Night of Camp David

by Fletcher Knebel

  “That was all until I sent him over by courier the two-month interim report of the committee. Of course, that showed that they were dealing with the mental problem. He called me right away, wanted to know why the CACTUS people were getting into that area—and what if they came up with an idea that the Big Three should be examined by psychiatrists? Oh, I said, nothing like that. But he demanded the study be canceled. He was mad again. Finally I argued him into letting it continue and I said of course nothing would be set in motion without his complete approval. He agreed very reluctantly.

  “Then about three weeks ago I told him on the phone that CACTUS was a flop, that the committee could suggest nothing. And you know what he said? He said, ‘Sid, I don’t trust those five fellows, I’ve got information they’ve joined the conspiracy against me, and I want you to keep a close eye on them.’ I was so thunderstruck I couldn’t say anything but a ‘yes, sir.’

  “Well, that’s when I decided I’d better do something. What, I didn’t know, but I got to wondering about his early life, so I called for his Korean War record. The service is a natural place for stress and strain to show up. And, of course, I requested that disability file from the Library of Congress. I wanted to make sure of the law and of the agreement between Hollenbach and O’Malley.”

  “What did the service record show?” asked MacVeagh.

  “Nothing,” said Karper, “but there was something damned funny about it. The Army only recently got around to microfilming records of men in that particular division, the one in which Hollenbach served. The microfilming shows the numbered pages in each file, but in Hollenbach’s case it jumped from page five to seven. What was missing was the medical record. Obviously somebody had it scissored out of the record.

  “Of course it would be a mess to try to piece his medical history together now. Some of the medics in that division may have died, and even those you could find probably wouldn’t remember anything. And obviously such a search would stir up a devil of a lot of talk. Another thing. You probably know that Hollenbach got the Silver Star for gallantry in action in Korea. The citation in his record shows that he got it for holding firm, with his platoon, in the face of a heavy Chicom attack. Frankly, Jim, that kind of cooled me off. Even with his medical record missing, it’s doubtful it would reveal anything bearing on our present situation—not for a Silver Star man. So, I just haven’t done a thing about it.”

  Jim dug at his desk blotter with a letter opener. “Sid, you’ve been more perceptive about this whole thing than I’ve been. For instance, at the Gridiron dinner, you sensed immediately that something was wrong when Hollenbach made his suggestion for a national wire-tapping law. Remember? I laughed, but you said it was a ‘chilling suggestion.’ ”

  Karper smiled. “Of course, I had some background to fit that into. At the time, you didn’t. Now, in some ways, I find his serious idea of such a law the most conclusive evidence we’ve got as to the state of his mind. Even Hitler didn’t dream up anything so methodically diabolical in the way of invading personal privacy.”

  “You’re right,” said Jim. “I wonder why he hasn’t mentioned his wiretap plan to other people?”

  “Maybe he has,” said Karper, “and we just don’t know about it.”

  “The same thing goes for this whole story,” said Jim. “It’s a big government. Maybe a dozen people have gotten separate pieces of the President’s mental trouble, but lacking any pattern to fit them into, the incidents don’t mean anything to them.

  “Look, Sid, you’ve just got to tell your story to the same group that met at Cavanaugh’s. They’ll believe you. They sure didn’t believe me. Actually, my feeling was that a majority of the men there thought there was something wrong with my mind.”

  “I can understand that,” said Karper. “Nobody wants to believe the President of the United States is deranged.”

  Jim rubbed the bridge of his nose reflectively. “So, why isn’t the simplest and most direct plan to convene that group again and let you talk? You carry an awful lot of weight around this town, Sid.”

  “I’m not sure that’s feasible,” said Karper. “In the first place, there’s the security problem. CACTUS carries the highest classification and I know Odium, Gullion and Cavanaugh aren’t cleared that high. And I’d have to describe CACTUS, with the problem of the command decision on nukes, to have the impact. After all, Mark’s blowup over Urey was almost six months ago. Far more telling, to my mind, was his contention that the CACTUS committee had joined a conspiracy to destroy him—and he said that only three weeks ago. But I couldn’t go into that without breaking security on CACTUS.”

  “Of course,” said Jim, “if you talked to O’Malley, I’m sure we could get him to convene the Cabinet and then invoke the legal provision on succeeding a disabled president.”

  Karper shook his head. “We can’t do anything that formal without an airtight case. That Cabinet leaks like a sieve. We might as well phone all the newspapers.” Karper thought for a moment. “No, I guess we have to go back to that original small group first. But I also think we’ve got to have more solid evidence before we approach them. You really can’t blame them for being incredulous. You and I know that a person has to experience Hollenbach’s rage—see it personally—to understand what we both feel. We need more corroboration.”

  They sat silent, thinking. Karper chewed absently on his toothpick while Jim fingered the bridge of his nose again. It occurred to Jim that this same thought—the need for more corroboration—had harried him for days.

  “But where are we going to get it?” he asked after a few moments. “We can’t just go around polling people on whether the President is all there.”

  “I know,” said Karper. He fell silent again, and Jim experienced a sinking sensation. The dilemma was unchanged, and two men seemed no more capable of solving it than one. This time the silence lasted for several minutes.

  “The doctor,” said Karper at last. “I’m not sure it promises much, but I think our first move is to have a session with General Leppert.”

  MacVeagh considered the name. Brigadier General Maury Leppert, formerly a practicing physician in Denver, had been brought to the White House by President Hollenbach and given an Army commission. He was a gaunt, melancholy man who seldom appeared in public and who steadfastly refused to discuss any aspect of the President’s health with newspapermen, confining himself to an annual report filled with bleak statistics on blood pressure, cholesterol count, urine analysis, and pulse rate.

  “Certainly,” said Karper, “if the President is crazed, his own physician should have some inkling of it. I thought of consulting him before, but alone I had no standing, no excuse really. With two of us, and our positions, perhaps we could base our questions on some unclassified aspect of C and C procedures. We’d have to be adroit, but it’s worth a try.”

  “All right, let’s do it. When?”

  “The sooner the better. How about 4:30 this afternoon if he’ll agree to see us then?”

  “You make the date,” said Jim, “then call me. I’ll be there.”

  Karper rose and Jim automatically followed suit. They shook hands, wordlessly, in the center of the room and then moved toward the private door to the corridor.

  “This is a sad business,” said Karper, “but actually I’m approaching it pretty cold-bloodedly now. All the days and nights of frustration and doubts are gone. It boils down to just one thing. We’ve just got to get Mark Hollenbach out of that White House before something terrible happens.”

  Jim merely nodded. His own feelings were an elusive combination of pity for the President, dread over the inevitable clash of wills to come, and a fierce pride—pride that his own judgment had been vindicated by this strong, resolute man.

  “Jim,” said Karper, “what exactly do you think Mark’s trouble is?”

  “Just from poking around the fringes of abnormal psychology since
this thing started,” replied Jim, “I’d say he’s a paranoid.”

  “That’s my curbstone diagnosis too,” said Karper. “Let’s see what we can pry out of the doctor.”

  They shook hands again, and then Karper was out the door and walking rapidly down the corridor.

  17.

  Saybrook

  That Thursday afternoon, several hours after Defense Secretary Karper drove back to the Pentagon, Mark Hollenbach, Jr., the 21-year-old son of the President, slumped on his spine in a splotched leather chair in a top floor suite of Saybrook College, Yale University. He wore khaki pants, sweat socks, loafers, and a reversed crew-neck sweater through which his varsity Y showed in discreet outline.

  Yale men, in a judicious accommodation of pride and modesty, never wore the Y outside. Such self-advertising was considered too blatant, too Ohio State. In a word, a Yale word, it was not “shoe.” On the other hand, a man did not want it forgotten that he had played three years at right end on winning teams, especially when the happenstance of being a President’s son created untold psychological hazards on the field. Had the coach favored him or purposely refused to give him the breaks another man would get? Had the Cornell linebacker, who snapped one of Mark’s ribs on a hard tackle, hoped to put a famous name out of the game? Had he been favored when his pass pattern was called, out of sequence, for the last, unneeded touchdown against Harvard? Mark felt he would never know. But whatever the truth, his sweater could not be permitted to speak his secret pride in lasting three years of college football. So he turned the sweater inside out and pretended he was disenchanted with such transient status symbols as university athletic letters.

  In manner and ritual Mark Jr. was of a brand with his roommate, “Little Doc” Peyster of Saragosa, Texas. He differed but little from the other young men of Saybrook College—the chief difference being the Secret Service agent who lived next door, accompanied Mark to classes, and hovered in the background as Mark moved about the campus.

  Record albums, books, playing cards, and a Fence Club tie rested in disorderly companionship on the fireplace mantel. In the wastebasket stood a metal marker, “Visitor Parking, Connecticut College,” which Little Doc had uprooted one night in a fit of joy after achieving conquest of one of Connecticut College’s more nunlike juniors exactly seventeen months after he had set his erotic sights on her. In another corner of the room was a pile of dirty laundry, and in still another a stack of old copies of the New York Times. Through the open door and the casement bay window came the mingled sounds of higher education: the slamming of doors, a gust of laughter, feet thudding on steps as young men raced downstairs. In the York Street courtyard below could be heard the slap of a bat, for it was the first warm afternoon of the year in New Haven, and the boys of Saybrook were playing whiffle ball.

  Mark Jr. resembled his father. He had a similar long, sensitive face and his brown hair was crew-cut. But he was taller, six feet two, and his muscles were tough and wiry. Mark admired his father, and on top of the record player, only partially obscured by two tennis racquets, was a framed photograph of President Hollenbach taking the oath of office on the Capitol steps. The son, who enjoyed rambling political discussions with his father, got along fairly well with the older man, chiefly because Mark Jr. refused to heed every echo of his father’s stern call to excellence. In the boy’s opinion, excellence was akin to everything else—all right in moderation. And, anyway, even if a man privately dedicated himself to excellence, too much prattling about it spoiled the effect. Passionate devotion to a cause was not “shoe.”

  This afternoon Mark Jr. was deep in the old leather chair which still showed a dusty footprint on the arm, where Little Doc had stood last night to declaim on the virtues of wine, wanderlust and women. With his loafered feet propped on the seat of another chair, Mark was reading a letter on pale-green White House stationery. After finishing it he frowned, crumpled the letter into a ball, and hurled it at the wastebasket. He missed. He sat glaring at the letter a moment, then retrieved it, smoothed out the wrinkles, and put it in his hip pocket. He went to the casement window and looked down at the ballplayers in the courtyard. Then, lying on the cushioned ledge, he took out the letter and read it through slowly for the third time. At last he shoved the letter in his pocket again, went to the telephone and placed a person-to-person call, collect, to Mrs. Evelyn Hollenbach in the White House.

  When his mother answered, they exchanged the small talk, with its affectionate fumbling for understanding, that characterizes the communications between close relatives of different generations and sexes. Evelyn Hollenbach loved her son, but could not quite comprehend what he was up to or why. Mark loved his mother, but had little insight into her matronly world and even less curiosity about it.

  “Say, Mom,” he asked at last, “how is Dad feeling?”

  “Fine,” she said cheerfully. “You know your father. He’s on all cylinders as usual, working too hard. But who can stop him? He thrives on it. Why do you ask, Mark?”

  “I got a funny letter from him,” he said. “It kinda worries me. It doesn’t sound like him at all.”

  “What do you mean, dear?”

  “Oh,” said Mark, “he’s bawling me out for my semester grades. Jeez, 1 thought they were pretty good, an 85 average, which puts me in the top quarter of the class. But he seems to think that’s lousy. God knows what he’ll think about my comps in history.”

  “You know our Mr. President,” she comforted. “He wants everybody to be first. I say, well, then, who’d be left to be second, but he can’t see that. Everyone connected with him has to be first. But I agree with you, dear, I think they’re fine grades.”

  “It’s not so much the idea of it, but the way he said it,” said Mark. “He sounded kind of sour and mad as though I’d disgraced the family or something. Bitter almost. And a little snide from a guy’s father.”

  “Can’t you read it to me?” she asked.

  “No,” he parried. “I’d rather not. There’s a lot of man-to-man stuff you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh.” She sounded relieved that the letter would go unread.

  “Honestly, Mom, it’s pretty dreary stuff. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “All right,” she said, “but please don’t worry about your father. He’s in fine shape. Why don’t you have a good, long talk with him about your grades when you come home for spring vacation next week? He probably doesn’t realize you’re in the top quarter.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “And how are the girls, dear?” she asked.

  “Plentiful,” he said, “but chaste. My roommate has all the luck.”

  She clucked a reprimand. “I’ve got a nice date for you here next week. You’ll adore her.”

  He was immediately suspicious. “Not another cherry blossom princess? I got a dog last time.”

  “This one’s a beauty,” she said. “Gracious and intelligent too.”

  He groaned, and they said a laughing good-by.

  But the telephone call did not appease Mark’s anxieties. He fingered his father’s letter again and stood for a moment brooding over the language.

  Then, through the windows, he heard the cries of the whiffle-ball players, and he ran from the room, yelled a warning to his Secret Service guard, pounded down the steps like an upended trunk, and joined the game. He was deep in play, sweating freely, an hour later when a letter carrier appeared in the courtyard and was directed to young Hollenbach. The mailman brought a special delivery letter. Mark glanced at the envelope, noted the postmark, Saragosa, Texas, and surmised it was news from Slim Carmichael about his summer job. He jammed the letter in his hip pocket and continued the game.

  A half hour later, dirty and tired, Mark mounted the steps again, joking as he went with his Secret Service guard. He took a hot shower and cannonaded the tiled walls with off-key songs. He dried himself, wrapped a towel about his hips, and turn
ed on the record player.

  Then he remembered the letter. He took it from the hip pocket of his khaki pants and sank into the easy chair again to read. A sheet of pale-green White House stationery accompanied the letter, and Mark fingered it idly while reading Slim Carmichael’s cramped, penciled handwriting:

  Saragosa, Tex.

  Tuesday, April 6

  Dear Mark:

  This is an awful hard letter for me to write, as you’ll realize as soon as you’ve read the enclosed letter from your father, which I got some days ago. I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, and Betsy wanted me to save it until you got out here. But your father’s letter keeps worrying me. Sometimes I get mad, and then sometimes I feel a little scared.

  I got a nice letter from the President in January, about a suggestion of mine that the federal government should figure out a way to conserve the water in these parts, but this last letter from him has got me upset. Mark, either your father never wrote this letter I’m enclosing or he completely misunderstands my position.

  I’m not trying to get a thing from the government. You know me well enough for that. I’ve worked hard all my life, made it on my own, and never took a nickel of public money, price supports, crop loans, disaster relief or anything else. Cotton has been good to me out here, and I figure success or failure is entirely up to me.

  All I was trying to do was to suggest a way that we could conserve this great river of water underneath the land. I’m willing to cut back voluntarily, but a lot of fellows aren’t. I just want to conserve our resources, as I’m sure you understand from our talks about it. But now your father treats me like a criminal or some kind of riffraff.

  I figured you’d be going to Washington soon for spring vacation. If you get a chance, would you straighten your father out on this? As I said, maybe he didn’t write the letter at all. If not, please let me know, as I’ve always thought him a great president up until now.