Promise of Joy (28 page)

Mrs. Jason narrowly escapes death in bomb blast. Her chauffeur dies in car booby trap. Attack believed caused by concern over Knox war policies.

President issues angry statement, discloses threats to son and daughter-in-law. Announces stepped-up security for “all members of my personal and official family.” Vice president given extra guards. NAWAC leaders deny responsibility but warn that “he who resorts to sword must expect to find sword used against him.”

Reports from war zones indicate U.S. forces still in retreat as powerful red offensives roll on.

“And so Orrin Knox has reaped the first—or is it the second, or third, or how many? Whatever it is, the number will assuredly grow—bitter fruit of his obdurate, intractable and foredoomed policies,”
The Greatest Publication
commented. “An innocent man is dead and the President’s Ambassador to the United Nations has narrowly escaped death. Mrs. Ceil Jason, who only five months ago lost her husband to assailants unknown, has now herself come within seconds of suffering the same fate. It should be enough to give a prudent man pause—since it is his actions which have apparently led straight to this unhappy event.…”

“An innocent chauffeur dead,” the
Times
said with equal severity, “Ambassador Ceil Jason almost dead, the President’s children and his Vice President subjected to threats of terrible violence unless he changes his policies—only an Orrin Knox, we suspect, could continue his stubborn course under circumstances such as these. How much longer must all around him—how much longer must his helpless country and the world—suffer from the intemperate and ill-advised war program of this most erratic and unfortunate of Chief Executives? He takes upon himself a fearful burden, to play so lightly with the lives of all of us entrusted to his care. How much longer, we wonder, will the Congress and the country suffer him to continue without imposing checkreins he cannot imperially ignore…?”

“So the insanity goes on,” the
Post
exploded. “So the insane stubbornness of Orrin Knox goes on. It staggers the mind, where it does not desolate the heart. How many must die, on the battlefields and in his own immediate group, before he gets it through his head that America and the world simply do not approve of his ruthless, arrogant, foredoomed war policies? Only one truly paranoiac, truly schizophrenic, we suspect, could play so lightly with the fate of men and nations. Starting on Page 1 today we present an analysis of the President by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists. Entitled
Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power,
it promises to give Americans a profound insight into their most unfit President ever. We commend it to all citizens who wish to understand this strange man who is riding the juggernaut straight down the road to national and world disaster.…”

“Washington waits and wonders tonight,” Frankly Unctuous said gravely—“another of Frankly’s wait-and-wonder nights,” his less respectful colleagues assured one another at the Press Club bar—“about the strange course of the strange man who has just assumed the awesome powers of the American Presidency. Confronted by the death of an innocent black chauffeur, the near death of Mrs. Ceil Jason, dire and terrible threats to the safety of his own son and daughter-in-law, his Vice President, his official family, he staggers blindly on, deeper and ever deeper into the morass of endless war. At such a time, subject to the whims of such a man, Americans can only pray—and try to understand. Today a major contribution to that understanding began, first of fifteen lengthy segments, in the
Post.
Written by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists, it is entitled
Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power.
It will be published next week in paperback by the
Post.
We urge all citizens anxious to understand their unhappy driven President to write the
Post
immediately for a free copy, enclosing twenty-five cents for postage and handling. Simply address it:
Unbalance,
Washington, D.C.…”

“Only a true megalomaniac,” Walter Dobius advised his 436 client newspapers, “would continue to pursue the course of Orrin Knox against all the odds—personal, national, international—psychological, diplomatic, military—which confront him. Such a megalomaniac, one suspects, is Orrin Knox, now falling further and further into the bottomless pit of a war he can neither win nor, apparently, end.

“Or, perhaps, one should say ‘neither win
nor bring himself to end.’
Because there is growing concern here in Washington that the new President may be a man so hounded by psychological fears and darkly driving obsessions that he may be spinning out of control and close to crack-up. If so, terrible times lie immediately ahead for this hapless country and the helpless world so endangered by his haunted compulsion to exercise supreme power, whatever the cost.

“Illuminating this tragic side of the President’s nature, suspected by so many who have known him during his Senate years, is a new book, soon to be available to all Americans, that began running today in the
Post.
Written by one of New York City’s most brilliant young psychiatrists, it is entitled
Orrin Knox: Achieving the Unbalance of Power.

“The unbalance of power it is, achieved by a man who really is, many fear, unbalanced. The thought can only bring to men everywhere the icy dread of what such a President can do to the world.

Well, he thought that night with a tartness they all would have recognized, there was an icy dread, all right: in him, for what they would do to the country and the world if he knuckled under and let them get away with it. Having found so far that they couldn’t shake him on the issues, they now were turning to all the tricks of sneak-and-peek journalism that had become so fashionable in such august places in recent years. The psychiatric study, that favorite ploy, was now under way: it was inevitable that it should have appeared first where it did. Next would come the hints about income tax, the attempts to becloud his financial record, the attacks on his personal life, the sly rumors and innuendos of some vague private failing, the smirk, the snigger, the leer, the lie. It was a well-honed and by now quite respectable technique, elevated to one of the basic principles of modern reporting by journals that had once prided themselves that their integrity would never allow it. Integrity was a long time gone, now, and every public man sooner or later had to defend himself against the hit-and-run tactics of those who wrapped themselves with a smug self-protective righteousness in the flag and the First Amendment to do their devious work.

Well: he had survived this sort of thing before, and he would survive it now. Whether he would survive the attacks of more responsible institutions such as the
Times,
which still possessed sufficient integrity to confront him on the merits, was another question. Because, being an honest man, he knew there was much to be said on the other side.

All of his public life, and ever more sharply in recent years, they had been challenging him on his basic attitudes toward the Communist world and his policies for working out a livable accommodation with it. They did not agree with him that firmness, diligence, prudence, forethought, a strong defense, a strong skepticism and a strong will were the prerequisites of living with the men of Moscow, Peking and their satellites. They felt that faith, hope, charity, concession, withdrawal, one-sided trust, the endless building of paper houses of treaties, agreements,
“détentes,”
would ultimately persuade a ravenous aggression to abandon its perfectly candid and never-changing aim of destroying democracy and the freedom of the human mind.

They had fought very hard, as they always did, to try to win the Presidency for the man who seemed best to symbolize their grimly held belief that comfortable, amiable retreat was more productive than uncomfortable, stubborn strength. This last time their hero had been Ted Jason, and because the violent had clustered around him, Orrin’s more worthwhile critics had found themselves in strange beds with strange bedfellows. They still were, as witness the riots and threats of NAWAC side by side with the solemn lashings of the
Times,
the nasty gut-fighting of the
Post.
Starting at those extremes, the troubled reaction to his policies spread on down through the populace, on over the world. Orrin Knox the candidate had meant a tough foreign policy to those who had fought him and those who had supported him. Orrin Knox the President meant the same thing, enlarged a thousandfold.

And many, many millions, he knew, were perfectly sincere, perfectly genuine, perfectly patriotic and disinterested in their opposition to him. He would never be given credit for understanding their point of view, because it suited his critics better to portray him as being as rigid, illiberal and intolerant of the opposing view as they were. But he knew, and he felt that many of his countrymen knew, that he did understand their point of view, and that only because he honestly could not accept it did he hold tenaciously to policies that could, in the present instance, truthfully be called warlike.

Yet he did not see how he could do other. He wanted a livable accommodation with the ever-surging, ever-probing, ever-imperializing Communist tide—and to him “livable” was the key word.

What could you live with? That was the heart of it. Long ago in World War II, he remembered, the columnist Dorothy Thompson had done a piece on “Who Would Go Nazi?”—a cleverly bitter speculation on which among the many public figures of whom she disapproved would embrace fascism if it should, as then seemed very possible, conquer the world.

The same thing might be done now, on the other side. “Who Would Go Communist?” Who—as she had then portrayed them and as many still were, weak of will, avid of ambition, consumed by fears for personal safety, the desire to be on the winning side and the arrogant intellectual conviction that they could handle anybody and survive—would go Communist?

He suspected there were quite a few, leaving well aside the never-resting minority in all countries around the world who were already actively committed. The media were always the first who had to bow to Communism when it took a country, because in the electronic age they were the keys to the control of public opinion. Therefore they were placed immediately under dictatorship. Inevitably many among them would point proudly to past sympathies and claim that this gave them a right to survive: because they had always “understood.” They would eagerly and naïvely “go Communist.” But this would do them no good. Having been free, inevitably in short order they would try to act as though they still were free. And immediately they would be eliminated, because the mindless state can brook no opposition from the mind.

For this reason he believed, although they would never concede it to him, that in a fundamental way he was protecting Supermedia and its friends as much as he was protecting anything else when he advocated a firm policy
vis-à-vis
history’s latest imperialism. It lent an extra impatience to the mood with which he thought of them. They thought they could embrace those who wished them death, and survive, did they? They would find out damned fast, if it ever came to that.

The same thing applied to the many millions who, conditioned by the constant drummings of Supermedia through newsprint, screen and tube, felt a perfectly innocent aversion to his policies—regarded him as warmonger and warmaker—desperately feared what they were told was his “belligerence,” his “arrogance,” his “intransigence” and his “refusal to negotiate for peace.” He was protecting them, too, though they were daily conditioned to give him no credit for it.

Having said all this, however, there remained a cold reality of which he was entirely aware:

What he was doing
was
dangerous. The policies he was pushing
did
carry the potential of final disaster. He
was
gambling. The outcome
could
be terminal.

Orrin Knox indeed was dealing in the fate of mankind. He did not blink at the awful thought. The only difference between him and his critics was that he believed that some things were more important than disaster—that some things were still worth fighting for, whatever the risks—that there were still principles valid enough to warrant saying,
“No!”
and taking one’s stand in the path of Juggernaut.

He believed this because, being a close student of history, a discipline now highly unpopular with entire generations, he had observed that time and again when men finally reached this conclusion, when they finally took leave of their fears, when they finally dedicated themselves selflessly to the principles of freedom, justice, truth and the other frayed but still valid achievements of the independent mind, the Lord sometimes moved in and rescued them. Events turned their way. They held firm against all potentials of disaster, all prophets of doom—and somehow, somewhere, frequently at the very last millisecond before midnight, things shifted in ways unpredictable, and they survived and made it through and saved what they were fighting for.

It was to this, he thought now as he prepared to leave the Oval Office and return to the Mansion and a sleep that might be broken at any moment with news of further disasters on the field of battle, that he clung, against reason, against logic, against the facts as they appeared to be aligning themselves all along the perimeters of the beleaguered democracy he led.

He knew his forces were in retreat—he knew the country’s sadly reduced military strength permitted him very little margin and very little time—he knew he was engaged on a gigantic gamble that could end everything—but he knew he had to stay with it, at least a while longer. The end result might be defeat, disaster, surrender … but it might not be.

He could not, being true to what Orrin Knox had always believed and been, remaining true to his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the nation it governed, open the door and invite disaster in. It might come through his policies, and if it did he would have to face it as best he could and take the consequences. But he could not, and he would not, give in to it without a fight. “Cooperating with the inevitable” had never been his style, because he had learned in life that the inevitable was frequently only as inevitable as men, in their fear, caution, lack of courage or cupidity, made it.