by Allen Drury
“Thanks so much,” he says, knowing that as soon as she leaves the dark terrible unhappiness that Seconal killed will return.
Sure enough, it does.
How arrogant he has been, he thinks, and how deserving of punishment from the Lord! As he had remarked wonderingly to Stanley—how many years ago, in what other world?—two deaths had occurred, and still he had not been humbled. However worthless the dead and however slight his own responsibility, at least they had been human beings; and still it had taken an attack upon his own daughter-in-law, the loss of his own grandson, before he had been moved to abandon his selfish worry after votes and realize the monstrous position into which ambition and events had forced him.
And how could he honestly say that his own responsibility was slight? It was slight in the vicious sense that Walter and Ted and all their friends and allies were trying to maintain, it was slight in that he had not ordered, condoned, or excused any of the violence that had crept into the convention … but was there not a general guilt in which he inevitably shared, a joint responsibility for the swift deterioration of decency that was his through sheer lack of attention, sheer self-absorption, if nothing else?
Two are dead—three are dead if one remembers the child—and he remembers it now with a sudden despair so great that he actually staggers and has to sit down again abruptly on the bed. His own grandson, his own grandson, Hal’s first child—maybe, though his mind can barely admit it, so agonizing is the thought—Hal’s last child. This is what he, Orrin Knox, has done, simply by not being strong enough, not selfless enough, simply by not speaking out with sufficient firmness and insistence.
Simply by not speaking out … simply by not getting out.
“Orrin Knox doesn’t run away,” Stanley Danta had said, and it was a tribute to all the years that lay between the Secretary and the idealistic boy who had married Elizabeth Henry, gone on to become state senator in Illinois, Governor of Illinois, United States Senator from Illinois, Secretary of State, one of the great powers of Washington and of his time. He never had run away—but that had been when he faced antagonists he could understand and fight with all the vigor of a candid and impatient heart. Now he was contending against something again, the monster of violence that stalked the unhappy twentieth century: an evil grown great, come to visible life, rampant and voracious in a land that perhaps had been lucky too long in escaping it, and now must be made to pay the price by the jealous Furies.
How could he fight that? He could condemn it, as he had—he could order his people to refrain from it, as he had—but it came nonetheless. Good intentions and decent behavior were not enough, when confronted by this Thing; certainly not enough when the citizenry were not unanimous in their rejection of it. The Thing only needed a few friends to open the gate and let it in; unless everyone stood firm it entered. And where it entered, the world tore open and society collapsed.
It has entered in Union Square, it has entered in blankly hostile faces at the Cow Palace—it has entered, at the start, in savage columns and hysteric editorials and slanted headlines and one-sided photographs—it has entered in suavely supercilious and blandly ruthless rearrangements of the facts in commentaries and roundups and special programs and news reports. The marvelous things that can be done with an adverb, the masterful ruinations of character and purpose that can be accomplished with an adjective, the delicious ability of one lying picture to destroy the effectiveness of a thousand truthful words! And how well the little knowing smile, the ironic expression in the eyes, the polite reservations in the voice, the cordial, chuckling deprecation, can reinforce and keep them company!
It is amazing how many weapons the age provides for the misusers of truth.
It is not surprising that so many should succumb, with so few pangs of conscience, to the temptation to employ them.
No qualms of conscience because, when all is said and done, many of them utterly and sincerely believe in the righteousness of their own point of view. Thus the constant implacable attack upon opposing thought becomes, not the result of a struggle of conscience but the result of the suave use of practiced techniques in the service of a genuine conviction.
Orrin has been in Washington too long to discount the sincerity of his enemies in Walter’s world. A few are hypocrites and self-servers. But by far the majority absolutely and sincerely believe that he is a detriment to the country and must be exorcised from public life without the slightest mercy or regret. He knows that they acknowledge his character, respect his integrity, calculate him to be a most determined and formidable opponent—who deserves, therefore, their biggest and most ruthless guns.
Now again, as they had in the bitter battle over the nomination of Bob Leffingwell to be Secretary of State, and later in the controversies arising from the visit of Terence Ajkaje to the United States and the UN, they are in effect dismissing the President and concentrating their fire on the man they consider most responsible for events and the most dangerous to the future success of their own beliefs. They do not fully know—of course they have not had the insider’s privilege of knowing—the iron that has come into the soul of Harley Hudson; they still cling to the lingering belief that someone else is putting it there, and that only one man could logically be responsible. The raucous attacks upon the Administration’s foreign policy, the pre-convention campaign, the general tone of the opposition speeches within the convention, have come down essentially to an attack upon that one man. He is the target, now, as he has been before. This time his enemies have succeeded. He can survive their attacks upon him personally, he has taken their measure a hundred times and found himself strong enough to stand it. But he cannot stand the results, now, for his family.
Probably no one from Walter Dobius to Frankly Unctuous and back again has seriously desired real hurt and damage to Orrin Knox and his family; still he knows the horrible yet fascinating feeling that has gone through their ranks nonetheless. “That’ll show the bastard,” they have thought, though he doubts that any has been so crude—or so honest with himself—as to say it aloud: but a sort of tortured, quivering satisfaction, a visceral elation they have doubtless been ashamed of but have not been able to withstand, has shivered deliciously through them all.
None would of himself or herself have raised a hand against the Knoxes. But they have been responsible, as surely as though they have done, for they have deliberately and knowingly created the atmosphere of hatred and hysteria in which the deed could happen.
That is the trouble with these terribly righteous people who play so cavalierly with the explosives of the age, he thinks: quite frequently the explosives go off. And they are really not too sorry about it, they really rather enjoy it, in some sick, near-vomiting fashion that nonetheless enthralls them, so deeply has violence penetrated the fabric of their age.
But it is time, now, to end such philosophizing and acknowledge that they have won. Ambition and idealism and the conviction that he was right carried him triumphant through the testing posed by Harley’s predecessor when he offered Orrin the Presidency if he would drop his opposition to Bob Leffingwell; carried him six months later through the difficult decisions and violent attacks connected with Terrible Terry’s visit; carried him through many and many a crisis in his long public life. But they cannot carry him through his grandson dead and Crystal alive only by the miracle of her youth and good health. His opponents have reached him at last, and the battle is over.
It is over because of what they have done, but even more—and he realizes it with an agonized self-reproach he knows they could not conceive him feeling and for which they would not give him credit—it is over because of his own sense of guilt for what has happened.
They can settle the argument with their own consciences, if any.
He knows only one way to settle it with his, and that is by offering expiation in the form most meaningful to public men—the voluntary abandonment of dear ambition.
He cannot foresee now, as he slowly rises and beg
ins to apply himself seriously to the business of getting dressed, how Harley will make out in this new contest with Ted Jason. However it is, he realizes with a disheartened exhaustion, he will be unable to help. He would like to, but the heart is out of it—out of him. He just wants to take his family and go away somewhere, out of sight and out of mind—even though he knows, with a sudden contemptuous self-anger, that of course he can’t do that, he’s Secretary of State. Life is rushing on, policy is rushing on, there’s a job to be done and he can’t get out of that. But he can get out of this—this madness, here in San Francisco, and that he will.
He knows what Harley wants to say to him, at the Huntington at noon, and he knows equally well what he is going to say to Harley.
“And don’t you try to argue me out of it!” he calls out in a strange, harsh voice that his wife and son hardly recognize as they tap on the door and come in. “We have a right to be let alone,” he adds, and in a curious, defiant, crazy fashion he is half-crying as he speaks, “and by God, we’re going to be!”
***
Chapter 2
“There you are,” Ted said, glancing up with his pleasant smile, strained and tired now after his restless night and all the strategies that had kept it company. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
“How could I refuse,” Cullee asked with an answering smile that held many curious things including irony, tension, and something the Governor sensed was probably contempt. “A candidate for President—the Governor of my state—my leader—”
“Never that, I suspect,” Ted said with a sudden serious sigh, aware of how quiet the room was, although in the corridors and through the streets below there swarmed the jostling, wondering, rumor-ridden members of the reawakening convention. “Never that.…And yet I’d like to hope so. That’s why I invited you here.”
Cullee raised a giant hand and shook his head.
“Maybe. That isn’t why I am here. I’m here to see how a man looks when he’s been responsible for what you’ve been responsible for in the last forty-eight hours. I want to find out how you rationalize it.”
“How does one rationalize anything in politics?” Governor Jason asked with an abrupt sharpness. “In terms of power and in terms of what can be accomplished by what has been done.”
“And what has been accomplished?” Congressman Hamilton inquired. “Crystal Knox has lost her baby and Orrin’s probably been driven out of it. But what else has been accomplished?”
“I have moved within a handful of votes of being the nominee for President of the United States,” Governor Jason said quietly. “That’s what’s been accomplished.”
“It’s great if you can live with it,” Cullee remarked politely. He glanced at the painting that now stood propped atop the television set. “I see Doña Valuela’s here. What have you been doing, praying to her or asking her forgiveness?”
“LeGage Shelby thinks I can persuade you to put me in nomination,” the Governor said quietly. “I told him he was crazy.”
“He is,” Cullee said with the dark annoyance that the name of his ex-roommate could always arouse in him. “He always has been. Why doesn’t he nominate you himself? That would look good, the head of DEFY up there on the platform telling the white folks he hates what to do. DEFY’s the black Ku Klux Klan, isn’t it? You need their support, don’t you? Have your boy LeGage do it.”
“I would rather have Cullee Hamilton, next United States Senator from California, do it,” Ted said calmly. “I would much rather—if you would like me,” he said with a sudden acid, “to put it in the terms you people seem to love to lacerate yourselves with—I would much rather have a respectable Negro do it than a tramp. Clever tramp though he is.”
“Oh, yes, he’s clever,” Cullee agreed. “So clever that I’ll bet you’re not going to know exactly what to do with him, if by any chance you make it. What does he want to be, Secretary of State? He’s about that modest.”
“He hasn’t said and I haven’t asked.”
“The time may be coming when there’s going to be an awful lot of saying and an awful lot of asking. I hope you’re going to be ready for it, if you have the chance.”
“I may not have it,” the Governor conceded quietly, “though I think I will. Tell me: what would it take to get you to nominate me?”
Cullee smiled, a not very pleasant smile.
“You don’t have the price. What it would take for me to nominate you would be for you not to run, and that’s a little contradictory, isn’t it?”
“You feel very confident about California, don’t you?” Ted remarked thoughtfully. An expression almost of distaste crossed his visitor’s handsome face.
“Hell, I don’t feel confident of anything. All I know is that I’ve told them what I believe and they’ve given me the primary—just barely. I’m going to keep on telling them what I believe and they may give me the election in November. But I don’t know.”
“And you don’t need any help.”
The Congressman snorted.
“Of course I need help, who doesn’t? But not from you, Ted. Or anyway, not as much as you need mine.”
“Will I have it if I win the nomination?”
Cullee shrugged.
“I don’t know. I’d have to think it over pretty carefully, wouldn’t I?”
“But you don’t know now.”
“Nope,” Congressman Hamilton said, getting slowly to his feet. “I don’t know now. Where’s Ceil?”
“She’s gone down to the ranch.”
Cullee nodded.
“That figures. Under the circumstances.”
“Who are you going to nominate?” the Governor asked. Cullee grinned down from his great height.
“Whoever makes the best offer.”
“I hope you really know what you’re doing, Cullee,” Ted Jason said softly. “Because the consequences of a mistake could be quite serious for your future.”
“That makes two of us,” Cullee observed. “See you at the Cow Palace.”
“Indubitably,” the Governor said.
After his visitor left he sat for several minutes staring straight ahead, his face devoid of expression. He knew who the next claimant to be his nominator would be, and he did not see exactly how he was going to avoid him, now that the choice he had maneuvered ’Gage Shelby into suggesting had reacted exactly as he had expected. A sudden look of sadness, surprisingly frustrated, surprisingly deep, touched his face for a second. Then he turned back to the television set murmuring softly to itself, the newspapers strewn across the beds. His expression hardened and became secure again. His friends were with him and the battle did not loom so frightening after all. He could not, in fact, have wished for endorsements more effective or encouraging than he had:
JASON BANDWAGON ROLLING TOWARD VICTORY, the Chronicle said. CONVENTION BREAKING TO JASON IN ALL DELEGATIONS, WORLD HAILS GOVERNOR AS PEACEMAKER, The Greatest Publication reported. JASON, VICTORY IN SIGHT, PONDERS ANTI-WAR ADMINISTRATION, the Post eagerly echoes … T.J. CONFIDENT OF VICTORY AS CONVENTION ROARS TO PEAK … GOVERNOR RACING TO VICTORY IN “CONVENTION OF CENTURY” … CONFIDENT JASON MAY TURN TO FELLOW GOVERNOR FOR V.P., cried all the rest.
And there was Walter Dobius’ column that began, just as he had written it last night, “At last America has a leader, washed to the top on a wave of repugnance against both the Hudson-Knox foreign policy and the violence which its supporters have brought to this otherwise decent convention.…”
And all the columns that dutifully followed his lead, and the earnestly agreeing editorials that chorused solemnly, “America’s innate political morality has a great chance to re-establish itself today when the San Francisco convention votes, as we believe it will, to give its presidential nomination to that fighting champion of human decency and world peace. Governor Edward M. Jason of California.…”
And the words of Frankly Unctuous the Anchor Man and all his colleagues of decibel, kilowatt, and little glowing screen, suavely, smoothly, insisten
tly pouring forth to their fellow citizens every fifteen minutes or less from commentary, round table, analysis, and news report: “An apparently almost irresistible tidal wave for Governor Ted Jason of California is sweeping this convention today. The signs of Jason victory are everywhere apparent as the forces of President Harley M. Hudson and Secretary of State Orrin Knox, in obvious disarray, strive desperately to turn back a demand from delegates and country alike that apparently is not to be denied.…”
And everywhere through the hotels, in the rooms, along the corridors, over the constantly jangling telephones, in the coffee shops and dining rooms and the hectic lobbies awash with shouting, excited people, everywhere on the streets outside where the crowds swirled and the bands played, the Jason agents traveled, saying, “You see what the Chronicle says? You see this headline out of New York? You hear Frankly Unctuous on television just now? Don’t be a fool, Manny! Get on the bandwagon before it’s too late! We’ll know who’s for us and who’s against us, you know! You think the Governor will forget it if you help hold that delegation against him? You got another think coming, Manny!”
And so the bandwagon grew even as he sat there, and the psychology worked, or seemed to work, and everywhere in the beautiful city emerging finally from the fog to bask in another diamond day the forces of Harley Hudson and Orrin Knox were indeed, or seemed to be, in disarray.
At the Huntington, however, the Speaker and Senator Munson would never have known it to watch the portly, fatherly, apparently entirely unperturbed figure that leaned comfortably back in an armchair and read the papers clamoring his defeat with an occasional “Tut, tut!” or a mild, “My, my!” or even, now and then, a calm, “Is that a fact, now?”
Finally he tossed them aside and gestured toward Frankly Unctuous, who was just explaining for the twentieth time this morning why a Jason victory was inevitable.
