Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The Presidency of Edward M. Jason

by Allen Drury

  So for approximately fourteen hours, while he read the papers over a leisurely breakfast, pleased to see his column featured in Times, Post and Greatest Publication, the three he read most faithfully every day, he felt he had discharged his responsibility as journalist and citizen well. He continued to feel that way later on while Roosevelt drove him at a leisurely pace through the lush and smiling land to Washington. He continued to feel that way until he stepped inside the door of Sans Souci half a block up Connecticut Avenue from the White House, where he was meeting the general director of the Post for lunch. Then he stopped feeling that way.

  “Monsieur Dobius, how nice to see you,” Paul said, as he always said. “You have a telephone call, Monsieur Dobius, and then we will seat you.”

  Arbella’s familiar face, plain and honest and now deeply disturbed, appeared on the Picturephone. A sudden premonition gripped his heart.

  “Mistah Waltuh,” she said, words tumbling over themselves. “Oh, Mistah Waltuh—”

  “Hush,” he said sharply, moving to shield the screen from the hatcheck girl. “Calm down and tell me what it is.”

  “They called, Mistah Waltuh,” she said, and he could see she was almost crying with worry and fright, “they called—”

  “Who called?” he demanded in an intense whisper, while the French Ambassador and the Secretary of Defense passed by with cordial smiles on the way to their table. “Arbella, I order you to calm down and speak slowly and tell me what it is. Now, who called?”

  “Don’t know,” she said hopelessly, “except I know they bad—real bad, Mistah Waltuh. They threaten to burn this house down, Mistah Waltuh, that’s what they did. They threaten to burn this house down.”

  A terrible pain for lovely and beloved “Salubria” knifed his body, even as he remembered the frightful threatening interview there with Fred Van Ackerman, LeGage Shelby and Rufus Kleinfert during the Committee sessions two months ago.

  “But why?” he asked, and she looked more desolate still.

  “They say you wrote somethin’ this mohnin’, Mistah Waltuh. They say you write anythin’ like that agin, they goin’ burn this house down. They mean it too, Mistah Waltuh. I went out right after they call and that little shed out by the barn—you know that little tool shed, Mistah Waltuh—”

  “For God’s sake,” he said in an explosive whisper, “I know the tool shed. What about it?”

  “They told me to go look and there was a little smoke goin’, Mistah Waltuh, a little pile of rags and some kerosene on it. I put it out and I looked all around, but I didn’t see nobody. But they was there, Mistah Waltuh, off in the pond woods. I know they was there. Maybe they still there, just waitin’ to come agin.” The honest face did finally crumple into tears. “Mistah Waltuh, what I goin’ do? Shall I call the police, or what?”

  “Salubria” he thought; and then: America! and finally with an agonized wonder: What are we getting into? But he spoke with a reasonable calmness.

  “Now, Arbella,” he said, keeping his voice carefully lowered and even managing to smile a little at the Undersecretary of State and Supreme Court Justice Thomas Buckmaster Davis on their way to a table, “you’re a very brave woman and I think you’ve done wonderfully well. Roosevelt and I won’t be back until about four o’clock, so I think you had better lock up the house and go next door to the Randolphs’ and just stay there till we get home. Don’t worry about ‘Salubria.’ I think,” he managed to say reassuringly, though his mind said, Oh, God, I hope so—“it will be all right. I think it was just a threat. It isn’t going to scare me and I don’t want it to scare you, either. So you lock up and go on over, and don’t worry. We’ll be back soon, and I’ll get some guards if I have to. We won’t let anything happen to us or to ‘Salubria.’ You go along now.”

  After she hung up, terribly troubled and uncertain, he stood for several moments breathing deeply and firmly until his nerves quieted and his face, while somber, regained most of its public composure. Then he turned to cross the upper dining platform and descend, through the customary barrage of shrewd and knowing eyes, to the restaurant floor.

  Somehow he managed not to show it, but he was really very upset indeed; and after he had talked for a few moments with the general director of the Post and told him the cause of it, they were very upset together; although they managed to put a reasonable face on it even then, so that the fact passed almost unnoticed in that small, crowded, self-important, self-preoccupied room.

  CAMPAIGN ROARS INTO FINAL WEEK WITH JASON IN COMMANDING LEAD. POLLS SHOW DROP OF SIX PER CENT IN GOVERNOR’S SUPPORT AS STRICKLAND HAMMERS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DANGER OF “WEAKNESS” IN DEALING WITH COMMUNISTS. NAWAC DEMONSTRATORS FORCE SENATOR TO LEAVE PLATFORM IN DETROIT, MAR RALLIES OF JASON CRITICS IN SEVEN CITIES. PRESIDENT MAKES SOMBER SPEECH TO COLORADO CONSTITUENTS, WARNS OF “EVIL MEN ACTING IN GOVERNOR’S NAME WHO MUST BE STOPPED,” ASSAILS “POSSIBILITY OF NEW TURN-TAIL ERA IN FOREIGN POLICY.” BRITAIN, SOVIETS STILL HESITATE ON PANAMA REBEL RECOGNITION AS PRESIDENT STRENGTHENS BLOCKADE. GOROTOLAND AID GOES FORWARD. U.S., SOVIETS REACH “INFORMAL UNDERSTANDING” ON LATEST BERING STRAIT FISHING SPAT. GOVERNOR CROY HOLDS TO LANDSLIDE PREDICTION DESPITE “SOME LOSS OF MOMENTUM.” GOVERNOR JASON REAFFIRMS STAND. CONTINUES TO DRAW HUGE CROWDS EVERYWHERE.

  But as Roger Croy accurately said, Ted was indeed “‘losing some momentum,’ and knew it; and now on the Saturday night before election, as he prepared to make his final campaign speech, in his native city of San Francisco, he was for the first time in two months a slightly worried man. Not greatly worried, for Ted Jason did not succumb easily to worry about his own course, nor did he worry, really, about the outcome on Election Day. He might have lost six points as a few polls showed (others, more friendly, acknowledged only two or three, although all conceded decline), but he was still so far ahead that not even the most drastic reversal could stop him now. No cause for such reversal was anywhere in sight. He was coming home safe; but still he was a little worried. Just a little.

  He knew why, as he stood thoughtfully at the window of his suite in the Fairmont and looked across the Bay to the diamond lights of Oakland and Berkeley strewn across the hills, while behind him his remaining family bickered and argued as they always had, as long as he could remember. Below on the rapidly darkening waters the ferry boats to Sausalito and Tiburon crisscrossed on their cheerfully lighted way; through the Golden Gate a long bolster of fog crept slowly in; the lights of Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach glittered their gaudy promise. To the north he could see the string of lights that marked the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Beyond, the Bay faded out of sight in the deepening twilight as it stretched on up toward his capital of Sacramento, where he had not been much lately. The lieutenant governor was having to mind the shop a good deal these days: which was all right with him, because he was running for governor and soon would have full charge of it anyway.

  “Sweetie,” Patsy said, coming to stand beside him, martini in hand, “Fred Van Ackerman just called from the Cow Palace. He says it’s already full, and we still have two hours to go before you speak. I’d say THAT’S something.”

  “Very gratifying,” he agreed. Behind them their aunt, Selena Jason Castleberry, she of the constant fund-raising parties, demonstrations and causes, gave a derisive snort and demanded in her whiskey voice,

  “Is that all you can say, Ted? ‘Very gratifying,’ he says. I’d say it’s damned exciting and thrilling, myself.”

  “He’s bored with it already,” remarked their other aunt, the painter Valuela Jason Randall, she of the villa at Positano and the steady string of never-quite-permanent young men. “He’ll probably go to sleep at his own inauguration.”

  He uttered the quick, and quickly gone, explosion of semi-mirth that had passed for a laugh with him ever since the dreadful day at the Monument, and turned to face them as his uncle Herbert Jason came out of the bathroom, eyes apop and hair afrizzle in his customary fashion: perfect picture, Ted thought dryly, of a Nobel Prize-winning s
cientific nut, which was exactly what he was. Here they were, the five of them, odd terminal branches of the once vigorous Montoya-Jason tree: what a family! But his.

  “Are you and Selena prepared to demonstrate, Herb?” he asked. “I don’t want this to be just a nice, peaceful, unanimous evening, you know. I want the Jasons to put some snap in it.”

  “Dear boy,” his uncle said blandly, “Sel and I have our banners ready and our noisemakers poised. Say the word!”

  “It’s hard for them this time,” Valuela observed, “because for once they agree with something, you see? They aren’t in opposition. They really think it’s good for the world to have Edward Jason elected President.”

  “And don’t YOU, Val?” Patsy inquired indignantly. “I didn’t know YOU objected.”

  “I DON’T,” Valuela said with a deadly parody of her niece’s exaggerated way of speaking. “I think it’s GREAT. But it might be humbling for us all, particularly the President-to-be, to remember that there are some who aren’t so ecstatic.”

  “I know that,” Ted said with a sudden moodiness, sitting down on the window seat and turning to stare at the lights of the fabulous city glowing below. “I’ve had indications.”

  “There won’t be any tonight,” Patsy promised flatly. “Fred and NAWAC are going to see to that.”

  “What’s with this NAWAC, Ted?” Valuela asked. “I just flew in from Europe yesterday, you know. Over there we get a rather mixed impression of NAWAC. It seems to be somewhere between Hitler’s storm troopers and the Russian KGB. Are you sure it’s good for you?”

  “It stops a lot of frivolous interference,” Herbert Jason pointed out, pouring himself a scotch and soda at the bar. “Refill, Sel?”

  “Not just yet, thanks,” she said. “I’m doing fine. And it does keep a lot of reactionary elements from interfering with Ted’s campaign.”

  “It shows them,” Patsy said with considerable satisfaction, “who’s boss.”

  “Is that what we’re out for?” Valuela inquired, with something of the persistence which must once have distinguished her grandmother, fabled Doña Valuela, founder of the family. “To show people who’s boss? Who bosses the boss?”

  “Very funny,” Patsy said, totally unamused. “I could stand one more small martini, Herbert. About half.”

  “Whoever,” Herbert inquired, “had ‘about half’ of a martini? But I shall do my best. The thing is, Val, that this all began really, you know, during the convention when—well, you do know, you were here. Ted thought it would be a good idea to coordinate all these anti-war groups into one organization, the National Anti-War Activities Congress. More manageable.”

  “And more managing, no doubt,” Valuela remarked. “Do you find it so, candidate?”

  Ted, who appeared not to have been listening—and indeed he had not been, being away in the charming streets below, hand-in-hand with Ceil in the enchanted days of their courtship—started and looked around.

  “I said NAWAC might have been more manageable once but could be more managing now,” Valuela told him. “Is that your experience?”

  “Oh,” he said, and paused thoughtfully, studying the question. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think so.”

  “You find that Senator Van Ackerman and Mr. Shelby and Mr. Kleinfert, and the others in charge, go along with what you say,” his aunt suggested. “You have no problems keeping them under control.”

  He hesitated and half-smiled.

  “Who’s been talking to you, Val? What do you hear in Europe?”

  “Nothing specific,” she said, handing her glass to her brother with a terse, “Another”—“but there have been some reports that you have tried to stop these interferences with Senator Strickland and some of the others, and that NAWAC has virtually ignored you. I didn’t worry when Der Spiegel had an article entitled ‘AMERICA’S BROWN-SHIRTS RISING?’—with a question mark. But when the Guardian went so far last week as to suggest gently that ‘Governor Jason should perhaps attempt a little more diligently to moderate the apparently over-enthusiastic efforts of a small minority of his supporters,’ I really began to get worried. So: are they giving you trouble?”

  “Valuela,” Patsy said firmly, “that is stupid. Just simply STUPID.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Ted said mildly. “It’s a valid question. It concerns me. It’s right to have it asked.”

  “How do you answer?” Valuela inquired, and Herbert and Selena betrayed by their uncharacteristically silent attention that his answer interested them too.

  “Publicly, I say nothing. Here in the family, I say it worries me some. The day I broke with the President we had quite a conversation, which included that; and I told him what was the truth, that I had protested to Fred and ’Gage and the rest and that they had assured me there would be no more attempts to break up other people’s meetings, no more bullyboy tactics, no more threats of violence. However,” he said, somewhat bleakly, “there have been. Some have been public knowledge and some have been reported to me privately. They have not kept their word.”

  “So why don’t you repudiate them?” Valuela demanded bluntly, sounding so much like the President for a moment that her nephew started and could not entirely suppress a small smile. “And what’s so funny? I think it’s very serious for you—and for everybody, really. Actually,” she said, leaning forward with an intent thoughtfulness which showed that despite the villa and the young men the practical shrewdness of her forebears ran in her yet, “I think you could really sew it up completely if you would repudiate them. Straight out, with no equivocations. I think it would be enormously popular, and it would certainly strengthen a lot of people’s respect for you. It has seemed to me, watching you at the convention, and then from Europe since I went back, that the story of the last two or three months has been a long succession of attempts on your part to make up your mind about them. Sometimes it’s seemed as though you might be drawing away from them, other times you seemed to be swinging back. The end result has been that they act as though they control you rather than vice versa, and you seem to be unable to destroy the impression. I think there’s only one way to do it, and that’s just what I said: repudiate them, flat out. This is your last speech tonight: let them have it. You don’t owe them a thing—it’s dangerous to let them think you do—get rid of them! That’s my advice, anyway.”

  “Valuela Jason Randall,” Selena said dryly, “political adviser par excellence. Don’t you realize how the price of your paintings will go up when you have a nephew in the White House?”

  “Oh, Sel,” her sister snapped, “stop being a damned fool. This is serious business. Damned serious.”

  “I think,” Patsy said tartly, “that Ted has to make his own decisions without us worrying him with half-baked uninformed opinions. He knows what he’s doing!”

  “Indeed,” Valuela said coldly. “Would it were more obvious.”

  “Well, now,” Herbert Jason said in his bland and comfortable voice as Ted again turned to stare moodily down into the lighted streets, like the thoroughfares of a toy town laid out before him there below. “I don’t see there’s any need to get heated about it. I believe Ted feels that for all its—er—imperfections, you might say—NAWAC still represents, in the most cohesive form, the great sentiment for peace and harmony in the world which is going to sweep him into office next Tuesday. I believe he feels he can’t repudiate that sentiment, Val: how could he? It would destroy the entire basis for his campaign. It would destroy everything he stands for. It would shatter the people who believe in him so, who have given him their faith and their trust. It would be a dreadful blow to peace.”

  “Yes,” Valuela said dryly. “‘We’re for peace, and by God you’d better do it our way or we’re going to beat your head in.’ Very peaceful. Very noble. Very worthy of trust and faith. Herbert, you sound like an ass.”

  “You’ve had too many, old girl,” Herbert said imperturbably. “Just a few too many. I do hope you can manage to stagger to yo
ur seat on the platform all right.”

  “Ted,” Valuela said earnestly, and again she sounded so much like the President that this time it did not amuse him, only sent an eerie little shiver along his spine, “I beg of you. No one else in this family seems to have the elemental sense of an alley cat about this. It’s tonight or never. You must break them or in due time they will try to break you. How can you not see that?”

  He turned back to face them, framed against the dramatic bay and beautiful city: gray-haired, tanned, handsome, distinguished, powerful. His voice was thoughtful as he spoke directly to Valuela.

  “Val,” he said soberly, “I appreciate your comments very much—I really do. Believe me, it has given me a lot of wakeful nights, starting with the convention and running right on through. I am still not really in charge, you see, at this moment: I am not yet the President, and even after next Tuesday, I won’t be—not until January. So that inhibits me. Then there’s the other thing: Herbert is right, in a basic way. These people do speak for many, many millions here and abroad whose pressures on this government have been strong enough to give me what appears to be the making of a great victory.”

  “But you wouldn’t have had it if Orrin Knox were alive,” she pointed out quickly. For a moment he stopped dead; then nodded.

  “That’s true. That is very true. But he isn’t, Val, and so—I can’t worry about what might have been. I’ve got to be concerned with what is. And that’s the fact that all these millions do believe in me, do want peace, do think I can get it for them—and I mustn’t tamper with that faith, in any way, because it’s what’s going to sustain me when I do what I think has to be done, starting next January. If I were to repudiate a group which—while sometimes showing a tendency to be ‘over-enthusiastic,’ as some say—” he conceded to her grimace—“yes, even violent—nonetheless represents the largest organized body of leaders of the peace movement, then I would be upsetting the delicate balance that underlies my campaign and my Administration. They’d probably still vote for me all right—I don’t think I’d lose any great swatch of votes, it really is too late to stop me now—but it would cause great questioning and great uncertainty among a lot of perfectly sincere people who form the broad base of NAWAC. My problem is to separate them from their leaders, and the time to do it isn’t until I actually get in the White House, as I see it. Until then, I’ll be needing those leaders to keep things moving in the direction I want to go.”