“Me, I have a real fear of drowning,” admitted Schmidt. “I can’t even swim, and I don’t mind admitting that this voyage fills me with a sense of foreboding. My brother was a sailor. He was drowned on the Yorktown, at the Battle of Midway.” Schmidt smiled nervously. “I guess that’s why the subject preoccupies me so much.”
“You won’t drown,” I said, and showed Schmidt one of the two automatics I was carrying. “If necessary, I’ll shoot you myself.”
“That’s very American of you.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s the least I can do for a Harvard man.”
Schmidt opened a small locker by his bed. “I’d say that calls for a drink, wouldn’t you?” He produced a bottle of Mount Vernon rye and poured two glasses. Handing one to me, he said, “Here’s to not drowning and not getting blown up by a torpedo.”
I raised my glass. “And to the Big Three.”
I really don’t remember much more about the rest of that day except that Schmidt and I got as stiff as a couple of cigar-store Indians. That made me feel a lot better about what I’d seen on Diana’s rug the night before, which is to say, I stopped feeling very much at all. Schmidt probably drank about twice as much as I did. For one thing it was his liquor we were drinking. For another, I figured he’d had a lot more practice. He put the stuff down his throat with no more thought than if it had come straight out of a cow.
There was no fanfare for the president’s arrival on board the Iowa. Waking early the next morning, we discovered that the ship was already under way, and since it seemed highly unlikely that the Iowa would have left Hampton Roads without him, we concluded that Roosevelt must have joined the ship sometime during the night.
Donning thick coats and ignoring our hangovers, we went up onto the first superstructure deck to catch sight of the Iowa and its escort of three destroyers at sea. It was a raw, cold morning and the wind off the rough-looking sea quickly sharpened our appetites. We went forward in search of breakfast. In the captain’s mess, we found several of the Joint Chiefs and Harry Hopkins already at the table under the restless eyes of four Secret Service agents at the next table.
A cadaverous man in his early fifties, and clearly sick from cancer-a disease that had also killed his wife and father-Hopkins glanced up from his neglected ham and eggs and nodded affably our way. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly as Generals Marshall and Arnold continued their impenetrable conversation.
“Good morning, sir.”
Seeing Hopkins in the flesh-what little there was of it-drove home the strangeness of a man not in uniform and with no official position in Roosevelt’s administration playing such an important role in our forthcoming mission. Beyond the fact that he was from Sioux City, Iowa, and had been secretary of commerce, I knew very little about the man who had been living in what had been Lincoln’s study at the White House for more than three years. I’d seen men with thinner arms and faces, but only on a pirate’s flag. The cuffs of his shirt had almost swallowed up his hands. His salt-and-pepper hair was as dry and lifeless as the front lawn of a bankrupt tenant farm in Oklahoma. Shadowy dark eyes full of pain gave the impression he had been stabbed just under the heart. A cynic might have suggested that Roosevelt kept Hopkins around to make himself appear electably healthy.
Given the president’s brief, that I should understudy this frail, scrappy-looking man, I was hoping to get a chance to know him better during our voyage; but Hopkins was way ahead of me.
“Which one of you two boys is Professor Mayer?” he asked. “The philosopher.”
“Me, sir.”
“I read your book,” he said, and smiled. His teeth looked so even, I wondered if they might be false. “I can’t say that I understood all of it. I was never much of a scholar. But I found it…” He paused. “Very energetic. And I can see why it would appeal to other philosophers to have a philosopher telling them all how important they are.”
“In that respect, at least,” I said, “philosophers are no different from politicians.”
“You’re probably right,” and he smiled again. “Sit down, Professor.” He shifted his smile to Schmidt. “You, too, son. Help yourself to some coffee.”
We sat. The coffee was surprisingly good and very welcome.
“Coming back to your book for a moment,” said Hopkins. “It seems to me that while your approach is generally right, your details are wrong. I’m not a philosopher, but I’m a pretty good gin rummy player and, well, the mistake you make is to assume that every card you hold that doesn’t look as though it might make a meld is deadwood. Your deadwood might make the other fellow a sequence, or a group, and therefore you might be ill advised to discard it. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Maybe that’s true,” I said. Then, embracing Hopkins’s metaphor, I continued. “But there has to be some deadwood or you couldn’t discard. And if you can’t discard, you can’t complete your turn. I like your analogy, sir, but I think it helps my position more than yours.”
“Then I guess you should go ahead and knock,” grinned Hopkins. He finished his coffee. “I take it you play the game. Gin rummy?”
Ted Schmidt shook his head. “Just bridge,” he said.
“Oh, that’s too sophisticated for a country boy like me.”
“I play,” I said.
“Thought you did. Well, good. We’ll have a game later on.”
Hopkins stood, nodded courteously, and left the mess. A minute or two later, the two generals followed, accompanied by Agent Rowley, leaving Schmidt and me alone with the three remaining Secret Service men. A minute or two later, Schmidt excused himself. He looked as if he was going to throw up.
In their cheap dark suits, the three agents stuck out like a trio of gooseberries among all the uniforms and the Sloppy Joes like Schmidt and me. Underneath the White House veneer, they were just cops with better manners and sharper razors. In the cramped conditions of the ship, they seemed boxed in and unmanned. Thick-ribbed, urgent, puissant, they had the look of men who needed to ride on the running board of a presidential limousine and investigate suspicious open windows in order to give their lives meaning, in the same way that I required a good book and a Mozart quartet.
“What exactly does a philosopher do?” asked one of them. “If you don’t mind me asking.” The man tossed a packet of Kools onto the table and leaned back in his chair.
I picked up my coffee cup, went over to their table, and sat down. One of the other agents tamped his pipe with a biscuit-colored thumb and stared at me with dumb insolence.
“There are three kinds of questions in life,” I told the man. “There’s the how-does-fire-work kind of question.” I picked up one of his cigarettes, put a flame to it, snapped the lighter shut, and then shook the rest of his cigarettes onto the table. “Then there’s the how-many-cigarettes-do-you-have-left kind of question. Ten take away one equals nine, right? Most of the questions you can ask in life will fall into one of those two boxes. Empirical or formal.
“And the questions that don’t? They’re the philosophical ones. Like, ‘What is morality?’ Philosophy begins when you don’t know where to look for an answer. You say to yourself, What kind of question is this, and what kind of answer am I looking for? And is it possible that I might be able to slot this question into one of the other two boxes after all? That, my friend, is what a philosopher does.”
The three agents looked at one another with skeptical expressions and restrained smiles on their faces. But the Secret Service agent hadn’t finished quite yet with our oceangoing Socratic dialogue. “So what about morality?” he asked. “The morality of killing someone in wartime, for instance. Better still, the morality of killing Hitler. Morality tells you that murder is wrong, right? But suppose it was Hitler. And suppose you had the chance to kill Hitler and save thousands, perhaps millions of people.”
“You ask me, Stalin’s just as bad as Hitler,” said one of the other agents.
“Only, here’s the thing,” continued the man. “You’re not allowed to kill him with a pistol. You gotta do it with a blade, or maybe your bare hands. What do you do then, huh? I mean everything tells you to kill him, right? To kill him, no matter what.”
“You kill the son of a bitch,” said the third man.
“I’m trying to ask a philosophical question here,” insisted the first man.
“A philosopher can’t tell you what to do,” I told him. “He can only explain the issues and values that are involved. But in the end, it’s up to you to decide what’s right. Choices such as the one you describe can be difficult.”
