Preserve and Protect (4 page)

So he stayed unmarried and wedded to the House, and as with some other famous bachelors in Congressional history, fidelity paid off with an ever-growing astuteness in legislative matters and an ever-greater dependence by his colleagues upon his sound common sense, good judgment and unfailing stability. No one ever saw Bill Abbott really upset except his secretary; and she, bless her funny widowed old heart, had hovered over him with a fierce protectiveness for thirty years and never said one word to her children or anyone else about the few times when she had come into the office and surprised him staring out the window with a sad, desolate set to his face and tears in his eyes. Such occasions always made her retire hastily and cry too, but within the hour the buzzer would sound and there he would be again, calm and efficient and so dignified that even she never dared mention it to him.

The years passed, and he worked hard and well at his committees, Appropriations and Foreign Affairs, and gradually, because he was such a rock and because other potential rivals one by one fell away as they moved through the decades together in the House, he became the almost inevitable heir apparent for the one office he really wanted, the Speakership. It was an office that had undergone its mutations through the years, from time to time being restricted by widely publicized revolts among the membership, but always, sooner or later, its powers were gradually restored until it became again what it basically always is, one of the four or five most powerful offices in the government.

Its strength, he perceived after serving under Mr. Sam and his successors, depends in large measure upon the character of the occupant. “Revolts” are usually against the Speaker’s personality and methods, not so much against the inherent powers of his office. Any whittling-away that is done can be smoothly and painlessly restored by the next man who comes along, if he is strong enough. Bill Abbott, watching them come and go, had no doubts about his own abilities to make of it just about what he wanted.

When the time came, following the death of an old and generally incompetent Speaker who had let many of his prerogatives slip from his bumbling hands. Bill Abbott had little to do but express his desire and the battle was over. There was some opposition at the White House, because, while Bill had usually gone along with the Administration, he was recognized as a stolidly independent character who, at some crucial point, might not. A Speaker more pliable had been the wish of the then occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a man who liked to have obedient men around him. But the will of the House was so obvious that the President, after a little grumbling, made the best of it by writing a letter in the Franklin Roosevelt style to an obscure freshman Congressman from New Hampshire—“Dear Johnny: You are kind enough to ask my advice on your choice for Speaker. If I were a member of the House, I think I would vote for—” and Bill was in. The lesson of who had come around to whom was not lost on the House or anyone else.

Perhaps because of this initial victory, he could reflect now, as the full impact of today’s events began to hit him and a creeping tiredness started to flood his mind and body, that he had managed to get along well with all the Presidents he had served in the twenty years of his Speakership. There had been frictions from time to time, and occasionally a pitched battle, and some of these he had won and some he had not. But he had supported most domestic legislation, and certainly he had given full endorsement to basic foreign policies. He had even approved, although somewhat reluctantly because he was aware of the great uneasiness on the Hill, Harley’s tandem decisions to go into Gorotoland, fight in Panama, and use the veto in the United Nations. The issues had been difficult and complex. Yet the facts that had brought them to climax had seemed sufficiently clear to Harley, and they seemed sufficiently clear to him.

In Gorotoland, Prince Obifumatta and his Communist advisers—masquerading as the “People’s Free Republic of Gorotoland”—had launched an attempt to overturn the legitimate government of his cousin, Prince Terry, as soon as Terry had successfully persuaded the UN to help him oust the British from their last remaining foothold in Central Africa. At first, President Hudson had kept the United States aloof from the struggle, but when Prince Obi’s forces had threatened an American missionary hospital and a Standard Oil installation, he had issued a stern hands-off warning. Obi and his friends, in common with the rest of the world, which had been conditioned by many American threats and little American action, did not believe him: forty-four missionaries had been tortured and killed, the Standard Oil installation had been blown up. Harley had ordered intervention, and immediately an enormous howl against “American aggression” and “oil imperialism” had risen around the globe. Many of the loudest screams came from America itself, where the group of influential columnists, publications, educators, churchmen, idealists and zanies, whom such as Walter Dobius spoke for, immediately attacked their own country with every vial of vitriol at their command.

In Panama, simultaneously, Patsy’s estranged husband, the Panamanian Ambassador Felix Labaiya-Sofra, finding the United States committed on the other side of the sea, had finally put into operation his long-brewing plans to seize the Canal and drive the United States forever out of Panama. He, too, had Communist advisers and they, too, had the usual shining labels to cover the usual grimy deeds. Basically the coup was the result of Felix’s longtime ambition to rule his country and the Communists’ longtime ambition to capture the Canal; but they called it “The Government of the Panamanian People’s Liberation Movement.”

Again Harley ordered intervention and again the world howled, if possible more loudly than before. The UN in a series of hectic special sessions had passed resolutions condemning American aggression and calling for American withdrawal. Harley Hudson had astounded the world and pushed his critics to the point of near-catalepsy by ordering the first American vetoes in history.

The consequence had been to throw the country, and the Presidential convention which shortly followed, into turmoil. But over and beyond the standard shrieks that had greeted every American move to oppose Communism since the Korean War, a genuine uneasiness and dismay had been created, and nowhere had it been more loudly or accurately reflected than it had been on Capitol Hill. There such men as Arkansas’ Senator Arly Richardson and Rep. J. B. “Jawbone” Swarthman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had joined in bitter denunciations of the President’s actions. Resolutions supporting him had passed by only the narrowest of margins in both the Senate and the House.

Against this background, the Speaker had laid his enormous prestige and influence on the line for Harley, and in consequence his prestige and influence after the convention were not what they had been before. But all that was academic now, because now he had power greater than that could ever be, and could do as he pleased.

And what would he do? Well, he imagined, just about what Harley would have done if Air Force One had behaved. The United States was in Gorotoland and Panama and Harley had told him privately a couple of days ago, “If I have anything to say about it, we’re in there to win as fast as we can.” It seemed a sensible policy to Old Rock Abbott then, he told himself with a wry self-mockery, and it seemed sensible now. Old Rock would keep it moving right along. Harley, God rest him wherever he was, could count on that.

But first, of course, the funeral and all it would demand of its participants; and then the necessary briefings so that he would know what he was talking about behind that big desk downtown, as no one on the Hill or anywhere else could really know except the one man in the world who sat behind it; and then something decisive and direct, whatever the risk, because the risk of letting things drag, he felt, was greater than any other risk might be.

And here, as he started to stand up and then sat slowly down again, one hand on the railing, his eyes wide in the night as he stared at the dark shore across, he came up against what was of course the most pressing problem of all. What of the election? What of a campaign without a candidate? What was he going to do about the national ticket that now was only half a ticket, and that half named Orrin Knox?

The thought of that volatile, goodhearted, impatient, idealistic, prickly, difficult, ineffable character brought a half-smile, amused, affectionate, almost tender, to his lips for a moment.

Dear old Orrin! What on earth was going to happen to him now?

A year ago, at the height of the Senate battle over the nomination of Bob Leffingwell to be Secretary of State, when the Speaker and Orrin had met on the House steps in the terrible hours after Senator Brigham Anderson’s suicide, he had told Orrin he would back him for the Presidency. True to his word once given, which was one of his major characteristics and strengths, he had done as much as he could in the convention just past. They had both of necessity deferred to Harley when he changed his mind and decided to run, but as soon as the Speaker understood that Orrin would defer still further and accept second place, he had done all he could to assist him there, too.

He still thought Orrin Knox the best-qualified man in the country to be in the White House.

Except for one thing.

Now
he
was in the White House.

He had only held the office five hours, but the Presidency, as always, was imposing its own perspective.

The Hudson-Knox ticket had carried the convention, but at an enormous cost in bitterness and division within the party. The President’s instinct now, as it had been during his years as Speaker, was to deplore party division and do everything he could to heal it over. Yet he was not fool enough to think it could be done under present circumstances, inflamed as they were by the forces supporting the candidacy—now obviously the revived candidacy—of Governor Edward M. Jason of California.

Ted Jason, too, had been given a new position in the world by the crash of Air Force One. Five hours ago he had been so bemused and so bewildered by the destruction of his hopes at the convention that he was letting his supporters force him down the blind alley of a third party. All those powerful elements in the press, the intellectual community, the universities and the churches who were so bitterly opposed to American attempts to stop Communist aggression in Gorotoland and Panama had been about to push Ted to a political destruction he seemed powerless to resist.

Not all their editorials, columns, broadcasts, headlines, one-sided photographs and news stories, statements, marches, protests, full-page ads in the
New York Times
and pious, pompous petitions to the White House had been able to force the convention to take the Governor. So they had been about to make him their sacrificial lamb to head a phony “Peace Party” which would, they obviously hoped, throw the election into chaos and paralyze the nation’s foreign policy during many crucial months.

And Ted had apparently been about to let them do it. The organizing session of the rump convention was gathering at the San Francisco Hilton as the news flash came. The Governor of California was about to slip into the vortex, carried by ambition beyond the point that any sensible, responsible politician in his right mind would let himself go.

Had he really wanted to create chaos in the country? Had his ambition really been so great that it could contemplate rule or ruin?

The President—who was, as the House had long ago found out, a most charitable man at heart—could only conclude so. Certainly he had to conclude so on the basis of the latest from Ted: GOVERNOR JASON REPUDIATES THIRD PARTY, PLEDGES FIGHT FOR TOP SPOT. Ambition apparently was still the driving force. It had now turned Ted right around 180 degrees and set him back on the road. The President took a little comfort from the fact that at least it was the right road: it was within the party again, through regular channels that would restore the contest to some ground of responsible politics. But it certainly would do nothing to restore harmony to the party or unity to the country. It would instead keep alive and further aggravate the already deep divisions concerning America’s course in world affairs.

Why couldn’t Ted have been a big enough man to get behind Orrin, who was Harley’s logical and rightful heir, and who deserved it if anybody did? Why did he have to continue to be ambitious and obstructionist?

Of course, the President recognized with a sardonic shrug in the forest night, not everyone considered Ted ambitious and obstructionist. Millions thought him the greatest patriot in America. The conviction had been strengthened over the past couple of months, and was being strengthened now, by the powerful personalities and publications that did so much to influence public opinion in America. Somebody had brought him Walter Dobius’ column and the initial expression of editorial opinion by
The
Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was.
He had also seen the late news round-up chaired by Frankly Unctuous, that suavely destructive hero of the tyrannical tube. The same format had distinguished them all: a little politely dutiful earth quickly tossed over Harley—a hasty reference to his own almost incidental accession (the
New York Times
had already produced the attack phrase for the pack to use: “The Caretaker President,” it called him)—and then a long, earnest discussion of why the party must now turn to the only logical candidate to lead the nation out of the disastrous situation created by the late slightly lamented and his awful Secretary of State, Orrin Knox.

Well, the President thought with a grim line to his jaw that members of the House would have recognized, “Caretaker,” was he? Very well, he’d take care. Of the country, and of Orrin, and of Ted Jason and the lot of them, if it came to that.

Half-Yank and half-Swede, and that’s a pretty tough combination, all right, all right. Maybe they thought they could stampede him with such phony items as PRESSURE MOUNTS FOR RECALL OF CONVENTION. It had been datelined Washington, and had begun: “Powerful political forces here who cannot presently be named called tonight for a reconvening of the national convention to select successor candidates to the late President Harley M. Hudson and Vice Presidential Nominee Orrin Knox.”