Preserve and Protect (11 page)

“It’s too much for me,”
people said.
“I just can’t understand it any more. I just try not to think about it.”

So the public, for the most part, accepted what Walter and his world had to tell them, without question and without the native skepticism that in earlier days had been one of the saving strengths of America. Now it was no longer, “Show me!” and, “Says who?” Now, Walter sometimes told himself with a superior contempt, it was a blank look, a dull shake of the head, and a Mortimer Snerd-like, “Ddhhhuuuhhh? Izzatt
so?”
which greeted the pronouncements of himself and his friends. It was not surprising if they often had a field day.

But this, he knew as he stared out thoughtfully upon the suffocating afternoon, rested upon a flimsy basis. You could never, even at this late stage in many decades of conditioning, quite count upon the American majority to be supine and placid. There still were unruly skepticisms that popped up now and then, there could still be a sudden disconcerting tendency to demand real answers, there still could be an almost atavistic, instinctive throwback to the days of, “Says who?” And when that happened, Walter and his world were in trouble. Voters didn’t vote the way they were supposed to, the country didn’t respond as dutifully as it should to carefully calculated words, photographs, headlines, broadcasts.

An old independence could come abruptly and disconcertingly back.

So you had to be clever and shrewd and persistent and never, ever, lose sight of the main objective, which was to persuade the country to think and behave the way you, as superior and intelligent beings, knew that it should and must if America was to be saved from her follies and peace was to be secured for the world.

How to do this through the medium of Ted Jason was now, once more, the problem. The convention, dominated by Harley Hudson and Orrin Knox, had perhaps been hopeless from the start (Walter could never admit to himself, though certain of his disgusted colleagues were admitting it to themselves, that he and they had perhaps been responsible for the growing tension that had finally brought revulsion and cost Ted the nomination). But now the crash of Air Force One had given them all a new chance.

There must be no slip-ups this time. For all his repulsive independence and disrespect, Ted should and must be the candidate. It must be handled with the greatest astuteness and skill.

He could almost have groaned with annoyance and dismay—an uncharacteristic “God damn it!” did surprisingly break the muffled silence of the cool, dark study—when he saw a car come up the curving drive and stop under the classic white portico. Out of it came the last people on earth he would expect to show astuteness and skill about anything. His first impulse was to call Roosevelt and Arbella on the intercom and tell them to say he wasn’t home. But then the longtime Washington reporter’s practicality returned. Whatever he thought of them, and however dangerous he thought them to be to the kind of political operation needed now, there was no doubt that in Senator Fred Van Ackerman of the Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce (COMFORT); LeGage Shelby, director of Defenders of Equality for You (DEFY); and Rufus Kleinfert, Knight Kommander of the Konference on Efforts to Encourage Patriotism (KEEP), there were represented the three main elements in the country whose strange political bedfellowship provided the principal foundation of the Jason campaign.

He sighed, braced himself and went slowly down the stairs with a stolid, unhurried dignity and a certain trepidation he would not have cared to admit, to answer Fred Van Ackerman’s imperious knocking.

Sometimes she read. Sometimes she dozed. But mostly, as the great house lay silent around her, the former First Lady of the United States thought.

Earlier, the White House physician and his soft-spoken young assistant had tried to give her sedatives, but she had refused them, aside from one tranquilizer which had seemed to stop her tendency to burst into tears when she didn’t expect it. She had thought she would be cried out by now, so bitterly had she wept most of last night, but all the way across the continent this morning it had welled up again every few minutes. Despite the worried sympathy of Bob and Dolly Munson, she had not been able to stop until just before they landed in Washington to face the barrage of cameras and newsmen. Then the inner iron that lay beneath the pink-cheeked, roly-poly fluffiness had come to her aid and she had managed to get down the steps and into the waiting limousine, with its little fender flags at half-mast, without breaking down again.

After that she had been engulfed in a curious, glacial mood that had continued, with one exception, all afternoon. For the most part she had remained in bed in the family quarters on the second floor. But once she had felt an irrational desire to find some old scrapbook, stored, she thought, in a closet on the far side of the mansion. She had slipped out, aided by Dolly, who had taken up vigil in the library, and had gone looking. But she had not remained long enough to find it. No sooner had they reached the east wing than they had heard a muffled hammering below.

“Oh, of course,” she had said in a distant voice. “We’re over the East Room. They must be setting up the catafalque.” Dolly had caught her just as she started to faint, and when she came to, she was back in bed. That time she had cried again for quite a long time. Finally she had stopped. Now, in a curious in-between world in which she realized but could not realize that her husband was dead, she looked out over the lawns and trees to the Ellipse, the Washington Monument, the slow, lazy river and the gentle rise of Virginia beyond.

How many times had she paused to enjoy that view in the year and three months—was it really only a year and three months?—of her husband’s Presidency. (She was not yet able to think of him by name. It was “my husband” or “the President” or “he.” To think or say, “Harley,” would have opened some final chasm of desolation and bereavement she was not yet strong enough to face.) She could remember their first meal in this house, shortly after seven o’clock on the evening after he had been sworn in, and how tense they were as the full awareness of his awesome new responsibilities had overwhelmed them. But after they had finished and were standing for the first time on the balcony looking out upon this same scene, he had put an arm around her shoulders and given her a sudden squeeze.

“Well, Mother,” he had said with a slow smile, “I guess we’re going to find out if a simple, homespun, all-American boy from Grand Rapids can do it, aren’t we?”

And abruptly the burden had lifted and she had said, “You know perfectly well he can. I’ve never doubted it for a minute.”

“There are some who have,” he said, the smile broadening. “Including, I must confess, me.”

“Well, I haven’t,” she said firmly, and he squeezed her again.

“I know. That’s why I don’t feel half as scared right now as I probably ought to.”

“You won’t have time to feel scared at all,” she said. “You’ll be too busy.”

And so it had come about, for he had been whirled immediately into the Geneva conference with the Russians that his predecessor had agreed to just before his death. And after that crisis there had been a thousand others, major and minor, foreign and domestic, culminating in the crises in Panama and Gorotoland which he had met with unhesitating firmness despite all the voices of anguish, anger and alarm that had welled up against him.

Press attacks, television attacks, riots, demonstrations, flag-burnings, draft-dodgings, Congressional hearings, statements, speeches, petitions, full-page ads in the
New York Times,
and the savage, relentless tide of Washington gossip that always attempts to destroy any President who dares do anything counter to what the nation’s self-appointed guardians in their self-righteous wisdom deem best—all of these had descended in full measure upon her husband and his Secretary of State. He had worried about it a lot, she knew that; he had studied and pondered and even, on a good many occasions, prayed. But when his basic decisions were taken, he did not look back. By so much had he grown, in this tragic house that held so much of history; this unique, mysterious, unknowable domicile that took the men who came to it and transformed them irrevocably into beings far different from what they had been when they entered its doors for the first time as master.

Master? No man was ever really master of this house for long. Too many echoes were in the air, too many predecessors looked over his shoulder, too many past decisions kept him company as he faced his dreadful responsibilities. Now and again he might assert himself, use the fearful power that was his to change or initiate events. But before long events regained control and he found he was merely their instrument. He found he must start over, or change course, or do something else than he had at first believed he should—and could.

Her husband’s predecessor had set in motion certain things: who knew how he would have finished them? Her husband had to decide, bound by what his predecessor had already done. Her husband had set in motion certain things: who knew how he would have finished them? His successor would have to decide, bound by what her husband had already done. Certain long-range tendencies appeared in the lives of nations, came to fruition, ran their course, subsided. It did not matter a great deal who attempted to change them along the way: they began, had their time, passed. Presidents, potentates, chairmen of “peoples’ republics,” possessed only the option to decide a few details; and while details sometimes could be fearfully important, the basic river of history flowed on between the banks predestined by the shortcomings of human nature, and would not be deflected.

Thus, no matter who had been in the White House, America would have opposed the imperialistic aggressions of Communism—the sheer instinct of national survival, as long as it lasted, would have determined that. It might have been done with more skill in this instance, less grace in that, but it would have been done, and with just about the same blundering, dogged determination. Even Governor Jason, had he ever the chance, would proceed along basically the same lines. Even Governor Jason, the hated and despised, whom she now, in some blind, irrational way that had no foundation in fact so far as she knew, considered responsible for her husband’s death.

Ted Jason and all his ambitious, ruthless schemes … her husband had been right to keep him off the ticket, right to thwart his ambitions, right to shut him out of government. He was a bad, bad man and he had helped to kill Harley.

He had helped to kill Harley.

And suddenly she began to cry as she had not cried before, silent, wracking, terrible; knowing, in some dimly grasped way that she had hardly time or ability to understand, in the depths of grief to which she now descended, that when it was over she would do what she could to assure that everything would be the way Harley wanted it.

Harley Hudson might be gone but Lucille Hudson was still here; and even as silent weeping gave way to strangled, grotesque, horrible sounds and she bit at a pillow to try to keep them muffled, she understood that she was not going back to Grand Rapids. She was going to stay right here and continue to be a part of Washington for his sake, in any way she could.

“Secretary Knox!” the photographers cried. “Secretary and Mrs. Knox—Senator—could we have you over here, please? Would you just come over this way a little, please? Please, Mr. Secretary!”

“Do you mind?” he murmured, looking down at Beth: comfortable, solid, unpretentious, somewhat windblown, obviously tired, but with her keen eyes amused as they so often were by the imperatives of prominence.

“Have I ever?” she inquired with a smile, and suddenly he knew, as he always did when she was with him, that everything was going to be all right.

“No,” he said with an answering smile that the
Post’s
photographer captured, but which was not used. (“It makes the bastard look too likable!” the general director protested with a wry chuckle, tossing it into the discard basket and substituting one that made him look worried, disheveled and tense.)

“Very well,” she said. “Strike a pose, Senator.”

And so they did, and were photographed standing near the terminal entrance. CANDIDATE AND WIFE, said
Life
in its next issue. THE EVER-HOPEFULS, said
Look.

In the State Department limousine, as the driver knifed it skillfully through the home-going Sunday traffic in the softly dying twilight, they were recognized twice and each time the neighboring car almost went off the road. After that they sat back as far as they could and at first were silent. But when they went over the bridge and entered the city, she gave him a thoughtful look and asked with a smile,

“How are you bearing up, Mr. Secretary? All right?”

“I’m managing,” he said. She squeezed his hand.

“That’s good. I’d hate to think you were being bothered by anything.”

“It
is
damned annoying—” he began with an explosive emphasis and then stopped with a sudden wry grin. “Hank,” he said, employing the nickname he had first begun to use years ago at the University of Illinois when she was Elizabeth Henry, “this is going to build up into the damnedest foofooraw you ever saw.”

“Considering the number of foofooraws you’ve been in,” she said, “I find it hard to believe that this is going to be the damnedest. However, what can I do to help even it up?”

“Just stand by me,” he said, the grin fading. “I expect I’m going to need it now more than I ever have.”

“There’s great doubt as to whether I will,” she said solemnly. “But perhaps if you promise me a job in your new Administration—”

“All right, all right,” he said relaxing into his first moment of genuine amusement since Senator Warren Strickland had called him in Carmel with the news of Harley’s death. “So I’m sounding stuffy and pompous. Maybe it won’t be as bad as that. But it’s going to be a hell of a fight. And, Hank”—and again a somber expression touched his face—“I’m getting a little tired of fighting.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said. “Four days at Esmé’s place were just what I needed. Particularly since she called this morning and wished you luck.”