Capable of Honor (58 page)

Chapter 4

“But I was there,” Hal Knox said bitterly, shortly after noon at the St. Francis.
“I was there.
I
know
our people didn’t start it. I saw it begin. You’ve got to say something. You can’t just sit here and let this—this—” he gestured with a wild anger and helplessness at the glaring headlines—
“assassination
go on. Stanley,” he appealed abruptly to his father-in-law, “Stanley,
make
him issue a statement.”

“I think you should, Orrin,” Senator Danta said gravely. “I quite agree. I think this is rapidly getting beyond any rational point. I think you’ve got to speak up, in your own defense.”

“With what?” the Secretary asked with a skeptical smile. “A denial that will be instantly drenched in sarcasm by the networks and the Dobius crowd? What’s the point in that?”

“The point,” Beth said crisply, “is a record, which has to be made whether you win or lose. If your people didn’t start the riot, say so. You only confirm his with silence.”

“So say I, too,” Crystal agreed from the bed where she was resting with a damp washcloth over her eyes. “I think you must.”

“Let’s see something,” the Secretary said, reaching suddenly for a phone, dialing a number. “Let’s see something, first. The only way it would do any good would be if—”

“Yes, Orrin?” Governor Jason said pleasantly. “What can I do for you?…Oh?…Well, yes, I think that’s understood, isn’t it? At least, I understand it. I know some of our people—or, rather, you’ll understand if I put it a little differently, some of the people who are volunteering their support for me—seem to be getting a little out of hand. I deplore it as much as you do.…I am doing something about it. I have issued the sternest orders to Bob Leffingwell to pass the word along that this sort of thing must stop at once.…A joint statement? What good would that accomplish?…Oh, you mean if I were to acknowledge that my people started it? Well, now—are we entirely sure? I mean, I understand myself that they did, but—after all, I don’t believe anyone has definite proof. The TV and the newspapers seem to think it was your people.…Oh, Hal saw it and says so, does he? Surely you’re not telling me that Hal is an objective witness.…No, no, no, of course I’m not saying your son is a liar. I’m just saying that very naturally he sees things from the Knox point of view. I certainly don’t criticize him for that, who would? I’m just saying it tends to discount—well, no, since you insist on an answer. No, I won’t join in it.…Because I don’t know that it
was
my people, Orrin, really. And why should I offend them if it wasn’t?…Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. Each of us has to judge this convention according to his own thoughts and do what he thinks best.…Yes, I appreciate that.…Yes, I know. I wish you luck with it.…All right … Good luck. Goodbye.”

“That twisting son of a bitch,” Hal said softly. “That slimy, shifting, two-faced son of a bitch.”

“I think he’s right, you know,” Ceil said thoughtfully. “I think you should join him and make clear it wasn’t done with any approval of yours. You have your own record to think about. I think you should issue the strongest possible denunciation. After all, I heard you say it to Walter right here in this room: they haven’t anywhere else to go. And,” she added with a look at Bob Leffingwell, “the few people left in America who still deplore violence and believe in fairness will think better of you for it. And that might be worth even more than a nomination to you, some day.”

“It would also, I am convinced,” Bob Leffingwell said gravely, “represent the last chance to turn this convention away from something very deeply serious toward which it seems to be racing at this moment. I think you are the one man who has it in his power to decide which way this convention will go. It’s a sad cliché with sad consequences, but the world is watching what we do here in San Francisco, and we do have some duty to help preserve certain things in America if we can—those old-fashioned things,” he said with a sudden bitterness that should have been a warning, “that Walter Dobius and his friends have such a good time making fun of all the time, like decency and integrity and kindliness and honor and being halfway fair to other people even if you are opposing them.…I agree with Ceil, I agree with Orrin: I think you should. Platform and credentials—those can be fought out on the floor, and while it may be bloody, at least it’s a relatively mild and accepted part of the system. But this thing that’s developing in the streets—it frightens me, Ted, it’s up to you to stop it, and I think you had damned well better.”

But the Governor, staring out the window with a frown of concentration on his handsome face, made no reply, being gone into what his wife had once referred to as his “fastnesses.” He stayed so for quite a few minutes, while far below a band played “Dixie” over and over and the silent watchers of COMFORT, DEFY, and KEEP frowned portentously upon the passersby. Nor, indeed, was it really necessary for him to say anything, for when Ceil finally walked over and turned on the television, more or less for something to do. Frankly Unctuous in his plummy tones was saying it for him.

“The one man,” he was saying sternly, “who has it in his power to decide whether this convention will sink deeper into a violence that is truly un-American, or be restored to those traditional principles of justice and fair play which have always characterized this great nation—Secretary of State Orrin Knox—has just issued a statement which would hardly seem to satisfy the harsh imperatives of this moment. The Secretary denies that his supporters are responsible for the frightening mood of hatred that is developing here. He denies that they were responsible for the tragic riot this morning in Union Square which may yet claim the lives of two Jason supporters, even though many competent observers who were there are convinced beyond a doubt that—”

“You know,” Ceil said pleasantly to no one in particular as she snapped off the set, “I am really becoming quite terrified.”

“Bill,” Senator Munson said in the lobby of the Hilton, “I think we’re going to need more protection out there this afternoon.”

“I’ve asked the city for extra police,” the Speaker said, “and the mayor thinks he can let us have a hundred or so more. I don’t like it, Bob.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

“Maybe the fight on credentials and platform will let off enough steam to calm it down,” the Majority Leader suggested. The Speaker frowned.

“The people behind this don’t want it calmed down. Their only chance is to keep it tensed up.”

“I begin to wonder,” Senator Munson said thoughtfully, “if they aren’t out for something more than a vice presidential nomination—or even a presidential, for that matter.”

“I don’t know,” the Speaker said. “But I know one thing,” he added grimly. “Ted Jason is a fool if he thinks he’s still in charge of it.”

“I’m afraid,” she said, amid the tinkling glasses, clinking silverware, and softly murmurous music in the Garden Court of the Palace. A shadow of pain touched her eyes. “It’s like the sort of thing that—that killed Brig. It’s akin to the kind of thing I heard on the phone and got in the mail before he—stopped being with us.…Politics is so evil, Lafe. It is so
evil.”

“It can be,” he conceded, taking her hand protectively in his where it lay upon the gleaming tablecloth, “and it’s so hopeless to say: it needn’t be—it isn’t always—it can accomplish wonderful things—it can be good and noble, worthy of a man’s lifelong devotion and a nation’s respect. Because it’s so easy to say: yes, but so often it isn’t.…Which is true.” He sighed. “Which is true.”

“I think,” Mabel said, “that after this convention is over—if,” she remarked with a sad, wry smile, “we all live through it—I shall take Pidge and go back to Provo and never, never, never stir out of my nest again.”

“Oh, come,” he said with a smile, though a genuine alarm touched his heart, “that’s no way to talk, when I have other plans for you. After all, you can’t be much help to me ’way out there. Or,” he said, more soberly, “to Jimmy, either.”

“Are you going to bring him down to Washington?” she asked with some interest and he congratulated himself that he had hit on the proper subject for the moment.

“Yes, I think so, providing”—he grinned—“I’m there myself, after November. I think I will be, but you never know.”

“I’m so thrilled that he’s finally trying to talk.”

“It’s a beginning. It may never go beyond that one moment, but at least I have a witness. Cullee was there and heard it, too, so we know it happened. And maybe, someday, if I keep at it.…You did that for me, you know it? And for him. I said why bring him out into the world to be hurt, and you kept writing that if he didn’t get out—even if he did get hurt—he would just exist and be a vegetable and might as well not have lived at all.” He squeezed her hand. “There’s an analogy there, if you will let me state it in my gauche Midwestern way: you and Provo. You can go back and hide in your nest, and you might as well be a vegetable, too.”

For a moment he feared she might be offended or upset, and the Mabel Anderson he had known a year ago in Washington would have been. But Brig’s death, which had done so many things to so many people, had also, apparently, helped his widow to some maturity she had never known before. She smiled a little, without offense.

“Oh, it won’t be that bad. After all, it’s my hometown, I have many friends, many things to do, clubs, parties, the outdoors, the Church.…I won’t be isolated.”

“Insulated,” he suggested. “Safe from being hurt.…Snug … smug.”

She laughed, quite genuinely amused, gave his hand a squeeze in return, and spoke in a much lighter tone.

“Oh, Lafe, you’re good for me. I won’t be smug. You won’t let me.”

“Not if you’re in Washington.”

She smiled.

“Well. We’ll see.”

“I think every American citizen who loves his country must be aghast at the mood of viciousness which is gaining control of this convention,” Herbert Jason said to the NBC reporter who held a microphone to his lips as he emerged from the Fairmont. “My nephew certainly does, I know.”

“Darling,” Selena said to the society editor of the
Examiner
in her fifth interview of the morning, “Orrin Knox should be shot. He should simply be shot!”

“I am sure,” Valuela said to the society editor of the
Chronicle
in her sixth interview of the morning, “that my nephew knows nothing of these dreadful things. They really seem to be coming out of the Knox group, don’t they?”

“Orrin Knox should be ashamed of himself,” Patsy said to the local lunchtime radio snooper who was sharing his microphone with her at the brunch given by the Michigan ladies in the Crown Room at the top of the Fairmont. “He should be ASHAMED.”

“It does seem,” Krishna Khaleel said to CBS, who had cornered him at the Clift, “that there should be some civilized way to decide these nominations without all this violence. I am afraid it is giving other countries, such as my own India, a most unfortunate impression.”

“Sorry, old boy,” Lord Maudulayne said cheerfully to NBC, who grabbed his arm as he and Kitty swung aboard the Powell Street cable car to go to Fishermen’s Wharf for lunch, “but I don’t mingle in these American family quarrels, you know.…Actually,” he murmured to Kitty as the car began its clanging, swaying, ineffable lurch upward, “I wouldn’t give the fellow the satisfaction of getting me to say it, but I’m damned upset.”

“The poor United States!” Raoul Barre said with a placid complacence to The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was (for use in a roundup on DIPLOMATIC OBSERVERS AT CONVENTION APPALLED BY KNOX BACKERS’ VIOLENCE, which would run at the bottom of page 1 tomorrow morning alongside EUROPEAN CAPITALS SHOCKED BY KNOX FORCES’ OUTBURST). “Somehow with the best will in the world, her people always manage to put her in a bad light. It amounts to a genius.”

“Beth, dear,” Lucille Hudson said from her penthouse at the Huntington, “do come up here and have lunch with me. The strain must be terrific for you.”

“You, too, isn’t it?” Beth responded from the St. Francis. “Have they left you alone at all?”

“There’s been a steady stream of grubby politicians,” the First Lady said with a chuckle, and Beth could see in mind’s eye the satisfied little smile on her plump little face. “They seem to think I hold the keys to the castle.”

“And don’t you?”

“That’s why you’d better hurry over, dear. Today may be the day I pass them out. Oh, and bring Crystal, too, if she’d care to come. The poor girl must be exhausted after visiting all those delegations.”

“Only ten this morning,” Beth said. “A mere nothing. I’d like to bring her but she and her husband have already left, announcing that they were going to find some secret little hideaway for lunch and—as my son, who is getting increasingly short-tempered, put it—‘get away from the whole God-damned convention for a while.’”

“These things are wearing on the young,” Lucille said comfortably. “Isn’t it nice to be old enough to take it. Do you want me to send a car, or have you one?”

“I have one. Who else do you want me to bring?”

“As a matter of fact,” the First Lady admitted, “I have asked Ceil Jason. But Ceil has her own car, of course.”

“Of course,” Beth said. She paused. “Very well,” she said finally.

“And, oh,” the First Lady added. “Not a word to Orrin, of course.”

“No,” Beth said. “Of course.”

From where they sat, far up toward the rafters in the middle of the last section just under the roof, the great hall spread out before them vast and echoing in the remaining hour before the session was scheduled to begin. Faintly there ascended the voices of the television crews making their final adjustments of equipment, the banter of the janitors making a casual pretense of sweeping up the last vestiges of yesterday’s session, the calls of the sergeants-at-arms across the floor to one another. Almost at eye level they could see the lost balloons of yesterday floating out of reach against the girders, trailing their messages of admonition, encouragement, enthusiasm, and hope:

CONSCIENCE MUST DECIDE THE ISSUE … EVERYONE FLOCKS TO ORRIN KNOX … STOP WAR—ELECT JASON … KNOX WILL DEFEND AMERICA’S HONOR … JASON … KNOX … ORRIN … TED … HARLEY AND ORRIN WILL PULL US THROUGH … HARLEY AND TED—A BALANCED TICKET …