Aloft, en route from Lajes Field, Azores, to Lod Airport, Israel
October 14, 1973
I am writing in the crew rest area of a C-5A Galaxy aircraft, now roaring eastward on a hairline course down the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. This Brobdingnagian cargo plane of the Military Airlift Command is the biggest flying machine in the world. The main deck below looks like a long sawed-off chunk of the Holland Tunnel; a space with curving walls and rows of lights stretching off into startling distance. That space is crammed with tanks, guns, and ammunition, and a troop-carrying compartment on this upper level is full of stuff, too. The first C-5 Galaxy that took me to the Azores is still grounded in Lajes with a “crump,” a mechanical problem. I’ll miss that flight commander, a chatty lieutenant colonel from Ohio. He invited me into the cockpit, put me in the jump seat, and we talked all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It made the time go, I’ll say that.
This pilot is more taciturn, in fact strictly business, for we are now heading straight into some scary unknowns. America’s European allies have denied transit rights to the airlift. So all the planes will be forced to fly through the Straits of Gibraltar and along the exact jagged dividing line over the sea between European and North African airspace; a route this C-5A I’m in is the first aircraft to traverse. For six hundred miles we will be flying within range of the Libyan lunatics and the Egyptian air force, all armed with MiGs. We’re supposed to be escorted past the trouble spots. But we are alone now. Air rendezvous over water is a chancy exercise, as I know well from my own war days.
What a collapse was there in Europe! What a failure of nerve! The Soviets are openly sending a giant airlift to Egypt and Syria. The whole world knows it. Yet the European powers, great and small, prohibited even landings to refuel, for an American airlift to Israel. The Arabs merely said “Oil” in a loud voice, and all Europe cringed. Why, where else could the Arabs sell oil, if not to Europe or America? Who else has the money to buy, money that means anything? Russian rubles are colorful toilet paper, worthless except where people are forced to take them. Think of England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Greece—yes, and Spain and Portugal too—the great old centers of western civilization, some of them so recently masters of the world, trembling like frightened old ladies before a few robed sheikhs! Until Portugal relented at the last minute and let us use the Azores, the Air Force was working on a desperate plan for refueling in the air in mid-Atlantic. That chatty flight commander went first because he’s one of three C-5 pilots who can refuel in the air. It’s a new evolution for these behemoth aircraft.
Well, six and a half nervous hours to Tel Aviv. I am as jumpy as I ever was flying bombing missions over Germany and Italy; more so, because now I’m a passenger with nothing to do, and my nerves have had thirty more years of wear and tear. Maybe I can kill the time by scrawling out what happened in Washington when I got back from Jerusalem. I certainly can’t sleep, nor can I just sit here for six hours, waiting for the thumping of gunfire, as this flying Goliath skirts Europe’s airspace and approaches the war zone. As for April House, there’s little left to tell, and forget it for now. I am riding a typhoon.
***
I arrived in Washington at eleven at night in a downpour, and I had no housekey. Jan poked her head out of the bedroom window to see who was banging the brass knocker.
“My God, you?”
Standing there in the rain, I called up to her, “Yes, and I’m okay. Let me in.”
When I came inside the peerless woman saw that I had no luggage. She looked into my drenched face and inquired, “Can you tell me anything?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What about Sandra?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t track her down.”
“I see.” Only I could read Jan’s calm tones and know how hard it hit her. “And your mother?”
“Hanging in there.”
“The war isn’t going well, is it?”
“No.”
“Will we lose?”
“I don’t know, Jan.”
The telephone rang.
“Ah, good, you’re here,” said the Israeli ambassador. “How was the flight?”
“Okay. What do I do now?”
“Wait.”
While I was wolfing an omelet Jan whipped up, she told me that Peter Quat, in a huge dither over his novel, had been vainly trying to telephone me in Israel. It had come out shortly before Yom Kippur to the usual ecstatic reviews, but it wasn’t selling. The piles in the bookstores were “beginning to stink like stale fish,” so Jan quoted a frantic Peter.
The telephone rang again; this time the White House, to say that a car would come and take me to the helicopter. The blades were already noisily spinning white spirals of glittery raindrops when I got to the pad. We lifted off in the jerky ungainly fashion that always scares me, and thudded and thrashed to Camp David. In the darkness I saw nothing of the camp except a lit-up heated pool outside the big lodge, steaming clouds of vapor into the rain.
The President sat in shirt sleeves, the usual yellow pad in his lap, by flaming logs in a stone fireplace, in a large sitting room with ex-posed ceiling beams. He looked awful. The firelight deepened the hollows of his eyes and the downthrust lines of his mouth, and highlighted his sagging jowls. He inquired about my mother’s health as I handed him Golda’s letter. With a glance at me from under those heavy eyebrows, the cartoonists’ delight, he opened it, and read it slowly, twice.
“Do you know what is in this letter?” he asked, dropping the pages in his lap.
“No idea at all?”
“No, sir.” This was simple truth. All the possibilities were so bad that I had tried hard to shut them from mind.
“What did she say when she gave it to you?”
“That it was for your eyes alone, and that nobody should know of its existence.”
“Does anybody know?”
“The Israeli ambassador knows I brought a letter.”
“Yes, he notified me.”
Sunk low in the armchair, he stared at the fire, then he sat up and put the handwritten sheets into the flames. “Forget you delivered it, or that it existed.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
A handwritten letter from a Prime Minister to a President, burned before my eyes! Maybe she made a copy, in which case it will survive in Israel’s secret archives. Otherwise I believe the letter is gone from the world and from history.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “How’s the war going over there?”
“Sir, I’ve been out of touch since I left.”
“I’m interested in your impressions.”
So I described Dado’s too-optimistic press conference, and the dark plunge afterward in the Israeli mood. I recounted, too, Mark Herz’s inside army gossip of disaster. He kept nodding, slouched down in his chair, his eyes glazed and hooded. Then I told him about my visit to the young American lawyer and tank captain in the hospital, and about Abe’s determination to get back into the war; also about the wounded soldiers going AWOL from the hospitals to rejoin their units. It was something to see, the way the President straightened up, and his face brightened, and his eyes cleared.
“They are going to win, and thank God for that,” he said. “They deserve to.”
“Mr. President, the Prime Minister said they need help. The Soviets have got a vast airlift going to Syria and Egypt.”
“We know. We’re not going to let Israel go down the tubes.” He gestured with his highball glass at a movable bar. “Have a drink.”
In the unbuttoned vein that he sometimes falls into with me, he began to ramble. I suspect he cannot sleep, and dreads lying down in the dark. Uppermost in his mind was a bill Congress is about to vote on, the War Powers Resolution, which he considers a historic national calamity. He says it hobbles a President’s power to use the armed forces in a sudden foreign crisis. “They are cutting the balls off the Presidency,” he put it, “and our enemies will know it, and will act accordingly.” If the bill passes he will veto it. He expects to be upheld, but it will be close. He talked of this as the major failure in his Presidency, his inability to persuade Congress that this bill is a catastrophic move. Imagine! With all the failures, mistakes, foul plays, and crimes of which he stands accused or has even admitted, he blames himself for this, something the media ignore.
Then he circled back on worn tracks. He had ended the Vietnam war by having the guts to do unpopular things like invading Cambodia and bombing Hanoi. Now Congress, with this resolution, was inviting the North Vietnamese to blitz the south. They would do that in short order if the bill became law. All those thousands of American boys, after securing an honorable peace with their lives, would have died in vain. As to Watergate, he was definitely going to fire the Special Prosecutor, a Kennedy man with a staff of Kennedy loyalists all out to get him. He was still waiting for a court decision about the tapes, and if it went against him he would take it to the Supreme Court. Such an invasion of executive privilege would really gut the Presidency, and if it meant being impeached, he would not yield.
As he went on, he drifted into a new, wistful key. He loves football, and football analogies. Most games were decided in the fourth quarter, he said; and his whole aim in seeking the Presidency had been to do something about world peace in the fourth quarter of his life. That would fix his place in history. He had been elected in the thick of the Vietnam mess, not of his making. He had brought home the troops, initiated detente and disarmament with the Soviet Union, and achieved the rapprochement with China. He had abolished the biological warfare section of the army, and ordered the stockpile of such weapons destroyed, a serious unilateral step toward peace. “Catch the media ever mentioning that,” he said. (It was news to me, in fact.) He had had a grand plan in mind for a start on world peace; but now between Watergate and this War Powers Resolution, it would probably die, a blasted dream.
Peculiarly, he never once referred to the big story of the hour. The Vice President had resigned, and for the first time in our history a President was going to appoint his own successor. The media were frothing with guesses and rumors about who he would designate. The story overshadowed the Middle East war and Watergate, but on this topic he said not a word. At two o’clock his voice was fading, his eyes drooping shut. All at once he sat up and told me I could go, and I might hear from him about midday.
Coming so abruptly, his dismissal jolted me into talking before I thought. I had been waiting and waiting for him to say something more about the war than that vague, “We’re not going to let Israel go down the tubes.” Nothing. Yet everything depended now on the word of this one distracted, dejected, hounded, played-out, incredibly hated man in shirt sleeves, the President of the United States.
“Sir,” I blurted, “may I say one thing before I go?”
He barely nodded.
“You spoke about the figure you’ll make in history,” I said. “Mr. President, the people with the longest historical memory in the world are the Jews. The Israelis can hold off the Arabs, though they’re outnumbered in manpower twenty-five to one. They can match them. They can beat them. The one thing they can’t match is the output of the Soviet Union’s munitions plants. They’re only three million people. The Russians have pushed the Arabs once more to die trying to destroy Israel, so that Soviet communism can move in and grab the Middle East. It’s happened before and now it’s happening again, Mr. President. It’s all that’s happening.”
“I’m aware of that,” the President said in a dry tone.
“Sir, my point is that it’s truly touch and go in Israel. I don’t know the latest intelligence, but I know how I felt when I saw Golda Meir’s face. If you order an airlift now to match the Soviet shipments—now, sir—then the world’s longest historical memory will honor you forever.” In those remote, infinitely tired eyes, I thought I saw a dusky glimmer. I plunged ahead. “It will honor the man who showed greatness, by rising above his own desperate political predicament and coming to the rescue of the Jewish State.”
The President said nothing for a while, staring at the dying fire, then he tiredly pushed himself up out of his armchair. “Well, I may have to kick some ass, at that. The thing has been batting back and forth all week between State and Defense.” He sighed, glanced back at the fireplace, and said indistinctly, as though to himself, “Anyway, she doesn’t leave me much of an alternative.” I wouldn’t swear to those words, but that’s what I think I heard.
He walked with me to the door and shook hands. “You’ve stayed aboard while some others were jumping ship. It’s been appreciated. Get some rest. You may be flying again soon.”
***
A gentle shake woke me up. “I hate to do this to you, but Peter Quat is here.”
I opened my eyes, and found myself lying dressed, except for shoes, tie, and jacket, on the library couch. I had no recollection of going to sleep. Jan drew open the drapes, and sunlight blazed on me.
“Peter Quat? What the hell?”
“He telephoned at nine o’clock, and like a damn fool I told him you were here. I didn’t expect him to hop the next Eastern shuttle, but he did.”
“Has the White House called?”
“No.”
“The Israeli Embassy?”
“No.”
“What’s the war news?”
“No better.”
Peter Quat looked sulky the first time I ever laid eyes on him, in the bus to Camp Eagle Wing; a sulky face was his normal mien at college and in April House; and he has looked sulkier and sulkier in his book-jacket pictures, as they have gotten older and older and his hairline has kept receding. But never have I seen him looking quite so sulky as he did today, glowering at me over the coffee and cake Jan served us in the living room. That grizzled widow’s peak of his has now receded behind his ears. Yet he still has the old air of the eternal sneering bad boy, plus a certain prideful bearing, because after all, he is Peter Quat. This time he was also in great rage.
“I want you to start a lawsuit against my publishers.”
“What for?”
“They’re not advertising my book, the sons of bitches.”
“Peter, I saw several ads before I left for Israel. I saw a full-page ad in the Times Book Review.”
“Why wasn’t it a double spread?” He brandished a folder. “Look, don’t argue with me, Dave, I’ve got the reviews here. A book with such notices should be selling five thousand a week. They say there are no sales, and a lot of returns. They can’t explain it. Didn’t the bastards contract to sell my book, not just print it? What they need is a red-hot poker up their ass.”
“The book’s been out only a couple of weeks, Peter.”
“Goddamn it, Dave, the first weeks are crucial for a novel! If it doesn’t get roaring in thirty days it’s gone. I’ve been in story conferences with Mort Oshins in Malibu for a month. He’s been snooping in the bookstores ever since pub date, and I know he’s cooling off already. I can feel it. Meantime I bought a house in Bel Air. Gigantic mortgage, all the cash I had or could borrow, and if Oshins drops this project I am up shit creek.”
His voice dropped and he sourly grinned.
“What’s more, and for Christ’s sake keep this to yourself until my custody suit over Stephen is settled, I’ve been screwing a movie star out there. I can’t mention her name, she’s got a husband and two kids, but she’s read all my books, and she’s the most astounding quiff I’ve ever experienced. We went to bed the same night we met. It’s a new country, Dave, a new universe of quiff—and, besides, she has all the money there is. We could even end up getting married. Wouldn’t that solve all my problems! But not if I have a fucking flop! You know how movie people are. Unless I hit number one with this book I am creamed, and it’s a great book, and I want you to make those stingy shitheads advertise it.”
All the time he was talking, my ear was cocked for a telephone ring. What in God’s name was happening with the airlift?
“Peter, the book is probably starting slow because of the war, that’s all.”
“What war?” Peter Quat honestly and truly asked that question. Then, “Oh, you mean the war in Israel? So what? What’s that got to do with my book?”
“Look, Peter, the Jews are your main audience, you know that. Ordinarily they love to laugh at themselves, and the more savage the jokes are, the better. That’s been your secret. Only right now they’re not in the mood. They’re worried. I’m worried. I’ve just returned from Jerusalem, and I assure you Israel is in trouble.”
Peter did not quite get my point. He may not have been paying close attention, being so upset. “Fuck Jerusalem, and flick Israel! My book isn’t selling!” He waved both arms up in the air and then down to the floor, pounding Jan’s oriental carpet with both fists. “MY—BOOK—ISN’T—SELLING, do you hear, Dave?”
“Well, I can’t start a lawsuit for you, Peter, but if you insist I can suggest some good litigation lawyers. I’m busy.”
“Doing what?” Peter inquired, making a magnificently horrible face. “Working for that depraved lying criminal who’s destroying America?”
“Mainly he’s destroying himself. It’s pitiful, and he’s done some fearful things, but I think he’s going to help the Jews.”
The telephone was ringing in the library.
“Christ, what a narrow point of view,” said Peter Quat.
“Wait a couple of weeks, Peter. Your book will start to sell.”
I darted into the library. The President’s appointments secretary told me that I should plan on flying to Israel tomorrow.
“I may have trouble getting on El Al,” I told him.
“I don’t think you’ll be flying El Al,” he said. I hung up and sat, bemused. Not flying El Al? Airlift? Peter Quat came into the library, and this will sound odd, but I had forgotten that he was in the house.
“Dave, why do you think my book will start to sell?”
There was something touching about his anxious tone. Peter Quat is a major author, if a monstrous muddlehead; he has long leaned on me for counsel; and the great PDQ once took a Bronx boy under his wing. So I assured him once more that he had a solid following, that My Cock was vintage Quat, and that they would be coming around to the bookstores. “Whether you’ll be number one, Peter, is in the lap of the gods,” I said. “That Willy the Whale book unfortunately seems to be all the vogue. Even Jan went out and bought it. Just don’t go starting a lawsuit. You’ll land on the front pages trumpeting that your book is a flop. That can be very damaging.”
Peter hesitated, then said uncertainly, “Well, okay. I’ll sweat it out for two more weeks. If there are still no sales, I’m definitely suing the bastards, and I want you to handle it.”
“Maybe by then the war will be over.”
“Fuck the war.”
Peter left for New York. His literary vocabulary is luxuriant, but his conversation has a certain repetitious spareness. I fear he’s in trouble with the Bel Air house. That whale book, a tenuous whimsy a hundred pages long, is selling like the Bible. Such freaks come along in publishing.
Old Peter’s timing has been bad, and his new universe of astounding quiff may, alas, dissolve into thin air
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Jan and I had an incongruously peaceful Friday night meal: candles, wine, gefilte fish, chicken soup, the works. As we sang the Sabbath songs, I kept thinking that it was getting on toward sunrise in Israel, and that more tank battles must be already thundering in the Sinai and the north.
Afterward I walked down to the White House through bleak drizzle, because I’d been invited to the announcement of the President’s choice of successor. It was no surprise. The ceremony was very incongruous in its way, too; a lot of happy laughing and congratulating under blinding blue television lights, just as if the Administration was not foundering and all-out war was not exploding in the Holy Land. I came and went unnoticed. I might have skipped it, but you never know with the President. Jan said an Air Force major had called in my absence. We disregard telephone rings on the Sabbath, but that’s off. He was coming for me early in the morning, no other details.
Well, as the world knows, wartime lends a golden edge to lovemaking; it is one of the corrupt charms of mankind’s chronic insanity. My unexpected night with Jan brought back old times, for we met and fell in love during the war, while I was serving in the Army Air Corps. I’ve written hardly anything about Jan, nor will I, but she is the woman poor Bobbie was not, the love of my life, the woman that lasted; and I am not putting Jan in any book, she is my private love, not for publication. The Air Force major telephoned at six in the morning and said he’d come for me within the hour, so I reluctantly disengaged myself from rapture and tumbled out of bed. “No heroics, now,” said Jan. “You’re a creaky old thing, and the Israelis can take care of themselves.”
“Me?” I said. “I’m sitting it out in the Jerusalem Savoy.”
When we parted at the door her eyes were wet. “I know you. You’re having fun,” she said. “Not too much, do you hear? And when you find Sandra, call me.”
At Dover Air Force Base things were jumping. All sorts of machines were noisily crisscrossing hither and yon: jeeps, trucks, fork-lifts, half-tracks, small cranes, and huge flatbed vehicles piled high with crates on pallets. Galaxies like this one were parked helter-skelter, with cavernous openings at nose and tail, into which the trucks were wheeling to unload and driving out again, to the shouts of loadmasters and work parties, and roars of arriving aircraft. It was like old times on bomber bases, but our Flying Fortresses were Piper Cubs to these open-ended leviathans.
The trip to the Azores passed pleasantly in all that cockpit talk. When we were coming down through night clouds the pilot let fall a disconcerting fact. The backbone of the airlift will be the smaller C-141, and a number of them are all loaded and ready to fly. But the recent crosswinds in the Azores were and still are beyond the C-141’s capacity to land. So some Galaxies were loaded up in a hurry, because they can lock their landing gear off-center, and do hairy cross-wind landings. Well, it was a damnably queer sensation, I tell you, sitting in that jump seat and watching the lights of the landing strip coming up at an angle to the plane, instead of straight ahead. “This is what we really get paid to do,” the flight commander said, calmly chewing gum as his titanic machine went crabbing into the ground, smooth as glass, and rolled on the tarmac along the strip of lights at that same acute angle.
“Pretty nifty,” I said, in a shaky voice.
“Just lucky,” he said.
But then, as I’ve mentioned, that Galaxy was grounded by a “crump.” This one came flying in, refueled, and took off, and I thumbed a ride. I had no notion of the risky flight plan, and deserve no credit for intrepidity; though even if I’d known the worst, the President’s letter in my breast pocket would have spurred me to get aboard….
The flight commander has just sent for me. What now?
***
What indeed!
When I came into the cockpit he gestured at the windows. On both sides of the Galaxy, six U.S. Navy planes were flying formation on us; half a dozen silver and blue needle-nosed fighters, flashing along in the sun. He motioned at the empty co-pilot’s seat, and pointed downward. I clambered into the seat, and through the clouds I saw below a carrier and its escort vessels, tiny and gray on the purple sea. I glanced at him and ventured a smile. He smiled back like a barefoot boy, and made a thumbs-up. Next moment his round freckled face froze into its hard cast. So on we go. Three reassured hours to Tel Aviv. However, two hundred miles out, the U.S. fighters will peel off. The Israeli Air Force is supposed to take over and escort us in. There’s the crunch.
I think I’ll be able to take a nap meanwhile. I haven’t slept much in the past two days. Six U.S. Navy fighters are a soothing presence.