by Allen Drury
“Well, dear friends,” Lafe said, “and what do you think of the great Republic now?”
“Fascinating,” Krishna Khaleel said with a hiss. “Absolutely fascinating.”
“We know that,” Lafe said, “But what’s going to happen?”
“Rather difficult to estimate at this point, isn’t it, old boy?” Lord Maudulayne suggested. “Looks somewhat like a Hudson-Knox victory, doesn’t it?”
“A little somewhat,” Cullee remarked. “Not a great big somewhat.”
“If Governor Jason wins,” Raoul Barre said politely, “it will create quite a dilemma, will it not?”
“It could create a contested election, yes,” Cullee said. “Which I don’t suppose would disappoint our good friends overseas. Nothing quite so delicious as seeing the United States all tied up in knots, is there?”
“Oh, now,” Krishna Khaleel protested. “Oh, now, Cullee, you mustn’t say bitter things like that. We all want the United States to succeed, so much depends upon her succeeding. We all want her to have a peaceable election and a new President—that is,” he added hastily in a flustered voice, “I mean a new President in the sense of one newly elected to take office next January. I do not mean in the sense—”
“We know what you mean, K.K.,” Lafe said dryly. “It’s clear enough. So you really think Ted Jason would lead the United States in the way you want her led, do you? You might be surprised.”
“I think perhaps he has created for himself—or allowed to be created for him,” Raoul Barre said thoughtfully, “I am not, at this point, sure exactly which—a psychological and political prison within which it would not be possible for us to be surprised. His hands would be effectively tied, his choices very much limited, I should think.”
“Presidents’ hands are never tied if they really want to break out,” Lafe said, “that’s one of the intriguing things about the office. Don’t be too sure of what he would do. The office might change him—if he got it,” he concluded firmly, “which I do not believe he will.”
“Still, you are not sure,” the French Ambassador said grimly.
“No,” Cullee conceded somberly. “We are not sure.”
Nor were they, really, in the penthouse at the Huntington, whose temporary tenants, like all the other temporaries of the convention, were surrounded by luggage, ready to leave. The First Lady and Dolly Munson had already departed half an hour ago to go to “Main Chance” for a week of rest, recuperation, and reconstruction; they would rejoin their husbands in Washington for the campaign’s opening strategy meeting. Bob Munson and Stanley Danta had come in and chatted for a while, assessed the prospects for the campaign with a shrewd and undaunted realism, and gone out to catch the California Zephyr back East, describing a train ride as the best decompression chamber they knew for the fearful tensions of a hard-fought convention. Bob Leffingwell had called to pay his respects and say that he and his wife were going to fly out to the Hana-Maui for a short vacation and then would be reporting in to Washington “for whatever you would like me to do.” The Speaker had come by for a moment to wish them luck, made no pretense about considering the task ahead easy, pledged his help in every way possible and then left for a week with his sister and brother-in-law at their cabin at Lake Tahoe. The last visitor, the Governor of Nebraska, came and went, the phone at last fell silent, there was a little delay before time for departure to the airport. The candidate for President and the candidate for Vice President at last had a few moments to talk.
“Any regrets?” the President asked quietly, looking for the last time over the beautiful Bay. An unhappy grimace crossed the face of the Secretary of State.
“Crystal, of course. And the bitterness of the whole thing.…I have a curious feeling we will be a long time recovering from this convention. I think it’s done something to us, and perhaps to America. It could,” he said slowly, “be something permanent, if we are not lucky.”
“These things come and go,” the President said. “For a people who like to think of themselves as calm and easygoing, we are apt to be surprisingly violent, at times. But we have been before, and it has passed. Sensibility reasserts itself. I think it will now.”
“I wish I were as sure as you are,” the Secretary said. “I never told you about the bomb somebody planted at my house a couple of months ago, I didn’t want to worry you. And of course you know what both of us get in the mail. The threats will be even more violent and fantastic now.”
“As Calvin Coolidge once remarked,” the President said, “‘Any well-dressed man who wants to give his own life can kill the President.’” His expression became both sad and ironic for a moment. “Nowadays, they don’t even have to be well-dressed. And someday, of course,” he added quietly, “somebody may succeed, with me, or with you, or with anyone else who seems to some unhappy mind to be a worthwhile target. But … one can’t stop for that.”
“Oh, no,” Orrin said, “of course not. I had my moment”—he smiled—“of thinking one could, but you talked me out of it. What I regret about it is not the danger to you or to me—or to Ted, say, if somebody on our side gets unbalanced enough to go after him—but the fact that Americans can get in such a state of mind about each other at all. That we could have the really terrifying things that have occurred at this convention. That out of this seemingly decent land could come such monstrous subversions of decency. That rational people—leave aside the kooks and the oddballs, that rational people—who begin with reasoned argument can end with the sort of ghastly sincerity that could produce death for their opponents.…You expect it in other countries, but somehow it always surprises you here, even though the record certainly has its examples.…It’s still hard to believe.”
The President gave him a somber look.
“We have a job ahead, to calm this situation down—to fight a campaign and win it—to maintain what we believe best in foreign policy—and still not let the country be torn apart any further. Can we do it?”
“We’ve got to,” the Secretary said simply. “And the first step, I think, is not to yield one inch on what we honestly believe to be best for the country and the world: not an inch. If we believe in patient firmness, then patient firmness is what we’ve got to preserve, regardless of what Ted may say or anyone else may do. It’s the only way to survive, I think.”
“Patient and unafraid firmness,” the President said softly. “Don’t forget the unafraid. It can’t be timorous or static. That would be fatal, too.”
The Secretary nodded as they stood up.
“Exactly.…So, I shall see you in Washington, then. What time will you get in?”
The President glanced at his watch.
“Around eight, I think—five o’clock out here. When are you coming on?”
“I had thought I’d go right now, but I think maybe Beth and I will stay around a day or two with Hal and Crystal, just to make sure everything’s coming along all right. I’m going to move them down to Carmel this afternoon. I’ll go to the airport with you and see you off, of course. Then I’ll come along a little later—unless you need me sooner?”
The President shook his head.
“Oh, no. Get a rest. And give the children my love. It’s very rough for them to have to take all this.”
“They’re standing it well,” Orrin said.
“You’re right to be proud of them,” the President said. He held out his hand.
“Well, old friend, let’s see how it goes.”
“Whatever I can do,” Orrin said very quietly, “I will do.”
“I do not think,” the President said with a smile that broke the emotion a little, “that our labors will go entirely unrewarded—as long as we have no illusions about what we face.”
“None whatsoever,” the Secretary said with an answering smile. “I’ve never felt so un-illusioned in my life.”
Then there was a knock on the door, the moment ended. Surrounded by Secret Service men, preceded by a group of frantically shouting newspaper
men and photographers running and jostling ahead of them down the corridor, the two principal members of the convention left the hotel and prepared to depart the golden city where they had won the golden prize—or at least the chance to try for it. Not they, nor anyone, had truly won it yet.
***
Chapter 10
Sometimes he read. Sometimes he dozed. But mostly, as Air Force One moved swiftly back across the land through a cloudless summer day, the President thought. Not particularly profound or major thoughts, he was too tired and too emotionally exhausted for that, but just the rather wandering, musing thoughts of a gentle man still surprised by his own capacity for deviousness, his own surrender to anger and retaliation, his own grim pursuit of the power he had once thought himself too mild and generous ever to need or want.
He had meant it when he said he would not run; crisis and those who produced the screaming headlines and the hurtful news stories and the suave, damaging broadcasts had changed all that. (PRESIDENT FORCES BITTER CONVENTION TO TAKE KNOX, they said now; JASON MAY LAUNCH THIRD PARTY IN CAUSE OF PEACE.)
He had meant it when he said he would not dictate the choice of Vice President; Ted himself, and the cynical souls behind him, had changed all that.
He had meant it, years ago, when he thought that all he wanted out of life was a loving family, a good home, a peaceful life.
The strange ways of power and politics in a strange and complex country had changed all that.
So here he was, plan-changer, word-breaker, grasper after power as avid as his fellows: Harley M. Hudson, President and candidate, learner with the rest that certain roads of power, once started upon, sometimes cannot be turned away from.
Nor should they be, he thought as the giant craft passed into Maryland and he wondered idly who would be there to meet him when he landed, providing a man believed that he could see a road that led at last, through whatever dark forest, toward some ultimate benefit for the United States. If a man saw somewhere ahead some shining upland where the puzzled, unhappy, beloved Republic might rest at last, if history had given him the chance to lead her to it, then he had a right to seek for power, a right to get it if he could, a right to hold and use it as the Lord gave him strength to do.
Most things were justified by this … for Presidents in pursuit of their fearful duty, he was finally beginning to believe, all things.
Much had been made of honor at the convention, as his opponent had said in his agonized speech. And so there had, and each of them had been forced to come to terms with it in his own way, as best he could. For himself, the President felt he had done what the imperatives of history required him to do. So, no doubt, had all the rest, from Ted to Walter and back again. He was satisfied in his own conscience: let them make what bargains they could with theirs. There came a point where a man could not worry about the peace of mind of others. His own was problem enough.
He closed his eyes, his plain, pleasant face slipping into repose. He wished Lucille were with him. He wished Orrin were, too. For the last time on his journey home, he slept.
“There it is!” cried the New York Times at Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia. “It’s a bird—it’s a man—”
“It’s Fearless Peerless,” the Chicago Daily News said dryly, “so cut the disrespectful, irreverent, God-damned chatter.”
“Shall we kneel down and touch our heads to the ground?” the Post inquired.
“Better lie down in a line and let him use us for a rug to walk to the White House helicopter, hadn’t we?” the Washington Evening Star suggested. “That might be more fitting, under the circumstances.”
They all laughed, somewhat ruefully but dauntless still; not noticing in the flurry and excitement and sudden bustling all about that in the jostling, police-held crowd pressed up against the fence just behind them, one other, gifted by a sometimes puzzling Almighty with the gift to change the world, laughed too.
In Gorotoland at that moment, at Mbuele in the highlands. Prince Obifumatta Ajkaje and his stern-faced Communist advisers were even then rejecting, for the twenty-seventh time, the cautious peace-feelers put out by Britain through the circuitous route of Ceylon, Nigeria, and Guyana; while in dusty Molobangwe on the plains, his cousin Prince Terry was reviewing the latest detachment of U.S. troops, whose arrival, as yet unannounced, would lift the formal American commitment to one hundred thousand men.
In Panama, Felix Labaiya, standing alone as he liked to do on the terrace of “Suerte,” staring down the long valley that led from Chiriqui to the sea, was calculating what his brother-in-law’s humiliation might drive him to do, and on the basis of what he thought he understood of that brilliant, ambitious mind, was deciding with a renewed determination to order his forces to fight on.
At the UN, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and nine Afro-Asian nations were preparing yet another resolution demanding United States withdrawal from around the globe, agreeing that they would reintroduce it regularly each month from now on so that the United States, if she so desired, might keep on affronting the world with her hated and inexcusable vetoes.
In San Francisco, the disgruntled, the hopeful, the idealistic, the subversive, the believers in Ted Jason and the Right Position, and his friends of Walter’s world, were beginning to drift into the ballroom of the Hilton, where cameras, lights, and microphones were already, an hour ahead of time, in place for the opening of the organizing session that would prepare the rump convention.
And at Andrews Air Force base, the Mayor and City Council of Washington, the members of the Cabinet, the members of Congress, the members of the diplomatic corps, the public, the reporters, and one other, waited.
Gracefully the giant craft glided toward the runway, ten miles from the great white city on the Potomac where the hopes and dreams, the triumphs and failures, the pasts and futures of so many men and causes were centered, while all around the lovely rolling green countryside drowsed in the peaceful heat of a soft, exhausted twilight, late in the month of July.
December 1964-December 1965
***
Appendix
***
On Being Famous and What It Lets You Do
Allen Drury speech to Pennsylvania State Library Association, York, PA, Oct. 2, 1959
Many strange and wonderful things happen when you write a book.
You find yourself engaged in bizarre and unexpected activities such as riding down Broadway with a famous producer in a $24,000 white Rolls Royce convertible—never having known before that Rolls Royce even made a convertible, let alone white, and let alone, as its owner tells you the moment you step aboard, for $24,000.
You find yourself appearing on radio and television shows that range from something called “Bright and Early” in San Francisco, where you are sandwiched between a recipe for shrimp creole and a lady in black tights doing calisthenics, to “The Last Word” with Bergen Evans in New York, where the recipe calls for wit, and the calisthenics are mental.
You find yourself acquiring a whole new range of perspective on professional critics, most of whom are flattering, but some of whom, you find it a little difficult not to feel, should be speedily put out to pasture.
And you get letters.
You get them from a young lady in a small Pennsylvania town who tells you how lonely she is, how proud she is of your accomplishments, and adds that “all I have is a degree and a good figure, neither of which has brought me anything up to now.” You learn to decide without a moment’s hesitation that with correspondence of this type, they aren’t going to bring her anything this time, either.
You get them from a spiteful lady in Maine who informs you that thousands of Americans are going to be shocked and horrified by your portrait of a President of the United States who is an actual, practical responsible politician instead of a godhead draped in cloth of gold; and you find that it is no problem at all for you to forget the manners of a lifetime and tell her by return mail that she has mad
e the stupidest and most unperceptive comment of any you have seen yet.
You get them from politicians, and from colleagues of the press and from influential men, telling you how they approve of what you have done.
But mostly, almost 99 to 1, you get them from average readers all over the country who tell you with genuine emotion how much they have liked your book, and how much it means to them, not only as readers who enjoy being entertained, but as Americans who have found in your writing something valid and hopeful and true about the country.
“Now I understand much better what goes on in Washington,” they write, “and I am not so worried about it.” “You have contributed greatly to our understanding of democracy,” they say, “and you make us feel more hopeful.” And over and over again, so that it becomes the dominant theme of their correspondence, they use the words “heartened and encouraged.”
And presently you realize—and it is, believe me, a very humbling thought—that they mean it, and that somehow you seem to have given a good many of your countrymen a light to see by in a twilit age, that the clear intention in your mind should indeed, through all the perils of composition and publication, have managed to come at least somewhere reasonably close to achieving it.
To that subject I should like to return before I conclude, for it seems to me that this response from readers throughout the country has a most direct and illuminating bearing upon the condition of America in this tense mid-century. It seems to me also that it perhaps has some bearing upon your own theme of “Building Upon The Past.”
