Preserve and Protect (10 page)

“Okay,” he said, handing her his glass. “This will be the final, for now.”

“Me, too, I’ve got to get back and write my column after I leave here. Is everything where I can find it?”

“It’s all beside the sink,” he said, yawning and rubbing the back of his neck. Two cardinals flew by, busy; a squirrel pranced; the world drowsed.

“God,” Helen-Anne said, handing him his drink, “am I sick to death of
Jasons!
Except Ceil, of course. She’s a great lady.”

“She’s wonderful,” he agreed. She gave him a shrewd look.

“So are you going to support her husband for President?”

“Helen-Anne,” he said soberly, “to tell you the truth, I really don’t know.”

“Orrin’s the better man.”

‘Yes,” he said with a smile. “We all know how you feel about Orrin. Anyway, who cares what I do? I thought,” he said, his eyes narrowing with pain as he remembered the violent cries of “Liar!” that had been hurled at him by the National Committeewoman from Pennsylvania, “that Mary Buttner Baffleburg pretty well took care of me at the convention.”

“Mary Baffleburg is an overstuffed Pennsylvania Dutch sausage.”

“But she’s going to have a vote for President when the Committee meets, isn’t she?”

“Perhaps. We don’t know yet how the Speaker—the President—is going to handle it. Anyway, don’t downgrade yourself. You’re in a good spot. They’d both love to have you on their side. You’d take the conservatives to Ted and the genuine liberals to Orrin.”

“What a political hermaphrodite! Not many heterosexuals can make this claim.”

“Okay, joke,” she said, “but I’m telling you the situation. Haven’t they been trying to reach you?”

“The phone’s been ringing, off and on. I haven’t been answering.”

“My,” she remarked, “aren’t we high and mighty, for a—”

“What?” he said quickly. “Liar?”

“Bob Leffingwell,” she said sharply, “will you stop beating yourself over the head with that? It’s
all over.
The situation has changed. You’ve been forgiven, to a considerable extent, so stop dramatizing yourself. Life’s moving on. Get with it.…What I started to say,” she added, more mildly, “was that you were rather high and mighty for a political has-been—and then I was going to say that really you
aren’t
a political has-been—and
then
I was going to say—oh, the hell with it. If you want to sit here by your pool and feel sorry for yourself, God bless you. I’ve got better things to do.”

And picking up her enormous handbag, from which a conglomeration of note paper, press releases and several sections of the Sunday
New York Times
threatened to spill, she stood up abruptly.

But he waved her down again.

“Helen-Anne,” he said, “you stop dramatizing, too. You’re about the only person I know in this town at the moment who is capable of giving me honest advice. What do you think I ought to do?”

“Well,” she said, subsiding with some reluctance, “I do have better things to do than nurse wounded egos, I can tell you that. Helen-Anne is a busy girl, right now. What
I
think you should do is go and talk to Orrin Knox, if you want my frank opinion. God knows you’ve talked to Ted enough, but I’ll bet you never have talked to Orrin—really talked to him, I mean.”

“Our relations, over the years,” he said with a certain wryness, “have hardly been such as to induce any boyish confidences. Before I was”—and even now, a year later, he hesitated painfully over the word—“nominated, I didn’t have much occasion to see him, except at a few cocktail parties around town. And then after I was nominated, we really didn’t have much opportunity for a cozy chat. And since then … No,” he agreed thoughtfully, his eyes far away as he stared at the distant dome of the Capitol, riding like a galleon through the gentle haze, “I never have really talked to Orrin Knox.”

“My advice to you is, do it,” she said bluntly. “Unless, of course, you’re going to go crawling back to Ted.”

“No,” he said with a sudden sharp annoyance that made her think perhaps she had gone too far, “I’m not going to go crawling back to Ted. He’s doing the crawling, if anybody is. They can all come crawling, as far as I’m concerned!”

“Now you are getting too high and mighty,” she told him soberly, once more gathering up her gear, yanking a comb through her tangled silver-gray hair, rising to her rather dumpy, ungainly stance. “I think you’d better have another drink, Bob, and then I think you’d better start answering the telephone, and then I think you’d better give some serious thought to going to see a few people. And not in the mood you expressed just now, but with a reasonable degree of humility. Pride and arrogance ruin more people and thwart more plans in this town than anything else, I’ve always thought, and you may think you’re humble but you sure as hell don’t sound it. I think you’d better be, if you really want to contribute anything to getting this God-awful situation straightened out.” She gave him a quick, shrewd look. “I don’t think you’ve really learned anything. You just think you have.”

For a long moment, staring at her with those handsome gray eyes that always contributed so much to the picture of the very parfit gentil knight of government that his admirers liked to think he was, he said nothing. Then he stood up, smiled, and held out his hand.

“Helen-Anne—” he said. “Old friend—old buddy—aide and adviser through thick and thin—”

“Oh, go to hell,” she said, batting aside his hand but beginning to smile in spite of herself.

“—I think you have a point. I really do. I shall treasure it. I shall sit for a while and think—no more drinking, though, that might defeat the whole purpose—and then I shall go humbly to the telephone and humbly on my rounds, and we shall see what happens.…And you,” he added, again offering his hand, which she took this time with a firm pressure, “don’t write one single solitary thing about what I may or may not do, okay?”

“Damn!” she said. “The stories I’ve killed for my country.”

“I know it,” he said, quite seriously. “As one American, I appreciate it.”

“Now you’re getting maudlin.” But she looked pleased. “I can’t avoid speculating some, sweetie, everybody is. Tell me what the facts are when you can, okay?”

“I will,” he said, taking her arm and walking her around the house to her car. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you more today.”

“You’ve given me quite a bit. I hope it’s been mutual.”

“Oh, it has,” he said, lightly but with a serious note underneath. “It has. I hope you find something for that column.”

“It doesn’t have to be done until tomorrow, but I want to get it out of the way today because there’s a lot of funeral coverage I’m going to have to help with, starting tomorrow morning.”

“I know,” he said, suddenly somber.

“Maybe—” she said, deliberately breaking the mood before it could depress them too much, “Maybe I’ll call Patsy. She’s always good for a horselaugh when I haven’t anything else to write about.”

But a few minutes later, when she was back over the river and out southeast in the deserted city room of the
Star,
she found Patsy singularly uncooperative. “I think you’re working on something, girl,” she told her. Patsy only laughed in a deliberately annoying way and refused to be drawn out, beyond saying in a dreamy voice, “Oh, I might just think of something to even things up a bit.” But Helen-Anne was not an old hand at the game for nothing.

Like any experienced Washington correspondent, she could make bricks without straw when she had to.

“In a Washington hushed and saddened by the tragic death of Harley M. Hudson,” she typed swiftly, “politics, as always, takes no holiday. Even as the President’s body was being prepared for formal lying-in-state at the White House Tuesday, and at the Capitol Wednesday morning, speculation was already rife today that Robert A. Leffingwell, key figure in the convention just concluded, may be even more of a key figure in the Presidential nominating yet to come.

“Governor Edward M. Jason of California was believed to be trying desperately to reach this glamorous figure, who only three days ago—”

But when Bob Leffingwell, after another dip in the pool and a few more minutes of somber contemplation of the great white city sprawled along the Potomac, went finally to answer the insistent telephone, it was not the Jason he expected who was on the line.

“This is Ceil,” she said quietly from California. “I want to give you some advice.”

“Lots of people do,” he said, carefully refraining from surprise. “I value yours more than most. Fire away.”

“This is Walter,” he said bluntly from “Salubria.” “I want to give you some advice.”

“I’m not in the market,” Governor Jason said coldly from his office in Sacramento. “Why don’t you call me after the funeral?”

“Now, see here,” Walter Dobius said with a sudden surge of anger. “This is important.”

“Everything you say is important, Walter. It’s the one thing we’re all agreed on.”

“I think you should call Bob Leffingwell,” Walter said, trying to control his irritation and managing with some difficulty. “I think he may be able to help you.”

“It never would have occurred to me,” Ted said in a startled voice. “How’s the third party coming, Walter?”

There was a silence in Leesburg. Finally “America’s greatest philosopher-statesman of the press” (as the
New York Times
had called him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his column a couple of months ago) spoke in a tightly controlled, level voice.

“I would not want you to think,” he said carefully, “that my support or that of any of my colleagues is automatic, Ted. It can always be changed.”

The Governor snorted.

“To Orrin Knox? Now tell me another.”

“Ted—” Walter Dobius began with a rising inflection, but the Governor cut him short and it was quite apparent that they now had to deal with a Jason who had recovered and never intended to lose control again.

“You have nowhere else to go, Walter, and all of you from Manhattan to the Golden Gate are perfectly aware of it. You aren’t going to support Orrin. You are going to support me. And on my terms. That’s the fact of it. Right, Walter?”

Again there was silence, broken, the Governor noted with a grim satisfaction, by a little heavy breathing from “Salubria.” At last Walter Dobius spoke in tones even heavier and more pompous than he usually used.

“You are insufferable. Absolutely insufferable.”

“But the great hope of America and world peace, Walter,” Ted Jason said with a savage irony. “Never forget that.”

And hung up, which, in the rarified world he inhabited, of columns that told his country what to do, public speeches that influenced large segments of press and public, and sagely given private advice to kings and potentates who looked to him as perhaps America’s major editorial voice, did not often happen to the man whom Lyndon Johnson had long ago nicknamed “Walter Wonderful.”

The conversation only demonstrated, he told himself after his anger had subsided somewhat and he could sit back reflectively once more at the desk from which so many significant words had gone forth to influence the world, what could be expected from a man of the Governor’s devious and unreliable character. Ted had always been too independent. Walter had known in his heart that it was a chancy game to rely upon him, but there had been no alternative to the insanely dangerous war policies of the President and Orrin Knox.

At least Governor Jason represented a policy of negotiation and peace; at least he genuinely did believe in a “new spirit toward the Soviets,” a “détente between East and West,” a “thaw in relations between the Communist and capitalist worlds,” and all those other phrases, comforting to the timid, however unfounded in fact, which were so beloved of Walter’s world from New York to San Francisco.

He was also Governor of the largest state in the Union, which was a rather important factor, too.

It was important enough, in fact, so that even Walter and his friends could not very well do anything about it. Like Ted Jason or despise him—and some, including Walter, now inclined strongly to the latter—there he was. A political reality of the highest magnitude, once more in command of himself and the situation which confronted him.

To that situation, Walter reflected after a few more moments of calming down, he, Walter, must now apply himself with all the skill and influence he possessed. That this was great and far-reaching, he knew. That it really “controlled” the press, only his more naïve countrymen claimed.

There were those who, reading some criticism of Walter in some un-fashionable publication or book, would say, “I just don’t believe that one man could have that much control over the press.” But no intelligent critic, of course, ever claimed that Walter did. Walter was influential because he was a member in high standing of that small group of columnists, commentators, newspapers, magazines and television programs that largely influence and affect the general thinking of the American nation. He did not “control” his peers any more than they controlled him. What he did do, and with great effectiveness, was sometimes to originate, and sometimes to clarify and synthesize, the major ideas and emotions they held in common.

Thus a few weeks ago he had called together
The Greatest Publication That Ever Was,
the
Times,
the
Post, Newsweek, Look,
CBS, NBC and a few others, for one of those exchanges of ideas that quite often precede the selection of the Presidential candidate they will all support. In some previous elections this consensus had been reached, not at any formal gathering, but rather in a series of informal dinners, cocktail party meetings, transcontinental telephone calls, even casual meetings at golf courses, clubs, public events, at which the general desire had gradually been formed and articulated. Walter’s little meeting had probably not been necessary, so deeply committed had they already become to Governor Jason. But he had a sense of neatness that required it; and, as the general director of the
Post
remarked dryly afterward to his crony, Associate Supreme Court Justice Thomas Buckmaster Davis, “Walter’s ego needed it, too.”

But, as always, he had not “controlled” them. He had simply stated, in the clearest, most powerful and most widely syndicated form, the thoughts and purposes toward which the policy makers were moving within those citadels of journalistic power from which so many decrees and decisions affecting America’s ultimate destiny were handed down to a public apathetic because it was simply so overwhelmed by the furious onward rush of national and world events.