by Allen Drury
“Governor,” he said, “thanks very much for coming to see me at this ungodly hour.”
“Your command,” Ted Jason said with a smile equally pleasant, “my wish.”
“Glad of that,” the President said amicably. “Guess if it wasn’t your wish, the command wouldn’t matter much, right?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Ted said, his smile steady.
“Let’s sit over by the window,” the President suggested, leading the way to a couple of armchairs facing one another comfortably across a coffee table on which cups and a steaming percolator were already set out. “You’ve no idea how nice it is to get away from that desk. Already. You may not believe it, seeing as how you and some others regard it as the most attractive piece of furniture in the world, but it’s a fact. Less than a week, and I’m already glad to sit somewhere else.”
Governor Jason smiled and took the proffered chair.
“As long as you retain the option,” he said, “That’s what makes the difference.”
“Coffee?”
“Black, please,” Ted said. He looked thoughtfully around the room while the President poured. “Are you going to have it redecorated?”
“Don’t imagine so,” the President said. “I’ll add a few of my own pictures, of course—I’ve got about a thousand still up there in the Speaker’s office. Going to take me a week or two to dismantle that. Then I’ll settle in for a while. I imagine you have a very attractive office in Sacramento?”
“Very pleasant,” the Governor said politely.
“Good,” his host said, stirring in cream and sugar gently and watching his visitor with a friendly smile while silence grew. Presently Ted put down his cup with a little laugh and leaned forward.
“Mr. President, am I supposed to crack psychologically, or something? Is that the idea?”
“Not at all,” the President said blandly. “Not at all! Why on earth would I want you to do that?”
“I really don’t know,” Ted said calmly. “I really don’t. But I thought you might.”
“No, indeed.”
“Then why am I here?”
“I expect you know,” the President said.
His visitor gave him an easy, relaxed smile.
“Pat tells me Helen-Anne Carrew says it’s all her doing. The face that launched a thousand inaccurate columns, its owner moving like a noisy gray eminence through the secret paths of government, swaying men to her ruthless desires. See them hop! Senators, Speakers, Governors, Presidents—”
“Not always inaccurate,” the President said with an equally relaxed and comfortable smile. “Helen-Anne hits it on the button nine times out of ten, I’ve found. She’s hard-working, clever and astute, and often has the luck that seems to be attracted by those attributes. For instance, she was lucky tonight when she decided to go to the twelfth floor.”
“Now what cock-and-bull story has she told you about the twelfth floor?” the Governor inquired humorously. “‘The Twelfth Floor.’ It sounds like a good mystery story or a bad novel about big business. Which is it?”
“Neither,” the President said, also humorously. “It’s just a nice big front-page story by Helen-Anne involving several interesting people.”
“Which the Star isn’t going to print,” the Governor said, “because it’s only her word, and that can easily enough be knocked down.”
“She had company, you know. One of her colleagues was along.”
The Governor laughed.
“You won’t see a line of it in their pages. Now, if it had been Orrin, whom they don’t like, there would have been column after column of sinister speculation. You know how these things are done, Mr. President. But since it’s me, whom they do like—Anyway, there was no meeting—nothing sinister—nothing. So what proof does she have?”
“She says she took some pictures of you as you came out.”
“No one took any p—” Ted started quickly, and as quickly stopped, while the President gave him a hard, inquisitive stare. “Anyway,” he continued after a moment, “it’s her word, unsupported, and there is no proof. I doubt very much that the Star will print it, with no confirmation from any other source.”
“Governor,” the President inquired with the quiet curiosity of one who really wanted to know, “why are you still running with that shoddy crew? Don’t you see the terrible dangers to you and to the country in what they’re doing? Don’t you see you’re giving them an option on you, even if you only stopped in for two minutes to say hello? They can claim all sorts of things about your approval and your endorsement—maybe even your complicity, for that matter.”
“Complicity in what?” Ted Jason demanded sharply. The President shrugged.
“How do I know? Whatever they plan to do. For all I or anyone outside that room knows, you might have been plotting to kill the President. It’s been done.”
“Not by sane men,” the Governor said. The President made an impatient sound.
“Who said we’re discussing sane men? Look, Governor”—and he leaned forward and turned on the full impact of Mr. President and Mr. Speaker combined—“there must come a halt to this sort of thing if you wish to survive in American politics, or maybe just if you wish to survive, period. Nobody I know is going to kill you, but your newfound friends might. These things backfire. Violence feeds upon itself; presently all order and all certainty are swept away. You cannot control these forces. I thought you learned that at the convention.”
“You and your friends certainly did your best to instruct me!” Ted said with a sudden flash of anger. The President returned him cold look for cold look.
“Somebody had to,” he said bluntly. “You refused to learn otherwise. Now I say to you this: I don’t know what happened in that room, and I don’t know what Helen-Anne is going to print about it—if she does. But I do know that you are betraying yourself—and the people who believe in you—and this republic—if you do not once and for all, unequivocally and forever, repudiate violence as a method of conducting the public business, foreign policy and social progress of the United States of America.” He leaned back in his chair and stared out at the Monument with a tired little sigh. “This is so obvious to me,” he said quietly, “and, I think, to all sane men who want their country to survive, that I don’t see why it has to be spelled out to a man of your intelligence. I really do not.”
“You really have it rationalized, don’t you?” Governor Jason asked with an equal quietness, an equal wonderment; which, if it was not sincere, was a masterpiece of acting, the President thought. And perhaps it was sincere: he could not tell, so earnestly was it presented. “You really have the world turned around so that the policies of this Administration have nothing at all to do with the excesses of protest that have occurred in the last few days.”
“‘Excesses of protest,’ my God!” the President exclaimed, bringing a fist down hard on the arm of his chair. “Is the sort of thing that happened in Arlington an ‘excess of protest’? Is the sort of organized disruption we’re seeing all across the country these days just an ‘excess of protest’? How neatly you rationalize, yourself. How neatly”—his eyes narrowed—“and how well-designed to win you the political support of the disrupters.”
“Mr. President,” Governor Jason said, “I am willing to concede that there are some forces—”
“Including those you met with earlier this evening.”
“Some forces,” Ted continued, unmoved, “which are involved in these things, and which are not sincere or genuine or perhaps even loyal to the country. But there are many, many millions more who honestly and earnestly and sincerely deplore and abhor the policies your Administration is following in world affairs. Now, these people are not,” he said carefully, “kooks. They are not crackpots. They are not wild-eyed radicals or subversive Communists. They are decent Americans, deeply and genuinely disturbed. Am I to repudiate them, when they look to me for voice? Am I to say to them, ‘Sorry, run along. I agree with Big Daddy, ever
ything’s 100 per cent okay and you’re just a bunch of disloyal rats’? I cannot do that, Mr. President. I don’t believe it to be true.”
“What do you believe?” the President asked, as others had asked, and would ask, his handsome visitor. “That’s what I don’t understand. Perhaps if I could, I’d understand better where you think you’re going, and what you think you’re trying to do.”
“I think, if you will forgive me,” Governor Jason said quietly, “that I am going right to that desk over there. And I think what I am trying to do—”
“Is get there.”
“Partly that,” he agreed, “but even more, I think, I am trying to give these people a voice and an instrument to work out a foreign policy that will really lead this country and the world toward genuine peace—”
“The clichés of peace!” the President interrupted.
“As worn as the clichés of violence,” Ted responded quickly.
They gave one another stare for stare until the President finally spoke in a tired, musing tone.
“I wish I could believe you were sincere, Ted. I wish I could believe you know what you’re doing, when you run with that pack. I wish I could honestly think your method would bring us through. I might get out of your way if that were the case. But I cannot for the life of me believe you to be anything but overly ambitious, taking desperate chances with the very fabric of the nation, flirting and perhaps even conniving with forces whose capacities for destruction you just don’t understand. I think you’re the product of your upbringing. I think you think that just because your name’s Jason, you can ride any whirlwind, control any holocaust, put any genie back in the bottle. And my friend,” he concluded quietly, “I just don’t think you can.”
“I thank you for worrying about me,” Governor Jason said dryly.
“Oh, not you,” the President said. “I don’t give a damn about you. But quite a lot of my fellow-Americans are involved in what you do—possibly the fate of the country itself is involved. And that makes it a worrisome matter, for me. You have the power to lead or mislead. Right now, you’re misleading, in my estimation, because you’re misled. By ambition and greed for office and people who are taking advantage of those two weaknesses to trap you into being a stalking-horse for their own purposes.”
For a moment Ted did not reply. When he did, it was in a tone of cold and level anger.
“You really think I am nothing more than a stalking-horse for someone else. You really think so.”
“That is the most charitable thing I can conclude,” the President said calmly. “I wouldn’t want to think you were knowingly and deliberately conspiring to bring down your own country.”
Again the Governor was silent. At last he shrugged and stood up with a smile that was both tolerant and pitying.
“I must concede your sincerity in these strange remarks,” he said, “but I really see no reason to prolong the interview. You obviously really believe that I am a fool, an idiot, a dupe and possibly even a traitor. So I think there’s no point in any further communication, except officially. Isn’t that correct?”
The President remained seated, staring up at him with an intently appraising air, head cocked to one side, eyes half-closed, shrewd and analytical.
“The only thing I think you are,” he said finally, “is an extremely ambitious man who has been gifted by birth with freedom from all restraints, financial, moral or in personal character, upon his ambition. And so I think you’re getting into things that may well destroy you, and certainly if carried to their extremes will come pretty close to destroying the country. At least in my judgment. So I guess I have a duty to oppose you, don’t I?”
“You haven’t been in doubt on that point for six months.”
“No,” the President said slowly. “But I kept hoping you might see of your own accord where you’re headed.”
“I told you,” Governor Jason said with a sudden, quite genuine smile, gesturing toward the desk. The President smiled too, but there was no humor in it.
“I might say, over my dead body,” he remarked softly. “Except that it might be true.”
For a long moment the Governor of California stared at him with a look filled with many things, anger and contempt and pity, and a sort of overriding disbelief that there could be such a man, with such an opinion. Then he bowed quickly, said, “You will forgive me, I must go,” turned swiftly and left the room.
He could not have analyzed, had anyone asked him, the conflicting currents of anger, emotion, revulsion, determination, which had brought him in Patsy’s gleaming black Rolls-Royce to this apparently deserted house at this post-midnight hour. He had given the order to the chauffeur almost without thinking; almost automatically, it seemed, he had acted on the impulse to see the man he had last seen in the heat of anger at the convention. He was not entirely sure why he wanted to see him now, not even sure where the impulse had come from—some urgency developing out of the earlier events of the evening, some headlong rush of decision coming from his tumbling thoughts, something that seemed logical after his bitter, frustrating talk with the President. He had not even known the correct address: the Secret Service man the President had kindly assigned to him yesterday had called Patsy to find out.
Now here they were, and the house was silent and dark in the steaming hot night. For a second only he debated whether to pass on and try to arrange something tomorrow. Then he strode forward up the winding walk, jabbed his finger forcefully and repeatedly on the bell. Somewhere deep in the house he could hear it ringing, apparently unanswered. He was about to turn away when he heard the scrape of shrubbery alongside the house.
“I’ve been out back at the pool,” Bob Leffingwell said in a politely puzzled voice. “Did someone wish to see me?”
“I did,” he said, and for a moment there was silence from the shadowy figure standing at the corner of the house.
“I’m sorry I didn’t turn on the light,” Bob said in a voice that indicated nothing. “Watch your step as you come around the walk, here. One or two of the slabs are a little uneven.…Sit down, Ted,” he said when they had traversed the house, the sloping lawn, and so come to the dim expanse of the pool, its placid surface reflecting a little of the light of the city across the Potomac. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Ice water, thank you,” he said, taking one of the chaise longues beside the water. His host made some sound he could not quite analyze, partly amused, partly, perhaps, quizzical.
“I, too.”
When they were both seated, he spoke abruptly and without preliminary.
“What would you think, Bob, if you had just been accused by the President of the United States of conspiring against the country, threatening it with destruction, and perhaps even plotting to kill him?”
For a moment his host said nothing at all, nor could the Governor see in the darkness what expression might be on his face. Actually there was none, for Bob was taking pains to keep both face and voice impersonal.
“I think I might wonder,” he said finally, “what could prompt so very grave an accusation from one in such position, and whether I had done anything to warrant it. If I concluded I had, I think I would begin to look around for a way to change what I was doing.”
It was Ted’s turn to remain silent. When he spoke it was in a half-amused, half-quizzical tone of his own.
“Well, that’s straightforward enough.”
“I try to be.”
“Yes,” Ted agreed; and said, with a pleasant edge, “these days.…So is he correct, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t presume to pass judgment on his judgment,” Bob said, his voice impervious.
The Governor laughed without much humor.
“I wouldn’t call that straightforward.”
“I didn’t know you had the capacity to judge—” Bob Leffingwell began quickly, broke it off and started over. “I’m sorry. Yes, in my estimation, he is correct, at least about endangering the country. The conspiring
and plotting may have been exaggeration on his part or exaggeration on yours.…Though I can see,” he added quietly after a moment, “that a fair fear could be raised if things continue as they’re going.”
“You really think so,” Ted said in a thoughtful tone. “You really do think so.”
“What you must realize,” Bob Leffingwell said with a sudden sharpness, “is that perfectly sensible and intelligent people are very much concerned about the course you’re apparently taking. Even though,” he added slowly, “other perfectly sensible and intelligent people, I know, approve.”
“Exactly,” Governor Jason said. “That being so, I have some warrant, I think, for doing what I believe to be right.”
“Right for what?” his host inquired, his tone again sharp. “You? The country?”
“Many people,” Ted Jason said with the quiet objectivity that in Washington accompanies only the greatest of egotism, “seem to consider the two identical.”
“And that justifies anything you want to do,” Bob Leffingwell said. “Well …” In the dim light the Governor could see his profile as he stared at the city. It indicated nothing. “Well, I suppose that sense of identification is necessary if one is to seek the Presidency. I wouldn’t know, thank God.…In any event,” he added with a sudden firmness, “a fair fear still lies. You haven’t reduced it much this evening.”
“What have I done this evening?” Governor Jason demanded. “Made a speech to the National Committee. Stated my position candidly to the country. Made clear to the President and Orrin that they have a fight on their hands—”
“Met secretly with a pathological black racist, a paranoiac demagogue of a U.S. Senator and an unbalanced right-wing weirdo,” Bob Leffingwell snapped. “Isn’t that enough to make decent people worry?”