The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  “I gather,” he told Sabath curtly, “that a President isn’t allowed to be seen with a woman without those vultures hanging around.”

  “No, sir,” Sabath said with regretful firmness.

  “What am I supposed to do for a normal social life?”

  “I guess,” Sabath admitted, “that a President either puts up with gossip and publicity or he sort of takes the veil.”

  In time Jeremy Haines achieved a reasonable tolerance toward the inbred inquisitiveness of the press. But the unpleasantness of the football date forced him to retreat more and more into a shell of solitude and almost total devotion to work. Sabath and several Cabinet members suggested that he install some spinster relative in the White House as an official hostess. He adamantly refused, telling them half-jokingly that he needed a wife, not a hostess.

  So in what still can be a lonely job even for a President with family, Haines used his official duties as sublimation for normal personal pleasures. He substituted memories of the past for the companionship he so badly needed in the present. The inevitable result was a President with an air of aloof yet rather wistful kindness toward the entire White House personnel, numbering more than five hundred persons, all of whom worshiped Jeremy Haines and not a few of whom occasionally felt sorry for him.

  He was a strong person, or he would have felt sorry for himself on too many occasions. Fortunately some of the vexations of office helped him to retain his sense of perspective. As had more than thirty of his predecessors, he found that getting mad at Congress easily could occupy enough time to take a President’s mind off most personal troubles. He was a forceful Chief Executive, and this automatically put him in frequent conflict with the provincially jealous legislative branch. One of his most difficult adjustments to the presidency was the necessity of getting along with Congress: accustoming himself to its molasses pace, its tendency toward brutally partisan criticism of the executive branch, its self-righteous sensitivity toward any censuring of itself, and mostly its impractical protection of archaic methods and means that preserved obsolescence under the name of tradition.

  He liked and admired certain individual congressmen, recognizing them as hard-working and able public servants. But for Congress as an institution he could muster only disdain and disrespect that he kept shoving under the rug of his conscience because he knew legislative support was to a President’s program what blood is to a heart.

  Capitol Hill, however, with all its foibles, was not the biggest cross on Jeremy Haines’s back. Almost from the day he took office the international situation had deteriorated steadily into global sword rattling. He had been elected on a platform largely pledging numerous domestic programs that had suffered mass pigeonholing throughout the Vietnam war. When that conflict ended, in an uneasy, indefinite, Korean-type armistice, Haines assumed he could concentrate on domestic problems. Instead he had to face the growing menace of Red China, emerging more belligerent than ever after a period of internal conflict.

  Only three weeks before, he had met with the National Security Council for a briefing on the Dragon’s designs. For China had successfully tested an ICBM with a hydrogen bomb warhead and was boasting that the incredibly destructive weapon was now in a stockpile status.

  Jeremy Haines had listened with chilling concentration to the Council’s report, read verbally by the Secretary of Defense. He and the Secretary of State were the only Cabinet members represented on the Council.

  “Possession of the hydrogen bomb by the Red Chinese and the means of delivering it via intercontinental ballistic missile, Mr. President, poses a genuine and serious threat to the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency concurs with this body that a surprise and sneak attack by China on the U.S. is not only within the realm of possibility but even, eventually, probability, and there is no known diplomatic deterrent that seems likely to succeed.

  “The CIA also concurs that the Soviet Union in all likelihood would remain neutral in the event of a Sino-U.S. conflict. Neither CIA nor NSC is impressed with the deteriorated state of Soviet-Sino relations with regard to Russia itself being a deterrent to Chinese aggression. Rather, the Soviet Union undoubtedly would prefer to remain aloof during such a conflict, with the obvious goal of letting its greatest rival in the Communist world and its greatest rival in the free world tear each other to pieces. This would enable the Soviet Union to emerge unscathed as the dominant nation in a world decimated by atomic war.

  “Following, Mr. President, is the Department of Defense’s latest estimates of Red China’s missile strength and a revised list of probable priority targets on the Chinese mainland. . . ”

  Jeremy Haines could still hear the Defense Secretary’s voice droning through the Cabinet Room, dry and yet deadly with its awful implications of the nearness of war. Atomic war. With its horrifying mental image of searing white heat bringing death to millions in the time it would take to scratch one’s nose. He thought, impulsively, of his dead son and remembered that when the Vietnam war came to a shaky end he had felt that the blood of Jerry Haines, Jr., had perhaps helped win a respite in the march toward World War III.

  A short respite, the President told himself bitterly. The equivalent of a ten-minute break on a hike over an endless treadmill.

  His gloomy thoughts were interrupted by a knock on his door and the subsequent entrance of Rear Admiral Luther Philips, the tall but heavy-set White House physician. Philips talked to him casually every day without any formal medical examination, although Haines was aware he was being observed through the critical eyes of a capable doctor looking for the slightest suspicion of an ailment.

  “Good morning, Mr. President. Thought I’d stop in for a chat. Any complaints?”

  “Not health-wise,” the President said. “I can’t say the same for my mental state.”

  “I’m glad I don’t have your problems,” Philips remarked sympathetically. “You seem a bit tired. Sleeping well?”

  “Reasonably well, Luther. Those sedatives have helped. How about yourself? All set for the trip?”

  “As ready as I ever am for travel. I leave the packing to my wife and she invariably forgets a few items of importance. Like this time, I’ll probably arrive in California minus bathing trunks.”

  Haines laughed but without real mirth, and Philips worried momentarily whether he had touched presidential sensitivity by mentioning his own wife’s packing chores. He was only too well aware of the President’s loneliness and that even his innocent remark could have produced pain.

  “Well,” he said with assumed jocularity that hid his embarrassment, “I imagine you have a pretty full schedule today so I’ll be on my way. Surgery at Bethesda Medical in about an hour. Melanoma case. Insidious type of malignancy, melanoma. You’re lucky you’ve got the complexion of a baby. Not a mole on you. One of those little bastards can go bad on you and if it gets under the skin you’ve got big troubles. . .”

  Philips halted his medical discourse, remorsefully recalling too late that the President’s wife had died of cancer. Two unnecessary reminders of the past in the course of a brief conversation. Great. Just great. He flirted briefly with the idea of apologizing, then decided on diversionary tactics instead. “Mr. President, before I go let’s take your blood pressure. Don’t believe I’ve checked it for ,a couple of weeks.”

  “If it’s up,” Haines said with a trace of dry humor, “blame it on the Senate Appropriations Committee. What those gentlemen did to the Airport Aid bill yesterday was castration, not economy.” He dutifully removed his coat and rolled up both sleeves, surreptitiously eying the doctor’s face to see if it would display any expression of medical solicitude.

  Philips completed the examination with professional dispatch and smiled his approval. “Perfectly normal. I’ll wager you’re in better shape than I. Remarkable that a man with all your burdens can keep his pressure down.”

  “High boiling point,” Haines explained. “Luther, tell me something. Are you one of those physicians who believe
in letting a patient know exactly where he stands?”

  The doctor’s eyebrows furrowed into a near frown. “Such as telling him he had a fatal disease? Something like that? Mr. President, I—”

  “Relax, Luther,” Haines reassured him. Philips’s face was a study in sudden misgiving. “I don’t have the slightest suspicion I’m walking around doomed or anything on that order. I’m posing more of a philosophical question. Or maybe it’s a matter of ethics.”

  “Every doctor has to answer that question at one time or another,” Philips said thoughtfully. “It all depends on the circumstances. Most of all, on the patient. You have to judge how he’ll take it. I’ve had those who insisted they be told the truth and then came apart at the seams. Dammit, now you’ve got me curious. What prompted you to ask me? You know something I should know?”

  Haines shook his head. “No. As I said, I wasn’t asking in the medical sense. I was trying to draw something of an analogy, I suppose.”

  “The patient is the nation,” Philips deduced sagely. “And I take it you’re wondering how much you can tell your patient without causing panic. Such as how close we are to war.”

  The President nodded.

  “I’m just a doctor and I don’t presume to go around giving a President advice on anything but how to stay healthy. Do what you think is best.”

  “That,” Haines observed wryly, “belongs in the same innocuous category as medicine’s recipe for a cold. Take aspirin, drink fluids and get plenty of rest. I guess I’m searching for a miracle drug and you hand me an aspirin plus a few platitudes.”

  “The simple remedy is often the best,” Philips said. “Speaking of getting some rest, a vacation trip is the finest medicine in the world.”

  “Palm Springs, for example.”

  “Palm Springs is an excellent example. Provided you could leave some of your problems behind. Which you can’t.”

  “Which, unfortunately, I can’t. By design or accident. Like the bathing suit your wife will forget to pack. I wish life were that simple.”

  “I wish, for your sake, the presidency were that simple,” Philips said. “Well, time to favor the Naval Medical Center with my august presence. I’ll . . . I’ll see you around, Mr. President.”

  “Very soon, I trust,” said Jeremy Haines. “Thanks for stopping in, Luther. I enjoy your visits. Make sure you’re back here no later than nine-thirty this evening. As my airline friends would say, I prefer on-time departures.”

  “You’re asking a lot if you want a physician to be on time for anything,” Philips observed. “However, make it a presidential order and I’ll obey.”

  “In my capacity as Commander-in-Chief, I’ll make it an order. And in your capacity as a rear admiral, I expect you to follow orders.”

  “Ay, ay, sir,” Philips acknowledged with mock graveness. He was about as nautical as a Kansas farmer. He waved and left, pleased to hear the President’s laughing farewell, and he marveled anew that Haines could muster a laugh in these harried times. What a magnificent man he was. No wonder he was beloved, not only by his associates but by most Americans no matter what their party affiliation.

  There was something about Jeremy Haines, the doctor was thinking, that instilled in others a confidence akin to the warm, unquestioning security of the father image. He seemed a kind of political patriarch who might have been Ben Cartwright translocated from the Ponderosa to the White House. Haines had been elected by a considerable margin after a campaign in which he succeeded in establishing what each presidential candidate must sear in the minds of the voters—an easy-to-grasp image. A personality that automatically produces a reflex of trusting acceptance, whether it be confidence, affection, respect or a merger of such qualities. In the case of Jeremy Haines, the political pundits decided he won the presidential election because he had created an image of a man who combined Eisenhower’s aura of patriotism above politics and Kennedy’s gift of inspiring eloquence. And in the presidency, Haines also achieved those essential ^qualities of persuasion and leadership.. He persuaded because he was a leader, and he led because he could persuade. A man of wise, firm kindness rather than saccharine sympathies.

  He remembered the first time he had met Haines, one week before the new President’s inauguration.

  They had quickly established ground rules. Philips would see the President once or twice daily and meanwhile could continue his surgical duties at Bathesda Naval Medical Center. The President would have a routine physical examination every month and a more thorough checkup twice a year.

  “Are you the kind of patient who follows a doctor’s advice?” Philips had asked.

  “I’m a sensible man,” Haines had replied. “That’s the closest I’ll come to making you a flat promise.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But there’s one department in which I might find it difficult to accept your advice, Doctor,” Haines said with a poker face as the meeting ended.

  “What’s that?” Philips wanted to know.

  The President-elect eyed the doctor’s rotund figure. “Weight reduction,” he murmured.

  Since that first introduction, Philips’ favorable impression of Jeremy Haines had grown into a quiet, solid friendship. It would have pleased the doctor to know that at this moment the President also was thinking of him with affection. Philips was one of a handful of people whom Haines trusted implicitly. If there was one negative quality the presidency had embossed on Jeremy Haines’s personality, it was cynicism. Mostly cynicism toward motives. He was never quite sure what might lie behind a proposal, a suggestion, a request or an objection.

  He found himself examining others as he would look at an iceberg, knowing that only one third appeared above the surface. Politics was the usual motivation and he could never quite bring himself to regard politics with anything but cynicism. Carefully controlled cynicism, naturally. He could not have become President if he had not been skilled in the art of politics, which in its purest sense is merely the art of compromise. He knew he could not be an effective President without practicing that art, yet he was never truly happy in the exercise. He relished with enormous, grateful pride his role as a nation’s leader, but he resented his necessary second role as a party’s leader. He had to be two men and he did not have much respect for one of them—the one who had to deal with fawning, wheedling, grasping politicians. Who had to wink at their hypocrisy, ignore their power-oriented ethics, and tolerate the narrow-mindedness of their purposes.

  He accepted the inevitability of this double existence, this dual-personality, Jekyll-Hyde facet of the presidency, as had so many others before him. But he occasionally chafed under its overly frequent collisions with his own simple code of ethics—black vs. white, good vs. evil.

  That was the trouble with more than just the presidency, Haines mused. There were few simple, this-is-right and this-is-wrong answers. Even war. War was stupid and wasteful. But war sometimes had to be fought, and avoiding it by any means could be as destructive as fighting it. And how many Presidents had been faced with that dilemma?

  Every one of his five immediate predecessors, Haines ruminated, had served at least partially through some kind of armed conflict in which American blood was shed. A sad commentary for a nation and a world which thought it had found peace when the guns of two world wars were stilled.

  Now there were hands on the triggers again, or perhaps buttons this time., Jeremy Haines sighed in mental weariness and left the room to walk to his office in the West Wing. He passed the valet, who asked if it would be all right to finish the packing.

  “Sooner the better, John. There’s a list on the top of that big bureau in the bedroom. Just follow that.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.” The valet entered the President’s private quarters and began to remove the breakfast dishes. He interrupted this task long enough to glance at the headlines of the papers the President had left behind. He shook his head at the alarming words on the front page of the Post and turned the paper over to re
ad what was below the fold. One headline caught his eye.

  PRESIDENT FLIES TO CALIFORNIA TONIGHT

  Haines Leaves for Indefinite

  Vacation at Palm Springs

  “Man,” the valet said out loud. “I’d sure like to be going with him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gunther Damon awoke that Monday morning with the vaguely unpleasant recall to reality that always seems to follow a Sunday.

  The feeling of disappointment lasted only as long as it took to shake the fog of sleep from his mind. For Gunther Damon loved his job at the Washington Bureau of International Press Service. He was the bureau’s news superintendent, a title he had acquired a year ago in lieu of a promised raise.

  He hauled his slim yet muscular frame out of bed and viewed with renewed satisfaction his new, tastefully furnished efficiency apartment in the Bethesda high-rise. It had the absolutely essential components of a confirmed bachelor’s quarters, such as an excellent hi-fi and a well-stocked liquor cabinet, along with an enormous collection of books, most of which he actually had read.

  It was typical of him that his first thoughts were of the office and what problems might have to be solved in the next seven or eight hours. No one could predict news with complete accuracy, but a good wire service executive seemed to develop an instinct for anticipating the unexpected. And Gunther Damon was good, whether the need was for careful advance planning or for spur-of-the-moment improvisation. He kept the latter down to a minimum because he was so adept at the former and this made him invaluable to IPS, the smallest of the three wire services and the one with the sparsest manpower resources.

  Some men think best while sitting on commodes. Damon’s fondest moment of meditation was during the shaving process. Between the first insertion of a fresh blade and the final splashing of after-shave lotion, he could map the day’s campaign for his troops—ten copy editors, thirty-eight reporters, six dictationists, three office boys, nineteen teletype operators, three teletype mechanics and the five “special writers” Gunther kept referring to as “our prima donna division.”