The Shadow Cabinet Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Does he think he’s doing himself a favor?”
    â€œHe’s training for a cardiac arrest—that and fallen arches. You can tell by how they move whether they know what they’re doing or not. That guy doesn’t.”
    â€œThey’re everywhere you look these days,” Nick said as Wilson drove on. “You catch the Pentagon shuttle across Memorial Bridge at noon and that’s all you see—people running all over the place, like it’s lunch hour at St. Elizabeths.” The rain pattered against the roof. Wilson dimmed his lights for an approaching car and slowed down. After the car splashed past, Nick said, “It’s the same thing along the Mall or the Georgetown towpath. There’s a major in my office at DIA. He runs ten miles a day. He logs the Soviet SS-19 missiles, the Mod 4 SS-18 with ten warheads, both, but he spends more time on his jogging log. He calculates his daily mileage within two hundred yards.” He turned. “Did you realize that there are fewer than a dozen people in Washington who can understand the calculus upon which the claims for Soviet missile accuracy are based? Did you realize that?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t,” Wilson said.
    â€œThat’s where most of them you see running along the Potomac come from,” Nick said, his voice odd, a man hovering between two voids.
    â€œThat’s the way it is with those guys,” Wilson said, trying to evoke the Nick Straus he’d once known. “It used to be handball, then squash, after that, racquetball. I remember when I was in Berlin for a week or two back in the sixties, working on a Senate staff study. I used to play squash with a bird colonel, a short little guy who was still playing regimental football. A forty-six-year-old blocking back with gray hair, scabs on his shins, and a houseful of teen-aged kids. He could never make the adjustment. He had the reflexes of a kid, but he’d always overrun the ball. He’d nearly kill himself every time we got on the court, and the poor guy’d always lose. Then he’d jump in a hot shower, boil himself up like a lobster, put on his strangle suit, and go roaring off to his battle group, ready to blitzkrieg the Wall. He used to scare the hell out of me. I kept thinking to myself: This guy’s our tripwire out here? This nut? I used to see the same kind in Vietnam, the kind of gung-ho CO that gives pep talks to his troops over the bullhorn, then steps out of his bunker after the lights are out and gets fragged. That’s a kind of paranoia too, isn’t it?”
    He turned off the boulevard and up the hill through the tunnel of trees, conscious of that crude, colloquial voice Nick Straus sometimes drew from him. He didn’t know why he was telling him all this. “Anyway, that’s the trouble with the Pentagon, whether it’s Afghanistan, Poland, or the Persian Gulf. They’re always overrunning the goddamned ball.”
    â€œThey’re dusting off some of the old strategies,” Nick said, “and not just containment. Fighting a limited war with theater nuclear weapons, for example. I even saw an option paper the other day for reviving the old Davy Crockett. You remember that? It’s a sub-kiloton nuclear weapon, small enough to be carried by an infantryman. Totally destabilizing, totally insane.”
    Wilson turned off the shadowy lane and into the Straus driveway. Nick sat quietly in his seat, not stirring, still pondering some cosmic destabilization. Finally, he said, “How about a quick one, one for the road?”
    â€œThanks, I’d like to, but Betsy’ll be looking for me. She’s home by now.”
    Nick opened the door but didn’t get out, still holding the door open. “Sometimes I think maybe I didn’t put up enough of a fight when they wanted to retire me. What do you think?” He sat looking at the old coach lamp atop the post near the front