Capable of Honor (38 page)

In a sense the President has to admire this, because he knows the pressures to make Ted run against him are fully as strong as the pressures to make the President retire—they ought to be, they come from the same sources. He is not giving in to them himself, and every day that Ted withstands them is one more day in the bank for the Administration. The President has not attempted to influence him any further after the weekend of Panama and the memorial service; hasn’t seen him in Washington, called on the phone, written.

“It’s up to you to decide,” he remarked when they shook hands at 3 A.M. after the Panama meeting and Ted smiled, a little wanly, the President thought.

“Decisions, decisions!” he said with a humorous air.

The President nodded.

“They go with this house, and they go with getting here. I wish you luck with yours.”

“Thanks,” Governor Jason said. “If I’m as calm in mine as you always seem to be in yours, I should be able to stand the gaff.”

And in a real sense that is true, the President thinks now as he prepares to go downstairs, walk the colonnade along the rose garden, and so come to his oval office and the clamoring world that waits to leap upon him from his desk. He always has been pretty calm, now that he looks back upon it. The only rough period came during the seven years when his brilliant predecessor deliberately excluded him from the inner workings of the government so that Harley found himself, more times than he likes to remember now, in the unenviable position of being outside looking in. That had been hard to take, while all the formal pretenses of consultation and cooperation and “making unprecedented use of the Vice President” had been kept up for the benefit of press and public. Harley had known that the President wasn’t really cutting him in on anything very important, and he had also known in the President’s last year and a half that he might soon be called upon to fall heir to all of it. It had been a most frustrating time, and only Lucille’s support and his own innate stability had permitted him to emerge, somewhat emotionally tattered and torn but otherwise in reasonably good shape, when the news he had been dreading so long arrived at his office in the Capitol on a night he would never forget.

The first portion of his life, however—“Before the blitz hit me and I got into this,” he will sometimes tell his appreciative audiences—and, in a sense, the first year of his Presidency, had been comparatively serene. He had returned from college just as he said he would, plunged into the business with interest and enthusiasm, and in a short while led it through a carefully planned expansion to a new level of success. Additional branch stores were opened in Flint, Saginaw, and Detroit, and by the time he was forty the company was doing an annual gross business of ten million dollars. The years appeared to stretch out ahead filled with more stores, bigger grosses, greater fortune—and what?

Although it took him a while to admit it to himself, he was beginning to get bored.

More for that reason than for any deep-seated social motivation, he began to dabble in a mild way in politics. His money was more than welcome and his participation, since it did not involve wounding battles for or against any particular candidate or issue, proved equally so. It was good to have Harley around, the party leaders felt; he could always be relied upon for a handsome check, and he could also be relied upon to provide one shoulder everybody could cry on, one heart and mind that didn’t seem to hate anyone. Subtly and quite without any conscious desire or manipulation on his part, he presently became the one man in Michigan whom everybody liked. It was only a short step from that to becoming the one man upon whom everybody could agree. When that happened, destiny took over and the roller-coaster ride began. Even so, his nomination for Governor came as a complete surprise to him.

“But not
me!”
he had exclaimed blankly when Bob Munson, exercising his prerogative as Michigan’s senior Senator to step in and bring squabbling factions together after the sudden death of the party’s standard-bearer, came to him with the news. “Why me?”

“Because nobody’s mad at you,” the Majority Leader said. “No other contender can make this claim.”

“But I’m not a contender!”

“I know,” Senator Munson said cheerfully. “That’s why. So you are now.”

“You’ll let me talk it over with Lucille,” he suggested timidly. Bob had smiled.

“Sure, but I’ll bet we both know what her answer will be.”

And so they had.

“Do it. They think you’re just an amiable man they can all agree on. They also think you’re an amiable man they can all push around. They don’t know you’re also a good man, who won’t be pushed and who will do some good. Surprise them all. They need it.”

So he had called Bob Munson next morning in Washington. His selection had been announced that afternoon. By nightfall pledges of support were flooding in. In the six remaining weeks of the campaign he and Lucille had crisscrossed their huge state by plane, bus, and motor caravan, drawing good crowds and an increasingly warm response wherever they went. There had been a series of television interviews and flattering reports in the papers—he had been fashionable, in those days, and even Walter Dobius had come out from Washington to do a series of columns around the general theme, “A Man of Integrity Seeks A Governorship.” On election day he had won by a comfortable margin. He still has among his papers somewhere Walter’s letter of congratulations, written in the gravely dignified, fatherly style he likes to effect with newcomers on the national scene:

“I look forward—and I know it will not be long delayed—to the time when you will come to Washington. There I know we can work together in harmony and understanding for the good of our great country.”

His year in the governorship had been notable for its smoothness. “Everybody Likes Harley,” his campaign posters had proclaimed, and in Lansing, it seemed, they did. The state’s problems at that point were not too great, and he handled them with an easygoing efficiency. He was beginning to get heavy-jowled, portly, and gray; his face grew more kindly and likable as he aged. His popularity continued to rise, he could probably have stayed around for quite a while. But then came the famous convention at which Orrin Knox had made his second bid for the Presidency—against, ironically, another Governor of California—and out of its wild turmoil Harley M. Hudson had been flung to the top.

He could still remember that fantastic moment in which he had been trying to reach the podium to cast Michigan’s votes for the then Senator from Illinois, only to have Orrin intercept him with a blaze of anger and the charge that he was backing Orrin’s opponent. His own reaction had been instantaneous—it had to be, in that roaring sea of emotion—he had cast Michigan’s votes for the Governor, Orrin had lost, and not until almost eight years later, in the first hours of his own Presidency at the end of the Senate fight over Bob Leffingwell, had Harley revealed to Orrin what his original intention had been.

To this day he could not entirely understand Orrin’s motivations in so affronting him in that crucial moment. But it had made him Vice President—for Bob Munson and the Michigan delegation claimed their price from the winner—and in due time it had made him President. So he was not ungrateful for it. And it had also had much to do with the maturing of Orrin Knox, and that was a gain for the country.

The personality of his Secretary of State, like that of Governor Jason, is a matter of endless fascination to the President. He has watched that shrewd, calculating, volatile, impulsive, dynamic, skeptical, impatient, sometimes arrogant, often domineering, generous, and idealistic mind at work for a good many years now, and there are areas of it that still don’t add up, from his standpoint. But there has been a steady growth, a maturing and calming-down from more extravagant extremes, which he has watched with approval and relief. Although Orrin is taking a pounding from Walter’s world fully as savage and severe as the President’s, there is still an excellent chance that he may yet be President himself. And even if that should not develop, he will continue to have, in office or out, a major influence with a great many of his countrymen who, the President suspects, are loyal and unshaken despite the bitter criticisms to which the Secretary is being subjected.

These criticisms, and the events in Gorotoland and Panama which have brought them down upon Orrin and himself, are, the President has long since concluded, just part of the normal burden one has to bear if he wishes to remain true to certain principles in carrying out the office of Chief Executive. It would be nice to be loved, and in his first few months he certainly had been, so he knows how that feels; but sooner or later there comes a time when personal popularity has to be put in the balance against doing what judgment and the facts say is best for the country. There had been some Presidents in the twentieth century who, faced with this choice, had taken the easy way and sought to hold personal popularity to a maximum while doing the minimum necessary to meet the imperatives that challenged them. That has not been his concept of the Presidency.

What that concept is he had been forced to decide, of course, the moment he assumed office, for there had been waiting for him the Soviet demand that the United States meet in Geneva under the threat of the successful Russian manned landing on the moon. His predecessor had already accepted this challenge when he died, and Harley, though he could gracefully have used the excuse of his sudden new responsibilities to evade it, had accepted, too. There had followed that flat defiance of the Soviet threats which had won him such universal popularity. When he had walked out of the Geneva Conference and brought the American delegation home, leaving behind a sputtering Russian Premier, his personal stock had shot up to a fantastic peak, and the self-confidence and pride of his countrymen in their country had reached heights it had not known for many years and would not, perhaps, know again for many more.

“The only place I can go now is down,” he had told Lucille ironically when he saw the nation’s most influential opinion poll two weeks after his return from Geneva. (Now, of course, that poll, following as always the line of Walter and his world, is telling a different story. COUNTRY DISAPPROVES OF GOROTO-PANAMA POLICIES, its latest headline had said only yesterday. “One in five American voters is concerned about the President’s policies in Gorotoland and Panama,” its report began. Some fifteen hundred in a population pushing 250,000,000 had, indeed, been interviewed.)

He had known at Geneva, however, that he must decide then and there, without any chance for second guesses, what kind of President he intended to be. It was true that the Soviet demands, encouraged by the euphoria of beating the United States to the moon, had been presented in such a harshly exaggerated fashion that it would have been impossible for any President to accept them and stay in office. Yet there would have been some who would have made counter-offers, who would have stayed and “negotiated,” to use the favorite word of Walter’s world, who would somehow have submitted to some face-saving compromise that would have yielded a few more ells of advantage to the Communists while retaining some small inch of American face to bring home to the country.

He could not. Fortunately he had been surrounded by Orrin Knox and Bob Munson and some other strong-minded friends from the Senate, rather than with the sort of timid and tentative minds that had accompanied too many Presidents to too many conferences. So the delegation had been almost unanimous, and it had been relatively easy to be strong. But he knew he would have been, anyway.

Surprisingly, Harley M. Hudson, the easygoing, amiable, outwardly timid and uncertain soul who had been thrown off his psychological underpinnings by his predecessor’s equivocal and wounding treatment of him as Vice President, had emerged—as one of Washington’s livelier humorous columnists had put it—as Harley M. Hudson the Fearless Peerless. And for nearly a year—until Gorotoland and Panama came along—he had remained so in the eyes of the great majority of his countrymen. Even Walter and his friends had been forced to concede his courage and integrity. Their only mistake had lain in hoping it was just the one time, and that he would not again subject them to the nervous shock he had when he went counter to their cherished beliefs and actually defied right out loud, in an absolutely irretrievable manner, the demands of imperial Communism.

For him to have done so in the first instance had been gauche, it had been chauvinistic, it had been stupid, it had been one of those things that absolutely wasn’t done in the best of circles—and it had worked. But to have him try it again, on two more occasions—to have him go to the heart of the matter, brush aside the pious hypocrisies about “wars of liberation,” “genuine democratic freedom-loving revolutions,” and the rest, and actually meet the challenge again, head-on—
well
. Who does he think he is, anyway? Does he think he has been given a warrant to be Fearless Peerless forever?

Yes, as a matter of fact, he tells himself now as he opens the door and steps out of the lovely spring day into the pleasant green hush of his office, he does. He has come to terms with the Presidency and with himself, and he has made up his mind that he will not look back and will not hesitate. He will do whatever needs to be done and do it firmly, and as swiftly as he can persuade the ponderous machinery of government to move. He would have liked to have sat down and consulted with the United Nations and Walter and everybody else about Gorotoland, but there it was: he had to act at once or see everything get out of control. He would have liked to have spent weeks of gracious chatting with the O.A.S. about Felix Labaiya’s coup in Panama, but there it was: he had to act at once or see everything get out of control. And whose control? His and the United States’. And does anybody object? Well, let ’em bellow.

And so they are. Of course neither situation has gone too well, it is almost inevitable nowadays that in difficult terrain, unless the United States wishes to use its major weapons, decimate the earth, and destroy its peoples, it has to move slowly and be prepared to take temporary reverses. American troops have recaptured Molobangwe in Gorotoland and driven the rebels out of most of the lowlands; Terry’s control is now restored almost everywhere except for an area roughly the size of Rhode Island in the rich highlands, where Obifumatta holds out. But Obi is holding out very well, and in the lowlands constant rebel bombings, stabbings, spearings, and ritual massacres are keeping the populace agitated and uneasy. In Panama, although the Americans and a small, extremely reluctant O.A.S. detachment have recaptured most of Panama City and a good part of the Canal, things are at a virtual stalemate at the moment. Felix is doing very well with his appeals to the UN and friendly nations to help his “Panamanian People’s Liberation Movement” so that he may stabilize the country and reopen the Canal to commerce. This appeal from a native leader seems to have won more support around the world than a similar appeal from the United States, though no one has dared test the President’s calm announcement that he will again employ the veto if necessary to halt UN obstruction of his policies.