The Man

Dilman pushed himself up from the desk and walked heavily toward Abrahams, joining him at the French doors. For a long and silent interval he looked out upon the barren Rose Garden. Then, as if addressing himself rather than Abrahams and Fla

He looked at Abrahams. “Nat, it’s my fault for not resigning when I could, for being a selfish and prideful mule and bucking the men with the whips, and all I’ll have succeeded in doing is to harm everyone-Wanda, Julian, the Spingers, and now the worst of it, my little girl Mindy. I knew I was up against mudslingers, but I thought I’d be taking most of the mud. I didn’t know it would spatter so wide, so wide and far and destructively. Well, I guess there is no turning back now.”

Absently clasping and unclasping his hands, he wandered back to the middle of the office floor. Aware of Tim Fla

Fla

“No. What could I say that would do anything but make it worse? Thanks, Tim. You’d better get back to your work.” Then, as Fla

He saw Fla

As Fla

Abrahams said, “Don’t worry about my problems. This is something altogether your own. This is personal. Act the way I know you want to act-like a father, and not like the President.”

“Yes,” said Dilman.

“Do you want to dictate this statement now?” asked Fla

“Dictate it? No. I just want to go out in the press lobby-yes, that’s what I’ll do-and speak my mind. You go ahead, Tim. Alert the correspondents that I want to make a few brief remarks, and that’s all.”

Fla

“Poor child,” he said, and then he left, with Abrahams following him.

After Dilman went through Edna Foster’s empty office into the corridor, where two Secret Service men fell into step behind him, and turned toward the Reading Room, he was conscious of his press secretary’s staff watching him curiously from their desks as he passed them.

Nearing the open door leading to the press lobby, now blocked by Tim Fla

“-I repeat, gentlemen, those are the rules. He’s decided to make an impromptu statement about the unfortunate story that appeared exclusively in Zeke Miller’s Washington Citizen-American this morning. When he has finished his remarks, no questions about the matter will be entertained. None, boys.”

“Hey, Tim,” someone shouted, “after he does that, would he mind a couple of questions about the impeachment trial? I’d like to ask him about the House witnesses yesterday from the Vaduz Exporters, who insisted-”

“Absolutely no,” Fla

Several voices yelled out, “Okay, Tim!… Bring him out!… Let’s go! Where’s the President?”

Tim Fla

Dilman’s lips were dry. His Adam’s apple had grown huge in his throat. His lungs felt hot. For a hanging second he wondered if this was wrong, feeding fuel to the scurrilous Blaser story, and then his eyes picked out Blaser’s toad face, puffed and important, toward the rear. At once, he knew that he must speak what was in his heart, because somewhere in New York his poor girl child might be waiting also, and listening.

Dilman opened the newspaper in his hand, studied it, then held it aloft.

“You all read this-this news, I’m sure,” he said. He cast the newspaper aside, heard it flutter to the floor. “It is quite true, every word of it. Despite its tone or interpretation, these are the facts. The facts are correct. I have a twenty-year-old son named Julian, who has returned to his studies at Trafford University. I also have a daughter, yes, she is older than my son, she is twenty-four, and her legal name is Mindy Dilman. I have not seen her, not set eyes upon her, since shortly before my wife’s death, when my daughter was eighteen or thereabouts. With my wife’s encouragement, Mindy left the Midwest for the East, to seek a career. Like my wife, more than my wife, Mindy was fair-ski

Dilman hesitated. “I might add, this is not unusual. I am well acquainted, as are most literate Negroes, with the history of our common ancestry. The information about ourselves comes to us largely from white sociologists and anthropologists. According to these authorities, there has always been miscegenation-racial mixing with consequent propagation-in the United States. This began in colonial times, although the most intensive interracial contact among Caucasians, Negroes, and Indians, as Dr. Gu