by Allen Drury
“3. A Potomac cruise to a White House reception at Mt. Vernon, given two days ago by the President and the full Cabinet—this one very sedate with no fireworks, thank you very much!
“4. A reception given by the dean of the diplomatic corps. His Excellency Willem van der Merwe, at the South African Embassy, attended by fifty-one nations that are presently speaking to South Africa.
“5. A reception given at the Embassy of Ethiopia by His Excellency Ras Tafari Tudwa, attended by sixty-seven nations that presently are not speaking to South Africa.
“6. A joint dinner given by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Committee for a More Effective Congress, and the Over-All Study Group on Improving Just About Everything in Washington.
“7. Innumerable receptions, cocktail parties, dinners, brunches, teas, lunches, given by the various Congressional delegations for their respective National Committeemen and women.
“This capital, which does half its business at social functions and lives in a perpetual daze—and haze—of sociopolitical entertaining, has never seen the like.
“If Committee members don’t start their rendezvous with destiny next week with the biggest hangover in history, it won’t be Washington’s fault. Everybody is doing his, or her, best!”
But there was, of course, a darker side; and as she sat at her cluttered desk in the Monday-morning-noisy newsroom, she reflected thoughtfully on how little the country was told, sometimes, about what actually went on in the beautiful city where its fate was decided. She was not the only reporter in Washington who had been tipped to various strange events in the past several days: ominous, anonymous telephone calls to certain Committee members urging their support for Ted Jason, more open attempts to influence them through direct interventions by powerful political and financial leaders in their states, even, in three or four cases, veiled but unmistakable threats of physical reprisal if they did not support the Governor’s cause.
She was not the only reporter, but she was still the only one who was almost certain she knew where and when this new spurt of underground activity had begun. Or at least, she thought with a contempt that twisted her mouth suddenly into an ugly line that startled a passing copy boy, the only one who was prepared to print what she knew.
Prepared but uncertain, at the moment, whether she was going to be able to. She had not yet discussed it with her editors, but she was not entirely sure, for all her bravado to Patsy last week, that the Star really would back her up and print the story. Especially since the story was getting rather more sensational, as she dug deeper, than she had at first dared imagine.
Her inquiries to the hotel, as she had expected, had met with a bland, blank incomprehension. No, no one at all had been in Room 1223 that night. No, no one on the staff had seen the Governor anywhere except at the reception downstairs. No, nobody had any knowledge—certainly no record—of the presence on the premises of Senator Van Ackerman, Mr. Shelby, Mr. Kleinfert, other than at the reception, of course. Actually, that room had been reserved for a Mr. and Mrs. Hjalmar B. Poulsen from St. Paul, Minnesota, but they had not appeared and so the management regretfully was going to have to bill American Express for it; perhaps if madam would care to check with Amer—“I just might!” she had snapped before banging down the receiver.
But it had not been necessary to collect one more lie: by one of those happenstances that occur quite often in the capital, her maid happened to have a sister who happened to have a son who happened to work as a waiter at the hotel. He just happened to have been the one to take drinks a couple of times to Room 1223, the first time while the Governor was there, the second after he left. From him Helen-Anne was able to find out a good deal of what she wanted to know. She had learned from long experience covering Congressional hearings, political crises and social scandals, that there was almost always one little link somewhere that somebody forgot to take care of. If you could just find it, most things fell into place, even though when she called the hotel again, the response was equally bland. No, no one had seen that gentleman either, except at the reception, of course.
Yet she was convinced that now she had a good deal of the story and could piece together intuitively, in the fashion of most experienced Washington correspondents, much of the rest of it. She was planning at this moment to do two things. One would probably not produce much response, but would be interesting as a further insight into a character she was coming to dislike and fear as she had few others in a long reportorial life. The other could be downright dangerous. The gaps in what she knew were such that she had to tackle the dangerous one before she would be fully briefed for the other. She made a quick telephone call, elicited prompt if surprised assent from the party on the other end of the line. Then she drew a deep breath, pushed her wayward hair back under the rim of a rather rakish green hat she had purchased just yesterday at Woody’s, tossed a terse, “I’ll be on the Hill,” over her shoulder to the city desk, and started forth.
Already a shimmering opacity lay over the sprawling city. It was going to be another exhauster of a day. How the government had functioned without air conditioning, he would never know. How it functioned with it, he would never know. Somehow, he reflected with a sardonic little smile, it managed.
Standing on the narrow balcony rimming the top of the New State Building, staring, with both hands on the railing, across the jumble of trees, parks, government buildings, rushing traffic, placid river, he could see the Hill where he had worked so long, the White House, almost hidden, where he hoped to work. He was supposed to go there in a short while to tell its new occupant the news from Gorotoland, and he hoped that this, when officially released, would brighten things a little for the country. But of course it would not for those who opposed the Administration, who wanted nothing less than American surrender, and whose joy, in this odd age, was not reserved for America’s victories but for America’s defeats.
The dead weight of their doggedly sterile hostility weighed him down this morning; indeed it weighed him down all the time. The security detail was still on duty at the house in Spring Valley, and he supposed it would be until the National Committee had rendered its decision, at which time, if the decision was in his favor, the Secret Service would take over. If it was not in his favor, he supposed he would still have to have guards for a while, so venomous and unrelenting were his critics.
From Walter Dobius’ most recent column to the episode at the house at three o’clock this morning, he had certainly received full proof of this since Patsy’s reception. Walter had been at his smoothest, providing what to his friends, supporters, idolaters and true believers must have been just one more of his brilliantly sound and balanced discussions of national realities:
“Washington,” he wrote, “is awaiting with a somber unease the meeting of the National Committee. A mood of deep sobriety lies upon this restive and worried capital.
“It wants a solution for its crisis, but it doesn’t want a catastrophe.
“It wants a leader, but it doesn’t want a misleader.
“It wants a President, but it doesn’t want Orrin Knox.
“Thus the task which confronts everyone here is how to keep things on an even keel while at the same time aiding the Committee to reach the decision that will be best for the nation and the world. Perhaps not since the Constitutional Convention of 1789 has a handful of Americans borne a greater responsibility than the fifty-three men and fifty-three women of the National Committee bear today. Washington is doing what it can to assist them in reaching a sane and sensible decision.
“What this troubled city is trying to do is show the Committee that there is a way out of uncertainty that will not create more uncertainty; that there is a policy of accommodation which is not a policy of appeasement; that there is a policy of firmness which is not a policy of fatuity; that there is an answer to violence which will remove the causes of violence.”
And from there, in a straight line, the column went on to one more endorsement
of the Governor of California, who would provide all these balanced and alliterative alternatives and in the process remove from government the ominous and destructive influence of the late Harley M. Hudson, his successor, and above all, the dreadful and dismaying Secretary of State.
In any ordinary context, Orrin would have dismissed Walter as he had dismissed him so many times before, as the bellwether of a certain element and a personal enemy who had been after Orrin as a matter of spite ever since the Secretary rejected his advice in the first Gorotoland crisis six months ago. In the context of present events, he possessed more significance.
All through the body of the column there had run the smooth rationalization of violence—and the smooth implication that violence must be appeased by a drastic change in Administration policy, or it would grow worse—which Orrin had come to recognize as the hallmark of the new Jason campaign. How directly his opponent was involved in this, he did not know; but from what he had learned of Ted during their contest in the convention, he had arrived at a concept of a man rather far from the steady, unshakable, responsible leader whom Walter and his friends were so busy re-establishing for the public on the eve of the National Committee meeting.
This newly restored hero of certain columns, networks, newspapers and magazines, this suddenly revived colossus, who stood astride the Committee’s path like some leader gifted to the nation by Heaven, was not the man Orrin knew. Nor, he suspected, was it the man Walter knew. Walter was too shrewd a Washington hand to be fooled for long by the caliber of the men he wrote about; only his obsessive fear of the consequences of a Knox victory could be dictating his columns now. That, and perhaps things more sinister, which the Secretary could suspect though he did not know them for sure.
Like Helen-Anne and many others in the deceptively placid capital that lay sprawled before him in August mid-morning, he too had heard rumors of pressures on the Committee, and of course he was a practical politician: his people were just as busy lobbying the Committee as Ted’s were, he wanted them to, and he had told them to go to it. Every possible source of appeal was being exerted to influence the Committee members who were either, to believe Helen-Anne, headed for “the greatest hangover in history,” or, to believe her ex-husband, awaiting with “a mood of deep sobriety” their day of destiny.
But he did not think—in fact, he was certain—that the nature of the pressures was the same from his supporters as it was from some in the Jason camp.
Down below the customary surface of political battle—the calls from state and local leaders, the pressure from financial and professional figures, the appeals to self-interest, the promises of future preferment, the desire to be with the winner that were all part of the fair game of politics—something deeper and more frightening seemed to be underpinning the Jason campaign now as it had in the convention. Ted had not shaken himself free from the vicious and the violent, for all his statements and speeches of the past few days. The statements and speeches had never really closed the door: violence still grinned like a death’s-head behind the mask of reason.
And it had grinned like a death’s-head at his own house, where Beth had brought him awake just before three a.m. with a hand on his shoulder and a whispered, “Don’t move, but I think there’s someone at the window.”
“How could there be?” he had demanded, instantly awake, in an answering whisper. “The guards are all around the house.”
“Just listen.”
And presently he had heard it, a very gentle, very furtive scrape, scrape, scrape as though someone were doing—what?
Trying to attach a bomb to the sill, it had turned out two minutes later, after he had reached out very slowly and carefully to touch the buzzer over the bed that connected with the impromptu command post in the garage. Instantly the floodlights had illumined the house, there had been a concerted rush by the four men on duty. A sullen Negro had been captured and held for questioning. (A good thing the episode was unknown to the press, he thought now with a dry smile: it would have been absolutely horrid for them to have to contemplate the fact of the culprit’s race. He would have appeared in their pages as “a man,” and his membership in DEFY and his close personal relationship with LeGage Shelby, which had been developed this morning in the investigation, would have required an evasive delicacy of treatment that all too many of them had learned how to achieve in these recent dishonest decades.)
So there it was, confronting him in Spring Valley, confronting him in the final great political contest of his life, confronting him in the National Committee. Neither he nor Ted had been idle in these past three days: much more than the giddy garland of social fripperies reported by Helen-Anne had occupied the attention of the “fateful 106.” Both he and his opponent had managed to hold highly secret conferences with nearly all of them; and while he had not emerged with any very clear picture of how the majority intended to vote, it was very clear that they were deeply disturbed, and in many cases, downright scared, by the menace that seemed to be in the air around them.
This was what Washington had become, in the current climate: a city of fear in a nation of violence. It was not a prospect that reasonable men could contemplate without the gravest misgivings.
Nonetheless, he must go forward along the road his destiny seemed to have laid out, and he had to do it with all the vigor and courage at his command—with what Seab Cooley in the Senate had long ago referred to as “Orrin’s little extra—he drives and drives and drives and just when you think you have him beaten, he gives it jest a leettle extra—jest a leettle extra.” He would need the leettle extra now, for the options open to his opponents were many, and he would have to be alert for all of them.
The least they could do would be to provoke a nasty riot at the opening of the Committee tomorrow; the most, something such as had occurred in Spring Valley, carried to its final extreme. He knew that he, Ted, the President and their immediate families were all under guard; but as history had proved, guards were only as good as they happened to be at the moment they were needed. There might well be attempts to assassinate him, there might be attempts to get at him again through his family: what had happened to Crystal was warning enough, had any of the Knoxes been cowards. But they were not, any more than were Jasons. The difference was that the Knoxes did not create situations in which people could be killed.
Yet here he paused, turned back by the innate sense of justice that had made him such an effective leader in the Senate. He was quite sure that Ted would not consciously desire his death, or even remotely give anyone cause to think he would like to have it brought about. He would simply let things slide into a situation in which such an event could occur, and even as he did so, would be maintaining to himself that he was innocent of desire, guiltless of intention.
This paralysis of foresight and moral will, taken with a policy the Secretary could only regard as one of dangerous and possibly fatal appeasement of those who wished to destroy the country, made Ted in Orrin’s estimation a dangerous man; about as dangerous, he thought with a wry smile, as Ted probably considered him. Ted was also one whose quick recovery from his low point at the convention had brought back to his side all the major elements of the communications world which had assisted him so powerfully before. Again Orrin faced the hostile establishment he had faced in San Francisco. But perhaps foolishly, as he stood above the city, he was not discouraged or downhearted. In fact he was quite lighthearted, exhilarated by the prospect of the battle ahead, encouraged and lifted up by a number of signs of support, both from within the Committee and from less expected quarters. Ceil, for one. She had sent her cautious message via Lucille Hudson, but its import was clear enough: she too was trying to save the country from Ted, and Ted, though he would never acknowledge it, from himself.
At least, Orrin reflected as he cast one more glance at the distant Capitol before going in—a glance that touched his face, though he was unaware of it, with an instant’s wistful regret for days in the Senate when life, while hi
ghly contentious, had somehow seemed so much simpler—at least the pattern of the next few days was reasonably well set.
The Committee would meet at ten a.m. tomorrow. On the Hill and in the world, events would be moving in favor of the Administration. Inevitably he would profit from this.
Or so he thought, as he stood for one last lingering moment staring out at the lovely city where ambition and apprehension lived, before going in.
“Now, Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, sir,” Jawbone Swarthman said in his usual hurried way after a quick glance around the Oval Room, “now, Mr. President, sir, looks to me like you-all are jes’ gangin’ up on ol’ Jawbone, it surely does, now.”
“Sit down, Jawbone,” the President said, “Wouldn’t dream of doing a thing like that to you. Isn’t that right, Bob? Cullee?”
“Absolutely correct,” Senator Munson agreed.
“Anyway, what’s to gang up about?” Cullee Hamilton inquired cheerfully. “Far as I know, everything’s going just the way you want it to. Big campaign against the antiviolence bill, that takes care of that. Big antiwar demonstration coming up tomorrow, that takes care of that. Lots of stirring around in the Committee lining up votes for Ted, that takes care of that—”
“Not doing any stirrin’ ’round,” Jawbone declared stoutly. “Not at all, now! Anyway,” he added defiantly, “can’t nobody say I’m the only one doin’ it, now, can they, Mr. President, sir!”
“I expect we’ve all been doing our share,” the President said calmly. “Can’t blame anybody for trying. Must confess, though, I don’t get a very clear picture at the moment, do you? Looks to me like you haven’t made much of a dent, can’t say as I have either. Maybe we’re losing our touch.”