by Allen Drury
“Why? I’m not responsible for what’s going on there. I didn’t organize the chorus, that was Fred’s and LeGage’s and Rufus’ idea. I didn’t ask Roger Croy to take off into the stratosphere on a couple of no-good tramps—but I must say he was damned effective, and I don’t think Bob Munson managed to kill it much, either, particularly with the television boys helping us out and knocking down his remarks for us. I think it’s all been damned effective.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t effective,” Bob Leffingwell said slowly. “I’m interested to know you’re satisfied with it. And that you think you’re not responsible. The captain of his ship,’ to quote Roger Croy.…I thought you were.”
“I’m a passenger,” Ted Jason said. “I’ve been a passenger for six months and more.”
“You didn’t sound like a passenger yesterday. You told me to let COMFORT and DEFY and KEEP into this. You were giving all the orders then. It wasn’t my idea.”
“What has your idea been,” Ted inquired pleasantly, “except to issue sounds of warning and worry? I’ve been a little puzzled, sometimes.”
“My idea has been,” Bob Leffingwell said coldly, “that you should fight an honorable campaign and win or take your licking as the event turned out.”
“I don’t like to take lickings,” Governor Jason said blandly. “It isn’t part of my family pattern.…Look!” he said, turning toward Bob Leffingwell and tapping him firmly on the knee. “If the wild-eyed Negroes, the half-assed liberals, and the crazy conservative kooks want to link hands and dance around my Maypole, that’s their problem, not mine. I think it’s great to have their support, if it helps me win”—he hesitated for an infinitesimal fraction and some little warning thought flashed across Bob Leffingwell’s mind, so fleeting as to be almost subconscious—“this nomination.”
“You know Orrin’s people didn’t start that riot,” Bob Leffingwell said, “and you know he didn’t have a thing to do with it. ‘With-draw, mur-der-er’ My God, Ted, what are you getting into? And these blank-faced semi-storm troopers standing around like sick children playing games! We’re going to be lucky if we get out of this with no one else hurt. What are you letting it build up to?”
The Governor gave him a calm glance.
“You heard me talk with Orrin this morning. I told him I had told you to issue orders against any form of violence, didn’t I? And I had, hadn’t I? What more—”
“You know what more,” Bob Leffingwell said flatly. “You seem to think you score a point when the scum of San Francisco calls Orrin murderer. Who scores when the Majority Leader of the United States calls you Hitler?”
“I don’t lose in the minds of those who believe in me,” the Governor said softly, “Because they don’t believe it.”
“But decent people do,” Bob Leffingwell said, and quick as a shot Ted said,
“Oh?”
His companion flushed but stood his ground, while somewhere in front of them, quite forgotten now, Anna Hooper Bigelow reported patiently, “Horace B. Stevenson votes AYE.”
“Yes,” Bob Leffingwell said, “they do. And they are going to leave you because of it.”
“Oh, are they?” Governor Jason asked, still softly.
“Yes,” Bob Leffingwell said, unflinching.
“How soon?”
“Not long, if this continues.”
“I shall have to take this into account in making my plans,” the Governor said.
“You should,” Bob Leffingwell agreed.
There was a silence, while Anna Hooper Bigelow polled Justin B. Thompson, who voted NO, and Alicia Tiburoni, who voted AYE.
“So Patsy was right,” Ted said finally in a thoughtful voice. Bob Leffingwell shrugged.
“Patsy is often right, for the wrong reasons. I think we’d better listen to Illinois, now.”
“On a poll of the delegation,” Anna Hooper Bigelow announced, “Illinois casts 53 votes NO on the minority amendment, 20 votes AYE.”
“Orrin isn’t in very good shape,” the Governor said with satisfaction. “Even if,” he added gently, “the decent people are flocking to him.”
“You don’t care as long as you win, do you?”
Ted smiled pleasantly.
“Oh, I’m determined to, now … whatever I run for.” His expression suddenly became dead-serious. “Because, look you, my friend: no man tries for these offices at the top unless he has some conviction that he personally knows what is best for the country—unless he personally feels that he has a mission to try to put it into effect. There has to be—there is in all of us—some inner conviction that we know best and that we have simply got to try to do it. This may be mistaken, I grant you. Obviously history eliminates many who share the conviction equally. But underneath everything else, there’s that—the feeling of ‘I want—my program—for my country.”
“But what would your program be?” Bob Leffingwell asked. “At the moment you’re nothing but a focus for discontents—a sort of political back fence on which all the unhappy little boys in the neighborhood are scribbling their dirty words against the President and Orrin Knox.…What do you stand for, in your mind? What positive program are you offering?”
“Just myself,” the Governor said calmly. “Which, in contrast to the opposition, is not too bad a selling point for many people, obviously.
As for the other—I’ll develop a program, once I’m in. It won’t be difficult, I’ll have plenty of help.”
“Of the same kind you have now in seeking this nomination,” Bob Leffingwell said flatly.
The Governor shrugged.
“Listen,” he said, nodding to the set. “What’s Indiana going to do for her great neighbor from Illinois?”
“Stay with him, I think,” Bob Leffingwell said, deciding to drop it, for it was all over, anyway, “though there will be some interesting breaks further down the list.”
“I don’t like this, Stanley,” Orrin said at their equally deserted headquarters at the Fairmont as Anna Hooper Bigelow called, “Innn—dee—anna!…It’s too close. They told me five defections in Illinois and it’s fifteen more than they said. He’s going to get a big vote on this.”
“He isn’t going to win it, though,” Senator Danta predicted calmly. “I’ve just checked with our people on the floor. It’s still holding.”
“Hmph,” the Secretary said. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head as if to clear it. “How strange it is, Stanley: I’ve been accused of the most monstrous things, two young men who may have been worthless but were still human are dead, the ugliest sort of menacing element has been introduced into the convention, I’ve been most unjustly and viciously blamed—and here we sit counting votes, just as though the world were still entirely sane. That’s what conventions can do for you: they establish their own logic, which is like no other logic known to man, and you ride with it because to do anything else would be to go stark, staring mad.…I don’t really know what else I can do, do you, to counteract this violence charge? I’ve issued my statement-Bob and the Speaker, bless their hearts, have done what they could—our people are under strict orders to refrain from any provocation whatsoever—”
“And so everybody is being successfully paralyzed into inaction and successfully browbeaten into allowing what could be a Jason walkaway, if carried a bit further,” Senator Danta said soberly. “The man I really feel sorry for is Ted, because I don’t think, for all his cleverness and intelligence and skill and force, that he really realizes, yet, what he’s letting himself in for.”
“I could feel sorry for him, too,” Orrin Knox said tartly, “and maybe I will—some other time. Right now, I find his methods vicious, underhanded, unprincipled, and dangerous, and if his bullyboys swallow him up I think he deserves it.…What’s Indiana doing?”
“Indiana,” Anna Hooper Bigelow said obligingly from the screen, “casts 31 votes YES for the minority amendment, 12 votes NO.”
“Stanley—?”
“I’ll go and check again,” Senator
Danta said, “but they assure me there’s enough to stop him.”
“But he’s got to be stopped big,” Orrin said. “And he isn’t being stopped big. Look at that!” he exclaimed as the cameras cut abruptly from the vote to the outside of the Cow Palace. The ranks of sullen-faced demonstrators had substantially increased since the cameras’ last visit. Now there were several hundred, standing in groups around the entrances and near the parking lots. A new element seemed to have been added: now they had been provided with black leather jackets and helmets, on each of which the words JASON MEANS PEACE had been painted in white. They permitted no slightest flicker of intelligence to break through as the cameras traveled across their deliberately somber faces. They intended to appear, and they succeeded, lifeless, cold, and menacing,
“What is that man encouraging?” Orrin said in a wondering voice. “We’ll be lucky to get out of this without somebody else getting hurt.”
“As long as it isn’t one of yours or mine,” Stanley Danta said softly.
The Secretary looked grim.
“It better not be.” His voice changed and an expression close to horror came into his eyes. “I swear to God, Stanley, I do not know what I would do.”
“Kansas requests a poll of the delegation,” the Speaker was saying as the cameras cut back inside. “The Secretary will poll.”
Flying through the night across the enormous country that was his to lead, the President was thinking of his own concerns and of the things the sensitive always think of when flying across America: how vast it is, how fast it goes, what was it like to cross it by oxcart, how did the pioneers ever do it, how brave, how brave—and what do we have left in us now to match their courage as we slide through the reaches of the sky at six hundred—eight hundred—one thousand-two thousand—who-knows-what-thousand—miles an hour? He thought, inevitably, too, of his predecessors, what they did, how they felt, how they managed this great, unwieldy nation as it grew and grew and grew, in size and power if not always in charity and grace.
He was tired tonight, and he knew he would be more tired before the week was done; yet he had known for some hours that he must advance the time of his arrival in San Francisco. The reports he had received from Lucille, Bob Munson, the Speaker, Cullee, and Lafe and half a hundred others at the convention had been filled with a steadily growing concern giving way, in recent hours, to open alarm. The appearance of the strange demonstrators, their robot-like aspect and articulation—the cleverest psychological touch of the whole business, he conceded grimly, was that blank-faced look and the menacing , mechanical outbursts in the galleries—had given to the convention an atmosphere unlike any in the memory of most of its participants. Then had come the growing violence, the riot in Union Square, the deaths of two young no-goods—worthless as human beings, like so many of the world’s symbols in the twentieth century, but absolutely invaluable as propaganda—and now a bitterness building to some further outbreak whose nature could not be foreseen.
It was all, he supposed, typical of what seemed to be the century’s major theme as it sank rapidly and perhaps irrevocably into a welter of chaos, uncertainty, and violence almost everywhere: a pointless, insensate rebellion against everything, for no reason, no purpose, no logic, no nothing. Out of the great creeds of liberation, uplift, and reform had come finally—nihilism, heartless … mindless … pointless … useless. Millions had died already in the names it put on for a day and lost as easily, many millions more would die—just so somebody could have the sick emotional thrill of being against.
It didn’t matter against what.
Just against.
But now, as had happened here and there, clever and astute managers had arisen to try and channel nihilism behind their own ambitions; and he was sure they were going to find, as so many had before them, that nihilism destroyed both its participants and its would-be profiteers. When it had all ended—when the whole world—wide orgy of slaughter and insensate rebellion had come to its final horrid end—what would be left to preside over the echoing graveyard of humanity’s hopes? No individual, surely no cause in whose name it had all begun. Just more slaughter … and more rebellion … and more awful, pathetic emptiness of mind and heart and spirit.
This he had to stop in America, if he could, for his was the responsibility to do it. Never once had he grandly sided with rebellion, placed himself in ringing tones on the side of the nihilists, said blandly that it was all a healthy sign of natural exuberance or long-deferred justice for society to be torn apart. He didn’t believe in letting the devils out of the box. He believed in sitting on the lid, for history had shown on too many bloody occasions lately what happened when you let it open. You couldn’t tuck the Thing that came out neatly back inside, once it had broken loose to ravage the world.
Harley M. Hudson, in short, was a damned old stick-in-the-mud, not at all enlightened, and someday, perhaps, if his country lived that long, he would be given grateful credit for it.
At this moment, the problem was complicated by the parallel developments in what he and Bob and the Speaker and other old hands were already beginning to think of as “the regular convention.” The Jason forces—or, rather, the forces that had chosen to make the Governor of California their instrument—were simply using foreign policy to inflame their adherents in the country. But people like Roger P. Croy and Esmé Stryke were by no stretch of the imagination to be placed in that category, Roger P. Croy was a notorious troublemaker and Esmé Harbellow Stryke was a smart, shrewish little political climber who had clawed her way to the National Committee over other smart, shrewish political ladies, but neither was frivolous concerning politics itself nor the issues that engaged the country. Particularly were they not frivolous about Gorotoland and Panama or the prolonged and unsatisfactory struggles that were going on in those two countries.
He knew that their concern bespoke a perfectly genuine concern on the part of a great many people in their states, and in all the states. Down under the demonstration level, there were many millions of sincerely worried Americans who did not parade, demonstrate, seek headlines, or otherwise use crisis for the care and feeding of their own egos and ambitions. These were deeply troubled about Gorotoland and Panama. The problems in the Platform Committee had been quite genuine, and on an entirely different plane from riots in Union Square and JASON MEANS PEACE.
Nonetheless, the two strands in the convention, the one of genuine concern, the other of calculated self-serving protest, were beginning to come together in his mind, as in so many minds, into a single force which he must oppose with everything he could command. Inevitably he and others of good will were being forced into a more and more intolerant position by the deliberate intolerance of the other side. It was true that the intolerance of the other side, commanding as it did great mediums of public communication and many powerful means of carrying its case to the watching country and the world, was of course quite skillful—as always—in putting the blame for its own crimes upon its opponents. But that could not deter him now, nor could it deter, much longer, decent men. The time was coming for them to go ahead regardless and do what they felt they had to do to save the country.
Therefore he was coming early to San Francisco, and as Air Force One swung slowly over the glittering city and the great Bay awash with lights in the clear cold night, his mind was made up on what he must do. Tonight he would lay the groundwork, tomorrow he would act. It did not occur to him at that moment, as the plane began gliding gently toward the airport and clearly below he could see the floodlit Cow Palace surrounded by searchlights sweeping the sides, that tomorrow might already have arrived, a little more quickly than he thought.
“The Secretary reports,” the Speaker said into the tense silence—after all the States had voted, after the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico had fulfilled its quadrennial duty of giving everyone a good laugh, after Guam and the Virgin Islands and the Canal Zone—“which will soon be 100 percent American again from Panama City to Colon!” had cast th
eir ballots—“the Secretary reports that on the minority amendment the vote is 643 AYE—(“My God,” Lafe exclaimed to Cullee, against the rising roar of excitement from floor and galleries)—and,” the Speaker concluded in a voice he could not quite keep from sounding excited, “650 NO. The minority amendment is defeated.”
SEVEN VOTES, the claque said suddenly, in a monotone that cut heavily across the shouting uproar that filled the hall. SEVEN VOTES, SEVEN VOTES, SEVEN VOTES … WHAT NOW, LI-TTLE MAN?
“How exciting it all is!” Krishna Khaleel said to Lord Maudulayne with an ecstatic hiss, and over beyond Kitty Maudulayne, Raoul Barre leaned forward to gesture at the wildly excited delegates on the floor below.
“I wonder,” he said with a speculative expression in his eyes, “which li-ttle man they mean.”
“Mr. Chairman!” Cullee cried from the California microphone, and here and there, including his own delegation, there were shouts of, “Sit down! Sit down!” But he went on unimpressed, “I move that the majority report of the platform committee, which in effect empowers the convention to write the foreign policy plank here on the floor, be adopted.”
“Mr. Speaker!” Mary Buttner Baffleburg shouted from the Pennsylvania microphone, “Mr. Speaker, Pennsylvania asks a roll call—”
But there was an enormous “NO!” of impatience and disgust, and the Governor of Pennsylvania grabbed the microphone from her hand and bellowed, “Pennsylvania withdraws that request and urges a voice vote, Mr., Speaker!”
“All those in favor—” the Speaker said quickly.
“AYE!” roared the convention.
“All those opposed the Ayes have it,” the Speaker said in one breath. “The Chair recognizes the distinguished delegate from South Carolina, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Honorable J. B. Swarthman.…Anna!” he said, hastily turning to her where she sat behind him at a little wooden table with the parliamentarian, “take the gavel for a few minutes, will you, please?”
