Capable of Honor

by Allen Drury

  “I don’t want to say anything,” Ceil had remarked at last, and not unkindly, “but I wonder a little if maybe you aren’t beginning to lose a little of your virtu—in the old sense.”

  Again he had denied it with some sharpness, but in his heart he had wondered, too. Compromise was so easy to rationalize, and indeed so much of it was perfectly good and perfectly necessary: the line was easy to slip over. A compromise with elements in Southern California that wanted certain concessions on offshore oil drilling—which would probably guarantee his re-election as Governor—which in turn would permit him to go on being a statesman—which in turn would help him, perhaps, to become President—who was to say that it was wrong? Only Ceil, of course, and his own heart; and, perhaps, Doña Valuela, hanging on the wall. But her he could appease, he thought. Passing her picture on the night of his triumphant re-election, he made his habitual little bow to the comb, the mantilla, the dark, brooding eyes, and somber but beautiful face.

  “I’m going to hang you on the White House wall yet, old girl,” he promised her with a sudden smile. “You wait and see.”

  But he was not entirely sure that she would have wanted to go there, could she know the paths he must follow to make good the pledge.

  Not that there were any major betrayals of principle, of course; not that he engaged in anything notably shady or devious; not that he was, by any standard of politics, a dishonest man. It was just that somehow, step by step, daily, hourly perhaps, imperceptibly beneath the outward show of firmness and determination that remained unchanged, he was becoming more careful, more calculating, more equivocal. In some subtle fashion that he was partly aware of but seemed powerless to stop, he was no longer the direct and straightforward individual he used to be.

  Occasionally Ceil would repeat the suggestion that this was really not necessary, that he could achieve what he desired without going the long way ’round to get it. But it always seemed to him that he had perfectly good reasons. It could even be argued that a certain amount of deviousness and equivocation was a necessary concomitant of being a good President: it had characterized some of the greatest, on occasion.

  “It takes flexibility to be a leader,” he had explained once.

  “My point is,” she said in one of her rare impatient moments, “that you really don’t need to be ‘flexible.’ You’ve got everything going for you. Nobody was ever more favored, certainly. Nobody ever had less reason to compromise. Why be indirect?”

  “Being a leader means you lead, doesn’t it?” he inquired with a defensive sharpness. “People. And that means you can’t always be direct. You have to persuade, you can’t bludgeon.”

  “I know that’s the rationale,” she said, ending one of their few open arguments on the subject. “But it isn’t always what I like to think of as Ted Jason.”

  But it was, obviously, what a great many other people liked to think of as Ted Jason. In fact, as he moved farther into politics and climbed higher toward the top, he became aware, with a curious combination of distaste and gratitude, that people were not really interested in Ted Jason, himself. They were interested only in what it satisfied them to think Ted Jason was.

  By now it was second nature to him to do as he had on the Administration’s policies, to emerge from a meeting and say something like, “There is a time to support. And there is a time to oppose. Conscience must decide the issue.”

  He had not said whether he would support or oppose, yet look what had happened. With a glad cry Walter and his world and millions of his countrymen had leaped upon the phrase and interpreted it to suit themselves, written columns, printed editorials, held rallies, presented programs, taken full-page ads in the New York Times under that heading to urge him to run, made it, inevitably, his campaign slogan: Conscience Must Decide The Issue! What issue? And whose conscience? And what made them so sure they knew what it would decide?

  There was, however, no doubt that they knew. The phrase was sweeping the country. Conscience—theirs and Ted Jason’s—was automatically enlisted against the Administration.

  They didn’t have to ask Ted Jason what he meant.

  They knew.

  He feels again, as he proceeds with his dressing and in the bedroom hears Ceil begin to stir, that sense of terror and fear of being devoured that comes to the intelligent when they are given the love of the mob—doubly terrifying and fearful when the mob is intelligent, too, and possessed of the means of coercing the beloved into the image the mob desires … doubly treacherous when the mob has within its grasp, or thinks it has, the means of giving, in return, what the beloved desires.

  For two months he has been the plaything of the mob as it has prepared the country for his candidacy for Vice President. Not once has he broken his private vow of silence on the subject, but it hasn’t mattered: the mob has launched him anyway. Look and Newsweek, working overtime for a point of view, have put him on their covers, made him the subject of their lead articles; Time and Life, less ideological but faced by the imperatives of the news, have done the same. His views on finance have appeared in Fortune, his views on California as a tourist paradise in Holiday. Sports Illustrated has discussed his opinions of tennis, the Saturday Review has carried a guest editorial (written, because, he told himself, he simply didn’t have the time, by one of the higher-paid young men on his publicity staff) on the perennial dream of nuclear disarmament. U. S. News & World Report has interviewed him in depth for eight pages of graceful dodging that somehow, in print, sound firm and positive. The Library Journal has discussed his reading habits, the National Geographic has run an article on the romance of California’s Spanish land-grants, prepared some months ago and shrewdly held in reserve for the proper moment; the Montoya Grant, with many flattering photographs of its present inheritors, is featured throughout. The nation’s leading opinion poll seems to be releasing his latest ratings every other hour on the hour: they are always up. He has appeared at least twice on Face the Nation, Meet the Press, Today, Tonight, Talk, and Monitor. (Orrin Knox has been invited to appear once, on two of them.)

  His clipping service reported only yesterday that in sixty days there have been a total of 1,217 profiles or personality sketches of him in the nation’s newspapers; that he has appeared in front-page articles on fifty-three of those days; that his picture has appeared on some front page somewhere on every one of the sixty, and that on many days it has appeared on the front pages of all the metropolitan papers throughout the country. A collection of his speeches, published two weeks ago under the title, Where I Stand: Governor Jason on the Record, has been reviewed most favorably to date in 673 newspapers and periodicals; a competing volume, A Consistent Policy: As Orrin Knox Sees It has been reviewed by 231, not so favorably.

  (In a front-page report in its Sunday Book Review, The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was commented gravely:

  (“Governor Jason’s book is a major contribution to current American thought, the fine and moving statement of a dedicated public servant. Every American—and particularly all those delegates to the convention that will convene in San Francisco next month—owes it to himself and his country to read this powerful presentation before he votes. It is an absolute must.”

  (In a brief item on page 23 of the same section the same publication reported:

  (“Secretary Knox’s rehash of old speeches and, it must be confessed, rather tired statements of policy, have, inevitably, a passing interest in view of his declared intention to seek the Vice Presidency. But there is here no fresh opinion, no such vigorous and commanding point of view as we are receiving from many others in the political arena. His book will probably be of interest to his most rabid partisans. Others may wish to seek enlightenment elsewhere.”

  (Dutifully the same type of treatment was accorded in journal after journal across a free and independent land.)

  And as for Ceil—Ceil is everywhere. THE LOVELY CEIL JASON, McCall’s described her in a fawning interview.…The Ladies Home Journal report
ed HOW MRS. EDWARD JASON RUNS HER HOME.…CEIL JASON, Life said, putting her on the cover in a really sensational pose against the pines and sea at Big Sur (Beth Knox, who knows a thing or two herself, appeared a week later on the same cover, standing at the stove in the dowdiest, old-shoe dress she could find).…Look, reluctantly delaying its 521st twelve-page spread on the Kennedy family, countered with an almost equally sensational cover taken at the Wawona Tunnel entrance to Yosemite: CEIL JASON: WILL A WOULD-BE SECOND LADY SOMEDAY BE FIRST?

  Woman’s Day has featured her recipes, Vogue her hair. Harpers Bazaar her clothes. Good Housekeeping has described HOW CEIL JASON AIDS HER MAN. Redbook has called them, simply, CEIL AND TED: AMERICA’S TOP POLITICAL TEAM. And in Hollywood each new week brings a new sensation: CEIL JASON’S MOST DIFFICULT DECISION (how to decorate the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento).…WHEN CEIL ALMOST LOST TED (he had been fifteen minutes overdue on a flight from “Vistazo” to New York).…THE SECRET FRIEND WHO HELPED CEIL MOST (her mother, who told her how to decorate the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento).…CEIL JASON’S TRAGEDY (that politics doesn’t give her enough time for painting, at which, as a matter of fact, she is actually rather good).…CEIL’S MOST SACRED LOVE (for Doormat, an English sheepdog she owned in childhood).…

  And she, too, has appeared in so many articles on so many days in so many papers, has been guest on so many programs, had her picture on so many front pages so many times.…

  By now, Ted realizes, completing his dressing and calling out, “Hi!” as she goes by his bathroom door with a sleepy wave, the two of them no longer exist. They are creations.

  And he realizes also, on the opening day of the convention that will decide his future and that of many other things, that he is no longer an individual named Edward Montoya Jason, occupying the office of Governor of California, an independent being with an independent judgment and independent course to follow in the world. He is the prisoner of his creators, bound hand and foot, hogtied and delivered up upon the altar of their ravenous love and their terrible desire to punish Harley M. Hudson and Orrin Knox and remake the world in their own image.

  He has equivocated too long.

  He is a candidate, announced or not, and Walter and his world have won.

  ***

  Chapter 2

  Somewhere a band was playing—a band is always playing, that Great Eternal Band of American politics that is always on hand every time, everywhere, its happily excited tootlings and thumpings forming the backdrop for arrivals, departures, rallies, parades, speeches, picnics, hand-shakings, barbecues, baby-kissings—and the July sun shone bright and sparkling on lovely San Francisco as the delegates arrived.

  Some—the chairman of the National Committee, the vice chairman, principal sergeants-at-arms, head doorkeepers, the chairman of arrangements, the publicity director, officials of the press and communications galleries of the Senate and House, staffs of the Jason Headquarters, the Knox Headquarters, the Hudson Headquarters, members of the Credentials, Housing, and Platform Committees, parliamentarians, secretaries, stenographers, hundreds of eager college kids who swarmed the corridors and now and then managed to be helpful—these had arrived a week or ten days ago, together with many working reporters and a large number of detached and analytical observers from Walter’s world. As a result of their preliminary hustling and bustling much drama had already emerged—JASON WINS FIRST ROUND IN CREDENTIALS COMMITTEE, for instance; SERGEANT-AT-ARMS RULING UPHELD.…KNOX FORCES FIGHTING HARD TO RETAIN PLATFORM PLANK.… REPORT MICHIGAN DELEGATION SPLIT. A steadily rising tension gripped the magical city and the nation, fascinated and frequently dumfounded, which watched its portentous story unfold.

  But today was the day of the delegates, and all that had gone before was only preliminary to their shouting, whooping, lighthearted arrival. Old hands stood about the lobbies of the St. Francis, the Palace, the Mark Hopkins, the Fairmont, the Hilton, making disparaging remarks about the naïveté and exuberance of the newcomers, but on this day nothing could detract from their carefree enthusiasm. “They think it’s real,” the New York Times remarked to the Deseret News at the Mark, as they watched a noisy troop of delegates from Pennsylvania swarming in to pay their respects at Jason Headquarters on the third floor; but for the delegates it was real. “They think what they think is important here,” CBS commented in the same mood to The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was as they stood in the lobby of the St. Francis and watched a similar group, from Ohio, storming up to Knox Headquarters on the mezzanine; but it would be a while yet before the delegates realized the acrid wisdom of the comment.

  Right now the convention was young and it was happy, and in some strange, mysterious way that no one has ever entirely defined, it would work, as it usually has, to send into the field two reasonably good men, perhaps no better, perhaps no worse, than most of their countrymen—two men to carry the hopes of millions—two men to reaffirm what America is all about—two men to become Symbols instead of eating, sleeping, lusting, sweating, stinking, defecating men—two men to bear witness to a great experiment’s long, continuing life.

  The convention might not work the way a majority of the delegates thought it was going to—but it would work. They might not have quite the influence on its deliberations that some of them thought they would—but it would work. Their votes might not be quite as free and independent as some of them believed right now—out of their tumultuous, swirling, agglutinous mass on the convention floor there might not come quite the solemn, profound, and dedicated judgments that some of them fondly fancied—but it would work.

  Conventions don’t get together to fail. They get together to pick candidates. And somehow, in some way, at some point in three or four frantic days and nights—but best not ask too closely exactly how, for sometimes it is a little far from the textbooks that children read in school—they work.

  This, however, was a knowledge that would come later, and in some cases with some lasting bitterness, to the happy souls who were arriving literally every minute from air terminals, train stations, by car, by chartered bus, and even—in the case of a well-publicized rebel section of the Illinois delegation which was going to go for Jason instead of Knox—by hovercraft across the Bay and thence by helicopter to Union Square in front of the St. Francis. This was their day, and it was possible as one watched, no matter how old a hand, no matter how sophisticated, how experienced, how skeptical and cynical and know-it-all, to yet feel a thrill along with them, to believe for just a moment that it was all real, that everything was as bright and shining and free and glorious as America was in her days of beginning, and as she sometimes still is in the hearts of her people.

  For here came good old Joe Smitters from Ashtabula, chairman of the county central committee for nigh these twenty years, and Mrs. Joe Smitters—Belle—head of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. And right after them came Bill Smatters from Atlanta, biggest contributor in town to the last campaign, and Mary-Clare, daughter of the late Senator Rivage, smartest old Sentuh theh evuh was. And right after them. Bob Smutters and Lulie, from Punxsutawney, Pa., and John Smotters and Susie from Phoenix, and—h’aar y’all?—ding, dang, if it wasn’t Buddy and Vangie Smetters from Little Rock, and how have you-all beein?

  And the Governors and the Senators and the Congressmen, and the state senators and the assemblymen, and the Cabinet officials and the state officials and the society gals preparing their big shebangs and the members of the diplomatic corps ready to observe—ready to observe, on an average, fifty martinis, thirty gin and tonics, fifteen bourbon highballs, two bottles of rosé, four of burgundy, and three of sauterne—at innumerable cocktail parties, receptions, private dinners, and public banquets before the week was over.

  And Walter Dobius and Helen-Anne and all their friends and colleagues of the communications media, the teams, the groups, the lone wolves, the sages, and the working-stiffs, prepared to fill endless reams of newsprint and endless hours of newstime with an awful, abysmal, appalling expanse
of absolutely nothing—and on four or five vital occasions, at four or five electrically decisive moments, with something really important and really exciting.

  And Ted and Ceil Jason, arriving at the Mark, to face a wild surge of reporters, cameramen, and shouting delegates, speaking a few hastily innocuous words into the insistent microphones, being whisked by their campaign staff into a crowded elevator and rushed to their suite on the twenty-third floor—there to have the last half-hour of quiet they would know for five days—before leaving to attend an 11 A.M. reception given by the Massachusetts delegation at the Palace.

  And Orrin and Beth Knox, arriving at the St. Francis to be greeted by a similar wildly excited crowd, speaking a few hastily innocuous words into the insistent microphones, being whisked by their campaign aides into a crowded elevator and rushed to their suite on the eighteenth floor, there to have an excited reunion with a Hal looking older and more settled and more—“husbandly,” as Beth put it—and a Crystal radiant and glowing with her pregnancy—before being hurried away to the Fairmont for a reception given by the ladies of the Ohio delegation.

  And Bob Leffingwell, also arriving at the St. Francis, carefully noncommittal; and Fred Van Ackerman, arriving at the Mark with a flat prediction of victory for Ted Jason; and LeGage Shelby and Rufus Kleinfert, arriving together at the Palace, which caused some startled comment from the press, Rufus silent and uneasy but ’Gage making the same firm prediction. And the same prediction from Patsy Labaiya, arriving in a flurry of lights and cameras at the Fairmont, accompanied by Herbert Jason, Selena Castleberry, and Valuela Randall, Valuela come all the way from Portofino “to help my favorite nephew.” And Cullee Hamilton, smiling quietly and slipping in behind them with Sarah Johnson, almost unnoticed in the Jasons’ characteristic uproar. And Bob and Dolly Munson, equally unobtrusive, managing to elude the press at the St. Francis by coming in a side door. And the Speaker, following seconds after, at the Hilton. And Justice Thomas Buckmaster Davis and his friend from the Post—“Let’s slip in this way, dear boy, we don’t want too much publicity, you know, it might detract from Ted.” “You old fraud, Tommy, you want all the publicity you can get and we all know it. Hey, boys! Here’s Justice Davis! Better ask him a few questions!”