by Allen Drury
“Patsy!” Ceil exclaimed, genuinely shocked.
“Well, I’m sorry he got killed,” Patsy conceded defiantly, “but I’m not sorry he’s out of Ted’s way. He never should have done and said the things he did.”
“And Ted should have said and done what he did?”
“He only did what he felt he had to do to win the nomination,” Patsy said.
“But he didn’t win it, did he?”
“No,” his sister said with a sudden waspish note in her voice, “because that—that—gang—of old reactionaries led by Harley and Orrin blocked him from doing it. That doesn’t mean the convention didn’t want him, and doesn’t want him still. Now, you KNOW that, Ceil, so why keep pretending?”
There was a sigh, half-exasperated, half-amused, from “Vistazo.”
“Patsy, you wear me out. What makes you so sure the convention still wants him? Anyway, who says the convention’s going to have a chance? The President doesn’t have to reconvene the convention—”
“No, but sooner or later he’s got to call the National Committee, and they can reconvene the convention. That’s why you’ve got to call Bob Leffingwell immediately and get him to help us persuade the Committee members—”
“Patsy!” Ceil protested, overwhelmed, and not for the first time, by the Jasons’ ability to ignore all obstacles and ride roughshod toward what they wanted. “That’s exactly what I mean about things having gone too far. You heard Bob’s nominating speech for Harley and the attack he made on Ted. ‘Devious’ and ‘playing fast and loose with principle’ and all the rest of it. How on earth can you ask him to work for you now?”
“Oh, poof! Poof, POOF! That was an entirely different set of circumstances. Bob didn’t nominate Orrin, did he?”
“No, Harley did.”
“Well, then: why assume Bob’s for Orrin now? He owed Harley a debt for salvaging his career after he was defeated for Secretary of State, but who defeated him? Orrin Knox! Maybe that wasn’t ‘going so far nothing can be done about it,’ I ask you!”
“Even so, I don’t think there’s any reason at all to believe that Bob Leffingwell is going to come back to Ted just because he may not like Orrin. And I don’t think he’s all that influential, either, especially after all the things that were said about him at the convention.”
Patsy sniffed.
“Everybody said a lot of things about everybody at the convention. That’s what conventions are for. People’s emotions don’t change basic political realities. The reality is that Ted is going to win that nomination now, and that Bob will have to back him against Orrin. And Bob is influential, Ceil. He’s lost a little ground, maybe, but the minute he announces for Ted, Walter Dobius and everybody else in the press will start praising him again. He hasn’t lost them permanently. They’d love to come back if he’ll give them the chance. The professional liberals,” she said with a dry savagery that startled her sister-in-law, who had thought she was one of them, “never really like to abandon a hero in whom they’ve invested their time and reputations. They’ll take him back if he gives the slightest sign that he’s willing to behave from now on.”
“Bob isn’t a member of the National Committee—”
“We’re going to organize this just like the convention,” Patsy said. “We’re opening a headquarters here in Washington tomorrow morning and we’re going to issue releases and hold press conferences, and all the rest of it. Bob can head it up again if he wants to. It would be a great help to us. We’re already getting marvelous support from the press and the networks. You’ve probably seen Walter’s column and some of the editorials. CBS wants to do a half-hour interview with Ted from here after the funeral on Wednesday, and NBC is planning to do one, too, I believe. They’re going to call it ‘Party Without a President.’”
“That should please President Abbott,” Ceil remarked. “That should please him very much. Don’t you think he’s the man you should be working on, not Bob Leffingwell and the Committee members?”
“He’s only ONE,” Patsy said tartly.
“But look where he lies now. A rather big ONE, I’d say.”
“He can’t control what the Committee does! All he can do is try to influence it for Orrin, I suppose. And we’re going to influence it for Ted. So our chance is as good as his. Better, because the convention still wants Ted. Can’t you see,” she demanded, “what a perfect COUP it would be if he and Bob are reconciled? Right now Bob still has a lot of his old liberal support, and by nominating Harley he’s picked up a lot of conservatives, too. He’s a symbol of the honest man who genuinely stands in the middle, now. He genuinely does. They’ll listen to what he says. But, sweetie, he won’t listen to me, because he doesn’t like me right now. He does like and respect you, I believe. So you’ve got to call him for us. He’s apparently trying to avoid Ted.”
“Why should he like me?” Ceil inquired. “I’m Ted’s wife.” She uttered the sudden little sardonic chuckle that sometimes upset her in-laws. “In a manner of speaking.”
“That’s exactly why, dear,” Patsy said smoothly. “You are—but there’s a little doubt about it at the moment, because you’ve been so dramatic, leaving him at the crucial moment of the convention and sneaking away down there—”
“I didn’t sneak,” Ceil said mildly. “I told him where I was going.”
“Well, anyway, you LEFT. That’s the main thing. And yet you’re still his wife, of course, and I suppose will remain so—you will, won’t you?” she asked in abrupt alarm. “You aren’t really thinking about doing anything foolish—”
“Oh, no,” Ceil said in a tired tone. “I just wanted to think things out by myself. If a simple desire for reflection is something the Jason family can understand.”
“Then that makes you the perfect one to call Bob,” Patsy said triumphantly. “You’re—with Ted, but you’re not actually too—close—at the moment. It gives YOU a nice independent status, too. Have you talked to Ted?”
“Not lately.”
“Well. I’m sure this is EXACTLY what he would want you to do.”
“No doubt.”
“Well. You will, then.”
“I’m not making any promises.”
“Well, at least you’ll think about it—” Patsy began in a concerned tone.
“I’m thinking about a lot of things,” Ceil told her. “Goodbye, Patsy. Thanks for calling.”
“But, Ceil—”
There was a firm click! from California, and the line went dead. Damn her, anyway, Patsy thought angrily. Ceil had always been an uncertain element in the Jason campaign to put Ted in the White House. Sometimes Patsy thought that all Ceil ever wanted to do was be beautiful and ride on Ted’s name to wherever it might take her. She had never really believed in him the way his sister did.
She looked out through the vines that shaded the big windows of her study, to the tennis court and the pool beyond. It was close to noon. Nothing stirred. Washington’s suffocating summer heat had the world flat on its back.
“Thank God for air-conditioning,” she said aloud. She put her finger tips together and narrowed her eyes.
“Well!” she said. “What shall I do next?”
But as always with Patsy, the question was rhetorical. She already had an idea, and pulling the telephone once more toward her, she dialed a number and began to set it in motion.
At the same moment, at the airport, Senator Munson, who had left the Zephyr in Denver to meet his wife Dolly and the widowed First Lady and her two Secret Service escorts, was facing half a dozen reporters after a swift and uneventful flight in the special Air Force plane provided by the President. They wanted to know a lot of details that he wasn’t about to tell them: Had Lucille Hudson balked at taking an airplane back to Washington? Had she been worried because it was an Air Force plane? Was she in reasonably good spirits? Had she been crying? Who did he think the party’s new standard bearers would be? Would Orrin Knox get the nomination now?
All of these he had
refused to answer, with a curt impatience that prompted the New York Times to murmur to The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was, “Our Robert seems awfully tense about something. You don’t suppose Abbott’s putting the hex on Orrin, do you?” To which the G.P. murmured back, “It might be worth a little analyzing, I should think.”
They were about to press him further and see if they couldn’t make him mad enough to say something interesting, when the cabin door opened again and the First Lady, heavily veiled, came slowly out on Dolly Munson’s arm and started down the steps. In the ensuing hubbub the photographers got some wonderful pictures, even if the reporters didn’t get quite the factual story from Senator Munson that they wanted. But they were old hands at interpreting the moods of the great, and a few minutes later The Greatest Publication’s man was back in his office in the National Press Building tapping out the think-piece that he would send to New York to run alongside his colorful and moving account of Lucille Hudson’s return to a black-draped White House.
“An obviously troubled Senate Majority Leader Munson,” it began, “apparently concerned that the death of President Harley M. Hudson may blast the Presidential hopes of his longtime friend. Secretary of State Orrin Knox—”
WHITE HOUSE MAY DUMP KNOX IN NEW BALLOTING, MUNSON FEARS, the headline said.
An hour later at “Salubria,” his lovely old home in Leesburg, forty miles out from the capital in the slumbering Virginia countryside, Walter Dobius, just back from San Francisco, read the item on his news-agency ticker (“Can you match Greatest Wh Hu Knox dump?” the New York office had queried the Washington bureau, and the Washington bureau had speedily obliged). Then he put a sheet of paper in his typewriter to start tomorrow’s column.
“It is apparent already,” he wrote swiftly, “that the arrogance with which Secretary of State Knox has claimed the Presidential nomination following the death of President Hudson may be somewhat premature. If the attitude of Senate Majority Leader Robert M. Munson of Michigan is to be believed—and most observers here consider the Majority Leader to be one of the nation’s shrewdest political weather vanes—there appears to be what might justly be termed a growing disenchantment with the Secretary’s ambitions on the part of the new President, William Abbott.…”
Within two hours after that, the correspondents of the London Times, the London Observer and the Guardian, the little man from Tass, the correspondents of the French, German and Italian news agencies, the man from the Times of India, the lady who wrote for the Swedish newspapers, and the correspondent of News-Arabia, had all cabled stories to the general effect that the new President was rapidly cooling toward Secretary Knox and would probably toss him off the ticket. And by the time he presented his special six p.m. Sunday news broadcast, “The Course of the Week,” Frankly Unctuous was able to fix the camera with a forthright, candid and earnest eye and tell his countrymen in his customary suave, plum-pudding tones:
“It is already apparent, here in this capital still rocking from the terrible tragedy that has brought a new man into the White House, that the new man may not be so wedded to the Presidential hopes of Secretary of State Orrin Knox as the Secretary would obviously like to believe.
“The tip-off may have come shortly after noon today when Senate Majority Leader Munson, arriving from the West with the widowed First Lady, appeared to be worried and reluctant to discuss Mr. Knox’s prospects with reporters.
“It is being generally assumed here that Senator Munson, who worked in the closest relationship with President Abbott during the latter’s long tenure as Speaker of the House, may possibly know something that Secretary Knox does not know. If this growing conviction among those who study politics day by day should prove to be correct, it may well be that the Secretary’s claim upon the nomination—which he volunteered yesterday scarcely three hours after President Hudson’s tragic death—will turn out to be premature. Add to this growing uncertainty about Mr. Knox’s prospects the equally lively conviction that Governor Edward M. Jason of California now has once again become the major contender for the nomination, and it is easy to see—”
“It’s easy to see, you twisting son of a bitch,” the Majority Leader said quietly in the comfortable home of Orrin and Beth Knox in Spring Valley, “that all you bastards are now out to get poor old Mr. Knox again. Why don’t we just turn you off and enjoy a little silence for a change?”
And reaching forward to the set, he did so and then sat back with a sympathetic look at his host.
“Orrin,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ve got another fight on your hands.”
“When did I not have?” the Secretary of State inquired. “I no longer care, Bob. I’ve got to go ahead living, I can’t afford to let myself be handicapped by that sort of thing. And maybe by now the techniques are so obvious that the public is beginning to be on guard a little. This performance Frankly and Walter and the rest are putting on is typical. You arrived at the airport and refused to talk—”
“I was really worried about getting Lucille back to the mansion before she broke down again,” Bob Munson said mildly. “I also resented all those political questions at a time like that. I haven’t talked to Bill about you.”
“Oh, I know you haven’t. Your crime, you see, was that you didn’t want to answer. So the door was wide open for the broadest possible latitude in interpreting your non-cooperation. This tied in neatly with the general urge to cut me down before I can get started, so the standard techniques went right to work. You heard Frankly:
“The President ‘may not be so wedded’ to my ‘hopes’ as I ‘would obviously like to believe.’ You gave the ‘tip-off’ because you ‘appeared’ to be ‘worried and reluctant’ to discuss my future. Nobody says you actually were worried and reluctant, of course, you just ‘appeared’ to be. Because you have had ‘the closest relationship’ with the Speaker, you ‘may possibly’—not for sure, but ‘may possibly’—know ‘something’ that I don’t know.
“If this ‘conviction,’ which naturally is ‘growing’ among ‘those who study politics day by day’ should ‘prove to be correct’ it may be that my claim on the nomination—which I ‘volunteered scarcely three hours’ after Harley’s death, heartless bastard that I am—will turn out to be ‘premature’.
“These same carefully anonymous students of ‘politics day by day’ share the ‘equally lively conviction’ that Ted has ‘once again become the major contender for the nomination’ and so ‘it is easy to see’—just what is it easy to see, Bob?”
“It’s easy to see that the English language in certain hands these days has become so smooth as to be practically subliminal,” the Majority Leader said dryly. “It’s easy to see that this is the sort of thing that comes out of Washington day in and day out about any person or cause that the major commentators and publications don’t like. All the public has to do is read and listen with an ounce of attention and there they are almost every time you pick up a paper or turn a dial—the little knife-words and knife-phrases that cut a man down. The few earnest but unfashionable correspondents, broadcasters and publications who don’t love Ted Jason aren’t going to be able to do much to stem the tide.…Except, of course,” he said more soberly, “that it’s got to be stemmed.”
“Why does it?” Orrin inquired in an oddly distant, offhand manner. “We’ve got a President in the White House. He’s committed to the policies we believe in. Why should we worry? They’ll have a tough time getting him out if he decides to run.”
“I don’t think he will run,” Senator Munson said slowly. His host gave him a sudden sharp look.
“But you don’t know.”
He shrugged.
“No, I don’t know. But from what I know of Bill, in my long, close relationship, I would find it a little hard to believe.”
“But not impossible,” the Secretary said. “Not impossible. And maybe it would be best, Bob. Maybe all this will work out all right. Maybe I should be the sacrificial lamb, so they can all concent
rate on me while Bill goes about lining up the National Committee to give him the nomination. Shall we work for that?”
The Majority Leader studied him for a moment. Then he smiled.
“Who is this noble soul I’m talking to? Is this the Orrin Knox I know from yesteryear, The Man Who Would Be President? Say not so!”
“You can laugh if you like,” Orrin said calmly, “but that’s the way I feel now. That convention wasn’t easy for me, either, Bob. Nor has it been easy to try three times for the Presidential nomination, and lose. I’ve about had it, with politics. I’ll take it if I can get it, certainly, but I don’t think any more that the end of the world is going to come if I don’t. I used to, but I think I’ve been cured. I’m perfectly willing to leave it to Bill, if that’s what he wants. He’s a good man.”
“One of the best,” Senator Munson said. “But I don’t think he’s going to let you get out that easily.”
“What does he want me to do, then, stay where I am and run for Vice President? I’m perfectly willing to do that, too, if that’s what he wants.”
“Now, just how does that jibe,” Senator Munson inquired thoughtfully, “with your ‘volunteering’ for the nomination? What were those headlines I saw last night? SECRETARY KNOX SAYS, ‘I EXPECT TO HEAD THE TICKET’—”
Orrin shrugged.
“I was just establishing my territory. To hold for me, or hold for him, if he wants it. I didn’t think it should go by default.”
“I must say you’re in a funny mood,” Bob Munson told him. “Is it because Beth and Hal and Crystal are still in Carmel, or—”
The Secretary’s face became uncharacteristically somber for a moment.
“I think it’s because of Harley, basically.”
Senator Munson nodded.
“What a hell of a thing,” he said slowly. “Poor Harley. What a hell of a thing!”
