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

by Allen Drury

  Thus he had surveyed, as he emerged from college, a country whose evils, inadequacies and inhumanities his teachers had drilled into him constantly, as they had tried, with considerable success, to do with a great many of his generation. Some had responded with a desperate, intolerant idealism which, in a peculiar, turned-around way, pushed them into wanting to destroy the system in order to save it. With Fred Van Ackerman this went one step further. He kept it to himself because he knew candor in this area to be self-defeating, but inside he harbored only contempt for what he referred to in his own mind as “the idealism stuff.” He could see, however, that the idealism stuff was a perfect vehicle by which to rise to some powerful position, undefined at first but gradually clarified as he went on to law school and graduated with reasonably satisfactory grades. He decided quite early that if he played it right, he could use the idealism stuff as a springboard and then kick it away when he became strong enough. He had completed the first part of this program and now he could see its sequel approaching very fast.

  The process had begun with his first election to the Senate six years ago. He had seized upon the opportunity offered by a dying incumbent to announce his candidacy without so much as an aye, yes or no from those who thought they ran the party machinery. He had appeared, apparently out of nowhere, to challenge the “old politics” of the too-complacent mossbacks, and he had succeeded. He was not, after all, deformed: at least on the outside. He was reasonably good-looking, relatively intelligent, supremely crafty, a powerful, demagogic speaker. Shrewdly and apparently with great sincerity spouting the clichés of the earnest left, he had stumped the state, an exciting liberal whirlwind in contrast to the bumbling conservatism of his much older opponent. Instantly this had won him not only state recognition but the sort of national attention that comes automatically, with great speed and warmth, to anyone who appears to challenge the basic worth of America’s customs, history and tradition.

  A DARING YOUNG FIGHTER TAKES ON WYOMING’S CONSERVATIVES, World had trumpeted early in his campaign. WYOMING SENDS AN EXCITING NEW LIBERAL TO THE SENATE, Time had dutifully announced after it was all over. VAN ACKERMAN OF WYOMING: A NEW KENNEDY? wistfully inquired Newsweek, ever engaged on the ceaseless quest. The Times, the Post and the networks, kit, caboodle and all, had rallied ’round with glowing articles, flattering photographs, sycophantic interviews, fatherly, approving commentaries and editorials. He had fooled them all, and it was only after he had taken office and begun to reveal his contempt for the traditional customs, and the frayed but still valid decencies, of the national political game, that some began to become a little uneasy. He might, a few perceptive souls were moved to think, eventually turn on them.

  But such queasy thoughts were successfully suppressed, even though his speeches and actions soon appeared to become somewhat erratic. The high psychotic whine of his voice under pressure disturbed all who heard it, but because he always backed the Right Causes and worked with the Right People, this was never commented upon in national publications or broadcasts. The media went with him, in fact, almost all the way through his fight in support of the first nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State. It was only after he had succeeded in blackmailing Bob’s stubborn young opponent, Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, literally to death, that a strong undercurrent of questioning and disapproval began to run through the media. And even then it surfaced rarely, because after all, he was still fighting on the Right Side for the Right Things.

  In similar fashion, his association with COMFORT, the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce, evoked only scattered, uneasy comment, no more than was accorded the sudden appearance of COMFORT itself. Destiny had brought the rising young Senator and COMFORT together the night Fred delivered a speech with the immortal line “I had rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an atom bomb!” Prior to that, COMFORT had been a brand-new unknown, come, like himself in his early days, apparently out of nowhere to enter the American political scene.

  He did not know for quite some time where its funds and its backing came from. By the time he began to get an inkling, their destinies were so intertwined that he probably could not have disengaged himself even had he wanted to. He did not want to, because a nationwide organization of COMFORT’s wealth, skill and tenacity was indispensable to the ultimate plans that were beginning to form in his mind. And then Ted Jason had come along, with a rare and still baffling stupidity, to give him inadvertently the final weapon he needed. Almost absent-mindedly Ted had accepted the idea of NAWAC, and with it had sealed, as Senator Van Ackerman saw it, both his own fate and that of the American Republic as it had existed up to now.

  Ted Jason, that weak, silly, egotistical, idealistic, arrogant nincompoop! Of all the people he considered his enemies on the political scene, and that was almost everyone of any consequence, the new President was the one for whom he had the most complete and withering contempt.

  How anyone could reason as naively as Ted had concerning the formation of NAWAC, Fred could not understand. If you were smart you didn’t permit your problems to be unified into one big bundle, you kept them fragmented. Instead of COMFORT, DEFY and KEEP, working at cross-purposes and generally hostile to one another, no real threat to the country or to him, Ted had naively, almost eagerly, embraced the casual suggestion that it might be easier to further his Presidential ambitions in cooperation with the various peace movements if they could all be brought into a single organization. The name, with its harsh and menacing acronym, had been entirely his inspiration: The National Anti-War Activities Congress—NAWAC! It could not have been more perfectly named if Fred and the man who actually originated the idea had christened it themselves.

  And then Ted found that he had given his support to the birth of a monster, and the knowledge had begun the process of breaking him down that figured so vitally in the plans of so many today.

  The beating of Crystal Danta Knox by NAWAC bullies outside the Cow Palace during the Knox-Jason nominating battle had been the first move in the dislocation and destruction of a personality. It had been done by an element that was largely Ted’s creation, and Ted, for all his defiance about it to Orrin Knox and others, could not escape the burden of conscience.

  Then had come President Harley Hudson’s savage tongue-lashing of Ted before the convention, his support of Orrin for Vice President, Ted’s defeat. This had been followed immediately by Fred Van Ackerman’s own bullying of Ted as he had ordered him to be present at the formation of a third party to run against Orrin, a development canceled only by Harley’s death on the way back to Washington.

  Then, most importantly of all, had come the death of Ceil at the Monument Grounds, an event far less haphazard and unplanned than the world assumed. That had begun the real process of shattering, submerged but not halted when Ted was chosen to succeed the slain Orrin as the Presidential candidate.

  Then had come the campaign, in which NAWAC had tried its muscle on a national scale and gotten away with it because the candidate apparently—either through fear, self-confidence, desire for office, or sheer inability to grasp its dangers—failed to repudiate it.

  And then had come Ted’s astounding inaugural address, idealistic in the eyes of his devout supporters but appallingly weak (though very welcome) in the eyes of Fred Van Ackerman and his friends—and in it the voluntary sacrifice of nearly all of America’s few remaining advantages in dealing with the Russians. This had been followed instantaneously and inexorably by Tashikov’s brilliantly ruthless and apparently successful gamble, culminating in the Moscow conference whose inner core Fred did not know but could shrewdly guess.

  How could one feel anything but contempt for such a weakling? And what else could one logically do but proceed as fast as possible toward the dark, fantastic goal one had evolved out of one’s bitter, harsh and twisted personality? Especially since it had now been made clear to him, through channels in NAWAC and elsewhere, that those whose help he would require looked
with kindly encouragement upon his efforts?

  It was true that there had been, in recent months, two events which had temporarily shaken him a bit. But he had survived the one and thought he knew how to triumph eventually over the other. His extremely narrow margin of victory, only a scant 106 votes, in his race for re-election to the Senate in November had been a shock, for defeat would have put an end to his dreams forever. But in its mysterious wisdom the electorate had just barely saved him. In the American system a miss was as good as a mile: you could be the victor by one vote, if it came to that, as long as you had the majority. He had won, and that was that.

  The event had deepened his dislike for Ted Jason, if that were possible, because he had given Fred far less enthusiastic support than Fred hoped for and needed. The media had made a lot of the fact that Ted had spoken for him, but he had only spoken once, in a rather offhand way. It had been a mighty namby-pamby, delicate laying on of hands, in Fred’s opinion, far more concerned with the necessity for sending Ted Jason to the White House than it was with the necessity for returning Fred Van Ackerman to the Senate. If Ted had really supported him, Fred would have won comfortably by a margin that could have gone as high as fifty thousand votes or more. As it was, he had left Fred to squeak ignominiously in. It was not something Fred would forgive him, even if he could.

  The second disturbing event had been Ted’s selection of Roger P. Croy as his running mate, but it had not taken Fred long to rationalize that to his own advantage. He could see why Ted could not choose him, the fuss from certain of the media and from Ted’s idealistic supporters would have been too much. And Roger P. Croy, fatuous, pompous, arrogant and asinine stuffed shirt as Fred saw him, would be no great hindrance in the long run. Perhaps you needed a Kerensky for a while, until things were ripe for the Lenin to move.

  For this, fantastic though it might sound, and unbelievable (happily and fortunately unbelievable, from his standpoint) though it might be for the great majority of his naïve and well-meaning countrymen to grasp, was actually the way Fred Van Ackerman saw himself.

  He knew what no one yet was quite prepared to believe, though some in the media were finally beginning to suspect—some he would take care of, he rather thought, before they had a chance to get to him—that there actually was a United States Senator who wanted to become dictator of his country, and who wanted to do so badly enough that he was accepting the covert and all-embracing help of the Soviet Union to achieve his desire.

  And this in a wild, disjointed moment when the whole fabric of America, thanks to the President’s genuine idealism and the Russians’ ruthless response, was suddenly unraveled, and when no one could predict what might not come of it for the stern of purpose and the fleet of foot.

  Nothing like this had ever happened in America—it just couldn’t. But like so many other things that just couldn’t happen in America, yet in these recent hectic decades had indeed happened, this, too, Fred believed, could come to pass.

  He reflected, with a grimly sardonic humor, that it was rather like the old joke about Washington weather.

  So it can’t happen here because it never has happened here?

  Wait a minute.…

  Now the first overt moves were under way.

  The uniforming and arming of NAWAC, tested tentatively during the convention and the campaign, had been sanctioned by the non-opposition of the President and now were established beyond his power to control.

  “Help America” had been launched this afternoon on the Hill by the man who only four months ago had filibustered it to death in the Senate in its original form of “the anti-riot bill.” Fred had reversed his field without a moment’s hesitation when the Administration changed and it became certain that the bill could now be used against the general citizenry instead of against NAWAC. He had revised and amended it to give the government terrible teeth, counting on the political naïveté, ideological intolerance and lifelong educational conditioning of the new young members who came in on Ted’s coattails to help him carry it through. He knew it would be a hell of a fight, but he felt he could either intimidate Ted into supporting it or intimidate him into remaining silent. Fred believed that Ted in his present condition was highly subject to being intimidated, and he intended to do so.

  And around the world and in Moscow the other side of the pincers was closing.

  The situation of fright and fluidity in which he saw his opportunities was hourly increasing.

  At his back, on the two floors rented by NAWAC overlooking Connecticut Avenue, the computer memory banks were filling up with a steadily increasing stream of data on most of the prominent citizens of the country. Within a month virtually every American of any importance would be filed and catalogued according to his or her weaknesses. Much of this might not be necessary if the Help America Act passed, for then he intended to so arrange things that he and NAWAC would have access to all the vast records of the government. But this would give NAWAC a nice backup, just in case. The computers were the latest and most sophisticated, and there was very little they could not be used for in the hands of men unscrupulous enough to do it. It had always been only a matter of time before such men came along in America, as they had long since in the Soviet Union and other police states of the world.

  Half-laughing, at beautiful “Vagaries” a couple of miles north in snow-hushed Rock Creek Park, Hal Knox had made a wry joke about spying.

  Downtown overlooking busy snow-clogged Connecticut Avenue, NAWAC and its chairman weren’t joking at all.

  ABBOTT, MRS. KNOX, SENATOR HAMILTON ANNOUNCE FORMATION OF “IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM” GROUP TO OPPOSE PRESIDENT’S POLICIES. IDF TO HAVE QUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, CAMPAIGN FOR STRONG RESPONSE TO RUSSIA, DEFEAT OF HELP AMERICA BILL. VAN ACKERMAN DISMISSES EFFORT AS “TYPICAL RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY ATTEMPT TO CRIPPLE OUR GREAT PRESIDENT.” SENATOR PLEDGES ALL-OUT NAWAC FIGHT TO PASS HELP AMERICA, SUPPORT JASON IN ANTI-WAR POLICIES. HAWKS EXPECTED TO RALLY TO ANTI-JASON STANDARD.

  PRESIDENT REMAINS SILENT WHILE MOSCOW CONTINUES TO CONSOLIDATE NEW POSITIONS AROUND GLOBE. NO WORD OF TALK TO NATION AS HEALTH RUMORS HIT CAPITAL. SUPPORTERS EXPRESS CONFIDENCE, CONCERN.

  And not the least of these, on the morning of the day on which the two houses of Congress would start their bitter debates on S. 1776 and H.R. 1776, was the distinguished white-haired gentleman who now occupied the office of Vice President of the United States. Roger P. Croy looked every inch the confident statesman as he dismissed the worried questions of reporters when they cornered him just outside the Senators’ Dining Room after an early lunch, but underneath a hearty facade a somber and increasingly desperate concern was gnawing away. This he managed to conceal, though he found it impossible to banish.

  “Mr. Vice President,” the Dallas News led off, “is it true that you have been unable to contact the President since his return from Moscow?”

  “I have been in contact with the White House on several occasions—” Roger P. Croy began, but of course he was not allowed to get away with that.

  “I said the President, sir,” the Dallas News reminded politely but firmly.

  “I am not privileged to disclose my conversations with the President,” Roger Croy said, congratulating himself that this was true enough.

  “Have you had any, sir?” the New York Times inquired blandly. With equal blandness the Vice President shook his head and smiled.

  “Now, gentlemen, you know very well I can’t answer that sort of question. Furthermore, I won’t. So let’s proceed to something else, shall we?”

  “Mr. Vice President,” the Washington Star-News said, quite severely, “you are aware that there is a substantial and growing concern in the country. The President’s silence is disturbing people. Can you tell us anything about it?”

  “The President,” Roger Croy said thoughtfully, “has a great many things on his mind, right? He wants to be sure that when he speaks his words—and his actions—will contribute to a solution of the rather difficult situation in which
we find ourselves, right? Therefore, I personally don’t fault him at all for taking his time. And I think, on reflection, that you won’t either.”

  “But when, Mr. Vice President?” the Washington Post inquired. “Don’t you feel any sense of urgency about it at all?”

  Roger P. Croy flushed and for a moment looked quite annoyed.

  “Naturally I feel urgency about it,” he admitted sharply. “This is a very grave situation we are in. At the same time, however, I am prepared to trust the judgment of the President of the United States, who will act at such a time and in such a manner as he deems best. After all, what are you gentlemen complaining about? You wanted him elected President, didn’t you? Then have faith in him!”

  “Mr. Vice President—” the Post began to reply with equal sharpness, but Roger Croy gave a toss of his silver head and turned on his heel with a last riposte.

  “Have faith!” he repeated, and strode off, satisfied that their angry grumbles indicated that he had put them in their places.

  He was not, however, at all satisfied with the way things were going, and as soon as he had taken a few steps down the hall a worried frown returned to his face. Earlier this morning he had tried twice to telephone the President, only to be fobbed off by the appointments secretary with some flimsy excuse. A little while ago he had tried again and this time the appointments secretary had snapped, “The President is only taking calls of major import, Mr. Vice President!”

  “It is imperative that I speak to him,” Roger P. Croy had said evenly, keeping his temper with great difficulty. “I want to know what he thinks I should—”

  “He has other imperatives!” the appointments secretary interrupted brutally, and rang off.

  The result of this, as with so many of the appointments secretary’s arrogant rejoinders, was that it left his listener enraged and very much inclined to say, “To hell with you and the President too.” Except, of course, that one did not say that, and certainly not in such an hour.