Fail Safe (9 page)

Black had seen Ned Black's library. It was made up of books by John Locke, Fourier, Robert Owens, the great Chartists, Marx, Spencer, Ricardo. The books were w'orn and used. Ned Black had gone off to the Civil War and caine back with an empty sleeve. He was a quiet man before he left and quieter when he returned. He lectured his children on only one thing:

man was social, he had a primary obligation to his society.

The Blacks, like all rich San Franciscans, gave to the Opera and the Symphony and museums, but most of their money went into schools, hospitals, and libraries. And not a single building they gave to the city bore the name of Black. Ned's sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons all followed his quiet, intense, and private way of life. They became ministers, businessmen, educators, and a few of them, to old Ned Black's great gratification, became politicians. Ned Black thought it the most noble of professions, the most necessary of social tasks.

Whenever there was a reform movement, a commission to investigate crime, an effort to broaden education, a Black played an important role.

Warren Black had not found it easy to follow the tradition. He had no flair for politics and little interest in business. Even when he had graduated from one of the best of the Ivy League schools he felt rootless and somehow guilty. In World War II he had joined the Army Air Force and it was there first, and later in SAC, that he found his calling. He flew and fought with unspectacular success and although he loathed the destruction of life he brought himself to agree that it was necessary. He was steady, competent, and with absolutely no desire for publicity. Over the years he had developed a love for the Air Force, although he knew that it should be impossible to love such a great impersonal organization.

Hehad met Betty when the Air Force sent him back to his Ivy League college after World War II to study international politics and foreign policy with the famous. Professor Tolliver. Betty had forced herself into one of Tolliver's seminars and commuted from Raddiffe once a week to attend. The austere old man had balked, but Betty's father was a famous professor of naval history and Tolliver had finally yielded. He pointed out bluntly that she was the first girl he had ever had in his foreign-policy seminar, that the talk often got "salty," that she would not be given grace because she was a female-female was the word he used, not "girl."

Betty nodded. When she appeared at the seminar it was more like someone coming to do battle than to discuss abstract ideas. Her face was scrubbed and without makeup. She wore severe little gray suits and she seldom smiled. She spoke with a strong even voice that

was overcontrolled. It was only midway through the semester, when her anger emerged, that her face took on a striking and handsome look. It surprised Black, for he suddenly realized that she was both an attractive and a very emotional person.

Betty had been tensed against Tolliver from the start. She saw him' as an intellectual enemy. To see Tolliver as an enemy was easy. Most of the graduate students did. To reveal antagonism was another thing. Tolliver was formidable.

Tolliver was a senior professor in the field of international relations. He came from old New England stock and his dedication to scholarship was savage, total, and complete. If his ideas led him out of the classroom and the library and into public battle he did not hesitate a moment.

His first public battle, when he was very young, had been a catastrophe. Before World War I he had been a pacifist. He had spoken and lectured and written against involvement with the European power blocs, he had attacked war as inhuman and obsolete, he had led "peace parades" in New York City and Washington. He had studied ancient war, medieval war, nineteenth-century war, twentieth-century war. Quite unknowingly he became one of the foremost experts on warfare in order to attack it.

At some point-it was never identified by anyone precisely and Tolliver never spoke of it-Tolliver changed. It was one of the most famous intellectual conversions of his time. Tolliver became pro-war. He abandoned his pacifist friends and their cause for a position on the other side so extreme that it startled even the interventionists: war was an ingrained part of any society. His argument was not crude, it was stated in the language of the scholar, it was replete with foot.

note references to history and to the psychology of aggression, allusions to Freud and the death-wish. Tolliver did not argue that war was good or desirable, merely that it would always exist as long as man organized himself into societies.

For several years in the thirties Tolliver had been intensely unpopular. He was labeled pro-English, a subversive, a turncoat. His classes dwindled in size. Liberal and radical magazines attacked him ferociously. But when America entered the war, almost overnight Tolliver became something of a prophet, a culture hero, an intellectual "with his feet on the ground." Tolliver ignored the praise just as he had ignored the criticism. He survived even the public reason which he gave for not volunteering for military duty. "Some people with brains must stay behind and develop a theory of war and peace. I'm one of those best equipped to do that. That I shall do."

He had been doing it ever since.

He was entirely a person of the mind. His age was indeterminate and no one had dared ask him. He could have been a burned-out fifty or a well-preserved seventy. His white hair was thin and seldom brushed. He had several suits; no one knew how many, for they were all the same conservative cut, the same excellent English cloth, the same hue. They all looked ruined in a few months for they were never pressed or cleaned and they were decorated with pinpoint holes where live ashes from the endless cigarettes he smoked had burned themselves out. When he stood up a small cloud of ashes fell away from him.

In a relaxed mood his face appeared weakly muscled. But it was an illusion and he was seldom relaxed anyway. Usually he seemed to be burning with fury. It showed most in his eyes-bright, blue, New England granite eyes, glittering with the hunter's excitement. In argument his face went hard-musded; his nose seemed more beaked. At the slightest criticism of his ideas, even the suggestion of indifference, Tolliver attacked. He moved forward in his chair, his body tense. He looked somehow like a logic-chopping rat, teeth slashing into flimsy arguments, gnawing at more solid evidence with a terrible persistence. He rarely left an argument with the decision in doubt. His knowledge of war and society was so vast, his dedication so singleminded, that it seemed unlikely while listening to him that anyone could know more than he or develop a viewpoint which he had not anticipated and worked into his master view.

Tolliver paid no attention to university politics, his colleagues, campus social Qccasions, or other trivia. His students received his intense and narrowly focused attention, for he saw them as the carriçrs of ideas. Personally he knew only their names; intellectually he knew them completely. It was impossible to flatter the man; his eyes merely went icy with contempt.

The first time Betty differed with Tolliver the students in the seminar had tensed, leaned forward in their chairs and waited for the blood to flow. It did not happen quite that way. Betty had introduced some anthropological evidence• that a certain Melanesian tribe waged peace rather than war. They competed at giving one another gifts, at doing small favors, at multiplying courtesies. It was dear that the example was new to Tolliver, but he attacked at once. The data were insufficient for general condusions, he said. Let the tribes be attacked once and they would respond with conventional warlike reactions. But they had been attacked and had not so responded, Betty said. She read from the study.

When she finished Tolliver came back with a ripping

analysis. Betty countered with further evidence.

Black broke in with a neutral question and Betty glarn*d at him with contempt. He was in uniform and she had assumed that he would automatically support Tolliver's views on the inevitability of war.

The argument had ended in a draw. Tolliver had muttered that he would check the original study and also other anthropological evidence. From Tolliver this was dose to a glowing tribute. Black congratulated Betty as they filed out of the seminar room. She cut him short. It was plain that she did not like men in uniform.

There had been other things besides his uniform she had not liked. When she learned that he was from the San Francisco dan of Blacks, she invested him automatically with all responsibility for the misdeeds of the Huntingtons, the Hopkinses, and old Grandfather Black. She knew Black was wealthy and she thought that the Air Force was Black's hobby. Once she told him, "To paraphrase Will James, you seem to have made war the moral equivalent of being a playboy."

It was during that semester that the man who was now President had started in politics, running for Congress in a nearby state. Needing all the campaign help he could get, he naturally called on his old dassmates. Black was one.

Betty supported him in that initial campaign, and once chided Black and some others for their political inactivity. When Black revealed that he commuted on weekends to help in the same campaign Betty was startled. In an ornery and hilarious way, which Black later came to love, she then attacked him for being linked with the Eastern "great wealthy."

To Betty, Black seemed a perfect example of a dangerous breed: the power elite from the industrial, fi

nancial, military, and political world. It was Tollver's seminar which gradually dissolved Betty's notions about Black. One particular afternoon Tolliver had let himself go a little further toward preemptive war than usual. A young Ph.D. candidate named Groteschele, who had just recently transferred to political science from mathematics, had been present. He argued that the war against fascism was not over: the military struggle against black fascism must now be converted into the military struggle against red fascism.