The General's President (33 page)

After the briefing, the president boarded an army helicopter and overflew the site, an action of no obvious functional but considerable political value. Afterward he met the press at the army's nuclear cleanup camp near Prince Frederick, where he delivered a two-minute address and dealt with a few questions. Then, with the first lady, he visited the refugee center near Washington, and the injured at Walter Reed Medical Center.

They were back at the White House for supper. And while he'd gotten no "work" done that day, it occurred to Arne Haugen that what he had done was as important in the functioning of a president as anything else would have been.

After supper he worked on his "new technology" speech.

THIRTY

Barron Tallmon reached for his buzzing intercom and touched the pulsing button. "This is Barron," he said. The screen remained blank. By contrast, the television in the corner of his darkened living-dining room was alive with motion and color, though he'd keyed down the sound to take the call.

"Barron, this is Massey. I'm in my office, about to watch the speech. Come down here. I may have thoughts for you to take notes on."

"Yes Mr. Massey." As he said it, Tallmon glanced at the digital clock built into the face of his set, and touched the countdown key on his remote; one minute and fifty-three seconds before nine.

"I'll be there momentarily."

"Do so."

Tallmon took the barely-touched TV dinner into his kitchenette and put it on the drainboard.
I shouldn't have waited so long to eat
, he told himself. From a stand by his apartment door, he grabbed an ever-ready clipboard, pen attached, then hurried out. A minute later he knocked at the door of Massey's sitting room/office.

"Come."

He entered. The room was lit only by the television and a small glow panel turned low beside a window. Massey spoke without taking his eyes from the screen. "There is scotch and seltzer on the sideboard if you'd care for some."

Massey had repeated the invitation innumerable times over eighteen years; the answer had always been the same.

"No thank you, sir." It occurred to Tallmon to wonder what Massey's reaction would have been if he'd said "yes sir." There would be no reaction, he decided as he took a chair a half dozen feet to Massey's left. Then, clipboard on his knee, he turned his own attention to the set.

"...and perhaps
some
comment on the reported coup attempt in the Far East Command of the Soviet army." The familiar, resonant voice of CBS's Weldon Germaine paused, and dropped to an undertone. "The president has just come into the room."

The picture switched to Arne Haugen as he walked across the room and sat down at a desk. His gaze went to the camera facing him and seemed to look out at Tallmon.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans. I have several important things to talk to you about this evening. My press secretary, Mr. Okada, tells me it's preferable to talk about only one subject in a talk like this, and I can see the logic in that. But at the rate things have been happening, tonight I need to talk about more than one."

He chuckled then, seemingly not aware of it, as he looked down at the ruled yellow sheets on the desk. Then he looked back up at the camera, his gaze and attention focusing.

"I'm going to talk to you briefly about foreign trade and a foreign affairs action I'm taking. And after that I'm going to tell you about the new technology I mentioned in my Warsaw speech; I understand there's been a lot of curiosity about that.

"But before I talk about any of those things, I need to talk to you briefly about the goal I have as your president. It's a goal I take so much for granted that I had to be away from America before it occurred to me that I needed to tell you about it."

He seemed to gaze out at Tallmon for a pair of seconds before continuing, seemed to catch and hold his eyes, and for a moment it took the man by surprise. "I have a vision of America," the president said. "Nothing magical, nothing Utopian, it doesn't have heavenly choirs. But I want to tell you about it, tell you what it seems to me that America might become. If you agree with me on it; if you decide to make it that way or let others make it that way."

The president paused. Tallmon glanced surreptitiously at Massey. Massey's expression was detached interest—no stranger to his pale, aristocratic face.

"I visualize an America," Haugen was saying, "where the law defends the rights of its people, and at the same time enables them to grow and evolve individually and as a nation. Where education—" He paused for emphasis. "Where
effective
education functions freely and creatively to
help
them grow and evolve as a continuingly unique and special part of the community of Planet Earth." Another pause. "An America where the individual has more freedom than ever to shape his or her life according to his or her own developing purposes. And..." He slowed, enunciating the words one after the other. "Where that individual growth and development is not threatened by arbitrary bureaucratic regulations, but is constrained only to the degree necessary to protect the reasonable rights of others."

Again the president paused, eyes intent on the camera, as if looking through it at his audience. Intent but not intense, calm instead of zealous.

"An America active, rich in ideas, where new things are tried, and new ways of doing things, with no more than essential regulation. Where personal and group experimentation is respected or at least tolerated. Where the future takes form by persons and groups choosing from many alternatives or creating new ones. Where government planning agencies have no power to dictate the future. Where government's role is to ensure freedom and reasonable opportunity to grow. Where the board rooms of giant corporations cannot play big games with the economy and dictate people's choices to suit corporate ambitions." He paused again for emphasis. "Where arrogant elites do not undertake to program the nation, and through it the world, into a machine which they intend to drive."

Once more Tallmon slid a rightward glance from the corner of his eye and saw no response. Or had the expression hardened a little?

"All of these," Haugen was saying, "government agencies, corporations, self-appointed elites—all of these should be free to propose, experiment and expound, but not to coerce and dictate to the people.

"And I see the key to this future as reduced restrictions, greater individual responsibility before the law, and greater tolerance of differences, even greater respect for differences. Which is to say, the conditions which the founders of this nation intended and which a self-interested establishment has degraded.

"In about a month I will announce reforms of our legal system to move us in that direction.

"That's enough about that for now though. Let's look at foreign trade next: I've had a lot of urging to put tighter restrictions on foreign imports and even to cut off most of them entirely; cut off almost all but the importation of oil and strategic minerals.

"Decades of movement in the direction of totally free world trade have helped put us where we are. The free-trade theory is still attractive; it
seems
as if it should work. And it might have, if everyone had worked at it. Some nations tried; America tried. But too many others, for very real political and economic reasons, restricted imports while taking full advantage of freedoms to export. Many competed in world markets while paying their workers far lower wages than others did, which enabled those countries to sell at cutthroat prices. But which on the other hand enabled them to develop their primitive economies into more or less modern economies—to join us in the late twentieth century. And a few countries deliberately dumped commodities on world markets at a loss, to destroy competition.

"Let me give you just a few examples from the many I could have chosen. West Germany put restrictions on foreign poultry and dairy products that effectively held out American poultry and cheeses. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and more recently India exported very large volumes of clothing to us, made by workers whose pay for a day was less than American workers made in an hour. The result was that American employment in the manufacture of fabrics and clothing was cut to a small fraction of what it had been. And as some of you are aware, the economies of Finland, Sweden, and Canada crashed after the Soviet Union, selling at a loss, dumped huge quantities of coniferous timber on the world market to ruin their competitors.

"Of course, as world recession slipped toward world depression, the support for free trade fell off. Most countries acted to protect their producers at home by increasing restrictions and raising tariffs on imports of anything they produced themselves. Some reacted more extremely than others. The United States, under President Donnelly, reacted less extremely than perhaps any other country.

"I have been urged to increase both tariffs and restrictions, and I have also been urged not to. I won't go into the arguments here, except to say that recently our wage levels have dropped to the point that the prices of imported goods no longer seriously undercut the prices of goods made in America. Meanwhile the popular movement to 'buy American,' urged by President Donnelly, has helped noticeably. So the advantages of increased restrictions are not as great as some people would like to believe.

"In my second week in office, I asked the Congress for its best recommendations, and the House and Senate jointly set up a select committee to winnow through the pros and cons and hammer out a program. They've done that. And it's a convincing program but not a dramatic one. It recommends only a few moderate adjustments to the formula President Donnelly established under the authority granted him by Congress last year. The overall effects should be about the best we can get, under the circumstances. I'm instructing the Secretaries of State, Commerce, and Agriculture to carry out the Congressional recommendations.

"As for foreign policy actions, I have only one to announce. I am closing all Soviet consulates in America and discontinuing their trade missions; this evening they were given six days to leave the country."

The president paused to let it sink in.

"This is not intended as a hostile act. I am definitely not contemplating breaking off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union or any other country. It is simply a recognition of certain realities.

"A country has consulates and trade missions in foreign nations for two purposes: One is to serve its trade interests. And the second—the second is to gather intelligence by monitoring publications and broadcasts, by recruiting spies, and by providing contacts for spies. Because we now have very little trade with the Soviet Union, their consulates and trade missions here serve little purpose except to gather intelligence, both legally and by spying. By shutting them down, I am disrupting their spy network and closing several of their monitoring centers, and we can expect them to take half a year or more to regain something approaching their present intelligence effectiveness.

"Hopefully, by then we'll be ready to trade with them on a significant level again, and to reopen their consulates here."

The president paused, then spoke more slowly, more emphatically. "Let me repeat, this action is not an act of hostility, although we can expect the Soviet government to claim that it is. That is part of their standard political response to foreign actions they don't like."

He stopped, glanced down at the papers on his desk, then back up at the cameras. "And now for something more positive, probably the most important announcement I will ever make. It deals with a major step toward renewed prosperity."

Unawarely, Tallmon leaned slightly forward at this.

"But you'll have to be patient with me," the president said, "because I'm going to set the stage with some background for it.

"The greatest boost to recovery from economic depression is new or improved technology of a kind that means more goods and services available and more jobs. What you do is
out-create
the depression. If we can produce more goods more cheaply without reducing incomes, we've beaten the depression. Some people might say this is impossible. It's not, as you'll see.

"For years we've had a worsening problem of environmental pollution. To keep pollution from getting worse, controls have been imposed. And directly or indirectly, the cost of those controls has to be paid for by the products, which has made those products somewhat more expensive. That was one cause of inflation.

"Another major cause was our dependence on petroleum for fuel, for energy. Oil prices more than tripled a year ago, making electricity, heating, and transportation much more expensive."

The president paused to sip lemon and water, then looked at the cameras again. "How would you like electricity so cheap that most homes will be heated with it? How would you like to have transportation costs drop below anything you've seen for decades? Without smog from power plants or automobile motors? Without nuclear wastes? How would you like to see these things happening in a large way within a year? That's what our new technology will give us. And the world's limited oil supplies will be left for other uses.

"The new development I've been referring to is called the geogravitic power converter; the GPC for short. You can think of the GPC as converting gravity into electricity without in any way reducing gravity. And it provides that electricity far more cheaply than any other system. The generators are cheap enough that every town and village can have one. In every nation, under congress or king, parliament or dictator, free enterprise system or Marxist dictatorship.

"My technical staff and I, at Duluth Industries, completed its development less than a year ago.

"And now we get into the reasons for secrecy. At that time we recognized serious problems in getting it released for use on Planet Earth. There are financial interests who would see in it the loss of much of their influence and some of their wealth. There is also an intricate complex of laws and regulations that could be manipulated to serve as barriers, and a disinformation system that could be used to discredit it. And finally, the government could have slapped it with a
Top Secret
classification that would effectively and finally have buried it."