“Let me put a hypothetical question to you, Budd. Suppose that you were President of the United States, say two years from now, and early one morning you were waked out of your sleep by a phone call from the Prime Minister of Britain, and told that you had twenty-four hours in which to make up your mind whether or not to enter the war—otherwise the British fleet would be surrendered to the Germans. What would you answer?”
Lanny was startled by this question, for it was exactly the one he had invited F.D.R. to consider in his bedroom in the White House less than a year ago. Had the President passed it on to Alston and told him to use it with recalcitrant manufacturers? Or was it a question which the insiders were asking one another over the teacups in Washington—a very hush-hush question, never to get into the newspapers.
Robbie Budd, the hard-boiled isolationist, did not let it phaze him. “Your question is nonsensical,” he replied. “But if it happened, I would answer that the U.S. had had enough of righting other people’s wars, and it was ‘never again’ for my administration.”
“All right, Budd; and now another telephone call, a year later, or perhaps only six months. This time it comes from Buenos Aires. Shall they surrender, or will we help them?”
“Oh, there’s no question there. I believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I would keep the Germans out of South America.”
“Good God, Budd, don’t you know they are all over the place? There are something like a million Germans in the Argentine, and as many Italians, and most of them working day and night for their fatherlands. They can take any country in South America any day they want to. They have a complete chain of airports covering the continent, and with a base in West Africa they can fly expeditions across and have a dozen countries under their control in half a year. They can bomb the Panama Canal out of business, and then, so far as naval affairs are concerned, they have divided us into two countries, east and west.”
VIII
The two contestants could have wrangled all day over questions like that. Robbie Budd was a man who made fighter planes, and to him the proposition was simple. If you made enough of them, you could stop any bombing expedition before it got to its target. No use quoting the military maxim that the best defensive is an offensive, for Robbie had heard it, and his answer was that his offensive would be a swarm of the new B-E P11’s, equipped with the new Ascott single-gear supercharger, which could get up above any bombing plane in the world. When Alston said: “You would have to have hundreds of them based at every one of our industrial centers,” Robbie’s answer was: “Why not? That wouldn’t cost the hundredth part of what it would cost to fight the wars of the British Empire. Give me the money and let me make the planes.”
It was the voice of old-time America, from the days of the Know-Nothings to the days of Henry Ford. Professor Alston, who presumably had studied history as well as geography, replied, quietly: “All right, Budd; if that’s the way you feel, the problem is simple. Make fighter planes for your own country.”
The other stared at him. “When have I ever refused to make them? Who wants planes, and how many does he want?”
“The government wants them, and it wants all that you can make in a hurry.”
Robbie continued to gaze at the mousy little man with nose-glasses who made this extraordinary statement. In his mind was the thought: “My God, the brain trust!”—a symbol for incompetence on an astronomical scale. When he spoke, it was patiently, as if to a little child. “Listen, Charlie! You are talking to a man who has been to Washington something over fifty times, and has interviewed hundreds of the brass hats and the gold-braid admirals. They expect you to fly whenever they telephone, and when you get there they tell you that you have to submit new specifications in quintuplicate, and that the board which has to pass upon them meets next November, and that in any case the order has to be reduced from fifty units to thirty because the Naval Affairs Committee of the Senate is expected to reduce the appropriation still further.”
“I know, Budd,” replied the ex-professor. “I have been spending six years going round with a pair of shears cutting people out of tangles of red tape. But this time it’s going to be different. May I speak to you in the strictest confidence?”
“I never gossip about my business affairs.”
“This time it’s more than a business affair, it’s an affair of national security. I remember that in Paris Lanny used to keep his country’s secrets carefully, and now I have to ask both him and his father to do the same.”
“O.K.,” said the father. “You can count upon us.”
“The planes will be in accordance with Army specifications and will have to pass Army inspection, but the money will come from another source. You can be certain of getting it promptly; but first, you have to get the Nazis out of your plant and cancel whatever contracts you have with the Luftwaffe.”
“Charlie,” said the president of Budd-Erling, “I am not a noble idealist like you, trying to save the human race. I am a vulgar, common business fellow who has to meet a payroll every week, and keep several accountants working to keep records and make out social security reports and income-tax statements and everything else that you New Dealers have dreamed up. Also, I have persuaded some widows and orphans to invest their savings in my stock, in the expectation that I will be able to earn profits and pay them something to live on. My deal with Marshal Göring doesn’t represent merely the cash I get—it’s very little now—but it’s something I can use to frighten the British and the French and the Poles, to pry orders out of them. I know that’s ignoble, perhaps even rascally, but it’s the way I was taught to do business by my father and the way I’ve been doing it for some forty years. In short, I am a merchant of death—the other fellow’s death, not mine—and before I risk cutting off a considerable chunk of my income I have got to know exactly what I’m going to get to make up for it.”
“You will get the money in the amounts agreed on, and at the time.”
“And where will I get it?”
“It will come to you in the form of checks from the central office of the WPA in Washington.”
“WPA,” repeated the fabricator of fighter planes, in a tone which seemed to say: “Do my ears betray me?” There were so many of these damned letter combinations in the New Deal that nobody could keep track of them, not even their own parents. But WPA—didn’t that mean Works Progress Administration, and wasn’t that the double-damnedest of all damnations, which Robbie Budd and his friends at the country club had been cursing all over the golf links? By God, the relief organization! The leaf-rakers, the builders of swimming-pools and wild-duck ponds, the jackasses who had been setting fellows from Greenwich Village to painting crazy murals in post offices all over the land! WPA!
“Listen, Budd,” said the fixer, who had no trouble in reading the thoughts of businessmen; “we have people in Congress of isolationist views who refuse to take measures for the national safety. They won’t vote appropriations for battleships and tanks and planes, but they have voted large sums to put the unemployed at work; and why isn’t it just as important to make jobs for the makers of battleships and tanks and planes as for those who do any other sort of work?”
“Oh, so that’s it!” exclaimed the head of Budd-Erling. “So that’s what’s going on!”
“It has been going on for quite a while, Budd, and it’s one of the best-kept secrets in the country. Don’t forget that you have given your word not to talk about it.”
“And so I’m going to be put on the dole!”
“You can call it that, but I think it would be better to say that you are put on your country’s roll of honor. Wouldn’t you prefer that, Lanny?”
Thus appealed to, the son hastened to pour a jet of oil on these troubled waters. “Ever since childhood,” he declared, “my father has explained to me that the reason he stuck to making munitions in spite of all abuse was that when the time came for the country to need his services, he would be there with the goods.”
“E
xactly!” said the brain-truster. “The time has come, and here you are—Robbie on the spot!”
IX
Driving his father home, Lanny listened to a thorough canvassing of this unheard-of development in the life of a businessman. “I’ll be handcuffed to these sons of the wild jackass,” was Robbie’s pessimistic conclusion; to which his son replied: “You always said that what you wanted was to be able to produce at capacity; and here you have it!”
“There’s a catch in it somewhere,” responded the father. “It won’t work out.”
Lanny had to be cautious, weighing every word. “From what I have seen in the papers about Alston, he must have a good deal of influence, and he certainly talked straight.”
Sure enough, fairly early in the morning Robbie received a telephone call from Washington; a high-up officer in the Service of Supply—a man with whom Robbie had dealings in the past and not so satisfactory—this General Armisted wanted to know if Mr. Budd could be in Washington the following morning on a matter of importance. Robbie phoned Lanny at the house, interrupting the reading of Sir James Jeans. “Would you like to drive me?”—and then: “You might like to stop on the way back and pay that call on the Holdenhursts.” Such a guileless parent was Robbie Budd!
Lanny consented, for he was really curious as to this unexpected development in the affairs of Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation. They would leave at the end of the business day, have dinner somewhere on the way, and reach their destination by midnight. As an afterthought, the father said: “By the way, there’s an airmail letter from Germany here, addressed in my care. No superscription on it.”
Lanny knew what that meant, but his voice showed no excitement. “I’ll stop by for it in the course of the morning,” he replied.
He drove to the plant, and when his father’s secretary gave him the letter he put it into his pocket and didn’t open it until he was back in the car. In the familiar script he read: “Your friend Weinmann is going to purchase the Vereshchagin, I feel quite certain. I have one or two other paintings which I think will interest you. Trust you can come soon. Braun.”
The arrangement had been that Monck was to write about paintings, selecting such as would give a hint of what he had in mind. Lanny knew nobody by the name of Weinmann, but he knew Ribbentrop, the wine salesman, and that was clear enough. Vereshchagin, the Russian, had hated war, and had made vivid its horrors in a series of paintings. Lanny did not overlook the phrase “is going to purchase,” instead of “will purchase,” more natural to a German writing English. The message told him that the Nazi Foreign Minister was planning a visit to Moscow, to arrange some sort of peace agreement, the deal concerning which both Hitler and Hess had dropped hints. The second sentence told Lanny that Monck had some project of his own and wanted money. The third was as near as he dared go in telling Lanny that these matters were urgent.
X
An item of news as important as this had to be taken to F.D. at once. Lanny had read in the papers that the Big Boss had gone back to the White House, and that fitted in with Lanny’s plans. He drove to a near-by town, and in a pay station in a poolroom, an unlikely sort of place for anybody to know him, he put in a telephone call, dropped in a stream of quarters, and asked for Baker. He was told that the man was expected back in an hour, so he said: “Tell him to wait for an important call.”
Then he took a walk, thinking about the future of the world he lived in—blacker every hour it loomed. Truly, it was like standing in the middle of a prairie and watching a “twister” approaching: a portentous stillness, and a great yellow turnip-shaped dustcloud sweeping nearer, its root reaching down, swinging here and there and picking up houses and barns and cattle, whatever caught its fancy. Lanny had never seen this sight, but had read about it. Here was a cyclone that swung over the whole earth, catching up nations and people in its deadly whirlpool: Manchuria, Abyssinia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania—and now it was hanging over Poland.
Lanny went to a new place to put in his second call. He pronounced his formula, and added: “I can’t come tonight. Make it tomorrow night or the next, if possible.” He was told to call again at four, which fitted in with his plans. Meantime he wanted to talk to somebody, but there wasn’t a soul to whom he could tell what he knew. The Hansibesses were near by, so he dropped in to tell them that he would be sailing for Europe in a few days.
The talk turned to the Soviet Union. Sooner or later Hitler was going to attack them, Bess declared, and they knew it and no doubt were doing their best to prepare. Lanny agreed with this, and wondered whether they might not become disgusted with their ally, France, and her politicians who refused to implement her treaty of alliance; also with the British Tories, who were trying to play with both sides. Might not the Soviets decide that Hitler was no worse than Chamberlain?
“You mean they might make a deal with that Nazi ape?” So spoke Bess; it was absolutely unthinkable, an obscene idea, a consequence of Lanny’s associating with the rotten ruling classes, people who had no more political morals than they had of any other kind.
Said the visiting half-brother: “Doesn’t it occur to you that the Soviet leaders may have heard the maxim about fighting the devil with fire?”
But no, Bess couldn’t bear to hear about it, to say nothing of considering it seriously. The Communists were men of principle; they had a cause to fight for, and it was the very antithesis of Nazism; their goal was a classless society, while the Nazis were building a world of slaves.
Lanny didn’t try to argue; he just sat and listened while they committed themselves hopelessly. He wondered how they would wriggle out of it, if the calamity actually came to pass. He loved them both; Hansi was a man of genius, and Bess had made herself at least a good pianist and a devoted helpmate. They had a faith, which they had built around them as a sort of armor against the cruelties and corruptions of the world. They would admit that there might be evil and selfish men in the Communist movement—yes, they had met such, it happened in every movement. But the movement itself was the workers and peasants of Russia and the struggling revolutionaries of other countries, and they were showing the way to the whole world! They were the hope of the world, and without them there would be no future! Uncle Jesse had said it, and now Hansi and Bess.
XI
Lanny put in his third call, and was told that he was to be on the customary street corner at nine on the following evening. Then he went home and packed his bags—not forgetting that he might stop off for a day or two at Baltimore. He drove his father—striking north and crossing by the George Washington Bridge so as to by-pass the traffic of a crowded metropolis. On the way Robbie talked about this phenomenon that had suddenly popped up in his pathway; Lanny had never seen him so completely at a loss, so disposed to consider the point of view of his ex-playboy son. He didn’t forget that Lanny had dallied with the New Deal for years, and had never formally renounced his interest in it. With the CIO in his plant, and now the WPA becoming his paymaster, the president of Budd-Erling was like a general who finds himself surrounded by hostile forces, and can only wonder what terms they mean to exact.
And then questions about the situation in Europe, subject to such sudden and erratic changes, beyond any man’s power to foresee. Lanny had never been pinned down so closely. Just what had Hitler said, and Göring, and Hess? In Hitler’s recent speech he had stated that his final terms had been submitted to Poland. What were they, and how much did he mean them? If the Poles gave way, would he betray them and take Warsaw as he had taken Prague? What had the Nazis done about Skoda, and what did Schneider say about it?
Of course Robbie didn’t forget the questions that all the world was asking: Was Hitler going to fight Russia, and when, and how was it going to turn out when it came? Lanny was free to tell of the hints that both the Führer and his Deputy had dropped concerning the possibility of a deal with the Soviets. This time, he discovered, the idea didn’t cause the least surprise. Why not? Nazism and Communism were practically
the same thing, weren’t they? Why shouldn’t they get together and divide Europe between them?
Lanny answered that they were alike in some ways and different in others. Both had what they called “monolithic” governments, that is, party dictatorships; but when it came to economics they were at opposite poles; the Soviets had dispossessed the capitalists, while the Nazis had given them everything they could ask for. Lanny told what Hitler had commanded him to report to the big businessmen of Britain and France—the enormous plant expansion and dividends of the great cartels under his regime. “After all,” said Lanny, “what do they care who pays them the money? They turn out the goods and have a permanent market.”
“Like me and the New Deal!” said the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft, with a wry face which his son couldn’t see in the darkness.
XII
Next morning father and son kept the appointment with the United States Army, and found that immense institution in a mood the like of which Robbie had not seen in a period of some twenty-one years. No panic or anything like that, but a firm quiet realization that the great U.S.A. ought to have more fighter planes. How many B-E P11’s was Mr. Budd prepared to turn out in the course of the next fiscal year and what would he want for them? What arrangement was he prepared to make for changes such as might be required if a part of the product was to be taken by the British or the French government? Robbie had all the answers in his portfolio. He told about the wonderful new Ascott supercharger, and at once the Army wanted to know when and where it could be tested and how soon and in what quantities it would be in production.
Really, it was the way things happen in dreams; in that so-common dream in which you are suddenly endowed with the power of levitation, and go soaring over landscapes where formerly you had to plod your way through plowed fields and mud puddles. It was as if some mousy little gentleman with gray hair and nose-glasses had come with a pair of sharp shears and cut every single strand of red tape in this huge office building. The reason, of course, was not beyond guessing; the Army, like all other institutions under a democracy, is kept on a budget, and has to be careful how it spends its money; but if somebody comes along and says: “The WPA will pay,” why then the brass hats behave like any family which is put on the dole—they proceed to spend while the spending is good. The unemployed workers of Newcastle would have jobs, the merchants of Newcastle would sell goods—and the tennis and golf players of the country club would go right on damning That Man in the White House.