Betty had been tensed against Tolliver from the start. She saw him’ as an intellectual enemy. To see Tolliver as an enemy was easy. Most of the graduate students did. To reveal antagonism was another thing. Tolliver was formidable.
Tolliver was a senior professor in the field of international relations. He came from old New England stock and his dedication to scholarship was savage, total, and complete. If his ideas led him out of the classroom and the library and into public battle he did not hesitate a moment.
His first public battle, when he was very young, had been a catastrophe. Before World War I he had been a pacifist. He had spoken and lectured and written against involvement with the European power blocs, he had attacked war as inhuman and obsolete, he had led “peace parades” in New York City and Washington. He had studied ancient war, medieval war, nineteenth-century war, twentieth-century war. Quite unknowingly he became one of the foremost experts on warfare in order to attack it.
At some point-it was never identified by anyone precisely and Tolliver never spoke of it-Tolliver changed. It was one of the most famous intellectual conversions of his time. Tolliver became pro-war. He abandoned his pacifist friends and their cause for a position on the other side so extreme that it startled even the interventionists: war was an ingrained part of any society. His argument was not crude, it was stated in the language of the scholar, it was replete with footnote references to history and to the psychology of aggression, allusions to Freud and the death-wish. Tolliver did not argue that war was good or desirable, merely that it would always exist as long as man organized himself into societies.
For several years in the thirties Tolliver had been intensely unpopular. He was labeled pro-English, a subversive, a turncoat. His classes dwindled in size. Liberal and radical magazines attacked him ferociously. But when America entered the war, almost overnight Tolliver became something of a prophet, a culture hero, an intellectual “with his feet on the ground.” Tolliver ignored the praise just as he had ignored the criticism. He survived even the public reason which he gave for not volunteering for military duty. “Some people with brains must stay behind and develop a theory of war and peace. I’m one of those best equipped to do that. That I shall do.”
He had been doing it ever since.
He was entirely a person of the mind. His age was indeterminate and no one had dared ask him. He could have been a burned-out fifty or a well-preserved seventy. His white hair was thin and seldom brushed. He had several suits; no one knew how many, for they were all the same conservative cut, the same excellent English cloth, the same hue. They all looked ruined in a few months for they were never pressed or cleaned and they were decorated with pinpoint holes where live ashes from the endless cigarettes he smoked had burned themselves out. When he stood up a small cloud of ashes fell away from him.
In a relaxed mood his face appeared weakly muscled. But it was an illusion and he was seldom relaxed anyway. Usually he seemed to be burning with fury. It showed most in his eyes-bright, blue, New England granite eyes, glittering with the hunter’s excitement. In argument his face went hard-musded; his nose seemed more beaked. At the slightest criticism of his ideas, even the suggestion of indifference, Tolliver attacked. He moved forward in his chair, his body tense. He looked somehow like a logic-chopping rat, teeth slashing into flimsy arguments, gnawing at more solid evidence with a terrible persistence. He rarely left an argument with the decision in doubt. His knowledge of war and society was so vast, his dedication so singleminded, that it seemed unlikely while listening to him that anyone could know more than he or develop a viewpoint which he had not anticipated and worked into his master view.
Tolliver paid no attention to university politics, his colleagues, campus social occasions, or other trivia. His students received his intense and narrowly focused attention, for he saw them as the carriers of ideas. Personally he knew only their names; intellectually he knew them completely. It was impossible to flatter the man; his eyes merely went icy with contempt.
The first time Betty differed with Tolliver the students in the seminar had tensed, leaned forward in their chairs and waited for the blood to flow. It did not happen quite that way. Betty had introduced some anthropological evidence that a certain Melanesian tribe waged peace rather than war. They competed at giving one another gifts, at doing small favors, at multiplying courtesies. It was dear that the example was new to Tolliver, but he attacked at once. The data were insufficient for general condusions, he said. Let the tribes be attacked once and they would respond with conventional warlike reactions. But they had been attacked and had not so responded, Betty said. She read from the study.
When she finished Tolliver came back with a ripping analysis. Betty countered with further evidence.
Black broke in with a neutral question and Betty glanced at him with contempt. He was in uniform and she had assumed that he would automatically support Tolliver’s views on the inevitability of war.
The argument had ended in a draw. Tolliver had muttered that he would check the original study and also other anthropological evidence. From Tolliver this was dose to a glowing tribute. Black congratulated Betty as they filed out of the seminar room. She cut him short. It was plain that she did not like men in uniform.
There had been other things besides his uniform she had not liked. When she learned that he was from the San Francisco dan of Blacks, she invested him automatically with all responsibility for the misdeeds of the Huntingtons, the Hopkinses, and old Grandfather Black. She knew Black was wealthy and she thought that the Air Force was Black’s hobby. Once she told him, “To paraphrase Will James, you seem to have made war the moral equivalent of being a playboy.”
It was during that semester that the man who was now President had started in politics, running for Congress in a nearby state. Needing all the campaign help he could get, he naturally called on his old dassmates. Black was one.
Betty supported him in that initial campaign, and once chided Black and some others for their political inactivity. When Black revealed that he commuted on weekends to help in the same campaign Betty was startled. In an ornery and hilarious way, which Black later came to love, she then attacked him for being linked with the Eastern “great wealthy.”
To Betty, Black seemed a perfect example of a dangerous breed: the power elite from the industrial, financial, military, and political world. It was Tollver’s seminar which gradually dissolved Betty’s notions about Black. One particular afternoon Tolliver had let himself go a little further toward preemptive war than usual. A young Ph.D. candidate named Groteschele, who had just recently transferred to political science from mathematics, had been present. He argued that the war against fascism was not over: the military struggle against black fascism must now be converted into the military struggle against red fascism.
It was the first time Black had ever heard Walter Groteschele speak, and as he listened he had no notion that it would be the first of scores of times. Groteschele was the earliest of the brilliant group of mathematical political scientists that developed after World War II, a group which later included such as Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, Herbert Simon, and Karl Deutsch. But for a few years in the beginning, Groteschele stood alone, without peer, just as he had planned it Nbw Black was only aware of a faint rasp of irritating at what Groteschele said. There was nothing on which he could put his finger, nothing he could use his intellect against-only a dim kind of restlessness, a sense that there was some obscure danger In what Groteschele said.
The professional liberals in the seminar shifted in their seats but did not speak.
Tolliver turned to Black. But instead of giving the expected reply Black outlined what he thought were the military reasons Russia, though dangerous, was a manageable threat to America.
Black spoke calmly and with authority and his eyes never wavered when Tolliver began to tense into his rigid posture of attack. When the attack came Black handled it calmly, constantly referring to expert opinions, studies, statistics, probabilities.
Betty was torn and it showed on her face. She found It difficult to side with Black the militarist but when finally she did it was with a fierce eloquence. The seminar did not end with the neat trimmed summation that Tolliver liked. It ended in a sense of tension, an odd unbalance. The students walked out gingerly.
Black moved toward Betty as the seminar ended. She got up quickly, folded her papers, snapped them into her briefcase, walked out without glancing at Tolliver. Her face was flushed and attractive. Black thought: she has all the charm of bawd unmasked at a Sunday-school picnic.
“How about continuing this over a beer?” he said in a low voice, leaning down just behind her ear. She turned so quickly her nose brushed against his cheek before he could withdraw. A blush spread over her face and deepened as she realized it. He knew for sure then what had remained true ever since. Betty was the most attractive, the most interesting, and the most quixotic girl he’d ever known. He was on the verge of kissing her on the spot, and
