The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  It was one of those specialists who occupied Damon’s early musings as he scraped the stubble off his face. The IPS aviation editor, Rod Pitcher, normally covered all presidential arrivals and departures at Andrews Air Force Base. Any forty-dollar-a-week copy boy could have phoned in a landing or take-off time. Tonight’s, for example, would be transmitted on IPS wires mostly so the Los Angeles bureau would know when to staff the Palm Springs arrival. But Pitcher knew airplanes and Damon liked to assign him to Andrews on the one-in-ten-million chance that something would happen to Air Force One on take-off or landing.

  Up until two months ago Pitcher had been the ideal wire service reporter, namely a man who never beefed at extra night work. The metamorphosis had occurred with his marriage to an American Airlines stewardess, transforming Mr. Pitcher into a typical newlywed who blackly resented anything that took him away from his bride after 6 P.M., and causing confirmed bachelor Damon to observe sourly —and with only partial accuracy—that “marriage has ruined more goddamned good reporters than the Press Club bar.”

  And, Damon knew, Pitcher would object loudly to covering this presidential departure—at the unusual and ungodly hour of 10 P.M. The aviation writer, like the science, religion, political and general feature specialists, was ineligible for overtime. It was either Pitcher or about ten dollars in overtime pay drained from the Washington Bureau’s tight budget. The alternative was to send someone from the undermanned night desk.

  Pitcher it would be, Damon decided. He’d give Rod a Friday off sometime as repayment. Let the lovesick bastard gripe and bitch for a change. Pitcher was somewhat spoiled, anyway. He got more free junkets than anyone else in the office and it was widely rumored that at Christmastime Pitcher asked the airlines to send his annual presents to his home so the rest of the IPS staff wouldn’t see all the embarrassing loot.

  Having reached this eminently satisfactory decision—a subconscious reprisal against Pitcher’s recent tendency to goof off—Damon suddenly started wondering exactly why the President chose a late night departure. Press Secretary Phil Sabath had explained at yesterday’s regular 4 P.M. briefing that the President had many things to do before leaving on a badly needed vacation.

  “Like what?” IPS senior White House correspondent Malcolm Jones had asked impertinently.

  “Quite a bit of last-minute paperwork and study of various reports,” Sabath had answered. “Stuff he doesn’t want to take with him to Palm Springs. As I’ve explained to you guys before, he’s going for a rest—repeat, rest. God knows, he needs one.”

  Made sense, Damon was thinking. Except there was something that bothered him about that take-off time. It would get Air Force One into Palm Springs around midnight West Coast time or even later. That would make it a rather tiring trip for a man so obviously worn by the demands of the presidency that his fatigue sometimes showed perceptibly in photographs. Which in turn poured additional nourishing water on Gunther Damon’s inbred seeds of suspicion. It was not like Haines to take a vacation in the middle of worsening international affairs. True, every President carried both office and duties in his pocket, no matter where he was. Maybe the trip was designed to ease general concern over Red China, Damon speculated. A sort of “things aren’t so bad that I can’t take some time off” soothing sedative for public, press and stock market.

  Damon shared with the majority of his colleagues their large quota of esteem for the man who was President of the United States, and it was a quota in inverse proportion to the lack of esteem they possessed for the man who was Vice President of the United States. This largely explained Damon’s hazy, undefined concern about the Palm Springs flight. Not the trip itself, but the expressed reason for it— fatigue and the need for a rest.

  In the eyes of a distrustful newspaperman, official explanations too often turned out to be camouflage. Damon had only to think back to the persistent denials that FDR was ailing, or the famous Eisenhower stomach upset that wound up as a major heart attack. If he wanted to go back further in history, there was the incredible cover-up of Wilson’s incapacitating stroke.

  Because he desperately wanted to believe that the President merely was tired and really needed a vacation, he put his misgivings aside temporarily, a bank deposit of incredibility to be drawn on later if circumstances warranted. After all, he reasoned, Haines hadn’t looked like a sick man when Damon saw him up close two weeks before, at a White House reception for the Washington press corps. A little tired, perhaps, but that was to be expected. Maybe the vacation story was legitimate after all.

  This chain of more optimistic deduction took Damon through the concluding application of English Leather on a face remarkably unlined and youthful, belying his forty-five years of age. He had always looked younger than his years. At twenty, as a cub reporter, he had grown a mustache to add a semblance of maturity. The mustache departed the scene five years later but Damon had since managed to offset his baby-faced appearance with rule-riveted discipline governing a traditionally unruly wire service office. When Gunther Damon chewed out an errant staffer, his five feet eight seemed to swell to six feet. He was simultaneously fair and tough. He was a good editor because he had curiosity, imagination and integrity, virtues which he had managed to implant in most of his staff. Typical of most good wire service executives, he was not a particularly smooth or accomplished writer himself. But he could tell good writing, would encourage good writing and above all he had the ability to prune, revise or organize ordinary copy into stories that were simple without being condescending, dramatic without straining for effect, hard-hitting with no tinge of biased editorializing.

  Like so many experienced Washington correspondents, he had acquired a professional personality that emerged as an incongruous mixture of cynicism and idealism, suspicion and enthusiasm. He was an instinctive crusader blessed with an equally instinctive sense of objectivity. He was, in brief, an excellent example of that journalistic breed known as the wire service editor, a man of unappreciated and underpaid competence. If wire services were the infantry of the newspaper world, men like Gunther Damon were their top sergeants—crafty veterans who knew how to cajole, wheedle, soft-soap, inspire and occasionally frighten men of lesser ability into performances beyond their supposed capability.

  His own by-line rarely appeared on an IPS wire. He was a director who could strain a superb performance out of a lackadaisical actor, yet not be able to deliver a line of his own. A maestro who might mangle his own playing but still could weld a collection of average musicians into a majestic orchestra. A teacher capable of infusing others with genius without being close to genius himself. He could teach a man how to write a taut story without the fat of padded, adjective-laden verbiage. To use words that painted pictures and gave off real odors. To transmit excitement without screaming”. Or shouting.

  He was modest and therefore touched with a modicum of insecurity which he kept hidden under a cloak of brusque authority and staccato decisions. His top writers never knew that he sometimes envied them; they were too busy complaining about the occasional surgery he performed on their precious copy. He could have been an excellent writer on his own, but he had lived too long on a diet of what other people wrote. If he had ever tried a novel, the characters would have been no deeper than sweat on skin. Speed, brevity, clarity were the cornerstones of a good wire service report. It was a one-dimensional, superficial kind of topical literature because it had to be. Because it could not be slowed down any more than the world and its events could be slowed down.

  If he occasionally succumbed to envy of others, it was a fleeting emotion with no vestige of self-pity. He liked being a newspaperman too much to indulge in that weakness. From boyhood, his heroes and his idols had not been athletes or soldiers or statesmen. The names he had worshiped were Zenger, Greeley, Pultizer and Bennett. His bibles were the great newspapers and wire services. He still possessed the book his father had given him a long, long time ago, a history of journalism on whose flyleaf his parent had inscribed:


  “To Gunther on the occasion of his 14th birthday, from one who can merely quote the words of Henry Ward Beecher—‘that endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.’ ”

  He had stayed a bachelor, rationalizing that marriage would have made him a schizophrenic, with divided and incompatible loyalties. He knew he would use IPS as a crutch for every tension, every difficulty, every misunderstanding that normally occurs in a marriage. And he knew he could not keep Gunther Damon, the husband, separate from Gunther Damon, the IPS boss. Other newspapermen had happy marriages, he conceded, but they lacked his all-consuming dedication to his job. International Press Service was his wife, his mistress. He funneled all his sense of responsibility through the single channel that was the wire service. And while he was frequently lonely and dissatisfied, he made enough feminine conquests to delude himself that sex was better if it were varied.

  Gunther Damon dressed, his last act being the affixing of the jaunty bow tie he invariably wore to work. He drove out of the high-rise complex onto the curving Washington Beltway, that sixty-six-mile sash around the capital area, across the Cabin John Bridge into Virginia and then down the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It was a pleasant, tree-lined trip seven, miles longer than the most direct route between Bethesda and downtown Washington. Damon preferred it because it was easier with no traffic lights most of the way and far less traffic after 9 A.M., and because it gave ‘his active mind an additional opportunity for advance inspection of the day’s forthcoming problems.

  He was wheeling peacefully along at the legal fifty-mile limit, all windows down on this hot early September day, when another sliver of suspicion pricked his thinking process. Malcolm Jones had told him Air Force One would not be carrying the usual press contingent—one man each from IPS, UPI, and AP, plus network pool reporters.

  “We’ll have to go on the press charter,” Jones had informed him. “I don’t know exactly why—Haines usually likes to have a few regular reporters around on a long flight. But Sabath says no soap this time.”

  This announcement hadn’t bothered Damon at the time. Now it suddenly invaded his thoughts like the first sign of an unwanted cold. It nagged him, bothered him, disturbed him. He hoped again that the President was not ill.

  The Vice President of the United States awoke, that Monday morning, acutely aware that his speech last night before the General Federation of Tax Accountants had laid an egg capable of hatching a dinosaur.

  Vice President Frederick James Madigan’s mediocrity extended even to his physical appearance. It was not that he had unpleasant features or obvious physical faults. He simply looked so nondescript and average that the newspaper cartoonists complained he was impossible to caricature.

  His nose was slightly large but not in the Roman category. His jaw didn’t resemble something hewed out of granite, but it wasn’t weak either. He had a pleasant smile but it wouldn’t dazzle anybody. At the age of forty-nine he had the suggestion of a potbelly but he was by no means fat. He was five feet nine, which speaks for itself. His eyebrows were his only distinguishing facial feature—they slanted southward, like an oriental’s turned upside down. Yet the reverse slant was not pronounced enough to give him that sympathy-attracting look of perpetual melancholy, the appearance of a martyr always on the verge of justifiable tears. In brief, his face had all the warmth, personality and individualism of an amoeba.

  He also was a man cursed by a sensitiveness that recognized his mediocrity. This added up to a sense of gnawing frustration, because Fred Madigan wanted desperately to be liked and, more important, respected. He was more tolerated than liked, and he was seldom respected.

  Take last night’s speech. It was typical Madigan oratory, saturated with platitudes and empty pomposity. Which, as a matter of fact, described the Vice President. A columnist had once compared Madigan’s mind to “a vast desert, occasionally invaded by a covered-wagon cliché.”

  The speech had been written by Madigan’s administrative assistant, who called the VP “chief and kept his job mainly because he was one of the few people in Washington who could make Madigan feel important. Like the VP, he was well-meaning but armed with a vaporous intellect. He had turned over the speech to Madigan with enthusiastic confidence born of ignorance.

  “It’s a nut-twister, Chief,” he had announced. “Hard-hitting and a great joke to open up with.”

  Because Madigan himself could not recognize a well-written speech if it walked up and bit him, he shared his AA’s opinion. Until the delivery itself. The great opening joke lay down and died, recipient of what is dreaded most by comedians and politicians alike—a few chuckles generated solely by politeness. Ditto the speech. The applause was perfunctory to the point of being insulting. Naturally the toastmaster was generous with his praise—“a fine speech, Mr. Vice President”—and a number of delegates (not many, but a few) had approached Madigan to offer congratulations.

  “Excellent talk, Mr. Vice President.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  They reminded Madigan of small boys approaching the crestfallen players of a losing pro football team to ask for autographs regardless of their ignominious fall from hero status. Fawning people, themselves inconsequential, who would go home and brag, “I met the Vice President.” He knew it was his office, not himself or what he had said, that generated even a modicum of worshipful attention. Now that it was over, he realized he had—as usual— talked too long and had said nothing. That he could realize it was one of his few virtues. That he never could do anything about it was one of his numerous faults.

  Now he lay in bed, trying to dredge a few pebbles of satisfaction from last night’s failure. After all, it was a rather uninspiring audience. What the hell could you say to a bunch of tax accountants that could raise blood pressure and prompt wild cheering? He had praised their profession as “vitally important to the well-being of the American people,” which was more than the dull bastards deserved. And he had come out solidly, unequivocally and foursquare for honest tax law enforcement.

  The Vice President sighed loudly enough to wake his wife, curled like a relaxed kitten in the twin bed four feet away. Only Hester Madigan was more of a cat than a kitten. A voluptuous, slithering, stalking, black-haired woman three inches taller than Madigan, she had the knack of catering to his starved ego. In private she called him “lover” and she was one of those females who could simulate wild, runaway passion so skillfully that her husband fancied himself a sexual swordsman. Actually he was no better in bed than he was on a speaker’s platform but Hester Madigan was an ambitious woman who had married him principally because, as a then congressman, he knew so many important people. At times she wondered if she had made a mistake but when Madigan won the vice presidential nomination—more or less by accident, as a compromise candidate who offended nobody—she knew she would stick by him. After all, Hester Madigan told herself, there wasn’t anything but the health of Jeremy Haines separating her from the status of First Lady. “Good morning, Freddie lover,” she cooed.

  “Good morning, dear. Sorry I woke you.”

  “It’s time I was getting up anyway. Come over here and cuddle for a little while.”

  Madigan dutifully climbed into the conjugal bed and cuddled as ordered. Normally, it would have taken practically nothing to seduce him. But he still was upset over that damned speech. Then he happened to consult his wrist-watch, which he wore to bed as habitually as he wore pajamas.

  “Jesus, Hester, it’s eight forty-five. There’s a Cabinet meeting at ten.”

  “How long is he going to be in California, Fred?”

  “Damned if I know. A couple of weeks, I suppose. He never takes me into his confidence.”

  The last was said with open bitterness and Hester Madigan knew why. Haines treated her husband with deference and even a certain amount of affection. But it was almost amused, tolerant deference and affection. The kind a brilliant, sophisticated man would bestow on a rather backward younger brother. Hai
nes liked Fred Madigan, but he knew him for exactly what he was. He had been a machine-elected congressman originally, a hack politician with all the intellectual depth of a shyster used-car salesman. The trouble was that Madigan knew exactly how the President felt toward him.

  It was not from the instinct of a man with a vast inferiority complex, but from what the newly nominated Haines had said to his face the night the party leaders decided to break a strangling, bitter deadlock over the ticket’s second spot. Madigan had been summoned to Haines’s room after the fourteenth roll call left the two vice-presidential favorites virtually tied, each unwilling to throw in the towel, and with Haines reluctant to exercise the presidential candidate’s prerogative of choosing his running mate.

  The party’s national chairman greeted Madigan bluntly. “Fred, those two bastards won’t give in. We’ve been talking it over and we figure you’d make a good compromise choice. They’re both willing to accept you just so the other guy won’t get it. Would you take the nomination?” Madigan, his heart pounding, tried valiantly but failed completely to look modest. “If the party wants me, I’ll take it. Provided I’m acceptable to Jeremy.”

  Haines, who perhaps had been drinking a bit beyond his normal intake under the now ended strain of his own nominating battle, stared at the little politician with a look that came close to being sardonic. “I’ll be honest with you, Fred. You aren’t my choice by a long shot. If anything should happen to me, I wonder if you’d be up to the presidency. But you’ve been loyal to the party, you’re a hard worker and we could do worse. I just want you to know where I stand. So now will you take it?”

  Ambition wrestled with a flash of anger at Haines’s bluntness. Hurt pride collided with political avarice. “Jeremy, I appreciate your frankness. You have what I’ve always given the party—total loyalty. If you still want me, I accept.”