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

by Allen Drury

  “So I’d suggest you act like a President, Mr. President, because this may be your very last chance.… We want your promise,” he concluded somberly. “And we want it now.”

  “And,” Walter Dobius spoke up, as Jawbone and Arly Richardson stirred uneasily but this time did not quite dare interrupt, “speaking on behalf of my profession, we want your promise that you will immediately denounce the Help America Act, state that you will never activate it, and seek its immediate repeal.”

  For the last time in their desperate and doom-hung conversation, silence filled the Oval Office. The President appeared pale but composed. The handsome silver head did not yield, the tired dark eyes did not waver from the contemplation they seemed to have taken up, of Abe Lincoln on the wall. With a fearful intensity his countrymen studied him for some sign of defiance, capitulation, anger, remorse, fright, determination—anything. It did not come.

  At last he sighed and lowered his eyes to stare into those of his predecessor who sat, stolid, powerful and adamant, across the enormous desk.

  “I go to Moscow and get browbeaten,” Edward M. Jason said softly, “I sit in my own office and get browbeaten. I recognize the motivations are different, but the effect upon me is very close to being the same.… Very well. I cannot promise you anything. I can only promise to give the most serious consideration to what you have proposed. I shall have to think about it. But I will. You have my word on that.”

  “Then,” William Abbott said, and his voice was filled with a growing relief, for in situations so perilous well-meaning men will grasp at any cause for hope in their leaders, no matter how much they may think cause for hope does not exist, “if you will really do that, Mr. President, I think we can go away in good spirits. Because I don’t think, after you have really thought it through, that you can do other than we ask.”

  “I shall hope I can,” the President said. “Thank you for coming.” He stood up and held out his hand gravely to each of them in turn, and each shook it with a suddenly fervent, sentimental, deeply emotional vigor. There were even tears in many eyes, of relief, of love of country, of reviving faith in Ted Jason, of reviving hope that everything would yet, somehow, be well.…

  But under the awning of the South Portico while they waited for the limousines to drive up, as a savage wind blew off the Potomac and the swiftly rising sun struck enchanted sparkles from the ice-hung trees and shrubbery, Walter Dobius said to William Abbott:

  “Do you believe we accomplished anything?”

  And the ex-President, with a sigh that seemed to come from the very depths of his being, a sigh for his country, for her President, for all the teeming millions here and everywhere whose lives hung dependent upon decisions still to be made in this fateful, haunted house, gave him a sadly troubled look and replied:

  “I’m damned if I know.”

  U.S. recognizes new regimes in Panama, Gorotoland.

  White House press secretary denies rumors Jason will ask congress to rearm against Russians. President names Wattersill head of “special branch” in charge of help America act, picks Van Ackerman to head “domestic tranquility board.”

  Hint Abbott may introduce impeachment resolution in house tomorrow. He and Munson announce immediate appeal to supreme court to overturn help America.

  NAWAC, IDF forces begin to converge on capital as anti-Jason moves gain steam.

  ***

  BOOK FIVE

  1

  “We do not know,” the Washington Star-News said somberly in its lead editorial, which hit the streets shortly before 11 a.m., “what pressures have prompted the President to move forward with so quick and drastic an implementation of the highly suspect ‘Help America Act.’ But we do know we deplore it.

  “We also deplore the fact that he is still keeping the country in the dark on what plans, if any, he may have in mind to reverse the alarming trend in world affairs touched off by the startling concessions to Soviet power which he made in his inaugural address. We give him full credit for his sincerity, but in this instance the personal sincerity of the President may not be enough. The safety of the whole American experiment may well be at stake.

  “It seems to us that serious.

  “As for the ‘Help America Act,’ we of this publication long ago concluded that George Henry Wattersill and Fred Van Ackerman are of no real help to anybody but the misfit and the mistaken. We believe this has been amply demonstrated by the careers of both. We have been uneasy ever since the President named Mr. Wattersill to the post of Attorney General, the office most directly concerned with the liberties of the citizen. Our uneasiness is compounded by his recruitment of Senator Van Ackerman, who comes trailing clouds, not of glory, but of NAWAC. We do not think the appointments mean anything good for the country, nor do we think they mean anything good for our profession. On the contrary, we think the free press and media of the United States of America are suddenly in jeopardy as they have never been before in the more than two centuries of this Republic.

  “The liberties of the citizen, we have always believed, in basic measure stand or fall with the liberties of the media. Sometimes, we will admit, some in the media have sadly abused their liberties and with them, in many indirect but inescapable ways, the liberties of the citizen. We do not condone those lapses, some of which we have ourselves no doubt been guilty of. But that does not change the basic fact of it: a free press is vital to the continuance of a free democracy.

  “Suddenly it is a question how much longer the press will be free.

  “We do not think the President can be lightly excused for this, even though he is obviously under terrible pressures. His duty to American freedom still remains, even in the midst of what seems to be the collapse of all his hopes, and ours. We still hope he will respond strongly and without equivocation to the challenge from Russia, particularly now that he has been to Moscow and savored for himself the plans and purposes of that enigmatic state. But we are deeply and earnestly alarmed if he thinks putting two of the nation’s most ruthless and arbitrary men in a position to threaten the free media of the land is one of the ways to meet the challenge.”

  In similar vein, though not quite so harshly as regards their longtime pet Wattersill—they were more critical of their more suspect friend Van Ackerman—spoke the Times, the Post, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the rest of that particular sector of the media. In similar vein spoke NBC, CBS and ABC as the morning wore on. So wrote Walter Dobius at “Salubria” for tomorrow’s column. So buzzed the world, or at least that portion of it that had control of newsprint, picture tube and airwave.

  The members of the media were suddenly scared to death. Like so many other things made vulnerable by the Presidency of the man they had helped elect to office, their own position was suddenly thrown into glaring light. Suddenly their high and mighty, unaccountable-to-anyone position seemed not so inviolate after all. For years they had screamed, “Wolf!” at the slightest challenge to their self-assumed right to describe the world as they pleased: now, abruptly, it appeared the wolf was here. After protesting hysterically for decades against the frequently justified criticisms of the fair-minded, it suddenly appeared that they were about to be done in by their friends. They found it quite unbelievable but also quite terrifying. In the privacy of the handsome offices from which they had hurled such thunderbolts against the clod-like public they secretly deplored, they were petrified. Significantly, almost none of them protested the rumors that the ex-President might be preparing a resolution of impeachment against his successor. The clear implication was that, while they did not yet (maybe never would) dare say so openly, they were beginning to conclude that this might be the only way out of a situation they themselves had done so much to create and now stood to suffer from as much as, if not more than, anyone in the country.

  Whether or not he was planning impeachment resolutions, William Abbott refused to say to the reporters who besieged him in the lobby of the House shortly before noon.
In fact, he refused to say anything, except, tersely, “Come with me.”

  “How’s that?” the head of the AP house staff asked blankly.

  “I said,” said William Abbott, getting his hat and coat, “‘Come with me.’”

  “That’s funny, we thought you said, ‘Come with me,’” AP remarked. “Where?”

  “You have no spirit of adventure,” the ex-President told him.

  “It’s weakening,” AP said as his clustering colleagues joined him in rather wan laughter. “Do we have time to get our hats and coats or do you want us to freeze to death?”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes,” William Abbott said.

  “How about cars?” UPI inquired.

  “Don’t bother,” Bill Abbott said. “We’ll walk.”

  “What the hell—?” AP said as they tumbled over one another getting to the elevators, up the stairs, into the Press Gallery, down again. “In weather like this? Is the old man reviving the LBJ Memorial Walkie-Talkies?”

  But when they joined him just inside the entrance, some thirty or forty of them suited up for the steel-cold sunshine that awaited them outside, they could see it was no lighthearted expedition but grimly serious business. Senator Munson, Senator Strickland and Senator Danta had joined the ex-President. They nodded gravely to their friends in the press corps but indulged in no banter. “Come,” William Abbott said. Obediently they followed, out the door, through the archway, toward what they had guessed would be their destination: the Supreme Court, standing stately and sedate, white against the white of the winter world, across Capitol Plaza.

  “And so, Mr. Chief Justice, if it please your honorable Court,” the ex-President concluded gravely, “petitioners, who include those you see before you, plus Representative Harold Knox of Illinois, absent because of a monstrous bereavement we all know about, plus several other members of both houses of Congress whose names are appended, request this honorable Court to pass judgment at once upon the constitutionality of the so-called Help America Act, Public Law 1 of this Congress signed yesterday by the President. We shall be glad to answer any question you or other members of your honorable Court may wish to propound to us. And,” he added, looking somberly around the small, dark, red-velvet-marble-and-leather room at George Henry Wattersill, Senator Van Ackerman and Congressman Bernard (all of whom had appeared, breathless and taken by surprise, a few moments before), “we will also be glad to answer any who may wish to oppose our petition.

  “In summation, it is our position that this law is unconstitutional per se and on its face; that it gives to the government of the United States, in the person of the President and those he may designate to exercise his authority for him, very vast and dangerous powers over American citizens and American institutions; that censorship, suppression of free thought, suppression of dissent and actual physical control of the thoughts and the actions of the individual citizen and many very important American institutions are both implicit and unavoidable in the language, the intent and, I am afraid, the purpose of the law; and that it is basically repugnant and horrendous to the liberties of a free people and particularly to the free people of the Republic of the United States of America. We respectfully urge your honorable Court to expunge it from American history before so much as another day goes by. Its provisions are too dangerous in the wrong hands, or indeed in any hands, for it to remain on the books even an hour longer.

  “We so respectfully petition, your honor.”

  During the interval while he sat down and George Henry Wattersill prepared to rise, there was time for the tensely watching group of newsmen to glance quickly around the room and appraise the leading participants in this latest episode in the on-racing career of Edward M. Jason the Peacemaker and his distraught country. There was also time to hear a rising murmur, at first far-off then rapidly nearer and louder: the sound of NAWAC, the IDF and their respective friends, supporters and hangers-on, hurrying up from the city below to swarm in ever-increasing numbers into Capitol Plaza. It was an animal sound, ominous, ugly and uneasy: the sound of a human volcano, building up.

  It was obvious that the implications of this were not lost upon the occupants of the small, sequestered room. The first to take official notice was the Chief Justice, that actually aging but outwardly still-youthful figure appointed soon after the end of the second Nixon term. Hurriedly he beckoned to the bailiff, hurriedly the bailiff hurried away. Within moments extra guards appeared at the doors and presumably, although no one inside could know for sure, along the corridors and outside at the great marble portals that looked out upon the roiling park. What good they could actually do against a determined assault, being most of them aging pensioners of the Court or elderly constituents who had been given their jobs as the Court’s obeisance to the powerful chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, remained to be seen. But it was obvious they were prepared to do their best if they had to.

  In the room, from which the public had been cleared twenty minutes earlier so that it was now occupied only by the petitioners from Congress, their opponents from the Administration, the media and the Justices, it was obvious that these preparations, and their cause, were making everyone nervous. But there was a job to be done, and a most serious and fundamental one; and so for a time they managed to proceed as though everything were the same in America as it had always been, and that by so proceeding, they could keep it that way by sheer force of institution.

  Beside the ex-President in the front row sat his colleagues from the Senate. Further along sat the Attorney General, Bronnie Bernard and the junior Senator from Wyoming, clothed now in all the dignity of his new position as head of the Domestic Tranquility Board. The dignity did not seem to extend too far, for Fred Van Ackerman was too obviously enjoying himself as he sat glancing with a sardonic air of superiority at William Abbott and his group. Fred, in fact, appeared to be the only man really enjoying himself at the moment. Even George Henry Wattersill and Bronnie Bernard looked tense and serious.

  Equally tense and serious were the members of the Court, called now to pass upon one of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental, questions ever to come before them. This time there was no protective shield furnished by what they always called “the courts below.” Nobody beneath their august level had cushioned the shock of the case by ruling upon it first. This came to them ab initio and they stood exposed in the eye of the hurricane. It is not a position the Court relishes, and it was obvious it did not relish it now. Its members appeared distinctly worried, uneasy and apprehensive.

  This was true of the Chief Justice himself and of Justices Grant, Osborne, Stevenson and Mulvaney to his right; and it was true of Justices Davis, Montgomery, Cappola and Madam Justice Watson on his left. In the quick whispered tallyings and analyzings of the media, it was generally assumed that the Chief and Justices Davis, Osborne, Stevenson and Mulvaney would, on the basis of past track records, vote to deny petitioners and uphold the government; while Justice Cappola, Justice Montgomery, Justice Grant and Madam Justice Watson would vote to uphold petitioners and defy the government. It therefore came as something of a shock when, just as the Attorney General was tossing his famous leonine mane and getting ready to deliver another of his famed oratorical salvos, Justice Davis spoke up from his position, as senior justice, on the C.J.’s left.

  “I trust the Attorney General,” he said quietly, “will refrain from extraneous oratorical flourishes and address himself directly to the very serious issues raised by petitioners. I think the Court would appreciate that, Mr. Chief Justice. At least I would.”

  (“Well, what do you know,” the Post whispered to the Times. “Is Tommy going to be the swing man?” “I wouldn’t have believed it before,” the Times whispered back, “but suddenly everything has become unpredictable.”)

  “Well, Mr. Chief Justice,” George Wattersill said, obviously flustered by this gentle but firm interruption, “of course I—of course I—”

  “Let him ha
ve it,” Fred Van Ackerman whispered fiercely at his side, and this seemed to give the Attorney General a boost.

  “I shall of course defer as much as possible to the wishes of the Court for expedition,” he said with a somewhat defiant firmness, “but I cannot, of course, slight what we believe to be the merits of the government’s case.”

  “Mr. Chief Justice,” the ex-President said, rising, in an ominous tone of voice, “in this instance I think we can dispense with the term ‘the government’ in the arguments of counsel opposite. My colleagues and I, I will remind the Attorney General and his friend, are members of ‘the government’ also, fully coordinate and co-equal with anything he may represent. I would suggest we just talk about ‘the Administration,’ if my distinguished opponent will be so kind.”

  The Chief Justice nodded, without other comment, and after a moment of annoyed silence George Wattersill proceeded.

  “Very well, your honor, the Administration, then. We in the Administration believe we have merit on our side. We in the Administration believe petition should be denied. I will tell the Court why, if it pleases your honors. If there be flourishes,” he added dryly, giving Tommy Davis a look and gaining confidence as he went along, “then that, I am afraid, must just be put down to my characteristic style of argumentation. This Court, other courts and numerous clients, I will say to Mr. Justice Davis, have not found it insufferable.”

  “Nor I, Mr. Attorney General,” Tommy Davis said, “as long as it doesn’t get too windblown. We are under some pressures here to expedite. As witness,” he added as there came a sudden swelling, cause unknown, in the distant roar and everyone turned to glance with varying degrees of concern and apprehension at the guarded doors, “what is going on outside.”