The American Ambassador Read Online Free Page B

Dunphy suddenly announcing: “We thought he was FDR. And greater than FDR because he was a man of the people, not an aristocrat come down from the Hudson Valley. LBJ knew common Americans at first hand, and was native to the newest region of the country, not the oldest, and had passions—what passions!—and a parliamentary skill that took your breath away. But he could never overcome the manner of his arrival, and then that fucking war. He’s brokenhearted now, won’t last a year. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? He hears it day and night, it won’t go away. I thought of the war like this: a storm that had been gathering for a hundred and ninety years, breaking suddenly, a deluge. He had the best minds around him, and he took their advice. The best minds were wonderfully articulate when talking about war. It became their academic specialty. And they were wrong and he was wrong, and there was never a greater error in the history of the presidency. What consequences! If he had come to the presidency on his own, what an eight years he, and we, could have had! That war is going to go on and on, and LBJ will be dead in a year. And I’ll go back to Washington and make a lot of money because that’s the other change I’ve seen. It happened just the other day, it seems. Money in Washington. You’ve never seen so much money, it’s a great sea of money, and there for the taking. For the asking. And as for you, you’re young yet”—he nodded at them both, his eyes welling—“you and your wife have lived abroad all this time, and you’ve never served in Indochina. My advice is, Stay away from it. Avoid the war, not because it will hurt your career, because it won’t. The Foreign Service is going to need somebody who is not in love with the memory of Indochina. It is not the only memory there is. Indochina is an aberration, an aberration for him, and for the country. Let’s go to bed now. I’m going upstairs to check on the old bastard. He’s probably reading, not asleep at all. He has insomnia. Many people would say that’s a small price for him to pay, and perhaps it is. But, as I say, he’ll be dead in a year. And our fellow citizens, or many of them, will be happy. But I like to remember a man on the best day he ever had, so I’ll remember him in the well of the House of Representatives, shouting—it was a shout, you’ll remember—
And we shall overcome!
And knowing what it meant. Or knowing it as well as any white man can know it, and feel it, too. You should have seen him, after he made the speech. And knew its effect. He spread his arms wide. I think he thought he could fly, that night. He took it all, ears, tail, and hooves. I’m going now, and as you know we leave early in the morning. I don’t know what we’re doing here, in the Federal Republic of Germany. We go to Paris tomorrow and then somewhere else. And then back to the ranch. I’ll be in Washington in a year. When you come back, look me up. I’ll be in the book, the yellow pages, under attorney at law. . . .”).
    Photographs of them together in Cape Town, Madrid, Venice, Berlin (the Wall), and at the summit of Kilimanjaro (Elinor pointing to a pile of bones and insisting that it was the carcass of Hemingway’s leopard). And at the rear, partly obscured by Venice and Berlin, Elinor's sketch of Bill Jr. on the deck (in the background, through the windows, the attentive observer could see the table with the photographs in silver frames). Standing in the kitchen, he could not see Elinor’s sketch. He could not see any of the pictures clearly, but he remembered them, each detail, and their locations on the table. The sketch was made on the deck late on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Bill Jr. at seventeen, tall and muscular, clad in chinos and a plain white T-shirt, an austere presence. Any stranger would have thought him