by Adam Yoshida
The former Acting President laughed uproariously throughout, much to the amusement of those who sat near him. Seeing a man known for being so dour and who had been so often denounced as a blood-soaked tyrant laugh through the show’s collection of songs from the show’s best years was something that changed more than a few perspectives that evening.
When the show was over, Rickover stayed behind and signed autographs for several people who approached him and lightly chatted about the snowy weather. New Yorkers, whatever their opinions on his politics, were beginning to - as Americans are so very good at doing - accept the former Acting President as one of their own.
Rather than take a taxi home or call a call service, Rickover walked home thirty blocks amidst the light snow. Even though he had been raised in - and elected to Congress from - exurban Virginia he had never joined many of his fellow conservatives in exhibiting contempt for this most American of cities. He liked looking at the lights and shops and buildings that lined his route home. He even stopped at the better McDonalds in Times Square and purchased an ice cream cone. The cashier, he was pretty sure, had recognized him but had been too shocked to do anything more than take his order.
It was after midnight when Rickover arrived home and went to sleep. As was his life-long habit, he left the television on at a low volume and with the brightness reduced to zero as he sought to drift off.
.
He awoke to the feeling of a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on,” said an instantly-familiar voice, “you wouldn’t want to miss the fun.”
Rickover opened his eyes and found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. Instead of his usual plush bed, he was on a cot. When he remembered having gone to bed in pyjamas, he suddenly realized that he was wearing his best suit.
“Where am I?” he asked the man. The man took a puff of his cigar and checked the time on his giant gold pocket watch.
“There’s no time for that now,” he said, “I’ll tell you when we get there.”
Rickover got up and allowed himself to be led up a narrow set of metal staircases, emerging on a small rooftop in the dead of night amidst a sensory flood of sirens and spotlights.
“There!” said the man, pointing off into the distance at a series of tiny lighted specks.
“What am I looking at?” asked Rickover.
“The Luftwaffe,” said the man who took another puff of his cigar, “they’re coming for London tonight. But we shall see them off, as we do every night.”
The sound of anti-aircraft fire quickly began to fill the evening sky.
“Every night?” asked Rickover.
“Well,” said the man, “either here or Gettysburg or Salamis or some other such place. That’s what we do here.”
.
The next morning the former President’s Chief of Staff became concerned when he failed to arrive for a long-standing appointment with the British Ambassador to the United States. When Rickover failed to answer his phone the NYPD were asked to visit. Within an hour the news of what they had found was flashed around the nation and world.
Epilogue
The White House, Washington, DC
President Dylan Mackenzie shifted about warily and checked his watch repeatedly as the minutes ticked past. The former Commander of the Central Command and the man who, depending on whose telling of the story you believed, had brought the armed forces home to liberate the United States from foreign occupation and division was not accustomed to being kept waiting. Mitchell Randall had proven to be a competent enough President, taking pains at every turn to attempt to avoid re-opening any of the wounds of the war and he’d done more than a few things to put the economy back together and to restore international trade. Indeed, President Mackenzie was pretty sure that history would look back on him with far more fondness than his contemporaries had, much as had been the case for George H.W. Bush and Harry Truman, men who had likewise been saddled with the vexing problem of following a successor who was a world giant. It said, Mackenzie thought, rather a lot about the character of Mitch Randall that he was sitting just a few feet from him and chatting amiably.
“…what they’ve done in terms of the Seattle waterfront revitalization is pretty amazing,” the former President explained, “though, of course, Seattle didn’t suffer any substantial damage during the fighting, so that’s helped a lot. Though even I was surprised when the city offered such a generous package for locating my Library there.”
Mackenzie looked at Randall a little oddly. He sensed no falsity in the man. If he had been sitting a few feet from a man who had resigned as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, run against him for the Presidency, and then defeated him, he would not have been quite so friendly. Indeed, the former President had joined William Howard Taft in suffering the humiliation of having actually narrowly come in third in his race for re-election, running one percentage point behind the candidate of a revitalized Democratic Party that had actually managed to finally retake control of the House of Representatives in the sixth year of Mackenzie’s own stint in the White House.
“I’m glad that things are going so well for you, Mitch,” said the President finally.
“Jeez,” said Randall, checking the time on his phone, “you’d think that this guy would eventually have learned how to tell time. He was always keeping me waiting too, you know.”
“At the rate that he’s going, we should just be thankful that he hasn’t implemented proskynesis,” said the President, taking a rare opportunity to put his History MA to good use.
MV-22B Osprey, Near Washington, DC
General of the Army William Thomas Jackson carefully fixed his tie, using the screen and camera of a tablet held in pace by an aide. For more than a decade the General had served as the “Supreme Governor of the Canadian Provinces.” Legend had it that the title had originally been proposed by a low-level staffer in the Randall Administration with the intention of making the General seem pompous and ridiculous. However, General Jackson had taken an immediate liking to it and, in the end, it had stuck. In theory the former territory of eastern Canada was only being temporarily administered by the United States pending a plebiscite to determine whether the various provinces wished either to be independent or to join the United States. However, under the reign of the General, those transitional arrangements had taken on a more-permanent hue, with the General serving, in effect, as the military dictator of Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces.
Lieutenant General Evan Dunford, who had succeeded to the command of XII Corps and the three divisions worth of soldiers that served as the occupation force in eastern Canada, sat down next to the General.
“At least three are definitely dead and several times that many are injured,” he whispered.
“And it was definitely a bomb?” asked Jackson.
“Yes sir,” replied Dunford.
“Damn.”
During the early years of Jackson’s reign there had been a lot of resistance, especially in Quebec. Insurgents, supplied with the weapons that were awash in the aftermath of the Second Civil War, had regularly attacked American and Western Republic soldiers in the name of either Quebec or Canadian independence. A few years in the latter cause had picked up a little steam when, amidst the increasing tensions of the so-called “Second Cold War”, the Western Republic had voted to dissolve itself and join the United States. However, two sets of measures had proven to be wildly successful in reducing the resistance faced by the American forces in the Canadian provinces. On one had, Jackson’s soldiers and Administrators had taken full advantage of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and all that came along with that. On the other hand, Jackson had taken advantage of his proconsular powers in order to launch some urgently-needed reforms in all of the territory that he governed.
The White House, Washington, DC
“The problem,” said Mitchell Randall, “is that there are more than a few people who not only approve of what he’s done in Canada, but wish that
they could import the model here. That’s the source of his political appeal.”
“I know it well,” replied the President, “and that’s the real problem. The country was deeply traumatized by everything that it went through - you know that better than anyone else. A lot of the things that the old Democrats stood for were - and are - popular, but they remain very vulnerable to the waving of the bloody shirt. The problem that people had with Kevin Bryan and his lot was more their attitude than their policies. They thought that they were Kings. But a lot of the Republican Party just doesn’t get it. I have to move to the centre in order to - the party has to move to and remained in the centre - in order to maintain its long-term viability and to keep the Democrats from coming back too soon.”
“Perhaps they do know it,” said Mitchell Randall, “and that’s why they long for someone like Jackson, who has dispensed with elections for the most part. Up in Canada he’s free to govern however he likes. He simply unilaterally fired the majority of government workers. How much do a lot of people wish that they could do that? I mean, even I - it was pretty shocking when it became clear to me that the only way to keep the government running in any coherent way in the aftermath of the war as to take back most of the people who’d worked for the Loyalists and then for the FNAS. There’s an appeal to governing without the sort of restrictions that democratic politics places upon a nation and the American people have a pretty good view of that thanks to what the Chinese and the Russians have done, as well as what General Jackson is doing up north.”
“He’s landing now, Mr. President,” reported the White House Chief of Staff as he stuck his head through the door.
“Should we greet him?” asked Randall.
“No. Fuck it. Let him come to us,” replied the President.
South Lawn, The White House
As soon as he stepped off the tilt rotor aircraft, General Jackson took a moment to stop and look up at the sixty star flag that was flying over the White House. The combination of the admission of the new states of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba with the deliberate division of a number of states during the war years had transformed more than just the maps of North America. Instead, the transformation of the political geography of the North American continent had gone alongside a broader revolution in the world that was at least as broad as that which had occurred in the aftermath of the Cold War and the other great conflicts of the 20th Century. Russia had redrawn the map of Eastern Europe and pulled most of Western Europe into a radically-revamped and suddenly eastward-leaning European Union. China had managed to absorb not only Taiwan, but also the majority of the disputed territories that lay along the coast of Asia. The net effect was that most of the Eurasian continent, with the notable exception of an increasingly-militarized India, lay inside either the Russian or Chinese camps. The notable exceptions to this rule were the two island nations that lay at the opposite ends of the great landmass, Britain and Japan. Those nations had, continuing a trend that had begun in the last days of the Second Civil War, become vast armed camps with more than a quarter of a million American servicemen stationed in or around each of them.
The White House Chief of Staff, wearing a broad and utterly insincere smile, advanced across the South Lawn with his hand extended. Jackson took it and shook it vigorously.
“Welcome to the White House, General,” he said.
The White House, Washington, DC
“Well, General,” said the President as Jackson stepped into the Oval Office, “I’m glad that you could make it.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” replied Jackson, “there was a resistance attack that delayed my departure from Montreal.”
“Yes,” said Mackenzie, “so I’ve heard. It’s amazing, isn’t it, that the resistance forces are able to put up such a fight even after ten years?”
“Well, Mr. President, they’ve grown a little bit weaker and a little more desperate with each passing year. Don’t worry, this latest act of savagery will not go unpunished.”
“Of that I have no doubt, General,” said the President.
“Yes,” interjected Mitchell Randall, speaking for the first time since Jackson had entered the room, “we all know that you’re very good at that kind of thing.”
“It’s very good to see you, Mr. President,” replied Jackson, turning towards Randall, “how is retirement going?”
“It’s very pleasant, thank you,” replied Randall, “a lot less stressful than shooting unarmed protestors.”
“Some of the protestors who were shot might not have had weapons,” replied Jackson, “but they were in the middle of a crowd of people who did. They were hardly innocent.”
“Ok, ok, gentlemen,” said President Mackenzie, holding up his hands, “this isn’t a partisan occasion.”
“No,” agreed General Jackson as he extended his hand to President Randall, “I suppose that we can let bygones be bygones. At least for today.”
The former President took the General’s hand and shook it.
“I suppose so,” said Randall, “at least for today.”
“Let’s get the cameras on in here,” said President Mackenzie to his Chief of Staff. The man left the room as the two Presidents and the General sat down in three carefully laid out chairs.
“I must admit,” said Randall, “I bought a pair of boots that came from a factory in Quebec the other week - from one of the contract facilities that’s run by Pretorian up there - an I was quite impressed with them. Don’t tell any of my friends in Seattle that.”
General Jackson laughed.
“It’s amazing what gets done when people have no choice other than to work for a living,” he said.
The cameramen came in and began to film.
“No questions,” said the White House Press Secretary as he led them in.
“I wonder what President Rickover would have thought of today,” said Mackenzie, “did either of you know him well?”
Both Randall and Jackson shook their heads.
“I’m not sure that anyone really did,” said Jackson, “I wonder what he’d have thought about being upgraded posthumously to a full President.”
“There were plenty of his friends still around Washington when I signed that bill,” said Randall, “and they were kind of ambivalent about it. He was very insistent about the whole Acting President thing. But it just settled so many weird historical debates to simply say that anyone who served out the rest of a President’s term as an Acting President should be considered a full President that they just went along with it anyways.”
“Well,” said President Mackenzie, “we’d better get going.”
The Mall, Washington, DC
General Jackson hadn’t bothered listening to most of the speeches. They had, as was usual for events of this nature, been far more about the speakers than about the subject. He was surprised that President Mackenzie had managed to get through his speech without bringing up how the man they were honoring today had fired him during the final days of the war. Either the man was truly genuine in his expressed desire to let bygones be bygones, thought Jackson, or he was one hell of a politician.
At least, it was General Jackson’s turn to speak.
“We are here today to honor both a man and an idea,” the General began, “we are here to pay homage to Terrance Rickover, the President who saved the Union in the greatest trial of our lives and to the ideals of limited government that he believed in and fought for. The purpose of this conflict was not merely to settle the political differences that impelled us to take up arms, but also to vindicate the notion that our nation is still a republic of laws and not one of men.”
“A free government, if it is to be sustained, must rest upon a solid foundation of moral righteousness. That is why we went to war. Because if our government is built upon nothing more than the transitory and temporary will of the majority, then we no longer live in a free state, but instead a tyranny. That is the outcome that Terrance Rickover spent hi
s life in trying to protect. That is the cause that I and many others still serve today - to advance the American republic and, in so doing, to serve the cause of the human race.”
“For, in the world in which we live today, the notion of a limited and republican government is unique to America. The rest of the world lives in all different kinds of states. Some of them call themselves free. Some are clearly tyrannies. But only the United States is founded upon the notion of individual liberty as the most essential basis of government. The moment that we decide, as many did all of those years ago, that the common good - outside of certain defined emergencies - is more important than the liberties of the people, then free government ceases to exist.”
“So I say today, on behalf of those who served during the war - including tens of thousands of our own brave soldiers who cannot ever again speak in their own voice - that we will not forget the sacrifices of this man, nor will we dishonor them by restoring to power those who believed that any temporary majority created by any means gave them a license to tyrannize their fellow citizens. Let this memorial stand forever not only in the name of this man, but in the name of all that he represented.”
“Let this memorial stand as a reminder to all that, as we have once recovered our liberties by the sword, so we may do again, should they ever be once more endangered.”
With those words, the crowd burst into applause. General Jackson solemnly waved and took his seat.
Author’s Note
Thus ends a journey. Over two years ago, shortly before the 2012 Presidential election, I began writing “A House Divided” in anticipation that it would be a relatively short project that would carry me through perhaps the summer of 2013. Instead, over the course of the twenty-six months that followed, I ended up writing a work that, if one views it as a single extended novel broken into five pieces, totals around 350,000 words - or about the length of Anna Karenina.
