Capable of Honor

by Allen Drury

  “Good morning, Walter,” the President had said crisply when he reached him in the Senate Press Gallery, and at once Walter could tell he was in a hostile mood. “I have something to tell you that you are to keep confidential until after my press conference this afternoon. You can’t use it before anyone else does, but”—his tone had become dry—“in view of your extreme interest, I wanted you to be one of the first to know.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Walter had said without, he congratulated himself, a trace of inflection one way or the other in his voice. “I appreciate your thinking of me.” Then his feelings had momentarily won the upper hand and he had asked with a dryness of his own, “Is this something the world will be upset about?”

  “The world?” the President had said. And then: “Oh, the world. Yes, I expect it will. All sorts of worlds, including yours. It doesn’t involve military action, though, if that’s your worry.”

  “It seems a legitimate one,” Walter said with an edge to his voice, “under all the circumstances.”

  “Well,” the President said, “I’m not going to debate that with you, Walter. You just go ahead and write another column about it, if you like. No, this concerns me; and your favorite candidate for President; and other people....I really,” he said thoughtfully, “don’t know why I’m bothering to call you—unless it’s just spite, which isn’t a very worthy motivation for a President of the United States to have.” He laughed, surprisingly. “I’m afraid, Walter, that you’ve got me into rather bad habits, lately. I didn’t used to feel spiteful toward anyone.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Walter said, his eyes straying over his gossiping colleagues sitting about on the sofas and chairs of the Press Gallery, the inevitable gin rummy game that starts when the Senate is not in session going at the table by the fireplace. How astounded they would be if they knew the extraordinary conversation going on fifteen feet from them.

  “So am I, Walter,” the President said. “It’s a sad commentary on the times. And some people in it.”

  “If you mean me, Mr. President,” Walter said, and his tone became pompous and emphatic, “I have only done my duty as I see it.”

  “I’m not sure I grant you that,” the President said, “since you so bitterly refuse to grant it to me. However, I repeat: I didn’t call to debate it.” He laughed, a brief, unamused sound. “Actually, I just called so you could get a head start on the column you’ll write tomorrow condemning me.…I’m going to run.”

  There was a silence on the phone in the gallery. It lasted long enough so that the President finally said, “Walter?”

  “I’m here,” Walter Dobius said heavily. “Why?”

  “Because you—and other people—have forced me to. Because you’ve been so extraordinarily savage and unfair that I feel I must defend myself and my policies and the only way to do it is to go to the country and get a mandate, if I can.”

  “Do you think it will be large enough to be called that?” Walter asked in a tone close to insolence. This time the silence occurred at the White House.

  “No one can say until the votes are counted,” the President said finally. “But at least there will be a decision, one way or the other. If it were no greater than a hundred thousand for your side, you know you would claim it as a mandate. I shall certainly do no less.”

  He paused and Walter wondered what more he had to say, this odd, extraordinary, foolishly blind and destructive man who was mining the world.

  “There’s an aspect of it which may give you hope, however,” the President went on. “I’m throwing the convention open for Vice President. Perhaps you can find a candidate for that office who will suit you.” He uttered a small, ironic sound. “If you can persuade him to run, that is.”

  “That is extraordinary,” Walter conceded. “But of course I think you are very wise. Very shrewd, too,” he added with a grudging honesty. “I will say, Mr. President, whatever else I may think of you, that you have become quite a remarkable politician in the past year.”

  “Thank you so much. I treasure these small items of your regard....I wish you luck with your candidate.”

  “You want him to run, don’t you, Mr. President?”

  “It’s part of my shrewdness. I hope you can persuade him. I don’t think I have.”

  “I hope I can,” Walter Dobius said calmly. “I regard his election as absolutely imperative for world peace.”

  “You know,” the President said dryly, “that’s exactly how I regard my own. Strange, isn’t it?”

  It was indeed, Walter thought as the fantastic call ended, and strange he thought it still as the fatherly face faded from the television screen and his guests expressed themselves with suitable scorn and indignation. He had come downstairs to find privacy for the call he had intended to place ever since the President had told him of his intentions. He had deliberately waited until after the speech because he thought delay would carry some element of surprise and perhaps increase the psychological pressure. He had known, however, that the project would not be easy and might well be unsatisfying. But damn it, he told himself as the phone began to ring in Sacramento, there had to be a decision sometime. There had to be.

  “Ted?” he said, and he deliberately made his voice as emphatic as he could, “this is Walter. How much longer are you going to keep on playing games with us—now?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” Governor Jason asked blandly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t fence. This may not be the first call you have received; certainly it won’t be the last. They will all ask the same question and seek the same answer. I trust you have it ready.”

  “For Vice President?” Ted Jason said dreamily. “That office?”

  “I said don’t fence. You know all the possibilities.”

  “I also know why the President wants me to run,” the Governor told him tartly. “To balance the ticket, to futz up the image, and to blur the issues so that he can be elected.”

  “But if you’re elected with him—”

  “What will you do?” Ted asked like a shot. “Find another Lee Oswald?”

  There was a silence.

  “That,” said Walter angrily, “is a vicious, unprincipled, evil remark.”

  “Oh, come, Walter,” said Governor Jason, unimpressed. “You’d be delighted if Harley died. You wouldn’t care how it happened.”

  “I repeat, that is a vicious, unprincipled—”

  “Listen to me, friend,” Ted Jason broke in coldly. “If there is any one man in the United States responsible for creating the climate in which such a thing could happen, it is Walter Dobius the great philosopher. Now, you examine your own conscience for a change and leave mine out of it. If I decide to run, I’ll run, and if I decide not to, I won’t. From now on I’m not taking any more pressure from you or anybody.”

  “Those are brave words,” Walter said, and over three thousand miles the Governor could hear his breath come heavily with anger. “You are a very difficult man for those who know you to like.”

  “But those who don’t know me worship me, don’t they?” the Governor asked in a nasty voice. Then his tone changed and became quite matter-of-fact and impersonal. “You think now, don’t you, that I’m in a spot where I’m really vulnerable—where I’ve really got to do something and where I can really be pressured. I don’t see it that way. I think I’m in a spot where anyone who wants me to run has got to come to me and pay for the favor. Why should I take the gamble of a second-best office for you, just so you can write your precious columns about ‘a balancing influence on the ticket,’ and kid yourself that there’ll be somebody inside who can subvert the President’s policies? He’ll swallow me up if I take second place. I wouldn’t be able to subvert anything—even if I wanted to, and I’m not sure I do.”

  “You remain the one hope for a return to sanity in this Administration,” Walter said with a dogged insistence, “and if you think the progressive and decent forces of this country are goin
g to give you up or let you evade your responsibility, you can think again. The situation was unclear as long as the President withheld his intentions, but now that he has announced them the way is open. It is imperative that you become Vice President. At the very least, it will inevitably have a moderating influence upon the Administration. And anything can happen once you’re in there. Nothing may, of course. He may live eight more years in office. The important thing is to have you there in case he doesn’t. To that end,” he concluded with an adamantine coldness to match the Governor’s own, “my energies and those of many other powerful people in the country are being directed, and the tempo will increase as we approach the convention. If you think you can halt it now, you are a fool, Ted Jason. And you’re not a fool.”

  “No,” the Governor agreed pleasantly. “But I warn you not to take me too much for granted. You may be trying to fabricate me into a symbol that doesn’t exist.”

  “I may be trying to fabricate you into a straightforward and unequivocal man,” Walter Dobius said with a biting scorn, “and that, I grant you, may be impossible. Whether you announce or not you are, from today, a candidate, and all the energies and activities of a great many top people in very influential places are going to be devoted to placing you on the ticket. So prepare to accept your martyrdom with grace, because it’s coming.”

  “In that case,” Ted Jason said, still pleasantly, “I really don’t have to say a thing, do I?”

  “If that is your concept of honor,” Walter said coldly, “I wish you joy of it.”

  “Goodnight, Walter,” the Governor said cheerfully. “Thanks for calling.”

  “You will be hearing from us,” Walter Dobius promised with a ponderous portentousness in his voice. “By the millions.”

  And yet, what could you do with him, and what did a conversation like that portend for the future? He would be nominated, all right, Walter was sure he and his colleagues could bring that about, but then what? Suppose he did become President someday, how could you ever count on him? He would never listen to advice, he would never take guidance from those most capable of giving it, he would never—he would never behave. You could never be sure of him, even if you did succeed in giving him the prize he wanted. He would be a disappointing President, should he become one.

  Ted simply had no respect for those who saw clearly how the world should go. He had too many ideas of his own.

  But for now, Walter thought grimly, he was a prisoner of the political tide and nothing he could do would stop it. Too many powerful factions and forces were too deeply committed on his behalf.

  For example, the rather odd trio that waited in his study now. Their coming out here tonight had not been his doing, but he had agreed to it when they called, partly because he was curious to pick their brains, partly because he knew that they symbolized the coalition from which Ted’s basic strengths would come, and partly because they had told him flatteringly that they needed his advice.

  “I talked to him,” he announced, opening the study door. “As always, he loves to be equivocal. But he’ll run.”

  “Then all we have to do is get organized,” said Fred Van Ackerman of the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce (COMFORT), “and we’ve got it made.”

  With an air of savage satisfaction LeGage Shelby of the Defenders of Equality for You (DEFY) nodded his darkly equine head, and Rufus Kleinfert of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism (KEEP) gave the awkward and uneasy grimace which, with him, passed for a smile.

  “Wait ’til Orrin comes up against this combination,” Senator Van Ackerman said with an ugly pleasure. “I’ll bet he’s wetting his pants already.”

  “You heard his statement,” Walter said. “He’s setting about as coldly and efficiently as he knows how to get on that ticket.”

  But in this glib assumption the Secretary’s reputation for political pragmatism was perhaps playing him a little false, for it was in a mood not quite so unemotional as Walter believed that he was contemplating what appeared to be the ruin, for the third and probably final time, of his hopes of ever becoming President, He too of course had seen the obvious the moment Harley disclosed his intention to throw the convention open, Harley himself had succeeded to the Presidency as a result of death, the event had happened before in one way or another, it could happen this time.

  Equally could it happen that the President would live to retire at some distant date full of years and dignity, and Orrin could end his own political career as a Vice President having far less direct control of policy and events than he did right now as Secretary of State.

  One thing he realized at once, however, and that was the immediate need to support the President and to indicate by his own actions that he endorsed and defended the policies he had done so much to help formulate. The slightest hesitation on his part would be read as a drastic weakening of an Administration already hampered to a considerable degree by the hesitations of the Governor of California. Overriding every other consideration in Orrin’s mind at that moment was the necessity to speak out at once in support of the President. Being Orrin, it had taken him five minutes to reach the decision. Half an hour after the President’s press conference ended he had acted upon it.

  In a sense this had been easier to do because of the kindness with which the President had disclosed his intentions. When he had called to invite the Secretary over, Orrin had known instinctively at once what the subject would be; and some other element, the necessary escape clause that most experienced politicians carry always in some defensive recess of the mind—“Things probably won’t work out the way I want them to, so Td better not get my hopes up too high”—prepared him for the likely decision. Yet Harley could not have been nicer.

  “Sit down, Orrin,” he said cordially, and the Secretary could sense at once that he was not entirely at ease. A moment later he admitted it, with a self-deprecating smile that aroused Orrin’s sympathies at once.

  “This isn’t too easy a conversation for me,” he confessed. “I hope you’ll help me with it.”

  “You know I will, Mr. President,” Orrin said gravely. “What does it concern?”

  “I expect you know,” the President said.

  The Secretary stared out at the bursting gardens, the beautiful lawn, the sweet felicity of the weather, committed at last to Washington’s lovely spring. He sighed.

  “Yes, I expect I do.”

  “I don’t feel too good about it,” the President said with a wry little smile. “I don’t like to go back on my word, or abandon a position and a conviction that have been entirely sincere—though you may not think so now.”

  “Oh, yes,” Orrin said. He too smiled with some wryness. “Of all the people concerned with your decision, I expect I can probably grant your sincerity almost more than anyone else does … even though I probably have more to lose from it than anyone else.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” the President said, and Orrin looked puzzled. “I do want you to understand why I do this,” he went on before Orrin could speak. “It really is because I am under such vicious attack that I feel I must defend my own policies and not ask anyone else to do it. I wouldn’t consider it for a moment, otherwise.”

  “I realize that plays a major part in it,” Orrin agreed. He smiled with a genuine amusement. “At least I think that’s how most Presidents rationalize it—they have to defend the record, isn’t that it?”

  The President laughed in a completely relaxed fashion, and from that moment their talk went forward without strain.

  “You may be right. But certainly the immediate practical reason is exactly what I say: I have got to defend myself. The division in the country is sharp enough so that I really—at least as I see it—do not have a choice. I must meet the situation head-on because basically it’s my responsibility.”

  “And you want to.”

  The President smiled.

  “I’d kind of like to see it through. I’m making a great experiment here: whet
her a policy of complete candor about what needs to be done to save America and with it the free world from another Dark Ages of the mind can work in this century of ours. I’m not sure it can. But,” he said with a somber emphasis unexpected in one usually so calm, “I intend to accomplish it if I can.”

  “I admire you for that,” Orrin said. The President’s next remark came with a gentleness that took him by surprise and almost destroyed the tight grip he was maintaining on his swirling emotions.

  “I regret very much the destruction of your hopes to run for this office.”

  For a moment, absurdly, Orrin found himself unable to answer. By a great effort of will—another moment, he told himself with a hasty scorn, and he would probably be blubbering like a schoolboy, if he didn’t watch it—he forced himself to concentrate his gaze upon the rose garden and think of something else, while the President, too, stared tactfully out the window.

  “It is of course a disappointment to me,” he said finally, managing to keep his voice steady, but just. “You know how long I have been—interested.” He smiled, at considerable cost. “Nobody knows better than you do, Harley—and how much, foolishly, I suppose, I have been depending upon the word you gave the country a year ago. But we talked about this a month ago right here, didn’t we? And I went home and told Beth you were going to run.” He smiled again, a little better this time. “But it’s still a disappointment. You can’t keep yourself from disbelieving the things you don’t want to believe. I do understand—I do accept your reasons—I do see how you consider them valid.” He smiled again, though it still cost him something to do it, but it was getting easier every second. “It’s a long way across this desk from this chair to that one, but if I’d ever made it, I think I would do exactly the same thing.”

  The President gave him a long look, obviously touched himself.