May 1973
Egypt is about to attack Israel. It’s set for mid-May; secret intelligence, and evidently hard fact. So I’ve sat up all night, scribbling away, trying at least to finish the great sauerkraut affair before what looks like a long break in my peace. Couldn’t make it. If those last pages seemed more helter-skelter than the rest, that’s why. The dawn is streaked pink outside the library window of our rented Georgetown house. The street lights just went out. I’ve got to snatch some sleep.
I hope this isn’t the end of my book, but I hardly see how I can go on writing, in that tumbling cement mixer of a White House down on Pennsylvania Avenue. On the other hand, if I resign and go back to my law firm—a step I’m considering—that’ll be curtains. My mind will sink again into the muck of legal English, and to attempt narrative in odd hours with such a bemired instrument will be futile.
The fact is I was beginning to love that big dark dusty half-forgotten office in the Executive Office Building, and the solitary hours of roaming in my past, piling up the pages. I imagined that by now I’d be reliving those iridescent brief years with Bobbie Webb, yet here I am, no farther than Bobbeh and the sauerkraut. Long haul, Bobbeh to Bobbie! I can only plug on, and hope to get there if I find the time and retain my wits. But for the moment, the scroll of remembrance has to roll up, while I blearily turn to the day’s abrasive realities.
Abe Herz has been called home. He telephoned Sandra very late at night, woke her up to tell her he was “going back to familiar scenery.” Abe served a year on the Suez Canal line during what the Israelis call the War of Attrition, the little-publicized but very costly border conflict at the Canal after the Six-Day War. Sandra came into our bedroom and stirred us up. I’d already heard, at the White House, and from the Israeli ambassador, about the war alarm, but I didn’t let on. Jan sat with Sandra drinking scotch and talking most of the night, while I wrote and wrote.
My troublesome daughter Sandra is twenty-one, upsettingly beautiful in a darkish way, with large overpowering eyes which I can resist only by laughing at her. She cuts men down with those eyes as though with twin-mount lasers. I don’t mean young men, I mean any men. She slops around in patched rags, looking marvellous, and if she wants to, she can groom herself up to dazzling formal chic in half an hour. To a possibly fond father Sandra looks like a Jewish entry for Miss Universe; at any rate, she is a smart tough sort, a straight-A Wellesley graduate: informed, positive, and out to make old I. David Goodkind’s life miserable, for reasons obscure. About the time I took on the tax problems of the United Jewish Appeal and became chief counsel, Sandra brought home an Arab, a Saudi attending Yale. Imagine, if you will, a young Arab in preppy garb sitting at our Friday night candle-lit kosher table on Central Park West, listening politely as we sang Hebrew songs! That gives you an idea of Sandra Goodkind and suggests her range, since Abe Herz is her current interest, though neither of them outright acknowledges it.
Well, dear Sandra does seem to have put her shapely little foot in the door, doesn’t she? There is only one way with Sandra Goodkind. Firmly but gently I shove her pretty foot back outside, and I clang the door shut. I have enough on my mind.
***
If the war does break out, I don’t see how this President can handle it. The main question about him now is whether—or indeed when—he will resign. The newspapers and the television carry almost nothing else, it seems. Every day there are new scoops, new leaks, new accusations. Small fry and medium fry have been indicted right and left, and now the hue and cry is narrowing in on this one personage. It has become a public manhunt, a colossal and eerie national spectator sport. The press is in full cry. The hounds are leaping and snarling at the quarry treed in the White House. Anything goes. The wildest rumor, the most farfetched story, gets attributed to faceless “sources” and plastered all over the front page. I’m not talking about the yellow rags but about The New York Times and The Washington Post. The TV anchormen vie for hot lead-off stories about the President. Like as not the stories turn out within the week to be exaggerated or phony, but nobody minds, nobody notices, nobody apologizes.
We lived through the same kind of hoo-ha twenty years ago, the McCarthy business; a rabbit shoot of frightened little bureaucrats who in their dim pasts had gotten caught up in depression radicalism, a few to the extent of joining the Communist party. It was all lunkheaded nonsense, first to last, kicked off by the trapping of one sizable bureaucrat, Alger Hiss, in lies to a congressional committee about his Communist past. The press and television went baying in exactly this way after every new name that cropped up in Senate hearings launched by a Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin. It was nightmarish. It had all our liberal crowd in a tizzy, not a few of them getting rid of their old copies of Karl Marx and John Strachey, just in case the FBI would come knocking at midnight. Quite a few lives and careers were blasted in all that malignant tumult. McCarthy uncovered nothing, nothing at all.
The irony of all this is that the President, then a congressman, was the very man who trapped Hiss in perjury. It made him a national figure. Of course he cheered on the McCarthy hullabaloo, right up to the moment when the Senator got condemned by the Senate and fell out of sight. Now he himself is the target of just such a hue and cry, and in my obscure office I hear wails echoing through the White House about the unfairness and irresponsibility of the media. The poetic justice of it all escapes everybody around here: to wit, that this is the Hiss-McCarthy thing in reverse, assailing the very man who touched it all off twenty years ago.
And the richest irony, maybe, is that our liberal crowd—and my dear wife Jan leading the pack—snatch up the newspapers, gloat over the Watergate headlines, grin and giggle at the television stories, happy as pigs in clover with the whole thing; we, who were so indignant and horrified at the way the media were trumpeting Senator McCarthy’s accusations, hounding his targets with sensational stories, and being so horridly unfair. All over the political spectrum, I guess, human nature is much the same.
I’ve said I’m keeping the Watergate mess out of these pages, and it still goes. That the President and his inner crowd got involved in some very rancid misconduct, indeed subversion, and that he has now been caught lying in his teeth about it, seems evident to me, as it does to the newshounds and their public. Everyone smells blood. Everyone is caught up in the thrilling daily serial melodrama of bringing down a President. Behind it all, it seems to me—though nobody is saying this yet—is the anger over our Vietnam flop. Americans don’t like getting licked. Somebody’s head has to roll, and he’s the President. Three other Presidents backed us into that war, but our crawl-out happened on his watch. The poor fellow poses with the returning prisoners of war, thinking it does him some good in the Watergate mess; and he just paints himself tighter into the corner as the crook who bombed the poor Asiatics and lost the war anyway.
I have got to get to bed, the sun’s shining on my desk. But I have just referred to the President of the United States, the most powerful politician on earth, as a “poor fellow,” and that’s revealing, isn’t it? It may be why I’ll decide to stay on. Here is the original Horatio Alger figure, the American dream incarnate, the nobody who rises by sheer drive and grit out of poverty and obscurity to the Presidency. I don’t think any President since Lincoln has had more lowly beginnings. There he is in the White House; and nobody loves him, and legions hate him, and that has been true ever since he got there. To be forced to resign from the Presidency almost seems to have been his fixed fate, the star he has unknowingly been following, all his days.
Well, I have a front seat at this melodrama. With the rising Watergate sewage, the smell of which seeps through the place, I have nothing to do. Jan would claw me for saying this, but if I could I’d help the bedevilled bastard. I keep trying to do that, in the snippets I contribute to his speeches. Meantime it’s a glorious morning out there, and the magnolias are in bloom. A few hours’ sleep, and then a walk to the White House, my chief pleasure in these dismal and scary days.
Will Egypt really attack?
***
Two weeks have passed since I penned those weary hasty pages. Let me pick up the pieces quick-march. Abe Herz is back. False alarm. Either that, or the Israeli mobilization made the Egyptians think better of it. Stand-down on the Egyptian side of the Canal, anyway, after a massing of troops and equipment that looked like D-day minus one.
First thing Herz did when he returned, practically, was to get into a fight with Sandra. That romance is off for now. Sandra’s views on Israel are strong and negative. The Arab boy friend, I’ve always believed, was an expression of Sandra’s opinion of Israel—and of me, for taking on the UJA—made as explicit and as jarring as possible. Since the Six-Day War I’ve come to believe, like most Jews, that the destiny of our ancient people now turns on the fulcrum of Israel. If my little New Leftist Phi Bete can’t grasp that, okay. I myself once thought Zionism was for the birds. Il faut que la jeunesse se passe, as the wise Frenchies put it.
The Israeli ambassador scared the hell out of me, two weeks ago, by confiding that the Israeli defense line along the Canal is paper-thin. In effect nobody is there, just a handful of troops moving around to give an impression of being ten times as many as they are. How can Israel take this risk? Answer, a damn sobering one: no choice. Israel has a very small standing army. Its military strength lies in its reserves. The whole country can spring to arms in a matter of days, and the reserves are remarkably well trained. The economy can’t stand any other arrangement. Abe Herz says that even the swift brief mobilization from which he has just returned cost Israel twenty to thirty million dollars. Rough, on such a poor and tiny country.
Abe says—and at lunch yesterday the ambassador, now much less tense, made the same point—that the Israeli victory in 1967 so overawed the Arabs that a skeleton force of a couple of thousand along the Canal can face down the whole Egyptian army, unless it masses at the Canal on a full war footing. I hope that’s right. When I visited the Israeli installations along the Canal a few years ago, they seemed damned meager to me, but I told myself, “What the hell do I know about land warfare?” Sizable Egyptian formations moved in plain sight on the other side of that broad ditch. The handful of Israeli soldiers facing them seemed cheerful and self-confident, though pretty lonesome out there in the sand, the blazing sun, and the flies, living on field rations and anxious to get relieved; tanned brawny kids in green fatigues, nearly all of them younger than my own two sons.
***
Brezhnev’s due here, so the media are momentarily letting up on the President. The howling storm that burst over him after his “clarifying statement,” a revelation of some long-hidden White House misdeeds, is starting to die down. The statement was forced on him, obviously, because someone on the inside was about to squeal and seek immunity. It’ll all be in the history books one day, this shocking Presidential confession of surreptitious crimes, committed by goons in his secret employ, to get evidence on people he considered male-factors. No wonder the cartoonists now show the White House collapsing, as in an earthquake; or the President on a ship in a typhoon, rolling two steel balls; or else he’s standing on a sandspit labelled Presidency, that’s awash and melting in a tidal wave; or he’s cowering in a fierce beam of light, stripped to his jockstrap. All sorts of jolly representations of our Head of State fill our press, as he prepares to meet the boss of the Soviet Union.
I was in the thick of that “clarifying” bombshell. I couldn’t contribute too much, not knowing exactly what was going on. But the startling thing I’m beginning to perceive is, nobody may know the whole truth about Watergate, not even the President. The affair is so complicated, and it was so secretive to begin with, and so many people are now lying, and everybody’s motives are so desperate and so suspect, and there’s so much buck-passing, that it’s all becoming a hall of mirrors; a hundred images and half-images bouncing around and receding into an infinity of prismatic shadows, until you can’t tell where you are, or what’s an image and what’s real. The President may even be groping among the mirrors himself. Still, he knows more than he’s letting on to the public. He once said to me, very soberly and earnestly, “David, it’s too bad national security precludes our going the hangout route, because that would be the easy way.” In advertising-man patois—the chief legacy around here of the departed German shepherds—“going the hangout route” means telling the truth.
He said that at the time he found me studying the Talmud. Somehow the glimpse of that exotic tome got to him. He sat down and talked about his parents, especially his mother, whom he reveres; and about his Quaker upbringing, and his unchanged fundamental belief in a Supreme Being, and his practice of praying for guidance in difficult hours, and his respect for the tenacity and brilliance of the Jewish people. “I know something about tenacity,” he said with a far-off look from under those heavy cartoon eyebrows; and he added wearily, with a twisted little smile, “also, about being disliked.” I’ve been glancing again at the description I wrote down of that strange chat, and I can now understand why Jan saw red. He does come out sort of sympathetic, and to her he is a loathsome tricky knave who must fall. Nothing else. She doesn’t want to be confused with light and shade, or with multiple mirror images.
When the “clarifying statement” reached its final form, word went down to “run it past Dave Goodkind for the ethical angle.” You can believe that or not, but it happened. What with my yarmulka and my Talmud, I was evidently counted on to detect and correct ethical sour notes to which he and his staff might be tone-deaf. In fact, I did suggest changing a few phrases and sentences; and they were changed, and I got from him a scribble of praise and thanks.
Around this White House nothing seems to be in itself right or wrong, you see, moral or immoral, law-abiding or criminal. There’s only one standard: things either work or they don’t work. Vaguely sensing the limits of that viewpoint, they run the statement past me for “the ethical angle.” It all has an Alice in Wonderland sound, but even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have thought up the fantasy of running a speech past me—I. David Goodkind, tax lawyer, artful dodger and wriggler for hire—for the ethical angle! Well, the White House staff tried to laugh off Watergate as a caper, and now one by one they’re capering over a precipice. The boss man seems about to caper off into the void himself, and free-fall. If so, I’ll help him with the ethical angle till he hits. I don’t know exactly why, but I want to. A hell of a way for a President to face Brezhnev, stripped to his jockstrap.
***
Meantime I turn back to April House, as I’ve decided to call my book. It’s becoming my refuge and my fun. I’ve never wholly buried the urge to write, that’s becoming obvious. Maybe I just envy Peter Quat. Law was my game, regret is vain, and I’ve done good things in the law, whatever Abe Herz thinks. (He, by the way, when he’s not abroad for special training or out on reserve maneuvers and call-ups, now practices tax law in Tel Aviv. Not the first fire-eater to turn shit-eater, I daresay.) But I’m still happiest writing, preferably to make people laugh.
And why not? It was always my bent. My high school and college yearbooks both show, in the senior class vote, “Wittiest—Goodkind.” More to the point, it was the way I earned my first dollar. It was the vocation of Molière and Twain, so who can knock it? I believe I’d rather write about my Uncle Velvel, and amuse a few people in these gruesome times, than be a Supreme Court justice. That doesn’t mean in the least that jokes are better than law; it simply defines me as a frustrated funny man.
A propos of old Peter, I have at last read a typescript of his new book. Whew! Words fail me! Then there’s a letter from Mark Herz. About the time his son Abe got called back on the war scare, Mark was invited to lecture in Israel this summer and he may go, just for the money; it’s one of those endowed things. Maybe he’ll meet his son again in Israel, after long cold estranged years. In all the time Abe’s been here, they haven’t even spoken on the phone.
Herz, Quat, and Goodkind! The three comic musketeers of Columbia in the 1930’s; you’ll read all about us soon. Meantime, here we go with Bobbeh’s sauerkraut.