ASHES AND ECHOES
ASHES AND ECHOES
A Play in Three Acts
For those who waited to be counted.
PRODUCTION NOTES
On Time: This play does not move through time. It moves against it. Scenes may repeat with different outcomes. A line spoken in Act I may recur in Act III in a different mouth. This is intentional. Directors should resist the urge to clarify.
On the Four Visitors: Brecht, Beckett, Nietzsche, and Rumi are not ghosts. They are not symbols. They are not the playwright's mouthpiece. They are the questions that the historical figures are unable to ask themselves — given human form, given impatience, given grief. They should be played neither as wise men nor as accusers, but as people who have seen this before and cannot stop watching.
On the Historical Figures: Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, and Humphrey are not villains in this play. Villains are a mercy — they make the audience safe. These men are something harder: comprehensible. We must feel, at every moment, that we understand exactly how they arrived at each decision, which is what makes the decisions unbearable.
On the Mechanical Hum: It is the sound of systems. It should be felt in the chest more than heard by the ears. It never fully stops. Even in silence — especially in silence — the audience should sense that it continues somewhere just below the threshold of hearing.
On Staging the Void: When maps dissolve, when the room becomes dimensionless, when characters exist in two times simultaneously — the stage should not strain to represent this. Let the lighting carry it. Let the actors carry it. Elaborate scenic machinery will only close the space this play needs to breathe.
CHARACTERS
The Historical:
- LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON — 36th President of the United States. A man of terrible appetite — for power, for legacy, for absolution, in roughly that order. He contains multitudes he cannot reconcile.
- ROBERT S. McNAMARA — Secretary of Defense. An architect of precision who has begun, in secret, to suspect that precision was the wrong instrument entirely.
- HUBERT HUMPHREY — Vice President. A good man in the worst position a good man can occupy: standing just behind power, close enough to see everything, too far to stop anything.
- RICHARD NIXON — 37th President. Brilliant, wounded, perpetually in negotiation with his own reflection.
- HENRY KISSINGER — National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. The coldest room in any building he enters.
The Philosophical:
- BERTOLT BRECHT — Playwright, theorist, exile. Does not pity. Insists on clarity as an act of love.
- SAMUEL BECKETT — Writer of absences. Knows better than anyone the comedy of men who cannot stop and cannot continue. Is not laughing.
- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE — Philosopher. Brilliant, dangerous, frequently misunderstood, aware of all three. More tender, ultimately, than his reputation allows.
- JALĀL AD-DĪN RUMI — 13th-century mystic and poet. Has traveled further to be here than anyone. Brings with him the sound of reed flutes in a different century.
The Absent:
- THE DEAD — They do not appear. Their presence is structural.
A NOTE ON THE SET
A long table. Documents. A telephone.
That is all that is required.
Everything else — the maps, the fog, the fractured chronology, the sense that the room is slightly larger inside than outside — is accomplished by what the actors withhold.
ACT ONE: THE SCIENCE OF NECESSITY
SCENE ONE: METRICS
1965. Or thereabouts. Time in this room has always been somewhat theoretical.
The White House Situation Room. The mechanical hum is present from the first moment of darkness before the play begins.
JOHNSON stands at the head of the table. McNAMARA sits with papers arrayed before him with the precision of a man who believes in precision the way others believe in God. HUMPHREY sits to one side, slightly separated — the geography of the already-marginalized.
Military aides are frozen at the room's edges. They will unfreeze and freeze throughout the scene without comment.
Projected, without announcement, on the back wall:
"This is not a reconstruction. This is an exposure." — Attributed to Brecht; disputed by Brecht
JOHNSON (to the audience, while McNamara and Humphrey are frozen)
They tell me numbers are neutral.
Sorties. Tonnage. Body count.
Numbers do not weep at funerals. Numbers do not write letters home. Numbers occupy no particular geography and claim no particular name. This, I am informed, is their virtue.
(beat)
But I have been a schoolteacher. I have been a congressman, a senator, a vice president, and now I am this. And in all those years and all those roles I have found that the numbers are never neutral. The numbers are always the argument. The numbers are always the conclusion dressed up as evidence.
(The room unfreezes.)
McNAMARA (presenting, from memory, without notes, because he has memorized this)
Increased bombing sorties — we are currently at four hundred and fifty per week, proposed escalation to nine hundred — will yield what the modeling indicates is a logarithmic disruption of Viet Cong supply chains. The Ho Chi Minh Trail becomes, at sufficient pressure, a liability rather than an asset. The mathematics—
JOHNSON
The mathematics.
McNAMARA
—the mathematics are unambiguous.
HUMPHREY
May I—
McNAMARA
The models have been stress-tested against seventeen independent variables—
HUMPHREY
Robert—
McNAMARA
—including weather patterns, terrain resistance, and estimated civilian—
HUMPHREY
Robert.
(Pause. McNamara stops.)
When you say "civilian"—
McNAMARA
Estimated civilian infrastructure impact. Yes.
HUMPHREY
You were about to say something else.
(Long pause.)
McNAMARA
Casualty projections are built into the model as a cost variable.
HUMPHREY
A cost variable.
McNAMARA
All conflict involves—
HUMPHREY
I know what all conflict involves. I'm asking what we involve.
(Silence. The hum.)
JOHNSON
What's the alternative, Hubert.
HUMPHREY
I'm not sure that's the question I was asking.
JOHNSON
That's always the question. What is the alternative. If you don't have an alternative, you're not in the argument.
HUMPHREY
I thought I was in the cabinet.
JOHNSON
(quietly, not cruelly)
Those are not the same thing.
SCENE TWO: INTERRUPTION
A single, hard clap.
Everything stops. The figures at the table are frozen. The hum drops to a subterranean frequency.
BRECHT steps forward from the side of the stage. He is not wearing a costume. He is wearing clothes.
BRECHT (to the audience)
Observe carefully what has just occurred.
A man — a good man, I think, within the available definitions of the term — asked an ethical question. He asked: what are we involving ourselves in? He asked it sincerely.
And he was told he was not in the argument.
(He moves slowly around the frozen tableau.)
This is the mechanism. This is how it is done. Not with threats. Not with cruelty. With a very simple grammatical move: you transform the ethical question into the procedural question. You ask not should we but what is the alternative to what we have already decided to do.
(He stops behind McNamara.)
This man. He is not lying. That is what makes him so useful to the moment and so catastrophic to the century. He genuinely believes in his models. He genuinely believes that if you describe a thing with sufficient precision you have understood it.
(He moves to Humphrey.)
This man knows better. Which is why he will spend the next several years saying increasingly compromised versions of what he thinks, until what he thinks and what he says are no longer recognizable to each other.
(He steps back.)
The play will not tell you this is wrong and that is right. The play is not interested in your comfort.
The play is interested in your attention.
BECKETT drifts in from the opposite side. He moves differently — slower, as though each step is a decision reconsidered.
BECKETT
I find I want to contradict you, Bertolt.
BRECHT
You usually do.
BECKETT
You keep implying there is a clarity available, if only they would reach for it. A truth they could say, a question they could ask properly, and the machinery would stop.
BRECHT
Couldn't it?
BECKETT
(long pause)
I've been watching men in rooms like this one for a very long time. Across many centuries and many latitudes. And I think the machinery has its own momentum. I think the point at which a decision can be unmade passes very quickly. And then you are simply — waiting.
BRECHT
That's too convenient. That licenses everything.
BECKETT
It licenses nothing. It simply describes the weather.
(He looks at Johnson, frozen.)
This one. This one knows. Watch him later. Watch what he does with what he knows.
NIETZSCHE enters. He walks as someone who has recently been arguing with himself and has not entirely resolved the dispute.
NIETZSCHE
Both of you are circling it. You will not say it directly.
BRECHT
Say what?
NIETZSCHE
These men are not confused. They are not deceived. They are not — as your theater would have it, Bertolt — victims of false consciousness who need only see clearly to choose differently.
They have chosen. The choice precedes the justification. The justification is the performance. They are staging a necessity.
BECKETT
And we are watching the staging.
NIETZSCHE
And we are watching the staging.
RUMI is simply there. He has been there, perhaps, since the beginning. He stands at some distance from the others.
RUMI
The man at the head of the table cannot sleep.
(The others turn.)
I say this not as biography. I say this as diagnosis. Something in him hears what the numbers cannot say. Something in him has already begun to receive the transmission from the future — from those who will live inside these decisions — and does not know how to decode it.
This is what is being debated in this room, without anyone naming it: not strategy, but whether a man can act against his own knowing.
NIETZSCHE
The answer is yes.
RUMI
The answer is yes. And the question is: at what cost to the one who acts, and what, in the end, does the cost accomplish.
(Pause.)
BRECHT
Are we going to stand here philosophizing while they're deciding to burn a country?
BECKETT
What else would we do?
(Silence.)
BRECHT
Sometimes I genuinely cannot tell whether you're being absurd or just accurate.
BECKETT
I'm never sure either.
The room reanimates. The four figures withdraw to the margins — watchers.
SCENE THREE: THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITSELF
Later. The aides have gone. It is Johnson, McNamara, and Humphrey. The maps on the wall have begun to look vaguely geological — as though Vietnam is becoming a feature of the earth's permanent record.
McNAMARA
The question before us is not whether we commit further. We have already committed. The question is the increment.
JOHNSON
The increment.
McNAMARA
The rate of escalation. The—
JOHNSON
I know what increment means, Bob.
(pause)
I know what all the words mean. I have been sitting in rooms like this for thirty years and I know what all the words mean, and what I have noticed is that the words we use in rooms like this are very good at describing the situation and very poor at describing what the situation is made of.
McNAMARA
I'm not sure I follow.
JOHNSON
No.
(He stands, moves away from the table.)
I had a dream last month. I was standing in the Pedernales River — that's the river on my ranch in Texas, Bob, you've been there — and the water was running fast, and I was trying to hold it. Just hold it. With my hands. And the water kept going and I kept standing there with my hands out.
McNAMARA
(carefully)
Mr. President—
JOHNSON
That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that in the dream, I wasn't sad. I wasn't afraid. I was furious. I was absolutely certain that if I wanted to badly enough, I could make the river stop.
(pause)
That's the point of the story.
HUMPHREY
Lyndon.
JOHNSON
(turning)
What.
HUMPHREY
I want to say something that I will probably regret saying and that I should say anyway.
JOHNSON
You always want to say that thing.
HUMPHREY
This time I'm going to.
(He stands.)
The people who wrote me letters this week. Ordinary people, not political people — a woman from Minnesota whose son is twenty-two years old and who wrote four pages in longhand about his face when he left and asked me directly, by name, Hubert, is this necessary, is this truly necessary—
McNAMARA
The Vice President understands that strategic decisions cannot be—
HUMPHREY
I'm not talking to you, Robert.
(to Johnson)
I can't answer her. I don't know what to write back. And I want to be able to write back. I want there to be something true to say.
(pause)
Is there something true to say?
From the margins, NIETZSCHE, quietly.
NIETZSCHE
He is asking you to confirm a story in which this is unavoidable.
JOHNSON (who does not hear him, or who hears him)
(long silence)
I'm going to tell you what I think is true, Hubert.
I think we are in the middle of a river and we cannot get to either bank. I think the men downstream are drowning already and will continue to drown whether we wade forward or wade back. I think the question of which decision is right was available to us at some earlier moment that we cannot precisely locate and that we did not take. I think we are now in the territory of deciding which version of wrong we can live with.
(pause)
That is what is true.
HUMPHREY
(quietly)
I don't know what to write back.
JOHNSON
No.
(pause)
Neither do I.
RUMI (from the margin, barely a whisper)
And there it is.
The knowledge that cannot be acted upon, which is the most terrible kind.
SCENE FOUR: THE COLLAPSE OF LANGUAGE
McNamara, alone at the table. The others have left. He is writing a memorandum. Or trying to.
This scene should take longer than seems comfortable.
McNAMARA
(writing, then pausing)
"It is recommended that the United States proceed with—"
(He stops.)
(He crosses it out.)
"Based on current projections, continued—"
(He stops.)
(He crosses it out.)
"The following analysis supports a determination that—"
(He stops.)
BECKETT (emerging from darkness)
Yes.
McNAMARA (startled)
Who are you?
BECKETT
Nobody in particular. Please continue. You were saying.
McNAMARA
I was writing a memorandum.
BECKETT
You were trying to.
McNAMARA
(irritated)
I'm writing a policy memorandum that recommends—
BECKETT
What does it recommend?
(pause)
McNAMARA
It recommends that we—
(He stops.)
(Long pause.)
(Quietly.)
I'm not sure I can finish the sentence.
BECKETT
No.
(He sits across from McNamara.)
Do you want to know something remarkable? The sentence has been sitting in that position for three hundred years. Politicians, generals, strategists across a remarkable variety of wars and a quite limited variety of rationales—
All of them have eventually arrived at the point where you are now: with a hand over a document, and a pen not moving, and a very well-constructed sentence that stops before it says the thing it means.
McNAMARA
(carefully)
You're suggesting this is a known phenomenon.
BECKETT
I'm suggesting it's the defining phenomenon. The gap between the language of decision and the content of decision — that gap is the whole of political history. Everything official ever written is an attempt to paper over that gap.
(pause)
You know what the sentence means. That's why you can't finish it.
McNAMARA
(after a long moment)
The models are sound. The methodology is—
BECKETT
Yes, yes. The models are sound.
(pause)
That's actually the problem, isn't it? If the models were flawed you'd have somewhere to stand. But the models are sound, and the models recommend a course of action that requires, as a variable, a quantity of human death, and the models cannot tell you what that quantity is — they can only compute it — and you cannot find the sentence that travels between the computation and the decision.
(pause)
Finish the memorandum, Mr. McNamara.
(Long, terrible silence. McNamara picks up the pen. Puts it down. Picks it up.)
McNAMARA
"It is recommended that the United States proceed with the planned escalation of aerial operations over North Vietnam."
(He puts the pen down. He does not look up.)
BECKETT
Yes. There it is.
(pause)
How do you feel?
McNAMARA
Like I've done my job.
BECKETT
(very quietly)
That's the worst answer you could have given. And it may also be the only honest one.
SCENE FIVE: JOHNSON ALONE
(The room empties. Johnson stands.
The lighting fractures. He is younger. Then older. Then neither. Then both. This is not a trick — it is the natural state of a man being unmade by the weight of compound time.)
JOHNSON (to himself; to history; to the woman in Minnesota; to the young men in the river; to the future; to no one in particular)
My father died on this river.
(He looks up.)
Not literally. Metaphorically. He died in debt and in dignity and in a Texas that did not recognize the difference between those two things.
I swore I would not be him. I swore I would be the one who made the river stop.
(pause)
I passed the Civil Rights Act. I passed the Voting Rights Act. I passed Medicare, Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Head Start. The Clean Air Act. I sent federal troops to protect children walking to school.
(pause)
I am trying to tell you — I am trying to tell you — that I am not a small man. That I have not been a cruel man. That the thing that is happening is happening to a man who has loved this country with the violence of someone who was told it didn't love him back and refused to believe it.
(pause)
And still.
(pause)
And still I am standing in the river.
BRECHT (stepping in, gently — more gently than one might expect)
Say it.
JOHNSON
(long pause)
I know what we're doing.
(pause)
I've known for a while.
(pause)
We are burning a country to prove that we are the kind of country that does not burn countries. We are killing the argument by killing the people who are making it.
(pause)
And I cannot stop. Not because I don't know. But because—
(He cannot finish.)
BRECHT
Say the rest.
JOHNSON
(quietly, as though for the first time)
Because stopping is also a decision. And every decision now costs something I cannot calculate and cannot take back.
(pause)
I am not the Pedernales River.
I am the man standing in it.
(pause)
And I am going to drown.
Blackout.
The hum continues.
ACT TWO: THE EXIT THAT IS NOT AN EXIT
Projected:
"Withdrawal is also a performance. The question is: for whom, at what price, and whether the curtain hides more than it reveals."
SCENE ONE: THE GEOMETRY OF FACE
1969. Nixon and Kissinger at the same table. The maps are the same. The documents have different dates. The hum has gotten, somehow, slightly louder.
NIXON
You understand what I'm telling you.
KISSINGER
I understand what you're telling me.
NIXON
I'm telling you that we do not, under any circumstance, appear to lose.
KISSINGER
I understand.
NIXON
I'm telling you that history—
KISSINGER
—is written by those who—
NIXON
Don't finish that sentence for me.
(pause)
I'm telling you that the manner in which we leave this theater—
KISSINGER
(a slight, involuntary flinch at the word)
—the theater—
NIXON
—this theater of operations — will determine not only the American position in Asia but the global perception of American resolve for the next twenty years.
KISSINGER
(quietly)
Perhaps thirty.
NIXON
(studying him)
You've already decided it's not winnable.
KISSINGER
I concluded that some time ago.
NIXON
Then why didn't you—
KISSINGER
You didn't ask me. You asked me how to manage it.
(pause)
Those are not the same question.
From the margins, all four visitors. But watching — not yet intervening.
NIXON
(standing, moving)
Johnson couldn't accept the paradox. That's his failure, that's why he's on a ranch in Texas, that's why his approval ratings in the last year were—
KISSINGER
The paradox.
NIXON
We are engaged in a commitment we cannot honor by the means available to us — but that does not mean the commitment itself was wrong. The commitment is the foundation of every alliance, every deterrent, every arrangement of power in the—
KISSINGER
Mr. President.
NIXON
What.
KISSINGER
I agree with everything you've just said. I want to note that I also agreed with everything Johnson said in 1965, and with everything Eisenhower said in 1954, and with the domino theory, and with the strategic importance of Indochina, and with the necessity of demonstrating—
(He stops himself.)
NIXON
And?
KISSINGER
(quietly)
And there are approximately forty-five thousand American dead. And an uncountable number of Vietnamese dead, which I note we have not discussed this morning, or many mornings.
(pause)
I'm not sure what the conclusion of that list is. I'm simply noting the list.
NIXON (after a long moment)
The conclusion is: we don't lose another one that we can avoid losing.
KISSINGER
We agree.
NIXON
And we leave in a way that looks like something other than leaving.
KISSINGER
Vietnamization. Transfer of responsibility to the South Vietnamese forces, gradual American withdrawal, phased and legible and—
NIXON
—and orderly.
KISSINGER
(a pause so slight only the audience will catch it)
Orderly. Yes.
SCENE TWO: THE TRIAL
Now the visitors step forward. The scene does not stop — but it becomes, somehow, two things at once: the conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, and a kind of tribunal without gallery or judge.
BRECHT (to the audience)
Note: this is not unusual. Policy decisions are always simultaneously themselves and their own trial. The men who make them know this. This is, in fact, the condition under which they make them — with one eye on the present necessity and one eye on the verdict. The verdict they are imagining is not always the verdict that arrives.
NIETZSCHE (stepping up to Nixon, who does not see him or who sees him differently)
You are more honest than your predecessor. Admit it.
NIXON
(to Kissinger, but perhaps to Nietzsche)
We are in the position of playing the end of a hand we didn't deal.
NIETZSCHE
Yes. And you have decided that honesty about the hand is permissible, provided the manner of losing is controlled.
NIXON
I'm not losing.
NIETZSCHE
You are defining what losing means in such a way that it cannot be you who does it.
(pause)
This is called: the will to power applied to the past. You cannot change what has happened, so you are changing what it will be called.
NIXON
That's what leadership is.
NIETZSCHE
(pause)
Yes. It is. I'm not certain that makes it defensible. But I want to acknowledge: I recognize the move. It is a very human move.
(quietly)
It is perhaps the most human move.
BRECHT (to Kissinger)
Speak plainly. Just once. Just here.
KISSINGER (to Nixon, but the words land somewhere else)
We cannot win. But we cannot appear to lose. We can only — manage the distance between those two facts.
BRECHT
There it is.
(to audience)
Forty years ago I wrote plays about men who knew the difference between what they were doing and what they said they were doing, and who chose the language over the fact, every time, because the language was survivable and the fact was not.
I thought if I showed people this mechanism, they would refuse it.
(pause)
I was wrong about the timescale.
BECKETT (to Kissinger, almost kind)
How do you carry it?
KISSINGER
(actually turning, as though hearing something)
How do I—
BECKETT
The weight of the disjunction. The space between what you analyze and what you sanction.
KISSINGER
(long pause)
You develop a language that bridges it. A vocabulary of consequence in which the moral question is not absent but is — re-registered. It becomes a vector. A variable. It enters the calculation rather than standing outside it.
BECKETT
(nodding slowly)
And then one day the vocabulary is all you have.
(pause)
And you wake up at three in the morning — I'm guessing you wake up at three in the morning—
KISSINGER (not answering, which is an answer)
BECKETT
—and the vocabulary doesn't work at three in the morning. And you lie there with the fact. Without the language.
(pause)
That's the only honest hour most men get. Whether they use it is another matter.
SCENE THREE: RUMI'S QUESTION
RUMI steps fully into the light for the first time. Not onto the stage as performance space, but into the room — actually into the room — as though he has simply been sitting in a corner for the whole play waiting for the right moment.
RUMI
I want to ask a question that none of you have asked.
(Everyone — historical figures and visitors alike — slowly orients toward him.)
You have been discussing how to leave. The logistics of leaving. The politics of leaving. The appearance of leaving.
No one has asked: where do you go?
KISSINGER
(carefully)
I don't follow.
RUMI
You leave Vietnam. Geographically, physically, diplomatically — you leave. And then you are standing in Washington, or in a hotel in Paris, or wherever the machinery of American life carries you next.
Where are you, then? What have you brought with you?
NIXON
(hardening)
I don't have the luxury of—
RUMI
I am not asking you to have a luxury. I am asking you a practical question. Because I have watched men leave wars for several hundred years and I can tell you that the war does not remain where you left it.
(He moves slowly through the space.)
You are not withdrawing from Vietnam. The soldiers are. The policy is. The flags are.
But you — the men who decided — you carry Vietnam into everything you touch from this moment forward. You carry it into the next conversation, the next decision, the next country, the next war, the next justification—
(He stops.)
This is not a punishment. It is just physics. You put your hands into a thing that deep and you do not come back from it unchanged.
(pause)
My question is: what are you preparing to carry? Not what will history say — history has its own requirements. I am asking about the interior. What do you take with you into the room you sleep in?
(Silence. The longest silence in the play so far.)
KISSINGER
(finally, barely audible)
Strategy.
(pause)
I take strategy with me.
RUMI
(after a long, not unkind pause)
Yes. I thought so.
(He looks at Nixon.)
NIXON
(He cannot answer. This, perhaps, is the most honest thing he does in the play.)
SCENE FOUR: THE SECOND COLLAPSE
McNamara reappears — suddenly, as though expelled from a different timeline. He is older. He is carrying nothing.
McNAMARA
I want to say something.
(No one stops him.)
I want to say—
(pause)
I have spent thirty years—
(pause)
I calculated—
(pause)
The models—
(He cannot. He tries again.)
There is a number. A specific number. That I know. A number that corresponds to—
(He stops.)
(He looks at his hands.)
When I was at Ford Motor Company, before all of this, I designed safety systems. I worked on the question of how to make things that would fail in controllable ways.
(pause)
I brought that to the Pentagon. I brought the idea that war could be designed. That violence could be made efficient. That if you modeled it correctly, with sufficient granularity, you could control the outputs.
(pause)
I was wrong.
(pause)
Not about the models. The models were correct. I was wrong about what the models were modeling.
(pause)
I was modeling a thing that was not a thing. I was treating as a system something that was a collection of people in specific places at specific times with specific names and specific faces and I never—
(He stops.)
(Very quietly.)
I never accounted for the faces.
(Long pause.)
BECKETT
(sitting down next to him, quietly)
That's the most important thing anyone has said in this room.
(pause)
I don't know what to do with it either.
SCENE FIVE: DECISION
Nixon and Kissinger. Stripped down. No performance now, just two men at the end of a long night.
NIXON
We withdraw.
KISSINGER
Yes.
NIXON
Phased. Responsible. With the full transfer of—
KISSINGER
Yes.
NIXON
And if it falls.
KISSINGER
(pause)
It will fall.
NIXON
(pause)
When.
KISSINGER
Not immediately. A year. Two years. Long enough—
NIXON
Long enough for what.
KISSINGER
(pause)
Long enough that the causal connection becomes — arguable.
(Long silence. The hum is very loud now.)
NIXON
(very quietly)
Is that what we're doing.
KISSINGER
(very quietly)
I believe that's what we're doing.
(pause)
NIXON
Say it then.
KISSINGER
(pause — this costs him something)
We are withdrawing in a manner that preserves, for a period of time sufficient to constitute political cover, the appearance of a stable South Vietnam, after which the situation will resolve in the direction that the situation has always been moving, and which we will no longer be positioned to be blamed for.
(pause)
NIXON
(pause)
God.
KISSINGER
Yes.
(pause)
NIXON
Write it up as a policy framework.
KISSINGER
Of course.
(Neither of them moves for a moment.)
NIXON
Henry.
KISSINGER
Yes.
NIXON
Have you ever—
(He stops.)
KISSINGER
Have I ever what.
NIXON
(shakes his head)
Never mind.
(He stands, straightens his jacket, becomes the President again.)
Thank you, Henry. That will be all.
(Kissinger leaves. Nixon stands alone for a moment.)
(The question he didn't ask hangs in the air like smoke.)
BRECHT (stepping in)
What were you going to ask?
(Nixon does not answer.)
BRECHT
You were going to ask whether he has ever regretted something. That's what you were going to ask.
(pause)
You wanted to know if you're alone.
(pause)
Mr. President. You are going to be one of the most studied men in American history. Scholars are going to spend their careers unpacking your decisions, your psychology, your contradictions. There will be a library. There will be archives. There will be a thousand perspectives on whether you were great or terrible or both.
(pause)
And still nobody is going to be able to answer the question you just didn't ask.
(pause)
Because that question doesn't live in the archive. It only lives in the room you sleep in at three in the morning.
(He looks at Nixon.)
Are you alone?
(Nixon walks off. He does not answer. This, too, is an answer.)
SCENE SIX: SAIGON (NOT SHOWN)
The stage empties.
The hum.
Distant rotor blades. Growing, then fading.
Projected:
"April 30, 1975."
Then, after a moment:
"The scene you expect will not be shown."
BRECHT (voice only, from darkness)
Because you already know it. You have seen the photograph. The helicopter on the rooftop. The figures on the ladder. The crowd below that the ladder did not reach.
You have carried that image your entire life, whether you were born before or after it was taken, because certain images belong to everyone regardless of when they arrive.
(pause)
The play will not show it. Not because it is beyond representation. But because representation, here, would be a kind of relief. It would give you somewhere to put the feeling.
(pause)
The play does not want to give you somewhere to put the feeling.
(pause)
The play wants you to have to sit with it.
ACT THREE: THE ACCOUNTING
The room again. But now it is stripped further. The documents are gone. The maps are gone. The telephone is still there, but it does not ring. The table is there. Nothing is on it.
The four visitors and the three surviving historical figures — Johnson, McNamara, Nixon — stand in the space.
(Kissinger and Humphrey are in separate pools of light, slightly apart from the group.)
It is not any particular year. It might be all of them.
SCENE ONE: THE QUESTION OF LEGACY
JOHNSON
I want to be understood correctly.
BRECHT
You want to be vindicated.
JOHNSON
I want to be understood.
BRECHT
Those are the same request in different packaging.
JOHNSON
(flashing)
They are not the same—
NIETZSCHE
(gently)
He's right that they aren't exactly the same. The desire to be understood is the desire for the record to be complete. The desire to be vindicated is the desire for the record to conclude in your favor. You want both.
JOHNSON
Is that not reasonable?
NIETZSCHE
It is extremely reasonable. Reason is not the issue.
(pause)
The issue is that the record does not belong to you. You made entries in it. But the record was there before you and will continue after you and does not take its meaning from your intention.
JOHNSON
(quietly)
Then what did it mean for?
NIETZSCHE
(pause)
That is the right question. Finally.
HUMPHREY
(from his pool of light)
Can I say something.
(Beat. Everyone looks.)
I want to say that I stood in rooms where these decisions were made, and I opposed them in the ways that were available to me, and those ways were not enough, and I have thought about that for fifty years.
(pause)
I don't know if I should have done more. I don't know what more would have been. I know that the room I was in had certain geometries — certain arrangements of power — that made certain things possible and certain things not. I know I was loyal to a man who was making terrible decisions, partly because I believed in him and partly because loyalty was the only position I had from which to exert any influence at all.
(pause)
I don't know if that was cowardice or strategy. I have never been able to decide. And I am aware that the inability to decide might itself be the answer.
(He goes quiet.)
RUMI
(quietly)
That was honest.
HUMPHREY
(even more quietly)
I've had a long time to practice.
SCENE TWO: McNAMARA'S CONFESSION
MCNAMARA steps forward. He has been building to this.
McNAMARA
I wrote a book.
BRECHT
We know.
McNAMARA
I wrote a book in which I said that I was wrong. That I knew, or should have known, and that the war was a mistake. That I failed the country and I failed the men who—
(He stops.)
People were very angry about the book.
BECKETT
Yes.
McNAMARA
They said it was too late. They said an apology was—
BECKETT
It was too late.
(pause)
I want to be clear that "too late" does not mean "worthless." It means too late. It means the thing it says it means: that the moment at which the statement would have changed anything is not the moment in which the statement was made.
(pause)
It was still worth saying. I want to be clear about that too.
McNAMARA
Then why did it feel like—
BECKETT
Because you wanted the saying to undo the doing. And language cannot do that. Language can name things, and witness things, and transmit things across time. But it cannot reach back and unwind a decision made in a room in 1965.
(pause)
That's not language's failure. That's just what time is.
McNAMARA
(very quietly)
I counted them. Later. I went back and I counted all of them. Not just the Americans. All of them.
(pause)
There is no sentence large enough for the number.
BECKETT
No.
(pause)
That's why you keep trying to find one. That's what the book was.
(pause)
That's what this night is.
SCENE THREE: NIETZSCHE AND JOHNSON
The others have drawn back. NIETZSCHE and JOHNSON face each other.
NIETZSCHE
You asked me, earlier — you didn't ask me directly, but the question was in the room — whether it's possible to be a great man and still be catastrophically wrong.
JOHNSON
(pause)
Is it?
NIETZSCHE
The question itself is wrong. "Great" and "wrong" are not operating on the same axis. A man can reshape the landscape of his country — can extend rights to millions, can build institutions that outlast him by centuries — and can simultaneously, in the same life, with the same hands, cause a scale of destruction that no subsequent achievement can annul.
(pause)
This is not a paradox. It is just the truth about what human beings are, when they are given sufficient power and insufficient wisdom and an excess of will.
JOHNSON
So there's no verdict.
NIETZSCHE
There's never a final verdict. There's only the ongoing argument.
JOHNSON
(frustrated, suddenly exhausted)
Then what was it for?
NIETZSCHE
(pause)
I have been thinking about this question for my entire philosophical career. I have a very famous answer, which is: it is for the affirmation of life itself, which includes suffering, which includes failure, which includes this conversation. The eternal recurrence — if you had to live this life, every decision, every consequence, again and again and again forever—
JOHNSON
I know what the eternal recurrence is.
NIETZSCHE
(surprised)
Do you.
JOHNSON
I've read a few things in my time.
(pause)
And I'll tell you what I think of it. I think it's a beautiful idea if you are a philosopher in the nineteenth century and your legacy is a set of books and a mustache.
(Nietzsche almost smiles.)
JOHNSON (continuing)
If you are a man who signed the papers — if you are a man who has to imagine living the signing of the papers again and again forever — the eternal recurrence is not affirmation. It is a curse.
(pause)
Unless—
(He stops himself.)
NIETZSCHE
Unless what.
JOHNSON
(very quietly)
Unless you are supposed to choose differently. The second time. Or the hundredth time. Unless the recurrence is not the sentence but the—
(pause)
Is it the lesson?
NIETZSCHE
(pause — this is the most uncertain he has been in the play)
I wrote it as affirmation. But I wonder, sometimes — I wonder whether I wrote it out of despair and called it affirmation because despair was not a publishable position.
(pause)
I honestly don't know.
(This is the most important thing Nietzsche says in the play. It should be allowed to sit.)
SCENE FOUR: RUMI AND ALL OF THEM
RUMI stands at the center. Everyone is present now. The hum is at its most present.
RUMI
I want to tell you something about the reed.
(pause)
In my tradition — in the tradition I come from, which is not this room's tradition but which has some bearing on it — there is an image of a reed cut from the reed bed, playing music from the wound of its separation. The music is grief and the grief is the music and the music is beautiful.
(pause)
I tell you this not to offer comfort. Comfort would be an insult to the occasion.
I tell you this because I think every person in this room — the men who decided, and the men who witnessed, and the dead who are not present but are structurally essential — all of them are some version of the reed. Cut from the place where they should have been. Making a sound out of the cut.
(pause)
The question that I have carried for eight hundred years, and that I bring into this room, is this:
Can you hear what you are playing?
(He looks at each of them in turn.)
Not "will you be forgiven." Not "were you right or wrong." Not "what will history say."
Can you hear what you are playing?
Because the reed that cannot hear its own music — that plays without knowing what it is making — is the most dangerous instrument in the world.
(pause)
Some of you heard it. I want that to be on the record. Not to comfort you — to complicate the record. Because the record tends toward simplicity, and this was not simple.
(He steps back.)
(The hum.)
SCENE FIVE: THE LAST ADDRESSES
They come forward one at a time. No theatrical framing. Just people, speaking.
BRECHT
The play has shown you men making decisions. It has not shown you the people those decisions were made about. This was deliberate, and it is a limitation, and I want to name it.
The people the decisions were made about lived in a specific country, in a specific climate, in specific villages, with specific names, and the play has kept them at the level of implication. This is partly because there is no adequate dramatic form for the scale of what happened to them. And partly because this play is about the mechanism, not the total account. And partly because I suspect that to show them would be to aestheticize them, and I am not willing to do that.
But the absence should be felt as a weight. Not as a gap. As a weight.
(He steps back.)
BECKETT
I have been told that I am pessimistic. That my work offers no hope.
I want to clarify: I offer no reassurance. Hope and reassurance are not the same thing.
What I believe — what I have believed for a very long time — is that the capacity to see clearly, even when what you see clearly is terrible, is not nothing. It is perhaps the only thing.
Not because seeing saves anything. History suggests that seeing saves very little, in the short term.
But because the alternative — to not see, to not name, to construct the language that bridges the gap between what is done and what is said to be done — is to make the same room again. With the same table. And different men who are not different.
(He steps back.)
NIETZSCHE
I am usually quoted at this type of occasion to provide either the endorsement of will or the skepticism toward morality. I want to refuse both roles tonight.
What I want to say is this: the man who says "I had no choice" — and every man in this room has said this, in some form, in some language — the man who says "I had no choice" is usually telling the truth about his psychology and lying about his situation. He had choices. The choices had costs he was not willing to pay. Those costs were real. But the absence of will to pay them is not the absence of the choice.
(pause)
This matters because if there is no choice, there is no learning. If the machine simply proceeds, there is nothing for the next man in the next room to do differently.
(pause)
I believe — against my own reputation, against the use to which I have been put — that the next man can do differently. Not easily. Not without cost. But as a matter of available possibility.
(pause)
I'm sorry I didn't make this clearer in the books. I was showing off.
(He steps back.)
RUMI
I will say only what I have always said, which is that the wound is not the end of the story.
I do not say this to minimize the wound. The wound is real. The people in the wound are real. The particular weight and texture and duration of each person's suffering is real and is not interchangeable with any other person's suffering and is not adequately captured by any number or any word.
I say it because the story, in my experience, continues. Not toward resolution, necessarily. But continues. And in the continuing there is sometimes — not always, not guaranteed, not easy — but sometimes the possibility of something that did not exist in the wound itself.
This is not consolation. Consolation implies that the wound can be made comfortable.
It is simply observation. The story continues.
(He steps back.)
FINAL SCENE: THE TABLE
Everyone has left.
The table.
The telephone. It does not ring.
Silence for the first time — real silence, the hum finally gone.
After the silence has lasted long enough that the audience begins to understand it is intentional:
A document is placed on the table.
We cannot see who places it. Or whether anyone does. It simply appears.
Projected:
"Classified."
Then:
"Record Group 59."
Then:
"Exempted from declassification review under Executive Order—"
The projection cuts out.
The document lies on the table.
The audience and the document regard each other.
Very slowly, the lights go out.
The hum does not return.
This, finally, is the most frightening thing the play has done.
End of Play.
CODA: AN OPTIONAL EPILOGUE FOR SPECIFIC PRODUCTIONS
(To be used at the director's discretion. It should not be performed at every production — its power depends on being unexpected. If used, it occurs after a full blackout and a pause of at least three minutes, during which the house lights do not come up. The audience should begin to wonder if the evening is over. Then:)
A single light. A single actor — not any character from the play, but a person in ordinary clothes — stands on the empty stage.
THE PERSON
In 1995, Robert McNamara stood before a gathering of former enemies and said the words: We were wrong. Terribly wrong.
The Vietnamese general across the table — General Giap, who had spent his life opposing everything McNamara represented — looked at him and said nothing for a long moment.
Then he said: Why did it take so long to admit what you knew?
McNamara did not have an answer.
(pause)
I don't think the question needed an answer.
I think the question was the answer.
(pause)
I think we keep asking it.
(The light goes out.)
(This time the hum does not return.)
(This time it is over.)
PRODUCTION APPENDIX: NOTES ON STAGING THE PHILOSOPHICAL FIGURES
The four philosophical visitors present a challenge that directors consistently mishandle by resolving it in the wrong direction: they are made either too theatrical (robes, other-worldly staging, obvious symbolism) or too ordinary (modern clothes, casual affect). Both choices reduce them.
The correct approach is this: they should be as present and as material as anyone else on the stage. They should occupy the space fully. They should make coffee if there is coffee to make. They should get tired. They should, occasionally, be wrong.
What distinguishes them is not omniscience but perspective. They see from outside the moment. This should register not as supernatural awareness but as the very specific quality of attention that belongs to someone who has spent a long time thinking about exactly this kind of thing.
Brecht wants clarity and is, in some ways, the most impatient of the four. He genuinely believes that if people understood clearly what they were seeing, they would refuse it. He is not naïve about this. He has been disappointed before. But he cannot give up on the belief because giving it up would mean giving up on theater, and he is not able to do that.
Beckett is not hopeless. He is precise. He has stripped everything from his worldview that is not strictly necessary, and what remains after the stripping is not despair but a very bare, very honest observation: things are as they are, and saying so is the most useful thing available.
Nietzsche is funnier than he is usually played. He is also more tender. The mustache-twirling nihilist of undergraduate philosophy is a misreading. The actual Nietzsche was a man in tremendous pain who found, in the idea of affirming the full weight of existence, a way to keep going. He should play as someone who wants these men to rise to the occasion, not as someone who enjoys watching them fail.
Rumi should not be exoticized. He is eight hundred years old and has seen more than anyone else on the stage, and this should register as a quality of stillness rather than otherworldliness. He is the one who returns the play, when it needs returning, to the human interior — to what it costs, what it carries, what the room feels like at three in the morning.
A NOTE ON THE ABSENT
This play is structured around an absence that should feel present throughout: the Vietnamese dead, the Vietnamese living, the specific and irreplaceable weight of the people these decisions were made about.
There is a version of this play that centers them. It should be written. It should be written by different hands. The play you hold was written from inside the machinery of American decision-making — the architecture of the rooms, the grammar of the policy documents, the register of the men who held the pens.
That is a limited perspective. It is named here as limited deliberately.
The people who were downstream of these decisions were not abstractions, not variables, not costs. They had names. They had particular kinds of morning light and particular ways of saying goodbye to their children. They lived inside a history that the men in these rooms were making without adequate knowledge of what they were making, or sufficient imagination of what it would be made of.
Any production of this play should hold that absence in view.
It is structural. It is intentional. And it is not sufficient.
"The wound you refuse to see becomes the future you cannot escape."
posted by farid novin @ April 13, 2026
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