Preserve and Protect Page 17

  “Of course you will,” he said; and, deliberately using the name: “Harley would expect you to.”

  For a moment he thought she might break down, but then it had the effect he hoped it would. She sat up straighter and took another spoonful of cereal with a thoughtful expression.

  “Yes,” she said presently, “he would. And of course I will. It won’t last too long anyway, will it?”

  “About two hours,” he said. “We ride to the Capitol to get the—where the procession forms—and then back down through town to the bridge and over to Arlington—and then perhaps half an hour—and then that’s it.”

  “That’s it,” she echoed bleakly. “That’s it. Oh, Bill, I—”

  “Now,” he said, rising quickly, “suppose you abandon the rest of that cereal as a lost cause and come over here with me. We have things to discuss. Come along, now.” And he put a hand under her arm and helped her stand up, which she managed somewhat shakily, but dutifully, as though she were an obedient little girl. “Now,” he said, when she was seated facing him across the glowing rug, “what are you and I going to do to make sure that this country goes along the way Harley would have wanted it?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he was relieved to see that she was really considering the question, with an interest that brought back a little of her usual rosy warmth, “yes. I’ve been doing some thinking about that, Bill. I think you’ve done very well, so far—what you’re doing overseas I think is what my husb—what Harley—would have done. I hope you won’t let them scare you out of it.”

  “Scare me?” he asked with a mock-chiding disbelief. “Lucille!”

  “Well, I know you won’t,” she said, with a smile that he was pleased to note was more like herself. “I can’t imagine anybody scaring the Speaker out of anything. Particularly now,” she added—and for a second she hesitated and he realized that she was making a real effort as she ended firmly—“now that he is the President.”

  “Thank you,” he said gravely. “But there are vicious forces loose, Lucille. Vicious and dangerous.”

  She shivered and her eyes widened with remembered horror.

  “Yes, I know. They were outside this house Sunday night. Oh, Bill!” she said urgently. “Do be careful, do be careful!”

  “I shall,” he promised grimly.

  “They killed Harley, didn’t they?” she asked, and for a long moment he did not answer, staring moodily out the window at the green trees, the Monument, the hot, dull sky overcast with intimations of thunderstorms to come.

  “I don’t know, Lucille,” he said finally, “I can’t honestly say that. The commission is already finding some strange things. A couple of the crew were involved in a Communist group in Annapolis, there’s a lead into the ground crew in San Francisco that may develop something, the body of a man with a gun was found among the victims—”

  “No!” she protested in a horrified voice. “Then they—they weren’t going to take any chances, were they? If it didn’t happen one way, it would happen—”

  “Now, Lucille,” he said firmly, “you must not, you must not, let yourself get into that kind of thinking. All that we actually know is that Air Force One crashed because of some sort of malfunction. We have no evidence as yet of any genuine conspiracy, or any kind of plot, or anything. There are coincidences that are strange, but that’s all we know. Until we know more, I don’t think you should let yourself brood about it, because that way lies nothing but pain and unhappiness for years to come.”

  “I think Ted Jason knew about it,” she said, almost in a whisper, and again he replied sharply and firmly.

  “I think Ted Jason is a fool about certain things, but I don’t think—don’t think and won’t say, and wouldn’t want you ever to think or say, either—that he was in any way knowingly involved in Harley’s death. Ted’s an ill-advised and perhaps ill-fated man in many ways, but I don’t believe that he would ever let himself be pushed that far. The irony of it is, of course,” he added with a grim little smile, “that if the people who may have been responsible ever find the heat getting too much for them, they’ll turn on him and try to make it appear that he did know. That’s the type they are,” he said with a sudden savage distaste. “Scum of the scum of the earth.”

  “They’re going to cause trouble for Orrin, aren’t they?”

  He nodded.

  “Surely. I think the convention was only the beginning. I think we’re going to have many tense times before this is over, Lucille. And perhaps for years after that, if it doesn’t come out the way they want.”

  “How horrible they are,” she said softly. “They want to destroy this country, I think.”

  “I think so too. I took an oath, though, you know, to preserve, protect and defend, and by God, I’m going to do it. And so is Orrin, if he gets it. And even, so is Ted, if he gets it, unless he’s absolutely worthless. And I don’t think he is.”

  “No,” she agreed with a wan little smile. “I suppose he isn’t, really. He’s like everything else in America, all mixed up between good and bad.…What do you want me to do, Bill? I’ll do anything you say.”

  For a moment he looked at her thoughtfully. Then he smiled affectionately and shook his head.

  “Nope. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’ve always thought Lucille Hudson was one of the smartest politicians in this town. I expect you’ll know what to do when you decide the timing is right. I’ll just wait and be surprised like everybody else.”

  “Well,” she said, and he could tell from her pleased expression that for the moment, at least, she was taken out of herself and her grief, “I’ll just have to see what seems best.”

  “I’m sure instinct will tell you,” he said. “What will you do, Lucille? Go back to Michigan?”

  “Oh, no,” she said promptly, and it was obvious that she had been giving this a lot of thought, too. “There’s nothing for me there, any more, and here, at least, I can stay in the swing of things and still be part of what’s going on. For the time being, I’m going to be with the Munsons.”

  “Are you,” he said. “That will be nice for you. And nice for them.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, looking excited and taken out of herself for a moment by the prospect. “You know that guest house Dolly has at ‘Vagaries,’ down the slope toward the greenhouse. It’s all furnished and ready to occupy, with its own drive and entrance and all, so that I can be close to them and be with them when I want, but not be a burden. And Harley—left enough—so that money’s no problem. And also, I suppose I get a—a pension from Congress, so I should be quite comfortable there, I think. For a while, at least. I may get my own place later.”

  “I think it’s an excellent idea. And Lucille—you’re always welcome here, you know. My sister and brother-in-law are going to be with me, and we’d all like to have you here just as often as you can.”

  “Thank you, Bill,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I have so many good friends in Washington.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, “and don’t you ever forget it. And now, my dear,” he said gently, standing up and holding out his hand, “I’ve got to get back to the office and tend to some things before we go to the Hill.”

  “Of course,” she said, her voice getting shaky again as she accompanied him to the door. “Downstairs at eleven-fifteen, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” he said gravely. “Are your daughters and their families coming here, or do you want us to pick them up at the Carlton?”

  “They’re coming here in a few minutes,” she said, her eyes filling again. “They wanted me to stay over there with them these past three days, but I—I wanted to stay here until—until—”

  “Of course you did.” He kissed her again. “Now, my dear—be brave for a little longer, and the ordeal will be over.”

  “It won’t be too bad, will it?” she asked in a tiny voice, like a child seeking reassurance.

  “No,” he said gravely. “It won’t be too bad.”
>
  But in this, of course, he was mistaken, for it was not a world nor a century that permitted the decent the privilege of being left in peace. It was a world of horrors in a century of evil, and on this day as on some others, all of its pretenses were stripped away and nothing but the glaring skeleton of mankind’s hope looked out upon its ghastly spiritual desolation.

  However, the funeral of Harley M. Hudson, late President of the United States, began in relative calm and dignity, and for a time it appeared that it would continue so to the end. Lucille was at the door at eleven-fifteen, white and trembling but holding her head high. Her two daughters, her sons-in-law and the five grandchildren were at her side. The President, his sister and his brother-in-law joined them a moment later. Senator Munson and Dolly, representing the Senate (Bob having been elected president pro tempore following the death of Senator Cooley) were with them, as were Representative Swarthman and Miss Bitty-Bug, representing the House, which had not yet had time to elect a successor to the Speaker. The Chief Justice and his eight associates came next, Tommy Davis tossing the President an archly defiant little glance as they formed in procession to go out to the limousines. Secretary of State Knox, Beth and his Cabinet colleagues and their wives, followed by the dean of the diplomatic corps and his wife, completed the White House party.

  At eleven-thirty exactly, the first limousine, carrying the President, his sister and Mrs. Hudson pulled slowly away from the steps, the others following in evenly spaced procession. Slowly the cortege moved down the curving drive lined on both sides with the men of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines standing rigidly at attention; turned right past Albert Gallatin and the Treasury, right again and down the short incline, and then left along Pennsylvania Avenue past thousands upon thousands of silent citizens, and the rigid double row of servicemen standing at ten-foot intervals all the way to the Capitol, looming on its hill a mile to the east.

  There the members of the White House party left their cars and walked up the worn stone steps to the rotunda where more than half a million people of all races had filed past Harley’s coffin during the twenty-four hours it had lain in state there, a tally that rather surprised some of Harley’s critics who had thought he was as unpopular with his fellow citizens as he was with them. (Another 110,000 had paid their respects in the East Room of the White House before the body was moved to the Capitol.) Inside in the hushed chamber with the great dome soaring above, the light filtering down upon the catafalque and the grave faces of the dignitaries, the Senate, the House and the heads of foreign states joined the party. Then the flag-draped coffin was carried slowly down the steps and placed on the caisson drawn by eight matched grays. The cortège reassembled in its limousines, orders rang out in the still, humid air; the beat of muffled drums began, and with a slow, implacable, heart-shattering dignity, yet another President of the United States began his last journey down Capitol Hill.

  Again the cortège moved slowly, slowly, along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Federal Triangle, past solemn-faced young servicemen and silent thousands (quite a few, reporters noted, were weeping, though it was only for bumbling old Harley Hudson, that poor excuse for a President); slowly it turned left into Constitution Avenue, moved slowly past the great federal buildings and more thousands standing hushed and respectful; turned left and, at Lucille’s request, left again and around the east side of the Lincoln Memorial so that for a moment the statue of the saddest of all Presidents looked down upon the somber passage of his distant successor; moved slowly across Memorial Bridge toward Lee Mansion and Arlington National Cemetery on their soft green hills; and there, under the sullen heat of a sullen sky, met the anguish of the age as another procession, led by a hearse and seeming to materialize out of nowhere, shot from the left through the surprised, unsuspecting ranks of military and police and careened alongside the Presidential cortege with horns blaring, riders screaming and placards waving.

  In the wild confusion of the next fifteen minutes, reporters and cameramen stationed high on the approaches to Arlington Cemetery were able to discern and transmit to a horrified nation the fact that several of the cars in the opposing group were emblazoned with the flaming torch of KEEP, the clenched fist of DEFY, the stylized white dove of COMFORT; that their passengers, shouting wild obscenities at the Presidential party, were composed about equally of whites and blacks; that the placard affixed to the top of the hearse made clear the purpose of this ghastly intrusion—SYLVESTER SMITH, NEGRO: KILLED AT THE WHITE HOUSE IN OPPOSITION TO THE HUDSON-KNOX WARS. GOING TO A HERO’S GRAVE IN ARLINGTON—and that the hobbledehoy crew in their screeching vehicles, might be perilously close to achieving the intent described in the savage chant that soon filled a hundred million homes:

  “INTO THE DITCH, YOU SON OF A BITCH! INTO THE DITCH, YOU SON OF A BITCH! INTO THE DITCH, YOU SON OF A BITCH! INTO THE DITCH, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

  That the late President’s coffin was spared this final horror was due in major part to the quick thinking of his successor, who sprang from his limousine and shouted to the stunned military to close in and protect the caisson, his own and the immediately following cars. It was also due to the drivers of the matched grays, who somehow managed to hold rein on their terrified animals (that evening they would tell their wives that they had thought their arms would be torn from their sockets; but it had to be done, and so they did it); and to the fact that after the first few seconds of stunned disbelief, the military and police did move, the ranks did close, the procession was protected and the invaders were driven off. By some miracle that he was later to thank God for, the President was able to make his own roar of “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” heard above the mêlée, and no one did: the invaders were robbed of the martyrdom they would dearly have loved to provoke. But tear gas and nerve gas were available, and were used; and after some fifteen minutes of chaos, they scuttled back to their cars and screeched away toward the cemetery, up the hill and out of sight among the trees, to the spot where, a few minutes later, dutifully recorded by a section of the television crews and reporters who had been quickly reassigned by their alert and fast-thinking superiors to cover this ghastly side show, Sylvester Smith, a veteran of his nation’s foreign wars and domestic agonies, was laid to rest.

  After such an interruption, the ceremonies for Harley Hudson were concluded under a terrible psychological burden. His wife and family were so close to hysteria that the President was not sure they were going to get through the brief interment without losing control completely. He himself, phlegmatic though he was by nature and deliberate self-discipline, was shattered as he had rarely been in all his life. There hung over the committal of President Hudson’s remains to earth a sadness beyond words and very nearly beyond bearing. It communicated itself to the country, where decent citizens wondered with a horrified dismay what was going to happen to America; a wonder made even more frightening when the parallel coverage of the two funerals in Arlington was lent a final terrible note. It was announced about an hour after the cortège had returned to the White House and dispersed that two men wearing masks had run past the sentries at the grave, splashed a bucket of black paint on the headstone and tossed upon the plain white sarcophagus a placard bearing the words, scrawled in blood (of an ox, laboratory analysts at Bethesda Naval Hospital reported later):

  SO DIE ALL WAR MAKERS.

  8

  Out of such horrors the President spoke to his countrymen at nine-thirty that evening, and it was declared, by those who declare such things, that 210,637,209 citizens of the unhappy Republic sat before their television sets and watched him do it. Such statistics were then, as always, a little difficult to prove, but had there been anyone moving in the streets of the hushed cities and the quiet towns, or in the vast empty reaches where only the twinkling lights of an occasional ranch house broke the deepening dusk, he would have seen that the land was silent and listening as it had rarely listened before.

  So, too, was the world, linked by satellite into an audience that stretc
hed from Tierra del Fuego to Tibet from the Cape of Good Hope to Baffin Bay. Wherever men lived, they heard on the “Voice of America” the terse sentences and calm, unhurried tones of the Chief Executive who now led the nation most of them either feared, despised, ridiculed or deplored; and for this he was grateful because he wanted, as he had told Bob Leffingwell a couple of hours ago, to give it to them straight, so that no one anywhere would have any doubts about his intentions, his ideas, or his character. His decision to spell it out beyond mistake had been made in the limousine riding back to the White House with a Lucille Hudson once again on the edge of collapse, and a sister whose white face and strained expression epitomized for him what he knew must be the reaction of millions upon millions of his countrymen. The majority of them, he knew, were decent people, inclined to look upon the world with good will, not perfect always, not tolerant always, sometimes impatient and erratic in their judgments and emotions, but still basically goodhearted and well-meaning. The America they had known—or, idealistically, had liked to think they had known, under all the shabbiness and dross of recent decades—was being whirled away from them by ruthless and despicable men. He could sense that his sister for the first time was genuinely frightened for her country, with a terror and uncertainty she had never felt before. And he knew that many millions—still, he hoped, the great majority—of his fellow Americans felt an equal concern in the face of the acts of the evildoers.

  To him fell the task of reassurance. His instinct for timing told him it must be done at once. His instinct for a good speech, the realities of politics and what he believed to be the ultimate good of his country told him whom he should get to help him. Five minutes after commending Lucille to the care of her family and the Munsons, he had detached Orrin Knox from the somber group of dispersing officials and taken him off to the upstairs study. Five minutes after that a startled but perforce compliant Orrin was putting through a call to Arlington Ridge Road. Half an hour after that a startled but perforce compliant Robert A. Leffingwell had joined them. Together they began to draft the speech.