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

by Allen Drury

  “He is an evil, evil man,” Lafe said in a comforting tone, though he agreed with Bob’s own analysis of his performance. “You did the best you could in the face of this crew. Listen to them!”

  “VOTE!” demanded the galleries, and “VOTE!” demanded many on the floor.

  For several moments Lacey Pollard looked about him with an angry and affronted glare.

  “In a minute,” he said finally in his dignified old voice, and there was something about it, heavy and shaking with emotion, about his overflushed face and about his manner, almost painfully dragging and slow, that silenced the clamor and made Verne Cramer again stir uneasily in his seat. “In a minute, we shall vote. But first I think I have a right to say a word or two in my own defense, and in defense of the Senate. You will grant me that, I hope. If you don’t, I shall say it anyway.…

  “Now,” he said, and the voice that had so often thundered to the Senate suddenly lost its strength and sounded weak and strained, “I am being personally attacked, and through me, this Senate is being attacked as an institution. As for me, I can take it, although it comes as a bitter thing at my age, which is seventy-seven, after thirty-two years of honorable and I hope effective service in this body.

  “It comes as a bitter thing because I am not being attacked for my personal merits or demerits, or even because, as he so kindly phrases it, the Senator from Wyoming considers me an ‘out-of-date, used-up, absurd leftover from an earlier time.’ Oh, no, that isn’t it. The reason I, together with old friends here who believe as I do, am under attack, is because we are in his way. More or less incidentally—because I don’t think the two are parallel at all in spite of his shouting about it—we are in the President’s way.

  “I say ‘more or less incidentally’ because I don’t think the Senator from Wyoming really cares whether the President lives or dies, or whether he succeeds—” there was a start of harsh and ominous booing but he overrode it with a trace of the old fire for a moment—“whether the President succeeds or fails. His success, I think, would be worse than his failure, in the mind of the Senator from Wyoming.

  “The success of the Senator from Wyoming would be dreadful for this Senate and dreadful for the country.

  “That is why it is mightily important that this vote be earned against the motion of the Senator from Wyoming. Not because I am an issue. Not because my age or my political philosophy is an issue. But because it would open the way for domination of the Senate by the Executive, and even more important—more desperately important—it would open the way, potentially, to put the Senator from Wyoming in direct line of succession to an office which I hope and pray to God he may never even remotely come near to occupying.”

  “Mr. President!” Fred Van Ackerman shouted triumphantly as again the dutiful chorus of boos began. “Mr. President, I challenge you on that point! Look who is talking, Senators, about the line of succession! Look who is talking! A man seventy-seven years old, who disagrees entirely with the President in every respect, who stands three heartbeats away from the Presidency, who may die at any minute—yes, Senators, any minute—that man has the infinite gall and presumption to say he should be kept on in this most important office. Look at him, Senators, look at him! Seventy-seven years old! Seventy-seven years old! Seventy-seven years old!”

  And he sat down with a quick, belligerent, satisfied nod as a buzzing started and applause rewarded him.

  For what seemed like quite a long time but actually was probably no more than half a minute, Lacey Pollard paused, hesitated, looked about with what appeared a sudden vagueness. Verne Cramer and the Senate’s other three doctor members braced themselves. Then he seemed to regain control for a moment.

  “I think,” he said very slowly, “that when members come to examine closely this proposal … I think when Senators … it seems to me that when—that when Senators … when Senators—”

  “Mr. President,” Bob Munson said in alarm, jumping up and going forward as did Senator Cramer and his medical colleagues. “Mr. President, let me take the chair—”

  And presently Lacey Pollard, breathing heavily, still conscious but appearing dreadfully unwell, was taken out on a stretcher hastily summoned from the office of the Capitol physician; and presently Senator Munson in the chair gaveled for order and found himself confronted by just one Senator seeking recognition.

  “The Senator,” he said, and his old friends had never heard such a burden of anger, hurt, contempt and dislike in his voice, “from Wyoming.”

  “Mr. President,” Fred Van Ackerman said into the tense silence that held the room, “now may we have a vote on my motion?”

  And after it had been approved 43-20, with many abstentions, the new young Senator from South Dakota arose and said quietly, “Mr. President, I move that the junior Senator from Wyoming be named president pro tempore of the Senate.”

  And after the roll call had been taken in the somber hush, Senator Munson announced the result in a voice which he now kept, at great cost, totally devoid of any feeling of any kind.

  “The vote is 51 Ayes, 49 Nays, and the junior Senator from Wyoming is hereby declared president pro tempore of the United States Senate.”

  “And now, Mr. President,” Fred said softly, not bothering just yet to come forward and claim the chair, “I reintroduce and call up for an immediate vote my resolution condemning the move to impeach the President of the United States.”

  And after that too in due course had been approved 53-47, Bob Munson brought down the gavel and declared the session at an end.

  Hurrying up the Press Gallery stairs to dash to the teletypes and file this latest bulletin of the day from the Senate side, UPI looked at AP with a deeply troubled glance.

  “The Senate has gone insane,” he said in a voice both somber and unbelieving.

  “The Senate has gone,” AP replied, equally somber. “—Period.”

  And so also, it seemed to those who did not support Edward M. Jason, had the House, which shortly before 9 p.m. voted down 387-136 William Abbott’s resolution of impeachment. Its defeat was followed by another hour of speeches, most of them filled with a bitter dislike of the ex-President and his friends, a quiveringly angry and ominously vindictive note of triumph, as opposing members gloated over his repudiation and the endorsement of his successor.

  At 10:07, not really knowing quite how he felt about things now that it was all over, Jawbone brought down the gavel with a masterful rap to end the session. At 10:10 Walter Dobius was in a cab on his way to the White House.

  3

  “Scarcely two years ago,” Frankly Unctuous began his concluding commentary from the House Radio-Television Gallery, “he was censured with unprecedented severity by the Senate and warned in the strongest terms that he would remain a member only on the suffrage of his elders.

  “Three months ago he won re-election to the Senate by the very narrowest of margins, leading his opponent by only 106 votes.

  “The militant organization for which he serves as principal spokesman is increasingly arrogant, increasingly paramilitary, increasingly dangerous to all the principles that used to be lumped generally under the loose tent of what we have known as ‘American democracy.’

  “Yet today he stands at the head of the Senate organization as president pro tempore, and in the broader arena of public affairs he has been entrusted by the President with vast and potentially very dangerous powers over the citizenry and the media.

  “How has Fred Van Ackerman, junior Senator from Wyoming, done it?

  “At first glance it does not seem to make sense—until one takes into account the very strained and peculiar atmosphere in which all Americans are living at this crisis point in their history. Then it fits a pattern of sorts—a pattern which disturbs many Americans greatly, but a pattern which in these hectic days seems to be gaining an increasing hold upon the nation.

  “The Senator’s censuring by the Senate and near rejection by the voters of his state occurred in one era of Americ
an life—prior to the inauguration of President Jason. His election as president pro tempore of the Senate, and his appointment to head the Domestic Tranquility Board come in another—after the inauguration of President Jason.

  “Rarely have two eras been so different, and rarely, perhaps never, has one led so rapidly into, and been so rapidly absorbed by, another.

  “Tonight’s Senate vote—like the House vote a little later to kill by overwhelming majority ex-President Abbott’s resolution of impeachment against President Jason—serves to symbolize the vast confusions that rage through the country at this moment. Many in the Senate still do not like Fred Van Ackerman, many in the House are deeply uneasy about the policies of President Jason. Yet the old appeals to ‘support the President—don’t rock the boat—uphold national unity’—have combined in a most peculiar way to produce tonight’s events.

  “Partly the Senator’s victory came simply because he saw an opening and was audacious enough to go after it. Senator Lacey Pollard of Texas, whose retirement from the Senate itself will now probably be forced by reasons of health, has served very long in the upper house. His age disturbed some of his colleagues, his conservative record disturbed many of the incoming new liberals in the Senate. When his obvious poor health was added as a factor, Senator Van Ackerman had only to seize the moment and use it to further his own ambitions. The brazen swiftness of it successfully bowled over opposition that might otherwise have formed against him had it had time. Those who know him well enough to dislike him but wanted to support the President, whose man he cleverly pictured himself to be—and, apparently, is—voted for him. Those who do not know him well enough to dislike him voted for him. Those who were uneasy about Senator Pollard voted for him. Those who wanted a change but were given no alternative voted for him. He moved fast, too fast for his opponents: and he won. It is typical of the gambler’s streak in him, which has been apparent to all who have reported his activities in the six years he has been in the Senate.

  “Now the broader implications enter in. They were touched upon in the debate by the Senator’s opponents but in the heat and haste of the moment they were not effective. Sober reflection calls them to mind. Firstly, he is not the most stable of legislators or the most devoted to American liberties. Secondly, he now holds, as president pro tempore of the Senate, the position of being third in line to the Presidency after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Presumably the possibility is a very long shot and will never concern the country. But it may—it may. And certainly his general free-wheeling attitude toward traditional democratic procedures must be an immediate worry as he embarks upon the chairmanship of the Domestic Tranquility Board, with its very broad and very ill-defined authority to encourage a public atmosphere ‘conducive’ to support of the President’s policies.

  “Almost lost in today’s shuffle was the President’s message on national defense—if message it could be called. It was, as some of its opponents accurately said, basically an exercise in window dressing, a collection of clichés which did not add up to the strong call for massive rearmament which such defenders as Speaker of the House J. B. Swarthman attempted valiantly to read into it. Because of its very vagueness, it was easy for the peace faction—or perhaps more accurately the do-nothing faction—to shunt it summarily aside in both houses. So much for the strong call to massive rearmament—another example of the ‘strong, decisive leadership’ his supporters profess to see in President Edward M. Jason.

  “It left the Congress unmoved and the Russians, presumably, not at all deterred from whatever further plans they may have for our discomfort.

  “The country is left with a puzzle and a threat. The puzzle is, what further, if anything, does the President contemplate to meet the Communist advance?

  “The threat, which now takes its place alongside all the others beleaguered America faces at the moment, is the junior Senator from Wyoming.

  “It is not easy to decide at the moment whether the puzzle or the threat poses more problems for this tense and unhappy nation.”

  And that, Lafe thought as he switched off the set in his new home on Foxhall Road and considered idly for a moment whether or not to mix himself a nightcap, is something you can say again, Frankly, boy.

  The threat or the puzzle: which was worse. He decided with a heavy heart that there wasn’t really all that much difference between them. Both meant trouble for an already deeply troubled land.

  He had been one of those who had wanted to debate the President’s message, which could have provided the springboard for a full-scale Congressional review of the last few days’ events. But the angry momentum generated against it by Fred had foreclosed this in the Senate, as had Bronnie Bronson’s in the House. The message had died the innocuous death which he suspected the President had intended. And Fred’s momentum had carried him on to a triumph Lafe would never have believed possible in a million years.

  But: there it was. And from it, he knew with an instinctive certainty, many ominous things could flow. Lafe had long ago passed any point of charity with Fred. He did not put anything past him. He was one expert on Fred Van Ackerman who did not consider it at all unlikely that Fred, if he had the chance, would do what he could to shorten the line of succession, now that he had joined it.

  Even without anything as melodramatic as that, there was still all the damage he could do as head of the Domestic Tranquility Board. If Ted Jason exercised no more control over his appointee than he seemed to be exercising over the flow of world events, then God help the democracy, in Lafe’s opinion. The job was so ill-defined, as Frankly said, and its potentials for real thought control were so great, that an ambitious and vindictive man could make of it virtually anything he pleased. Fred was both of those and then some. If he worked in close cooperation with George Wattersill and the new Special Branch in the Justice Department, there was almost no limit to what might occur.

  And so, what to do? Lafe found himself, like any decent and well-meaning citizen, up against a stone wall when it came to dealing with genuine evil. He had cast his vote in opposition, but once that was done, what else could he do? Fred would be able to do certain things to his opponents, and Lafe had no difficulty at all in imagining what they might be. But Lafe himself could no more imagine himself doing those things to anyone than he could imagine himself flying. Lafe belonged to that great mass of well-meaning people (he suspected, the overwhelming majority of mankind) upon whose hesitant impulses and general inability to recognize and comprehend evil, let alone cope with it, dictators and tyrants build their worlds. He was more sophisticated than many: he could see and believe in the evil. But he was as helpless as they because he could not bring himself to adopt evil’s methods to defeat it.

  Basically, he was just a human being, like most around the globe, who wanted to go on living his life as peaceably and constructively as he could. He was not equipped to be constantly on guard against the predators of the world, or as ruthless as they in his defenses against them. So the predators grew great, as had ever been the case.

  It was a gloomy world, as he saw it tonight from Foxhall Road, and he did not perceive many bright spots in it. He looked about the pleasant, comfortable room and thought of the three people he hoped soon to have here: Mabel Anderson, anxiously and fearfully seeking some safe haven after Brig’s dark tragedy, bright little Pidge sparkling about the world like a mischievous sunbeam, Jimmy Fry, locked away in his silent citadel that as yet gave no one entry.

  Those three hearts, Lafe thought fiercely, belonged to him; and he wanted them close about him as the icy winds of winter and the even icier winds of history beat in on Washington. It was a time for the good to gather together, it was a time to be close: there appeared to be, even to the most optimistic and well-balanced of people, as he generally was, little else.

  He thought of Mabel and Pidge, staying temporarily at the haunted household of the Knoxes in Spring Valley; of Jimmy, temporarily quartered in Bethesda Naval Hospital, underg
oing a final checkup before being released to come here to his new home. He thought of himself, one United States Senator, now very much in the minority, struggling desperately against the terrifying downhill slide of his country which every day grew more rapid and more terrifying. And he did not know whether the goodness in four such hearts, combined with the goodness he knew to exist in many millions of other hearts, would be enough to save what must be saved. For the first time in his life he really did not think so. He really saw the possibility that America, always heretofore strong through all her weaknesses, decent through all her indecencies, great through all her faults, might really be coming to an end.

  He got up with a sudden angry, impatient movement and started toward the phone. Then he paused, irresolute. He had already called the hospital about Jimmy, found out that he had stood the day well and was sleeping placidly; had already talked once, an uneasy, inconclusive conversation earlier in the evening, with Mabel. Now it was getting on for midnight. There was no point in checking on Jimmy again; the house in Spring Valley would be silent as its occupants tried to sleep and gather strength for Beth’s funeral tomorrow afternoon. Who should he call? Why should he call? What good would it do?

  Slowly he went to the bar, slowly mixed himself a light bourbon and soda, slowly returned to his chair by the now dying fire. Outside he heard the wind, inside he heard the wind. There was no crevice and no stout heart it did not penetrate, this night.

  “Val,” Patsy said with a rising exasperation as the family sat in the solarium and looked out through the swirling snow toward the luminous, barely visible sliver of the Washington Monument across the Ellipse, “sometimes I think you are perfectly AWFUL. As if he doesn’t have ENOUGH problems, without you coming along and lecturing him like some old biddy. He’s too kind to tell you so, but you’re really just AWFUL.”