Preserve and Protect (7 page)

Thinking of the Senate Majority Whip, Stanley Danta of Connecticut, still shattered by the brutal attack on his daughter Crystal at the Cow Palace, the Secretary sighed.

“I don’t know that Stanley has much heart for it. I think I may have to find someone else.”

“That was my feeling when we started east on the
Zephyr
together,” Bob Munson said. “He hated to leave the kids, but felt he had to get back here to tend to some things on the Hill. The minute the news came about Harley, he seized the excuse of releasing you and flew back to Carmel.”

Orrin nodded.

“Yes, that’s really why I decided to leave them there and come on back. I wouldn’t have left until Tuesday if he hadn’t been there to keep them company.” He frowned. “I wish Beth would hurry up and arrive. She ought to be here with Dolly, helping Lucille.”

“And helping you,” Bob Munson said. Orrin smiled.

“And helping me. She’ll be arriving this evening, I believe, and then I’ll be in better shape for whatever comes.…About a campaign manager, I … have an idea.”

Senator Munson nodded.

“Yes, so do I. But will he do it, and is he all that valuable to you?”

The Secretary frowned again.

“I don’t really know, exactly. Robert A. Leffingwell is a puzzle, to me. I still haven’t got him quite figured out. I can understand his supporting Harley, but whether he would have gone farther had Harley lived, whether he would have actively supported a ticket with me on it too, I don’t know. And,” he added thoughtfully, “I don’t really know exactly what his value is; whether he really is that important in the scheme of things; whether the beating he’s taken from the press since he left Ted to back Harley may not have hurt him so much with the public that he’d be more handicap than help. I’ve tried to reach him several times, because I do want to talk to him and find out what I think about him after I’ve done so.…It’s an idea. I’m not closing it out. It could be he’d be very helpful. It’s a possibility.”

“I think you should have a real talk with him,” Bob Munson said. “And go into it with an open mind and a friendly manner. That’s the only way to find out.”

“I will as soon as I can find him,” the Secretary said with some annoyance. “But where is he? Talking to Ted, I suppose. That would be just my luck.”

But in this instance, though he did not know it, his luck was holding all right, because Bob Leffingwell was not talking to Ted at the moment. Nor was anyone else. The Governor of California, in fact, was sitting all alone in his office in Sacramento, staring out over the beautifully kept lawns that looked so cool and shaded under their enormous trees despite the fact that right now the capital of California was even hotter and more humid than the capital of the country.

Inside the east wing of the Capitol building, however, it was genuinely cool, hushed and quiet on this Sunday morning. A couple of state troopers were on duty, a few tourists wandered even on so sweltering a day, a janitor or two shuffled along the gleaming halls. Otherwise he had his domain to himself, and that was the way he liked it, at this moment when so many things were crowding in upon him, clamoring for decision.

The most important of all, of course, was already decided: immediately after the news of Harley’s death had flashed upon the screen in his room at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, he had cut himself loose, with an instinctive, almost animal, repugnance, from the tatterdemalion rag-tag-and-bobtail of the foredoomed “Peace Party.” Within five minutes he had framed his statement repudiating the third-party movement and affirming his renewed determination to seek the Presidential nomination. He had spent the next hour rewriting it until it was as succinct and powerful as he felt it should be. As soon as the Speaker’s swearing-in had been completed at Tahoe, Ted was on the telephone dictating it to his secretary in Sacramento. Fifteen minutes later she had called the wire services, and within the hour it was top news across the nation.

Not, inevitably, the only top news: right along with it had come Orrin Knox’s confident statement that he expected to head the ticket. Ted Jason did not know how confident his opponent was in reality, but of necessity he had to sound confident, and he had managed it very well.

“The United States has lost a great President and a great leader in the cause of world peace,” Orrin had said. “He was my friend and my commander in the battle against the forces of aggression that everywhere threaten free men. I honor his memory as I valued his friendship.

“The task he began must be completed. American foreign policy must have the continuity and firmness that alone can guarantee the survival of this nation and of freedom everywhere.

“A leader is fallen but the battle goes on.

“An election must be fought and won.

“I expect to head the ticket.

“I expect to finish the great work he began.

“I call upon all of you who believe in an America firm in strength and firm in justice to give me your help and support in the task we must all carry forward together.”

Ted had been no less confident, forceful and uncompromising:

“America has lost a distinguished and able leader, who led her, as he sincerely believed best, through perilous times. Those of us who disagreed with some aspects of his policies were ever aware that his ideals were admirable, his purposes sincere, his integrity unimpeachable. No one could have asked for a more dedicated and honorable man to lead this nation.

“His tragic death reopens many issues that appeared to have been settled by his nomination at the convention just concluded. Because of this, those of us who disagreed with certain policies are now freed of political commitments. Many things must now be re-approached and reappraised. The way is open to reconsider decisions that only yesterday seemed settled for the duration of the present campaign.

“For myself, let me make it clear that I repudiate, once and for all and absolutely, any attempt to divide America by the creation of a so-called ‘peace party.’ The formation of such a third party was proposed, as you know, by those claiming to be my supporters. This was done without my instigation and without my approval. Now, any such political adventuring is even more inexcusable and pointless than it was before.

“What happens now must occur through the regular channels of the party. A nominee for President and, presumably, a nominee for Vice President, must be selected. And our great party must decide once and for all what it stands for.

“I was a candidate for President before. I am a candidate now. Whether by selection of the National Committee or through a reconvened convention, the party must choose.

“Either this great nation follows the course of further international adventuring, ever-spreading foreign commitments, ever more entangling military involvements—or it follows the course of prudence, decency and peace.

“I offer myself again, as I did before, as one who believes our best course to lie in negotiation, reasonable compromise, and an end to jingoism and bullying belligerence.

“I speak now, as I did before, for peace. I call upon all of you who believe America can best be served by sanity and prudence to join me in the renewed battle.

“We must not fail.”

Rereading the two statements as they lay before him on the front page of the
Sacramento Bee,
the Governor reflected that his own accomplished several things. It paid graceful tribute to the man who had so brutally shouldered him aside at the convention, thereby displaying a forgiveness he could never have shown had Harley lived—an absolutely necessary forgiveness if the votes of many goodhearted citizens were to come his way. It cleared his mind of the heavy burden of self-contempt that had dragged it down since the bleak post-convention moment when Senator Fred Van Ackerman, that savagely unprincipled demagogue of the irresponsible left, had telephoned and virtually forced him to accept the third-party idea. And it established him again as the champion of all those forces that were so bitterly and vociferously opposed to American involvement in the twin conflicts of Gorotoland and Panama.

Thus he had freed himself of the fatal incubus of the hodge-podge “Peace Party,” something he would never have agreed to at all had he not been so absolutely stunned by the convention’s repudiation and President Hudson’s bitter speech attacking him. At the same moment he had skillfully re-established his claim upon the position favored by those who had supported him but could not follow him down so blind an alley.
The Greatest Publication
was such a one: it had warned him against the third party even though its editorial board was unanimously for him and had given him every possible break in friendly news-coverage, flattering photographs and editorial endorsement during and before the convention. Some of the major columnists and commentators were equally hesitant, aware that American history gave little encouragement to third parties.

Of the small but enormously powerful group who influenced and in large measure dominated public opinion, only Walter Dobius, carried forward furiously on the wave of his angry hatred for Harley Hudson and Orrin Knox, had openly endorsed and encouraged the third party idea. Even he, Ted Jason was willing to wager with some irony, was greatly relieved that Harley’s death made it no longer necessary to carry through on a cause so devoid of practical hope.

For Walter, for
The Greatest Publication,
and for all their friends and fellow-believers of press, television, church, drama, campus and periodical, everything was now all right again: Despised Harley was dead, Orrin stood exposed alone to the attacks of those who could once more reunite against him with a good conscience and a strengthened will, and the Governor of California was in the clear. Once again he was the hero of all those who, either sincerely or for purposes not so sincere, devoted their time and energies to opposing, hindering, demeaning and generally weakening their own country as it sought, with an uncertain success, to stand firm against its enemies and the enemies of freedom everywhere.

Respectability and the support of many of the nation’s most powerful institutions and individuals were his again, and it was with some confidence that he looked forward to the next few weeks: confidence and, much more important, the renewed self-respect which, coming out of the angry morass of the convention, seemed almost a miracle to him now.

Miracle, because it had followed upon things that could have destroyed a weaker man and had almost destroyed him: the increasing, politically motivated violence in the convention which, he was sufficiently confident to admit to himself now, he had tacitly if not openly condoned—the appearance of the black-uniformed bullyboys produced by COMFORT, DEFY and KEEP, those strange ideological bedfellows, culminating in the attack on Crystal Danta Knox which was probably, he could see now, the decisive turning point of the convention and the beginning of the end of his own chances—followed by his humiliating defeat for the Presidential nomination—the President’s crushing denial of his right to the Vice Presidential nomination—his own deep despair and the dreadful dazed, helpless, almost comatose condition in which he had submitted to Fred Van Ackerman’s bullying and agreed to appear at the third party meeting. He had been as near nadir as he had ever come in all his life, probably as near as any Jason had ever come in all the long years since the family first began its climb to fortune in Spanish California. He literally did not know what would have become of him had the President not been killed.

He drew a sudden long, shivering breath. How awful the prospects had been for the golden hero of the Golden State; how miraculous his salvation. Surely there must be a purpose in it somewhere!

As quickly as it came, the mood passed. Governor Jason was not one to brood overlong on might-have-beens. If there was purpose, it was up to him to implement it. By some strange kindness or irony, the Lord had given him another chance. This time he would not destroy it but would see it through with vigor, integrity and all the determination of a clever mind, to which family character and great wealth had long ago given the habit of decisive command. Three days after his descent into the abyss of abandoned hope, he was on the way back; and with only a very little extra luck, he would not only regain his former position but go on from it to the goal he had been within sight of when the convention roared out of his control.

“In January,” he said with a quiet certainty to the silent office, “Edward Montoya Jason will be President of the United States.”

As if in response, the telephone rang; and lifting it to listen while the switchboard carried out his instructions to take the message but deflect the caller, he heard a voice he had not expected to hear unless he initiated the call. He felt a sudden surge of happiness. That she had called first seemed somehow to put the seal on all his certainties.

“I’ll take this, Operator,” he broke in; and then, his voice, despite his best efforts, trembling a little, “Good morning. Where are you?”

“I’m still at the ranch,” Ceil said. “Have you been home?”

“No,” he said. “I just came up from San Francisco this morning. I came directly here.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“A little.”

“Well, you ought to have a good one. These are challenging times.”

“Yes, I know,” he said, absurdly relieved that she should use her usual bantering tone. “I’m not being too active at the moment, though: just sitting here thinking.”

“Is anyone with you?”

“No,” he said; and ventured, “Not even my wife.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying to keep it light though his voice trembled a little again. “I came back to the Mark and found a note that you had gone to ‘Vistazo.’ I didn’t think I had kicked you out.”

“I suppose it was a little abrupt,” she conceded. “But I suddenly had just had it.”

“I thought I had too,” he said quietly.

“It wasn’t very obvious at the time,” she said thoughtfully. “You didn’t give that impression.”

“I have some pride, after all.”

“Yes, I know.…What are you doing now?”