Capable of Honor

by Allen Drury

  Abruptly the flurry died, as if by some signal. A silence almost stealthy descended upon the great room. His peroration received no objections. It was so quiet, in fact, that his voice began to sound a little uncertain as he concluded:

  “So I call upon you, my friends, to go forth armored in righteousness and truth, to do battle for a great President and the great cause he leads: the cause of freedom, dignity, human decency, and human peace—seeking solutions of justice for this sad world’s problems, so that you and I and our children and the children of all mankind unto the last generation may live in dignity and honor.

  “It gives me great pleasure,” he said, and a certain genuine relief in his voice brought a titter of amusement in the press section, “to turn the gavel over now to our permanent chairman, that great leader of our party who has, through sunshine and shadow, through thick and thin, through triumph and through adversity, carried high the standard of our great party and done it credit in the eyes of all men—our beloved Speaker of the House. Mr. Speaker!”

  And for a moment, as the Speaker came forward with his plodding, matter-of-fact gait that looked as stolid, pragmatic, and practical as he was, their great party was briefly reunited in affectionate tribute to one of its giants. But his comments in the Credentials Committee had been publicized enough, his obvious dedication to orderly procedures was well enough known, he was so obviously on the side of the President in seeking some sensible compromise, that the moment swiftly passed. For the first time in the five conventions at which he had served as permanent chairman he could sense as he stood before them that he was facing an audience containing not only dutiful and affectionate friends but genuinely hostile and resourceful enemies who were no longer impressed and held docile by his legend. This time legends were not going to be enough. He looked slowly about at the aisles, the entryways, the tiers of seats climbing into the blue haze above. He saw what he wanted to see, and he made very plain to them what it was: the police. An ugly little murmur, a ripple of muffled yet insistent hisses and boos began to accompany his slow surveillance of the hall, and when he finished they knew they were in for a fight: he was a tough old bird and he meant them to realize it. Abruptly he slammed down the gavel, so abruptly and so harshly in the silence that had gradually fallen upon them that almost all of the eighteen thousand souls under the balloon-specked roof jumped.

  “Now,” he said calmly, “this convention will be in order.…It is customary at this time for me to make you a little speech on the four years past and the four years ahead.

  “That’s simple: the past four have been tough and the next four are going to be tougher.

  “The only way to get through them is with a united party and a united nation. Those who would tear either apart”—he paused and then went on calmly—“are fools.”

  Immediately there were renewed boos and hisses, a little stronger and defiant now. There was also an inarticulate, choking half-yell, as though someone had started to shout something into a microphone and been yanked down. He ignored it.

  “In the next few hours, you will have plenty of time to fight out these issues of credentials, of foreign policy, and of anything else you please. But as long as you are in this hall and I am chairman of this convention, you will settle your differences here and you will do it like ladies and gentlemen with a decent respect for one another’s opinions.”

  Again there was an outbreak, and this time the applause overrode it; but there was a tentative, almost frightened, quality to the applause that he could sense and did not like.

  “I say to you, that is the only way for one of our great political parties to do it. It is the only way for decent men and women to do it. It is the only way for Americans who love their country (“My God, not that old chestnut,” Newsweek groaned to the Washington Post, and the Post shrugged and smiled back) to do it. I don’t like,” he added bluntly, “these odd elements who are trying to take over this convention. I don’t like the kooks and oddballs I see trying to start demonstrations and frighten decent people. I don’t like the element of violence that has come into this great gathering—and I don’t like candidates who are too cautious to speak up about it, either.”

  Again, as he had planned, there was a sound of protest, this time louder and uglier.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said with a grating anger. “You can call on the scum and the shame of America to come out of its gutters to help you, if you’re that idiotic and besotted with the lust for power—but you can’t put them neatly back when you’re through. They’ll take you over if you let them. They’ll take over this party if you let them. I say to you, my old friends who have stood with me for so long, stand with me now! We have a problem here, and it isn’t going to do anybody any good to pretend we don’t. It’s a tough problem and we’re going to have to be tough about it. I have one hundred extra policemen in this hall tonight, and if anybody wants to start a rumpus in here that isn’t strictly within the rules of free and orderly debate, he’s going to jail. Right—now.…So keep that in mind.

  “Now,” he said, more calmly, “just so you won’t forget a couple of things: we have a President in the White House. He is about to be our candidate for re-election. He’s the only President, and his is the only program, we have. If you have disagreements with him, state them. There is an area for reasonable disagreement and reasonable debate—and then, if a majority of the delegates wish it, there is an area for amendment and revision. But we are here for one purpose and one only: to write a winning platform and choose a winning ticket.

  “Let’s get at it.

  “The first order of business,” he concluded quietly, “is the report of the Credentials Committee. The Chair recognizes the distinguished delegate from the great state of Ohio, the Honorable Joe Smitters, chairman of the committee.”

  There came, while Old Joe Smitters shuffled out the long ramp to the podium, one of those hasty moments of pause and reflection which, snatched out of time in the midst of the furious contentions of men, sometimes provide them with sound judgments on which to move ahead, and sometimes do not. In this instance it served only to make the uncertain more nervous and the determined more grim. The Speaker’s effort had been well meant, and it had been delivered in the manner he had found effective many times before, in the House and in convention; but there was a new breed and a new mood present here. Even as Joe Smitters approached the lectern and, adjusting the black-ribboned pince-nez he affected, opened his report to begin reading, there came again from somewhere in the enormous room the level, measured, monotonous, and curiously menacing chant:

  JA-SON MEANS PEACE. JA-SON MEANS PEACE. JA-SON MEANS PEACE.

  And though in response there came an immediate outcry of WE WANT KNOX! WE WANT KNOX! WE WANT KNOX! somehow its exuberant enthusiasm, its uneven, raucous, and undisciplined nature, contrasted oddly—frighteningly, many thought—with the deliberately uninflected, deliberately dispassionate, heavy, somber, steady chant that met and gradually overcame the cries for Orrin Knox. Someone, as Cullee remarked to Lafe when they paused in mid-aisle near the Oklahoma delegation to compare notes, had studied his textbooks on mob psychology well. A disciplined force was present, and it was becoming more effective with each passing moment.

  After that flurry, however, and while Joe Smitters spoke, the hall remained surprisingly silent. To Orrin, watching with Stanley Danta at their headquarters at the Fairmont, and to Ted, doing the same with Bob Leffingwell at the Mark Hopkins, it appeared that the agreement was going to hold in spite of the brief excitements that broke out as Joe Smitters described it. Mary Buttner Baffleburg billowed to the microphone to shout an indignant protest, Lizzie Hanson McWharter and six or seven others followed, but despite Mary’s staunch claims, even her own Pennsylvania did not support her. When she made a motion to separate the two cases of Mississippi and Ohio so that the convention might vote individually upon them, she was shouted down so unanimously that the Speaker did not even bother to order a roll call.
The question came upon the full text of the compromise, which would give Orrin all of Mississippi’s fourteen votes and divide Ohio’s sixty equally. Esmé Harbellow Stryke for California demanded a roll call, but it turned out to be pro forma. The lines held all the way.

  The vote for the compromise was 1037-256.

  Briefly there was the wistful hope in many minds that perhaps the whole convention could go like this, so quickly had the great headlined battle over delegates dissolved, so short and mannerly had been the debate, so easily had the charges of “Knox steal” been allowed to disappear. It had, as Hal Knox put it with some dryness to Mabel Anderson when he stopped by the Utah delegation to say hello, “served its purpose until they decided to concentrate on bigger game.” Now it was all right to let it go.

  Five minutes later the Speaker recognized Senator August to present the majority report of the Platform Committee, and abruptly the convention narrowed itself down to the only real issue before it, the only purpose for which history, looking back, would ultimately record that it had met: to reach a judgment on foreign policy. Far away in Gorotoland a platoon of American soldiers, cut off in the highlands by Obifumatta’s forces, was even then learning—as long as consciousness remained, which mercifully was not long—what it meant to be subjected to ritual death. Nearer at hand in Panama the first two jets to be shot down by the Soviet missiles installed along the Western reaches of the Canal had just crashed into the sea with the loss of six American lives. At the Cow Palace the convention hushed to listen as the senior Senator from Minnesota began to review the ten bitter days of controversy that had brought the committee to an impasse—“this deadlock of sincerely held opinions,” as he put it, “to which we all hope this great convention has the key.”

  At Central Emergency and at Mount Zion, in almost identical gestures at almost identical moments, doctors glanced at nurses across two bodies and shook their heads. The convention had a very few minutes of even its present rather tortured calm left to go.

  “Therefore it was decided,” Tom August concluded, and his audience was silent and tense as it listened, “that the committee would return the matter of this disputed plank on foreign policy to this great convention for decision. After the vote and the adjournment of the committee,” he added rather uncertainly, “a minority report was filed by the distinguished National Committeeman from Oregon, former Governor Roger P. Croy, and the distinguished National Committee-woman from California, Mrs. Stryke, embodying the language of the so-called ‘committee plank’ which I have just read to you and declaring it to be the sense of the committee that it should be adopted by the convention.…Apparently”—he looked around vaguely, while below in the Michigan delegation the Majority Leader deplored in violent private terms Tom’s inability to ever take a firm, definite stand on anything—“this is an attempt to bring the matter even more emphatically before the convention, though it seems to me that …”

  His voice trailed away and he looked puzzled as there were sudden indications of a disturbance at the other end of the ramp. The parliamentarian came forward and murmured hastily in his ear, he turned and looked and then turned hastily back to the microphone.

  “But it seems,” he said, “that the distinguished delegate from Wyoming, Senator Van Ackerman, is here to speak in behalf of the minority report—”

  “No, he isn’t,” Bob Munson shouted, prompted by some intuition he could not have explained as Fred Van Ackerman strode furiously forward. “Stop him! Stop him!”

  But of course Tom went mildly on, “so I shall be happy to yield to him for that purpose.”

  And with that air of obvious relief with which he always concluded his speeches in the Senate, his speeches to the electorate, and other onerous public duties, he stepped back, holding out his hand for the handshake that inevitably accompanies all such comings and goings at the lectern. Fred’s normal discourtesy, however, was heightened by an agitation so obvious that he brushed past the Senator from Minnesota as though he did not exist. Something in his haste and his manner electrified the convention. Here and there across the floor and in the public galleries where delegates and guests had transistor radios or small television sets there were startled outcries and word of mouth began to travel like lightning through the hall even as Fred started to speak.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he cried, and already his voice held its high, demagogic whine, “Mr. Speaker, I want to report to this great convention two cases of murder. Yes,” he cried as there were shocked shouts of protest and a scattering of boos, automatic and nervous, “murder! Evil, monstrous, deliberate murder! Two young men are dead, Mr. Chairman—victims of an unprincipled campaign for high office—victims of a devouring, corrupting ambition that would sweep everything ruthlessly before it—murdered as a result of the riot in Union Square this morning—murdered by the gangs of Orrin Knox!”

  There were furious outbursts from many sections of the floor and galleries, angry shouts of protest from people too angry to be frightened. But even as they tried to shout Fred down—even as Bob Munson, pausing only to give a hasty order to Hal Knox, who happened to be standing at his side, began to fight his way forward—even as the Speaker, looking furious, strode toward the lectern—there broke from the galleries a somber, measured chant, mechanical, robot-like, which spoke three times with a slow, massive deliberation:

  WITH-DRAW, MUR-DER-ER. WITH-DRAW, MUR-DER-ER. WITH-DRAW, MUR-DER-ER.

  As abruptly as it began it ceased, while in their box Beth and Crystal and Dolly Munson looked absolutely stricken, and in his office at the Fairmont Orrin shifted in his chair as though yielding to a physical blow.

  Into the shocked silence Fred shouted:

  “Yes, he should withdraw, Mr. Chairman! Orrin Knox should withdraw! Two young heroes have been murdered, Mr. Chairman! Fighting for what they believed in, a free and decent world without wars and without aggression! Murdered, Mr. Chairman! Murdered by the gangs of—”

  But now the Speaker had reached him and clamped a hand upon his shoulder so heavily that the Senator winced as the Speaker spun him around and shouted, his face scarcely six inches from Fred’s, “Get off this platform, you monster! Get out of the sight of decent men, you—”

  But the Speaker was sixty-eight and Fred was thirty-nine, and with a furious contempt the Senator wrenched his shoulder away and struck down the Speaker’s hand.

  “Leave me alone, old man,” he shouted in his enraged psychotic whine; and then, as he saw the Speaker wince, his voice changed abruptly to a level, sneering nastiness. “Yes, you are an old man! An old, used-up man who has been around too long! This convention belongs to the young men, now, not to old men who are friends of the friend of murderers. This convention doesn’t want murderers! It wants the only hope for a decent peace in the world—Governor Ted Jason of California. And it’s going to get him!”

  WITH-DRAW, MUR-DER-ER, the galleries rumbled in a flat, mechanical thunder. WITH-DRAW, MUR-DER-ER. JA-SON MEANS PEACE. JA-SON MEANS PEACE.

  For a long moment Fred and the Speaker glared at one another, suspended above the convention on a private cord of hatred. Then the Speaker reached out, with a slow deliberation that called on all the reserves of all the years, and drew the microphone to him.

  “Captain Hughes,” he said sharply, “remove this man.”

  “I’m a United States Senator!” Fred shouted as four policemen came forward along the ramp, and the press stood on its worktables, and on the floor in a great wave rising the delegates stood, too, and watched in a strange, indefinable silence. “You can’t arrest me, I’m a United States Senator!”

  “And more shame to the people of Wyoming who sent you there,” the Speaker roared, letting go at last. “More shame to the Senate that allows you to remain! And shame to you, you vicious being! Take him off this platform and throw him out!”

  After that, for a while, there was no particular order to things, as Fred, adopting a sudden satisfied smirk in one of his lightning changes of mood, stepped forw
ard to meet the policemen, gave them an elaborate sardonic bow, and marched out ahead of them, untouched, off the ramp, out of sight and presumably out of the building; as Senator Munson, finally achieving the platform, conferred hastily with the Speaker; as fistfights and scufflings broke out in the galleries and across the floor; as the band desperately played “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle” in a nervous attempt to restore some jollity to the proceedings; as the reporters furiously wrote and the commentators furiously commented; and as the angry sounds of eighteen thousand agitated voices filled the Cow Palace to the point of near-explosion.

  “The Chair,” the Speaker said at last in a voice that trembled slightly in spite of him, when the noise had begun to drain itself out a little, “will recognize the distinguished National Committeewoman from California, Mrs. Esmé Harbellow Stryke, to speak in support of the minority report on the foreign policy plank.”

  And for twenty minutes Esmé Stryke did, while the delegates and galleries listened with an almost desperate attention. The demonstrators of COMFORT, DEFY, and KEEP did not perform again during her speech, their opponents were similarly silent. By a sort of tacit agreement, everyone for the moment seemed too emotionally exhausted and too involved in letting tensions relax to do more than give her a few perfunctory moments of applause, a few dutiful boos and hisses. A great many in the hall were thoroughly frightened, not so much by what had occurred as by what it revealed of the capacity of the human animal to go suddenly berserk. Who knew what they might do together next? It was a thought that left many deeply shaken. Esmé Stryke was one of them. Her voice was not too steady, her usually positive manner was uncertain, and although she did make one quick reference to “those who have paid a tragic price for their belief in a peaceful world,” she raced over it and hurried on before there could be any reaction one way or the other from the convention.