Preserve and Protect (58 page)

“And you want to win the election,” Hal interrupted, his tone so bitter again that his father for a few moments was too crushed to reply. “You want the votes he can bring with him.
You want to win.”

“Yes,” Orrin said at last, quietly, “I want to win. Because I think that I can save the country and save the general peace, in the long run, and I want to try.”

“And so the death of your grandson doesn’t really mean so much to you, after all, does it?” Hal asked, and again his father was too hurt and astounded to speak for a little while. But he managed, presently, and he managed to keep his voice quiet and reasonably steady.

“I won’t dignify that with an answer, but I do wonder if you’ve listened to me at all, these last few minutes. I’ve been trying to tell you why I’ve arrived at the decision I have—because you’re my son, and you have a right to ask. But I have a right to ask you not to say things like that, don’t I? There’s a limit to how unfair you should be to your father—I think.”

“I’m sorry,” Hal said in a desolate tone. “I
am
sorry. But—but”—and again his face crumpled and he spoke in a choked, half-audible voice—“he
is
a bad man and a dangerous man—and I’m afraid—if you make him Vice President that he’ll change you, you won’t change him, and then—then it will all be pointless: what happened to Crystal and the baby—and what happened to Harley—and Helen-Anne—and all the riots—and what’s happening to the country—and everything. It just won’t any of it make any sense at all, if you let him do that. And you already have, because the first step—the only step he needs—
they
need—is to get him in there beside you. They’ll be inside, then, and you won’t be able to control them, any more than he can.”

He stood up.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a desolate sadness. “I’m sorry I said the things I did.
But I am so afraid for my father
 … and for all of us.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Orrin said in a suddenly firm tone that his son recognized.

“You’re losing me,” Hal said in his tortured half-whisper.

“I’m sorry,” Orrin said again, managing to keep his voice almost steady; and he too stood up, and turned away, and did not look again at his son as he went blindly out. “I hope not.”

At the stately glass doors through which so many of the famous quick and the famous dead had passed in their unending cavalcade down the Republic’s years of grief and glory, they greeted him with a new respect; escorted him quickly down the long carpeted corridor to the private elevator; stood at attention as he ascended to the study on the second floor; saluted as they left and returned to their posts below.

Four faces, three friendly, one uncommunicative and unfathomable, swung toward him from the chairs and sofa grouped by the windows looking out upon the Washington Monument.

He was the man people turned to now with that special waiting, expectant look.

The knowledge did not make him as happy as he had once imagined it would, in his dreams of this terrible, haunted house.

“Mr. President—” he said, coming forward; the President nodded gravely. “Bob—” Bob Leffingwell gave him an encouraging smile. “Robert—” Senator Munson smiled too, in his eyes the memories of many battles, many understandings, the deeply binding friendship of the Hill.

He hesitated for a second, held out his hand, started to say, “Governor,” changed it:

“Ted.”

“Good evening, Orrin,” Governor Jason said gravely, shaking hands. “Thank you for asking me to come.”

There was just enough of Orrin left in this moment of conflicting, unhappy, chaotic emotions, to say wryly,

“I had so many options.”

“It needn’t have been me.”

“Perhaps not,” Orrin agreed. “But it would have been even more difficult for the country. And that is what we all have to think about now.”

He walked toward the window; instinctively they held back and let him precede them; instinctively he took the chair that dominated the grouping.

He sat down. They did the same.

“Have you been waiting for me long?”

“I just got here,” Governor Jason said.

“We were discussing,” Bob Munson said with a little smile, “the brutal heat of Washington, D.C., in the month of August.”

“I’m sorry I was late,” Orrin said. “I was having a talk with my son.” He paused for a moment, eyes narrowed in thought as he stared at the glowing red carpet. “He does not think,” he said in a level voice, raising his eyes and staring straight at the Governor, “that you are capable of controlling the violent forces that have supported your candidacy. He is threatening me with a permanent estrangement if I take you on the ticket. Nonetheless, I am here.”

There was a silence during which no one moved or, it seemed, even breathed. The eyes of the Secretary and the eyes of the Governor held each other and did not waver. Finally Ted spoke, with a careful enunciation and a careful choice of words.

“I am sorry he feels that way. I trust he will not be as adamant as he sounds if you take the action of which he disapproves.”

“I trust so,” Orrin agreed, looking thoughtfully at the President. “Though I cannot be sure.…My son,” he added quietly, “is not the only one who doubts your abilities in this regard.” He looked again at Ted. “You are in a roomful of skeptics, Governor. What can you say to reassure us?”

“What do you want me to say?” Ted asked, and the President stirred restlessly in his chair.

“Something straightforward,” he suggested. “If you please.”

For a moment Ted flushed. Then he controlled it and replied with an equal quietness,

“Perhaps I deserve that: I wouldn’t know. Obviously it expresses what you think of me. I can only say that many others think differently.”

“They don’t know you like we do,” Bob Leffingwell remarked, and this time the Governor made no attempt to conceal his annoyance.

“Oh, don’t they! And what do you know of me, really, Bob? What am I to you, but some sort of excuse for your own moral regeneration? If that’s what it is. I find it a little difficult to understand, myself.”

Bob Leffingwell did not flinch.

“Perhaps
I
deserve that. But the issue isn’t my moral regeneration, it’s yours. What proof have we got that you are a man responsible enough to be Vice President of the United States in this perilous age?”

For a time Governor Jason did not reply. Then he spoke in a steady, dispassionate voice.

“I came here tonight largely as a matter of courtesy to you, Orrin. I didn’t have to come here to take this kind of tongue-lashing from any of you. I could have stayed away and you would still have had to take me for Vice President because there isn’t anyone else. I’m so popular you can’t avoid it. You couldn’t win without me and you know it. Evidently you consider winning important enough so that you are going to take me regardless of what you think of me. What does that say about your moral regeneration, Orrin?”

It was the turn of the Secretary of State to remain silent for a while.

“About what my son says of it, I guess,” he responded at last, “if you look at it on that direct and simple a level. But we all know that when the selection of candidates for President and Vice President reaches this point it isn’t that direct and simple any more …
Yes!”
he said with a sudden angry impatience.
“Yes,
I want to win!
Yes,
I need you to win!
Yes,
I haven’t any choice but to take you if I do want to win! But”—and his voice dropped to a quietly emphatic level—“don’t think that means that we aren’t going to ask a few questions and expect a few replies, Ted. Because I don’t want a running mate I can’t trust. I don’t want to win and preside over the kind of world some of your supporters want you to help them bring about. I don’t want to win and preside over the dissolution of the democracy. I don’t intend to administer the graveyard of the Republic.”

Governor Jason shook his head with a weary, puzzled, frustrated air.

“How strange a concept you have of the legitimate forces of protest that disapprove of your policies! I have a few things to say, too, on that score. How much longer are you going to continue to regard legitimate protest and dissent as being traitorous and subversive? How much longer are you going to try to maintain that opposition to your policies
must
be subversive,
must
be hostile to democracy,
must
be inspired by a desire to destroy America? Don’t you make any allowance for honest dissent? How am
I
supposed to feel, when
I
contemplate running with a man possessed of such—such dangerous egomania—and self-righteousness? What must
I
sacrifice of my integrity and beliefs to accept the Vice Presidency, when you imply you must sacrifice so much of yours to offer it to me?”

Again there was silence, broken finally by Senator Munson in a businesslike tone that effectively shattered the emotional tension and brought the discussion back to a pragmatic political basis.

“I think you’d better tell him what you have, Orrin,” he said. “He isn’t going to understand anything otherwise.”

The Secretary sighed, a long unhappy sound. Then he shrugged.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

He took a sheaf of folded copy paper from his pocket and opened it slowly.

“What’s that?” the Governor asked skeptically, though a sudden hooded expression in his eyes indicated that he recognized it well enough. “A plan for world revolution?”

“Not quite,” Orrin said quietly. “These are notes on a meeting held at the Washington Statler hotel after your sister’s reception. They were written by Helen-Anne Carrew—”

“So that’s it!” Ted said angrily, turning on Bob Leffingwell.

“—and were sent to me by Mr. Justice Davis.”

Ted was silent.

“They tell a tale you ought to know.”

Ted held out his hand.

“May I see them?”

“You may.”

For perhaps five minutes he studied them carefully, his expression impassive. Then he handed them back and shook his head with a baffled expression.

“They aren’t very clear. There seem to be a lot of excisions and abbreviations. I’m not sure I understand—”

“I’m quite sure you do,” Orrin said, and his tone was cold and flat. “But if you’re in any doubt, let me fill in the gaps for you. It appears, first of all, that you attended a meeting—”

“Which you tried to give me to understand you did not,” the President interjected. But the Governor did not look at him or even indicate he had heard him.

“—at which were present Fred Van Ackerman, LeGage Shelby and Rufus Kleinfert. At this meeting, apparently, more or less routine campaign plans were discussed. The assumption on their part evidently was that this would be sufficient to put you off their real purpose, while at the same time giving them the power to hold over you when necessary the fact that you did, indeed, attend a secret meeting.”

“Who’s trying to hold it over me?” Governor Jason inquired dryly.

“Hold over you,” the Secretary repeated calmly, “the fact that you did, indeed, attend such a secret meeting. On that basis they could link you with, and make you responsible for, decisions reached at the further meeting which occurred after you left.

“I understand that you were worried about this possibility yourself, so you later asked these three gentlemen if there had been such a subsequent meeting and they said No. You apparently believed them. This,” he observed, “was a mistake, as Helen-Anne presently discovered, through the young busboy who was murdered at the same time she was.

“Shortly after you left, your three friends”—Ted moved angrily—“I’m sorry, your three supporters—were joined by the Ambassador of the Soviet Union, Vasily Tashikov. Vasily was accompanied by the third consul of the embassy, a young man named Andreiev Susnin. Susnin spends his more informal hours as agricultural attaché, traveling about the United States studying farm experiments and attending county fairs, at which he frequently makes graceful little talks hailing the rosy future of Soviet-American relations under the Agricultural Exchange Agreement.

“In his less informal hours, he is a lieutenant general in the KGB, commanding the Soviet intelligence network for the eastern United States.”

Again Governor Jason moved restlessly and remarked in a dry tone, “I told you it was a plan for world revolution.”

“Do you think he’s lying?” the President asked sharply.

“N—o.” Ted said slowly. “But you must admit it’s hard to believe.”

“Not if you’ve stayed awake to what’s been going on in the world in the past few years,” Orrin said with some tartness. “This is the kind of setup, I might point out, that has occurred in many other countries. It has occurred here numerous times in the past, as various arrests by the FBI and various expulsions of Soviet diplomats have revealed. So I advise you not to be too scoffing and too skeptical when I tell you about it. American skepticism has always been the strongest weapon in the Communist arsenal, but it’s imperative that you, of all people, not succumb to it. You’re in too important a position. Or,” he remarked calmly, and the Governor did not change expression, “you may be …

“Helen-Anne’s notes from here on are not too complete, because her source was only human, and he wasn’t in the room all the time, of course. He was in a couple of times, and apparently because he was a Negro, LeGage seems to have assumed that he hated his own country as much as LeGage does. LeGage should have known this was a dangerous generalization for him to make, but LeGage is not the most stable of young men, and so the boy was permitted to come up twice with drinks, and to linger for several minutes each time. LeGage at one point apparently became so drunk with liquor and egotism that he actually said something about, ‘We’re planning to burn down the whole country if necessary to get our man in the White House.’”

“I suppose I’m ‘our man,’” Ted said dryly.

“Evidently. The boy also got the impression that plans were being made for this, and that the Soviet visitors were actively engaged in helping to make them. All of this he told Helen-Anne, who most unfortunately thought she could go it alone with something like this, until finally she got frightened and brought Bob Leffingwell, here, into it. By then she had tipped her hand too much; thinking, as an old Washington operator, that the game could be played by Washington rules, and that with a judicious use of her knowledge she could scare off the fellow Americans who were apparently bent upon destroying the country.