The General's President

by John Dalmas

  The president had already decided Coulter would have to go, but he'd looked into her performance anyway. And been impressed. Coulter's complaints had no substance. They'd grown out of the same strange mental program that controlled most of what he'd done.

  Now he turned the sound down and looked at Valenzuela. "What do you think of her?" he asked.

  "She is both wise and skilled. It was entirely her speech, you know; I merely read it and concurred. She picked a theme, civilized behavior, and left out things that might have offended the black South African, like the Afrikaner as a source of jobs and technology. She scarcely mentioned him as a fighter, cornered and dangerous."

  He shook his head. "There's no doubt at all that the General Assembly will give the necessary two-thirds majority, and the Security Council is prepared to act regardless. Now if young van Louw can hold his position against the die-hards... But I'm certain he will. Their families are with them there, and it will even allow them their blessed apartheid within their own small land. Though life without a subject race to exploit may require considerable adjustment.

  "But still the Afrikaner probably will prosper."

  The president nodded. "It'll be the white South African who lives on a reservation, not the black, but in this case the land will be truly his. And you're right; he has the technology, the skills, the discipline; I expect he will prosper. Maybe after a bit he'll even be a good neighbor. Or am I being sentimental?"

  Absently he sipped tepid coffee. "What would you think of the lady as vice president?"

  "Marianne? What that really means is, what kind of president would she be, if it came to that." He looked at the question, then at Haugen. "I believe she would be quite effective. I take it General Cromwell still wants out and you're considering her."

  "No, I'm considering someone else. But the someone else might want to consider her." He put down his cup. "I'm not going to stay on past this year. I'm not indispensable, and I'd like to take Lois out of here."

  His eyes captured Valenzuela's, and at that moment, Valenzuela knew what was coming.

  "How'd you like to be vice president, Val? For a little while. And after that, president. The Jones Act made Puerto Ricans eligible way back in 1917; Cavanaugh assures me there's no question about your constitutional eligibility.

  "It's a kind of spooky feeling, I know, to become president this way. Or it was for me. But why did it feel that way? Because culturally, something feels missing: I didn't run for office! Any office! I didn't go through the standard procedure. Background? Hell, Hoover was an engineer, Grant and Eisenhower career military men ... Reagan was an actor and Wheeler an ex-professional football player, for chrissake! You have as good a background, your credentials are as good, as almost any president this side of George Washington."

  The president grinned at his dark secretary then. "Or maybe you're rarin' to have a go at it. Maybe I'm wasting my sales pitch. Whatever. I've watched you enough to feel sure you can handle the job, handle it well, and I'm sure that Congress will approve you."

  "Hmh!" Valenzuela smiled slightly. "You'd be a hard act to follow, Mr. President. But yes, I would accept the vice presidency. There may be times I'll regret saying it, but I'm willing." He laughed then. "You realize of course that you're talking about a black Hispanic Catholic president and a female Jewish vice president."

  "Why not?" Haugen laughed too. "What the hell, we're up to it now. It's not that much wilder than a president who didn't speak English till after he started school."

  "You know," he added grinning, "Abe Lincoln would be proud of us."

  He reached for the phone. "I told Jumper I'd let him know what you said. He's probably got his resignation typed up and ready. Then I'll call Milstead and he'll get your nomination drafted. We'll get this underway right now."

  ***

  At Lois's suggestion, Arne had invited Flynn to supper. Flynn had spent time with her every day in the hospital. She'd gotten him to talk about his life: his childhood, so different from Arne's, his growing interest in becoming a priest, a teaching priest ... even two of the spiritual crises in his life. She thought of him now as a close personal friend.

  She wasn't able to eat much yet—soup prepared in the White House kitchen under the direction of her nurse, a gentle salad, custard. Therapy had been hard on her body's systems, though much harder on the lymphomas that threatened them with extinction. But for the men in her life she'd ordered stroganoff sent up from the kitchen, "in honor of our newfound affinity with things Russian," she told them.

  It felt so good to be out of the hospital, done at least for a time with the therapy. And the White House staff were always good to her; there was real affection here. Now, she thought, it would be pleasant to go for a drive along Lake Superior, in passing to look out through cliffy, fir and birch-framed vistas across steel-blue water... But this winter even Gitchee Gumee's storm-tossed winter seas would be bound, restrained, roofed over now with ice, and the roadside picnic tables buried under snow.

  She remembered north shore drives in winter. Except in the very hardest of them, Superior's broad expanse stayed open year round, even when harbors and bays were covered by thirty inches of ice. If you drove very far along the north shore, you usually could see open water, blue in the sun or gray beneath cloud, with a shelf of ice a mile or two wide along the shore.

  And at some place or places where the road passed near the bouldery beach, she and Arne would stop, get out. The shelf ice provided much easier travel than the rugged, stream-cut land and the often brushy forest, where the snow lay deep and soft. With its snow firm and wind-packed, the ice was a travelway, tracked by moose and deer and wolves, and at last by their own skis and ski poles.

  It seemed to Lois Haugen that they would never do that again, but there was no sense of loss in the thought. They'd lived and nurtured a good and rare life together, she and Arne, one that neither of them had imagined before they met, or even when they married.

  Things had their time and place. How had the song gone? It seemed to her it had been rooted in the Bible. "There's a time for all things—a time for life, a time for death, a time for love, a time for hate." Something like that. She wasn't sure which time this was, for life or for death.

  She couldn't visualize a time for hate. Children used the word as synonymous to "don't like," but the word was not the thing. She could remember anger briefly flaring, and transient resentments, largely during childhood and youth. But hate she knew only as a spectator, mostly by reading about it, and wondered if that was unusual or common. Perhaps hatred was more common in books than in the lives she'd seen being lived around her.

  Arne's laughter drew her attention outward, as animatedly he told a story from his youth to Stephen. "And old Inge laughed and said, 'Yesus Christ! Dey vere stinging me so terrible bad, you know, dat ay yumped over two fences and a hay rake.' "

  Flynn laughed too, and Lois, who knew the story, joined them.

  "Sometimes I miss those days," Arne said. "And those characters. And when we leave here, sometimes I'll miss this too." He turned to Lois, smiling. "We'll be out of here before Christmas, Babe, I promise you. And I'll shoot for Thanksgiving." His smile widened. "See! I'm moving the date back this way now. We'll spend next winter in Hawaii if you'd like, the way we used to say we would some day."

  FIFTY

  The presidential convoy was forced to slow as it approached the Washington Hilton. On Seventeenth Street, demonstrators, their signs bobbing up and down or waving, flowed across in front of the Metropolitan Police cars. There was not a large number of the demonstrators—probably no more than two hundred. Nor did they seem hostile as a group, though no doubt a few individuals were, for among the signs they carried were a couple that said BETRAYED! But mostly they bore messages like UKRAINAN FREEDOM! and DO NOT FORGET LITHUANIA!, and even REPARATIONS FOR IRAN!

  Inside the armored limousine, the president nudged Lester Okada with an elbow. "Les," he said, "tape what I tell you."

  Oka
da's hand emerged with a pocket recorder.

  "If it comes up with the press, make a point to them that these people, these demonstrators, have my sympathy. Most of them fled a hated police state, or their parents did, some just a jump ahead of the secret police, and they've wanted to see their homelands free ever since. Their anxieties are understandable. But the United States doesn't rule the world; it doesn't have unlimited powers. And I don't command the Soviet Union. Even Gurenko doesn't have unrestricted command there; he's limited by what the Russian people and the Soviet army are willing to go along with."

  The demonstrators had been kept well away from where the president would get out, but a small crowd of orderly bystanders had been allowed closer, standing behind a rope barricade and a cordon of Metropolitan Police. Closer still were media people—photographers and television crews, the so-called "body watch," there mainly to get pictures if someone attacked the president. Outwardly impassive, Secret Service men stood facing the onlookers. The limousine pulled up within ten feet of the canopied entrance, and Wayne and Gil got out to stand by the open, bulletproof, limousine door, shielding the president as he emerged and walked into the building.

  Once inside, the two bodyguards breathed just a little easier. Now they could see anyone in a position to harm the president. The corridor had been cleared, except for the other Secret Service men posted there, but in a minute the president would be in the convention hall, where seventeen hundred people would be sitting. A morning like this aged a Secret Service man five years.

  ***

  The President's February 13 address on education reform, before a special meeting of the American Association of School Administrators.

  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the opportunity of speaking to you. Because this is a speech on education reform, it makes sense to give it in front of a gathering of school administrators. But most Americans are interested in better education, and perhaps a hundred million of them are listening at their television sets and radios.

  Since I addressed the American Bar Association, groups have probably gotten nervous about having me speak at their meetings. But I'm really not an ogre; I'm not out to get anyone. I'm simply going to discuss what we'll be doing together to improve the literacy and abilities of the United States and its citizens.

  So here I am, and I thank you for meeting with me.

  Most of us, as children and youth, had teachers we remember fondly, who stimulated our interest in this or that subject or in learning in general. Teachers from whom we learned a lot or who helped us learn a lot. We also remember teachers whose ineptitude or hostility made us dislike or disdain them more or less heartily, who wasted our time and theirs. Teachers from whom we developed at least a temporary distaste for the subject they taught, and in too many cases a dislike for school. Some of them, in their incompetence, ridiculed and degraded pupils.

  Mostly though, there were teachers we liked well enough, and from whom we learned quite a bit.

  Some of that latter class of teachers might have been a lot more effective if they'd had a better environment to teach in. Or if their students had been better prepared in the lower grades. Or if they'd been free of arbitrary administrative idiocies of the kind that all too many teachers can tell about at length.

  Of course, often those administrative idiocies grew out of unfortunate laws and court rulings, and problems with strange parents and ineffective teachers. All too often, school administrators have found themselves in a Catch-22 situation.

  And of course, there are problems with children. In any school system that undertakes to teach any and all children, there are certain children who simply don't seem able to learn very much. Putting it plainly, for whatever reasons, some of them seem to be stupid. Others have attention spans near zero. Others, from families that may be poor or may be affluent, are so discouraged by what they see around them and do not understand, that they consider education a waste of time.

  While all too many hate school. Hating school is undoubtedly a major cause of juvenile delinquency and adolescent drug use.

  There was a time when children who didn't learn were failed repeatedly, until at age fourteen or so they were allowed to leave school. And did leave, perhaps with the fifth grade uncompleted. In more recent decades, children like those have been passed forward indiscriminately, often to graduate from high school illiterate or semiliterate, actually unable to do third grade work. Their activity in school was not learning. At best it was suffering in silence, and all too often it was interfering with teachers and other students.

  How brutally boring it would be to spend five or six hours a day in classrooms, understanding little and learning less!

  Another gross failure of our educational system is the semi-education of those many many young people who obviously can learn, and do learn, but who finish school with serious gaps in their education. Who are, for example, nonfunctional mathematically, can't divide or multiply or tell you what a fraction signifies; or never learn to learn effectively; or are ignorant of history or government or science, or the basics of how societies and economies function. And commonly don't realize they are ignorant! Or think it doesn't matter. This is truly disgraceful—the central and perhaps most critical disgrace of our education system, and a danger to our future.

  We've been more or less aware of this in America for decades, yet nothing effective has been done about it. Our teachers colleges have turned out far too many teachers who cannot, or at least do not, teach effectively. And if the institutions that teach the teachers don't know how to teach—well, there you have one reason we're in trouble. Of course they impart some useful teaching knowledge and techniques—any interested parent or grandparent is aware of this—but the teachers colleges have utterly failed to solve the problems, and have contributed to some of them.

  I strongly suspect that many teachers would have been at least as good if they'd never attended classes in education, if they'd simply been trained in the subject matter they teach and allowed to use their own intelligence and judgment in their own way. And I further suspect that some would have been better teachers without courses in education.

  Our school districts have hired many incompetent teachers, perhaps for lack of enough good candidates, and inflicted them on our children and teenagers. And some of these incompetents prove very hard to get rid of, once they've gotten tenure.

  Well, that's enough review of the situation. A couple of months ago I rough-drafted a critique of American education, with some notes on what I thought might be done. Then I called in three prominent educators who've been publicly and responsibly critical of the system, and asked them to critique my write-up....

  ...I'm going to present you with the main points [of this reform]. When I'm done, a detailed package will be handed out. It's being mailed today to school districts, legislatures, and colleges nationwide.

  Some of you may be wondering what the legal basis is for federal law on education. After all, the Constitution, by default, leaves public education, if any, to the states. But the Constitution also guarantees various rights to individuals, and the courts have long since determined that education is necessary to provide some of these in today's world. Also, almost all school districts and states in America receive federal aid to education in one form and another. Beginning next year, to receive federal aid of any kind to education, states will have to abide by these reforms.

  So here is a summary of them. From this date there is only conditional tenure for public school teachers. The condition is competence, based on the progress of their pupils. Teachers will not be allowed to teach a subject that they don't teach effectively.

  Likewise, administrative employees of a school district have only conditional tenure. They have to be competent too. I'm sure that all of you are aware by now of the changes in the federal civil service law requiring competency. Perhaps you live in a state that has followed the federal lead in this.

  So how will we get competent teachers?

&
nbsp; Degree programs at teachers colleges, and teacher certification will be subject to national standards. Our examiners will be testing the subject matter competency of graduates. And we will publicize the overall statistics of each teachers college. Can the would-be math teacher do and explain math? Can the would-be English teacher parse a sentence?

  The stress will be on the ability to produce pupils who know and can use the subject matter of their grade level. So teaching candidates must be thoroughly trained in the subjects they're going to teach. There will be very strict limits on what courses in education and in the psychology of education can be required, either openly or covertly—because curricula heavy on these courses do not produce a high percentage of effective teachers.

  Without the ballast of required courses in education, the required curriculum for a school teacher should take a full-time student no more than three years.

  In lieu of most required courses in education, and regardless of any elective courses in education they may have taken, all new candidates for a teaching certificate—not a diploma but a certificate authorizing them to teach—must serve a year as a full-time, minimally paid teaching intern, working with several teachers in two or more schools for experience. When the internship has been completed, the candidate will be advanced to associate teacher. Interns and associates will meet in seminars with invited master teachers, to discuss the techniques and problems of teaching. This system should be a major improvement over required courses in education and educational psychology.

  And this brings us to a very important point: Beginning with the next academic year, teaching candidates must score well on tests of their subject matter competency. Those who pass will be certified as intern-eligible. There will be no college requirements whatever for acceptance as an intern. If an applicant who has never been to college passes the tests, that applicant must be entered on the roster of intern-eligibles, and ranked according to score.