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

by Allen Drury

  By this cold standard, in the opinion of Robert A. Leffingwell, the new President of the United States was already far, far down the road to final failure, for himself and for his country. The moment had come and the character had not been there to match it. In the last analysis all an international confrontation really involved was character—one man’s guts against another man’s guts: or the collective guts of one group of men against the collective guts of another. Tashikov and his colleagues were tough; Edward M. Jason and his—or at least a good many of them—apparently were not. Therein lay the tale of a lost republic, unless things changed very, very drastically and the Lord vouchsafed some last-minute miracle to those who perhaps had not really earned it, except that they knew in their hearts that they were so noble, so well-meaning, so innocent, so good.

  Bob Leffingwell was very skeptical, in this bleak moment, that the Lord would still be that generous to America. He felt that he himself was tough, and he had tried insofar as he could in a subordinate position to urge the President to be likewise; but there was only so much a Cabinet officer could do, or indeed that anyone could do. So he had for the time being submerged his very great fears and worries about the course Ted Jason was pursuing and done his loyal best to help him carry out his policies.

  Now they had all apparently failed, in the span of three terribly short, terribly long days. Surely there would be something now, some desperate last-minute turning, some response finally unleashed. Then it would be the Secretary’s job to try to hold back, to counsel moderation, to urge a middle ground. When Edward M. Jason reacted in anger at last, it might well be a fearsome thing.

  The President turned away from the telecast of grinning black figures cavorting in the aisles and instantly all such ideas died.

  “They really don’t like us,” he agreed with a wry little smile. “But I suppose, from their point of view, they’re justified.”

  “And what do you propose to do about it, Mr. President?” Bob Leffingwell ventured, sounding more impatient than he meant to. “What do you intend?”

  “What do you want him to intend?” Senator Richardson snapped before the President had a chance to answer. “What is he supposed to do, blow up the world? I get the distinct impression you’d be a lot happier if he did.”

  “Anyway,” Jawbone remarked dourly, “a lot happier with some other Administration, I’d bet you that.”

  “Well, I’m with this one,” the Secretary replied sharply. “Unless, and until,” he added with an equal sharpness, turning directly to face his employer, “the President prefers otherwise.”

  The response was a mild and somewhat surprised little laugh.

  “No, I don’t prefer otherwise. Why should I? You’ve been a good Secretary of State in our vast three days of experience together. Why should I make a change at this late juncture? I have no complaints. You’ve supported me loyally in what I’ve tried to do.”

  “Which brings me back,” Bob Leffingwell said in a more amicable but still insistent tone, “to my original question.” He gestured to the little screen where the grinning puppets still rollicked and cavorted in the aisles. “What are we going to do now?”

  For a moment the President stared up at the impassive portraits of his predecessors. Then he spoke one word softly:

  “Wait.”

  “For what?” Bob Leffingwell asked blankly, and even Arly and Jawbone looked genuinely puzzled for a moment before loyalty covered it up again.

  “For the only thing that really matters,” the President said. “Word from Tashikov himself.”

  “And suppose it doesn’t come?” the Secretary persisted.

  “It will,” the President said with serene confidence. “After the military clique in Moscow realizes they can’t push him or me around.”

  “The military clique in Moscow,” Bob Leffingwell pointed out, “now has the official sanction of the world for whatever it has done, is doing and may wish to do. Are you going to say anything at all about this? Shouldn’t we make some official response? At least reiterate our position—restate our principles—set the facts straight again in a formal statement? Do something?”

  “There are times,” the President said, “when simply waiting can be the best kind of something. I feel this is one of those times.” And he glanced for the first time at Senator Richardson and Congressman Swarthman as if seeking reassurance. It was given with loyal promptitude.

  “Couldn’t be more right!” the Speaker exclaimed. “No, sir couldn’t be more right! Best we jest sit tight and see what that great statesman in Moscow is goin’ do, I say. Best we not rush into anything, now, Bob. Best we play it cooool and cautious. The President’s right. You know he’s right, Bob!”

  “I don’t know he’s right,” Secretary Leffingwell said, but mildly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “The curse of this Administration, like that of so many others I’ve seen,” Senator Richardson remarked, “is apparently going to be divided counsel. And there’s no need for it to be divided. The Congress is behind him, the country is behind him—”

  “Some of the country is behind him,” Bob Leffingwell interrupted. “Some are beginning to turn, and that’s going to mean trouble, too.”

  “The country is behind him,” Arly Richardson repeated firmly, as though saying would make it so.

  “And the world is against him,” Bob Leffingwell responded tartly, “in spite of the fact, as Claude Maudulayne and the Vice President have just pointed out in New York to no avail whatsoever, that he is the President the whole world wanted. Doesn’t this discrepancy suggest to you that maybe we’re ’way out there all alone with only ourselves to depend upon—and that maybe it is now time for the United States of America to act instead of react? I just don’t want us to be so damned passive. That’s what’s beginning to bug me.”

  “If we are really under all this pressure,” the President said, and his voice was still confident, though weary, “and I agree with you, we are—then, as I tried to point out, waiting—‘being passive,’ if you like—is a very strong act of affirmation in itself. They aren’t stampeding us. We aren’t scared. We aren’t panicking—”

  “We’re just being driven back everywhere,” the Secretary of State said bleakly, “and we aren’t responding in the only way these people understand, which is with decisiveness and strength.”

  “There!” the Senate Majority Leader cried triumphantly. “You see? He really belongs to the war party after all, Mr. President! He isn’t your man at all!”

  “Arly,” Bob Leffingwell said, “I am grateful to you for your past support of me in the Senate on various occasions. But there are times when I think you are a fool.”

  “Well, now!” Jawbone protested loudly. “Well, now—”

  “You, too,” Bob Leffingwell said, turned on his heel, left Jawbone gasping, and walked to the doors leading to the Rose Garden where he stood gazing somberly out into the snow-hung trees.

  Behind him there was silence for several minutes, broken at last by the President.

  “Come back and sit down, Bob,” he said quietly, “and let me put all this in perspective, if I may. Will you let me do that, in fairness to myself?… Now,” he said, after the Secretary of State had complied, though without moderating in the slightest the annoyed expression with which he glanced at, and dismissed, the Speaker and the Majority Leader as he returned to his chair, “let us suppose that any President you like had been sitting here when these things happened. Any hero you want, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Nixon, Wilson, Lincoln, Jefferson, G.W., you name him. And suppose the Soviet Union had done the things it has done. What do you think any one of them would have done, really? What could any one of them have done? The event happens, and instantly you think—even I,” he remarked dryly, “think: it’s an act of war, how dare those lying bastards, damn their souls in hell, I’m going to let them have it! But then instantly you think: over what? Reports that a few fishing boats have been sunk? Reports that a couple of
friendly governments have been overthrown? A little harassment of withdrawing American troops—now, wait!” he said, holding up a restraining hand as the Secretary of State started to offer angry protest. “Wait! This is at the beginning, remember—the first moment it happens. All you have to go on are these first, fragmentary reports, probably true, but not quite—not quite—substantial and conclusive enough so that you can in good conscience order retaliation. Particularly knowing that the only kind of retaliation that would be really effective would be atomic—and that would mean the end of everything.

  “So. You don’t proceed quite as fast and quite as dramatically, in those opening hours, as many of your countrymen would like you to do—as you yourself, perhaps, would like to do. You act cautiously—and the next reports are worse—and the enemy has advanced even further and is moving very rapidly—and again, there is a way to stop him. But again you think: is it worth it? Is it really justified? Should you really do this awful thing? And you wait a little longer—and you don’t do it. And he keeps coming. And things get worse.

  “Except!” he said with a sudden vigor and a light of inner conviction that brought to the Secretary of State the sudden chilling thought that the desperate need for hope had overreached itself in a mind always accustomed, except in these last few chaotic months, to having things its own way. “Except, that in your heart of hearts you know—you know—that there must be rational men still operating on the other side—that there must be men of good will—even more importantly, of sanity—who no more want the world to blow up than you do. You know, because you have to know, that there must be men to whom it is as unthinkable as it is to you that they would quite literally end the world if they are not careful.

  “And to them,” he concluded quietly, “you pin your hope, and with them in mind you conduct your policies, and reaching out to them across the gulfs of suspicion and hatred that isolate the races of man upon their bristling, fortified, embattled mountaintops, you say, ‘Friends, we cannot commit this final awful insanity, we simply cannot.’”

  He stopped, and the Secretary of State realized suddenly that Ted Jason, the wealthy, the ambitious, the pragmatic politician and avid Presidency seeker, had somewhere along the way undergone a most startling and apparently genuine conversion to an almost Messianic concept of his mission in the world. The Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker broke into hearty, prolonged, genuinely emotional applause.

  In it the Secretary of State did not join, sitting quietly, elbows on arms of chair, chin on fingertips, staring moodily at the floor. A silence fell and into it Arly Richardson said in a spiteful voice,

  “He won’t even applaud you, Mr. President. A loyal Secretary indeed.”

  As though coming back from some far distance, Bob Leffingwell raised his eyes slowly from the floor until they met the Senate Majority Leader’s full-on.

  “Arly,” he said in a tired voice, “again you are a fool. I don’t think the President really doubts my loyalty, do you, Mr. President?”

  The President studied him thoughtfully for a moment and then shook his head.

  “No. And I hope you don’t doubt my sincerity, either, Bob.”

  “Not at all,” the Secretary said. “Not at all. I just find one thing missing in your historical equation, and that is that, of all those you named, of all who have sat in this house, all of them—you are the very first who came into office and deliberately and immediately began to dismantle America’s power and position in the world. And from that, it seems to me, flow our present perils and the great trouble we are in. It was not a sudden decision by the Russians to move—until you made it clear to them that they could do so with impunity. And then they moved—and kept moving—and are still moving—and will, I am very much afraid, keep right on moving, because from your very first moments in office you made clear to them that you will not stop them. And the world, which I am afraid is really not a very idealistic place, assesses this accordingly. And so we have these votes just now, and dancing in the aisles.

  “That,” he said in a tired and unhappy voice, “is where I fault you, Mr. President. Not for idealism. Not for honesty. Not for courage. Not for a sincere vision of what you sincerely believe—what any sane man sincerely believes—to be the only safe dream for mankind—but because you did it too fast—by yourself—without adequate preparation—and without getting from them, first, a quid pro quo, some sort of guarantee, some sort of bargain, something that would give us a little influence left on our side, which would at least keep them a little bit uncertain as to what we would do, a little bit uneasy, a little bit cautious, a little bit restrained. But you didn’t do that. You voluntarily gave up all our advantage which, shaky and shopworn though it may be by now, still had some inhibiting effect. And now—how, and where, do we stop them?”

  The President gave him a long look, and then he smiled,

  “I say what I said at the beginning, Bob,” he said pleasantly. “We wait.”

  “And rightly so, in my estimation,” Arly Richardson said bluntly.

  “That’s what I say, too, Mr. President,” Jawbone Swarthman said stoutly. “Rightly so, now. Rightly so!”

  “And you will not even authorize,” the Secretary of State said in a disbelieving voice, “a statement in response to these votes which would set the historical record straight. I do not understand it, Mr. President. I simply do not understand it.”

  “Wait,” the President repeated gently. “Wait, Bob. The answer will come.”

  And within fifteen minutes, during which they engaged in desultory small talk while Frankly and Walter Dobius and various others analyzed the UN votes in a way which disturbed the Secretary even more, because for the first time in all his years of knowing them he could tell they were disturbed too—though the fact did not seem to reach his companions, or bother them—the answer did come.

  One more of what Bob Leffingwell was beginning to think of as those endless young men in uniforms and crew cuts who seem to live in the White House woodwork knocked on the door and was admitted. Being strictly schooled in protocol he held strictly to it, ignoring the President save for a dutiful quick salute, handing the paper he was carrying to the Secretary of State.

  Bob Leffingwell read it through hastily and then said, “Christ!” in a tone of such terrible anger, disgust and sheer frustrated exasperation that even his colleagues, whom he regarded now as distinctly euphoric if not unbalanced, looked startled and upset.

  He reached across and placed it in front of the President, and keeping his voice carefully drained of expression of any kind, inquired,

  “And now?”

  TASHIKOV DEMANDS IMMEDIATE MOSCOW CONFERENCE WITH U.S. (the headlines would scream in half an hour as the news reached the world). Ignores White House, issues statement to president through soviet un delegation. Points out “overwhelming insistence of world opinion” that meeting be held. Tells Jason “your delay is inexcusable and can only lead to imminent consequences of gravest and most final nature.” Russian leader asserts “my government and i have been most patient with your intransigence but our patience has run out. We must insist upon an immediate and affirmative reply.”

  In the Oval Office, where at the moment only two men knew all this, there was again a silence—this time a very lengthy one as the President read, reread and read again the piece of paper while his companions regarded him with an intent and worried concentration.

  Finally he glanced up and, ignoring Senator Richardson and Representative Swarthman, asked Bob Leffingwell,

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he thinks he has you on the run,” the Secretary said bluntly. “This is no message, this is a public humiliation. I think he thinks he has you licked.”

  “Ah, but he doesn’t, though,” the President said softly.

  “What will you do?” Bob Leffingwell inquired, his voice beginning to fill with a hope that now, at last, something—he did not know exactly what at this desperately late date, but somet
hing—would be done to stop the headlong downward rush of events.

  “I shall go to Moscow,” the President said serenely.

  “But, Mr. President—” the Secretary said, his face and voice nearly ludicrous with dismay.

  “I shall go to Moscow,” the President repeated with a sudden sharpness that disclosed a strain so deep that it chilled the Secretary, though it seemed to escape their colleagues from the Congress. It was gone as swiftly as it had come. “And then,” he concluded calmly, “we shall talk this over face to face and settle it once and for all.”

  “But, Mr. President—” Bob Leffingwell tried again, his voice this time attempting to be patient and reasonable but only sounding completely tired and completely hopeless.

  “I shall go,” the President repeated firmly, and again for just a second the Secretary was convinced he was seeing a glimpse of hell in the fine eyes that stared out at him with an almost frantic anguish before again becoming opaque and unreadable, “to Moscow. You will go with me. You two will also go with me, so that the Congress may be represented I may even take Bill Abbott, though I don’t know yet. But I do know I shall go before Congress tomorrow as I depart and tell them and the country why I am going and what I intend to accomplish. So you two may get back up to the Hill and get things started on that, if you will. And you, Bob, may stay here and help me start drafting the speech, if you will.”

  “Anything I can do, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said, very low, “God knows I will do.”

  “That applies to me too,” the President said with a little smile and some return, from somewhere, of a small, amazing gleam of humor. Then his expression changed to one of calm, if somber, confidence.

  “I think He will help us,” he said quietly, “for we go in good heart.”

  “By ding-dang-doozy,” Jawbone Swarthman said with a sudden explosive emphasis which disclosed for the first time that even his loyal and ebullient soul was beginning to be shaken at last, “He’d better.”