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

by Allen Drury

  Bronson Bernard and his generation were the great innocents who could do horrible things to their fellow beings, simply because they had been taught no other way of dealing with them. And this they were now about to do.

  He wondered impatiently why the House took so long to get down to business, and made a mental note to talk about it to his already rapidly widening circle of friends among the new members. House rules were antiquated, outmoded, inefficient, deliberately designed to permit the forces of reaction to retain their control of the democratic process. Bronnie and his friends would get to that in due time, he promised himself grimly. But first, of course, they had to get the Help America bill through. With a serene and absolutely sincere conviction that the bill was entirely necessary, and a serene and absolutely sincere inability to perceive any of its dangers to democracy, he arose when it presently came time for him to open debate and stated his case with a youthful and stirring fervor.

  “Mr. Speaker!” he began, and the challenge of his tone disclosed that all those medals for debating at Harvard had not been ill-accorded. “We meet here in a grave moment for the American Republic—a moment which makes it imperative that we consult, not the old and outworn fears of the past, but the new and dynamic opportunities that have come to us with the Presidency of Edward M. Jason.

  “Opportunities which, I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, come but seldom to a people.… ”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary,” the guard at the East Gate said politely, “but the appointments office doesn’t appear to have anything on the list for you—for any of you. Perhaps if you could come back later—”

  “Listen,” Ewan MacDonald MacDonald said with a rare show of anger, his clipped Scottish accent at its driest and most acerbic. “You get back on that phone and you tell the appointments office for me that the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on their way in, and if the appointments office wishes to shoot us down at the door of the Oval Office they are welcome to do so, because that’s the only way we’re going to be stopped. Come along, gentlemen.”

  And with an expressive whirl of his chunky body, he turned on his heel and started up the curving drive, dutifully followed by his colleagues of the armed services, bundled against the savage wind which tore through the city under a bleak and elusive winter sun.

  Other guards, worried, upset, distraught, politely trying to follow orders but not quite daring to use physical force against the phalanx that bore down upon them, attempted to stop it at the east door, the entry to the corridor leading past the Rose Garden, the door to the corridor outside the Oval Office, the door of the Oval Office itself. Ewan MacDonald MacDonald, a stubborn man enraged and desperately worried by events, was an impressive sight backed by his admiral, his Army general, his Air Force general and his Marine general; and within five minutes after their arrival at the East Gate they were standing before the closed door of the Oval Office.

  “Mr. Secretary—” the appointments secretary said in a tone of angry dismay.

  “Announce us!” Ewan MacDonald ordered flatly, “And no more of your damned nonsense.”

  “The President—” the appointments secretary began, but with a sudden imperious, contemptuous gesture the Secretary of Defense stepped forward and threw open the door.

  Hushed, orderly, impressive and serene, the empty office appeared before them, everything in place, not a single piece of paper, not even a pencil, on the gleaming expanse of the mammoth desk.

  “Where is he?” Ewan MacDonald demanded. “What have you done with him?”

  “I haven’t ‘done’ anything with him!” the appointments secretary spat out “If you hadn’t been so damned stubborn—he’s over in the Mansion and he isn’t receiving anyone this afternoon.”

  “He has got to receive us,” the Secretary said, while behind him the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave worried, confirming nods. “The situation is deteriorating so fast we must do something. We must.”

  “Mr. Secretary,” the appointments secretary said, and for the first time in their brief acquaintance Ewan MacDonald perceived that he might be human too, “believe me, I am as scared as you are. I am as scared as hell. But all I can do is what the President tells me, and he’s told me that he won’t see anyone at all today or tonight, except Mrs. Knox. He has an appointment with her at three. In fact”—he glanced at his watch—“she’s a little overdue already. I have orders to take her directly to the Lincoln Study, and she’s the only person he’s going to see today. Believe me, Mr. Secretary, I’m not being arbitrary or insulting to you personally, or to you gentlemen of the Joint Chiefs. It’s just his orders. I haven’t any choice.”

  “We can understand that,” the chief of staff of the Army agreed, and again they all nodded, more friendly now.

  “Well—” Ewan MacDonald said uncertainly.

  “Why don’t we do this?” the appointments secretary suggested. “Why don’t you just sit down in here and wait, and I’ll get word to him right away that you’re here, and perhaps after he’s seen Mrs. Knox he’ll see you. All right?”

  “All right,” Ewan MacDonald said. “Fair enough.” He offered his hand. “I’m sorry if I sounded—”

  “No, that’s all right,” the appointments secretary said, accepting it thankfully. “It’s a tough time for everybody. Have a seat, gentlemen, and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can.”

  But after they had sat for ten minutes in the fateful room, burdened now by history as it perhaps had never been before—after each had thought his long long thoughts about America and reviewed all his desperate fears and worries about it in this dreadful hour—the appointments secretary came back openly dejected, shaking his head.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “The request is in. I’ll just have to let you know.”

  “Very well,” the Secretary said. “Come along, gentlemen. I only hope,” he said, trying not to sound bitter, “that Mrs. Knox can say something to him, since the rest of us don’t have the chance.”

  “She’s late,” the appointments secretary repeated with a frown. “I’m going to have to check with our people who went after her.”

  On the second floor of the Mansion, in the little narrow room off the Lincoln Bedroom which over the years had come to be known, to those of his successors who had used it as a place to brood, ponder or exult, as “the Lincoln Study,” the solitary figure by the window made no movement, uttered no sound as he watched them go out through the East Gate to be whisked away in their Pentagon limousine. Looking idly down on the street below as the minutes ticked past 3 p.m., he could see the traffic passing between the White House and the Treasury. It looked like the traffic of any other day. Nobody would know the world wasn’t going along about as it always had. What are you thinking, people? he wondered. Are you frightened too?

  But of course he knew they were, and he knew that inevitably he must sooner or later reassure them. They were looking to him for guidance, comfort, leadership, hope. They were looking to him to act and he knew he must act. He knew also that every hour that passed without action could only make action more difficult when it finally came. Yet he still had not found the key, and the one thing his exhausted mind still clung to was the certain knowledge that unless he had answers and a positive solution to offer, it would be better not to speak at all than to offer a feeble and ill-prepared response.

  This, if ever, was the time for the American President to think. American Presidents were supposed to think. They were supposed to have the answers. They were supposed to know everything, be always confident, always strong. If and when they confronted Doomsday, they were supposed to know what to do.

  All of them, that is, except the one who finally did confront Doomsday: who, through the lazy, overconfident hopes, the devious, too-clever-by-half maneuverings, or the careless, overly wishful trespasses of his predecessors, found himself and his nation suddenly naked in the gale of history with nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide and nothing to do but—what? Touch the bu
tton and blow up the world in an agony of lost hopes and failed purposes? Or surrender the nation and all its dreams, and close the book of time upon an experiment unable to triumph over the built-in potentials of its own destruction?

  This was the choice he confronted, or so he believed; and down there in the street, on the Hill, in the great cluttered cities, the peaceful small towns, the farmlands, the deserts, the mountains, lakes and prairies, they did not know this. And therefore his silence only frightened them more.

  He was aware of their fright, as he was aware of his own, and of the reasons for it which they did not know and which he perhaps might never be able to bring himself to tell them. Yet the responsibility was his. He had wanted it, he had received it, and he had tried to exercise it, in the way that seemed most enlightened and most worthy in the eyes of God, for his nation and for mankind.

  “Why didn’t it go right?” he demanded in a sudden anguished outcry, hastily choked off lest any unexpected servant wandering the Mansion hear him. But he knew the answer to his own question. And again he was silent and nothing broke the brooding hush of the Lincoln Study.

  There must be a key: there must be a way out. In some almost superstitious fashion, as though he could draw from her some mysterious transfer of strength from her volatile, pragmatic husband, he clung desperately to the thought of Beth Knox, who would soon be here and might be able to give him advice and encouragement and work with him to discover and decide what he must do.

  He waited and he hoped; and yet, when the appointments secretary presently entered, white-faced and shaking, to tell him that it was not to be, his tired mind seemed unable to feel surprise. One more horror on top of so many was not unexpected, somehow. It seemed to be the pattern of life that God had ordained for Edward M. Jason at this particular moment in time, and he was not really surprised to learn of another of its consistencies.

  “Call the Attorney General for me,” he said in a voice almost devoid of expression, “and tell him I said to do everything we possibly can to help.”

  “If you will forgive me, sir,” the appointments secretary said, “I have already taken it upon myself to do that. He’s got the FBI on it already.”

  “Good,” he said in the same mechanical way. “Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir,” the appointments secretary said, and hesitated, on the verge of some blurt of sympathy, some offer of assistance, some human gesture that might help the man whose burdens were so terribly great. But the President did not stir, the moment vanished. The appointments secretary, looking young and desolate, swiftly withdrew.

  Patiently the silent figure in the rocker by the window resumed its perusal of the traffic in the street.

  Sitting calmly at his desk, still in the front row on the majority side but now some seats away from the front seat on the aisle that he had occupied for so many years as Majority Leader, Robert Durham Munson of Michigan stared around what he kept thinking of as “the new Senate” with a thoughtfully somber air that was not lost upon the Press Gallery above. The afternoon was already half gone. He and Warren Strickland and a few others had managed to delay the start of debate on the Help America bill with a series of brief statements on other matters, routine insertions of material in the Congressional Record, elaborately prolonged discussions of minor issues and other time-consuming trivia. But now the time had come for the junior Senator from Wyoming to begin argument for his dreadful measure and the time of delay was over.

  “Would you say Bobby and Warren have been filibustering?” AP leaned over to ask UPI in the front row of the gallery, as Fred Van Ackerman sought and received recognition from the president pro tempore, shrewd old Lacey Pollard of Texas.

  “Not yet,” UPI said with a grin. “Just practicing. The filibuster may come later. And,” he said, smile fading, “not such a bad idea, if you ask me.

  “Yes,” AP agreed. “This is a damned peculiar piece of legislation.”

  “A damned frightening one,” the New York Times said from the desk above. “Can’t you see Freddy censoring the press?”

  “I can,” AP agreed. “That’s what scares me.”

  “This new Senate,” the Washington Post said with a certain relish, “is likely to do almost anything.”

  “Thank God we have a few old hands left,” UPI said.

  “A few,” AP remarked glumly, “but not many. Have you talked to any of this new breed? They’re getting ready to set up a guillotine.”

  “I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” the Post said. “The Senate has a way of taming down firebrands.”

  “Mr. Post,” the Times said dryly as below them Senator Van Ackerman cried, “Mr. President!” in a harsh and demanding tone, “meet Mr. Firebrand. He’s got buddies, this time.”

  “Maybe,” the Post agreed, though skeptically. “But I still think the Senate will tone them down.”

  “The Senate as we have known it is dead,” AP said flatly as they concluded their sotto voce conversation and turned to the business of taking notes. “Believe me, this is a new breed.”

  Yet for a time it did not seem that the changes brought by the Jason landslide had done so very much to the United States Senate. It was true that there were some fifty new members, a relatively massive turnover brought about by the usual election of one third of the membership every two years plus an unusual number of vacancies due to death or retirement. But for those who had not had time to talk to many of them in depth—and in this last hectic week since inauguration, few had—they appeared on the surface to be much like any other group of newcomers to the Hill. The majority were under forty, several barely thirty, and most of those who were over forty were very conscious of, and self-congratulatory about, how well they “related” to their younger colleagues; but outwardly they had given little sign as yet of any unified desire to upset traditional patterns. They had defeated Bob Munson for Majority Leader, which had startled most experienced Washington observers, but that could have been brought about by many different causes. He had finally concluded, himself, that it was basically just a youthful desire for change, strengthened of course by the President’s wishes. He had held the power for a dozen years and it was probably understandable, though hurtful, that a new President and a new group of his followers should want someone else. And it wasn’t as though they had chosen anyone very radical: just waspish old Arly Richardson of Arkansas, who had a couple of years on Bob Munson and was certainly no flaming liberal.

  He was pliable, though, Bob reflected, watching the sycophantic way in which he was following Fred Van Ackerman’s every word: vain, egotistical, intellectually arrogant, intellectually flatterable: a man who would go along, which was obviously what the President wanted, as his letter to the Senate had made thoroughly clear.

  But go along where, and with what? With this terribly dangerous monstrosity of a bill that Van Ackerman had suddenly produced? With this abject surrender to the Russians that appeared to be Ted Jason’s tacit response to their deliberate démarche against the United States? With drift, paralysis, terrifying inaction at the head of the government at a moment when America’s whole world appeared to be collapsing?

  What was the matter with the man? Senator Munson wondered for the thousandth time. And what could be done about it?

  There were plans afoot already to get up a deputation to call upon him. Bill Abbott had dropped over from the House a while ago to convey Beth’s warning to him and to Cullee. They had agreed that things could not be permitted to drift much longer—not later than tomorrow, probably. They would have to rally a group that could not be denied, and insist that the President see them. They would announce their visit to the press, and he would not be able to say no unless he wished to destroy the last vestige of public confidence and put the final cap on public fear.

  But when they did see him, what could they accomplish? From what he had experienced of Ted Jason so far, Senator Munson did not have many hopes. He had seen him slide skillfully out from under too many attempts to pin
him down, to feel very sanguine about it. Except that this time he could not be allowed to slide out from under. This time he could be allowed no escape, for, indeed, there was none.

  Meanwhile, Fred Van Ackerman, ranging back and forth along the center of the majority side, was stating the official defense for everything that was going on. Presently, Bob knew, he would rise to answer. For the time being, he could only marvel anew at the vast rationalization that was comforting the President’s supporters in this hour when all their basic assumptions were being challenged.

  You would never know the challenge existed, to hear Fred Van Ackerman.

  “Mr. President,” he said, his voice still relatively calm though it would no doubt soon rage up under pressure, “I rise to urge passage of S. 1776, a bill to help America overcome the disruptive activities of her enemies both foreign and domestic. I wish to give notice to all Senators that I and the proponents of the bill intend to keep the Senate in session until the bill is passed, even if that means an all-night session. The leadership tells me this is perfectly agreeable, considering the desperate nature of the situation that exists in the nation. Am I correct, I will ask the distinguished Senator from Arkansas?”

  “The Senator is entirely correct,” Arly Richardson agreed promptly, hardly bothering to rise from his seat. There was an approving murmur from many Senators, objections from a few, a little ripple of applause from the galleries, filled with the now customary scattering of NAWAC representatives. Lacey Pollard in the chair looked stern but did not rap the gavel. Fred went on, his voice beginning to fill with sarcasm.

  “Now, Mr. President,” he said, “there seem to be a few timorous people around who are worried about this bill. And they’re even more worried about what’s going on in the world right now—as they see it. I say to them, it’s what’s going on inside the country that’s truly disturbing, not what’s going on outside. Because, outside, things aren’t so bad.”