Headlines of the late-afternoon editions played the story. The front page of the tabloid Washington Daily News used huge type: “Like Cal, Jim Does Not Choose To Run.” It was the top story in the red-bordered final of the Washington Evening Star: “MacVeagh Takes Sherman. Keeps Senate Seat.” A friend in New York called Carlson to read him the World-Telegram’s headline: “MacVeagh’s Out. Who’s In?”
In the Senate press gallery Craig Spence frowned at a typewriter, scratched his freckled, bald head, then began a two-finger drumming on the keys. It was his daily offering for the syndicate which that night would wire his words to 150 newspapers from Jersey City to Honolulu:
The real reason Senator James F. MacVeagh of Iowa suddenly withdrew his name from consideration for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination may not be revealed for years.
Some future professor of history undoubtedly will print the reason in a dry, dull little book which nobody will read, because nobody will care any longer. And therein lies the frustration of political writing. The motivations that produce the big stories only rarely are revealed at the time, and sometimes never. “There is no history,” President John F. Kennedy once told his confidant, Kenneth O’Donnell. Kennedy, with his acute political perception, recognized that what we call history is a patchwork of guessing, thirdhand reports and formal state documents, most of which penetrate the kernel of truth only occasionally.
This is by way of warning the reader to take all speculation on MacVeagh’s astounding renunciation with reservation, for all of us who write political commentary will only be guessing at the truth.
James MacVeagh is known for his refreshing candor, and deservedly so, but in this instance even his best friends find it difficult to accept MacVeagh’s own stated reasons—youth, inexperience, lack of capacity to handle the presidency in event tragedy should move him into President Hollenbach’s office. He is young, but he is not inexperienced. As for his capacity, the potential is enormous, even though as yet the junior senator from Iowa has been tested but rarely on major issues of the day.
Jim MacVeagh is one of the most forthright, intellectually honest, and unusual young politicians to reach Washington in many years, and he will not fade from the limelight. Instead, a certain mystery will cling to his unexpected announcement….
Spence lit a cigarette, crossed his long legs, and sat staring at what he had written. He sat for a long time, his stomach knotting as his deadline approached, and when he finally resumed writing, he realized that his words merely proved that he was right in warning the reader against all speculation, including his own. For Spence, despite his close friendship with MacVeagh, had not the smallest clue as to why Jim had slammed the door on his own future.
MacVeagh’s own mind was fastened on a future only two days away, the Thursday night meeting at Cavanaugh’s home, which O’Malley informed him cryptically by phone had now been arranged. Sitting blankly at his office desk, isolated from his staff by orders that he not be disturbed, Jim tried to erect the case for the plaintiff, Jim MacVeagh, Citizen, vs. Mark Hollenbach, President. The more he thought the more he visualized ponderous, bulky Speaker Nicholson and adroit, incisive Fred Odium. For these men would his story have the texture of floss? Cavanaugh was another matter. With his judicious temperament and his zest for truth, the Supreme Court justice at least would weigh all the evidence. O’Malley, Jim knew, was halfway convinced already, but O’Malley would do nothing unless the others insisted that he act. Somehow, Jim felt, he must persuade Nicholson and the cynical Odium, but unless they could hear Rita with their own ears, scrutinize her features as she talked, they would never believe him. There was no way out. She must come to St. Leonard’s Creek Thursday night.
He reached her on the phone only after a long delay. Calls were stacked up for Donovan’s office, the national committee’s switchboard girl explained, in the wake of Senator MacVeagh’s surprise announcement. Rita accepted his call without comment.
“Rita,” he said, “I need your help badly. Something has come up that involves—well—national security. There’s a private meeting Thursday night of some important men, and I want you to come along with me and repeat that story you told me about President Hollenbach and that Chicago banker, Davidge. I know this is asking a lot but, Rita, it’s vital to the country.”
“Has this got something to do with those agents who called on me?” Her voice was wary.
“Yes, in a way.”
“You mean you want me to tell that Davidge story to the FBI?”
“No, no,” said Jim. “These aren’t FBI men. It’s an allied matter, but it’s something much bigger than any security check, Rita—”
“I don’t repeat conversations with the President,” she cut in, her tone hostile. “And I don’t like what’s going on. Have you any explanation for that other agent’s visit yet?”
“No, I haven’t, not yet. But, Rita, this is something else, much more important. Believe me.”
“Believe you?” Her laugh was brittle. “You’re acting mighty strange lately. This press conference of yours tops everything. You’d hardly begun to run when, suddenly, you quit.”
MacVeagh hurried into the opening. “You know why I did that, Rita. After that FBI security check, how could I possibly risk the chance that your name would be dragged into the open? I don’t blame you for being upset, but at least give me credit for trying to protect you.”
She softened. “I do, Jim. Of course, there’s you and your wife too.”
“I don’t deny that, Rita.”
“Now that you’ve quit the race, things aren’t much different than they used to be, are they?” It was her old voice, low, throaty.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that if something is already in FBI files anyway, there isn’t much more to lose, is there?”
“Oh.” He could hear Martha’s racking sobs, and he wanted to reiterate that the affair with Rita was over forever, but he didn’t. He needed Rita Thursday night, desperately. “No,” he said, “I suppose there isn’t.”
“I’m sorry I lost my temper yesterday, Jims.”
“That’s okay, baby,” he said hurriedly, “but that’s got nothing to do with this other thing. You’ve just got to come Thursday night.”
“What’s the purpose?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you. You’ve just got to trust me now. Later, sometime, I can tell you.”
“Trust you. Haven’t I heard that before? That’s becoming quite a word in your vocabulary.”
“I know it.” The desperation was with him again and his tone reflected it. “This is urgent, Rita. It concerns the safety of the country. It really does. You’ve just got to come to that meeting. Please—for my sake.”
She was silent a moment, and he could hear her breathing. “Damn you, Jim,” she said. “You’re in my blood and you know it. Sometimes I wish I’d never met you.”
“But you will come?”
“Yes, Jims, I will—for your sake,” she said quietly.
“Thanks, baby. You’re a sweetheart.”
“Forget it,” she said, briskly competent again. But she mouthed a kiss into the phone as she hung up.
When he replaced the receiver, MacVeagh found that his palms were sweating. It had been close. He had played on her emotions, letting her think that their love could be renewed, and he felt like a heel for the forgery. But at this juncture he would do anything. She had to be at Cavanaugh’s. Without Rita there would be little chance of convincing Nicholson and Odium. Now there was a possibility.
There was a rap on the door, and Carlson put his head into the room.
“I know you’re not supposed to be disturbed,” he said, “but I’ve got a favor to ask you. An awful problem is bugging me, and it won’t wait.”
“That’s okay,” said MacVeagh. “Come on in, Flip. What can I do for you?”
; “This sounds ridiculous on a day like this,” said Carlson, “but that fat little dame who wants to make the chrysanthemum the national flower is driving me batty. She’s staging a sit-in in the reception room, and she claims she won’t leave until you agree to see her.”
MacVeagh grimaced and waved an arm as though to ward off a blow. “Oh, Jesus, no, Flip. Not that. Not today. She’s nutty as a fruitcake. If she gets in here we won’t get her out for two hours.”
Mrs. Jessica Tate Byerson, with the enormous white chrysanthemum at her challenging bosom—symbolizing, according to Mrs. Byerson, purity, generosity, love which would transform American foreign policy into a thing of beauty forever—padded the marble corridors of House and Senate day after day.
She knew every legislator by sight, and none could elude her when once observed. Seeing her enter the rotunda, men had been known to blanch and scuttle down a flight of side steps into the bowels of the Capitol. She haunted the Congressional offices, made life miserable for secretaries, and gave impromptu lectures to tourists, many of whom signed her long, crackling petitions to canonize the chrysanthemum. Never had a flower had such a belligerently saccharine advocate. Terrorized by her tactics, which centered on target like a dentist’s drill, several hundred congressmen had agreed to vote the mum into national sainthood. Mrs. Byerson, the “mum’s mum,” was the most persistent threat to the untrammeled freedom of the American legislator since the birth of the first veterans’ organization.
“Please, Jim,” pleaded Carlson, “if you agree to see her for ten minutes—ten minutes only—I’ll guarantee to get her out, if I have to smother her with her damned handbag. Otherwise she’ll sit in that outer office all week. She’s a menace to navigation. Everybody who comes in the door goes into a state of siege.”
“Ten minutes?” asked Jim. “You promise…on pain of getting fired if she stays one second longer?”
“I do.”
MacVeagh grinned. “All right, send her in. But, man, you’ll really owe me one after this.”
“Anything, boss, anything. Right?”
Jessica Tate Byerson sailed into the inner office like a bloated spinnaker. Her fat face, flushed with the exertion of the long campaign, was damp and she tapped at her brow with a lace handkerchief. She beamed at MacVeagh, plumped her handbag on his desk, and handed him three pamphlets simultaneously. When she sank into a chair, her feet barely touched the floor, but her pulpy thighs swelled over the sides of the chair. She wore a purple suit, the pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings, and her layered straw hat sat on her stringy blonde hair like a stack of wheat-cakes. A white chrysanthemum was pinned to her ferocious bosom.
“You’ve been trying to avoid me, Senator,” she admonished him. Her voice had a tinkling, bell-like cadence, strangely delicate from such a muffin of a figure. “I can’t understand what you’ve got against mums.”
“I have absolutely nothing against the chrysanthemum.” Jim decided he would not be bullied. “But neither do I think we need a national flower.”
“Ah, Senator,” she trilled, “how woefully shortsighted! Do you realize that practically every garden club in Iowa has joined the crusade to make the white mum America’s flower?”
“Indeed, I do, Mrs. Byerson. The letters come in here by the bale, and while I think that’s a tribute to your skill as a lobbyist, I also think the whole business is downright silly.”
“Silly?” Mrs. Byerson’s damp face lost its smile and her brow wrinkled as though she were recoiling from a stab of pain. “Oh, Senator, how could you be so cruel—and so ignorant of the true facts.”
“Facts are facts, Mrs. Byerson,” said Jim tartly. If he could offend her quickly, she might leave within the ten minutes. “There are no such things as true facts, for then we’d have to have false facts, wouldn’t we?”
“You’re trying to trap me with words,” she said indignantly, “and I do so terribly with words. I deal in sentiment, Senator, in what the heart speaks. And, if you would but listen, the heart of America is speaking today, imploring you to give this great country a national flower that it can wear proudly—”
“I went all through that with the rose and the sunflower. The corn tassel too, for that matter,” said Jim, “and I maintain it’s all utter nonsense. Mrs. Byerson, you may not realize it, but we are elected to legislate on the demanding problems facing the country, the balance of payments, ending unemployment, keeping the peace, you name it. We’re not here to worry about idiotic trifles.”
“Ah!” She brightened. “That’s just it. Once we adopt the white mum—purity, generosity, love—every aspect of foreign policy would take on new meaning. Our deeds would shine like our words, and our friends across the seas would find a new sincerity in all that we proposed.”
Mrs. Byerson tinkled along, rippling like the upper keys of a piano. She heaved and squirmed in her seat as she delivered her “A” lecture—for the intelligent but unenlightened—and she dabbed now and then at her temples with her limp lace handkerchief. Jim looked at his wrist watch. Four minutes to go. His mind veered to Mark Hollenbach, to the Thursday night meeting, and to his own perplexing dilemma. The lady lobbyist’s voice seemed as remote as faraway chapel bells. She must have noted the absence in his face, for she suddenly turned up her volume.
“…and if my crusade is so ridiculous, how do you explain the fact that the White House has endorsed my legislation?”
“What’s that?” Jim realized he had been questioned.
“I said, how do you explain the fact that the White House has endorsed my idea?”
“Oh, come now, Mrs. Byerson,” said Jim, “let’s not play games with each other. The White House has turned thumbs down on the chrysanthemum bill at least twice to my knowledge.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Byerson breathed deeply, mysteriously. “The White House did take that position, but no longer. The next report from the White House will be favorable, you watch.”
“I won’t hold my breath, dear lady.”
“You won’t have to. I have President Hollenbach’s personal promise on behalf of the mum.”
Jim frowned skeptically. “President Hollenbach told you he would support your national flower legislation?”
“Not exactly.” The little bells of her voice clanged conspiratorially. “He told me something much more interesting. If I tell you, can I swear you to secrecy?”
“Absolutely.” Puzzled, Jim was alert now.
“Well, you mustn’t whisper a word of this, because the President warned me not to tell a soul, but he’s working on a project for a big union of some kind—with other countries, you know—and he promises me the white mum will get priority consideration as the symbolic flower of this union. He’s going to have a special tree too, the aspen.”
Her face glowed with triumph. Her straw hat perched raffishly on her head, and she began a happy tapping with her feet, stretching slightly to reach the floor. Jim MacVeagh leaned across the desk, studying her.
“When did you see the President?” he asked.
“Last Wednesday afternoon.” She winked at him. “Two weeks ago I told his press secretary that I was going to sit in the lobby until I got to see the President. He tried to pull me out, physically, but I resisted him. The next morning they wouldn’t let me in the front gate, so I just went to Senator Hempstead’s office and told the senator that I was going to sit in his office until he got me an appointment with the President. It took twelve days, but in the end I got in to see the President.”
“What time did you see him Wednesday?”
“At four-thirty-five,” she said, beaming. “And I didn’t stay just five minutes. He kept me there 15 minutes, he was so interested.”
Jim crossed to her chair, took her chubby hands and pulled Mrs. Byerson to her feet.
“I’ll make you a promise,” he said. “If you can get a unanimous report from the Judiciary Committe
e and your bill gets to the floor, I’ll vote for it.”
“How lovely and thoughtful, Senator MacVeagh.” Her smile was angelic, blissfully distant, as though these victories were fashioned, after all, in heaven. She took her vast handbag from MacVeagh’s desk, rummaged a bit, and withdrew a pencil and notebook.
“I’m marking you down, Senator,” she tinkled. “Just two more names, and I’ll have a majority of the whole Congress.”
“Great.” Jim was edging her toward the door. “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”
“When her cause is just,” she said. She blew him a wet kiss, and then she was out the door, her handbag swinging on her wrist like a pendulum and news clippings dripping from the pockets of her purple suit.
Jim buzzed at once for Carlson. “Flip,” he said, “Our chrysanthemum tigress claims she got in to see Hollenbach on that nutty bill. Says she saw him at 4:35 last Wednesday. Call Howard down at the White House and see if she’s telling the truth. I want to know right away.”
Carlson was back on the intercom within minutes. “Yep,” he said. “The old dame wasn’t lying. Howard says she was in with the President from 4:35 to 4:50. Howie was ready to shoo her out after five minutes, but Hollenbach let Mrs. B. have fifteen.”
After clicking off the intercom key, MacVeagh sat quiet, gazing across the room at the color photograph of a tractor plow churning through the rich, black soil of Iowa. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, and slowly a feeling of exhilaration mounted within him. Confirmation! Now there were three other people who had glimpsed some recess of this strange, tangled mind of Mark Hollenbach. Rita had heard him explode over Davidge. O’Malley heard himself being accused of deliberate sabotage of Hollenbach’s re-election chances. And now tubby Mrs. Byerson, obsessed with her own floral crusade, had stumbled into a hint of the grand concept. A mum for the union of Aspen! Jim knew that this new indication of Hollenbach’s derangement should sadden him, should evoke again the fear that gripped him after he left Camp David that second Saturday night. Instead he felt curiously elated. His conjectures were right. There was no doubt about it now, thanks to a dumpy little woman whose hat resembled a pile of pancakes and whose talent for boring people was unrivaled in Washington. He began to leaf through his correspondence, making rapid decisions on a myriad small problems and whistling thinly to himself. He rattled off a dozen letters into the dictating machine before quitting for the day.
Night of Camp David Page 21