by Allen Drury
Two hours later that morning the general director of the Post, trying to be casual but betraying his uneasiness to the searching eye of the Picturephone, called the gentle old man who was executive chairman of The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was.
“Frederic,” he said without preliminary, “have you received any threats from NAWAC?”
“Not yet,” the executive chairman said with a smile. “Why?”
“Well, we have,” the general director of the Post said, not smiling, “and it wasn’t a make-believe one. I thought our editorial this morning was perfectly reasonable—”
“Perfectly,” the executive chairman agreed. “I’ve just been reading it.”
“—but apparently even that was too much for NAWAC. Somebody tossed a dud grenade into the foyer this morning, and I’ve just received a blank-screen call that next time we criticize them it will be the real thing.”
“So will you stop criticizing them?”
“We will not,” the executive director said stoutly. “But I just wanted to alert you that we’ve got something ugly on our hands.”
“Oh, I know that,” the executive chairman of the G.P. said gently. “I tried to convince my boys here of that during the convention and the Committee, but they never quite believed me, I think. They don’t like violence but in general they like the objectives of the violent. It makes it rather difficult for us to take a stand. As you noticed, we were quite tender with NAWAC this morning—far more so than you, and God knows you weren’t exactly savage. Maybe this has saved us. No hand grenades here, so far. But—” his tone became more firm, his face stopped smiling—“the time is rapidly coming, I fear, when we must take a stand, and a very positive one, too.”
“Yes,” the general director of the Post agreed unhappily. “I wish Ted Jason—”
“Talk to him,” the executive chairman suggested. “I wish so, too. He was, and he remains, an enigma to me. But I think we must first be honest with ourselves: we must not evade the fact that it is we who created the enigma and wanted desperately to place it where it is. Once we accept our share of the responsibility, then perhaps we can begin to effectuate the cure.”
“If we can,” the general director of the Post said moodily. “We also have to recognize the danger to a free press, it seems to me. Maybe we were too kind to violence in the beginning. Maybe we should have seen the danger then.”
The executive chairman of The Greatest Publication nodded.
“Yes,” he agreed gently. “That could be.”
Far down the lush valley of his childhood, youth and maturity, he could see the mountains rise against the sky, soft and mysterious in the aftermath of rain. At the rambling stone hacienda of “La Suerte”—named by fierce old Don Jorge, his grandfather, for “La suerte esta enchada,” or The die is cast—Felix Labaiya-Sofra, oligarch of Panama of the new style, knew that it was indeed cast, and, he believed, in his favor. Not only was his Panama People’s Liberation Movement successfully holding the troops sent by that old man in the White House, but the old man had trapped himself, with his silly attempt at blockade, into a position in which he was daring Felix’s powerful friends to break through and come to Felix’s aid. The challenge made it almost imperative that the friends try to do so. Then would come the unthinkable confrontation, and since it was indeed unthinkable, after it would come the irreversible retreat of the United States that had been inevitable for so many years.
And then would come the final humiliation of the hated colossus of the North, no longer so colossal in these days of its waning power in the world, and with it the final triumph of Felix Labaiya, who had known since childhood at Don Jorge’s knee that it was his destiny to drive the insufferable Yanquis into the sea forever.
One month to Election Day in the United States, three to the inauguration of his former brother-in-law as President: Felix knew he had only to hang on and wait. There had been a long period, while he was married to Patsy, when he had been in considerable awe of Ted Jason, the overwhelmingly wealthy, the golden, the invincible, who had risen with such destined inevitability to become, first, Governor of California, and then nominee for President of the United States. Ted was overawing, in those days, and Felix, though he never admitted it to Patsy and only very secretly to himself, had been overawed. Then came Ted’s race for the nomination and he was overawed no longer. Now he regarded Ted with the same contempt with which he regarded them all, the managers of the great Republic as it floundered from one desperate position to another in what its enemies believed to be its steady drift downhill. They all sought power, or came into power, thinking they could reverse the drift; they all succumbed to self-interest, the desire for election or re-election, the constant nagging of their critics in Congress and the media; and the drift went on. Ted would be no different. He had tipped his hand in the compromises he had made, and was still making, with those within America who desired America’s death. It was clear to Felix that this was their intention and he could not understand why Ted could not see it.
In Felix’s judgment, they were backing Ted because they believed he would be unable to stop their plans and would, indeed, either knowingly or unknowingly, assist them. In Felix’s judgment, Ted was a weakling who would do exactly that. And his first step would be to give in and retreat from all those positions around the world where America still held forth the promise that she would defend her own independence and that of others against the ravenous Soviet imperialism that threatened to bring down upon mankind the endless night of the death of the mind.
Not that Felix, of course, really feared this latest and most ruthless of history’s imperialisms, deep-rooted far in Russia’s past. He was convinced that he and his country could survive. He was one of the many around the world who thought they could take communism’s help without incurring communism’s domination. His slogan was It could never happen to me; and because he was brilliant and clever and, both personally and intellectually, supremely self-confident, he thought he could play both ends against the middle and emerge unscathed amid the ruination of the great contending powers. It was a heady belief and one which encouraged certain errors by the unwary, who thought they were shrewd but were actually only arrogant.
So now at “Suerte,” Felix, grandson of Don Jorge, was content with what he saw in mind’s eye as he looked far down his beautiful valley to the distant range. He could see the difficult jungle terrain where the Americans were bogged down; he could envisage, as vividly as though he were present, those long, agonized, frustrated debates in Washington, which he remembered so well from his days as ambassador, about the wisdom or unwisdom of using national power to the fullest; he could imagine, coming on a distant sea, the subs and planes and warships that would run the American blockade. And he could see the victory of all his lifelong plans and hopes, guaranteed, certified and made irrevocable by the coming electoral triumph of Edward M. Jason. Felix Labaiya was quite content.
Not so another figure, who also stood on a terrace and stared far into the distance—not, in his case, at green jungles and misty mountains, but at the flat, dusty plain that surrounded his ramshackle capital of Molobangwe in the heart of Gorotoland. His Royal Highness Terence Wolowo Ajkaje, 137th M’Bulu of Mbuele, was a worried and uncertain man; and this was not an easy thing for “Terrible Terry” to be.
Life, in fact, had played rather roughly with the M’Bulu in the past year and a half. First had come his smashing victory at the UN, when that body had demanded by an overwhelming vote that the reluctant British speed up their withdrawal and grant immediate independence to Gorotoland. Along with it had come the near censure of the United States, which Terry had virtually stage-managed, from his intervention in the school situation in Charleston, South Carolina, to his dramatic appearances prior to the knife-edge vote in the General Assembly. Those were the days when Terry had been the darling of the American and world media, hero of every headline, central figure, with his giant stature and shimmering colorful robes,
of every television show and commentary.
Then, abruptly—disaster. The friends from China and Russia, who had stood so kindly by his side when he was trying to break away from Britain, had suddenly proved themselves fair-weather indeed. Without warning they had turned to his cousin Prince Obifumatta, that scurrilous and rotten offshoot of the royal tree. A brief clash had occurred, a “coalition” government of the classical Communist pattern had been installed; and in the usual scenario for such things, Obi and his friends had promptly tried to seize power. Desperately Terry had called upon the British whom he had so recently ousted. They had responded with assistance, as had the United States. The situation had abruptly escalated when Obi’s forces slew American missionaries and destroyed a Standard Oil installation in the highlands; and with suddenly aroused American aid, Obi had been driven out and Terry had been re-established in his hodgepodge capital, sitting, as he had been portrayed in one of the Daily Telegraph’s most recent cartoons, not too comfortably upon American bayonets.
Not too comfortably, and not too certainly, and not with any guarantee as to how long even this uneasy support would last. It was true that President Abbott appeared to be as firm in his commitment as President Hudson had been; but it was also true that all of that group and all of that thinking in America was about to be swept away by the imminent apotheosis of Ted Jason. Terry had no more doubt than Ted himself that Ted would be elected a month from now, and when he was, American aid for Gorotoland would almost certainly cease. Terry was convinced of this—perhaps more convinced than Ted himself—since all he had to go by was what he read in the papers and heard on the air. It placed before him a bleak and chilling prospect.
It was true that Ted’s campaign speeches so far—to the obvious dismay of such as Walter Dobius and some of Ted’s more famous supporters of newsprint and tube—had been somewhat equivocal on the point. “In Gorotoland,” he had said in Cleveland just two nights ago, “as in Panama, we will immediately hold the most stringent review of past policies, present commitments and future necessities. And I promise you that we will not just talk. We will do something!” Ted had not said what, exactly, but the implication eagerly and widely spread by his supporters was that the United States would get the hell out, and no dilly-dallying. While this made Felix happy it filled Terence Ajkaje with a profound gloom; more than he should have felt, perhaps, but as so often on so many things with Ted—one simply did not know.
And even more frustrated than Terry, if possible, was the powerful and worried old man who faced Ted now across the massive desk in the Oval Office. He too had been thinking deeply and staring thoughtfully—in his case at Abraham Lincoln, who, from his place of honor on the wall, stared thoughtfully back. This was the continuity of America, the President thought dryly: except that there were times these days when he was not at all sure the continuity would continue. Certainly it might not if his visitor performed in office as he seemed to be performing on the way to it: still uncertain, still wavering, still equivocal, still slipping like quicksilver through the body politic and the awful imperatives of the world. He had thought that might be finished as the day of victory neared. If anything, in his estimation, it had grown worse.
“Ted,” he said abruptly when the Governor was seated, “what did you want to see me for? Just to make more points with the votes you’ve got sewed up already? I don’t get it.”
For a moment Governor Jason returned him appraising look for appraising look. Then he smiled and leaned forward.
“Mr. President,” he said calmly, “I wish you could concede, for just one moment, that my motivations might be as noble and as devoted to the best interests of America as yours are. I really do.”
“Hmph,” the President said. “I’ll concede that on the day I see it. If you disagree with my policies, it occurs to me the way to do it is to take them up privately with me, not to arrive here trailed by a hundred reporters and fifty cameramen like Hannibal crossing the Alps at the head of his herd of elephants.”
“I’ve taken your policies up with you privately before,” Ted pointed out in a reasonable voice, “and a fat lot of good it’s done me, if I may say so with a candor to match your own. You imply that I don’t care about the country. You think this is all an ego trip. I think it’s an attempt to focus public pressure in such a way as to prevent you from tying my hands completely when—if—I enter this office.”
“No ‘if’ about it,” the President said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“Then why—?” Governor Jason asked with a certain restrained exasperation. “‘Why’ what?” the President demanded with an equal annoyance.
“Why do you persist in placing us deeper into the Gorotoland mess? Why do you persist in trying to blockade Panama, daring the rest of the world to try to break it, which could only mean a most serious confrontation? You’re playing an extremely dangerous game, Mr. President. I don’t like it, and I don’t think the country likes it.”
“Living in this world nowadays is a dangerous game,” the President said. “Have to be as tough as the other side or go under. Not much of a game for cowards.”
“Which I am,” Ted said dryly.
“No, of course not,” the President said impatiently. “But you don’t play with your gut, which is what you have to do to survive. You play with your mind. And right now your mind is all involved with how you can satisfy that crowd over there in the Press Room, and how you can hold onto the NAWAC crowd, and how you can—well, basically, Ted, how you can please people you don’t have to please. That’s what gets me. It isn’t necessary for you to put on this kind of grandstand stunt. Why do you do it?”
Again there was a silence while they studied one another. Finally the Governor spoke, very quietly.
“Does it ever occur to you, Mr. President, that I might sincerely believe in what I’m doing? That I might feel genuine concern because of your activities? That I might really believe that they are ill-advised, and that I might really, genuinely feel that my ideas are better for the country and the world?” He paused and shook his head with a sigh. “But, no. Obviously not. That isn’t Ted Jason, is it? At least, not your Ted Jason.” He sat back in his chair and spoke with a growing firmness. “Now, understand me, Mr. President. I don’t like what you are doing. You are trapping me fearfully in what you think ought to be done, when in actual fact, in three months’ time you will be out of this office and back on the Hill and the whole responsibility will be mine. You can’t make me a prisoner of your policies. It isn’t fair, and I won’t let you.”
“Oh? How will you stop me?”
“By walking out that door and repudiating you,” Ted said calmly. “By removing myself completely and entirely from any support whatsoever for what you are doing. By turning on ‘the leader of my party,’ because now I am the leader of my party. I don’t have to wait three months, if you force me. I can begin right now.”
For several moments they gave one another look for look. Finally the President spoke softly.
“That’s right. But I don’t think you even have the guts for that—or at least the decisiveness. Five weeks into the campaign, and you still don’t know who you are. You still don’t know whether you want to set this foot here or that foot there. You’re still trying to play to people you don’t have to play to, because you’ve got ’em already, and you’re still flirting with the safety of this country and the independent nations because you think that will make you popular with the media and the violent. Isn’t it time you settled down and decided what you’re going to be, Ted Jason? Look here!” he said with a sudden vehemence, taking up a heavy blue-jacketed folder and tossing it across the desk. “Those are the reports I get on the infiltration and the invasion plans that are still going on in Gorotoland and in those great peace-loving black neighbors of hers who ring her like a flock of vultures. There are the plans for another Russian attempt at take-over, which may come at any minute. There are all the reasons why Gorotoland, lying at the heart of t
he continent, has to be saved for the independent world, all the strategic reasons why she is, in many practical ways, the key to Africa. And this!”—and he tossed another, in a red jacket, after the first—“here are the Russian plans for taking Panama after that egotistical fool Felix Labaiya has done their work for them. Here are the names of the people around him who are going to get rid of him as soon as he succeeds in kicking us out, if he succeeds in kicking us out, and here are the details of how they’re going to do it. Study those for a while, and decide who you are!”
For several minutes, turning the pages thoughtfully and carefully, first of the blue book, then of the red, Ted Jason did so. Then he closed them and pushed them back across the desk.
“If these are true,” he suggested quietly, “why don’t you publicize them? Why don’t you make a speech and tell the world about them? Why keep them quiet, if they are such perfect justification of what you are doing … and if they are true?”
“‘If they are true,’” the President mimicked bitterly, an angry and exact echo of Ted’s quizzical tone. “You’ve just told me why I can’t make a speech. Because you and your friends in this country have got us so conditioned to disbelief in everything that proves Communist duplicity that I couldn’t make a sufficient number believe me if I did. You try it, my friend, when you get behind this desk. You try it! You’ll know then that it’s true, but you’ll find you can’t do much about it, because not only will your friends disbelieve you, but you’ve made yourself one of theirs and you won’t dare take a public stand that flies in the face of their beliefs and their purposes. You won’t dare.” He paused abruptly and demanded with a harsh impatience, “Why are you smiling?”