The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  Nickerson looked down the table at him, as though trying to remember who he was. “Confused,” he said finally. “I would say, mostly, that they’re confused.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Vandermeer said. “The President locks up several thousand people as being ‘an immediate and present danger to this country,’ and the commandant of one of the lockups says they’re not really violent, they’re only confused. I can only hope that the commandant does not give interviews to the press. Or to anyone else, for that matter.” His tone was bantering, but Nickerson would have had to be a damn fool not to see that he was dead serious.

  “Between us, Mr. Vandermeer,” Nickerson said eagerly, “I don’t give interviews to the press in any case. You have my word.” Kit noticed that fear made Nickerson’s brow bead with sweat.

  St. Yves positioned himself by the steam table, the Bolex balanced on his shoulder. A guard opened the front door and counted out the first forty internees from the line outside, waggling a finger at each one as he entered, and then promptly closed the door.

  The internees who came in were as widely assorted a group of men as Kit had ever seen. About half of them had been standardized by a common uniform—denims and a white T-shirt—but the others still wore whatever they had been wearing when they were removed from society. One man was in rumpled evening clothes, a second in an airline flight officer’s uniform, a third didn’t seem to have anything on under a tweed overcoat. Several of them looked like college students, some like college dropouts, and many of the others like perfectly respectable professional men who had no business being incarcerated and knew that it was all some horrible mistake. As Nickerson had said, they did not look dangerous, only confused.

  They walked dully along the line to the steam table. Except for two of the college-student types, who were having an intense, low-pitched conversation, they were mute and seemed uninterested in their surroundings.

  St. Yves, camera grinding, followed them along the steam table, closing up on an occasional face, or tray, or hand. He moved among them like a fish in the water, and they parted for him without really noticing his presence.

  One of the men in the line, a neat-looking man with close-cropped hair, already in internee denim, had been staring at Vandermeer as he walked along. Suddenly he stepped out of line and pointed a finger. “You’re Vandermeer,” he said.

  A guard moved toward the man, but Vandermeer waved him back. “That’s right,” he said.

  “Son of a—” the internee said. A light came into his eyes. “Listen,” he said. “Do something for me, will you? You can do it. Listen, it’s not much to ask. Will you do something for me?”

  “What do you need?” Vandermeer asked.

  “Listen, nobody knows I’m here,” the man said. “That’s all I want is for somebody to know I’m here. My name is Jacob Stein, and I live in Brooklyn, Bensonhurst. Call up my wife and tell her I’m here. She doesn’t know where I am. She must be worried sick about me. I’ve got two kids. Please, for the love of God, do that for me!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Vandermeer said. He pointed to Kit. “You give this man your phone number. He’ll take care of it. You take care of it, Young.”

  Kit took out his pen and a small pocket notebook, and suddenly the other internees, who had been watching silently, started to babble. They pressed forward, but were discouraged by two guards with short clubs, so they stood in line and shouted names and phone numbers at Kit.

  “Wait a second!” Vandermeer yelled, holding up his hand. When they had quieted down, he stood up and shook his head. “I can’t address the problem of why you’re here,” he said. “In an operation of this size, there are bound to be a few screw-ups, and you, any of you, may be one of them. We’ll get that sorted out as quickly as possible. But if you people say you haven’t been allowed to write home, I say that’s wrong. And I can do something about that.” He turned to the commandant. “Is this true?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have these people been deprived of the chance to write home?”

  “Well—yes,” Nickerson said, sounding puzzled.

  “I want that rectified immediately!” Vandermeer said. He turned back to the internees. “Pencils, paper, and envelopes,” he told them. “As soon as possible. I promise you.” He stood up. “You people will not be forgotten,” he said.

  One of the college students, who had taken a seat with his back to Vandermeer, suddenly twisted around in his seat. “You’ve got to be shitting me!” he said loudly, in a high-pitched, nervous voice.

  “What’s that?” Vandermeer asked, maintaining his bland neutrality.

  “I said you’ve got to be shitting me, you pig!” the college student yelled. “What’s this ‘We will not be forgotten’ bullshit? It’s you motherfuckers who put us in here in the first place. You arbitrary, motherfucking, high-handed fascist pig!” The student stood up as his voice rose and two of the guards moved in closer to him.

  His buddy, sitting across from him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Watch it, Marve,” he said softly.

  “Watch it, hell,” Marve said and, picking up his tin tray, he flung it across the room at Vandermeer. The tray skimmed by Vandermeer’s left ear, and a great glob of the creamed meat splatted Vandermeer squarely across his face. The two guards leaped for the youth.

  Commandant Nickerson jumped to his feet and stood protectively in front of Vandermeer. “We’d better get you out of here, sir,” he said.

  Vandermeer, his body rigid with fury, clawed the creamed crap out of his eyes. “Just get me a goddamn napkin!” he snapped. Kit grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the table and helped Vandermeer clean his face.

  As two guards clubbed the youth to the floor, St. Yves moved his camera in for a close-up of the clubbing, a look of unholy joy on his face. Then he stared mournfully at his camera for a second and strode back to the table. “Shit!” he said. “I’m out of film.”

  Vandermeer stared disgustedly down at his jacket. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “My suit is ruined.”

  “What about this letting them write letters?” Nickerson asked, trotting alongside Vandermeer as they left the building. “It was your instruction not to let them write, sir.”

  “Let them write,” Vandermeer said. “Get them pencils and paper. Just don’t mail the fucking letters. We’ll set up a unit to read the mail. Can’t tell what we might get.” He took his jacket off and rolled it into a tight ball. “Let the bastards write.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  At a table in the bar of Bigg’s Bavarian Chophouse in Silver Spring, Maryland, Senator Kevin Ryan sat nursing a draft lager. He’d been sitting there for fifteen minutes when the door opened, admitting a blast of cold air along with Tom Clay, the Senate Majority Leader. Right behind him was David Wittling. An ex-Senator, and one of the most respected, influential men in the party. They took their heavy overcoats off and stamped their feet clear of snow before coming over to join Ryan.

  Ryan smiled as they sat down opposite him. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

  “I think the Senate is bugged,” Clay said, rubbing his hands together.

  “I know,” Ryan said, “you told me.”

  “My office is bugged,” Clay continued. “My home is bugged, my car is probably bugged.” He shook his head. “Have you ever stopped to consider the size of the staff necessary to conduct an operation like this? The amount of tax money that must be going to support it? That degenerate paranoid is costing this country a fortune.”

  “I, ah, don’t think you could support either of those pejoratives, Senator,” Ryan said.

  “Not to mention what he’s doing to the Constitution,” Clay added.

  Wittling signaled the waitress for a pair of lagers and then turned back to the table. “Its good to see you again, Kevin,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on that speech you made before the seventy-four election. Damn good. I don’t get to Washington m
uch anymore. Not so much as I’d like.”

  “We’d like to see more of you, Senator,” Ryan said. “We could use the benefit of your advice.”

  “Sure,” Wittling snorted. “Nothing you young pols need more than an old man like me hanging around and telling you how we used to do it back in my day. Now Tom here,” he added, patting Clay on the shoulder, “he’s different. He was around in my day. He was the bright young Senator back then. And now look at him. Never made it. Poor Tom.”

  Clay grinned and slapped Wittling fondly on the shoulder. “He flew in last night,” he told Ryan. “Staying at my house. And he’s been nagging me since he arrived about how I ‘never made it.’ I think the old man’s getting senile.”

  “What do you mean, never made it?” Ryan asked. “Senator Clay is the Majority Leader—most important job in the Senate.”

  “That’s as it may be,” Wittling said, “but he had the fever in his eyes back in the old days. The presidential fever. I could always spot it.”

  “What about our present incumbent?” Ryan asked. “He was in the Senate with you. Did he have it?”

  “I could never read his eyes,” Wittling said. “Narrow and close together, and he’d never look you in the eye, but always off behind you. And have you ever noticed the way he moves when he talks? His gestures have nothing to do with what he’s saying. It’s as though his mouth and his body were under the control of two separate people—like a badly handled marionette.”

  “That’s so,” Clay said, nodding. “But the man has a brilliant political mind, you have to give him that. He can find the lowest common denominator of any given group of voters faster and more surely than any man since Huey Long.”

  They paused while the waitress, in a short skirt and blouse that looked like the deMille version of Bavarian peasant garb, brought over the two lagers. She walked away again with a very nice hip swing. When she reached the bar Ryan, with a sigh, raised his gaze from her legs. “I suppose you two brought me down here for something beyond discussions of the President as a politician,” he said.

  Clay smiled. “Not exactly,” he said.

  Wittling leaned forward. “We want you to run,” he said. Clay nodded.

  Ryan looked slowly from one to the other. “Me?” he said. “You want me to run?”

  “Surely you’ve given it some thought,” Clay said.

  Ryan nodded. “I have,” he said. “A lot of thought. I was thinking of giving it a try in four years. Nineteen-eighty sounds good to me.” He looked up at Clay. “Hell, I’m not even fifty yet. What’s the idea? Why me?”

  “Here’s our thinking,” Clay said. “The President’s going to get behind Artie Arnold this year and run him as a figurehead. Eight more years of the same.”

  “I guess that’s obvious to all of us.”

  “Yes. Well, with the country so badly polarized, he’s got a good, solid hold on the great mass of middle Americans. Law and order sounds damn good to them now, and he’s appropriated that motto to himself and his people. And the opposition is fragmented into so many pieces that, unless we do some strong pulling together now, by the time the campaign starts we’ll have a dozen contenders fighting each other for the nomination.”

  “And he’s got the money and the office to get almost unlimited access to the voters.” Wittling said. “And you can bet your ass he’s not going to let a little thing like the fact that it’s improper and illegal stop him from using his office to wring every last vote out of every last voter.”

  “And that brings me in?” Ryan said.

  “A group of us old boys got together and had us a little talk,” Clay said. “And we decided on a strategy to beat the son of—ah—to ensure victory for the righteous and defeat for the ungodly. And you’re it.”

  “I see,” Ryan said. “You fed a list of the requirements into a computer and a card popped out with my name on it.”

  Wittling stabbed a finger out at him. “You’ve decided not to run this year because you have it figured the same way we do. This is the President’s year, and Artie Arnold is his man. Give Artie four years to sit in the White House and be shown up for the idiot that he is, and he’ll be ripe for replacement.”

  “Well—”

  ”Only this country can’t take four more years of what it’s been getting. The Constitution has been punched so full of holes that it’s sinking bow first. And the country is being ripped apart to the point where in a couple of years there’s going to be no way to put it together again.” Wittling stopped talking and he and Clay drank beer and stared at Ryan.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ryan asked.

  “Run for President,” Clay said.

  “And get chewed apart in the primaries?” Ryan said. “Our party has too many potential candidates and nobody who looks like a front runner—certainly not me.”

  “You underrate yourself,” Clay said. “The polls show you right up there in popularity with the other potential candidates, and you got there a lot faster. You have momentum going for you.”

  “But I don’t have the political base,” Ryan said. “Not nationwide.”

  “We do,” Clay said.

  Ryan looked at him, his eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” he said.

  “Do you understand what you’re being offered?” Clay asked.

  “Yes,” Ryan said, “I think I do.”

  “You run,” Clay said. “We’ll see that there’s enough opposition to you to keep you in the media, and we’ll see that it drops out at the proper time.”

  “Of course you’ll still have a fight on your hands,” Wittling said. “We don’t control the whole damned party. Remember what Will Rogers said: ‘I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat’.”

  “What you’re saying is that you’ll make it possible, but not easy, for me to get the nomination,” Ryan said.

  “Something like that,” Clay agreed.

  “We’ll keep the momentum going for you,” Wittling said. “And we’ll do our best to see that the party doesn’t get fragmented. And our best is pretty good. Tom and I have a lot of chips to call in.”

  “You understand that if I do this, and if I get elected, I am going to be the President. Neither of you is going to serve for me or through me, and I owe no favors outside of what you would normally expect from a president of your party.”

  “We’re quits when you get elected,” Clay said. “Just serve in the best interests of the country and within the limits of the Constitution, and you owe us nothing.”

  Ryan was quiet for a minute, his thoughts deep and distant from his surroundings. Then he shuddered very slightly and looked up. “You want my decision now?”

  “Preferably,” Clay said.

  “Yes. My decision is yes.”

  “Congratulations,” Wittling said. “I was going to say you won’t regret it, but that’s ridiculous. Of course you’ll regret it.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  THE OVAL OFFICE,

  Friday, April 23, 1976 (10:02-10:27 a.m.)

  MEETING: The President, Vandermeer, and Ober

  AUTHORIZED TRANSCRIPTION FROM THE EXECUTIVE ARCHIVES

  The President and Vandermeer are discussing household matters.

  At 10:02 Ober enters.

  P. Charlie.

  O. Good morning, Mr. President. Morning, Billy.

  V. You’re up late this morning, Charlie.

  O. Don’t you believe it. I’ve been here since six-thirty. I’ve been working.

  P. Good. Good. At what?

  O. I’ve been correlating the reports on Ryan’s Wednesday speech. The public’s reaction, what they got out of it, what they agreed with, what they disagreed with, what they thought was important, what bored them. That sort of thing. One of our press people came up with a great idea: we’re putting together a personality profile of Senator Ryan’s public personality. Not of Ryan, you see, but of who people see when they look at Ryan. Sort of the personality he projects.

  P. I don�
��t see how that mick son of a bitch is getting all that media time recently. It’s like the Democrats are handing him the nomination.

  V. What do we do with this profile of the media Ryan when we’ve got it?

  O. It tells us who we’re fighting. Can I have some coffee? It tells us what image the public sees as against the image we project. Then we can manipulate both images and distort them into whatever shapes we want. Thanks.

  P. You know, I wouldn’t put it past them.

  V. How’s that, sir?

  P. A conspiracy by the, you know, Democrats, to run Ryan against Arnold.

  O. We picked him as the front runner months ago.

  P. Yeah, the front runner. But there’s no pack.

  V. I see what you mean.

  O. We have a couple of bugs in the DNC headquarters. But I don’t know how heavy the surveillance is. I’ll put someone on it.

  P. That’s the sort of thing. No surprises, if you see what I mean. We want to keep the ball—keep making goals. We don’t want the other side to run with it.

  O. Right.

  V. Right.

  P. How’s that ACLU thing going? Anything on that?

  O. It looks like the Emergency Powers Act is going to hold. The courts are throwing it right back at Congress. And we sure as hell don’t have to sweat Congress on that. The IC camps are going to be with us for a while.

  V. What’s the latest count?

  O. Count?

  V. How many internees?

  O. At last count, nine thousand.

  V. There’s some votes Arnie isn’t going to get.

  P. I spoke to Arnie’s mother on the phone yesterday. She isn’t going to vote for him. His wife is going to vote for him, but he’s got something on her. Boys, I tell you, I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off.

  V. We could still ditch him. It isn’t too late to ditch him.

  P. For who?

  O. That’s the question.

  P. Arnold, the poor stupid son of a bitch, is my man—body and soul. We make him President and we keep the reins for another eight years. Have to move out of the White House, of course, but we keep the country. Who else can we trust?