer was, of course, a Government man. Not a soldier. It is doubtful that he has ever killed in person. Maybe he has never seen blood fall in violence. He wears a business suit to work, a conservative necktie in good taste.
The laughter he occasions through thin walls would be in good taste, too. He has wit, good education, excellent taste. He would consider it very bad taste for anyone to describe him as a great killer. In Government service a man does his duty, and for small pay, too, considering what his old college classmates are making in corporation boardrooms.
A good man, you would say. The sort you would like for a neighbor. Civilized, neat, hard-working, cares about the neighborhood, keeps his lawn up, lights out before midnight, works hard for his country.
Goes to the office and spends the day devising programs for killing people. And not soldiers, either. “Enemy,” he would call them, in the air-conditioned conference room, among colleagues in their good-taste haberdashery.
Killing “enemy” is decent work, even if they aren’t always in uniform. The famous better world a-coming will a-come that much sooner if good men can steel themselves against false squeamishness and face the ordeal of ordering the disposal of those who long for a worse world.
Or so, at any rate, the national security bureaucrats tell themselves. President Nixon once referred to the bombing of Hanoi, which he had ordered, as his ordeal.
It is the easy availability of power in Washington that makes these Government people behave so badly in spite of their commendable neckties. Some years back, all the best people came to bipartisan agreement that the most shameful thing a person could do with power was not use it.
Since then everybody who wants to get ahead in Washington has made a great show of being a fierce fellow when left alone in the room with a little power. There seems to be a fear that if there is somebody around so low that it is all right to dump the garbage on him, and you hesitate, everybody will call you a sissy, and you will never be invited to lunch with Professor Kissinger.
Strange values result. Great killers are esteemed for good citizenship. “Not afraid to use power,” people say of them.
They are entertained by cultivated men in rooms with thin walls. You can hear their laughter. It is civilized. Everything is in good taste. Such good taste.
As it should be, of course.
In the nation’s capital.