by Allen Drury
Thousands of churches were open, millions upon millions worshiped, the President’s desire for a Day of Dedication was amply fulfilled; yet from the members of Walter’s world there poured a steady counter-stream of cutting-down, weakening the effect, subtly but effectively destroying the mood.
It was one of their finest hours, and they gave it their best.
So also did they for Panama. The news of Felix Labaiya’s coup had not really surprised them much more than it had the government, for there had been fairly clear intimations during the preceding week; but no innocent citizen would ever know it, to hear the reports. Shocked and shattered by America’s response. Our Correspondent, Our Reporter, and Frankly Unctuous The Anchor Man announced with a grave dismay the sudden explosion of one more act of inexplicable violence by the United States. The shock and dismay were compounded a hundredfold because, as one of them put it, “in this nightmare world produced by hasty and impulsive action in Africa, the United States Government seems to be heading straight for a repetition six thousand miles away in Latin America.”
Endlessly Walter’s world repeated the story of the midnight White House meeting, exactly as before; the apparent determination to go it alone once again despite the outraged and embittered outcries from around the world, exactly as before.
“They say repetition is boring,” said Frankly Unctuous crisply as he brought to a close the fifth unanimously condemnatory round table he hosted for his network on that fantastically repetitive weekend filled with the ritual of one war and the bulletins of another, “but when repetition could mean the death of a great nation as well as the world’s hope of survival, it perhaps behooves us to pay attention.”
So they did, and the effort they had expended upon Gorotoland began to seem only rehearsal before they were through. Again there were the violent editorials, the savage commentaries, the headlines that twisted, the news stories that half-told, the photographs that misrepresented, the programs that smeared and subtly undermined—all the customary weapons of Walter’s world striving desperately to hold to the last vestige of sanity as they believed it to be. With a mounting hysteria they demanded that the United States submit the Panamanian issue to the United Nations, though the President had announced in his statement early Monday morning that the United States would again use the veto if any attempt were made to interfere with preventive action against what he described as “the clearest and most direct attack yet made upon the safety and security of the Western Hemisphere.” With an equal fury they demanded the intervention of the Organization of American States, though that argumentative and uncertain body was again wallowing helplessly in its own mutual suspicions and consternations. The CIA report listing the presence of Soviet and Chinese Communists in Felix’s “Government of the Panamanian People’s Liberation Movement” was treated with scorn and skepticism in many major publications and programs, almost completely ignored in others. The President’s statement that the United States had no choice but to meet an immediate situation with immediate action was dismissed by The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was as “an empty and obvious cover-up for American aggression, of a type the world has seen before in the Caribbean area.”
Repetitions there were, all right: the repetitions of Walter’s world, bound and determined that it would force the facts of an ugly century to conform to its own fond beliefs of what the United States should do, if it had to slant those facts, twist them, corrupt them, or suppress them altogether in order to make its case.
Confronted with this continuation, and in many cases escalation, of the furious attacks upon him, the portly man with the kindly face who sits at the big desk in the haunted house does not find it too difficult, on this morning three weeks after the start of hostilities in Panama, to maintain a relatively calm approach to the problems that confront him. He has called a press conference for 4 P.M. this afternoon, his first in almost a month, and in the hours between he is preparing firmly yet unhurriedly to do the things that must be done before he makes the statement he is planning for that time. Some will be pleasant, some painful, some, perhaps, a curious mixture, yet all, he feels, are necessary.
He looks forward to them with interest, for he is, among other things, an amateur but increasingly experienced student of human nature. It always intrigues him to observe how it will react to the pressures of ambition, disappointment, and hope.
Harley M. Hudson at sixty-two has been President of the United States for a year, and having satisfied himself at Geneva in the first week of his magistracy that he was equal to its demands, he is not about to shiver and shake now, either when he faces major decisions or when he is under attack. It is true that few Presidents have received the condemnation that has been his in the days since he moved in Gorotoland, ordered the vetoes, and then, three days later, found himself forced to move in Panama. But it is also true that few have been more comfortably supported by the conviction that what they have done has been the only thing possible if the country is to survive.
It would have been neater, he sometimes reflects with a rueful smile, if history had given the world time to assimilate Gorotoland before he was called upon to throw Panama in its face: yet history in these times is not neat. Crisis crowds upon crisis, disaster tumbles upon disaster. History never pauses to give men breath before it renders new demands upon them. They find they have survived one challenge with reasonable heroism only to discover that new heroics are required before they have time to get a shave and shower. They no sooner put out one fire here than another bursts out there. A ham sandwich, a gulp of Coke, a quick cigarette, and Marlborough s’a va t’en guerre again. It is all rush, rush, rush and the devil eager and anxious to take the hindmost.
It is all, in fact, hectic, dangerous, traumatic and upsetting, and it imposes upon the sheer luck of rapid decision the burden of whether or not the country, and with it some semblance of a free and decent civilization in the world, will survive.
So there was no time in Panama, precious little in Gorotoland.
Things had to be done.
He did them.
Psychologically and emotionally, his countrymen are still reeling, particularly that small but highly influential number comprising what he, in common with many who have felt the sting of its self-righteous savaging, thinks of as “Walter’s world.” They pay him their disrespects every day in a thousand different fashions, some direct—“The President’s Policies Are Foolish,” one of Walter’s lesser colleagues had entitled a column yesterday; some more crablike—“President May Wish To Protect Associates’ Holdings in Panama,” Washington’s most famous hit-and-run artist had put it the day before—but the essential song is the same. With it, the corollaries: an increasingly bleary-eyed academic community, staggering through its umpteenth teach-in; earnest gentlemen of the cloth almost, though none quite, asking Jehovah to strike him dead; an occasional full-page ad, signed by the more self-conscious members of the cultural community, still appearing with a weary defiance in the New York Times. The opposition may be groggy, but it is as grimly determined to thwart his purposes as it ever was. Now, as a month ago, he and his policies remain the issue.
For a soul who really loves peace and quiet, he sometimes tells Lucille with a rather grim humor, destiny has certainly cast him in a strange and hardly believable role. The furniture manufacturer from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who inherited a small family business and parlayed it into fortune, and then into fame when he was chosen by a hard-pressed party to run for Governor, really never wanted anything but to have a nice family in a nice house on a nice street, lead a friendly and productive life, travel a little, do some fishing, read a book or two. Yet here he is, fulcrum of the earth, hero to many, monster to many more, leader of the world’s strongest nation and as such repository of the hopes or hatreds of most of mankind.
It has its ironies, and Harley Moore Hudson, though not all his critics or his friends give him credit for it, has the sort of mind that can appreciate them.
For many years, though the record in Michigan was plain to those who knew him, this fact was overlooked or disbelieved in Washington. In Michigan, where he grew up as the son of an earnest Dutch immigrant running a small corner furniture store in Grand Rapids (expanded, before he died, by the addition of two branch stores), Harley was known as a steady, industrious child of an almost uniformly sunny disposition and a quietly determined personality. The oldest of three brothers and two sisters, he was what his Scotch-Irish mother called “my little top,” who seemed always to be spinning about the house or the school ground, going after what he wanted and humming with happiness and good will toward the world. Troubles were few and quickly forgotten, triumphs were modest but solidly grounded in the friendliness and encouragement of his teachers and contemporaries. He was not a brilliant student but he was a reliable one, who stood somewhere in the middle of his class scholastically, somewhere near the top in affectionate liking and regard. When his father died, Harley was seventeen and president of his high school student body. He had already decided that he would return after his graduation from the University of Michigan and enter the business. When he completed his studies he did so, assuming command from the junior partner into whose hands it had temporarily passed upon his father’s death.
In college his principal achievement, as he often told audiences when he was running for Governor, was to marry Lucille Breckenridge, even then a plump, rosy little soul who had been a class behind him. Theirs had been a mild but enduring courtship that had furnished placid companionship and much serene happiness, and still did. They had married as soon as he graduated, Lucille saying calmly that she didn’t need her degree anyway since she knew he would be a success in anything he did and so she would never have to make her own living. He had been both alarmed and flattered, but despite his innate caution about the future she had gone right ahead, and, as usual, had been correct. He has been a success, and she never will have to worry should anything happen to him. Her decision to devote herself to the running of a happy home and the rearing of two delightful daughters has proved to be the best possible for them both.
In a quiet, homebody way, however, she has been fully as much of a political help as Beth Knox to Orrin or Ceil Jason, in her wryly intelligent way, to Ted. Lucille has not been much of a one for campaigning or for making speeches, but she has put in appearances often enough to please the voters, and privately she has given him advice he has usually found to be sound and sensible. She has some instinct for brushing straight through all the rationalizations to get at the heart of things, and with it she also has a shrewd ability to judge human nature, particularly in its more ambitious aspects. It had taken him, for instance, some time to really size up Ted Jason, but it now seems to him that Lucille had pegged him right the first time. “He’s an opportunist,” she had said after they met the Jasons four years ago at a Governors’ Conference in Glacier National Park. “He may be a worrying one, but when the worry’s over, he doesn’t hesitate. You'll see.” It was an analysis that has come back often to the President’s mind in this last hectic month. Ted is still hesitating, the worry isn’t over yet. Which way will he jump?
In a sense the President has to admire this, because he knows the pressures to make Ted run against him are fully as strong as the pressures to make the President retire—they ought to be, they come from the same sources. He is not giving in to them himself, and every day that Ted withstands them is one more day in the bank for the Administration. The President has not attempted to influence him any further after the weekend of Panama and the memorial service; hasn’t seen him in Washington, called on the phone, written.
“It’s up to you to decide,” he remarked when they shook hands at 3 A.M. after the Panama meeting and Ted smiled, a little wanly, the President thought.
“Decisions, decisions!” he said with a humorous air.
The President nodded.
“They go with this house, and they go with getting here. I wish you luck with yours.”
“Thanks,” Governor Jason said. “If I’m as calm in mine as you always seem to be in yours, I should be able to stand the gaff.”
And in a real sense that is true, the President thinks now as he prepares to go downstairs, walk the colonnade along the rose garden, and so come to his oval office and the clamoring world that waits to leap upon him from his desk. He always has been pretty calm, now that he looks back upon it. The only rough period came during the seven years when his brilliant predecessor deliberately excluded him from the inner workings of the government so that Harley found himself, more times than he likes to remember now, in the unenviable position of being outside looking in. That had been hard to take, while all the formal pretenses of consultation and cooperation and “making unprecedented use of the Vice President” had been kept up for the benefit of press and public. Harley had known that the President wasn’t really cutting him in on anything very important, and he had also known in the President’s last year and a half that he might soon be called upon to fall heir to all of it. It had been a most frustrating time, and only Lucille’s support and his own innate stability had permitted him to emerge, somewhat emotionally tattered and torn but otherwise in reasonably good shape, when the news he had been dreading so long arrived at his office in the Capitol on a night he would never forget.
The first portion of his life, however—“Before the blitz hit me and I got into this,” he will sometimes tell his appreciative audiences—and, in a sense, the first year of his Presidency, had been comparatively serene. He had returned from college just as he said he would, plunged into the business with interest and enthusiasm, and in a short while led it through a carefully planned expansion to a new level of success. Additional branch stores were opened in Flint, Saginaw, and Detroit, and by the time he was forty the company was doing an annual gross business of ten million dollars. The years appeared to stretch out ahead filled with more stores, bigger grosses, greater fortune—and what?
Although it took him a while to admit it to himself, he was beginning to get bored.
More for that reason than for any deep-seated social motivation, he began to dabble in a mild way in politics. His money was more than welcome and his participation, since it did not involve wounding battles for or against any particular candidate or issue, proved equally so. It was good to have Harley around, the party leaders felt; he could always be relied upon for a handsome check, and he could also be relied upon to provide one shoulder everybody could cry on, one heart and mind that didn’t seem to hate anyone. Subtly and quite without any conscious desire or manipulation on his part, he presently became the one man in Michigan whom everybody liked. It was only a short step from that to becoming the one man upon whom everybody could agree. When that happened, destiny took over and the roller-coaster ride began. Even so, his nomination for Governor came as a complete surprise to him.
“But not me!” he had exclaimed blankly when Bob Munson, exercising his prerogative as
Michigan’s senior Senator to step in and bring squabbling factions together after the sudden death of the party’s standard-bearer, came to him with the news. “Why me?”
“Because nobody’s mad at you,” the Majority Leader said. “No other contender can make this claim.”
“But I’m not a contender!”
“I know,” Senator Munson said cheerfully. “That’s why. So you are now.”
“You’ll let me talk it over with Lucille,” he suggested timidly. Bob had smiled.
“Sure, but I’ll bet we both know what her answer will be.”
And so they had.
“Do it. They think you’re just an amiable man they can all agree on. They also think you’re an amiable man they can all push around. They don’t know you’re also a good man, who won’t be pushed and who will do some good. Surprise them all. They need it.”
So he had called Bob Munson next morning in Washington. His selection had been announced that afternoon. By nightfall pledges of support were flooding in. In the six remaining weeks of the campaign he and Lucille had crisscrossed their huge state by plane, bus, and motor caravan, drawing good crowds and an increasingly warm response wherever they went. There had been a series of television interviews and flattering reports in the papers—he had been fashionable, in those days, and even Walter Dobius had come out from Washington to do a series of columns around the general theme, “A Man of Integrity Seeks A Governorship.” On election day he had won by a comfortable margin. He still has among his papers somewhere Walter’s letter of congratulations, written in the gravely dignified, fatherly style he likes to effect with newcomers on the national scene:
“I look forward—and I know it will not be long delayed—to the time when you will come to Washington. There I know we can work together in harmony and understanding for the good of our great country.”
