Promise of Joy (23 page)

3

“Well, Sir, Mr. President,” Jawbone said brightly when they were all assembled in the Oval Office at 10 p.m., “here we are.”

“Yes,” he said, his flat tone conceding nothing. “Please be seated, Mrs. Jason, gentlemen. They’ll be bringing coffee and sandwiches in a minute.” His tone became dry. “Also liquor. We may be in for a long session.”

“Long as you like, Mr. President,” Jawbone said cheerfully. “I daresay we’re all game.”

“I am,” William Abbott said, helping Ceil to a chair, taking one beside her in the semicircle that faced the desk, now covered with documents and reports. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

“Yes,” Arly Richardson agreed with some acidity. “Indeed there is.”

“So I have invited you,” the President agreed, his tone still flat and impersonal. “I am glad you all could come.”

And he looked slowly around the semicircle from face to face: Jawbone, Arly, Ceil and the ex-President; the Vice President; Senator Munson, Senator Strickland, Senator August, Lafe Smith; the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense; his son. Stacked rather in his favor, he had to admit, only Tom August, Jawbone and Arly really in opposition—but now, of course, their opposition was a vital matter. He decided to address himself to it immediately the refreshments were served.

Ten minutes passed in stilted chitchat about the weather, which was still dreadful, a massive new snowstorm whipping out of the West and across the frozen Potomac with paralyzing cold and gale-force winds, pounding in on the beautiful old house, piling the deserted streets high with drifts—the only reason, they all knew, that there were not at this very moment huge hostile anti-Knox crowds filling Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Park across the way. During the interval waiters came in, placed coffee, sandwiches, cakes on a small table set up in the corner, liquor, ice and mixes on another next to it.

When they were gone he looked straight at the new Speaker and the new Majority Leader and demanded,

“How much trouble are you two going to make for me?”

“Well, now, Orrin—Mr. President, sir,” Jawbone began hastily, “you mustn’t take that hostile attitude, now, you really—”

Arly Richardson cut across his bluster, his voice as cold as the wind off the river.

“As much as the Congress decides you deserve,” he said, and even considering his long-time jealousy of Orrin, his harsh comment brought a surprised intake of breath around the room.

“I see,” the President said thoughtfully. “That seems frank enough. In effect, then, I really have no leader in either house, do I?”

“Oh, now,” Jawbone began, “let’s don’t get off on this kind of foot now, Mr. President, sir, let’s don’t get all hostile and unhappy right away, now—”

But again Senator Richardson spoke with a bluntness to match Orrin’s own.

“That depends entirely on what you do,” he said, somewhat more reasonable in tone but as adamant as before. “On some routine matters, I would think you would have the full cooperation of the Speaker and myself for whatever you want to do. On some other matters—” His voice trailed deliberately away.

“And those, of course,” Orrin said, “are exactly the matters most vital to this country, and the world.”

Arly shrugged.

“As you like, Mr. President. It is not the Speaker and I who have devised the collision course America is on now.”

“Right,” Orrin agreed promptly. “That has been devised in Moscow and Peking.”

“With some help,” Senator Richardson said dryly.

“From the beginning,”
the President said, returning him stare for stare.

“Well, now,” Jawbone began nervously. “Well, now, Mr. President—”

“From the beginning,”
the President repeated calmly. “When are you going to bring up my defense bill, Mr. Speaker?”

“Why, as soon as it’s gone through the committees,” Jawbone said. “As soon as it’s gone through the committees and everything’s in order. Can’t be any sooner than that, Mr. President. You know how the House works.”

“Slowly,” Orrin agreed. “And you, Mr. Majority Leader?”

“In the regular course.”

“That will be weeks.”

“So?”

The President gave him a steady look.

“So I need it now.”

Senator Richardson shrugged.

“Congress won’t give it to you now.”

“Bill—” the President said, turning to his predecessor and the former Majority Leader, “Bob—what can you do for me?”

“Mr. President,” William Abbott said regretfully, “you know: not very damned much. We’ve both been royally repudiated, and through us, you have been too.” He smiled ruefully. “It doesn’t exactly give any of us leverage.”

“I hope to provide the leverage with my speech tomorrow morning,” the President said. Bob Munson frowned.

“It’s a very uphill battle,” he observed. The President responded with a sudden blaze of the old Orrin.

“But
why is it?”
he demanded sharply. “Why
is
it an uphill battle? The facts of history are on my side, the truth of history is on my side—”

“But not,” the ex-President said glumly, “the frightened pretenses of history or the desperate willful blindnesses of history, or the terrible refusal of history to look harsh and demanding facts in the face. All of those things are rampant in America today. You know what the media will say tomorrow morning, have been saying for twenty-four hours—one long threnody of Pretend It Isn’t So, just as they’ve always done. Even more hysterical, now that you’ve cut through the pretense and acted on the reality.” He paused and fished in his breast pocket for a piece of paper. “I’ve been brushing up on my Solzhenitsyn these last few days,” he remarked when he found it, “because he’s an inside expert who knew what it’s all about and had the guts to say so.” He put on his glasses and read slowly:

“‘The timid civilized world’—and, he might have added,
the leadership of its journalistic, educational and intellectual communities
—‘has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of the sudden revival of barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful’—and, he might have added,
intellectually arrogant
—‘people; it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity’—and, he might have added,
the favor of the intellectually fashionable—
‘at any price.

“‘Such people … elect passivity and retreat … just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today.…’

“They think ‘tomorrow … it will be all right. But it will never be all right. The price of cowardice will always be evil.’

“He knew,” William Abbott concluded gravely. “And the delicate way our great liberals tiptoed around him, first applauding, then becoming fearful of his terrible Russian honesty, then fading quietly away from their tentative and timorous defense of his views because his words threw too cold and glaring a light on their own frightened and responsibility-evading approach to the horrors of Communist reality, bore him out. He was the great touchstone of the liberal conscience. And the liberal conscience failed him, in America as everywhere, because it lacked the guts to face up to the truth of what he said about his own country, whose false myths of peace and freedom they wanted so desperately to preserve, for the sake of their own cowardice.” He sighed and concluded quietly, “You, Mr. President, occupy the same unhappy ground.”

“But from a different base,” Orrin said quietly, “because I am President of the United States.”

“It may not be enough,” Senator Richardson remarked with a sort of superior certainty, and Cullee Hamilton turned on him with a sudden burst of anger.

“Why isn’t it enough?” he demanded. “Why are you so smug about it, Senator? What makes you think, just because you got elected this afternoon, that you have all the answers?”

“Because I did get elected this afternoon,” Arly said with some asperity, “and the issue was clearly drawn between the war policies of this President and the peace policies that a majority of his countrymen, and obviously of the whole world, want him to follow.”

“Not the whole world,” Ceil said quietly. “Peace has nothing to do with it, up there in the UN. It’s Get-America Day every day, and peace is only the excuse.”

“You seem to know a lot about it for one who has only been there one day,” Senator Richardson snapped. She gave him a cold little smile.

“One day at the UN goes a long way,” she observed. “Take my word for it, Senator.” The smile turned colder. “Thank you, incidentally, for your gallant support of my nomination.”

“The issue is clear-cut,” Arly said, flushing but standing his ground. “It goes right down the line.”

“So it does,” she agreed, her look dismissing him, “which is why I hope the President is going to make it very clear to the country tomorrow.”

“It won’t matter,” Arly said stubbornly. “You can’t conceal the facts with words.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” Robert A. Leffingwell said quietly. “You manage, Senator.”

“A fine comment,” Arly Richardson said angrily, “for one who must depend upon the Senate’s indulgence to win confirmation to the Cabinet.”

“I had your indulgence two years ago when I could excuse and justify the Communist rationale,” Bob Leffingwell replied with an equal anger. “Now I don’t accept it anymore and so I haven’t got your indulgence. I’ve changed and you’ve changed, Senator. Again, as you say, the issue cuts all down the line.”

“And are Mr. Leffingwell and I,” Blair Hannah spoke for the first time, with a dangerous quiet, “to infer from your remark that we cannot expect the indulgence of the Senate for our confirmations?”

The Majority Leader studied him thoughtfully for a moment.

“‘There may be some—protracted argument,” he said finally. “How long may depend upon how long the President persists in policies with which the Congress does not agree.”

The President leaned forward and did some thoughtful studying himself, staring straight at the sharp-featured old colleague who had given him so much trouble during all the years of their joint Senate careers.

“So you’re going to try to blackmail me, are you, Arly?” he inquired softly. “Won’t give me my Cabinet unless I come to heel. They’ll be delighted with that in Moscow and Peking.”

“They’ll be delighted in Washington, too,” Arly snapped, and got up abruptly. “I’m going to get a drink.”

“Bring me one, too,” Orrin suggested acidly to his departing back. “Scotch. Strong. I’ve got to wash a lot of bad taste out of my mouth.”

“Well, now!” the Speaker said hastily. “Well, now, you-all, you-all, now! That’s no way to talk, now, that’s no way at all. We got us a problem, here, and what we got to do is
solve
it, not go off bein’
hostile
to one another. We
got
to work together, now, we just
got
to!”

“Sure,” the President said. “On your terms.”

“Isn’t that what anybody wants, Mr. President, sir?” Jawbone demanded. “Isn’t that what anybody wants?”

“I need the support of Congress,” Orrin said levelly, “or the United States of America is going to have to surrender.”

“Oh, now!” Jawbone cried. “Oh, fudge, now! Those are very dramatic words, Mr. President, sir, but I don’t believe ’em. I just don’t believe ’em, now! It isn’t all that bad!”

“Of course it isn’t,” Senator Richardson agreed, returning with his drink and—creating a brief moment of amusement in the midst of tension—one for the President, which he placed on the desk in front of him before returning to his seat. “Of course it isn’t. We may take some humiliation in the world if we withdraw under pressure, we may look a little foolish, I’ll grant you. But”—his expression turned adamant—“we have invited the humiliation, and we deserve to look foolish.”

“And what happens to us,” Warren Strickland inquired quietly, “if we are humiliated, and if we do look foolish? What happens to the world’s respect, what happens to its willingness to believe in our credibility or rely upon our actions, what happens to our allies who see us turn tail and run in the face of the most blatant and open confrontation? Who will ever rely upon us again?”

“Old arguments,” Tom August said in his hesitant, regretful way. “Old, tired arguments that went out with Vietnam and other ill-fated adventures, and whose discrediting
should
have pointed the way toward a different course in Panama and Gorotoland. Except, of course”—and the regretfulness deepened—“that they did not.”

“But, Tom,” Bob Munson said, “for God’s
sake,
man! How you people can so blithely ignore the fact that
their aggression came first—”

“That does not excuse my country,” Senator August said with a certain prim and unshakable disapproval, “when it does the wrong thing.”

“Tom,” Senator Strickland said, his tone showing the strain of many years of arguing with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on this same general subject, “how can you possibly, as a rational man, accept the Soviet-Chinese claims as to how this thing began?”

“He doesn’t accept them as a rational man,” Lafe said shortly. “He accepts them as a frightened man.”

“And why shouldn’t I be frightened,” Senator August demanded with an almost quivering impatience, “when I see my President plunging us into new wars and bringing on a direct confrontation with the Communists? Why shouldn’t any sane man be frightened?”

“Any sane man should be frightened,” Lafe agreed shortly, “but only cowardly sane men should run away.”

“‘Cowardly, cowardly’!” Tom August mimicked in a bitter voice. “What does your bravery add up to? I suppose it’s brave to want to blow up the world!”

“Tom,” the President said with a sudden sharp annoyance, “will you stop sniveling? Nobody wants to blow up the world. All I want to do is—”

“Whatever you
want
to do,” Senator August interrupted, looking, as always, mouselike but doggedly determined, “the end result is going to be just what I said unless we can deflect you from this crazy course.”

At this a silence fell, while the President studied him thoughtfully for several moments. Then he leaned forward and observed softly: