Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The Presidency of Edward M. Jason

by Allen Drury

But Ted shook his head and sighed.

  “I’m not smiling, Mr. President; not really. I was just thinking that five weeks ago, when my nominee for Vice President came to me in Patsy’s house for our first private talk together, I said to him much the same things you have said, and are saying now, to me. I was smiling about life’s ironies—because, understand me, Mr. President: I know Gorotoland is important. I know Panama is important. I know elements dangerous to this country and to independent nations everywhere are seeking to drive us out of them both, as they have tried—and have succeeded—in driving us out of many other vital areas around the world. I know a great part of this—a great unnecessary part—has been caused by many of our own people, many sincere, some not so sincere, in many areas of American life, from the media to the universities, and back again. I know all this and I told Roger Croy that we must be careful, of our support and of our policies.”

  “Then why in the hell,” the President demanded in a tone compounded equally of bafflement and exasperation, “aren’t you honest enough to say so? You’ve got the election won.”

  “Not yet,” Ted Jason said softly. “You know how they’d turn on me, if I said these things now. They could conceivably cost me the election. They could conceivably—” and suddenly his eyes darkened with pain, and the President realized for a brief and fleeting moment of human sympathy that he was dealing with a still deeply wounded man—“cost me my life.… Wait until I’m in, Mr. President. I’ll say these things then. And they’ll take them from me, then.”

  “Want to bet?” the President asked quietly. “Do you really want to bet?”

  “And of course,” Ted Jason said, ignoring the question, “there is another thing for you to remember, Mr. President: I agree in principle with much of what you say, but I do honestly believe that there are areas in which a different approach—”

  “Oh, yes,” the President interrupted sarcastically. “Oh, yes. Here it comes.”

  “In some areas,” Ted repeated calmly, “there are fair arguments to be made about the ways in which we should do things. And there we begin to run into all the sincere and loyal and patriotic people—quite aside from anyone you may single out as disloyal and dangerous—who really disagree. Some disagree on methods and some disagree on the basic premises. And I have the job as candidate, and will soon have it as President, of trying to lead them all—”

  “And still save the country.”

  “And still save the country,” Ted agreed quietly.

  “In other words,” the President said, “they’ve gotten to you, haven’t they? In your heart of hearts you don’t really believe what you say about Gorotoland and Panama. They’ve managed to make you just a little bit unsure, just a little bit uncertain, just a little bit unable to act as the next President may have to act in this office. Well, good for them. You’re the one man they had to convince, and they’ve done it. That’s all they need. If they can get the President of the United States really intimidated and unsure of himself, they’ve got us.”

  “I’m not intimidated,” Ted replied quietly, “but I may be a little uncertain of my absolutes. I told Roger Croy we should be cautious and careful, and I am trying to be. Isn’t that enough for you? Really, Mr. President!” And he shook his head as if to clear it. “This is really an extraordinary conversation. You are saying the most extraordinary things to me, the most extraordinary attacks upon my beliefs and my integrity, and I am taking them with the most extraordinary patience, really, considering I don’t have to, when all’s said and done. I wonder why I should, any longer?”

  “Who’s been pressuring you, Ted?” the President inquired with an unimpressed bluntness. “The usual? NAWAC and Van Ackerman and Georgie Wattersill and Walter Dobius and all that crowd? You haven’t asked for this conference to try to make me change my mind or moderate my policies. You’ve asked for it to set yourself up for some big dramatic headlines about breaking with me over the war. Isn’t that right?”

  Once more Governor Jason did not answer for a while. When he finally did it was in a thoughtful, almost remote tone.

  “Mr. President,” he said quietly, “you want motives to be so simple. You want everything to be so cut and dried, because, I suppose, that’s how your generation has always looked at things. Yes, I’m prepared to break with you and get big headlines, if you force me to. But I also, as I said, am seriously interested in not having you tie my hands before I even get into office—in not having you create such a tangle in world affairs that I have no options to move—in not having you create such a strait jacket that I can’t reverse my field and turn us around, if I feel I must. I thought when I came here that maybe we could work out some compromise: announce a gradual reduction, with a definite time limit—six months, say—on aid to Gorotoland. Say that second thoughts have indicated that a blockade of Panama may not be the best way to achieve our objectives. Call for an international conference of the interested maritime powers, maybe, and try to get some voluntary reduction of aid to Felix and his group. Try to bring Felix to the negotiating table.… In other words, try to find a middle ground that would protect the United States and still make some reasonable concessions to her critics both domestic and foreign, who can’t go along with the way you’re trying to handle it.… That seems reasonable to me. I know it doesn’t to you, but—there it is.”

  “And there are your headlines,” the President suggested.

  “Yes,” Ted agreed. “If you make me do it.”

  “What are you going to do about NAWAC?” the President asked abruptly. “What about their trying to break up Warren’s rally last night? What about these reports I get—”

  “What are they in?” Ted couldn’t resist. “A black folder?”

  “They should be,” the President said grimly. “These reports I get that these so-called ‘campaign security guards’ of yours are beginning to turn up at other people’s rallies? Lafe Smith tells me he’s being increasingly bothered because he isn’t 100 per cent for you. And Cullee Hamilton called me the other day to say he’s beginning to run into the same flak in California. Bob Munson’s been shouted down a couple of times and some in his audiences have been roughed up. Why,” and his smile became sarcastic and a trifle savage—“even my old buddy the general director of the Post called up yesterday, scared peeless because he’s received a couple of blank-screen calls on the Picturephone threatening dire events if the paper doesn’t stop even its mildest type of pittypat criticism of NAWAC.… Now, in the first place, Ted: what in the hell are ‘campaign security guards’ of yours doing at somebody else’s rallies? And in the second place, have you learned a damned thing from the convention—or the Committee meeting—or—” and he said it with a deliberate sledgehammer bluntness that he knew would make his listener flinch, and it did—“the Monument Grounds? For God’s sake, man, cut loose from it! Stop it! I beg of you.”

  “Mr. President—” Ted began, then paused and started over again slowly and carefully. “I know there have been—excesses—here and there. I am aware of them. I have given orders they are to be stopped. I have been assured by Senator Van Ackerman, who is head of the campaign security division, and by LeGage Shelby, who is his assistant, that they will not occur again. I have that assurance.”

  “But you won’t fight them on it,” the President said. “Not really. You won’t have an open break and big headlines with them, will you?”

  “Because,” Ted said, a stubbornness in his tone, “they do represent the point of view held by millions of peaceable Americans. They do believe as I do on these great issues of foreign policy. They may be misguided and overenthusiastic—” the President snorted, but he ignored it—“but they represent the opinion that supports me and the people I have to work with.”

  “The point is,” the President said quietly, and it was obvious it was a quietness obtained only by the use of a great deal of will power, “the point is, you don’t have to do it. It isn’t necessary. It’s a concession to dangerous elements far
beyond what any necessity of political campaigning or political victory requires you to do. You don’t have to temporize with evil: it is your personal decision to do so. And frankly, my friend,” he concluded, even more quietly, “it scares the holy hell out of me.”

  Again there was a silence, the last of the many that had punctuated their conversation, as his visitor stared out at the Rose Garden, his face troubled but unyielding, his thoughts obviously far away in some region where the President, and perhaps no one, could accompany. Finally he replied, in a grave and thoughtful voice that conceded little.

  “Mr. President, thank you for seeing me. I appreciate your thoughts on these matters and I will take them under advisement. In the meantime I am going to be expected to make some statement when I leave this place. This is probably the last time we shall talk privately before the election. It would look better if we could show some sign of agreement. What would you suggest we say?”

  “Say,” the President suggested coldly, “that in January I shall be back on the Hill as Speaker, and that you realize that if you adopt a policy of retreat abroad and appeasement of the violent at home, you will have me and the Congress of the United States to deal with.”

  For a moment he and Ted Jason stared at one another almost blankly across the huge desk that symbolized their similarity and their differences. Then Ted spoke his last word.

  “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Maybe…”

  Five minutes later in the Press Room he met their clamorous friendly questions, their friendly flattering cameras. Within half an hour he had his headlines.

  JASON BREAKS WITH PRESIDENT, REPUDIATES “PRO-WAR” POLICIES OF ADMINISTRATION. SAYS HE SEEKS “MIDDLE GROUND” FOR SOLUTION OF WORLD’S ILLS, CONDEMNS FURTHER AID TO GOROTOLAND, BLOCKADE OF PANAMA. PROMISES TO WIN “WITH OR WITHOUT SUPPORT OF PRESIDENT’S MEN.” GOVERNOR’S DRAMATIC MOVE IS FIRST OPEN REPUDIATION OF SITTING PRESIDENT BY CANDIDATE OF OWN PARTY. WHITE HOUSE SILENT.

  “Rarely—indeed, almost never,” Walter Dobius wrote busily that evening in “Salubria’s” softly lighted, book-lined study, “has there been a political event of such dramatic magnitude as has just occurred here in a capital that has seen its share of them in recent years. In an act of unparalleled statesmanship and courage Governor Jason has acted, not on a basis of oversentimentalized ‘party loyalty,’ but on the basis of fact:

  “He is the leader of his party, and it is time the whole world knew it.

  “At one stroke he has freed himself of the obsessive and oppressive burden of the fearfully misguided, mismanaged war policies of the late Secretary of State Orrin Knox, the late President Harley M. Hudson and President Abbott himself. If he has not yet pledged himself to do what the overwhelming majority of his countrymen expect and want him to do—get out, immediately and entirely, once and for all, of the world’s wars and the world’s insoluble and never-ending troubles—at least he has taken a giant step in that direction. He has shaken off the crippling and imprisoning past—he has made way for the peaceful future. His fellow citizens and the world can await with a serene confidence the inevitable next step in his policy of complete and enlightened disengagement from hopeless quagmires into which no American Administration should ever have dragged us in the first place.

  “There remain now only the triumphant concluding weeks of Governor Jason’s great campaign—the ratification by the electorate of his inevitable victory—an uneasy but mercifully short interregnum during which President Abbott and his discredited advisers will have no choice but to cooperate in their own dismissal from control of the government—and the dawn of the new day. ‘Conscience must decide the issue,’ Governor Jason states it, in the most felicitous and appealing slogan of his campaign. Conscience has indeed decided this major act of political courage, and, if there were degrees of inevitability, has made an already inevitable triumph even more so.… ”

  Walter paused, reached over and poured himself a glass of iced water from the pitcher Arbella had left on the desk, after a dinner he had consumed alone at the big candlelit table downstairs, complete with his usual one Manhattan and one glass of wine. He sat back thoughtfully for a moment. There was something else in the Jason campaign he did not like quite so well—in fact he was beginning to find it quite disturbing—and he debated for several minutes whether he should say something about it, or let the great adoring multitudes Out There rest satisfied with a few more innocuous comments about Ted Jason’s courage, integrity, foresight, statesmanship, peace-loving nature, etc., etc., etc.

  He had a window open on the gently cooling, Indian-summer October night. Now that his typewriter had stopped there was nothing to break the quiet of the house or the silence of the beautiful Virginia countryside that stretched away on all sides of the little rise where “Salubria” had stood for the better part of two hundred years. He shivered suddenly, for no reason he could tell, and turned back to flick the machine on again and tackle it with his pudgy, determined fingers.

  “Given so notable and so noble an affirmation of decisiveness and integrity on Governor Jason’s part,” he wrote, and the words flowed right along, as they always did for Walter, “it is to be hoped, by all who value democracy and the place in it of decent and honorable dissent, that he will now turn his attention to the one flaw in an otherwise perfect campaign.

  “This is the unfortunate incidence of violent and near-violent ‘roughing-up’ of those who disagree in the slightest with the Governor’s philosophies and oppose, however reasonably, his bid for office. It seems, even to those observers here most favorable to the Governor’s cause, that such episodes are increasing. It is, if truth be known, a disturbing if not, indeed, a sinister, thing.

  “Certainly no fair-minded man can charge that Governor Jason himself knows of in advance, or sanctions or in any way excuses or condones, such episodes. Yet the roll of their occurrence is growing: disturbances when he spoke in Wyoming on behalf of the re-election of Senator Van Ackerman; disturbances in Iowa, where Senator Lafe Smith has apparently annoyed the Governor’s most partisan backers with his occasional criticisms; disturbances in California, where black Representative Cullee Hamilton, apparently well in the lead in his race for the Senate, is running into increasingly bitter heckling and some violence because he dares voice reservations about the Governor’s policies; disturbances in Illinois, where Hal Knox, the late Secretary’s son, is running for the House of Representatives under the party label but with a strongly independent approach—and now, most recently and most disgracefully, in Los Angeles, where Senator Warren Strickland, carrying his party’s standard honorably in a losing race, found his supporters balked and threatened and in several cases physically molested by forces purporting to be ‘campaign security guards’ for Governor Jason.

  “Sincere supporters of the Governor can legitimately wonder—and the wonder is certainly no personal reflection at all upon him—why ‘campaign security guards,’ other than the Secret Service contingent furnished all candidates by the federal government, and the forces customarily furnished by the states and municipalities where he speaks, are necessary. One wonders why ‘campaign security guards,’ supposedly directed by Senator Van Ackerman of COMFORT and LeGage Shelby of DEFY for the safety and protection of Governor Jason, should be turning up at other candidates’ rallies across the country to indulge in violent or near violent tactics. One must wonder if there is some significance, some message, intended in these carefully timed and carefully staged episodes, and whether they presage something unclean and unhealthy, possibly even dangerous, which could flower under the shield of the coming Jason Administration.

  “If there is even the remotest possibility of this—and again, one can only absolve the Governor himself from all responsibility, for he is an honorable and decent man—then it may perhaps be time for him to caution his more intemperate supporters against their intemperance. Zeal for a given candidate can be a fine and productive thing; even excessive zeal, if not carried to violent or harmful lengths, can
be fine and productive. But zeal carried beyond the bounds of democratic principle and a decent respect for those who disagree with you can be something else.

  “Governor Jason has shown great courage in breaking with the burden of past political mistakes by his own party. The many millions who see in him the world’s greatest hope for peace can only wish that he will show a similar courage in breaking with the present danger and future possibility of serious damage to the oft-battered but still worthy democracy which he soon will lead.”

  And for the next few hours, Walter Dobius—who on occasion did have the integrity to rise to the sobriquet of “Walter Wonderful” conferred upon him long ago by Lyndon Johnson—felt very well-satisfied with this. He was not all that bedazzled by Ted Jason, whom he had come to regard, after several close contacts in the pre- and post-convention period, as a devious and slippery individual, even if headed in what Walter believed to be the right direction. He was not a blind believer in the Jason myth, even though he industriously helped promulgate it every day because he considered it necessary to the country’s stability and the world’s peace. He admired many of Ted’s policies and actions, particularly the break with that stubborn old fool in the White House, but he was not at all bemused by the basic character that had to be dealt with, underneath. Though the President would have been much surprised to know it, Walter Dobius regarded Ted Jason pretty much as he did: as an individual with a good many fine qualities, but essentially opportunistic, arrogant, overconfident of “the Jason luck,” and weak—the weakness increased by the fact that he was still, behind the charismatic figure that managed to smile and wave, make a powerful speech and go through the motions, deeply shattered by the tragic death of his wife. Such a man required guidance, in Walter’s estimation, and it was not just the usual guidance that Walter normally gave to Presidents and other world leaders who needed it. It was guidance that would prevent the essential weakness from being played upon and taken advantage of by forces that did not see the future of the Republic as the free and still idealistic thing Walter felt both he and Ted believed in.