The China Card Read online

  There would, she knew, never be another John Foster Dulles. The Department of State, “Foggy Bottom,” was a huge, elite bureaucracy, full of leaks. Compared to this many-thousand-headed monster, Wolf Manheim's NSC was a tight and effective human computer with a staff of less than fifty.

  Before the crisis, even a weak chief executive had sometimes been able to protect his wavering standing in the polls by pitting his hawk, Higgins, against his dove, Manheim. Except that Manheim was the hawk—or a condor or an eagle, in terms of attack and tactics, in terms of power politics—and the “Bank” knew that; and not only Wall Street but Fleet Street, NATO and the rest of the West knew it too.

  Behind the scenes, and through a series of leaks to his “elite assets” in the news media, Manheim had ridiculed the hard-line campaign to send a task force to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia to confront Soviet- and Cuban-backed forces. Manheim was reported to have stood to his full height and announced to the suddenly awake President, during a showdown in the Oval Office, “Mr. President, Defense and State can never get it right, for some reason. The Somalis are the aggressors, they started it!”… Wolf Manheim had won that argument, as well as the one about censuring the U.S. allies following their rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons.

  So it, the secret war behind the scenes, had gone on for four years, while the public was almost completely obsessed with the economic disaster that was now reaching into every home in the country. Manheim was a mystery to the public; with inflation increasing dramatically since 1980 and Chrysler and Ford depressed, only the “Bank” really knew what a tall figure of authority Manheim was in a White House close to panic over the upcoming elections.

  “Manheim,” Betsy Jones-Russell had concluded to Gore Vidal, “is the man to watch in 1984. If he is unable to bring off the hat trick”—(1) face down the Bad Old Boys at State and CIA, (2) psychoanalyze the Chinese, and (3) put the fear of history into the Russians—”then George Orwell's 1984 image of all against all in the name of 'Security and Freedom' will have left the drawing board. The rough beast of the future will be reported as having been sighted in the suburbs, its hour come round at last.”

  Still, she pondered, if Manheim was in control and closest to the President, why the presence of the kid Kott and skinny Dr. Wick? These two men were Polish Catholic aristocrats like Brzezinski. They hated Russians—not communism, but Russians. And they disdained Americans. Americans were lazy, stupid and corrupt to the foreign-born elite of the U.S. diplomatic and National Security establishment. Manheim was not that type at all—was he? After all, he was a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald, very different, indeed. And he certainly didn't despise women the way the anteater Wick did. Hamlet, she thought, fallen among thieves… . Wick dogtrotted across the room toward the kitchen. Were those red socks? A secret solipsist into the bargain. “Guildenstern,” she thought.

  Peter Jan Wick: predatory, hyperthyroid… why did she hate him so on sight? Because she knew the type, male and female. The ones who follow great ones. The psychoanalyst in London had explained it to her once, what was that catchy phrase again? Oh, yes, “The shadow of the object falls across the ego.” And when Norman had attacked her and called her “the great man's moll,” he had had, as usual, a kernel, a seedling of truth.

  Under cover of offering her tea, the younger Secret Service agent was measuring her silk-shirt-sheathed breasts. The standard-issue reflecting sunglasses were supposed to hide the eyes, but she pretty well knew his type too. Though maybe it wasn't even her nipples, perhaps he was actually grasping, in his mind's eye, at her mound of Venus, where he imagined it lay in wait for him under her loosely pleated tweed trousers.

  “How nice. Just a bit of milk, please.” He moved away, like a cat in a Hickey-Freeman blue suit, toward the half-kitchen. She stacked her notes impatiently against the glass tabletop. “Jesus, just let me get out of this town,” she said to herself. She had been waiting in Washington since before Christmas for Wolfgang “Wolf” Manheim, to find eight hours for the long-awaited London Times interviews. “What's this?”

  “Milk.”

  “Milk?”

  “You said—”

  “Milk! Tea with milk. As in tea with lemon or coffee with… .”

  She remembered that they were called SS for short as he wheeled and quickstepped back to the kitchen. She looked toward the closed door. Four-thirty already. Again she wondered if it was possible that Wolf Manheim, the power diplomat, actually lived in the Watergate? No, she decided, it was not possible. This—what would she call it in her atmosphere sidebar accompanying the interview?—this “early Watergate,” the word was already generic.

  “Here you are.”

  Before she could find just the right words to thank the all-American agent with the yellow and blue plastic insignia in his lapel, the door opened and long-legged Wolf Manheim came across the foyer.

  The Secret Service man was gone and she and her quarry were vis-à-vis at last. As if in one of her own word pictures, she could see herself and the man facing each other like leader lions of rival prides. Both tall and lithe, except that he looked as if he had stepped out of a Gothic church window. “Too lean,” she thought, “almost a beautiful death's head, or a concentration camp—of course, he was in a concentration camp as a child… but that was decades ago.” Measuring herself, in her mind's eye, against his rangy frame and relishing the prospect of matching wits with the “geopolitical genius”—as the Times had referred to him—made her hunger for the agon, the combat of ideas that her interviews at their best were known for. “Max von Sydow!” she flashed, “that's who he reminds me of. Max, twenty-five years ago.”

  “I'll have tea, too. I admire the English,” he said, and smiled slowly.

  “Just like on television,” she thought, and punched the ON button. She spoke in rapid, intelligent clips, wiggling her fingers in the air when quoting from a newspaper or report.

  B.J-R: Dr. Manheim, since Christmas the world situation is such that we hear, once again, frightened talk of World War III. You've seen today's New York Times. Richard Nixon's press conference at the Hotel Pierre to announce, for the fourth time in as many years, that “World War III has already begun,” finally made the front page. And Henry Kissinger has let it be known that the situation is “more than serious.” But the Times is riveted on what you are going to say, calling you the man closest to the President during this, quote, “low-grade panic,” unquote. Are you, and is it?

  W.M.: I have always worked closely with the President. “Closest” is a subjective judgment that I can't make. Second—is there panic? Not that I can see. But then Congress hasn't returned from its holiday recess yet.

  B.J-R: No, and the Vice-President is being accused of waving the bloody shirt, milking the crisis before the first primaries. How serious is it? The President referred to “two fronts.” How apt is that figure of speech? Why the war image—”fronts”?

  W.M.: Let's take the first “challenge,” if you prefer. The President in his speech of December twenty-seventh stated that “if” Cuban agents were involved in the destruction of the American Embassy in Honduras and the subsequent insurgent violence, “if” these reports were true, then it could be characterized as a “warlike act.” In relation to the second challenge, the Soviet ultimatum to the People's Republic of China regarding the offshore islands, our position is that the United Nations should immediately dispatch observers to the area. I met with the Secretary General to that end, as you know, on Monday.

  B.J-R: Why you instead of Secretary of State Higgins? Is it true that you are going to succeed him in that post sometime between your visit to China and the fall elections?

  W.M.: I never speculate on such matters.

  B.J-R: No, but your trip to the People's Republic of China is certainly going to be seen as a “tilt” toward the PRC and away from the USSR in the present confrontation.

  W.M.: I don't see why. As soon as I return I will chair special meetings with Mr. Arbatov and the Soviet
U.N. delegation in order to hear their side of the latest chapter in their long-standing dispute with the People's Republic.

  B.J-R: If it's merely another “chapter” in a “dispute,” then why the panic? The March Against War last Sunday in New York had over two hundred thousand people out in very cold weather… .

  W.M.: What about it?

  B.J-R: What has the rest of the world extremely jittery, Dr. Manheim, is the uncanny coincidence of nuclear war headlines and leaks. I mean the Los Angeles Times came straight out with a “Thinking the Unthinkable” headline on page one. Time and Newsweek both have issues going on the stands tomorrow—SINO-SOVIET SHOWDOWN—in covers printed in 1950s red, and Richard Harkin in the Washington Post writes this morning that World War III began in Iran when the hostages were seized… (Roman numeral III as if there could be a IV or V.) I mean, doesn't it appear that these leaks are designed to prepare the country for the ultimate?

  W.M.: For the unthinkable?

  B.J-R: Unthinkable but, apparently, not un-doable.

  W.M.: I follow you. However, it all depends from where the leaks, uh, sprang—if that's the correct verb—because these kinds of headlines have in fact galvanized the antiwar forces as nothing has since the height of the Vietnam crisis. If I weren't such a notorious east coast liberal I might ask Mr. Nixon's famous question: “Is it a liberal plot?”

  B.J-R: Um… Look, do you mind if we come back to World War III next time? I feel that you're having a little fun or playing a small game before we—

  W.M.: Just the opposite. You've won two Pulitzer prizes for your devastating “interviews”—if you can call the confession of broken men that—and more than one government has almost fallen after your famous presence in the palace… . Are you really the illegitimate granddaughter of Bertrand Russell? You're the star; I'm afraid of you. I'm serious. Ask Peter Wick. No, don't, he's petrified, too. You don't know your own reputation, the Secret Service detail cried like babies when they heard—

  She threw back her honey-colored pelt of hair and laughed so loud that the two agents in the kitchen came poking around the corner to see what was up. “Broken men, eh? God, I didn't know you were so witty. I thought you had a sort of honorary or, ah, media wit like your old mentor Henry Kissinger, or a more, ah, popular wit (the story about his unzipping his fly was true, wasn't it?) like your predecessor, Dr. Brzezinski.”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. His lips were held straight but the large hazel eyes showed suppressed merriment. In the further room the aide, Wick, could be heard talking sibilantly on the telephone, but even in the relative quiet she couldn't make out any of the words. They looked at each other out of residual smiles. (Was it true, she suddenly wondered, that only the eyes reflected feeling, all the rest being only muscular reflex?) She met and sustained his bright-eyed gaze easily. Then she let her eyes move at will over his form, sculptured in the soft jersey of the jogging suit. He half-turned to see if the Secret Service men had returned to their coffee, then leaned forward to talk in a purposefully conspiratorial tone.

  “Suppose I go for my run, and then when I lose the SS I come over to your place and we continue?”

  “Is this off or on the record?”

  “However you prefer, Ms. Russell.”

  “You may call me Dr. Russell… and I'll be waiting for you.” The hand that jotted down and passed the suite number to the great man was steady and cool and warm as it brushed the President's “left hand.”

  2

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—JANUARY 13, 1984

  (FRIDAY NIGHT)

  Betsy Jones-Russell was too restless to sit and wait for the National Security Adviser to jog around the entire hotel complex until he finally turned up at her door. As the last daylight sank she detoured across the bridge connecting Watergate East and South. “Bridge of Sighs,” she thought at random, sniffing in cold, cutting air; “So many; I had not thought death had undone so many,” her association going to T.S. Eliot, then to his poor wife. “My nerves are bad. Yes, bad. Stay with me.” Lord Bertrand Russell (her grandfather, “B.R.”) had tried to help the much younger Eliot, but the wife… Had B.R. slept with her? No. Yes.

  Sighing on the Watergate Bridge of Sighs, thinking of how dark and cold it was, of how the orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s across the street appeared almost human alongside the pyramid of glass and concrete that was the Watergate Complex. Was the Italian architect who had designed this fortress, with the American flag atop whipping in the winter wind, making a political statement in stone? Here, now, before her eyes was the Fountainhead: piles of slabs flung up to make two office structures and three apartment units. A mall of shops stretched out to the hotel toward which she was going, and around it, ribbing the entire complex, were stony rows of concrete teeth, gray-white incisors demarking every balcony with the swollen elliptical wedges that the Italian had designed. “Unreal city… I think we are in rat’s alley…” She brooded in the cold, wishing she were home in her cozy Bury Street flat in London.

  She stared at the late shoppers and early diners. America never ceased to amaze her. Not that she was an Americaphobe like her grandfather, B.R.—in fact, what she felt for the American middle class was closer to compassion. Since 1980 the savings rate had all but collapsed—no one could save, with inflation roaring—so they bought. Now, every day crowds gathered in front of banks to watch for the twice-daily postings of interest rates, so they could withdraw and buy. Hoarding was becoming a national religion; fights, then small riots, broke out briefly in supermarkets. In the ghettos, systems of barter had virtually replaced the old marketplace economy. “The nation is caught up in the Red Queen’s Race,” she wrote, referring to Alice in Wonderland, “forced to run faster and faster merely to remain in the same place.”

  As in the Great Depression, the unemployed were once again blaming and losing confidence in themselves. In Detroit a gang of unemployed auto workers had managed to breach security and wreck twenty-five of the new robots that could each do the mechanical work of five flesh and blood employees. She gritted her teeth at the spectacle of millions being sold new body odors, new body images, new automotive body extensions—being sold themselves.

  The beautiful rich people and the power elite here in Washington—men like Manheim’s aide Wick—were openly beginning to turn on the “ordinary” people. She had heard a glamorous Washington party-giver say that “when the average American walks, his knuckles graze the ground.” This new civil-war mentality was being acted out by the poor in innumerable gestures of individual violence, much of it self-directed. Even now the Watergate Mall was lined with armed guards, some of them staring at her as she stood molded by the wind.

  One of the reasons that the world and its pundits now looked to a nonelected official like Wolf Manheim for some saving grace was the near-burned-out quality of American leadership since Jack Kennedy. Crooks and born-again Bible salesmen and their loyal opposition, hairdressers combing their way through national problems.… On the “Dick Cavett Show” she had described America’s First Republic “beginning with the Revolution and ending with the adoption of the Constitution; the Second ending with Lincoln’s waging of the Civil War to preserve the Union; and the Third Republic, now seemingly grounding to a halt with a series of profoundly disquieting bangs and whimpers.” Cavett had, uncharacteristically, said nothing.

  Two policemen handcuffing a youth at the other end of the bridge caught her eye. Why couldn’t the sociologists and national planners understand that youth, in America as in the rest of the world, was not only right but desperate. The relatively innocent morality of youth was a human treasure, too often despised and scoffed at. The fact that young people got cynical when they grew older didn’t mean they were wrong. The major uprisings—in Iran, South Korea, South Africa, Central America, America—were made by young people between thirteen and twenty. In recent weeks, Miami, Kwangju, Capetown, São Paulo—four cities on four different continents spanning the globe—had been scenes of bloody riots. Thousands o
f young black and white students in Capetown had been rioting since late April, openly defying the white police. The demonstrators in São Paulo, Brazil, were young, too—mainly metalworkers who had mounted massive strikes against the tough measures by the new president.

  What are the links? she asked herself. What did Capetown have to do with Miami, or Kwangju with São Paulo?

  In all four cases, a dangerous combination of ingredients was present prior to the outbursts. All four cities had large young suppressed populations struggling in a stagnant economy; in all four, the present economic downturn was preceded by a period of relative boom; and in each city, police or military forces had responded to the rising discontent of the young with preemptive crackdowns.

  Miami was no less vulnerable for being in the United States. The “Third World” in the human sense had come to America, bringing its volatile politics of poverty and youth with it. That was how she had to write about it, she thought.

  Yes, she felt some sorrow for the big upset country “where nothing really worked except the military—like the USSR,” she had written; and her people “forever optimistic but without enough hope.” North America was sinking deeper and deeper into the clutches of gigantic transnational corporations that were beyond even government scrutiny, were often not even located in the United States. Yet there was a huge protest movement that could, from time to time, hold some of the streets if not elected office. It would take that movement, she speculated, and the locked-out young and old people to fill up the streets around the clock to slow down the war machine that had especially been cranking up in this country since 1981. It had seemed clear for months that “a shit storm was coming.” Or worse: In Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, California, the Carolinas—American Nazi Party and KKK candidates were actually running ahead of the primary polls. Waves of anti-Semitism had surfaced in France and the U.S. to a lesser degree in 1980. Now they were truly taking on national proportions. Serious historians were alluding to an “American Weimar”; inflation still eating the psychological and fiscal heart out of the middle class, the dark current of despair and fear and, yes, loathing of the new waves of black and Latino and Asian immigrants. In her July 1983 essay she had asked the rhetorical question-“During the 1984 presidential election, which flag will fly—white or black or brown? With one of the potential candidates openly talking about ‘starting over again’ after a thermonuclear war…”