MR. BALDWIN: Billions of dollars may be allocated in the name of the downtrodden and the displaced, without ever being of any benefit to those persons. Such monies may be used, and generally are used, to build an infrastructure of contentment for the sensibilities of the subjugator, rather than the material needs of the subjugated. Billions have been sent to Oregon and Alaska and California to build fortresses and gun emplacements and sea walls and other fantasies, billions have been allocated for the longshoremen thrown out of work by the total collapse of Pacific trade. But those men are not being cared for. Those walls are not being built. The money goes in, and it goes as far as the contractors and the concrete suppliers and the banks and the insurers but it never quite reaches the coast, it never reaches the unemployed, it never reaches the people who need their savings restored or their insurance paid out. And there are men in, for example, Governor Reagan’s office, who could tell you exactly where the money goes, if they cared to. If they were to ever stop laughing behind their hands.
MR. CRONKITE: So you no longer believe that the progress of 1964 was noteworthy?
MR. BALDWIN: I treat every victory, Walter—I treat even incomplete victories as water in the desert. But I do not lose sight of the fact that we remain in a desert, and this desert is not a natural circumstance. This desert was built and maintained by a white world that still, to all evidence, disdains true mutuality and would prefer to spend the budget of a paradise on the maintenance of a desolation.
“Well, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, you spent months working through Mr. Rebozo to convince Erlichman to get you in here for ten minutes, and what you’re telling me is that I’m a dope who can’t win this war.”
“No, Mr. President. What I’m telling you is that you don’t have a war to win.”
Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, peers at Eugenia Aldrich-Haines, knowing he is scowling over the bridge of his ski-jump nose. She’s some sort of Manhattan ice queen, this woman from Atherton Brightwell Haines LLC, with cat’s-eye sunglasses pushed up on a raven-black bob, here in the Oval Office to lecture him about the basic facts of the universe. What the hell has he done to deserve this?
“Eight years now we’ve been trying to stop that thing, ma’am. Eight hundred ships, three million dead, thirty-three—”
“Thirty-three major cities attacked,” she cuts him off. “Three hundred nuclear weapons deployed, to no effect, and those are just the American ones the public knows about. Two other monsters were apparently killed, but this one has been shrugging it all off for two presidential terms. More than Johnson got. More than you should expect if you can’t manage the monster either.”
“My preference for frankness aside, ma’am, in this office I am not accustomed to being interrupted.” The president steeples his fingers below his nose, fully aware that it creates the impression of a chalet below the ski jump. “Anyway, the American people lost confidence in Johnson because Johnson lost Vietnam to the communists.”
“They didn’t care that we had advisors in a skinny little country in southeast Asia for four years and pulled them out, Mr. President. They cared about the unkillable monster the size of an office building and the way it denied us the Pacific and shifted our economy on its axis. Johnson failed to manage the monster!”
“ABH does advertising work, correct? Well, you’re quite the ball-buster for a little lady from the land of laundry soap jingles. You trying to end your career?”
“Or get it properly started,” she replies. “It’s not a war if only one side can hurt the other. It’s just a situation, and situations are handled via management. When Vietnam became unsupportable, did President Johnson go on TV and tell the American people ‘sorry, we blew it’? No! He declared victory. We’d done our part and it became somebody else’s problem.”
“And he lost the goddamn election!”
“Not because of Vietnam, he didn’t. It was his inability to get his hands around the monster situation. Treating this mess as a war is leaving money on the table, Mr. President, and locking yourself out of a second term.”
“Uh, on the one hand, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, go to hell. You’re way out of line. On the other hand…” The president spreads his hands. “Why not? Keep talking.”
“When you can’t win,” she says, “you can still reframe the narrative as if you had. Move the goalposts. Change the terms. You know, the Japanese have these—cults, you might call them. Schools of thought relating to the entity. They call it the