TINIEBLANS REMEMBER the one year, seven months, and ten days of León Fuertes’ presidency as a period of innovation, and León himself as something of a radical. In fact, however, his veneration for Lord Falkland remained as firm as ever, He merely judged—and this was the chief reason why he embraced his destiny cheerfully—that if the substance of life was to remain stable for himself and for the country, some outward forms would have to change. These formal alterations were what Tinieblans noticed—as they were meant to—when León translated the seat of his ministry to the Presidential Palace. León Fuertes brought to the Tinieblan Presidency intelligence, energy, personal authority, and the magnetism that nowadays is called charisma, but the trait that most marked his term in office was his knack for forming and performing integrated figures. He undertook to express in his own person how the government and the society ought to behave. I can, therefore, make a few sketches for an iconographic history of his administration such as might be sculpted in relief on door panels or fresco’d across a stretch of wall.
The first (already done in Chapter 21 above) shows his inauguration and function s through the symbolism of dress. When León put off his white linen suit, he announced to his countrymen that the bichos were no longer models of comportment.
He did not turn on them. He included them in his government, making Aquilino Piojo Minister of Finance, for example. He protected that portion of their prosperity which did not depend on graft. But he also gave public expression to a particular reality: the bichos’ system of values no longer constituted a cogent response to the circumstances of the country.
“A fellow like Castro would shoot some of them and ship the rest to Miami,” he told Soledad. “My way is less exciting but less costly.”
León wasn’t interested in eliminating specific classes or even specific people, an activity he deemed both futile and dangerous, since it fostered the false hope that things would improve magically. He meant to provide an interim of stability during which the value of personal (or family) greed might be replaced by loyalty to the commonwealth. A few bichos had already managed this conversion; if more could achieve it, so much the better. But his lesson was directed to all Tinieblans. It failed. His interim was brief, and it is likely no amount of time would have sufficed. But on 1st June, 1962, white linen suits went out of style for good, while much of what they stood for—graft, for example, and elitist contempt for the people—went out of style for one year, seven months, and ten days.
Our next view is of León Fuertes dismissing his Presidential guard. The unit, a special company of Guardia outfitted in chrome casques and marine blue uniforms and armed with Uzi machine pistols, is drawn up under the nine A.M. June sun in the little park opposite the porte-cochere of the Presidential Palace. León has trooped their line, followed by their commanding officer, Captain Dmitri Látigo, his military aide-de-camp, Major Dorindo Azote (who wears his right sleeve doubled in souvenir of his Korean service with Batallón Tinieblas), and the Guardia Commandant, Colonel Aiax Tolete. He has taken a position in front of Tolete and Azote near the statue of Simón Mocoso, has asked Captain “Látigo to give his men parade rest, and has assumed that attitude himself. He has told the company in his best drill field bellow that they are as soldierly a unit as he has ever been privileged to see and that he would be honored to lead them in battle. His expression is stern, but a twinkle in his eyes suggests that he is enjoying the event immensely and yet can view it with ironical perspective. (Ten minutes later he will remark to César Enrique Sancudo, who is about to take leave for his embassy in Madrid and who watches the scene from a Palace window, that with garrison troops, as with female jurors, it’s best to lay it on with a trowel, but that hyperbole comes easily at military reviews since few men—and León is no exception—ever mature to the point where they lose their taste for playing with toy soldiers.) Now, however, he takes his right hand from behind his back and sweeps it, fingers spread, across the line of troops: he is telling them he is dispensing with their services.
“This act involves no lack of respect for you as men and soldiers. My concept of government simply does not provide for leaders to be shielded with the instruments of violence; or set off from other citizens by the flattery of uniformed salutes; or insulated from the people in any fashion. I assure you, however, that I have too high a regard for the profession of arms, which once was my own calling, to break up so excellent a unit. Your commandant, Colonel Tolete, with whom I have consulted in this decision, will find an honorable place for you where you can put your discipline and valor to the protection of the people, whose servants we all are. For the duration of my period in office, the Presidential Guard will stand dismissed!”
He like wise dismissed the plain-clothes bodyguards who had been automatically assigned to him the morning of his inauguration and the leash of motorcycle cops whose job was to escort presidential limousines. The limousines themselves he ordered sold at auction. He retained a driver on the payroll to chauffeur my mother about in the family Cranston, a current-model four-door sedan, sea green In color and perfectly presentable, but without so much as an official license plate, much less fender flags or a presidential seal, to distinguish it from the cars of other well-to-do Tinieblans. For personal use he kept has blue Wildebeest hardtop, which he drove himself, unless he was traveling to the interior. More, since the Club Mercantil was only a few blocks from the Palace, citizens became accustomed to seeing the President of the Republic strolling unattended along the street below the sea wall, dressed in shorts and tennis shoes, carrying his racket. People took to greeting him informally as he passed, while some walked along with him to pass the time of day and offer comments on the business of the country, and León would answer in an easygoing, fraternal tone.
Thus León expressed his theory of government in his own person to three distinct audiences. The people were informed that while the President might be the first citizen of the country, the stress was on “citizen,” not “first.” Public servants were set a good example. Most cabinet ministers gave up their own limousines, and other members of León’s Administration dispensed with similar amenities, but the point was not that state funds were thereby saved. León’s example tended to restrain officials from grandiose feelings of their own importance. Finally, León himself was furnished some protection against the toxic effects of power.
“Power is both the drug and the hallucination,” he told my mother the night before he accepted the sash of office. “People in what are called positions of power often develop the illusion that they control events and human beings. The people who reach such positions are usually hooked on power to begin with and put their faith in it. But the sanest man can have his perceptions terribly distorted by being whisked around in a limousine, with armed men sweeping ordinary mortals from his path. The worst part is he mightn’t even realize he’s stopped seeing things straight. When I was on morphine, I at least knew when I’d had a fix and when I hadn’t, but power’s a lot sneakier than morphine. I’m going to take what steps I can against addiction. If they don’t seem to be working, for God’s sake let me know.”
Next we see the rotunda vestibule of the Ministry of Finance. Here citizens pay their taxes and obtain the square blue forms that certify they are at peace with the treasury and without which no one can leave the country or do any business with the state. Long queues of patient folk twist back from the windows in the frosted-glass partition, behind which clerks enjoy the air conditioning and now and then deign to give a little surly service. The fellow standing halfway between the street and the Property Tax window, the one in sports slacks, guayabera shirt, and shades, who keeps has face stuck in his copy of Informe Trópico, is León Fuertes, President of the Republic, Head of State and Government. He has been waiting twenty minutes and will wait another twenty-five before he reaches the window, stands glaring over his newspaper while the clerk debates the sex appeal of certain film stars with a colleague, at length gains her indolent attention, drops his paper, removes his dark glasses, and, in passing her a few expressions of controlled fury along with a cashier’s check and the assessments on his home and beach house, performs what he will always consider his most significant act of public service.
By the time León was back in the Palace—and he delayed only a few moments, apologizing to other long-sufferers for the inefficiency of the service and promising to improve it even if he had to put His Excellency the Minister behind one of the windows—every state employee in the land knew how the president had spent the past hour and expected him to show up any minute at his own place of work. Nor did the fear and trembling cease until León Fuertes was assassinated, so that for the duration of his time in office the members of his administration, from ministers of state to charwomen, not only got to work on time and stayed through their appointed hours and made some attempt at coherent effort, but actually treated the public with respect and decency.
Despite its air of placidity, the fourth frame or panel is a Cleansing the Temple scene. We have a view of the Salón Amarillo, the most sumptuous room of the Presidential Palace, whose walls and furniture are covered in daffodil-hue silk with tiny fleurs-de-lis, the room where General Isidro Bodega (who appreciated ancien régime elegance) received Rosalba Fuertes.
A table, spread in damask and set with the best Palace service, stands near the window. President León Fuertes is lunching special guests, executives of a branch company of a subsidiary corporation of the most powerful commercial conglomerate in the United States (“Bigger than U.S. Steel,” in the words of its Board Chairman, Mr. Meyer Lansky): the General Manager, Security Chief, and Sales Officer of Felicidad, S.A., a locally incorporated firm which for some years has operated gambling casinos, slot machines, and other recreative facilities and implements in Tinieblas. The slight, grey-haired gentleman in tinted glasses who shares the center of our scene with León is Mr. Albert Malocchio. The gentleman whose bald dome, bulged neck, and hippo shoulders fill half the lower foreground is Mr. Carmine (“Dum-Dum Charlie”) Fessobabbuino. And on León’s left, preening pearl teeth and cinematic profile and keeping one hand on the attaché case beside his chair, is Mr. Joseph Sporcati. (I am tempted here to let my sketch traduce historical accuracy, to change the material of Mr. Sporcati’s case from leather to translucent plastic, and thus to display some of the large-denomination U.S, banknotes banded and stacked therein, but any knowledgeable Tinieblan would, on recognizing the President’s guests, realize that the occasion was the day in August, 1962, when the Chamber considered renewal of Felicidad’s contract with the Ministry of Tourism and, further, be aware that, by tradition, whenever a foreign businessman brought luggage into the Palace it was likely to contain currency, if not gold bars.) Dessert plates and coffee cups are on the table. Mr. Malocchio has extracted a large Havana from its aluminum tube and cedar swaddling and is about to load it into lips that have not yet quite ceased smiling. But León Fuertes has taken from his Legislative Aide Bernardo Zancado (who stands half bowing at Malocchio’s left shoulder, holding an open manila folder), not the renewed contract (which the Chamber has just voted down on the President’s recommendation and despite the impassioned oratory of Filiberto Alacrán, former Minister of Tourism), but a packet of airline tickets (First-Class, one-way, Tinieblas-Miami), which he offers to Malocchio, smiling gravely.
In short, it was not my father’s style to rage around overturning tables and ranting melodramatic pronouncements, though Mr. Malocchio and associates were more malign than moneychangers or parrot-sellers. He acted legally and with utmost civility. He gave Mr. Malocchio an excellent lunch and free transportation home for himself and his employees, croupiers and shills included. He ordered generous compensation to Malocchio’s firm for the real property it had acquired in Tinieblas, and had all its movables, from the huge roulette wheel at El Opulento down to the last pair of trained dice, packed and sent north by air freight at the government’s expense. He acted neither in prudishness nor xenophobia: he made it clear by presiding at the next drawing of the National Lottery that he had no wish to deny his countrymen exercise of their passion for risk, and his administration encouraged foreign investment of a healthy kind. The point was not that Mr. Malocchio and his principals in Miami were gamblers; it was not that they were foreigners. The point was that they were leeches, and León’s actions in their regard were an example to the Tinieblan people, to its government, and to firms like Hirudo Oil, which spend more on public relations than the Mafia but whose motives and methods are often much the same. Tinieblans ought not to put up with leeches. In dealing with leeches the Tinieblan Government ought to proceed calmly, to avoid noisy manifestoes, to show courtesy, to adhere scrupulously to the law, to make due compensation, but to pluck them from the country with dispatch. Present or potential leeches ought take note.
“You shouldn’t do this,” Mr. Malocchio protested when President Fuertes professed unconcern with the contents of Mr. Sporcati’s attaché case and suggested that the gentlemen make use of their tickets as soon as possible, “It isn’t right. We paid an honest bribe to come in here, and we’ll pay to stay.”
“I understand.” Since the conversation was proceeding in Italian, León pushed his palm against the invisible wall between him and Malocchio. “I understand and I sympathize. I’ve given and accepted honest bribes myself. But now I’m dealing for my country, and my country’s going to do things differently. I’d appreciate it if you’d spread that word around.”
A final picture might show the living room of the United States Embassy residence at San José, Costa Rica—a long view in from the dining room toward a couch flanked by two armchairs and above it a large, gilt-framed reproduction of M. M. Sanford’s Washington at Princeton. Sitting about a yard apart on the couch, their shoulders hunched, their forearms on their knees, are Carlos Gavilán and Richard N. Schwartztrauber, Jr. The former looks to his right. The latter stares fixedly at the loafer-shod feet of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, plunked up on the coffee table as their owner lounges back in the right-hand armchair, one set of knuckles pressed to his lips, his eyes crinkled in an uneasy smile-scowl. In the left-band chair, his trunk erect, his right hand poked forward in a Kennedyesque jab, is León Fuertes. He is quoting, verbatim and in Boston-baa’d English, from a speech made by Kennedy the day before.
No tick can bite nor stray dog hunch to scratch it in the independent, sovereign Republic of Tinieblas without being somehow affected by the state of our relations with the U.S.A. This homey fact is dramatized by the presence, tumored against our capital, of an entire Gringoland in Miniature. It had, of course, been voguish back in 1898 for world powers to plant excrescences like the Reservation upon their weaker neighbors. Time had, however, passed and fashions altered. Thus León Fuertes judged that no matter what success he might have with other matters, he would not be able to preserve the tranquility of Tinieblas without putting our relations with the U.S.A. in modern dress: to wit, without replacing the Day-Cornudo Treaty with a contemporary instrument.
The problem was that his aim was peace and quiet, while—as he put it to his Cabinet at one of their first meetings—“in foreign affairs as in domestic matters, the U.S. Government works on the principle that unless you howl you never get a hearing; you never get attention till you kick them in the nuts.” Had León put himself out in front of the student radicals; had he made himself a merchant of abuse and insult; had he bred hatred and incited violence; had he bared the foamed canines of such afflicted beasts as these days pass for leaders almost everywhere and sent a good searing squeal toward Washington, he would have got a hearing for Tinieblas straightaway. But such action, though it would surely have made him look a hero to the home fans, would have defeated the very purpose of his existence as a leader. It would have stung the resentments of the people into fury. It would have flogged their expectations to the point where nothing would content them. It would have racked the country to such torment as to make it unlivable for the generality of citizens and the other Leóns in particular.
He took a course, then, that was more difficult and dangerous for him personally. He used his popularity to sponge up the evil humors that the Reservation generated in Tinieblans. Then he put himself face to face with the head of the United States government and, unsupported by any gallery of cheering countrymen, without the least security that his countrymen would ever know of, much less reward his effort, found the wit and courage to land a swift one in the tenderest parts of his adversary’s ego.
Both during his campaign and while in office, León took the refreshingly original line of saying publicly, over and again, that the United States was a great power and Tinieblas poor and weak, that both were located in the same hemisphere, that realities of this order were denied only at grave peril, that under his administration Tinieblan relations with the United States would be correct and friendly, and that while he would seek relief from certain injustices, no one should expect very much. He insisted on observing the provisions of the Day-Cornudo Treaty down to the last comma, and in his contacts with the students, which continued while he was President, though in diminished frequency due to their disillusionment with him, he retold the parable of Cuba until both he and his listeners were heartily sick of it. Meanwhile, he spent his spirit lavishly preparing for a trial by single combat in which he hoped to secure a general restructuring of our relations with the United States. Yet since the success of any effort in this direction depended on keeping Tinieblan expectations low, he kept these preparations secret and comported himself outwardly as if he were resigned to things as they were. Accordingly, those who had hoped for miracles from the baseball hero of New Year’s, 1934, were cruelly disappointed. And as for León’s popularity with the students and the urban masses of the capital, it dwindled to the point where large elements of both these sectors took to calling him “Superbicho” and, more cuttingly, “Meestair Forts.”
On the day after his election, León began studying English with Soledad. He took a ninety-minute class with her each evening and, as soon as he was able, spoke only English with her when they were alone together. He devoted his midnight reading exclusively to English, immersing himself in grammar books and dictionaries and giving special attention to U.S. history and literature. With the best part of León, husband, and all of León, scholar, thus engaged, he soon became perfectly fluent and attuned to most nuances in the language. So secret did he keep this activity, however, that his own children—who were themselves wrestling with the irrationalities of English and would have given Papa sympathy—were unaware of it.
He also studied John F. Kennedy. Every Tinieblan President since 1948 had, upon taking office, informed the Government of the United States that Tinieblas wished the Day-Cornudo Treaty abrogated and a new agreement negotiated to replace it. The sum of these efforts remained zero. León resolved to take an indirect approach. He did not mention Day-Cornudo to the U.S. Ambassador in Tinieblas or have his ambassador in Washington contact the State Department. He did not request a meeting with the President of the United States. Rather he trusted that the flow of events would bring a more or less impromptu encounter between John Kennedy and him, and he prepared himself to exploit that opportunity. He read Kennedy’s own published works and all the articles about him. He studied Kennedy’s state messages and public speeches, and memorized the declarations on Latin America so that he could quote the text and give the date and place of each specific statement. Most particularly, he tried, as an actor might, to work out the pattern of Kennedy’s personal values, throwing his imagination into Kennedy’s mind and body. The aim of these preparations is subsumed in the military principle of superiority of force at the point of contact. León hoped to meet Kennedy a certain distance from their official identities, on personal ground.
It would take a riot, an armed attack upon the Reservation, and a respectably high body count to make a President of the United States give serious attention to anything said by a President of what is probably referred to in Washington as the Banana Republic of What’s-its-name. On the other hand, John Kennedy might listen to León Fuertes. Now, León realized that Kennedy would not forget that he was President of the United States, yet there was cause to hope that if a meeting came Kennedy would not keep himself entirely bandaged up in protocol and presidential seals. He was supposed to enjoy mental stimulation, and would not expect to find much in a formal meeting with the head of an insignificant state. Given the chance, he would surely prefer to be Jack Kennedy, and chat with León Fuertes. The two had come into the world in the same year. They bad fought on the same side in the same war, and had come out of it with more or less the same distinction. Both bad a preference for the active life, yet had intellectual attainments. Both practiced politics with zest and yet with skepticism. Yes, Kennedy had enough self-confidence to meet León man to man. If so, León knew how to capture his attention.
León would ask for nothing. Asking for things would merely transform two equals back into the President of the world’s first power and the President of a little fly-speck pinch of mud and jungle. That would be boring: everyone approached the U.S. President for handouts. León meant to offer his coeval and brother politician Jack Kennedy something of value. The man had, or at least thought he had, certain principles. He aspired to a certain moral leadership. He considered himself to be a serious man and thought that was the kind of man to be. Now, León, in his readings in American fiction, had come upon one word that had a kind of French precision to it. He decided with some reluctance that he would not be able to try the word on Kennedy, but he hoped to evoke its connotations. He meant to offer Jack Kennedy a chance to prove—first of all to himself and in passing to others concerned—that he and his Latin American policy weren’t full of bullshit.
Let us now proceed without further digression to the scene sketched above. I shall not set forth León’s state of mind when it was announced that Kennedy would attend the meeting of Central American Presidents called at San José in spring, 1963, save to say that León was ready. I shall not describe the visit he received shortly following the announcement from the U.S. Ambassador to Tinieblas, except to record that León used an interpreter and the ambassador his Berlitz stutter; that the ambassador advised León that the President of the United States hoped to meet privately with his several Central American colleagues during the conference and asked León to furnish the embassy with his views on an agenda; that León replied that he had had enough head-of-state ritual from Charles de Gaulle to last a lifetime and that he hoped to meet John Kennedy informally; and that it was at length worked out that the two Presidents would breakfast together, each bringing one adviser. I shall give no details of the table talk but simply note that Kennedy did not stand on ceremony; that he was pleasantly surprised to find León at his ease in English and took advantage of the unexpected nature of this circumstance to crimson the cars of Dr. Schwartztrauber (a two-time Pulitzer laureate) with a remark about the brilliant, well-informed advice he was getting on Latin America from a man who, until he joined the White House staff, was a simple professor of sociology at an obscure college in New Haven; that the conversation ranged freely without touching hemispheric questions onto a discussion of the military mind—a tough subject to treat clearly, León said, since the phrase itself was a contradiction in terms; that Kennedy then recalled that his Secretary of Labor had once warned him against assuming a man’s knowledge bounded by his current place in life, and said he’d been informed (God knew how accurately) that Señor Fuertes had served in the French Army, and asked—since the subject might be of more than academia interest, and since he’d had opinion on it from men who didn’t think much of the French Army, but since it was his experience that men usually thought well of organizations in which they’d served with conspicuous distinction—León’s view of why the French Army had been whipped by the Vietminh; that León spoke to this question for several minutes, saying that difficult terrain took most of the technology from war and prevented Western soldiers from fighting according to their culture, citing the French Command’s temptation to underestimate an enemy led by generals who had never seen Saint Cyr, arguing that no Western army would have done much better, and being in this fashion so prophetic that were I to reproduce his discourse here it would seem gilded by hindsight; and that Kennedy listened with great interest and when León had finished, deadpanned to Schwartztrauber about requesting a memo from Señor Fuertes on another thorny guerrilla problem: how to handle the reform faction of the Democratic Party in New York. I need scarcely say that it was Kennedy, not León Fuertes, who at length turned the conversation toward Latin America, remarking when the four men had removed to the living room that it was time he started earning his day’s pay, asking what steps Señor Fuertes thought might be taken to improve relations between the United States and its neighbors, and adding that this was the first chance he’d had to put that question to a Latin American leader: he’d met with many of them in the past few years, but all had given their opinions long before they were requested.
León laughed and said he might well have done the same under different circumstances, but that while he could not speak for other countries, relations between the United States and the Republic of Tinieblas could not possibly be better—now that Mr. Kennedy had decided to abrogate the Day-Cornudo Treaty.
Kennedy looked to Schwartztrauber in puzzlement; Schwartztrauber shrugged back. “Excuse me, Señor Fuertes, but I have decided nothing of the sort.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Kennedy, but you announced that decision only yesterday.”
And without further preamble, León began reciting, in Kennedy’s own tones and with his gestures, from an address Kennedy had delivered the day before at the University of Costa Rica, a portion of which affirmed a continent-wide “right to social justice” and called for “an end to ancient institutions which perpetuate privilege.” León’s crammed data bank of Kennedy speeches thus remained untapped. Kennedy had given him fresher and more potent ammunition there in San José.
“That’s not a bad imitation,” said Kennedy with some impatience, “but I don’t see what it has to do with the treaty between our two countries.”
“No? The Day-Cornudo Treaty is the very thing you spoke of: ‘an ancient institution which perpetuates privilege.’” Here again, and whenever he repeated the phrase, León imitated Kennedy’s distinctive accent. “It reflects an epoch of history remote from our own,” León continued. “It grants a foreigner the privilege to quarter soldiers in our house. It perpetuates that privilege well into the future. You have called stridently and in the clearest terms for an end to such institutions. You have it in your power to end this one, since we Tinieblans are more than willing to bid it a farewell. The only possible conclusion is that you have decided to abrogate the treaty.”
Kennedy pressed the index and middle fingers of his right hand together and poked them softly at León. He had begun to show the kind of annoyance that might come to a tennis player when his opponent, who has been playing a straightforward game of clean, fiat strokes all morning, suddenly begins to slice, to cut, to chop, to hit his first service underhand so that the ball staggers over the net and then falls limply, to interrupt crisp baseline rallies with interminable successions of great, blooping lobs, and meanwhile to dance about grinning, making wise remarks, as though to mock him and the sport itself. “That treaty was signed by your President, and ratified by your Assembly, Mr. Fuertes.”
“Ah, Mr. Kennedy, some people say—even some North American scholars—that the treaty was signed by your dupe, or your captive, or your bribed agent; and ratified by your fleet. But why go into that? That is old history. Part of a remote, an ancient epoch. Yesterday, right here in San José, John Kennedy called for ‘an end to ancient institutions which perpetuate privilege.’ That speech made history! That call rang in a new epoch!” León beamed admiration at his host, then twisted his face in question. “You weren’t joking, were you?”
Although he did not change his relaxed posture, Kennedy was clearly nearing the end of what Mr. Dave Powers has called his “short fuse.” He poked a bit more strongly with his fingers: “Mr. Fuertes, you had best take any statement by the President of the United States just as seriously as you can.”
“Excellent!” León met Kennedy’s gaze without the slightest uneasiness. “Then the Day-Cornudo Treaty stands abrogated.”
Kennedy swung his feet down from the coffee table. “All right, Mr. President. Let’s cut out the crap. Day-Cornudo is a bona fide treaty. I haven’t abrogated one word of it, and you know goddamn well I haven’t. That kind of crap may go where you come from, but don’t play games with me.”
“Very well. Then let me return to the question you were kind enough to pose me earlier. About improving relations. I am sure you will agree that an important element of good relations is clear communication. You have made statements that bear on relations in this hemisphere. You have made them in your own country, and around Latin America, and here in San José. They are inspiring statements, but I suggest that they need clarification. My ‘game’ was an illustration of that need. I suggest that the Day-Cornudo Treaty offers you an opportunity to clarify your personal views and the Latin American policy of your government. I suggest that a military-base treaty done in 1898 and not scheduled to expire for nine hundred thirty-four more years stands in some dissonance to your stated views and policy. I suggest we abrogate that treaty and negotiate a new one to replace it. I suggest that to do so is in your interest. Otherwise those who listen to your speeches, and you yourself, unless you have great powers of self-deception, may very well conclude that John Kennedy pretends to principles he doesn’t have, and makes statements he doesn’t believe in.”
Let us draw a veil over the next few minutes, a semi-opaque veil which transmits a general outline yet filters out the grosser gestures. And let us mute the volume. Neither man did himself much credit, and neither is around to defend or excuse his comportment. Kennedy, on the whole, came off a little better. He merely showed his Irish, whereas León needled without mercy, trading on the basic decency and good will of a man he admired. Let us simply catch a phrase here and there: Kennedy announcing in cold rage that when a man told him to put up or shut up, he expected the man to tell him how he planned to back up the demand; León replying in apparent calm that since the conflict was not between him and Kennedy but between some inspiring statements and a degrading treaty, he made no demand but simply suggested means to resolve the conflict; Kennedy saying in disgust that everyone he’d met with in San José wanted something to take home and show the folks, but at least the rest had been straightforward about it; León saying that it was true he’d been a beggar in New York during the Depression, but that he hadn’t been successful in the profession and had given it up, permanently—he would get by one way or another, but he couldn’t see how Kennedy could make a speech like the one he’d made yesterday and go on perpetuating privilege. Let us hear the advisers getting in the act: Schwartztrauber suggesting that President Kennedy had been referring in his university speech to “institutions like the Club Mercantil clique and the thirteen families who run Tinieblas”; Carlitos returning him some warm remarks about how President Fuertes and the Progressive Party had broken the ruling-class monopolies. Kennedy admonished Schwartztrauber for equivocating, for making him sound like Nixon. León admonished Carlitos for defending when they needed no defense, and for making him sound like Castro. In the end, Castro and Nixon were the peacemakers.
“I’m not Fidel Castro,” León said to Kennedy. “I will not turn my country over to the Russians. It’s bad enough that others turned it over to you. I will try to hold out, enduring Day-Cornudo, until you, or some other President of your country, decide to put your speeches into practice. They are good speeches, really. So good that I refuse to accept that you don’t believe them.”
Kennedy sighed. “Well, Mr. Fuertes, I know what I believe. But as I understand your argument—and it’s a forceful case—the only way I can avoid sounding as hypocritical as my late opponent is to negotiate a new treaty with your country. Tell me, how would you have proceeded if Nixon had won in 1960?”
“I’d have sought counsel from some of my country’s more traditional politicians, Mr. Kennedy. They would probably have advised me to wait till he was running for a second term, and then get in touch with his campaign finance chairman.”
“Yes, Mr. Fuertes.” A smile flickered on Kennedy’s face. “You have an instinct for a man’s Achilles heel.”
Then Kennedy said he saw no bar to considering the abrogation of the Day-Cornudo treaty, and assured León that he was personally committed to modernizing a great many relationships. He mentioned the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets, which he was shortly to announce, and spoke of the difficulties he anticipated in securing passage for it in the Senate. He couldn’t throw too many treaties at the Senate all at once, and abrogating Day-Cornudo might have implications for the United States with regard to third countries. Those would have to be examined before he could make a commitment. He could say this, though, and he hoped León took him seriously: he would give the matter of negotiating a new treaty his personal attention. If León liked, if he would find it helpful, they could announce that they had discussed modernizing the treaty relationship between their two countries and had agreed in principle that efforts in. that direction should be pursued.
León preferred, however, not to put anyone’s hopes up.
“Let’s just say,” he answered, “that we swapped war stories. That way, should you find abrogation impossible, only Carlos and I will be disappointed. On the other hand, if you decide, as I think you will, to go forward, I can suggest an interesting scenario. It has you speaking at our university sometime next year, declaring that in line with your desire to put an end to those ‘ancient institutions,’ you, on your own initiative, would like to abrogate Day-Cornudo and negotiate a new treaty.”
And so the official communiqué said merely that the two Presidents had discussed matters of mutual interest.
León Fuertes and John Kennedy were in each other’s company on several occasions thereafter during the conference, but never privately, and neither mentioned Day-Cornudo. Late in the fall, however, Kennedy wrote León, saying that it was “time to put an end, or at least the beginning of an end, to a certain ‘ancient institution’” and inviting León to come to Palm Beach, Florida, early in December to discuss the matter with him. By December, 1963, of course, Kennedy’s body was in Arlington, Virginia, and his spirit in the next world.
It remains for me now to describe the circumstances under which León Fuertes made a similar migration.