by Allen Drury
But most important of all, what will the President of the United States do? Because there is one, of course, product of that American capability, built in by her founders and so annoying to those who would like to see her toppled, to maintain her national continuity even under so heavy a blow.
Even now, at his sister’s vacation cabin at Lake Tahoe, the pragmatic old veteran who has been Speaker of the House for the past twenty years is being sworn in by a trembling young Forest Service ranger whom he has pressed into service for the occasion. “Mr. Speaker” at this moment is in process of becoming “Mr. President,” just as the Constitution says he must in the absence of a Vice President. Harley didn’t have one, though he had the authority under the twenty-fourth Amendment to fill the vacancy created by his own accession to the White House. He had told the Speaker once that he was going to step down in a year anyway, and meanwhile he didn’t want to create all sorts of political hostilities in Congress by choosing one of them over another. This had disturbed the Speaker and caused much national concern, but Harley was the President and the option was his. He didn’t choose to exercise it, and so here is history being made at Lake Tahoe: Mr. Speaker is becoming Mr. President.
“If you will repeat after me, sir—” the young ranger says. The Speaker interrupts with a wave of the hand that starts out to be impatient but thinks better of it.
“I’ve attended a few, son,” he says, not unkindly. “I know how it’s done.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy says, blushing, and begins, stammering slightly in his excitement, “I, William Abbott—”
“I, William Abbott,” the Speaker repeats gravely, and everything is silent save for the click and whirr of cameras and the nearby battle of a pair of blue jays in the pines whose argument will go down in history on the tapes and films of this historic event.
“—do solemnly swear,” the young ranger goes on, and the Speaker’s voice grows a little stronger, though on his sister’s worn Bible his right hand trembles ever so slightly—
“—do solemnly swear—”
“—that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States—”
“—that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States—”
“—and will to the best of my ability—”
“—and will to the best of my ability—”
“—preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“Preserve,” the Speaker says, his voice falling suddenly to a soft, grave, deeply determined note, “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“Mr. President!” a cameraman shouts, and with a little smile he turns and faces the clicking, whirring, omnivorous machines, his sister and brother-in-law at his side. Their weathered faces blink into the lights a little uncertainly, plain, simple, unaffected, as if, for a second, beseeching the support and understanding of the world.
Behind and below them, over the porch railing, the beautiful lake can be seen, stretching far away in the gathering darkness to the distant lights against the distant mountains on the farther shore. Quite by accident, by no one’s design but simply because the Speaker happens to have been there when he got the news, a curiously bucolic air is lent the occasion. For just a second something subconscious, almost visceral, touches the hearts of his watching countrymen—something harking far back into the innocence of an earlier America, this swearing-in of the new President of the United States in a simple log cabin, in a forest, by a lake.
As if the actual ceremony has released them all, within the hour a few answers begin to be given to some of the questions of what-will-they-do.
The first headlines read:
ABBOTT SWORN IN, RETAINS CABINET. NAMES COMMISSION TO PROBE HUDSON CRASH. MAY SUMMON NATIONAL COMMITTEE IMMEDIATELY AFTER FUNERAL TO CHOOSE NEW NOMINEES.
They are followed quickly by:
PRESSURE MOUNTS FOR RECALL OF CONVENTION.
And shortly thereafter:
SECRETARY KNOX ANNOUNCES, “I EXPECT TO HEAD THE TICKET.”
And moments later:
GOVERNOR JASON REPUDIATES THIRD PARTY, PLEDGES FIGHT FOR TOP SPOT.
It appears that the tale as before is about to be retold.
But there will be differences.
3
So the power had come to him, the President thought as the last cameraman gathered his gear and departed, as the last gaping tourist, privileged by sheer happenstance to have been in the vicinity, gathered his gaping wife and drowsy kids and drove away.
The power had come to him: the ultimate power of America, which he had never sought and never wanted, being one of those who find in Washington their proper place and fill it to the full, knowing that this is right for them and that no amount of striving will make it any better or produce from it satisfactions greater than it already provides.
There were not many such, he reflected with a grim little amusement. Not many such. Mr. Speaker had been a rarity because he had always known exactly the power he wanted, had gone after it, won it, and settled in without another ambition forever after.
Until now.
Until now …
He sighed, a small unconscious sound that went unnoticed in the velvet night with its enormous stars shining over Tahoe, its little cool wind rustling in the pines, its distant sounds of laughter and music from somewhere down the shore.
He was alone on the porch for the first time in five hours. Inside, his sister and brother-in-law were getting ready for bed. In the two neighboring cabins, commandeered for press and Secret Service, the final poker game had ended, the last hectic political argument was over, the lights were going out.
He would have liked to have known what they had said about him this evening, that shrewd, experienced crew whom he had known so long and so well in Washington. He was pretty sure they had always respected Mr. Speaker, for he had conducted himself with a dignity and forcefulness that had guaranteed they should. But in this past week at the wild convention, things had not been the same. For the first time his power had slipped, his commands had been flouted. His influence had been mocked and made the target of bitter attack. He had lost ground—too much ground. Senator Fred Van Ackerman had shrieked “Old man!” at him in their bitter confrontation on the podium while the delegates listened in tense silence below: “An old, used-up man who has been around too long!” And toward the end, though this was the fifth national convention he had chaired—or perhaps precisely because it was the fifth—he had almost lost control of the delegates, almost been exposed to the final humiliation of an open and successful revolt.
In his own mind he had left San Francisco a defeated man, and he had not known whether he could recover from it. He had, in fact, been giving serious consideration to the idea of putting the matter up to the party caucus in the House when Congress reconvened: should he step down as Speaker? Of course he had known there was not the slightest chance they would accept it, but he had really not been thinking of it as a grandstand play. He had really almost come to the point where he had honestly meant to do it, so disturbed and depressed did he feel when he left San Francisco.
And then suddenly—this. You never knew, in public life. You just never knew. The most fantastic thing you could dream could always be topped by the Lord’s reality. The Lord, the President had found over the years, had quite a sense of humor. He was often just full of tricks.
Not, of course, that this particular example had been entirely unexpected. The method of it was certainly unexpected, so much so that the President, like every other American awake as midnight neared, was still almost totally unable to believe it. His first official act—after expressing condolences to Lucille Hudson and the families of the other victims—had been to appoint a commission. Already the retired dean of the Harvard Law School whom he had named to head it had called with the first of the sabotage rumors that had come to him; and of course there would be many, many more as the months and years drew on.
But whatever the commission concluded, it could never quite restore men to where they had been before the event. Some necessary self-confidence in everyone had been fundamentally shaken. Such events were so appalling, basically, because for just a moment they cut the ground right out from under life, revealed it for what it was, so frail and flimsy a thing; made of men’s institutions and their hopes so helpless and feeble a mockery; shattered all certainties, destroyed all pretensions, showed men what they really were in the scheme of things: nothing. That was the Lord’s real humor. He said to men, “You think you’re pretty good, don’t you? Well, watch for a minute.”
But though the method was unexpected and unbelievable, the possibility had never been entirely absent from the mind of the man who would have to bear the burden if it came. Ever since Harley had decided to leave the Vice Presidential office vacant, the possibility was always there. The Speaker had hoped it would not come to him in his mid-sixties, for many reasons: one of the main ones, emphasized harshly by his opponents at the convention, being the fact that he was in his mid-sixties.
But the event happened. The burden came. The Lord and history combined forces and said: Don’t look over your shoulder for anyone else, friend. Nobody’s here. It’s you, all by your little self. So hop to it.
And so you did, the President reflected, and again the little unconscious sigh escaped him. With a few exceptions, life had gone so much to order for William Abbott since he entered the House from Colorado forty years ago that it hardly seemed right now that in his closing years such a violent shift in plans should have come about.
Fortunately he wasn’t a worrying man, nor did he have any doubts about his ability to handle it. It was just that, as in that story Alben Barkley sometimes told when—the Speaker then a young and willing protégé of Sam Rayburn—they used to sit around in Mr. Sam’s office replenishing body and spirit after a particularly tough session: “It’s the unexpectedness of it.”
Unexpectedness, all things considered, had not been a feature of his life or his career since the day, at some point in the sixth grade in tiny Leadville, high in its cold, bright niche of the Rockies, when he made up his mind that he would be a member of the Congress of the United States. The figure who had inspired this decision at the age of twelve, he often reflected later with some amusement, had hardly been the type usually found in inspirational literature. He had, in fact, been a drunkard, a womanizer and, in the belief of many of his hard-bitten associates in the mining industry, a peculator as well. He was, in short, a typical inspirational figure of a society in which men are free to be as noble or as base, or as much of both, as they can manage. But to little Billy Abbott in the sixth grade, hearing him roll out the ancient, well-tried clarion calls of democracy against a background of great snow-covered peaks stabbing jaggedly into a sky so deeply blue and clear as to be unbelievable, he was inspiration enough.
The Speaker-to-be had come home from the special school assembly at which the rather rakish keeper of democracy’s Grail had spoken to tell his mother that he was going to run for Congress. “When?” she had inquired, not looking up from the stove where she was preparing lunch. “Next year,” he said firmly. “I’ll be there,” she promised, and when he announced his candidacy ten years later, she was, accompanying him on his strenuous travels by auto, jeep and horseback around the still almost frontier district; entertaining for him at the “Breakfasts with Bill” that did so much to persuade his women constituents to vote for their handsome young bachelor; giving him shrewd and sensible advice with all the calm pragmatism of her Scandinavian nature.
So, also, did his father, though he did not participate very actively in the campaign. He didn’t have to: everybody knew Dr. Abbott, who had come West from Vermont as a young man to cure his tuberculosis and had somehow found his way to Leadville. There his reputation as an excellent doctor and a man of sound wisdom soon traveled far along the high, lovely meadows, up the tumbling river valleys and into the mines where hardy, pragmatic men wrestled with the earth to seize her treasure. “Doc” Abbott in his own quiet way was the greatest asset his son could have: a natural advance-man who had been preparing the way with diligence and rectitude for thirty years and more. He too was capable of shrewd advice, always uttered in a terse, monosyllabic way. Between them, he and his wife gave their son all the support and guidance he could possibly need, having provided him initially with a strength of character and toughness of will that were to be his surest reliances in the years ahead.
“I’m half-Yank and half-Swede,” he used to tell his audiences in the early days, “and that’s a tough combination to beat.”
They always laughed and applauded and agreed delightedly with one another that that sure was right, all right.
His first campaign, against the same gallant knight who had first inspired him, now ten years older, drunker, shabbier and shadier, had not been a success in spite of what everyone in the district knew about the two of them. There was still a reluctance to kick out the old man; after all, people were human, and he was one of the most human. In a hard way of life that nature at her harshest had made even harder, the incumbent was not the only man who drank, womanized, didn’t pay too much attention to the finer items of dress, and now and again dipped too far into the till. And they knew him; and they were tolerant; and underneath the harshness, they were kind. So they gave him one last term, meanwhile sending some of their shrewdest men to tell him maybe he’d better quit and take that judgeship Harry Truman was offering in the East. And within a year, having thought it all over and being no fool, he thanked them for their kindness and announced his retirement. The field was open to young Bill Abbott. The following year he went to Washington.
He took with him the love of his parents and only sister, the faith of his constituents, and an education which had thrust him early, as it does so many who ultimately find their way to Capitol Hill, into the lively world of campus politics. He had decided he would educate himself to be a teacher, since common sense indicated that sixth-grade ambitions are not always achieved and one might conceivably, however worthy, have to live one’s life outside Congress. But the area he decided to teach in, of course, was political science and government, and it would have been surprising if he had gone through four years of it without seeking student office.
He ran twice at the University, for president of the freshman class, which he lost, and for president of the senior class, which he won. The years between were devoted to managing the campaigns of others—“all part of my education,” he told his closest friend. “But I thought you were going to be a teacher,” his friend remarked with a smile. “Oh, I’m going to teach people things,” he responded cheerfully. “Maybe not in classrooms, but I’ll teach ’em.”
If there was any one lesson that loomed above the others at that early stage, it seemed to be: steady does it. There were no extremes in Bill Abbott’s nature, and if this made him at times a somewhat dull, one-track type of companion, this was more than compensated for by the absolute reliability and trustworthiness that soon came to be attached to his name. These, in fact, were the two traits that his associates had always considered characteristic. “Billy’s a rock,” they said on campus. “Bill Abbott’s a rock,” they said in his first twenty years in the House. “The Speaker’s a rock,” they said in his second twenty.
And the President would have to be a rock now, he told himself as the noise down the shore began to diminish, the few lights he could see from other cabins along and across the lake began to go out, and the night took full possession. Yes, sir, the President would have to be a rock now.
Perhaps it was the rocklike, one-track quality that had kept him from ever achieving what so many other men had, a wife and family. “You’re so damned reliable, some girl should have snapped you up long ago,” one of his colleagues remarked jokingly when he was thirty and some bored reporter, with nothing else to write, had dreamed up a list of “Washington’s ten most eligible bachelors”
and put him at the top of it. “In Leadville,” he replied, “we learn to move fast or get our tails frozen off. Guess I just outrace ’em.” And there, even in his own mind, he left it, as the years drew on, his routine became more settled, and other bored reporters kept the legend of his eligibility alive.
Whether he actually was eligible, he never really paused to analyze. Certainly it was easy enough to plunge into the work of Congress so deeply that he could sooner or later forget the few hurtful things that happened along the way. He had tried to establish something lasting, now and then: it didn’t succeed for some reason he never quite understood. The antidote was work, and by the time another decade had passed, “Old Bill’s really married to this House,” was the way they put it on the Hill. “What do you suppose he does?” they asked now and then when they were musing in the cloakroom. But nobody ever knew, and by that time he had already gathered about him such a mantle of calm, pragmatic dignity that nobody ever dared inquire too openly. Whatever he did, he reflected with a harsh amusement one time when he overheard such a conversation as he walked through the corridors, no real gossip about it ever got around in that gossipy place.