Daily Dialogue — January 3, 2019

President Jordan Lyman: It covers your plan for the military overthrow… …of the United States Government. 
General James Mattoon Scott: I presume, Mr. President, you’re prepared to back up that charge. 
President Jordan Lyman: I am prepared to brand you for what you are, General. A strutting egoist with a Napoleonic power complex. And an out-and-out traitor! I know you think I’m a weak sister, General… but when it comes to my oath of office and defending the Constitution… 
General James Mattoon Scott: I know how to salute a flag. 
President Jordan Lyman: You don’t know the democratic processes it represents. 
General James Mattoon Scott: Don’t you presume to take on that job, Mr. President… …because you’re not qualified. Your action in the past year has bordered on criminal negligence. The treaty with the Russians is a violation of any concept of security. You’re not a weak sister, Mr. President. You’re a criminally weak sister. And if you want to talk about your oath of office, I’m here to tell you face to face, President Lyman, that you violated that oath when you stripped this country of its muscles — when you deliberately played upon the fear and fatigue of the people and told them they could remove that fear by the stroke of a pen. And then when this nation rejected you, lost faith in you, and began militantly to oppose you, you violated that oath by not resigning from office and turning the country over to someone who could represent the people of the United States.
President Jordan Lyman: And that would be General James Mattoon Scott, would it? I don’t know whether to laugh at that kind of megalomania, or simply cry.
General James Mattoon Scott: James Mattoon Scott, as you put it, hasn’t the slightest interest in his own glorification. But he does have an abiding interest in the survival of this country.
President Jordan Lyman: Then, by God, run for office. You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country — why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You say I’ve duped the people. I’ve bilked them. I’ve misled them. I’ve stripped them naked and made them defenseless. You accuse me of having lost their faith… and deliberately and criminally shut my ears to the national voice? 
General James Mattoon Scott: I do. 
President Jordan Lyman: Where the hell have you heard that voice? In freight elevators? In dark alleys? In secret places in the dead of night? How did that voice seep into a locked room full of conspirators? That’s not where you hear the voice of the people. Not in this republic. You want to defend the United States of America? Then defend it with the tools it supplies you with, it’s Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight.

— Seven Days in May (1964), screenplay by Rod Serling, novel by Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Politics.

Trivia: According to director John Frankenheimer, the Gen. Scott character is an amalgam of Gen. Curtis LeMay and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The novel’s co-author, Fletcher Knebel, has said that he based the character on disgraced and cashiered former army general Edwin Walker, who was forced out of the army after having been found to be using political material from various ultra-right-wing organizations he belonged to as “training manuals” in order to indoctrinate his troops in far-right-wing politics.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Somehow this dialogue feels strangely relevant to the current political dynamic in Washington D.C..