by Allen Drury
“There are lots of reservations about putting Ted on the ticket, in my mind, and I suppose in the minds of those who like Ted there are lots of reservations about Orrin. But at least having them together on the ticket should bring the party, and above all the country, together again in some reasonable degree of unity. That’s the hope, and I think maybe it’s a good one. We’re lucky—we can still close ranks the way we always have, now that the decision’s been made. I think we must, because I think this may very well be the last chance. I know people have felt that way all through our history, but sooner or later there had to come a point when it really could be the last chance. I think this may be it.
“There’s a mood here tonight—a good mood, in spite of you-know-who. And a good mood in the country, too. I wish my two girls could be here with me at the ceremony tomorrow, but I know you’ll be watching. I’ll wave for the cameras and maybe you’ll see me—we’re only expecting 500,000 or so at the Monument Grounds. Then I’ll be flying out to join you, early next week, and we’ll take that fishing vacation Pidge wants us to take together. I think that little lady is a matchmaker. I hope so.
“Everything is hopeful here tonight. Things look good for America again. It’s a nice feeling, after so much sadness.
“Love to my two sweethearts and good night from
their
Lafe.”
Across three thousand miles of continent, save for the Senate and one or two other places in Washington where men were not reconciled, the lights gradually went out. Over seacoast, mountain, plain and forest, over all their restless inhabitants, darkness deepened into dead of night.
The great Republic slept, in good heart and rising spirit, preparing, after so long a time of hatred, anger and harsh, unhappy things, for the coming of a happier day.
3
So the hour of acceptance came, bright and hot and clear, and from all the corners of the two cities, all the corners of the nation, all the corners of the earth, the great throng gathered on the Monument Grounds around the stark white obelisk to fatherly George. Krishna Khaleel, Vasily Tashikov and his agricultural attaché. Lord and Lady Maudulayne, Raoul and Celestine Barre, and almost all their colleagues of the diplomatic corps, were there. Somewhere in the enormous multitude that laughed and yelled and chattered, shoved and pushed and jostled in amiable contest for position, were LeGage Shelby, Rufus Kleinfert, and most of their fellow-members of NAWAC. (Only Senator Van Ackerman was missing. Whispering now, he was in his fourteenth hour of filibuster against the antiriot bill.) The Chief Justice was there, his wife already upset because she could tell from the way Mr. Justice Davis was bustling about near the platform that he must have some preferred assignment she didn’t know about. The Munsons, Stanley Danta and more than half the Senate had arrived. From the House, Jawbone Swarthman and Miss Bitty-Bug, rubbing elbows not too comfortably with Cullee Hamilton and Sarah Johnson, led a delegation of more than 200. The National Committee had already taken its seats on the platform.
Television crews were everywhere, and through the crowd there were many television sets in place to bring the ceremonies to the farthest reaches. Police with walkie-talkies were also everywhere, moving constantly, efficiently, yet amicably, their presence giving rise to a few catcalls but otherwise no indication of hostility. At regularly spaced intervals groups of four soldiers stood back-to-back facing their countrymen, guns, bayonets and gas canisters ready. Around the flag-decked platform and the dignitaries’ circle at the foot of the Monument, a tight cordon of Marines stood guard. Overhead the ubiquitous helicopters whirred and hovered.
Yet somehow, despite these precautions, there seemed to be something in the air that indicated they would not be needed. Press and police estimated more than 400,000 present on this day that belonged to Orrin Knox and Edward Jason, yet with no visible exceptions they seemed almost to be on picnic, so happy and relaxed did they look and sound. Even NAWAC’s banners were good-natured, and this seemed to put the final touches on it:
ORRIN AND TED: THE UNBEATABLES … HEY, HEY, GREAT DAY! BAD TIMES, GO AWAY! … TED AND ORRIN HAVE GOT US ROARIN’ … WE’LL HAVE PEACE TOMORROW AND NO MORE SORROW …
Presently from far-off there came again the sound of sirens, and this time they were hailed with a great roar of greeting and approval. The sleek black limousine from Spring Valley came along Constitution Avenue in the center of its police motorcycle escort, turned into the Monument Grounds and proceeded slowly to the foot of the obelisk. Two minutes later, more sirens, another great roar; the sleek black limousine from Dumbarton Oaks in the center of its police motorcycle escort came along Constitution Avenue, turned into the Monument Grounds, proceeded slowly to the foot of the obelisk.
Out of their cars stepped the nominee for President and the nominee for Vice President, and their wives, and for a moment in the midst of the wave of sound that seemed to blot out the world, they stared at one another with a questioning, uncertain, hesitant yet friendly look. Then Orrin stepped forward and held out his hand, and as the picture flashed on all the sets, a silence fell.
“Ted,” the Secretary said, and his words thundered over the Monument Grounds, the nation, the world, “Beth and I are glad to see you.”
“Orrin,” the Governor replied, “our pleasure.”
Impulsively and with a completely natural friendliness, Ceil stepped forward and kissed Beth and then Orrin. Beth gave her a warm hug and then turned to embrace Ted. The television cameras zoomed in, the still photographers pushed and shouted and scrambled. A shout of happiness and approval went up from all the vast concourse.
Orrin linked his arm informally through Ted’s and led the way toward the platform, through the dignitaries’ circle where friends and colleagues, opponents and supporters, greeted them with an eagerly smiling, unanimous cordiality.
“It seems to be a happy day,” the Secretary said quietly, words no longer overheard as the police held back the press. “I’m glad.”
“So am I,” Ted said. “I think we have a great responsibility.”
“We do,” Orrin agreed. “I’m going to make a conciliatory speech.”
“I too,” the Governor said. “I had thought of sending it over for your approval this morning, but—”
“Oh, no,” Orrin said quickly. He smiled, “I trust you.” The smile faded, he looked for a moment profoundly, almost sadly, serious. “We’ve got to trust each other, from now on.”
“Yes,” Ted said gravely. “We must. I think we can.”
Orrin gave him a shrewd sidelong glance as they reached the steps of the platform.
“I have no doubts,” he said quietly.
“They’re going to need our help,” Beth said to Ceil as they, too, reached the steps and started up after their husbands.
Ceil smiled, a sunny, happy smile.
“I think,” she said with a little laugh, “that you and I can manage.”
The wild, ecstatic roar broke out again as they appeared together on the platform, standing side by side, arms raised in greeting, framed by the flags against the backdrop of the gleaming white needle soaring against the hot, bright sky.
“Mr. Secretary and Mrs. Knox! Governor and Mrs. Jason! Look this way, please! Can you look over here, please? Mr. Secretary—Governor—Mrs. Jason—Mrs. Knox—this way, please! Here, please! Can you smile and wave again, please?”
Finally Orrin called,
“Haven’t you got enough?”
And from somewhere in the jostling tumult below them, of heads, hands, flailing arms, contorted bodies and cameras held high, there came a plea of such anguished supplication that they all laughed.
“Please, just one more, Mr. President! All together again, please!”
“The things we do for our country,” Orrin said with a mock despair as they all linked arms and stepped forward once more.
“Yes,” Ceil said happily. “It sometimes seems as though—”
But what it sometimes seemed to Ceil at that moment would never be
known, for they were interrupted.
No one in the crowd heard anything, no one saw anything. For several moments the full import of the sudden confusion on the platform did not penetrate.
It was so bright and hot and sunny.
It was such a happy day.
They could not quite comprehend, in that bright, hot, sunny, awful instant, the dreadful thing that had occurred so swiftly and so silently before their eyes.
It was not clear then, nor perhaps would it ever be, exactly what those who planned it had intended. But whatever they had intended, by some no doubt inadvertent and unintentional miscalculation, they had accomplished even more.
A husband and wife—but they were not the same husband and wife—stared at one another for a terrible moment suspended in time and history. Then she began to scream and he began to utter a strange animal howl of agony and regret.
Their puny ululations were soon lost in the great rush of sound that engulfed the platform slippery with blood, the Monument Grounds sweltering under the steaming sky, the two cities, the nation, the horrified, watching, avid world.
July 1967-April 1968
***
Appendix
Education for Politics
Speech given by Allen Drury
I thought that I would talk to you today—briefly, as President McKean suggested, and briefly as befits the spirit which now animates Washington speech-makers, and which I consider a very good thing—about “Education for Politics.”
I use the word politics in the classic sense of the science of governing; and I say education for politics rather than education and politics because I think that in the age in which we live, and in the face of the perils we confront, it would be best for us if the two did not run parallel, but convergent.
As one of those who has believed for a long time that it will indeed be decided in these very few net years whether this nation and the whole free world can continue to live, it seems to me imperative that we train and educate men and women capable of understanding and administering the great mechanisms of our liberty, and by this I mean not the nation level, but down through every level, from national to state to local.
Freedom is Not Easy
We need people who realize what it means to have free government, and who know how to go about seeing that it is strengthened and maintained in every area of our national life. We need a general tightening-up all along the line to get rid of the flabbiness which has crept into our attitude toward our own country in recent years. We have drifted too long on the theory that freedom is easy. It is time we realized that it is not, and time to begin consciously to prepare the citizens coming to maturity who will have charge of it in the fearful years immediately ahead.
We now have a president who sees this, and that in itself is a great step forward in setting the psychological climate without which the job cannot be done. But it is not enough—it is never enough—to slough off our own responsibilities upon a President, whoever it may be. The President has plenty to worry about without doing the jobs the citizenry should be doing for itself. And it is in our schools, and on just such campuses as this, everywhere throughout the land and at all grades, that the task must be accomplished.
Initially, it seems to me, there must be a drastic and immediate reappraisal of the teaching of American history, from the earliest grades on up. There is a great story here in this Republic, yet millions of citizens have come to voting age in the past couple of decades with only the haziest notion of what it is.
Along with the educative fad that it would be best not to teach anyone English, so that everyone could be sure to talk and write at the same level of scholasticized illiteracy, it has also been the fad to play down one of the greatest sagas of struggle and triumph that any people has ever known in all of recorded time.
Courage Made America Great
Somehow—and, I suspect, good teachers with some sense of dedication to their country can do it without too much extra trouble and strain—Americans must be brought back to a realization of the glories of their own heritage.
They must be reminded, and made to feel, what it meant to cross the ocean in a tiny boat and land in an unknown and hostile wilderness to start a colony.
They must be reminded, and made to take up arms against what was then the overwhelming world might of the British Empire—and win.
They must be reminded, and made to feel, what it meant to sit down in Philadelphia in a steaming summer long ago and patiently, step by step and argument by argument, hammer out a Constitution and a government that works.
They must be reminded of all the struggles that went on in the Congress as the nation spread westward, the frontier opened, and civil war threatened and finally came.
They must be told again of the awesome bravery of the pioneers, which was not a nice comfortable TV show that could be watched in the living room, but a matter of fortitude beyond imagination, courage beyond belief in which people died in terrible deserts and ate one another at Donner Pass.
They must understand anew the things earlier Americans did, and why they did them, in all the long pageant of nearly two hundred years in which the Lord has seen fit to raise us up, from a handful of colonizers, scattered along a thin thread of seaboard, to what every day becomes more truly what Mr. Lincoln called it the last best hope of earth.
They must be given again a sense of cohesion with their past, of unity with the nation and with one another. They must find again a sense of their own history, for only out of it can come the inner conviction and courage to carry them on into a future, not of the death and extinction that the Communists intend for us, but of justice and strength and compassion in which we can both save ourselves and lead a world in shadows back toward the light.
They Dared to be Different
In some such fashion, it seems to me, the schools and colleges of America can do their part; plus, also, a greater stress on political science and civics courses, the basic understanding of government; and a much greater emphasis upon what in today’s academic and social climate, may seem to be the rankest heresy, namely the individual’s obligation to the individual.
I spoke in October to the Whig-Cliosophic Society at Princeton, and after the session one of the students drove me back down to Philadelphia, where I was spending the night. He was a very nice fellow, I would say about 18, from Illinois; very much disturbed about the college world. “You know,” he said, “I’m really bothered about it. The whole emphasis is on the group—on everybody being equal—on nobody excelling anybody else—on nobody showing initiative—on nobody being outstanding. The whole emphasis is that we should all conform to the same median pattern. It bothers me, and I don’t like it.”
His complaint—and certainly he is not the only one of his generation to voice it—might also be considered, I think, in connection with education for politics.
If the highest aim of American education in this fearfully threatened world is to grind out a bland paste of conformity in which all lumps and scratchy pieces have been ground away in a sort of vast academic Waring blender, then that is one thing.
Second-Rate Leaders Won’t Do
But if the highest obligation of American education is to create leaders self-assured enough to lead and a citizenry intelligent enough to follow them constructively, then that is quite another.
Somehow, it means to me, we have got to get away from this frightening insistence that everybody be exactly the same as everybody else. This was not the spirit that landed on alien shores or went across the plains or on both sides, fought a civil war; or that helped us create the boundaries we have.
The pressures for conformity which surround the young in school and college are bad enough without their being the organized objectives of an entire society. Somehow we have got to break the grip of the drab and lackluster level of sameness which is oozing like wet cement through all levels of our national life. A little while longer, and it will begin to harden; and then no amount of
education for politics, of education for anything else, will be able to break through.
We need leaders. We need them desperately. We need every bright and unusual student we can get, because we are up against the grimmest foes that ever lived and we can’t beat them with the second-rate.
It is going to demand every bit of brilliance in this nation to see us safely through what lies ahead. If we really want to win—and I don’t know about you , but I do—it is going to mean the scrapping, completely and at once, of that other sickly educative fad of recent years, the one that says that everybody must be just alike and nobody must ever raise his head above the herd.
If we stick to that much longer, we are going to have a nation of mediocrities governed by mediocrities; and that not the way to survive in this jungle century.
Building an Institute of Government
Education for politics; in conclusion, one specific proposal of my own, springing from a purely personal attempt to find some constructive alternative to the empty and endless proposals to clutter up the nation’s capital with lifeless stone excrescences in the names of great men who are gone.
Instead of a statue to President X or a stone monolith to President Z—why should we not have in Washington a National Institute of Government to do honor to them all—a living memorial in which all our great men could be honored in a way that would mean the most, both to them and to posterity—namely the education of men and women in the practical science of governing free men?
It could be done, it seems to me without much difficulty, and it could pay in living dividends of leadership ten thousand times over.
Let it be created by Congressional charter as an educational institution supported partly by government contributions, principally by private charitable donations.