Only Love Can Break Your Heart by David Samuels

Author:David Samuels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582435039

II.

The reporters file down the Corridor, past walls lined with framed reminders of the American victories on San Juan Hill, Iwo Jima, and the beaches of Normandy. ROOSEVELT DEAD, another headline announces. TRUMAN PROMISES TO RETAIN POLICIES. The clack of keyboards is already audible in the well-polished hallways. In the Briefing Room, the television reporters do their afternoon stand-ups; trash accumulates at the feet of their cameras. On the other side of the Corridor, close to the windows, is the breezy, light-filled office of CNN, followed by a cluster of three much smaller offices, inhabited by the correspondents for ABC, NBC, and CBS. In the press room, reporters type in their stories for Time, Newsweek, U. S. News & World Report, and twenty-odd newspapers, as well as Reuters, the AP, and Agence France-Presse. On the wall near the press room hangs a photo gallery of postwar secretaries of defense, from Forrestal to McNamara, Schlesinger, Brown, Weinberger, Cheney, Aspin, Perry, and Cohen. All of the portraits appear to have been snapped by the same photographer—a cold, distanced professional with a novelist’s eye for the single, telling detail. There is Mc-Namara’s Brylcreemed hair; Schlesinger’s professorial pipe; and Donald Rumsfelds flinty smile. As I follow the progression of faces from the beginning of the Cold War to the present it is possible, perhaps, to notice a trend. It’s not that the secretaries of defense got stupider. The job is different now. The men who administer the military aspects of that power are not philosophers or military strategists. They are corporate bureaucrats, the type one might expect to find at the top of General Motors or General Dynamics, running the largest industrial complex in the history of the world.

Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, a tall, blonde woman in her early forties, receives petitioners in her office at the end of the Corridor. There are more reporters in her office than chairs, and so the reporters wander, and chatter with the secretaries, and watch the bombing on CNN. The sun shines in, spreading lazy pools of light on the rug. Through a picture window I can see outside to the sunny perfection of an early fall afternoon in northern Virginia. The temperature is a spectacular seventy-one degrees, according to the weather map on CNN. Fluffy cartoon clouds are taped to the flat blue sky. Torie Clarke isn’t here yet. She is meeting with the secretary upstairs.

Three captive reporters sit slumped in padded chairs near the door, looking up at those who stand. After five minutes, or sometimes ten, you can see the reporters break their pose and start shifting sullenly from foot to foot, like high school students in the principal’s office. They lift their heads and raise their eyes, as if to indicate a yawning canopy of boredom overhead; they scuff their feet and stare down at the carpet. Efficient, uniformed secretaries type steadily away at their desks, sending lines of structured type across pages and pages of bonded government paper. Torie Clarke arrives, and she invites me into her inner office, where we sit together at a polished wooden table by a window.

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