by Allen Drury
But Orrin had brought him back, he tells himself with a sudden grimness that gives sterner lines to the strong, impatient face, and if he could do that, he can bring the rest of them back too. Hal had been utterly devastated by his choice of Ted Jason, yet Orrin had brought him back. It had not been easy. But it had been done.
Their principal conversation on the subject had occurred soon after former Governor Roger P. Croy of Oregon, Ted’s campaign manager, had left the Spring Valley house to give the press indirect but unmistakable affirmation that Ted would indeed be the Vice Presidential choice. Shortly thereafter had come a peremptory rap on the study door.
“Who is it?” Orrin had asked.
A voice he hardly recognized had said, “Me.”
“Oh,” he said, and suddenly felt tense, nervous and sick inside. “Come in.”
He glanced up quickly into the haggard, unhappy eyes of his son and glanced quickly away again.
“Sit down.”
“I will if you’ll look me straight in the eyes,” Hal said in a voice so low he could hardly hear it.
“Very well,” he said, though it cost him as few things in life had. “Now, do you want to sit down, or had you rather stand?”
“Why?” Hal demanded, standing. “In the name of God, why?”
“Because there are times when politics offers cruel choices,” Orrin said slowly, “and sometimes, even with the best will in the world, one gets caught in them.”
“Do you realize that that man, or his people, killed my son and your grandson?” Hal asked in a strangled voice.
Orrin sighed.
“Yes.”
“And do you realize that his gangs may do anything—destroy the country—put us under dictatorship—anything?”
“I think there is that potential, yes, if they’re not controlled.”
“Do you think that millionaire lightweight is controlling them? Was he controlling them this afternoon?”
“Sit down, Hal,” he said quietly, “and stop being rhetorical. I know just about everything there is to know about the character and motivations and strengths and weaknesses of Edward M. Jason, I believe. I don’t think there’s much you can tell me. And I don’t think there’s much to be gained from our fighting about it.”
“But I want to know why,” Hal said, sitting slowly down on the sofa. “I want to know why my father, whom I have always loved and respected and looked up”—his voice began to break but he forced himself on—“looked up to—why he has decided now that this man is worthy to move up one step from the White House. I don’t—I don’t even know why you think he’s worthy to associate with you personally, let alone be Vice President.…You’ve got to tell me something,” he said, staring at the rug. “I’ve got to have something left to believe.”
For several minutes Orrin did not reply, though his first impulse was to go to his son and put his arms around him as though he were a little boy. But it died, as such things do, because he wasn’t a little boy. Instead he tried to piece together something coherent that would make sense. He wasn’t sure it would, in Hal’s present mood—or his own, for that matter—but he knew he had to try.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that Ted Jason, at heart, is not a bad or an evil man. I think to a large extent he is sincerely convinced that he has a better answer for this country than I do. I think he really believes that if he could be elected President, things would somehow straighten themselves out and he could bring peace to the world at large, and to us domestically. I think he really thinks that.”
“Does that give him a license to kill my son?” Hal asked with a withering bitterness. His face suddenly dissolved. “My son,” he said in a choking voice. “Like I—like I was for you, when I was born. My son.”
Orrin closed his eyes and sat back with his hands over them for a long moment. Then he looked up, though not at his son.
“You make it very difficult.”
Again Hal spoke with a devastating bitterness.
“Am I supposed to make it easy?”
“Easier,” his father said. “Just a little—easier—that’s all.…I don’t think there’s anything you’ve felt in these past few days that I haven’t—well, I’ll amend that, because I do remember how it was with you, and I do know you’ve been feeling things I can only imagine. I don’t really know, because back in those innocent days this kind of violence didn’t stalk America the way it does now. I didn’t have to worry about my family then as we all do now. I didn’t think I was taking my life and theirs into my hands every time I took a stand on a public issue. But it’s getting close to that now. Give us another five years like this, and freedom of opinion will be pretty much gone. Unless”—his expression too for a moment became bitter—“you’re on the right side.…
“All I’m saying about Ted Jason,” he resumed presently, “is that he’s in that curious state of mind in which ambition really does dominate all. It dominates so much that everything is related to it. Everything becomes possible to it. Everything seems right to it. Everything can be fitted in … and everything that feeds it can be justified.”
“And that doesn’t make him a dangerous man?”
“Of course it does,” Orrin said. “Of course it does. And yet not a bad man, in the sense that say”—his eyes grew somber as he thought of Wyoming’s demagogic junior Senator, chairman of the National Anti-War Activities Congress—“Fred Van Ackerman is a bad man.”
“How do you separate them?” Hal asked with a skepticism that at least, Orrin was relieved to note, replaced the bitterness a little. “Behind Ted Jason stands Van Ackerman. And all the rest of them. If you take one, you take them all.”
“I think they can be separated,” Orrin said, “because I think in Ted’s mind they are separated. I think if he can be shown what they are, and what they’re helping to get the United States into, he will break away from them. Because I think, as I say, that at heart he’s a decent and well-meaning man.”
“But that isn’t why you’re taking him,” Hal said with a sudden shrewd bitterness. “Not just because you think maybe you can reform him someday.”
“Sooner than that,” Orrin said. “But, no, you’re right. That isn’t why.”
Hal gave him a long look, so painful for him that he actually squinted as he did so. His father could barely hear him when he spoke.
“You’re taking him because of some deal, then.”
“No,” Orrin said, and thanked God he could say it truthfully. “No deal.” A smile lit his face briefly. “Do you really think if I’d made a deal I wouldn’t have made it for more than twenty-three votes, boy? What kind of a dealer do you think I am?”
“Well,” Hal said, and briefly he too smiled a little, “maybe not. But there must be some reason—some reason. There’s got to be something that makes sense”—and again his voice dropped very low—“if you are willing to put the murderer of your grandson on the ticket.”
Again Orrin sighed and looked away.
“You do have a way of cutting a man up.”
Hal laughed, a dry, humorless sound.
“I’m told it’s inherited,” he said, and at his father’s sudden angry look he did not flinch or drop his eyes. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“I’m trying. Give me a chance, will you?…In the first place, Ted isn’t a murderer—except as I suppose we are all murderers, who let things slide to a point where—things like that—can happen. Maybe I’m equally guilty, Hal. Did you ever think of that?”
Hal made a protesting movement but his father continued inexorably.
“Maybe I should have stepped aside at the convention. Maybe I should have stepped aside now, when the National Committee had to make its choice of a successor to Harley. Maybe I’m driven by power and ambition, too, beyond the point of decency—many think so, here and abroad. If I’d stepped aside, probably nobody would have hurt your wife and your—son. If I’d stepped aside in San Francisco, Harley would have had to take Ted, an
d maybe Harley would be alive now: who knows? It’s a fair assumption, even though Ted of course had nothing to do in any direct way with what happened to Harley. It was the climate—but maybe I’m as responsible as he is for the climate. Maybe if I’d gotten out of the way, Ted’s backers wouldn’t have felt they had to get desperate and do the things they have done. Maybe”—and again his eyes darkened at the thought of Helen-Anne Carrew, society columnist for the Washington Star-News, ex-wife of America’s leading political columnist, Walter Dobius, murdered because she was getting too close to discovering the violent elements behind Ted Jason—“maybe Helen-Anne would still be alive. Maybe all of this is my fault as much as his. Maybe all men who don’t deny the ambition for power when they catch a glimpse of where it can lead to are guilty.… Did you ever think of that?”
“But you couldn’t just walk away and let him have it!” Hal protested in a half whisper.
“No,” his father said quietly, “I could not, or I should have betrayed everything I believe in for this country, everything my whole life has stood for. So it isn’t so simple. And it isn’t for him, either.… The country is badly divided right now. We have enemies everywhere, both inside and outside, who would love to see us brought down, even though the fools will go down with us if we aren’t here to protect them. We need unity. He does command an enormous support among a great many sincere citizens who really do see in him the hope for peace that they honestly cannot see in me. This extends overseas as well. I’ve denied him the top spot by a very narrow margin, and many of those people are not going to be satisfied unless they can see him beside me—unless they can feel that he is offering some moderating influence on my policies, which they think are so horrible.”
“But you can’t accept his views on appeasing and giving in,” Hal said in the same dismayed half whisper.
“No,” Orrin agreed again, “I can’t. But one thing he said when he addressed the mob at Kennedy Center this afternoon did make sense, and that is that times change and people change.” He smiled a wry little smile, almost wistful. “I’m not anywhere near the positive soul I was in the Senate a year and a half ago, you know. I’ve been close to the center of the machine for a while as Secretary of State, and I know it isn’t so easy. It isn’t all black and white and cut and dried; it’s a sort of horrible gray, like fighting your way through a dirty fog where everything is hazy and blurred and you’re not even sure that the light ahead is a light: it may be just a—just a mirage.…No, I’ve changed, and I like to think for the better. And so can he. So will he, if I have anything to say about it. And I think I will.…He has good qualities—he wants to do what’s right for the country, I think—he just needs to be shown. And he does command an enormous popular support—”
“And you want to win the election,” Hal interrupted, his tone so bitter again that his father for a few moments was too crushed to reply. “You want the votes he can bring with him. You want to win.”
“Yes,” Orrin said at last, quietly, “I want to win. Because I think I can save the country and save the general peace, in the long run, and I want to try.…”
And there, of course, he had come squarely back to what seemed to him the essential justification of all his acts, as it was Ted’s self-justification too: peace, that great will-o’-the-wisp that had provided the basic inspiration for the actions of every American President in the past three decades. Peace, so glittering, so golden, so flickering, so faint. The greatest mirage of them all, for which men everywhere worked and labored and did unto other men horrible things, because to all of them peace did not mean peace unless they could somehow have it on their own terms.…
Later on, Hal, who in his bitter youthfulness had probed so many tender things, had given indication that he was forgiving his father, that he was finally convinced that Ted Jason had to share the ticket for the sake of what Orrin had told the National Committee must be an “Era of Reconciliation,” both at home and abroad. If Hal had seen it, even the skeptical among Orrin’s supporters could be made to see it. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of reconciliation among the hostile nations of the earth, and among the violently warring elements in America.…
This, in Orrin’s mind, transcends all other considerations, and to it he knows he will pledge himself publicly when, before the hour is over, he stands before his country and the world at the Washington Monument to make his acceptance speech and outline the policies he intends to follow if elected in November.
In these policies he hopes he will have the willing support of his running mate, for with that support will come the support of all the many millions who see in Ted Jason the world’s best hope for peace. If that support comes, then Orrin will not only win the election. He will also be able to move firmly to increase the chances for peace abroad and to diminish the power of the violent at home.
Without Ted’s full support, he knows that in all probability he cannot win the election, for Ted is the darling of the media, whose powerful pens and voices have made him the darling of the people, and Orrin very definitely is not. He has won his fight for the nomination. But his victory is openly and harshly begrudged.
He has not won the support of the media—could not, after all their years of mutually hostile battling over differing views of foreign policy—or of vast numbers of his countrymen who have been conditioned for the better part of three decades to be suspicious and resentful of Orrin Knox. His margin of victory for the nomination was small, his area of really genuine popularity is small. If he wins the White House, it will be because of votes reluctantly given him as an indirect endorsement of Ted Jason. If he wins, it will not be a recognition of the integrity of Orrin Knox, but a recognition of the popularity of Ted Jason.
This is not as he feels it should be, but being a blunt and pragmatic man, he knows this is how it is. And thus he is bound to his equivocal running mate whether he wants to be or not. All the conflicting elements whom he must somehow weld into a unified force enable Ted to hold him in pawn even more effectively than Ted himself, perhaps, realizes.
Exactly what Ted does realize about his own situation at the moment, Orrin finds it impossible to understand. After all the heated, frustrating and inconclusive conversations he and President Abbott have had with Ted—culminating finally in a flat ultimatum from Orrin that Ted must repudiate NAWAC and all the violent or be barred from the ticket—Orrin still does not know whether Ted has the slightest comprehension of the dangers he has been flirting with in his fight for the nomination—or, indeed, in what Orrin regards as his dangerously flaccid and complaisant attitude toward the never-resting imperialism of the Communist powers.
Ted has been, and remains, an enigma to Orrin, although Orrin thinks he understands the basic motivation, for it has been his own: Ted has wanted to win. So has Orrin, but not at the price of running with the pack that will, he feels, destroy America both at home and abroad if it cannot be checked.
Well, he tells himself abruptly: well. Grim lines come about the firm, emphatic lips. He intends to check the pack and, by God, he will, both at home and abroad. And if Ted Jason and his friends don’t like it, they can lump it. He will have the power and he will use it. They will have met not only their match but their master.
And as abruptly his mood changes, to be succeeded by an instant ironic bitterness as he surveys the world he wants so much to run. What will he have confronting him if he finally achieves his long-held ambition to sit behind the desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Gorotoland, strategic key to the heart of Africa, in flames as its U.S.-supported hereditary ruler, flamboyant “Terrible Terry”—His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje, 137th M’Bulu of Mbuele—battles desperately to hold his throne against the onslaught of his equally flamboyant cousin, Communist-backed Prince Obifumatta.
Panama, in flames as the Communist-backed People’s Liberation Movement of Ted’s former brother-in-law, Felix Labaiya-Sofra, attempts to overturn the U.S.-backed government of the old oligar
chy and seize the Canal.
In both countries, overt support for the revolutionaries, from both the Soviet Union and mainland China.
In both countries, commitments of U.S. forces by Harley Hudson that placed his immediate successor, William Abbott, in a most difficult position both in the eyes of the world and in practical fact—commitments that will put upon Bill Abbott’s successor the obligation to end both conflicts and get out as fast as possible, with honor if he can manage it, without honor if he can’t.
And domestically, all the anti-war turmoil, recently spilled over into a violence with sinister undertones that lead many to suspect that the excuse of foreign involvement is being used as the fulcrum for domestic revolution.
This lovely picture, full of so many potentially fatal pitfalls for the next American Chief Executive, is what confronts him now. It is, he suspects, the main reason why Bill Abbott has held firm to his decision to serve until January and then return to the House and the Speakership he has held for so many years.
Why in the hell would any sane man want the responsibility?
But, then, of course Orrin Knox knows why, for it is the same reason that motivates Ted, the same that has motivated every aspirant to the Presidency in recent years. Because he—in this case Orrin—believes he knows best. Because he thinks he has the answers—or, at least, some of them. Because, though he may not know exactly how he will go about it, he does know that he desperately wants to achieve world peace and restore domestic tranquility, and he honestly believes that he is more sincere and more determined about this than all his competitors.
Power is the great desideratum of all who rise above a certain level in American politics. But for the best—and they are many—it is not a completely selfish desire. Power to do something constructive for the country and the world is the name of the game, for the most earnest, the most idealistic, the most dedicated and the most sincere. Orrin feels—as all who achieve the highest office have had to feel, to survive all the scars of getting there—that he possesses these qualities in greater measure than anybody. Otherwise, why would he have been permitted to come so far and rise so high?
