When he had emerged from the University of Michigan, which he had attended as a very young World War II veteran under the G.I. Bill of Rights, Raymond Cass Stanley had at first thought he would go into law, at that time still a well-thought-of profession not yet sullied by the burst of wildly irresponsible, lawyer-encouraged litigation that would come later. Quite by accident—he was to learn later that many and many a career in the Foreign Service had begun “quite by accident”—he had been “dragged,” as he put it humorously in many of his public speeches over the years—to a lecture by the then Secretary of State. Since the dragging was done by the girl he hoped to marry, Ray Stanley went along.

  Mary Porter was very pretty, very bright, and very determined; and long, lean, lanky Ray soon realized that he was going to have to pay considerable attention to her ambitions if he wanted to blend them with his own. He had never been particularly interested in foreign affairs except as everyone was involved in them in those days simply by the sheer overwhelming impact of the war, but that was Mary’s field of study, and that was what she wanted him to go into. It was what she intended to do herself, and if he wanted to come along and be a part of her life, he had better get moving. She was leaving for Washington within a week after graduation to apply for the Foreign Service.

  That precipitated everything. A hitherto shy Ray proposed, Mary accepted instantly, they wired her parents in Chicago and his in Indiana, appeared before a judge three days later, and as the week expired, were on a train en route to DC. Today, Mary was still very pretty, very bright, and very determined; and Ray, still long and lanky, if no longer quite so lean, was Secretary of State, after the recent three-year period, so well publicized in the media, during which they had simultaneously been ambassadors, she to Egypt and he to Greece. After that, she had retired but was still credited in Washington gossip with “running the department”; and he was sometimes dismissed patronizingly by the media as a “nice, mild, rather dull, and not very forceful Secretary”—except for two things.

  The first was that, more successfully than anyone since Dean Acheson had managed to do, he looked the part.

  The second was that he possessed a flint-like honesty and integrity that some found “unyielding and difficult” but others, more perceptive, valued in a capital city where these qualities were not always found in public servants.

  Standing six feet four, holding himself always erect and commanding, kindly and courtly of manner, possessed of almost fluorescently white hair, deep-set dark eyes, high cheekbones, a generous, almost-always-smiling mouth, and a charm that could turn suddenly and disconcertingly into a forbiddingly reserved disapproval when crossed, he was to many a formidable but heartening father figure on the international scene.

  “He just looks like a Secretary of State,” one of his most persistent critics, the columnist James Van Rensselaer Burden (As I See It, 323 newspapers, TV talk shows, books, lectures, etc.) put it.

  “If Jimmy Van says so,” Ray Stanley remarked with a chuckle when the remark was passed along to him by the inevitable Georgetown gossip, “it must be true.”

  And it was; and the disturbing and sometimes rather sad thing about it was that looking the part was even more important, in this television age, than it had been back in Acheson’s heyday in the late 1940s.

  The quality of secretaries of state had fluctuated a good deal in recent decades, and so had the sometimes wildly skewed perceptions of them in other countries. It did help, as another of his media critics, Able Montague (anchorman and creator of the popular shows Washington Wrangle and WorldView), had remarked recently, to “look like God on a Sunday afternoon.”

  (Again, Ray Stanley had responded with amusement, “Able really does run on, doesn’t he?”)

  But it was true. When he embarked, as secretaries of state had become expected to do these days on every possible image-making pretext for the President, on “shuttle diplomacy,” it did help when the plane door opened and out stepped “dignified, white-haired, commanding,” etc., etc. Raymond Cass Stanley.

  (“Don’t let it go to your head,” Mary often prompted. “It’s the substance that counts.”)

  Well, he thought now as his secretary entered to inform him that what they referred to humorously between themselves as “the usual suspects” were waiting in the outer office to see him, he did have the substance and it did count. Harassed at times by Jaime, thwarted at times by the Pentagon, annoyed at times by the pontifical pinpricks of media types such as Jimmy Van and Able Montague, frustrated and impatient at times with the committees on the Hill, he nonetheless managed to maintain a basically unruffled approach to his demanding and tiring job. Substance was what he had, and substance was what he brought to the task. If some didn’t like it, they had the chance to overrule him. He was determined it wouldn’t happen this time.

  Perhaps he was “an Arabist,” as they were called in the department; perhaps he did tend to favor the desert peoples, now so wealthy and arrogant, whose modest beginnings he could associate with his own in their desert capitals so long ago; perhaps the department’s “Israelites” did consider him too pro-Arab. The great schism between Arabists and Israelites had dominated policy toward the Middle East in the department for many decades.

  He supposed his position in the unceasing and sometimes exceedingly bitter push-and-shove had been inevitable ever since he, Mary, and a tall, dramatic (and then almost hawk-thin) black girl named Eula Lee had been assigned together to the embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, thirty-five years ago. From that point on, their careers had roughly paralleled one another. It was some considerable tribute, Ray thought, to the present occupant of the White House that he had turned to the ranks of the professional Foreign Service when he chose both his Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State.

  Brilliant minds—or not so brilliant, depending on the issues they had to face and the particular periods of unrest in which they had to face them—had filled the offices before, but not often were either drawn from the professional ranks. Academic laurels—business achievements—campaign contributions—the he-feels-comfortable-with-him syndrome—there were many standards for picking a Secretary of State and his immediate subordinates. Some secretaries had been adequate, a few outstanding, a tiny handful brilliant; many bore out the dry French aphorism, “There are no great men, only great occasions and the men who happen to be there at the time.”

  Without being immodest, Ray Stanley thought he might well qualify in the “outstanding” category. Not the best of the best but certainly very far from the worst; a good, moderate, toward-the-top-of-the-rankings Secretary, determined to serve his country and his President as the times might dictate, fully equipped by age and experience to do so.

  On the floors below, the life of the department flowed on, sometimes, he thought, almost irrespective of who sat in the impressive office on the seventh floor. He looked around now at its many antiques, carefully collected over recent decades in the great rehabilitation that had gone on under the prodding of department officials and others who felt that the Secretary’s office should look as portentous and important as many in the department felt the department to be.

  The office exuded, he had to admit, a most impressive atmosphere, rich, luxurious, hushed, deliberately overwhelming. He hoped, as he had before on the eve of such interdepartmental conferences as the one about to begin, that it would impose some restraints of order and comity on the participants; but he knew this was probably a vain hope. His office might cow heads of state, intimidate kings and princes and lords of the desert, but it did not often slow down the usual suspects; not when, as on this lovely spring day about to heat up into another crisis, each had his or her ax to grind in the labyrinthine, Machiavellian, and often exquisitely bloody battles over foreign policy that went on all the time in Foggy Bottom.

  * * *

  Elsewhere in Washington, and in many places far from Washington, various people as convinced as Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi and Sheikh Mustafa of the righteousness of their causes and the importance of their countries’ interests, were also about to become part of what the President of the United States would refer to later as “the ungluing of Lolómé.” That it came close to ungluing the rest of the world was something the President preferred not to dwell upon; or upon his own part in an episode which, he also remarked, “was either a watershed in international affairs … or just more of the same.”

  That he could dismiss it so lightly in view of his own performance was typical of the curiously detached spirit in which he approached his great responsibilities; an apparent lightheartedness that infuriated his critics and made even his most partisan supporters uneasy.

  “I can’t understand him,” Ray Stanley often confided to Mary. “He just doesn’t seem to care.”

  They marveled that a mind “so ironic and so removed,” as Mary put it, should have achieved the apex of the American political system with such a seemingly almost frivolous attitude; yet there he was. Among the Secretary of State’s many other problems was that of having to deal with this rather strange individual who had, after all, crowned Ray’s career with the high office he now held, and presumably depended upon him in many areas of foreign policy that he himself sometimes seemed too remote to care about.

  All Presidents, Ray Stanley had concluded after many years of observing politics and serving in the government, were “rather strange” people; it took a certain larger-than-life ego and ambition, an unusual and ruthless ability to balance ethics with necessity, a personality that in the last analysis defied analysis, to achieve residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All this, plus an aptitude for public performance which, in the television age, was perhaps the most important single ingredient. “The camera doesn’t lie”—but it did; it did. It was no more capable of penetrating the bland and exterior shell of Presidents than any other medium. It only transmitted an impression. If the impression was skillfully enough devised and shrewdly enough presented, there were only superficial clues to what lay beneath.

  So it was with the present incumbent, risen to power, first through the governorship of his native Minnesota, and then through the Senate, where he served a single, rather perfunctory term before seeking the White House. But even in that collegial body, where members were usually appraised accurately by their fellow members, he had remained something of an enigma, essentially withdrawn and unknowable, so bent upon his own ultimate purposes that he often gave the impression of just making a pit stop on his way to more important matters. The quick smile was there, the easy grin, the joke, the backslap, the hearty guffaw, the seemingly complete candor of mind and emotion, the carefully managed public image; but always, as Jaime Serrano had confided to Ray not long ago in a moment of candid frustration, “sometheeng ees held back.” With it, the President performed such domestic and foreign miracles as he deigned to involve himself in. The last go-round with the two Lolómés had also been the last time he had really exerted himself; and that, the Secretary felt, was not a particularly good omen for the new crisis now brewing in the desert sands.

  On that occasion Seedy Sidi, as the chief executive soon took to calling him in the privacy of the Oval Office, had launched an impulsive, but for a couple of weeks overwhelming, attack on the ill-trained and virtually helpless “army” of Lesser Lolómé. The President had reacted like a prior outwardly involved and inwardly curiously detached occupant of the White House: he had slapped together a hasty international “coalition” and gone to war.

  His coalition was much flimsier, much shakier, much more reluctant; but given the flimsy nature of Sidi’s forces, equally effective in restoring the status quo.

  Interestingly—but equally ominous for the future, Ray Stanley thought—“the second Gulf War” had ended in the same undecided fashion as the first—“the half-assed conclusion of a half-assed concept,” as the President’s principal critic on the Hill, Senator “Willie” Wilson, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, acidly described it. “The second Gulf War” had turned out to be essentially “nothing more than a skirmish in the sand,” to quote the chairman again—except that, facing a crisis, a President of the United States had once again deliberately taken refuge behind the United Nations to flaunt his courage and conceal his hesitations. In what had increasingly become the pattern since the first Gulf War, a President had again made his country hostage to the 110—or 120—or was it 250, so fast was the world disintegrating into impossible political bits—ancient states, new states, city-states, island states, and tiny-dot-of-land states that comprised the international organization.

  The United States, its options for decisive leadership increasingly tied like Gulliver by the thousand silken threads of UN weakness and obfuscation, was by deliberate choice of its Presidents crippled down even further in the exercise of that leadership which its position as “the world’s sole remaining superpower” (for the time being—China, Japan, Germany, and the increasingly insistent Second Soviet Republic were coming up fast on the turn) imposed upon it.

  In recent years, as Ray Stanley saw it, America’s chief executives had deliberately ducked this responsibility and, in so doing, had thrown away their ability to lead the world. They had done so, Ray thought, because they had no real idea what else to do. They did not want to lead, because that would expose to the world their lack of ideas and their inability to formulate fundamental policy. It was no wonder the United Nations was such an eagerly sought shield for them. It made their weaknesses easy to hide, respectable, politically quite safe. The convenient myth of “United Nations unity” made life simple for them. If they got it, fine; if they didn’t, well, what was a poor President to do? Be a real leader? Perish the thought!

  “I’ll be damned,” the chairman had also said, “if putting the American horse behind the United Nations cart, instead of in front of it where it ought to be, is any way to climb the mountain.”

  But that was how it was being done in the final years of the topsy-turvy twentieth century.

  At the same time, with the most bland inconsistency, American Presidents, through their Secretaries of State, were always lecturing the world from a stance of high moral righteousness about the ills of this government here, that government there, a frowned-upon internal development in some country, a defiant refusal to live up to American standards in some other.

  “You have set yourself up,” the Russian ambassador had remarked bitterly to Ray Stanley not long ago, “as the moral preachers to the world. You’re as bad as the Pope, but at least he has almost two thousand years of history behind him. What gives the United States this right, we all wonder?”

  To which, the Secretary had to admit, he had found only the lamest and most inadequate of answers. His reply, in fact, had deteriorated into an almost inaudible mumble, to which the Russian had listened with his characteristic, beady-bright, skeptical look. It had not been, Ray reflected uncomfortably later, one of his own better moments.

  But, he thought with a long-suffering sigh as the usual suspects came in, life had to go on. What, in their combined wisdom, should State suggest at the NSC meeting to avoid another slide into the international La Brea tar pit of “United Nations unity”? He watched them enter—all, as usual, prepared to do battle for their particular point of view.

  * * *

  First came the most aggressive and, as always, probably the best informed and best prepared: Joan Cohn-Bourassa, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs; chosen by the President for her job because, as a Jew married to “Boo” Bourassa from Syria, she was a famous and highly touted “fair-minded” expert on her particular area of interest, “the Arab-Jewish Dilemma,” on which she had been teaching and holding graduate seminars for the past two decades at Yale University. It was at Yale that she had met Boo, then a graduate student in atomic physics, and after defying her parents and his, had virtually demanded that he marry her. Boo was an amiable soul whose ultimate purposes, whatever they might be, were successfully concealed by his easygoing nature and silly nickname, which he had acquired in undergraduate days when his fraternity brothers had started calling him “Abu ben Adam” instead of his real name, which was Achmed. Soon shortened to “Abu” and then to “Boo,” the nickname had stuck and would be with him for life. He didn’t mind. Boo Bourassa—that plump, amiable, always smiling, everybody’s friend—had his own agenda and didn’t mind playing the gentle buffoon if that would conceal it. Not even Joan, steel-trap mind, severe hairdo, and combative manner notwithstanding, suspected what it was. Hers was so obvious and vocal that she quite overshadowed him. Which was fine with him.

  “I’m the Bourassa of Cohn-Bourassa,” he always told new acquaintances with a grin. “My wife is that dramatic lady over there.”

  And so she was, Ray Stanley thought with a rather tired amusement: small, dark, driving, and intense, intense, intense. And so famous, because Joan Cohn-Bourassa was a highly publicized Arabist; and mighty, therefore, were her words in the land.

  After her came Eulie Montgomery, again holding in her hand the decoded dispatch from the American embassy in Greater Lolómé. She winked at Ray as she took her seat along the big oval table at which he held top department conferences. Eulie always enjoyed these tussles, in which she quite often crossed swords with Joanie Bourassa. Honors were usually pretty well divided when the smoke of battle cleared.

  “I like the Ay-rabs,” Eulie often said with a humorously exaggerated pronunciation, “but I can’t say I’m really partisan toward either side. I’m in the middle of the muddled Middle East.”