Preserve and Protect (5 page)

Powerful political sources here who cannot presently be named!

The President snorted.

He knew those sources from long, long experience in Washington:

Remington, Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Underwood and L. C. Smith. And most of them working overtime for Ted Jason.

He snorted again.

“Caretaker President” and the bland assumption—spurred on, of course, by the carefully concealed fear that he might just decide to “do a Harley” and run himself—that he would obediently get out of the White House as soon as possible.

“Caretaker President” and the bland assumption that they could force him to reconvene the national convention.

“The new President occupies a unique position in the party hierarchy in that he was, as Speaker, chairman of the National Committee,” the
Times
had written. “Presumably he retains this office, in the absence of any word from him—” That’s right, the President thought grimly—“and so has it in his power to call the Committee at once and instruct it to reconvene the national convention—”

Or not instruct it, he told them dryly. Or not even call it, for a week or two, until poor Harley had a chance to get a little decent rest and honorable men could again begin to take up political matters.

Except that of course he knew better than that. Honorable men and dishonorable men were all busy on politics this minute, and had been from the moment they heard the news. It was the nature of the system, and no point in being pious about that.

But there were fictions that could be used, and like everyone in politics, he had used them on many occasions. The fiction that a great quietus lay on politics until a leader was decently buried was one of them. He could use it now as he had before and outwardly keep up the pretense of respectful inaction, though he knew he would be bombarded—and might do a little bombarding himself—on all sides in the next few days.

One thing nobody could do: nobody could make him move faster than he wanted to. Walter could write, Frankly could fulminate,
The
Greatest Publication
and its colleagues could assault the world with new indignations each morning, Orrin and Ted could stand in line and pound on his door, and still nobody could make him move.

He had learned the value, in the House, of taking some time to think, and now he was going to stand firm for a while and have it.

Nobody had ever pushed the Speaker around much.

Nobody was going to push the President around, either.

He realized with a start that it must be almost one a.m.

“My God, I’m tired,” he remarked quietly to the little predawn wind that was beginning to probe through the pines. He stood up abruptly and went in to bed, where he fell asleep without delay and without dreams.

4

“SWEETIE,” Patsy Jason Labaiya said from her enormous redwood desk in Dumbarton Oaks next morning, “you simply must talk to him. You simply MUST. He won’t listen to me, I KNOW that. It’s got to be someone he respects, like you.”

For a moment she thought her sister-in-law was going to hang up, for there was no sound from the other end of the line at “Vistazo,” the enormous Jason ranch in the burnt-umber hills above Santa Barbara. But presently Ceil Jason responded in a tone that was, for her, surprisingly impatient.

“Oh, Patsy, why won’t you stop meddling? Things have gone to a point now where I don’t think anyone—”

“But they haven’t gone to that point at all, sweetie!” Patsy interrupted indignantly. “Not at ALL. Now that Ted’s repudiated that STUPID third party, everything’s just the way it was. He can run for President again, now that that old fool—”

“Patsy!” Ceil exclaimed, genuinely shocked.

“Well, I’m sorry he got killed,” Patsy conceded defiantly, “but I’m not sorry he’s out of Ted’s way. He never should have done and said the things he did.”

“And Ted should have said and done what he did?”

“He only did what he felt he had to do to win the nomination,” Patsy said.

“But he didn’t win it, did he?”

“No,” his sister said with a sudden waspish note in her voice, “because that—that—
gang
—of old reactionaries led by Harley and Orrin blocked him from doing it. That doesn’t mean the convention didn’t want him, and doesn’t want him still. Now, you KNOW that, Ceil, so why keep pretending?”

There was a sigh, half-exasperated, half-amused, from “Vistazo.”

“Patsy, you wear me out. What makes you so sure the convention still wants him? Anyway, who says the convention’s going to have a chance? The President doesn’t have to reconvene the convention—”

“No, but sooner or later he’s got to call the National Committee, and they can reconvene the convention. That’s why you’ve got to call Bob Leffingwell immediately and get him to help us persuade the Committee members—”

“Patsy!” Ceil protested, overwhelmed, and not for the first time, by the Jasons’ ability to ignore all obstacles and ride roughshod toward what they wanted. “That’s exactly what I mean about things having gone too far. You heard Bob’s nominating speech for Harley and the attack he made on Ted. ‘Devious’ and ‘playing fast and loose with principle’ and all the rest of it. How on earth can you ask him to work for you now?”

“Oh, poof! Poof, POOF! That was an entirely different set of circumstances. Bob didn’t nominate Orrin, did he?”

“No, Harley did.”

“Well, then: why assume Bob’s for Orrin now? He owed Harley a debt for salvaging his career after he was defeated for Secretary of State, but who defeated him? Orrin Knox! Maybe that wasn’t ‘going so far nothing can be done about it,’ I ask you!”

“Even so, I don’t think there’s any reason at all to believe that Bob Leffingwell is going to come back to Ted just because he may not like Orrin. And I don’t think he’s all that influential, either, especially after all the things that were said about
him
at the convention.”

Patsy sniffed.

“Everybody said a lot of things about everybody at the convention. That’s what conventions are for. People’s emotions don’t change basic political realities. The reality is that Ted is going to win that nomination now, and that Bob will have to back him against Orrin. And Bob
is
influential, Ceil. He’s lost a little ground, maybe, but the minute he announces for Ted, Walter Dobius and everybody else in the press will start praising him again. He hasn’t lost them permanently. They’d love to come back if he’ll give them the chance. The professional liberals,” she said with a dry savagery that startled her sister-in-law, who had thought she was one of them, “never really like to abandon a hero in whom they’ve invested their time and reputations. They’ll take him back if he gives the slightest sign that he’s willing to behave from now on.”

“Bob isn’t a member of the National Committee—”

“We’re going to organize this just like the convention,” Patsy said. “We’re opening a headquarters here in Washington tomorrow morning and we’re going to issue releases and hold press conferences, and all the rest of it. Bob can head it up again if he wants to. It would be a great help to us. We’re already getting marvelous support from the press and the networks. You’ve probably seen Walter’s column and some of the editorials. CBS wants to do a half-hour interview with Ted from here after the funeral on Wednesday, and NBC is planning to do one, too, I believe. They’re going to call it ‘Party Without a President.’”

“That should please President Abbott,” Ceil remarked. “That should please him very much. Don’t you think he’s the man you should be working on, not Bob Leffingwell and the Committee members?”

“He’s only ONE,” Patsy said tartly.

“But look where he lies now. A rather big ONE, I’d say.”

“He can’t control what the Committee does! All he can do is try to influence it for Orrin, I suppose. And we’re going to influence it for Ted. So our chance is as good as his. Better, because the convention still wants Ted. Can’t you see,” she demanded, “what a perfect COUP it would be if he and Bob are reconciled? Right now Bob still has a lot of his old liberal support, and by nominating Harley he’s picked up a lot of conservatives, too. He’s a symbol of the honest man who genuinely stands in the middle, now. He genuinely does. They’ll listen to what he says. But, sweetie,
he
won’t listen to
me,
because he doesn’t like me right now. He does like and respect you, I believe. So you’ve got to call him for us. He’s apparently trying to avoid Ted.”

“Why should he like me?” Ceil inquired. “I’m Ted’s wife.” She uttered the sudden little sardonic chuckle that sometimes upset her in-laws. “In a manner of speaking.”

“That’s exactly why, dear,” Patsy said smoothly. “You are—but there’s a little doubt about it at the moment, because you’ve been so dramatic, leaving him at the crucial moment of the convention and sneaking away down there—”

“I didn’t sneak,” Ceil said mildly. “I told him where I was going.”

“Well, anyway, you LEFT. That’s the main thing. And yet you’re still his wife, of course, and I suppose will remain so—you will, won’t you?” she asked in abrupt alarm. “You aren’t really thinking about doing anything foolish—”

“Oh, no,” Ceil said in a tired tone. “I just wanted to think things out by myself. If a simple desire for reflection is something the Jason family can understand.”

“Then that makes you the perfect one to call Bob,” Patsy said triumphantly. “You’re—
with
Ted, but you’re not actually too—
close
—at the moment. It gives YOU a nice independent status, too. Have you talked to Ted?”

“Not lately.”

“Well. I’m sure this is EXACTLY what he would want you to do.”

“No doubt.”

“Well. You will, then.”

“I’m not making any promises.”

“Well, at least you’ll think about it—” Patsy began in a concerned tone.

“I’m thinking about a lot of things,” Ceil told her. “Goodbye, Patsy. Thanks for calling.”

“But, Ceil—”

There was a firm
click!
from California, and the line went dead. Damn her, anyway, Patsy thought angrily. Ceil had always been an uncertain element in the Jason campaign to put Ted in the White House. Sometimes Patsy thought that all Ceil ever wanted to do was be beautiful and ride on Ted’s name to wherever it might take her. She had never really
believed
in him the way his sister did.

She looked out through the vines that shaded the big windows of her study, to the tennis court and the pool beyond. It was close to noon. Nothing stirred. Washington’s suffocating summer heat had the world flat on its back.

“Thank God for air-conditioning,” she said aloud. She put her finger tips together and narrowed her eyes.

“Well!” she said. “What shall I do next?”

But as always with Patsy, the question was rhetorical. She already had an idea, and pulling the telephone once more toward her, she dialed a number and began to set it in motion.

At the same moment, at the airport, Senator Munson, who had left the
Zephyr
in Denver to meet his wife Dolly and the widowed First Lady and her two Secret Service escorts, was facing half a dozen reporters after a swift and uneventful flight in the special Air Force plane provided by the President. They wanted to know a lot of details that he wasn’t about to tell them: Had Lucille Hudson balked at taking an airplane back to Washington? Had she been worried because it was an Air Force plane? Was she in reasonably good spirits? Had she been crying? Who did he think the party’s new standard bearers would be? Would Orrin Knox get the nomination now?

All of these he had refused to answer, with a curt impatience that prompted the
New York Times
to murmur to
The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was,
“Our Robert seems awfully tense about something. You don’t suppose Abbott’s putting the hex on Orrin, do you?” To which the G.P. murmured back, “It might be worth a little analyzing, I should think.”

They were about to press him further and see if they couldn’t make him mad enough to say something interesting, when the cabin door opened again and the First Lady, heavily veiled, came slowly out on Dolly Munson’s arm and started down the steps. In the ensuing hubbub the photographers got some wonderful pictures, even if the reporters didn’t get quite the factual story from Senator Munson that they wanted. But they were old hands at interpreting the moods of the great, and a few minutes later
The Greatest Publication’s
man was back in his office in the National Press Building tapping out the think-piece that he would send to New York to run alongside his colorful and moving account of Lucille Hudson’s return to a black-draped White House.

“An obviously troubled Senate Majority Leader Munson,” it began, “apparently concerned that the death of President Harley M. Hudson may blast the Presidential hopes of his longtime friend. Secretary of State Orrin Knox—”

WHITE HOUSE MAY DUMP KNOX IN NEW BALLOTING, MUNSON FEARS, the headline said.

An hour later at “Salubria,” his lovely old home in Leesburg, forty miles out from the capital in the slumbering Virginia countryside, Walter Dobius, just back from San Francisco, read the item on his news-agency ticker (“Can you match Greatest Wh Hu Knox dump?” the New York office had queried the Washington bureau, and the Washington bureau had speedily obliged). Then he put a sheet of paper in his typewriter to start tomorrow’s column.

“It is apparent already,” he wrote swiftly, “that the arrogance with which Secretary of State Knox has claimed the Presidential nomination following the death of President Hudson may be somewhat premature. If the attitude of Senate Majority Leader Robert M. Munson of Michigan is to be believed—and most observers here consider the Majority Leader to be one of the nation’s shrewdest political weather vanes—there appears to be what might justly be termed a growing disenchantment with the Secretary’s ambitions on the part of the new President, William Abbott.…”

Within two hours after that, the correspondents of the
London Times
, the
London Observer
and the
Guardian
, the little man from Tass, the correspondents of the French, German and Italian news agencies, the man from the
Times of India
, the lady who wrote for the Swedish newspapers, and the correspondent of
News-Arabia
, had all cabled stories to the general effect that the new President was rapidly cooling toward Secretary Knox and would probably toss him off the ticket. And by the time he presented his special six p.m. Sunday news broadcast, “The Course of the Week,” Frankly Unctuous was able to fix the camera with a forthright, candid and earnest eye and tell his countrymen in his customary suave, plum-pudding tones: