Preserve and Protect (23 page)

He had strayed close to what came in time to be described as “the New Left”—that phrase, so beloved of certain segments of the mass media, which really described just the same Old Left with a new generation of stooges to manipulate for its own imperialistic, Commufascist purposes. But he had never quite gone irrevocably over. Even when he had met and fallen in love with intense little Louise Maxwell, who was militant where he was philosophic, emotional where he was basically thoughtful.

How horribly serious and humorless so many of them had been in those days! How far they had persuaded themselves to go in swapping reality for an upside-down, cock-a-hoop vision of the world and society. What a strange psychotic state they lived in, encouraged by a press which tenderly front-paged their every unmannerly public belch and breaking of wind. And how desperately did some of them cling to immaturity still, despite all the evidence of all the years.

It was Louise’s intensity, he supposed, which had captured him more than anything else. This was a mate with whom a philosopher might storm the barricades. She did it every day, her bare, strained, not un-pretty little face contorted with her bitterness against America. Never had the noisy minority of a generation hated its own country more than Louise and her friends hated America; and with her, as with so many, he could never understand exactly why. She came of a wealthy, established family, had been given the most comfortable of childhoods. She had no reason, but for a long time she was as insensate and unthinking as the rest. It was the fashionable thing to do, in their generation, and so they did it, with that herd instinct of a certain segment of the young that stifles all thought and murders all individuality. The vast majority of their generation went quietly along getting an education, preparing themselves for constructive lives, becoming responsible citizens: Louise and her kind, everyday darlings of the media, rode high, wide and handsome in the days of their noisily pathetic youth.

For him it was an intellectual, not an emotional, matter. He kept to himself some basic reservations, for he did not really see for Robert A. Leffingwell any great future in destroying American society. If he had a future, and he believed he did, it was within the framework of that society, not in any chaos that might follow its destruction. And gradually, as time passed and they married and the children came, it seemed to him that Louise, too, acquired a certain maturity and mellowing, though she was still capable of flaring up in a white-lipped, implacable way about her country’s policies.

Gradually these outbursts became less, though she was always to be found in the front ranks of the middle-aged spread that overtook youthful rebellion as the years went on. Now her protests took the form of occasional attendance at the meetings of antiwar groups, donations to the Committee Condoning This, the Consensus Against That, her signature on petitions to Congress and full-page ads in the
New York Times
(moving higher up the list as he moved higher up the government). The barricades did not fit too well with a husband rising in the public service and a five-bedroom house on Arlington Ridge Road.

He had been genuinely surprised, however, that Seab Cooley or some member of the Foreign Relations Committee had not tried to raise the issue of Louise’s record and smear him with it during the hearings. No one had, and he had finally concluded, with a certain grudging disbelief that he was now ashamed of, that perhaps United States Senators weren’t as bad as he had always suspected. Louise’s past could have been a serious handicap to him, had it not turned out, ironically and through his own doing, that his own was quite enough.

Still, she had always furnished the sort of aura that had enabled him to remain in good standing with what he thought of as the “professional liberals.” The professional liberals, in his definition, were those who worked at it, for whom there was an unending, intolerant, relentless war against all differing opinion, for whom everything was always my-my and terribly-terribly, even as they too rose to being three-martini and wall-to-wall.

Louise remained, and helped him to remain, dreadfully In with all the Right People; and, as he was shrewdly aware and cynically capable of using, this did no harm to his career and reputation in an era dominated in major degree by certain powerful elements of the mass media, with their ability, through column, syndicate and broadcast, to condition the country coast-to-coast.

He had never told Louise about the days of the rather pathetic little four-man Communist discussion group when he was teaching at the University of Chicago. It had been, as much of his liberalism was, an intellectual exercise, a philosophic experiment, not direct or militant enough for her. She had been as shocked as his other supporters when it had come back years later in a Senate hearing to confront and confound him. He had not considered the episode that important, either when it happened or later. Its only importance, as she and so many who thought as she did were unable to see, was that he had lied about it under oath.

Almost all men, of course, would lie under oath at some point: a few saints perhaps had nothing embarrassing to hide, but not many of them existed in the world of power and press and politics that he knew. It just depended on which side of the table you happened to occupy. If you were lucky enough to be on the asking side instead of the answering side, you could wrap yourself in righteousness and heap coals on the heads of the guilty. If you were on the answering side—and were found out—you became a Robert A. Leffingwell, defeated for Secretary of State.

That was why he had been a little amused, even in the depths of his first despair over the Senate vote, by the attempts of his supporters to convince the country that he had been defeated because he was a “liberal.” That phony issue had nothing to do with it, as he knew and they knew: they were just playing the same old game they always played. The country sensed the reality, all right: dumpy little Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania had spoken for the people when she cried “Liar!” at the convention.

Out of the lie had come what he now regarded, in a way that would be almost mystical in a less skeptical and intelligent man, as regeneration. Out of it too had come what appeared to be the final loss of sympathy that had held together a marriage that had increasingly become, as he matured and she remained essentially the immature rebel of a long-gone day, a matter of calling to one another across an empty room. She had remained rigid, he had become more flexible. He suspected she really despised him because the Chicago incident had been so innocent—she would have respected him more had it really been subversive. A pursed-lipped disapproval had reached its climax in her frantic attempts to persuade him not to support Harley Hudson. He had recognized that this was the final step and, for all the reasons which seemed sufficient to him, had taken it. The result is summed up in a postcard from Chorocua saying,
“I hope you’re satisfied!”

Well: he can’t worry about that now. More pressing things are on his mind, for he has already had to make the first of those compromises in his new role that all men make, whatever philosophy they cling to.

He had been alarmed by the President’s desire to include in his speech a call for a much tighter anti-disturbance bill.

“I don’t like this,” he had said bluntly to Orrin when the President had gone off to the diplomatic reception.

The Secretary had studied him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

“I don’t either. It does go too far. But he has to reply to violence and he has to make it strong. If I know the Hill, the bill will go through a considerable watering-down before it sees the light of day.”

“It will bring him an awful lot of criticism from people like me who are in favor of the objective but alarmed at the method.”

“I think he feels that a firm response to violence is more important at the moment than criticism from his friends,” Orrin said. “It’s one of those balancing acts you get involved in here. It’s an executive decision.” He shrugged. “He’s made it. We write it.”

“I still don’t like it,” Bob Leffingwell said stubbornly.

“Just remember that I don’t either,” Orrin said crisply. “Record that in my favor, if you will. But I see the necessity.” He paused and then said, much as the President had earlier, “You don’t have to stay, Bob. You can go.”

Bob Leffingwell stared at him for a long moment.

“No,” he said finally, “I’m not going. Why don’t you try writing it out and I’ll see what I can do to help.”

The moment had been a further step along the way. He did not like it, but he had endorsed it—not only endorsed it but actively participated, for those few sledge-hammer sentences contained a phrase or two of his. The press does not know this now, but it will before long. Somehow, somewhere, through somebody, the story will leak out. (Not from himself, or Orrin, or the President or the stenographer, probably: but the stenographer’s husband, her girl-friend, her son, her maid, her hairdresser—who knows where Washington leaks really come from? But they always do.) And when it finally becomes known, the howl against him will be louder than ever from those who oppose the Administration.

But the whole episode has been, as Orrin said, “an executive decision,” and for none of them more than for him. All the assumptions of a liberal life had been challenged by the violence at the convention, challenged by the failure of the professional liberals to see the road to lawlessness down which they were taking America, challenged by events of recent years which have finally convinced him that his country must stand and defend on an old-fashioned, inconvenient, awkward, vulnerable but nonetheless valid set of principles, if she is ever to do so. He can see now that he has been circling for a long time around the decision to change his public position on many things. After his evening at the White House, he knows there can be no more hesitations. He is virtually a member of the Administration now, and there can be no turning back.

Nor does he want to, for the shrewd old President has solved something else for him: he has put him to work with Orrin Knox, and out of their forced collaboration has come a sense of relaxation and easiness with one another that comes from shared responsibility and a job effectively done. After the speech was roughed into shape for the President’s editing, they had a few minutes together to talk. Later the mere physical fact of eating dinner together had also made its contribution. Subconsciously, he supposed, he and Orrin must always have admired each other’s abilities, even in the most bitter moments of their contest in the Senate. In their brief talk in Spring Valley, and even more tonight in the White House, he has discovered to his surprise that apparently they really want to like each other. And they have.

Tonight he has seen another side of Orrin Knox than the prickly, dominant, impulsive, strong-willed politician. The ironic, whimsical, self-deprecating Orrin has also been present: he has found him quite charming. A lively sense of the irony of their collaboration infused many of the Secretary’s comments.

“Lord, if Walter and Tommy Davis could see us now!” he had said at one point and had literally stopped to sit back and laugh at the thought. “Who knows,” he had added, more thoughtfully. “It may be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Bob Leffingwell had replied with a smile and a cautious, “It may.”

Orrin had laughed again.

“Don’t commit yourself to anything,” he advised. “It’s a pretty dangerous thought, I’ll grant you.”

“I’ve probably had worse,” Bob said.

“There are no worse,” Orrin said solemnly. “Absolutely none.”

But the idea, finally defined between them, grew of itself. By the time he left the White House, going out the East Gate just as the speech began, so that all the press would be occupied and none would note his passage, he knew they were beginning already to think in terms of a more important collaboration in the days ahead. And he knows now, as he lounges in the warmly rustling night and stares at the city of power still alight across the river, that he is probably already committed.

As he arrives at this conclusion, which perhaps has been implicit in everything he has done since he decided to nominate Harley, the phone rings insistently. After a moment he goes reluctantly to the house to answer. Who can be calling at this midnight hour?

He might have known.

“Sweetie,” Patsy says, “I HOPE I didn’t wake you up!”

“You didn’t,” he says cheerfully.

“Oh,” she says, and he can tell she is a little taken aback at a cordiality she did not expect after her final bitter denunciation of him in Ted’s room at the Mark Hopkins. (He can picture that shrewd Jason brain thinking. Now why does he sound so friendly? I thought he didn’t like us. What does that mean?)

“Is there something I should know about?” he asks with an innocent interest, pursuing his advantage. “Some crisis, or—?”

She laughs heartily.

“Heavens, NO! Sweetie,” she goes on with an intimate urgency, and he gives her credit for sailing right into it, “how would you like to be chairman of Ted’s campaign again? You know I’m giving a big reception tomorrow night for the National Committee—”

“I’ve heard. But isn’t it rather soon after—”

“Things move fast nowadays,” she says archly. “It will be so wonderful if we can announce that you’ve decided to return to our side again. You can say that your support of President Hudson was just a personal matter, largely based on gratitude for what he did for you. You can say that you deplored the violence at the convention, just as you know Ted did. You can say that you are satisfied that the violence occurred without Ted’s knowledge, and that you are satisfied with his assurances that it will not be permitted to enter his campaign again. You can say—”

“Patsy,” he interrupts finally, a trifle dazed by this onrushing outline, “are you reading?”

“No, sweetie,” she says quickly. “Us Jasons don’t need notes. We think fast, you know.”

“I know,” he agrees. “But it still sounds—anyway, you have consulted with Ted?”

“Ted and I want Ted to be President,” she says blandly. “Is it necessary to consult?”