Kaiju Agonistes

June, 1971

“Well, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, you spent months working through Mr. Rebozo to convince Erlichman to get you in here for ten minutes, and what you’re telling me is that I’m a dope who can’t win this war.”

“No, Mr. President. What I’m telling you is that you don’t have a war to win.”

Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, peers at Eugenia Aldrich-Haines, knowing he is scowling over the bridge of his ski-jump nose. She’s some sort of Manhattan ice queen, this woman from Atherton Brightwell Haines LLC, with cat’s-eye sunglasses pushed up on a raven-black bob, here in the Oval Office to lecture him about the basic facts of the universe. What the hell has he done to deserve this?

“Eight years now we’ve been trying to stop that thing, ma’am. Eight hundred ships, three million dead, thirty-three—”

“Thirty-three major cities attacked,” she cuts him off. “Three hundred nuclear weapons deployed, to no effect, and those are just the American ones the public knows about. Two other monsters were apparently killed, but this one has been shrugging it all off for two presidential terms. More than Johnson got. More than you should expect if you can’t manage the monster either.”

“My preference for frankness aside, ma’am, in this office I am not accustomed to being interrupted.” The president steeples his fingers below his nose, fully aware that it creates the impression of a chalet below the ski jump. “Anyway, the American people lost confidence in Johnson because Johnson lost Vietnam to the communists.”

“They didn’t care that we had advisors in a skinny little country in southeast Asia for four years and pulled them out, Mr. President. They cared about the unkillable monster the size of an office building and the way it denied us the Pacific and shifted our economy on its axis. Johnson failed to manage the monster!”

“ABH does advertising work, correct? Well, you’re quite the ball-buster for a little lady from the land of laundry soap jingles. You trying to end your career?”

“Or get it properly started,” she replies. “It’s not a war if only one side can hurt the other. It’s just a situation, and situations are handled via management. When Vietnam became unsupportable, did President Johnson go on TV and tell the American people ‘sorry, we blew it’? No! He declared victory. We’d done our part and it became somebody else’s problem.”

“And he lost the goddamn election!”

“Not because of Vietnam, he didn’t. It was his inability to get his hands around the monster situation. Treating this mess as a war is leaving money on the table, Mr. President, and locking yourself out of a second term.”

“Uh, on the one hand, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, go to hell. You’re way out of line. On the other hand…” The president spreads his hands. “Why not? Keep talking.”

“When you can’t win,” she says, “you can still reframe the narrative as if you had. Move the goalposts. Change the terms. You know, the Japanese have these—cults, you might call them. Schools of thought relating to the entity. They call it the Daikaiju, the ‘giant strange monster.’ They have books and comics and movies. They frame it as a force of nature and reckoning, a misunderstood messenger. Meanwhile, we call it the Mid-Pacific Entity. MidPac-3.”

“If renaming the goddamn thing a dicky-joo would guarantee me 270 electoral votes I’d do it,” says the president, “but your point remains hazy.”

“My point is that our branding is godawful. We’re fighting the so-called Second Mid-Pacific Entity War. Give me a break. This shouldn’t be the monster’s story. It shouldn’t even be the world’s story. It should be an American story; our monster, our nemesis, our heroic struggle! This thing should be the PACIFIC FREEDOM WAR. Burn that into the pages of history. Write it in letters a thousand feet tall. Let’s make the whole world use OUR words for this thing, and buy OUR movies and comics about it, and see OUR version of it, even in their own heads! We’re just muddling through when we should be using this mess to revitalize the American spirit and the American reputation abroad. Hell, back in the fifties, the Russians tried to hint that they could make a monster, and the North Koreans still claim they’ve got a bigger one in a cage—”

“North Korea says a lot of asinine shit,” mutters the president.

“The big difference is that we can make our asinine shit stick,” says Aldrich-Haines. “Why let the Russians and North Koreans and Japanese dare what we won’t? Whether we can kill the beast or not seems to be in God’s hands, Mr. President. In the meantime we can name it, claim it, slap trademarks and copyrights on every available surface, and flood the market with our version of the story. Use that story to sell America. Even to Americans. You know in your heart we’ve got a pretty good product, Mr. President. Let’s make the world want to buy it ag—”

A knock at the door precedes the sudden arrival of an out-of-breath National Security Advisor.

“Don’t suppose you brought a butterfly net, did you Henry?”

“Mr. President, it wants to talk!” Kissinger waves a roll of thermal paper. “The MidPac-3 entity. It sent a message by radio fifteen minutes ago. It’s intelligent! It wants to have a sort of, uh, parley! With you and other world leaders. On an atoll in the Marshalls, in about twenty-six hours. It claims the offer will not be repeated.”

“Oh, the Secret Service is going to love this.” The president’s mouth creases upward at the thought of all the browned trousers among the security men, whose blood pressures rise when he steps out for so much as a walk in the Rose Garden. “Ms. Aldrich-Haines, I’ll have the secretarial pool put as much of a travel kit together for you as they can manage before we leave.”

“Mr. President, you want me to—”

“Yes. Come with. You’re completely nuts. But maybe that’s what the situation needs. Let’s go talk to a sea monster.”