"No shit," said Gold with feigned amazement. "What did you have in mind?"
"A manifesto, of course, by me, in the form of a petition, with a list of non-negotiable demands, insisting they change. I'll need supporting names."
"Count me in," said Gold.
"And a special issue of my magazine in which you and others express my feelings in two thousand words."
"How much will you pay?"
"Nothing."
"Count me out."
Lieberman retorted with the savage fervor of a maddened fanatic. "You want nine hundred million Chinese to be without political freedom just because you won't give up a few bucks? That's a third of the human race."
"A fourth, you imbecile. What about communism?"
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"I want to halt the spread right now on every border in the world. With armed might, if necessary."
"Whose?"
"I haven't been able to figure that out yet," admitted Lieberman. "But I'm willing to make the people of the world an offer they can't refuse—a preferable alternative they will find impossible to resist."
"What's the preferable alternative?"
"I haven't been able to figure that one out yet either."
"What about the grape growers?"
"The workers are on strike. There's been a breakdown of tradition and a loss of respect for the workings of the free marketplace."
"What do you want to do about it?"
Lieberman was quick to reply. "Government subsidies."
"To the workers?"
"The growers. To help them beat back the strikers indefinitely and allow them to band together to peg prices at a high level and stabilize the free market."
"I'll pass on that one too."
"That's the thing I dislike most about you," Lieberman rebuked him with a snarl. "What shall I say is wrong with you? You'll find it all spelled out in my newest autobiography. You're always afraid to come down solidly on the side of the status quo. It's the reason you're not getting anywhere."
"Really?" said Gold, and took pleasure in continuing, "I've just been promoted again."
"To what?" Lieberman demanded jealously.
"It must not pass my lips."
"Have you been working in Washington all this time?"
"I've been fucking girls there," Gold answered with a cryptic smile. "I can tell you no more."
"Well, I've been fucking girls too," Lieberman blurted out in challenge. After this, there came a pause from Lieberman, pregnant with the expanding weight
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***
of a confidence craving release. "If I tell you a secret," he said with uncommon reticence, "will you tell me one?" He persisted with his confession even after Gold said no. "Will you promise never to tell anyone?" "It will go with me," said Gold, "to the grave." "I've been getting girls too," said Lieberman, squirming with uneasiness. "I've been answering those sex help-wanted ads we run in the back of my magazine. I can get an early crack at the best ones before they're even published. I've been surprised at how easy it is and how many of them there are. I never knew women enjoyed sex too. Of course," said Lieberman, and here his voice sank confessionally in a mixture of disappointment and apology, "they're not always the most beautiful girls in the world." "No shit," said Gold.
"No-oo shit," said Gold in Washington when offered his pick by Ralph of Secretary of State, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Attorney General of the United States, or Director of the CIA in exchange for his "We Are Not a Society or We Are Not Worth Our Salt."
"I would go for Secretary of State if I were you."
"But I don't know anything," said Gold doubtfully, "and I've got no experience."
"That's never made a difference," said Ralph.
That part seemed plausible. "Ralph, can I really be appointed Secretary of State soon if I decide I want the job?"
"Oh, I can practically guarantee that," said Ralph, "although I can't be sure. That's as much as I can tell you right now."
"Would the Senate confirm me?" asked Gold. "Most of them don't even know who I am."
"That would work strongly to your advantage," said Ralph. "As you state so eloquently in your article, Bruce, the more we know about any candidate for public office the less deserving he is of our support, and the ideal nominee for President is always someone
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about whom everybody in the country knows absolutely nothing."
"Raiph," Gold cried, "that was a joke, a sarcasm, a piece of satirical whimsy."
"We see it," said Ralph with a look of grave reproof, "as the absolute truth and are already taking it into our calculations for the future. It's a pity you've had your name in the papers, Bruce, or you might have been our next Presidential nominee. Settle for Secretary of State, Bruce, at least for now. It's a foot in the door."
"What would I have to do?" asked Gold.
"N.vhing," said Ralph. "And you would have a large staf * elp. You would have a Deputy Undersecretary of . with a map showing the capitals of all the cou; ^ in the world and another with the names of the people in charge so you wouldn't have to call up the newspapers to find out. Unless you wanted to keep busy, and then there'd be no limit to the affairs in which you could interfere."
"Could I make policy?"
"As much as you want."
"Foreign policy?"
"Domestic too. If you're quick enough."
"Quick enough?"
"Oh, sure," said Ralph. "Bruce, you know the President as well as I do—"
"I've never met him, Ralph," Gold corrected stiffly.
Ralph appeared baffled. "Didn't he go to your big sister's birthday party?"
"I went. He went to China."
"But I took you to see him in the White House after you did so well at the Commission, didn't I?"
"He was taking a nap."
"Well, you will have to meet him at least once before he can announce your appointment," Ralph advised. "I hope you won't mind that."
"I don't think I'll mind."
"Actually, the best time to catch him is when he's feeling sleepy and wants to nap," said Ralph. "That's
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when the rush to see him is thickest and you have to be quick. This President is much too busy to spend time on life-and-death responsibilities in which he's lost interest. Although we do suspect," Ralph confided after a fretful glance at the wall, "that he's often off writing another book secretly when he's supposed to be napping. If you approach him with your policy when he's wide awake you might command his attention. Hang in there, if you can, until his eyes turn glassy and he starts to yawn. If you're beside him when he's drifting off, you can get his authorization for just about any policy you want."
"Suppose," said Gold, "it's a bad policy. Suppose I make a mistake."
"In government," Ralph answered, "there's no such thing as a mistake, since nobody really knows what's going to happen. After all, Bruce, nothing succeeds as planned. I wouldn't be worth my salt if I didn't know that."
"Suppose my policy fails."
"Then it fails. Nobody's perfect."
"It fails?"
"And there's no harm done," said Ralph. "It's happened before. But there was no harm done."
"No harm done?"
"We're still here, aren't we?" said Ralph.
The bland insouciance of the reply fell upon Gold with a nasty jar and evoked in him the first faint beginnings of repugnance and an inclination to withdraw. "Ralph," he began after a moment of inhibition, "there's a kind of cynicism and selfishness there that I'm not sure I can be comfortable with."
"I know that feeling of good conscience, Bruce," Ralph answered with a jovial air of patronage, "and I assure you it will fade without a trace when you've been working here a minute or two." Gold breathed more freely. "Just don't delude yourself into thinking you're going to upgrade anything. When your friend Henry Kissinger—"
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"He's not my friend, Ralph."
"I'm glad, Bruce, because I was going to say that when that pushy toad Henry Kissinger first came here, he told his friends the war would be over in less than six months, and he was sulking like a spoiled child when the country took it away from him after five years and wouldn't let him have another to play with in Africa. Bruce, please be Secretary of State. If you won't, we might have to give it to someone else of your religion—"
"1 have no religion, Ralph."
"To someone else of your faith then who—"
"I have no faith."
"To someone Jewish who might be just like him."
Gold required no further inducement. He yielded assent in a solemn moment in which words would not do. Ralph was greatly relieved by Gold's dignified handshake.
"Now let's see if we can get it for you."
Gold stared at him with a renewed sense of shock. "Ralph, you promised, you guaranteed it."
"But I didn't say I was sure."
"As a matter of fact, you did," Gold said in reprimand, and hoped Ralph caught the injured tone is his voice. "You did say you were sure you could get me appointed Secretary of State."
"Unless I couldn't, Bruce—I always add that in order to avoid misleading people. In your case, I have no hesitation about saying it's a sure thing unless, of course, it isn't. I don't see how you can miss once you're married to Andrea Conover and pass your medical exam, unless you can, but that would be hard, if it isn't easy."
"Ralph," said Gold, with his mind spinning, "I'm not even divorced."
There was something about the reproachful eye Ralph fixed upon him that made Gold blush profusely. "I thought you'd taken care of that, Bruce."
"I'm seeing a lawyer next week."
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"And the physical?"
"That same afternoon," said Gold. "Belle hasn't a real suspicion I'm even thinking about it."
"That's always the best way," Ralph said approvingly. "But won't she get a glimmer of some kind when you marry Andrea?"
"She doesn't even seem to understand I've practically moved out," Gold said with perplexity, and with the guilty knowledge that he had not. "Ralph, I should have the appointment quickly, before I do anything. Andrea is in love with me, I know, but she won't marry me until I'm somebody important in government."
"I'm not sure you can have that appointment quickly, Bruce, until she does marry you," Ralph answered frankly. "The Conover connection is crucial."
If the Conover connection was crucial, Gold was bereft of alternative. "I guess I'll just have to move all my shirts and underwear out and bring everything into the open with Belle, won't I?" He and Ralph regarded each other in silence. "In a way I hate to do this to her."
"Don't we always?" caroled Ralph with a sigh. "But your country comes first. If you like, Bruce, I can have the Vice President fly to your apartment in Manhattan and explain the exigencies of the emergency to Belle, or the president pro tern of the Senate, or even the minority or majority whip. Anyone you want, Bruce. Just ask."
Gold answered faintly with a sort of inert fortitude, "I'll just have to do it myself."
"This is noble, Bruce," said Ralph without a hint of guile and rose from his chair to his long legs. "And you'll never regret it. Why, you can become the country's first Jewish Secretary of State. You might even be a credit to your race."
"Kissinger was Jewish," countered Gold sullenly, dipping one shoulder to allow what he felt to be an offensive innuendo to go bouncing past like a glancing blow from a javelin. "Or said he was."
"Then maybe you could be the youngest Jewish
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Secretary of State. I bet your family would be proud of that too."
Gold scowled. "Kissinger was young," he muttered grudgingly with a note of aggression invading his voice. "But he could have been lying about that too."
"What do you mean?"
Gold knew a notorious idea when he had one and was not about to divulge it.
"He ain't no Jew!" Gold's deranged old father had howled like an ungovernable dybbuk toward the television screen with his hooked finger stabbing pitilessly at the corpulent, comic image of Kissinger descending from his plane with a complacent smile after his devious efforts to blame Israel for the breakdown of Middle East negotiations he had lacked ability to consummate. ("Kissinger," wrote journalist Leslie Gelb in the Times Magazine, "had agreed with the Israelis not to blame anyone for the breakdown of his latest round of shuttle diplomacy. No sooner did he get on his aircraft to return home than he started blaming the Israelis.") "No Jew was ever a cowboy! Ich hub im en d'rerd."
And Gold was prepared to develop the thesis that Kissinger was not a Jew in a book of Kissinger "memoirs" he was positive would excite attention and hoped earn him at least a discernible fraction of the parnusseh Kissinger was raking in from his own memoirs and the other vocational opportunities opening up on all sides that he oozed into naturally like an oleoresinous jelly. Perfect truth was not of determining importance in the exposition of Gold's theory: he felt mutinously that he had as much right to falsehood, bias, and distortion in his memoirs of Kissinger as Kissinger did in his own memoirs of Kissinger and had exercised in public office. In Gold's conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious shlump who made war gladly and did not often exude much of that legendary sympathy for weakness and suffering with which Jews regularly were credited. It was not a shayna Yid who would go down on his knees
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on a carpet to pray to Yahweh with that shmendrick Nixon, or a haimisha mentsh who would act with such cruelty against the free population of Chile:
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
Such a pisk on the pisher to speak with such chutzpah! And then plot, with a sneaky duplicity for which he was to grow scatologically abhorred, for the downfall of that innocent democracy. Under oath he dissembled about his role and his knowledge. Gold could detect with his nose a rancid taint of swaggering fascism in such arrogant deeds that did not fit flatteringly the plump bourgeois figure who committed them and was not in concordance with even the most prejudicial historic depictions of the characteristic Jew. Gold still recoiled from the cold terminology of Kissinger's book of 1957 in which he bravely talked of "the paralyzing fear of weapons" and called precociously for a unique brand of diplomacy:
... to break down the atmosphere of special horror which now surrounds the use of nuclear weapons.
The remedy suggested by the dumb putz was limited nuclear warfare. Zayer klieg, that grubba naar, with his special diplomacies and limited nuclear wars. In Israel there were hostile demonstrations when he visited, and former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was anything but friendly on French television when he spoke of Kissinger's departure from government:
That was a man we had everything to fear from, because he ended up exchanging the security of Israel for the good graces of the oil companies. Kissinger is going and it's a great relief for the Israeli people.
To a malign imagination like Gold's, the specter of
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oil conjured up a miasma of Rockefeller influence and money that clung to Kissinger like a cloud of corruption and gave to his eyes, cheeks, and lips the glistening look of a shnorrer who has been very well lubricated. Gold shivered anew at the sophomoric lunacy and preposterous intellectual claims of that noisy balaboss. The gaudy militarism of the portly trombenik was more Germanic than Jewish, and at least one newsman had fortuitously spied in Kissinger a puerile compulsion for "Teuton his own horn." There was foul brutality in the flippant remark attributed to him about the Christmas carpet bombing of North Vietnam, an act of warfare unmatched for enormity in modern times which Kissinger, depending on whom the bustling bonditt was trying to finagle, both opposed and approved:
We bombed them into letting us accept their terms.
For the very life of him Gold could not recall
such rakish and jocular contempt for the victims of massive bombardment as ever coming from a Jew, or from many Christians since Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himm-ler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Hjalmar Schacht, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.
So astir was Gold's mind with thoughts of his memoir of Kissinger that from Ralph to home seemed a journey of moments, and he was assiduously engrossed in his files by the glow of the setting sun that same day. Belle brought his dinner on a tray a minute before he was going to yell for it. The pot roast was succulent. The coffee was steaming and strong. Kissinger, that klutz, Gold noted in silent triumph while chewing wolfishly, had boorrrchet and cried real tears like a nebbish in Salzburg when questioned about perjury and had beamed like a clever shaygetz in Washington later when the suspicions appeared well founded. Gold was already restless to begin propounding doggedly and positively that his subject, Henry Kissinger, in all but the most confining definitions of cultural anthropology or bigotry, was no more Jewish, let's say, than Nelson
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Rockefeller, the prismatic apogee in a succession of patrons Kissinger had always managed to secure at pivotal points in his career. The first, a dynamic and eccentric voluntary German exile named Fritz Krae-mer, was attracted by an enterprising letter composed by young Kissinger when he was but an infantry private in Louisiana during World War II, a rank and military specialty in which, biographers Marvin and Bernard Kalb record from a family member, "Henry" was "unhappy" and, in his own words, "acutely sorry" for himself. Gold hoped to use this letter in his book as an example of Kissinger's early attainments as a writer. It was not odd to Gold that this ambitious man of the worst reputation who had lied to the world about so much would tell Nelson Rockefeller and others he was Jewish just to make a good impression.