Promise of Joy (6 page)

Many millions, he knew, would regard this as no loss, and there were plenty on the Committee who wouldn’t either. So this afternoon was the first and most important stage of the new era he found himself in. He must approach it crippled in heart, mind and body. A wave of bitterness consumed him for a moment.
Haven’t You done enough to me?
he demanded of a God he had always considered basically impersonal, impartial and generally uncaring of ordinary mortals, although possibly somewhat more concerned about Orrin Knox. Apparently He wasn’t, though: Orrin Knox had another river to cross, and there was no way around it.

And this time, as never before, he was entirely alone.

Again the desperate desolation of the fact savaged his mind, and again, after a titanic struggle with himself, he forced it back and forced himself to go on with the careful calculations an experienced politician in his situation had to make. Grief had to be put aside: for the present, at least, there was simply no time for it.

His alternatives were four, as he saw them.

He could recommend someone exactly in line with his own thinking, someone like Bill Abbott or Bob Munson. Walter Dobius and his colleagues had already made clear that they would do everything in their power to stop that. If Ted Jason had lived and he had died, he knew they would have been 100 per cent in favor of a Vice Presidential candidate whose views exactly paralleled Ted’s. The argument of “balance” would be forgotten, all thought of compromise would be hooted down, it would be presented as the greatest possible good for the country that both men on the ticket should reflect the same point of view. But Orrin was the one who had lived, and therefore “balance” was the slogan, compromise was the ideal, and only a ticket that faithfully reflected the sharp divisions in the party could possibly be supported.

So unless he wanted to fight what could well be a losing fight—for he knew there were enough in the sharply divided Committee who felt the same way Walter and his friends did to make it at best a razor’s-edge proposition—he had best give up the idea of a completely compatible Vice President.

He could, instead, choose Roger P. Croy or someone equally devoted to the Jason point of view on foreign policy. This would mean that in the event of his own death, all his policies would be reversed, whatever he might have achieved in foreign policy by a sensible and carefully calculated firmness would be wiped out, the world would be—as he saw it—delivered sooner or later to the twentieth century’s great new imperialists who operated under the guise of Communist liberation, brotherhood and good will. This he could not countenance, nor could those in the country who looked to him for leadership.

Or he could resign the nomination this afternoon, get out of the fight and let the Committee start afresh. This thought, which he had volunteered so listlessly to the President only a few short minutes ago, now seemed utterly repugnant. Such a move would indeed be to guarantee victory on all fronts to those he regarded, with a considerable contempt, as the appeasers, the trimmers, the equivocators, the foolish and the weak.

He had always believed and acted in a certain way, always represented a certain “tough” attitude in foreign policy. Many millions of his countrymen had depended upon him to do this. They depended upon him still. He would be betraying them and betraying himself if he withdrew.

The skeptical, impatient expression his family, friends and colleagues knew so well momentarily touched his face.

He wouldn’t consider it!

He would be a fool if he did.

His reaction revealed that Orrin Knox, having begun to mend, was mending very rapidly.

So only one alternative remained, and that was to find somebody occupying a reasonable middle ground and do his best to persuade the Committee to go along with the choice.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, he knew instantly whom he would nominate.

He did not know how the Committee would take this.

But he knew he would do it.

For the first time since horror struck three days ago, a smile—grim, determined, ironic, not very lasting or much filled with humor, but at least a smile—crossed his face.

Their Presidential nominee, they would find, might be down but he was not out.

When Hal knocked gently on the door a few moments later, his father’s response brought a smile, relieved and deeply affectionate, to his face too.

“I’m ready,” Orrin announced in a voice still weak but scarcely reluctant. “Lead me to ’em!”

And so the National Committee returned to heavily guarded Kennedy Center, scene just four days ago of the “Great Riot” in which the enormous mob led by the paramilitary forces of the National Anti-War Activities Congress had stormed the doors after the nomination of Orrin Knox for President. Thirty-nine had died on that terrifying, bitter day. Only the subsequent nomination of Ted Jason as Vice President and Ted’s dramatically soothing speech to his hysterically violent supporters appeared to have saved the country from revolution.

The memories hung heavy on Esmé Harbellow Stryke and Asa B. Attwood of California, on Anna Hooper Bigelow and Perry Amboy of New Hampshire, on Pierre Boissevain of Vermont and Blair Hannah of Illinois, on Ewan MacDonald MacDonald of Wyoming, on Lathia Talbot Jennings of South Dakota and Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania, and on all their fellow national committeemen and national committeewomen as they prepared to reconvene.

The memories were not eased by the fact that the scene was once again almost exactly as they had left it, and for the same reasons: NAWAC and the violent again were at their stations, and again the Committee was under terrible pressure.

Again the President had ordered out the troops, again the same precautions surrounded the hundred men and women who must select a new running mate for Orrin Knox. Again they were housed at military headquarters in Fort Myer, Virginia, just across the Potomac; again they arrived at the Center in Army cars, protected by motorcycle outriders; again they found themselves under siege. And again the President, as national committeeman from Colorado and chairman of the Committee, had arranged it so that the meeting should be held in the Playhouse, its seating capacity kept to a rigid five hundred: the Committee, three hundred visitors and observers divided as equally as possible between Knox and Jason supporters, and one hundred from the media. This last restriction had produced the same anguished denunciations that had greeted it before, but the President had been adamant. The original meeting had been chaos and circus enough and he did not want this one made more so. Again the
Times,
the
Post, The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was,
Walter Dobius, Frankly Unctuous, and his network colleagues, and all the rest, had cried, “Dictatorship!” and “Suppression of the news!” But William Abbott was a tough old man and he didn’t give a damn. Grumbling and unhappy, the media too had its collective memories revivified—creating, as the
Times
remarked acridly, “a sense of
déjà
damned
vu.”

Around Kennedy Center’s land perimeter the President had again arranged for riot-trained soldiers to supplement the District of Columbia police—a thousand this time instead of the five hundred before. An inner ring of riot-trained Marines—also increased from five hundred to a thousand—had been assigned to guard the Playhouse. In the Potomac’s Georgetown Channel, Theodore Roosevelt Island and Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, nearest approach to the Center from Virginia, had been closed. Across the river a strip a mile long and six hundred yards deep—again, double last time—had been sealed off to all traffic. In the channel four small armed Coast Guard cutters lay at anchor just off the esplanade, overhead a dozen helicopters were on regular patrol over the entire area, both precautions also escalated. At re-established “Checkpoint Alpha,” sole entrance for Committee members, visiting dignitaries and the media, security regulations even tighter than before, if possible, had been reinstated.

And beyond the barricades on the land side, and in hastily re-erected tent towns at the edge of the barred zone across the river, NAWAC and its friends were also back, and also nearly doubled. Just before he left the White House in his heavily guarded limousine to come to the Center, the President had been advised by the Secretary of Defense and the District chief of police that crowd estimates were between a hundred fifty and two hundred thousand, with more thousands still pouring into the capital from every plane, train, bus and freeway.

He too, Bill Abbott felt with a weary sigh as his bristling cavalcade headed west toward the Center, had a sense of repetition so heavy as to be almost unbearable. After all the bitter battling to put together the Knox-Jason ticket, after all the tension, bloodshed and horror, now another horror had been piled on top and everything had been smashed to smithereens. All the careful compromises of democracy, hammered out at such cost, destroyed in a bloody instant by those who felt only contempt for democracy and wished to destroy it … or so he analyzed their motives.

He did not know, yet, who had perpetrated the murders at the Monument, but he intended to find out. The commission he had appointed to investigate Harley Hudson’s mysterious death had a new mission now. He had conferred with its chairman, the ex-Chief Justice, within two hours after the assassinations. Already the staff was at work interviewing witnesses. He had a strong hunch that there was a link between all these murders and he thought he knew where it came from. He also suspected strongly that those responsible were very well entrenched in NAWAC. If he could find the connection, he would have them—providing he could convince some of his more skeptical countrymen to accept the facts in their columns, news stories and broadcasts. At least he would have the culprits as far as the historical record was concerned.

He was convinced that the trail led straight to the Soviet Ambassador, Vasily Tashikov, and his “agricultural aide,” long ago tagged by the FBI, military intelligence and the CIA as being the head of the Russian secret police network, the KGB, for the eastern United States.

If that was true, however, surely a great mistake must have been committed. For surely the man they wanted to kill was Orrin Knox, not Ted Jason, who, on all the evidence Bill Abbott had seen, would have been an easy mark for Soviet pressure had he become President in the event of Orrin’s death.

Orrin must have been the target—although, as it was turning out, the President could not really see that the assassins had lost much. The situation that had been created for Orrin was such a tangle that he might end up being unable to govern, too: for different reasons, but as fortuitously for America’s enemies. Perhaps, in fact, even more so, since a President under such attack as Orrin was under might be an even easier mark than, in the President’s estimation, Edward M. Jason would have been.

Except for one single factor, he told himself with the mildest glimmer of hope as the first outlying fringes of the mob began to appear along his route, screaming obscenities and shaking their fists at the old man who sat stolidly back in the cushions and gave no slightest acknowledgment that they existed.

Except for one single factor.

Long ago, watching the then freshman Senator from Illinois carry some point of debate by sheer logic and strength of character, the late Senator Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina had been moved to a remark that none of Orrin’s friends had ever forgotten.

“There comes a time,” Seab had said in his deceptively drowsy, sleepy-eyed way, “when most folks let themselves feel beaten and they give up on an issue. But not Orrin. Orrin keeps at it. You mark my words, now, Orrin will go far. And do you know why? Because Orrin’s got somethin’ jest a leetle bit extra, that’s why. Yes, sir. Jest a
leetle
bit extra.”

“Orrin’s little extra” had been a byword on the Hill and in American politics ever since; and since it was the quality that had carried him finally, over so many obstacles and so much bitter opposition, to his party’s Presidential nomination, it was the thing to which William Abbott was pinning his hopes as his cavalcade, coming now within sight of Kennedy Center, brought to full volume the angry wave of sound that kept him company.

“Orrin’s little extra,” needed now as it had never been before—first, by Orrin himself, and then, the President was convinced, by the country and the world.

The Secretary of State had looked wan and still in considerable pain a couple of hours ago during their talk at his home in Spring Valley, but on the whole he had appeared to be increasingly strong. Yet William Abbott the lifelong bachelor knew as well as Bob Munson and Orrin’s children how terribly much he must be missing Beth, and how terribly heartsick and weakened by her death he must be.

God knew
he
missed her, the President thought, recalling the shrewd, calm, comfortable presence that had contributed so much to the life and career of Orrin Knox. Beth Knox had been a rare woman, and she and Orrin had enjoyed a unique partnership in both marriage and politics. In fact, as in many great political careers of American history, the two had been so intermingled that no one, least of all the participants, could tell where the one ended and the other began. From the very first campaign for the state senate in Illinois it had been “Orrin and Beth” on the billboards and on the hustings; and during all the contentious, controversial, battling years since, in the state senate, the governorship, the United States Senate and finally the State Department, it had been “Orrin and Beth” who had together served, first the people of the state and then the people of the country, with an uncompromising integrity and an uncompromising opposition to all those attitudes and trends which they believed weakening, if not fatal, to the survival of democracy. This had brought them the unrelenting hostility of many in the media, the academic, religious, artistic and professional worlds who did not see the attitudes and trends in the same light they did. But it had not deflected or deterred either of them; nor had it jarred the steady balance or the wry good humor with which Beth, in particular, had responded to the incessant and unrelenting belittlement.