Capable of Honor

by Allen Drury

  “Will you turn that fluff artist off?” he requested mildly. “I’ve heard his requiem for my hopes enough times to get the drift, I think. A little silence would now be very helpful.”

  “Right,” the Speaker said, rising and crossing to snap off the machine. “He hasn’t convinced you, then.”

  “Bill,” the President said, “on the day I pay serious attention to that biased so-and-so I will cash in my chips.”

  “Not everybody,” Senator Munson suggested, “has your ability to perceive his true nature with such startling clarity. I suspect that a great many people believe he’s telling them the truth. A great many people like delegates, for instance.”

  The President shrugged.

  “I think this convention has reached the point where it’s utterly impossible to count noses. I don’t think anybody can accurately say at this moment how it’s going to go. Do you. Bill?”

  “N—o,” the Speaker said, “except as the propaganda is carrying some weight with some delegates, like Bob says. Could be Ted’s people don’t have to persuade very many.”

  “How many are we persuading?” the President inquired. “I assume you haven’t stopped your efforts.”

  “Hardly,” Bob Munson said. “Everybody’s busy. But I must admit all this—” he gestured at the triumphant headlines, the columns and editorials somebody had marked with a black grease-pencil, the silent television screen momentarily robbed of its many pompous, authoritative presences—“is having its effect. We need—” he paused.

  “We need an effect ourselves,” the President said. “All right, I’ve got one. In due course it will appear. In the meantime, keep calm and don’t panic. I’m not.”

  “No,” the Majority Leader said dryly. “I can see that. What is this—effect?”

  “Oh, you’ll be there,” the President said, somewhat archly. Then he grinned. “Aren’t these pixyish people annoying, though, in the midst of serious business? Part of the effect is Orrin. Who will be here,” he added pointedly, “in another ten minutes.”

  “You don’t want us to stay around and help,” the Speaker suggested. The President became serious but shook his head.

  “No. I don’t need any help or any witnesses. What I have to say to Orrin I have to say to him alone. How’s Crystal doing?”

  “Hal says she’s coming along very well,” Senator Munson said.

  “You’ve seen Hal.”

  “Yes, he showed up at the room a few minutes ago. Dolly ordered breakfast sent up and made him eat some, after which he said he’d like to keep busy, so I sent him off to the California delegation with Lafe.”

  “Good for him,” the President said. “Good assignment, too.”

  “I thought his presence around Ted’s own delegation might be salutary in making a few people think about the implications of what happened last night,” Senator Munson said grimly. “I want him out on the floor when the session starts, too. I don’t want the convention to forget it, even if”—and again he made his comprehensive, contemptuous gesture toward Walter’s world—“everybody else has apparently agreed to bury it as far out of sight as possible.”

  “We’ve got a new rule today,” the Speaker said dryly. “Law and order’s the ticket now. National Guardsmen all over the place and nary a storm trooper in sight. It’s touching.”

  “And the only place where it all continues,” the President said softly, “although he may perhaps think it’s not so, is in the mind and heart of the man who let it begin, and in the unforgiving and unrelenting minds and hearts of those who did his errands. Because now they have him in thrall in a way he won’t entirely realize until he looks back and sees how far he’s gone from the point of integrity where he first accepted their help.” He sighed. “Poor Ted.”

  “Poor Ted,” Bob Munson said shortly, “may very well take the Presidency of the United States away from you, you know. I don’t think I’d waste so many tears on Poor Ted.”

  “No, he won’t,” the President said calmly. “And if he does, it’s still poor Ted, because he’s gone now. He’s made his bargain with the devil and the devil won’t quit. Which poor Ted, like all men too smart to be humble, doesn’t believe. Which is why, poor Ted.…Be sure and have Anna Bigelow preside again this afternoon, will you, Bill?”

  The Speaker looked surprised.

  “Why? The poor girl was a nervous wreck this morning after it was all over.”

  The President chuckled.

  “Because I want to see her face when I make my little effect.”

  “Shame on you,” Senator Munson said with a smile. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously at all, Mr. President.”

  “Oh, yes, I am,” the President said, suddenly sober. “Now, get out, both of you, please. Go out and get votes. I’ll see you at the hall shortly after three.”

  “Good luck with our friend,” Bob Munson said.

  “Good luck with everything,” said the Speaker.

  The President nodded.

  “I’ve had pretty good luck with things up to now in this office. I aim to keep it that way if I can.”

  He could see that his visitors, though they put a good face on as they left, were deeply worried and thinking: poor Harley, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But poor Harley did, he told himself as he put in a call to the St. Francis and requested the support of the troubled party at the other end.

  “I think it would be most helpful,” he said.

  “But, Mr. President—” and there was a heavy sigh, lonely and forlorn, which he had never expected to hear from that source. One smart man was humbled, he could tell that.

  “You’re about to take one step,” he suggested. “Aren’t you? I have you badly figured if you aren’t, I’ll say that.”

  “Yes,” his listener said slowly. “I am—I have.”

  “Then you had best take the other.”

  “Are you ordering me?”

  “Good heavens, no. How could I order you? I’m just suggesting that you remember our talk the day I decided to run—”

  “Yes. You indicated you might call in an I.O.U.”

  “Well,” the President said, rather testily, “only if you genuinely agree.”

  There was a pause and another sigh.

  “I think,” Bob Leffingwell said finally, “I genuinely agree.”

  “Good,” the President said. “Then we can count on your endorsement—”

  “More than that,” Bob Leffingwell interrupted abruptly in the tone of one who has reached a fundamental decision and is determined suddenly to get on with it and not look back. “What I would like to do, if you’ll let me—”

  And that, the President told himself as he hung up five minutes later, was proof enough of his luck. He had a talisman, now, and the way was opening up. He put down the phone and stared out at the Golden Gate Bridge and the tawny reaches of Marin across the Bay. Faintly from the swarming apex of Nob Hill far below the sound of a band playing “Dixie” floated up.

  ***

  Chapter 3

  How many times in his life had he talked to Harley? the Secretary of State asked himself with a tired wonderment as his two Secret Service escorts swiftly and efficiently whisked him down a side alley, through a back entrance of the Huntington, and into a closely guarded service elevator for the quick, secret ride to the penthouse. It must be thousands, and some of them came back to him in bits and pieces now: the tense, uneasy talk in Chicago at the convention eight years ago … the wild, frantic exchange on the podium above the roaring crowd a few hours later that had cost Orrin the Presidency that time … many and many a talk with a nervous, worried, and apparently hopelessly weak Vice President in the years after … their first talk at the White House after Harley took over, the ironic exchange when Orrin had entered with a frowning concentration—“I was just thinking”—“About the President, I suppose,” Harley had suggested—“No, about you”—“I am the President,” in a kindly but ironic tone … the talks in Geneva with a sud
denly firm, suddenly matured Harley at the strange meeting when the Soviet leaders had made their grandiose, defeated ultimatum for control of the world … their talks about Terry and the UN, and more lately about Gorotoland and Panama—a thousand talks, a million talks, if you like, the talks of busy men dealing with great affairs who had worked together for the better part of a decade.

  But none, he knew, quite so fateful or so final as this.

  He was feeling a little better, now, but nothing had changed his determination to do the only thing consistent with what he believed to be his responsibility and his duty; consistent also with his love for his son and daughter-in-law, his regard for the safety of his family, the duty he felt he owed to all those millions in America who still had great faith in Orrin Knox despite what his enemies said about him. Someone had to be witness for principle, in this convention gone sick with the sickness of the age. Someone had to make a gesture sufficiently dramatic to reaffirm the decencies and perhaps shock the insane back to sanity. Someone had to have the integrity to accept blame and give up ambition.

  The bitter thought Why must it be me? was only a last, dying protest, a last wrenching farewell to lost hopes. He had thought he had bade them farewell on the night Harley’s predecessor offered him the Presidency and he refused. They had been revived when Harley appointed him Secretary of State and opened the way for his candidacy for Vice President. The door was still ajar, then, for future possibilities. It had been ajar until 3 A.M. this morning. Then it had slammed shut in the fog outside the Cow Palace and he knew it could not be reopened.

  He had tried too hard and done too much—and now, finally, suffered too much—for presidential ambition. He would fill out his term as Secretary of State for as long as Harley wanted him and then go out of office and devote himself to those pursuits ex-public men always talk of vaguely and sometimes do: write his memoirs, lecture and teach on government, visit the universities that were independent-minded enough to have him, try to convince the young that their self-conscious cynicism about America is really rather poor reward for the idealism that has prompted their elders to save their country for them on so many hard and thankless occasions.

  The elevator stopped with a thump, they were out of it and along the hall almost before he knew it. There was a sudden leaping up of reporters seated near the door, a startled, “Mr. Secretary—?” Then he was inside, the door slammed shut, the angry voices of press and Secret Service contending sank away, and he and the President were alone.

  “Orrin,” the President said, gesturing to chairs drawn up before the view, “sit down. You won’t mind if I stand for a minute. I’ve just been sitting down talking to Bob Munson and the Speaker. I want to stretch a little.”

  “What did they have to say?” Orrin asked, but with only an automatic politeness, for it no longer mattered.

  “They’re depressed,” the President said, staring thoughtfully at the impossible beauty spread before them as though cupped in the palm of some giant, fantastically overgenerous hand. He gave a rather wan smile. “They think I’m not.” He sighed. A surprising and, to the Secretary of State, quite alarming melancholy came upon his face. “I am,” he said simply, and he sat down abruptly, still not looking at his visitor. “Very.”

  “I’m sorry,” Orrin said with a genuine stirring of concern, the first he had felt for anyone other than his family and himself since 3 A.M. “I wish I could help.”

  “I don’t expect anyone can help,” the President said in a moody tone that sounded increasingly, disturbingly, unlike Harley. “Not even Lucille. She tried to cheer me up this morning with one of her little pep talks, but I’m afraid it’s too late for pep talks.” He glanced at Orrin finally, with an attempt at wry humor that didn’t quite make it and thus disturbed the Secretary more. “Old Happy Harley has just about had it, Orrin. I think we’re licked.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Orrin said, automatically and yet with a stirring of genuine protest against this apparent abandonment of even the will to fight. “Surely there are plenty of delegates who still—”

  “How many?” the President inquired, still moodily. “Half? Somewhat more than half? Somewhat less than half? We ought to know better than that, Orrin.”

  “Well,” the Secretary said shortly, and the President was pleased to see that there was a return to impatience in his manner, a revival of combativeness in his tone. “I expect you won’t know until the last vote is counted, that’s obvious, but that isn’t any reason to stop fighting … that I can see,” he ended somewhat lamely, suddenly aware that he was not being entirely consistent with his own determination to stop fighting. But the nuance was apparently lost on the President, who had swung back to stare out again at the glistening day and was seemingly unaware of any confusions in his colleague’s mind.

  “Why fight?” he asked finally. “Why fight any more? It seems to me that I have fought and fought and fought and fought”—he hit his knee with a sudden protesting fist—“to try to lead this country in ways consistent with safety and honor, and what good has it done me? What is it coming to? Nothing!”

  “Oh, now,” the Secretary objected, lifted out of his worries about his own position in spite of himself: no one could let that remark pass without objection, no one could let Harley deprecate himself when he had done so much, anyone with an ounce of fairness would have to protest that. “Now, that just isn’t true! You know it isn’t true, so stop saying it. You’ve done a great deal. The situation is such that you’ve got to keep on doing it. You can’t stop now.”

  “And take a licking in the convention this afternoon?” the President asked bitterly. “Be the first President in this century to be repudiated by his own party? Let myself be turned out to pasture? I ought to withdraw,” he said darkly, “and nominate Ted Jason for them, if that’s what they want, and be damned to them, It’s what they deserve.”

  “You can’t do that,” Orrin said, genuinely alarmed, forgetting protocol in his concern. “You just can’t do it, Harley, you must not. Why,” he said, and his eyes widened with the enormity of the prospect, “that would be terrible! It would mean the collapse of everything we have tried to do in the world.” His jaw set suddenly with the hue the President had been hoping to see. “It wouldn’t be the convention’s repudiation, it would be a self-repudiation. I won’t let you do it. I won’t let you do it. The least you can do is stand on your principles and make a fight for it. Then you’ll have an honorable record, no matter what happens.”

  “Why should I take their smearing and their attacks anymore?” the President inquired, still with an air of deep bitterness. “All the violence, and all the rest of it—blaming us for it when we weren’t responsible, for heaven’s sake! I can’t—why should I have to take that sort of thing? So if they’ve won, they’ve won, that’s all. I’ve fought them enough. I can’t take any more.”

  “But now, see here,” Orrin said, and his voice was its old positive self, the President could see he had forgotten himself entirely and was approaching the problem of changing Harley’s mind with all the powerful concentration he had brought to so many problems over the years. “Think what it would be like if you gave up. Why, they would say all the charges were true. They would say you had failed and knew it. It would shadow your name forever. And furthermore,” he concluded earnestly, “and this is why you really can’t do it—it just wouldn’t be you. It would be so completely out of character. You can’t just abandon your character and step out of it, you know. You can’t just stop being you and be somebody else.”

  I’m doing pretty well, the President told himself with some amusement, but his expression of gloom remained unchanging, his look of being completely unimpressed remained stubborn and unyielding.

  “Mr. President,” Orrin said solemnly, “I won’t let you do it. Nor will Bob or the Speaker or any of us. I think the only way to win is to stick with it and go straight ahead. It’s the only way consistent with your record, your character, your life. Maybe
I don’t have the right to ask, but”—his jaw set again in a stubborn line—“there’s nobody else here to do it, and by God I am Secretary of State, so I’m going to: I want you to promise me that you’ll stay with it—that you won’t withdraw—you won’t quit.”

  For several minutes the President said nothing, his eyes fixed on some distant point in Marin where all the inner imperatives and hidden things of a lifetime were apparently gathered. Orrin hardly dared look at him, hardly dared breathe, so certain was he that the issue hung in the balance and that the slightest word or motion could destroy his purpose.

  “If I were to stay in,” the President said at last in a tone that was still glum but carried, excitingly, the first glimmer of a returning will to fight, “I’d need help. I couldn’t do it alone.”

  “If you make the decision,” Orrin said firmly, “you’ll have the help. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “But how could you help?” the President objected with a slow moodiness. “You say you’re going to get out yourself.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the Secretary said flatly, and it was true he hadn’t said it to Harley, and now, so intent was he upon persuading the President, he forgot he had said it to anybody or even entertained the thought at all. “Don’t you worry. I’ll help in every way I can.”

  “You will?” the President inquired, but still in a tone that indicated he didn’t quite believe it. “But how can you, if you withdraw?…Aren’t the arguments you’ve used on me equally valid for you?” he asked moodily. “You’re not going to tell me, after that, that you have any more right to withdraw than I have? And furthermore, I need you to hold your delegates—for me, you know, as well as for you. Half of them are going to give up and bolt to Ted the minute you get out. Where would that leave me?” He looked abruptly less moody and more aggressive. “Come on, now, Orrin! If I stay in, you stay in. It’s got to be a cooperative effort, here. I’m not going to carry it alone. Surely you can’t expect that of me!”