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Possibly from long years of peering out to sea, Henry’s eyes were permanently marked with what looked like laugh lines. Strangers mistook him for a genial man.
Victor Henry had started to drink and smoke on the death of an infant girl, and had not returned to the abstinences his strict Methodist father had taught him. It was a topic he did not enjoy exploring.
He liked to search out the extra detail in the extra-discouraging-looking fat volume. Surprising things were recorded, but patient alert eyes were in perpetual short supply.
I suppose it is rather funny when you think about it. But this grotesque fantasy happens to be the central truth of our age.”
The Lacoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that had destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste.
This easy-mannered fellow had an infectious grin and an automatic warmth, Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President’s. Some people had it, some didn’t. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was “grease.” Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.
It was going to be a tough ten years, he thought, for men with grown sons.
They shook hands. Then Warren did something that embarrassed them both. He threw an arm around his father’s shoulder. “I feel mixed up. I’m damn sorry to see you go, and I’ve never been happier in my life.”
“Sooner or later all families change and scatter,” said Janice Lacouture, “and out of the pieces new families start up.
“Berlin can catch fire, too.” Pamela suddenly looked about as ugly as she could: a grim, nasty face with hate scored on it in the red paint of her mouth.
The German is all feeling, all Faustian striving. Appeal to his honor, and he will march or fly or sail to his death with a happy song. That is our naïveté, yes, our primitivism. But it is a healthy thing. America too has its own naïveté, the primitive realism of the frontier, the cowboys.
Victor Henry was inexpert at self-excuse, having done too few things in his life of which he disapproved.
He was well trained in the devices of impotence, having won the presidency in a wheelchair.
President smiled at him with flattering warmth. “Pug, you have a feeling for facts, and when you talk I understand you. Those are two uncommon virtues. So let’s have it. Take your time.”
“Then what’s the matter with your people?” “Our people are about where yours were at the time of the Munich pact.”
“The American people don’t want to fight Hitler, gentlemen,” said Pug. “It’s that simple, and Roosevelt can’t help that. They don’t want to fight anybody. Life is pleasant. The war’s a ball game they can watch. You’re the home team, because you talk our language. Hence Lend-Lease, and this Atlantic Charter. Lend-Lease is no sweat, it just means more jobs and money for everybody.”
As for Captain Henry, this stumpy, sallow, tired-looking fellow of fifty or so seemed to the Foreign Service officer almost a caricature of the anonymous military man: short on small talk, quick on professional matters, poker-faced, firm, and colorless.
It is very dangerous in war, Lenin said, to think too much of yourself and too little of your opponent. The result can only be inaccurate plans and very unpleasant surprises, as, for example, defeat.”
“You’re a pessimist, Slote.” “I’m a realist. I was in Warsaw. I know what the Germans can do.” “Do you know what the Russians can do?”
History offers no parallel for this gigantic military bouleversement.
The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes.
Japan wanted to threaten the Americans with Germany, and Hitler wanted to threaten them with Japan. By uniting in a pact, the two poor nations hoped to paralyze into inactivity the rich nation that lay between them.
