Capable of Honor (48 page)

Six months later, however, the Governor proved that his jesting had been in earnest when he called Ted one day in JM’s Los Angeles office and asked him to run for state comptroller. “I'll be leaving in a couple of years,” he said, “and we’ve got to give you a little experience up here before you take over.” “I’m not going to take over,” Ted said skeptically. The Governor chuckled. “There’s nothing you want more, at this point. I know the disease, I suffered from it myself until I got the more malignant type I have now—the one that makes you itch for Washington. Let yourself come to Sacramento, Ted. You won’t stop here.”

So he had run, with Ceil’s quick agreement—“Who am I”—with the elusive little smile she sometimes got in discussing the family—“to stand in the way of destiny?”—and had won without much trouble.

Two years later, in the election that took the Governor to the White House, he succeeded him in Sacramento.

“Everything comes easy to the Jasons,” skeptics said sourly. “What can you expect, with all that money?”

But hard work had gone into it, too, and much planning on his part, both in the selection of a management team he could rely upon to safeguard and improve JM in his absence, and in the organization of his campaign. It was conceivable that money alone could carry a candidate into office, but that had not been his observation of American politics. The candidate had to be attractive, and he did not minimize his own assets, or Ceil’s, in that; and to be sure of the outcome, he also had to have the best organization that could be put together. Here the Jason money was indeed a major factor, because it made all things easy. Top people were hired, top publicity outlets were purchased, California was saturated with the Jason name and record in a way that his more modestly financed opponents could not possibly match. His most effective campaign points were exactly those his shrewd predecessor had outlined at the Grove: the romantic tie-in with Don Carlos (an appearance in Spanish costume at several Southern California parades put his picture everywhere, including the cover of
Life
); his record as successful businessman, his success as comptroller; Ceil’s beauty, his own good looks, his pleasing personality and excellent record. ELECT A CALIFORNIAN FOR CALIFORNIA his most effective billboard cried. His handsome graying head against a background of misty mountains,
caballeros
near at hand, and in the distance Indians working the fields of Mission Santa Barbara, made the point in a way his Kansas-born opponent could not answer.

So he became Governor of California, with an ease that embittered many ambitious men who considered themselves more deserving, and so persisted in attributing his success to his money. But he entered upon office determined to prove that he had the ability as well; and for a time, in a honeymoon period that enabled him to move safely through his first session of the legislature without difficulty, there were no successful challenges. Then what his predecessor had called “the itch for Washington” began to assail him, and from then on, in some subtle, curious, and almost indefinable way, he seemed—to himself at least—to lose something.

To himself, and to Ceil. “You’re more cautious than you used to be,” she remarked thoughtfully in his second year when he was hesitating to challenge the lumbering interests on an amendment to a bill designed to prevent further destruction of the redwoods by the slide-rule-happy maniacs of the state highway department. “No I’m not,” he had said indignantly, and to prove it, forced the issue and won.

"You see?” she said after the vote. “It wasn’t much of a battle, was it?"

But they both knew that another time she would have to make her challenge even stronger, he would have to make his response even more a deliberate effort of will—if he made it at all.

Some essential of the younger Ted Jason, some automatic and unhesitating response to what was right, that perhaps went back as far as Doña Valuela, was beginning to atrophy. Now he was beginning to pause and calculate, now the pragmatic and forceful approach which, linked with integrity, had been invincible, was beginning to give way to a more devious approach. He was beginning to think of dreams ahead in a way that sometimes hurt realties at hand.

“I don’t want to say anything,” Ceil had remarked at last, and not unkindly, “but I wonder a little if maybe you aren’t beginning to lose a little of your
virtu
—in the old sense.”

Again he had denied it with some sharpness, but in his heart he had wondered, too. Compromise was so easy to rationalize, and indeed so much of it was perfectly good and perfectly necessary: the line was easy to slip over. A compromise with elements in Southern California that wanted certain concessions on offshore oil drilling—which would probably guarantee his re-election as Governor—which in turn would permit him to go on being a statesman—which in turn would help him, perhaps, to become President—who was to say that it was wrong? Only Ceil, of course, and his own heart; and, perhaps, Doña Valuela, hanging on the wall. But her he could appease, he thought. Passing her picture on the night of his triumphant re-election, he made his habitual little bow to the comb, the mantilla, the dark, brooding eyes, and somber but beautiful face.

“I’m going to hang you on the White House wall yet, old girl,” he promised her with a sudden smile. “You wait and see.”

But he was not entirely sure that she would have wanted to go there, could she know the paths he must follow to make good the pledge.

Not that there were any major betrayals of principle, of course; not that he engaged in anything notably shady or devious; not that he was, by any standard of politics, a dishonest man. It was just that somehow, step by step, daily, hourly perhaps, imperceptibly beneath the outward show of firmness and determination that remained unchanged, he was becoming more careful, more calculating, more equivocal. In some subtle fashion that he was partly aware of but seemed powerless to stop, he was no longer the direct and straightforward individual he used to be.

Occasionally Ceil would repeat the suggestion that this was really not necessary, that he could achieve what he desired without going the long way ’round to get it. But it always seemed to him that he had perfectly good reasons. It could even be argued that a certain amount of deviousness and equivocation was a necessary concomitant of being a good President: it had characterized some of the greatest, on occasion.

“It takes flexibility to be a leader,” he had explained once.

“My point is,” she said in one of her rare impatient moments, “that you really don’t need to be ‘flexible.’ You’ve got everything going for you. Nobody was ever more favored, certainly. Nobody ever had less reason to compromise. Why be indirect?”

“Being a leader means you lead, doesn’t it?” he inquired with a defensive sharpness. “People. And that means you can’t always be direct. You have to persuade, you can’t bludgeon.”

“I know that’s the rationale,” she said, ending one of their few open arguments on the subject. “But it isn’t always what I like to think of as Ted Jason.”

But it was, obviously, what a great many other people liked to think of as Ted Jason. In fact, as he moved farther into politics and climbed higher toward the top, he became aware, with a curious combination of distaste and gratitude, that people were not really interested in Ted Jason, himself. They were interested only in what it satisfied them to think Ted Jason was.

By now it was second nature to him to do as he had on the Administration’s policies, to emerge from a meeting and say something like, “There is a time to support. And there is a time to oppose. Conscience must decide the issue.”

He had not said whether he would support or oppose, yet look what had happened. With a glad cry Walter and his world and millions of his countrymen had leaped upon the phrase and interpreted it to suit themselves, written columns, printed editorials, held rallies, presented programs, taken full-page ads in the
New York Times
under that heading to urge him to run, made it, inevitably, his campaign slogan: Conscience Must Decide The Issue! What issue? And whose conscience? And what made them so sure they knew what it would decide?

There was, however, no doubt that they
knew.
The phrase was sweeping the country. Conscience—theirs and Ted Jason’s—was automatically enlisted against the Administration.

They didn’t have to ask Ted Jason what he meant.

They
knew.

He feels again, as he proceeds with his dressing and in the bedroom hears Ceil begin to stir, that sense of terror and fear of being devoured that comes to the intelligent when they are given the love of the mob—doubly terrifying and fearful when the mob is intelligent, too, and possessed of the means of coercing the beloved into the image the mob desires … doubly treacherous when the mob has within its grasp, or thinks it has, the means of giving, in return, what the beloved desires.

For two months he has been the plaything of the mob as it has prepared the country for his candidacy for Vice President. Not once has he broken his private vow of silence on the subject, but it hasn’t mattered: the mob has launched him anyway.
Look
and
Newsweek
, working overtime for a point of view, have put him on their covers, made him the subject of their lead articles;
Time
and
Life
, less ideological but faced by the imperatives of the news, have done the same. His views on finance have appeared in
Fortune
, his views on California as a tourist paradise in
Holiday
.
Sports Illustrated
has discussed his opinions of tennis, the
Saturday Review
has carried a guest editorial (written, because, he told himself, he simply didn’t have the time, by one of the higher-paid young men on his publicity staff) on the perennial dream of nuclear disarmament.
U. S. News & World Report
has interviewed him in depth for eight pages of graceful dodging that somehow, in print, sound firm and positive. The
Library Journal
has discussed his reading habits, the
National Geographic
has run an article on the romance of California’s Spanish land-grants, prepared some months ago and shrewdly held in reserve for the proper moment; the Montoya Grant, with many flattering photographs of its present inheritors, is featured throughout. The nation’s leading opinion poll seems to be releasing his latest ratings every other hour on the hour: they are always up. He has appeared at least twice on
Face the Nation
,
Meet the Press
,
Today
,
Tonight
,
Talk
, and
Monitor
. (Orrin Knox has been invited to appear once, on two of them.)

His clipping service reported only yesterday that in sixty days there have been a total of 1,217 profiles or personality sketches of him in the nation’s newspapers; that he has appeared in front-page articles on fifty-three of those days; that his picture has appeared on some front page somewhere on every one of the sixty, and that on many days it has appeared on the front pages of all the metropolitan papers throughout the country. A collection of his speeches, published two weeks ago under the title,
Where I Stand: Governor Jason on the Record,
has been reviewed most favorably to date in 673 newspapers and periodicals; a competing volume,
A Consistent Policy: As Orrin Knox Sees It
has been reviewed by 231, not so favorably.

(In a front-page report in its
Sunday Book Review
, The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was commented gravely:

(“Governor Jason’s book is a major contribution to current American thought, the fine and moving statement of a dedicated public servant. Every American—and particularly all those delegates to the convention that will convene in San Francisco next month—owes it to himself and his country to read this powerful presentation before he votes. It is an absolute must.”

(In a brief item on page 23 of the same section the same publication reported:

(“Secretary Knox’s rehash of old speeches and, it must be confessed, rather tired statements of policy, have, inevitably, a passing interest in view of his declared intention to seek the Vice Presidency. But there is here no fresh opinion, no such vigorous and commanding point of view as we are receiving from many others in the political arena. His book will probably be of interest to his most rabid partisans. Others may wish to seek enlightenment elsewhere.”

(Dutifully the same type of treatment was accorded in journal after journal across a free and independent land.)

And as for Ceil—Ceil is everywhere. THE LOVELY CEIL JASON,
McCall’s
described her in a fawning interview.…The
Ladies Home Journal
reported HOW MRS. EDWARD JASON RUNS HER HOME.…CEIL JASON,
Life
said, putting her on the cover in a really sensational pose against the pines and sea at Big Sur (Beth Knox, who knows a thing or two herself, appeared a week later on the same cover, standing at the stove in the dowdiest, old-shoe dress she could find).…
Look
, reluctantly delaying its 521st twelve-page spread on the Kennedy family, countered with an almost equally sensational cover taken at the Wawona Tunnel entrance to Yosemite: CEIL JASON: WILL A WOULD-BE SECOND LADY SOMEDAY BE FIRST?

Woman’s Day
has featured her recipes,
Vogue
her hair.
Harpers Bazaar
her clothes.
Good Housekeeping
has described HOW CEIL JASON AIDS HER MAN.
Redbook
has called them, simply, CEIL AND TED: AMERICA’S TOP POLITICAL TEAM. And in Hollywood each new week brings a new sensation: CEIL JASON’S MOST DIFFICULT DECISION (how to decorate the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento).…WHEN CEIL ALMOST LOST TED (he had been fifteen minutes overdue on a flight from “Vistazo” to New York).…THE SECRET FRIEND WHO HELPED CEIL MOST (her mother, who told her how to decorate the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento).…CEIL JASON’S TRAGEDY (that politics doesn’t give her enough time for painting, at which, as a matter of fact, she is actually rather good).…CEIL’S MOST SACRED LOVE (for Doormat, an English sheepdog she owned in childhood).…