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

by Allen Drury

  “Then perhaps,” the Chief Justice said, “we can take a recess to a time certain. It seems to me that Justice Davis is a trifle optimistic about the hour of 4 p.m. as a goal for reaching a decision, but perhaps some other member would wish to suggest an hour?”

  “How about 8 p.m.?” Justice Cappola proposed, his tone reasonable and calm once again now that the flurry appeared to be over. But of course it wasn’t.

  “Mr. Chief Justice!” Justice Osborne said sharply. “I don’t want any arbitrary limits put on a full and free discussion of this matter, it’s too important.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Justice Stevenson backed him up firmly.

  “Nor I,” said Justice Mulvaney.

  “Nor, I suppose, I,” agreed Madam Justice Watson. “But surely by midnight—”

  “Your honors,” George Wattersill said, “at the risk of intruding—”

  “You are,” Mr. Justice Cappola said—“it does seem to the Administration that if you go that late, you might just as well go to noon tomorrow in the regular order. We would be prepared, of course, to remain here all night if necessary, in case you wished further clarifications, but—”

  “Why don’t we, Mr. Chief Justice?” Mr. Justice Grant inquired.

  “Which?” the Chief Justice asked.

  “Run all night. As long as necessary. Not establish an arbitrary hour. I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Nor I,” said Justice Davis with a bland little smile. “None at all.”

  “Vote! Vote!” demanded the roar outside, and Justice Grant started and then turned upon Senator Van Ackerman a dry and withering smile.

  “Ah,” he said with a savagely gentle sarcasm. “I see you have informed them.”

  “Mr. Chief Justice—” Fred began in an ominous tone, but Justice Grant gave him a brusque, dismissing wave. He subsided, face suffused with a vengeful anger that might have disturbed Justice Grant if he had not already looked away. Many in the media observed it, however, and it did not make them feel easy.

  “Justice Davis wanted the deadline,” the Chief Justice pointed out with an indifferent air. “Will he allow us to continue beyond it?”

  Tommy gave him a sunny smile.

  “Why, certainly, it was just a suggestion, your honor, just a suggestion. I’m quite content to go on until all hours, if that suits the Administration. I don’t really think, on the basis of the vote just held, that it will matter much to the outcome.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Justice Osborne said dryly, a remark made in all innocence which would come back to haunt him later.

  “Well,” the Chief Justice said abruptly, forestalling what apparently was about to be a rather sharp retort from Tommy, “we needn’t go into that sort of thing again, it seems to me. If it is agreeable to my brethren, we will terminate the public hearing at this point and continue our discussions in private later, beginning possibly around 8 p.m. and running as late as we wish from there on. Would that be agreeable to the Court?”

  He looked along the bench at his colleagues on each hand, they all nodded, he turned back. Right on cue from outside came, “VOTE! VOTE!” Justice Cappola leaned forward and spoke in a dry, emphatic voice.

  “I would suggest, Mr. Chief Justice, since the Court is for all practical purposes under siege, that you ask the Justice Department for additional marshals and the District police for additional officers to be sent up here to protect us; and I would also suggest that justices be extremely circumspect and not venture out of the building for any purpose whatsoever until our deliberations are concluded.”

  “Oh, that is absurd!” Justice Stevenson said angrily.

  “It is?” Justice Cappola asked in the same dry tone. “Step outside, John: be my guest. I’m sure the President would welcome the opportunity to fill a vacancy on the Court so early in his term.”

  “I have nothing to fear,” Justice Stevenson said with the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. Madam Justice Watson was on it like a ferret.

  “Exactly!” she said. “Exactly so! You have nothing to fear because you will do their bidding, while we who oppose them may be subject to bodily harm. Is that what you’re trying to tell us, Mr. Justice?”

  “Not at all,” Justice Stevenson said indignantly. “Not at all!”

  But Justice Watson had obviously scored a point, and his denial fell uncomfortably into a widening pool of silence, unbroken until the Chief Justice said finally,

  “I have already sent the marshal of the Court a note requesting that he do as Justice Cappola suggests. Some minutes ago, in fact.”

  “Oh,” Justice Davis said brightly. “Then we are under siege.”

  “I do not wish to assign labels to anything,” the Chief Justice said in a tired tone. “I am telling you I have already taken steps. I join Justice Cappola in suggesting we remain in the Court. There is ample food on hand in the restaurant, we are in no danger inside the building—or out, either, I suspect. However, precautions are available and we will take them. If our deliberations carry over until tomorrow, justices, of course, can sleep in their chambers, which are fully equipped for overnight use.… So, then, gentlemen,” he said, addressing the ex-President and the Attorney General, who rose to come forward and stand side by side at the lectern, “if it is agreeable to you, we will conclude this public session, to resume in private at 8 p.m. If you wish to remain, quarters will be found for you and you may do so. I rather doubt that we will need to call you again for questioning, as the basic arguments are very clear. But we may.”

  “Then we on our side are prepared to remain,” William Abbott said.

  “And we,” George Henry Wattersill agreed.

  “And the media?” the Chief Justice inquired. There was a silence. The Times at length stood up.

  “Your honor,” he said, “speaking for myself and perhaps for my friends, I should like to remain and watch out this historic decision.”

  There was a general murmur of agreement. The Chief Justice nodded.

  “The press officer will make suitable arrangements,” he said. He looked along the bench once more, first to his right, then to his left.

  “Very well, gentlemen,” he said. “This public hearing is terminated and the Court stands in recess until 8 p.m., at which time we will take up the pending issue in camera.”

  He rose, his colleagues rose, everyone rose. The Clerk cried, “This honorable Court is now in recess until 8 p.m.!” The red velvet curtains parted, the justices turned and disappeared, the curtains fell into place again behind the empty bench. A milling about began. Into it Bronson Bernard cried out in a strong, commanding voice,

  “I will hold a press conference outside the door in five minutes!”

  “What the hell?” said many a reporter. But obediently they jostled out and took up their stations in the echoing marble corridor. A disgruntled murmuring came from beyond the walls, a last, rather halfhearted cry of “Vote! Vote!” The news had already spread and many in the mob were apparently preparing to disperse until 8 p.m., when they would resume their vigil. Miraculously there had been no really bloody clashes between NAWAC and the IDF during the past couple of hours, possibly because NAWAC had immediately appropriated the areas closest to the building and invested them in depth. An inner core remained in place as the fringes began to wander off. Enough remained, however, to fully warrant the Star-News’ final edition headline:

  SUPREME COURT UNDER SIEGE AS JUSTICES PONDER FATE OF “HELP AMERICA.”

  “The reason I’m having this press conference,” Bronnie Bernard said in a noticeably defensive tone, looking about the circle of attentive, worried faces, sensing that for the first time in decades a liberal figure was facing an openly hostile and suspicious press, “is because I intend to return to the House at once and introduce a resolution of impeachment against Justice Davis. I think he deserves it. I think the country deserves it. I think the time is now.”

  “Why does he deserve it, Congressman?” the Times inquired sharply, revealing
that a feeling of this-is-my-neck can be a marvelous educator for man or institution. “Just why does he?”

  “Because he is obstructing the policies of a great President,” Bronnie began. “Because he—”

  “Congressman,” the Post broke in harshly, also revealing a surprising deathbed conversion, “aren’t you simply parroting all the clichés we’ve been listening to from the Administration side for the past two days? Isn’t this just a naked power play to drive Justice Davis off the Court so that the Administration can have its way with this dictatorial bill?”

  “Listen to that!” Bronnie Bernard cried with an abrupt, blazing indignation. “Listen to that, will you! Talk about clichés! Talk about a prejudiced one-sided press! I never thought I’d live to see the day—Yes, so the Administration can have its way! Yes, so a great President can work out the terrible problems that face him without a lot of crap from you guys! Yes, so we can have peace! What’s wrong with peace, I’ll ask you! Let the media tell us, right here in front of television—” and he waved, somewhat wildly, at the cameras dutifully transmitting the brightly lighted scene in the historic white hallway—“let the press and the media tell us what’s wrong with peace! Go ahead! Go ahead!”

  “It isn’t a question of peace, Congressman,” the Boston Globe said coldly, “as you know damned well. It’s a question of a law which comes closer to dictatorship than we’ve ever seen yet in this country. Or ever will see, if it passes, because there won’t need to be anything more. This is it, right here. And you know that just as well as we do.”

  “I do not know that,” Bronnie Bernard cried bitterly. “I do not know that! My God, I’m a liberal! I’ve been a liberal all my life! How can you imagine that I would support anything dictatorial, anything that wasn’t for the good of all the people, the good of all this country?”

  “What makes you so sure this is for the good of the country, Congressman?” the Los Angeles Times demanded,

  “I know it is!” Bronnie Bernard cried. “I know it is! Any fool can see that!”

  “And so all fools have to accept it,” Walter Dobius said bitterly, “because you know it is best for them and so you and your precious Administration will do it, no matter who it hurts or what it destroys.”

  “‘Hurts!’ ‘Destroys!’” cried Bronnie Bernard with an almost hysterical scorn. “Listen to clichés, will you listen to clichés! My God, I’m a liberal! I’m a liberal, can’t you crazy fools get that through your heads?”

  There was a silence as they glared at one another, there in the great hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, while many an old god toppled and many an old faith crashed. Finally the Congressman spoke in a voice that he managed, with a terrific effort, just barely to control.

  “I am returning to the House, as I said, to introduce a resolution of impeachment against Justice Davis—”

  “Do you really think you can get it through in time to stop the proceedings here?” the Post interrupted with an open sarcasm.

  “It has to go to the Senate for trial, you know,” the Times agreed. “It could take weeks. They’re planning to vote here in hours.”

  “I am assured by Senator Van Ackerman,” Bronson Bernard said carefully, “and he tells me he has been assured by the Majority Leader, Senator Richardson, that the Senate will be prepared to take it up immediately.”

  “It still will take days,” the AP said shortly. “Who are you kidding?”

  “I’m kidding no one!” Bronnie Bernard cried, flaring up again. “No one! The Court has its responsibility, we have ours! Ours is to remove an illiberal, conservative, willful, reactionary old man who is standing in the way of this Administration and everything it wants to accomplish, in foreign affairs and domestic affairs, too. Everything!”

  “In other words,” Frankly Unctuous said quietly, extending a microphone to Bronnie’s lips to be sure and capture the answer, “you have to break the Court, don’t you?”

  For a long angry moment Congressman Bernard glared at him without reply. Then he snarled an answer quite clear and specific.

  “I have better things to do than waste my time talking to you fucking bastards! I’m going over and impeach Justice Davis!”

  And striding straight ahead without looking right or left, he shoved them roughly out of his way and stalked off down the hall.

  “I’m afraid Tommy’s right,” the Star-News said quietly as they stood in a dazed semi-circle watching him go. “This is the last place.”

  “And it’s going,” Walter Dobius said bitterly.

  “Tommy, baby,” the head of the AP House staff said fervently, “you’d better take care of yourself.”

  “So had we all,” Walter said, bitterness, if possible, even deeper. “So had we all.”

  At the doorway, far down the great corridor, Bronnie Bernard turned back for one last moment.

  “We’re going to impeach that reactionary old fool!” he shouted, his voice bouncing eerily off the marble. “We’re going to impeach him! Don’t you make any mistake about that!”

  But there were, of course, simpler and more efficient ways available to those who wished to use them; which, it should be said to his credit, he in all his innocent and liberal youth knew nothing about.

  He felt solemn, but also satisfied and confident of his course, as he sat in his silent chambers and waited for them to come up from the kitchen with the frugal meal he had ordered.

  This was the second time Mr. Justice Davis had defied the massive weight of Ted Jason’s political appeal compounded by the violent pressures of Ted Jason’s more radical supporters. He had won the first time, when he had ruled against Ted in the bitterly contested National Committee battle for the nomination after Harley Hudson’s death. He was certain he would win this time, and for the same reason: because he was right.

  Tommy was still old-fashioned enough to think, at this late date, that the righteous cause could win in America.

  Partly he was confident of this simply out of the old-fashioned goodness of his heart and the basic morality in which he had been reared, back in a simpler age when moral principle and devotion to democracy really meant something in government. Not everything, of course, because Lord knew, and he knew, that there had always been the trimmers, the cheaters, the subverters and the corruptibles in America, always, from the beginning. But he had grown up while there was still some sort of balance, some sort of equaling out—when decency and the cause of liberty still had a fighting chance.

  He had seen this condition change very drastically in recent decades, when those who really wanted to destroy democracy—and those who were too clever by half as they tried to appeal to all the pressure blocs with one hand and yet save democracy with the other—had, between them, come close to bringing democracy down.

  The world now was not the world he had grown up in, the world in which he had made his mark as a young anti-trust lawyer, become a leading figure in liberal causes, risen swiftly to national attention and finally, in his mid-forties, received the ultimate accolade of appointment to the Court.

  Tommy had seen many things besides water pass under the bridge, particularly the original meaning of the word “liberal.” When he began “liberal” had meant real liberalism, with all its passionate, impatient, but still basically tolerant devotion to the common weal. Now that he was in the final years of his life and service, “liberal” had come to mean the rigid, ruthless, intolerant and unyielding orthodoxy that had finally and inevitably produced the mood, the spirit and the fact of a “Help America” Act.

  Yet he remained confident that right and liberalism, as he conceived them, would prevail: and not just because he, Tommy Davis, was cast in the role of Horatio at the bridge, Dutch boy with finger in the dike, or whatever other clichés of heroism he might be representing at the moment. He wasn’t the only one standing at the bridge: he had become sharply, if ironically, aware in the last few hours that he had much strong company. From Walter Dobius to Tommy’s old crony, the gener
al director of the Post, the leaders of the media were suddenly, as the Post had put it to him a short while ago in a hurried chat on the Picturephone, “scared as hell.”

  “You’ve got to stop this law, Tommy,” the Post had said, his usual sniffy-superior expression changed to one of desperate earnestness. “It all depends on you.”

  “It does?” Tommy could not resist inquiring with a little twinkle. “Doesn’t it depend on you too?”

  “I think,” the Post said, his expression turning somber and genuinely honest at last, “that we’ve muffed it. I think it’s past time when it could depend on us.”

  “And whose fault is that?” the little Justice had inquired with some asperity. But the Post gave as good as he got.

  “Yours and ours, both, Tommy,” he said. “Yours and ours, both. How many phone calls have you made in this town, how many visits, how many little notes and letters, urging, urging, urging the liberal cause? Going by my own experience, it must run into the millions.”

  “That was in the cause of real liberalism,” Justice Davis said tartly, “Not in the cause of the Van Ackerman land.”

  “Where did we go wrong, Tommy?” the Post inquired in a tone of genuine puzzlement. “Where did the one kind slide over into the other kind? How did we stray so far from home base?”

  “I think it began,” Tommy Davis said thoughtfully, “on the day we all decided that those who disagreed with us should not only be disagreed with in return, but should be punished. When we began to lose tolerance for the opposing point of view. When we began to use our decisions, our editorials, our news stories, our broadcasts and commentaries and evening news reports, to deliberately stamp out and suppress all other points of view but our own. When we became so arrogant that we thought we and we alone knew what was best—and that anyone who disagreed must be denied his fair hearing, be suppressed, destroyed, sunk without trace. Now,” he said, somber himself, “it has been turned back upon us and we are the ones to be destroyed. And all in the name, God save the mark, of a ‘liberal’ President.”