by Allen Drury
“And very well, too,” the head of The Greatest Publication said soothingly. “You wouldn’t be America’s leading columnist otherwise.”
“You can do as you like,” Walter said, his face getting the balky set they knew so well, “but I am going to attack him in every way possible. I think we must hit him and hit him hard.”
“I’m with you, Walter,” the Post agreed, abandoning discussion with a sudden decisiveness. “He is on an insane collision course and he must be stopped. We’ll use everything we can.”
“I, too,” Frankly Unctuous said firmly.
“Even if it may tend to obscure the real issue?” the Times inquired thoughtfully.
“Even if it may inflame even further the leaders of NAWAC and the violent and incite them to more God-knows-what?” The Greatest Publication inquired gently.
“Even so,” Walter Dobius said coldly, his tone abandoning once and for all any remotest shred of tolerance that might still be lingering in his heart for Orrin Knox. “Even so.”
“I wouldn’t have asked for this interview,” he said with a sudden nervousness that surprised him, “except that you ought to know what I’ve been through this afternoon.”
“Sit down, Cullee,” the President said with a relaxed courtesy that might have been light-years away from the hectic moment in which they met, and from the house that was the fulcrum of the world’s animosities, hopes, disparagements, concerns. “I’m going through a bit, myself.”
“Yes, I know,” the Vice President said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Oh, I know,” the President said with a smile. “Ignore me. I’m just letting off steam. What happened to you on this happy day?”
His expression hardened as Cullee told him. When the recital ended he hit the desk with the flat of his hand.
“Those sons of bitches,” he said quietly. “I’ve always regretted society doesn’t have an automatic trapdoor for that type, preferably over a pool of piranhas. It would simplify matters. But we don’t, so here we are. Are you ready to take over if they get me?”
“Mr. President!” Cullee said in an alarmed voice, forgetting for a moment Orrin’s propensity to make rather grim jokes at times of tension. “They aren’t going to get you!”
“They may,” the President said, his voice becoming somber. “They may. I’m very well protected, but sooner or later somebody may get through, just as they did at the Monument Grounds.” His expression darkened. “They’re after my family again, you know.”
“No.”
“Yes. And you’d better look out for yours. Do you have enough protection at your house?”
The Vice President hesitated for a moment, then gave him an honest and troubled look.
“I could use more.”
“Right,” Orrin said promptly. “Excuse me.” He buzzed his secretary, asked for the chief of the Secret Service, reached him immediately, gave a quick order, turned back. “Five more men will be on the job in fifteen minutes, so you can rest a little easier. They added three more on the Spring Valley house last night, even though it’s empty now, with Hal and Crystal living here. Crystal had planned to go back this afternoon to get some clothes but we had the detail do it for her, after the threats.”
“What threats?”
“Death, doom and destruction to the two of them if I don’t change my policies. The same line you got, from the same sources, I suspect—although of course they’ve gathered so many kooks around them that it could be somebody down the line. But I rather think not.”
“Evil days,” Cullee said moodily. The President nodded, with a certain grim irony.
“And all my fault, too, as you can hear all over. Are you still glad you joined this Administration, Cullee?”
“I believe you’re doing what’s right,” Cullee said simply.
“Thank you,” the President said gravely. “So do I. However—” He picked up a sheaf of papers and handed them across the desk. “Look at these for a minute.”
There was silence while the Vice President read. Presently he looked up.
“It doesn’t look good,” he admitted uncomfortably.
“It does not,” Orrin agreed. “Their initial momentum is still running, we’re still falling back. Losses are mounting, matériel is being wiped out. Britain and France and the rest are beginning to talk seriously about running the blockade in Panama. Everything appears to be going wrong.” He gave his Vice President the sharp, direct, undodgeable look his friends and colleagues knew so well. “Shall I give up?”
Cullee answered without hesitation.
“How can you?”
“Yes,” the President said. “That is the question, which I resolve in favor of my policies because I do not see any other way out of the situation our enemies have created. I am afraid, however, that in the classical pattern of difficult democracy it is going to get worse before it gets better.”
“I’m not dismayed,” the Vice President said.
“Nor I. Troubled, of course—far more troubled than my critics will ever grant me—but not dismayed. This dismays them, no doubt, but I won’t yield to them, Cullee.” He paused and repeated softly as if to himself, “I won’t yield to them.…” He looked at the snow, still hitting the house in occasional spits and flurries, the great storm reluctant to yield its hold on the desolate gray world. “I wonder what Ted would have done,” he said in a musing tone, “if I had died at the Monument and he had come to this chair. Appeased, maybe? Been tough, maybe? Fought it out, or gulped and gone under? Nobody knows, but I do know one thing”—his tone became wry—“whatever it was, he would have had the media behind him with a whoop and a holler, that’s for sure. At least until it got too late, even for the media.… Well—” He stood up, held out his hand, prepared to say goodbye. As he did so the buzzer sounded urgently several times. “Yes?” he said, switching on the intercom, sitting slowly down again.
“Mrs. Jason on the line,” his secretary said.
“Yes, Ceil,” he said, turning on the Picturephone, gesturing Cullee to come stand beside him. “What is it? What is it?” he repeated sharply as her face, strained and obviously agitated as he had never seen Ceil Jason’s face agitated, came on the screen.
“Mr. President—” she began, seeming to have difficulty with her breathing. “Mr. President—”
“Take your time,” he ordered calmly. “The Vice President is here, as you can see. We’ll wait.”
“Yes,” she said; and after a moment, pushing her golden hair back, clearly fighting for control and presently achieving it, she was able to speak more quietly and coherently. “We have had some trouble up here.”
“You haven’t been hurt?” he demanded sharply.
“No,” she said. “No. But”—her face threatened to crumple again, then steadied—“but someone was. My—my chauffeur. We were about to leave for the Secretary-General’s cocktail party and he went—went out to the car a moment ahead of me and started it up. I was about to get in when I decided that I wanted to change my purse. So I went back up to the suite and did so, and just as I stepped out the door again, it—it went off.”
“A bomb,” he said, not a question but a flat, weary statement. She nodded.
“Yes,” she said, her voice threatening to break again. “It was apparently set to go off about—about five minutes after the engine was started. If I hadn’t gone back to get my purse—” She shivered and stopped.
“Was he killed?”
“Y—yes.”
“I am so sorry,” he said gravely. Suddenly his voice exploded in an angry, frustrated burst. “God damn it to hell! I could murder those bastards with my own bare hands.” Then he, too, with an obvious effort, regained control. “Who did it?”
“We don’t know yet,” she said. “The Secret Service and the New York police are already here and I think the FBI is on the way.”
“Who do you think did it? Some of our charming countrymen, or some of our charming friends in the UN?”
“It could be any one of fifty up here. But I have the feeling it was—our own people.”
“So do I,” he said. “How ironic that Ted’s most devoted followers should now be trying to kill Ted’s wife.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Of course, I don’t have to tell you to take all necessary precautions—”
“There are ten additional Secret Service men here already,” she said with the start of a shaky little laugh, “and a couple of policewomen. I can’t even—even powder my nose alone, right now.”
“That’s good,” he said. “And don’t try to, either, at any time in the foreseeable future. Maybe someday things will calm down, but not before the wars are over. And when that will be, I can’t predict.…Well”—a sudden cold decisiveness came into his tone—“there have been other things in the last several hours and I think it’s about time I did something about them. You and Cullee listen, now. I’m going to dictate a statement and I want you to make whatever suggestions you think necessary.” He flicked the intercom, buzzed his secretary. “Come in here a minute, Dottie. I’ve got something for you.”
Mrs. Jason narrowly escapes death in bomb blast. Her chauffeur dies in car booby trap. Attack believed caused by concern over Knox war policies.
President issues angry statement, discloses threats to son and daughter-in-law. Announces stepped-up security for “all members of my personal and official family.” Vice president given extra guards. NAWAC leaders deny responsibility but warn that “he who resorts to sword must expect to find sword used against him.”
Reports from war zones indicate U.S. forces still in retreat as powerful red offensives roll on.
“And so Orrin Knox has reaped the first—or is it the second, or third, or how many? Whatever it is, the number will assuredly grow—bitter fruit of his obdurate, intractable and foredoomed policies,” The Greatest Publication commented. “An innocent man is dead and the President’s Ambassador to the United Nations has narrowly escaped death. Mrs. Ceil Jason, who only five months ago lost her husband to assailants unknown, has now herself come within seconds of suffering the same fate. It should be enough to give a prudent man pause—since it is his actions which have apparently led straight to this unhappy event.…”
“An innocent chauffeur dead,” the Times said with equal severity, “Ambassador Ceil Jason almost dead, the President’s children and his Vice President subjected to threats of terrible violence unless he changes his policies—only an Orrin Knox, we suspect, could continue his stubborn course under circumstances such as these. How much longer must all around him—how much longer must his helpless country and the world—suffer from the intemperate and ill-advised war program of this most erratic and unfortunate of Chief Executives? He takes upon himself a fearful burden, to play so lightly with the lives of all of us entrusted to his care. How much longer, we wonder, will the Congress and the country suffer him to continue without imposing checkreins he cannot imperially ignore…?”
“So the insanity goes on,” the Post exploded. “So the insane stubbornness of Orrin Knox goes on. It staggers the mind, where it does not desolate the heart. How many must die, on the battlefields and in his own immediate group, before he gets it through his head that America and the world simply do not approve of his ruthless, arrogant, foredoomed war policies? Only one truly paranoiac, truly schizophrenic, we suspect, could play so lightly with the fate of men and nations. Starting on Page 1 today we present an analysis of the President by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists. Entitled Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power, it promises to give Americans a profound insight into their most unfit President ever. We commend it to all citizens who wish to understand this strange man who is riding the juggernaut straight down the road to national and world disaster.…”
“Washington waits and wonders tonight,” Frankly Unctuous said gravely—“another of Frankly’s wait-and-wonder nights,” his less respectful colleagues assured one another at the Press Club bar—“about the strange course of the strange man who has just assumed the awesome powers of the American Presidency. Confronted by the death of an innocent black chauffeur, the near death of Mrs. Ceil Jason, dire and terrible threats to the safety of his own son and daughter-in-law, his Vice President, his official family, he staggers blindly on, deeper and ever deeper into the morass of endless war. At such a time, subject to the whims of such a man, Americans can only pray—and try to understand. Today a major contribution to that understanding began, first of fifteen lengthy segments, in the Post. Written by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists, it is entitled Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power. It will be published next week in paperback by the Post. We urge all citizens anxious to understand their unhappy driven President to write the Post immediately for a free copy, enclosing twenty-five cents for postage and handling. Simply address it: Unbalance, Washington, D.C.…”
“Only a true megalomaniac,” Walter Dobius advised his 436 client newspapers, “would continue to pursue the course of Orrin Knox against all the odds—personal, national, international—psychological, diplomatic, military—which confront him. Such a megalomaniac, one suspects, is Orrin Knox, now falling further and further into the bottomless pit of a war he can neither win nor, apparently, end.
“Or, perhaps, one should say ‘neither win nor bring himself to end.’ Because there is growing concern here in Washington that the new President may be a man so hounded by psychological fears and darkly driving obsessions that he may be spinning out of control and close to crack-up. If so, terrible times lie immediately ahead for this hapless country and the helpless world so endangered by his haunted compulsion to exercise supreme power, whatever the cost.
“Illuminating this tragic side of the President’s nature, suspected by so many who have known him during his Senate years, is a new book, soon to be available to all Americans, that began running today in the Post. Written by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists, it is entitled Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power.
“The unbalance of power it is, achieved by a man who really is, many fear, unbalanced. The thought can only bring to men everywhere the icy dread of what such a President can do to the world.
Well, he thought that night with a tartness they all would have recognized, there was an icy dread, all right: in him, for what they would do to the country and the world if he knuckled under and let them get away with it. Having found so far that they couldn’t shake him on the issues, they now were turning to all the tricks of sneak-and-peek journalism that had become so fashionable in such august places in recent years. The psychiatric study, that favorite ploy, was now under way: it was inevitable that it should have appeared first where it did. Next would come the hints about income tax, the attempts to becloud his financial record, the attacks on his personal life, the sly rumors and innuendos of some vague private failing, the smirk, the snigger, the leer, the lie. It was a well-honed and by now quite respectable technique, elevated to one of the basic principles of modern reporting by journals that had once prided themselves that their integrity would never allow it. Integrity was a long time gone, now, and every public man sooner or later had to defend himself against the hit-and-run tactics of those who wrapped themselves with a smug self-protective righteousness in the flag and the First Amendment to do their devious work.
Well: he had survived this sort of thing before, and he would survive it now. Whether he would survive the attacks of more responsible institutions such as the Times, which still possessed sufficient integrity to confront him on the merits, was another question. Because, being an honest man, he knew there was much to be said on the other side.
All of his public life, and ever more sharply in recent years, they had been challenging him on his basic attitudes toward the Communist world and his policies for working out a livable accommodation with it. They did not agree with him that firmness, diligence, prudence, forethought, a strong defense, a strong skeptic
ism and a strong will were the prerequisites of living with the men of Moscow, Peking and their satellites. They felt that faith, hope, charity, concession, withdrawal, one-sided trust, the endless building of paper houses of treaties, agreements, “détentes,” would ultimately persuade a ravenous aggression to abandon its perfectly candid and never-changing aim of destroying democracy and the freedom of the human mind.
They had fought very hard, as they always did, to try to win the Presidency for the man who seemed best to symbolize their grimly held belief that comfortable, amiable retreat was more productive than uncomfortable, stubborn strength. This last time their hero had been Ted Jason, and because the violent had clustered around him, Orrin’s more worthwhile critics had found themselves in strange beds with strange bedfellows. They still were, as witness the riots and threats of NAWAC side by side with the solemn lashings of the Times, the nasty gut-fighting of the Post. Starting at those extremes, the troubled reaction to his policies spread on down through the populace, on over the world. Orrin Knox the candidate had meant a tough foreign policy to those who had fought him and those who had supported him. Orrin Knox the President meant the same thing, enlarged a thousandfold.
And many, many millions, he knew, were perfectly sincere, perfectly genuine, perfectly patriotic and disinterested in their opposition to him. He would never be given credit for understanding their point of view, because it suited his critics better to portray him as being as rigid, illiberal and intolerant of the opposing view as they were. But he knew, and he felt that many of his countrymen knew, that he did understand their point of view, and that only because he honestly could not accept it did he hold tenaciously to policies that could, in the present instance, truthfully be called warlike.
