Promise of Joy Page 5

  Knox forces denounce “any inference, assumption, hint, rumor, fabrication, slander or lie that in any way links secretary knox to jason death.” President Abbott leads bitter attack on media for “vicious undermining of one of the most decent men in public life.” Gallup poll shows 37 per cent “find it possible to believe” Knox had “some knowledge if not responsibility” for governor’s assassination.

  National committee convenes today in atmosphere of crisis as secretary plans first public appearance since shooting at monument grounds.

  3

  He was aware that somewhere below there was again the stirring that accompanies official arrivals and departures, and he realized that it must be for him. Although three days had passed he still was not sure he could make the effort. He knew he must, he was the nominee, even through the haze of grief, sedation and swirling confusion he had clung desperately to the knowledge that he had a responsibility that could not be avoided, a responsibility he had desired and must fulfill. It had kept him going—just barely. Then had come the visit from his son and daughter-in-law, accompanied by President Abbott and Senator Munson, shortly after 9 a.m., and with it the realization that it was time to put aside grief, insofar as possible, and return to the world. After that, very slowly and painfully, aided by two doctors, two nurses, Hal and Crystal, he had dressed, taken a cup of broth and some crackers and then asked to be left alone again for a little while until it came time to leave for the National Committee meeting.

  With considerable vehemence, Hal and Crystal, as the remaining members of his family (how awful and impossible that fact was to contemplate!), had recommended against his going. With equal emphasis Bill Abbott and Bob Munson, as old and dear friends and colleagues, had argued on the other side. The discussion had been sufficiently tart and sufficiently like old times to drive below the surface for at least a little while the aching knowledge he would live with for the rest of his life: the knowledge that the lively mind that had matched his and kept it company for so many years would never be with him again. How he could get along without it, he did not know: except that he knew he must, and so he knew he would.

  But for a few minutes out of the long agony of the past seventy-two hours, there was mercifully little time to think about that. Bill Abbott, with a shrewd understanding of the therapy he needed, opened the conversation with his usual direct, no-nonsense approach.

  “You know how Bob and I feel about things, Orrin,” he had said, not unkindly but not permitting any sentimentality to creep in, either, “so we won’t spend time on that. She was a wonderful, wonderful woman and your loss is the country’s more than the country knows, probably. As for him,” he added with a bluntness that brushed quickly past the tears that started, in spite of his determination, in Orrin’s eyes, “I suppose we must mourn, too, at least for Ceil’s sake. I don’t hold with the idea that we must mourn for the country, because I think he was a weak and equivocating man whose death was probably for the best. Can’t say that in public, of course, or I’d be shot. I made my formal statement and let it go at that. But that’s how I feel about him. If he hadn’t run with that violent crew and favored appeasing our enemies, I might feel differently. But he did, and I don’t. So there it is.…Now: who do you put in his place? Got any ideas?”

  For several moments Orrin had hesitated, an uncharacteristic uncertainty that revealed to them more than anything else had up to that moment how terribly crippled he was by the tragedy at the Monument Grounds. His voice when he spoke was uncertain, too: not the Orrin they had known, a change alarming because so much depended upon him and he must be strong. Otherwise, the world—or America’s part of it—could fall apart.

  “Who do you—who do you think I should select?” he asked, looking from face to face in a way so supplicating and unlike him that his son, in sheer grief, fright and worry at seeing him so, responded with an almost explosive irritation that made Crystal move quickly to place a restraining hand upon his.

  “Well, if you don’t know, Dad,” Hal said sharply, “then I don’t see how we’re to know, either. It’s your responsibility, isn’t it?”

  “That,” he said carefully, not responding to Hal’s tone with a tart rejoinder as he might have in some earlier, more manageable time, “may not be true. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “It will be true,” Bob Munson said, his voice deliberately comfortable and reassuring, “providing you make a quick decision and take it to the National Committee this afternoon. They’ve had three days to stir around but I don’t think things are out of your control yet. They’ll still follow your wishes, I think, providing you know what you want, and providing you take it to them personally. I don’t think this can be done by proxy, even though you know Bill and I and the rest of your friends would do our damnedest for you if you couldn’t show up.”

  “How can he show up?” Hal demanded, as fiercely protective of his father as he had been challenging to him a moment ago, and for the same reasons of grief, worry and alarm. “He isn’t in any condition yet to go anywhere, let alone face that crew at Kennedy Center. And maybe”—his eyes widened with a sudden desperate concern and unhappiness—“maybe another mob, as well.”

  “Orrin Knox has never been afraid,” William Abbott said bluntly. Hal rounded on him with a sudden flare of anger.

  “Orrin Knox has never had to face anything like this!” he snapped. “Don’t you have an ounce of human sympathy, Mr. President?”

  “Human sympathy is one thing,” William Abbott said with the same uncompromising bluntness, “and politics in this hectic age is another. The longer your father waits to name his Vice Presidential choice, the more chance there is for the Committee to run amuck and select somebody so alien to everything Orrin Knox stands for that he couldn’t possibly accept him on the ticket. Only, he may have to, if he doesn’t grab the initiative. And then where will we be?”

  “In one hell of a mess,” Senator Munson said crisply, “with NAWAC running rampant and violence in the streets and the Russians on the prowl and everything as bad as though Ted Jason himself had been elected. To say nothing of the fact that under those conditions Warren Strickland might even win. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Orrin?”

  But this did not evoke the response Bob Munson obviously hoped it would. Orrin only uttered a tired sigh and inquired in a listless voice:

  “Wouldn’t that be best for the country, maybe? Just wipe out Ted and me and all the bitter differences we’ve represented … let the country start over again with somebody entirely out of it? Warren would do a good job.”

  “He would,” the President agreed, “but he wouldn’t do the job Orrin Knox would. And that’s what we want.”

  “That’s what you want,” Orrin said in the same listless way, “but it’s not what half my countrymen want. More than half, more likely.” He sighed again, shifting in his chair in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve a little of the savage pain that still clawed his right shoulder and side. He looked up at the President, standing solid and stolid and uncompromising in front of him. “Why don’t I just quit altogether, Bill, and let the Committee start all over? A lot of them would like that.”

  “You cannot!” the President said with an indignation so sudden and so sharp that it provoked an uneasy stirring from Hal and Crystal. “It would throw away everything. Everything!”

  “Everything’s gone anyway,” he said dully. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because then,” Bob Munson said with a deliberately harsh impatience, “you would simply give further credence to all the rumors and all the vicious things that Walter Dobius and the rest of them are floating around.”

  “What are they ‘floating around’?” he asked with a careful articulation, although he found that he really did not seem to care about something that three days ago would have provoked an aroused rejoinder.

  “Awful things,” Crystal said quietly, “but nothing to bother you with right now.”

  “On the contrary,” the
President said. “On the contrary. I think he needs to know what he’s up against.”

  And with a deliberate, coldly driving emphasis, he told him: Walter’s column, the response from Walter’s colleagues, the instantaneous reaction from all who had always seized upon the slightest excuse to mistrust him, the worldwide whisper of suspicion and uncertainty that had spread in the past three days. Hal and Crystal watched with open apprehension, but the recital had the effect the President intended and anticipated. Orrin began to grow angry, and with the anger came the first break in the horrified, disbelieving shock and apathy of the past three days. When he looked up at the end of the President’s recital it was with a little of the old combativeness in his eyes.

  “Then I obviously have to go to the meeting this afternoon,” he said, and it was not a question but a statement of fact. Both his son and daughter-in-law responded at once.

  “You can’t go!” Hal said sharply. “You’re in no condition to go!”

  “You really aren’t, you know,” Crystal agreed with an undisguised worry. “The doctors told us just before we came in that—”

  “He has to go,” Bob Munson interrupted harshly. “If he can stand up and walk, he has to go.”

  “I can stand up,” Orrin said, with the first semblance of a smile he had managed since half his world ended with a shot; and he did so, shakily, holding out his hand to Hal, leaning on his arm. “Whether I can walk”—he took a step and stopped with a sudden sharp grimace—“is another matter. But even if I have to be carried—I think I’d better go.”

  “But, Dad—” Hal protested.

  “I have to go!” he said sharply, sounding for a moment completely like Orrin again. “Don’t argue with me, I have to go!”

  But after they had left, Hal and Crystal still greatly distressed and uneasy, the President and Bob Munson uneasy also but convinced they had carried an argument that had to be won, he sat for a long time alone, fighting with himself the battle their remarks had only begun.

  How fantastic it was, he thought, his mind gradually beginning to shake off the terrible inertia that had held it since the tragedy, that his friends of the media should leap so soon to the attack. It showed how much they must still concede Orrin Knox to be a major factor to be reckoned with in the destiny of his country. It also showed how much they must still fear and dislike him, for reasons reaching back into all the bitter battles over foreign policy of all his controversial years in the Senate—the battles in which they called him “warmonger” and he called them “appeasers.” It was a dislike so intense that it could not rest even long enough to let his wife grow cold. It was not until this moment that he had really understood the full extent of the burdens he was going to have to carry if he managed to win an election which now, thanks to those who had arranged to kill his running mate and his wife, appeared to be very much in doubt.

  He marveled, as he heard the sounds of preparation increasing downstairs, and as his nurses looked in from time to time to utter meaningless but cheerful sounds that must be words intended to lift his morale, at how much a tough mind could stand when it had to. He had thought three days ago, in that frightful moment at the Monument when Ceil Jason had started to say something—when there had been an instantaneous blur of sound and motion—when he felt a heavy weight sag suddenly against him and had known instinctively and with an awful certainty exactly what it was—that he would never recover. For the first few hours he had been almost completely sedated, hardly sentient, hardly knowing day from night. After his wound had been treated, sedation had continued for twelve hours and then been slowly withdrawn; but even now, off the drugs completely since last night, the pain reduced to a dull throb that was constant but bearable, his mind was only partially functioning. He prided himself, however, that, even though crippled, it was functioning.

  He started to promise himself that sometime, when there was time and when he could pay her proper tribute, he would think about Beth—and yet, in that formal a sense, why should he? He would always think about her, to the day he died. She would never leave him. She would always be there, as he knew she was there right now, strong, helpful, companionable, encouraging, just as always, her presence in some ways as real and vivid as though she had never left. At the moment he felt that there should be some formal acknowledgment of grief, since the doctors had absolutely forbade his attendance at the funeral. But perhaps in the long run there need not be. She had always known how he felt. He knew she knew now. It might be all that was necessary.

  And having told himself these things so calmly and philosophically—cold-blooded, ruthless Orrin Knox!—he suddenly had a sense of her presence so sharp that his eyes filled uncontrollably with tears and an anguished cry shattered through his mind: Come back, oh, come back! I miss you so!

  But after a few moments training and discipline began to take hold again, just as he expected them to, just as he knew she would expect them to. The Knoxes had taken a heavy battering during their years of public life and they had learned early to fight back, cut their losses, respond as strongly to events as events responded to them. He would mourn her forever, inside: but now there were things to be done. Aided by the blunt talking of his old and dear friends from the Hill, he began to contemplate at last in unsparing detail what they were.

  First he must regain command of the National Committee, which he knew must now be almost out of control as its one hundred members, a national committeeman and a national committeewoman for each of the fifty states, prepared to reconvene once more at riot-torn Kennedy Center to choose Ted Jason’s successor as Vice Presidential candidate. The members would be shattered by the twin tragedies at the Monument Grounds, by the abrupt and frightful destruction of the hard-fought compromise finally worked out between the forces of the Secretary of State and the Governor of California. Their mood would be sympathetic to Ceil Jason—much more sympathetic, now, to the anti-war position Ted Jason represented—much more susceptible to the bully-boy tactics of NAWAC, whose increasingly paramilitary activities would be even more militant now.

  The Committee, though he had many staunch friends there, would be the first and most difficult hurdle, particularly since he really did not know, at this moment, whom he would recommend as his running mate. If he could have time—a day, even—he could hold conferences, talk it over with the different elements of the party, ascertain the general mood, try to work out another compromise. But he apparently was not to be granted a day. It was clear enough that he must make his fight right now, this afternoon, in public, or the Committee would indeed, as the President had predicted, force upon him someone so far over on Ted’s side and so alien to his own philosophies that he would simply be unable to accept him. And then, given the mood in the Committee that such an event would generate, he himself might very well be forced off the ticket and that would be the end of everything Orrin Knox had stood for and fought for in almost three decades of public service.

  Many millions, he knew, would regard this as no loss, and there were plenty on the Committee who wouldn’t either. So this afternoon was the first and most important stage of the new era he found himself in. He must approach it crippled in heart, mind and body. A wave of bitterness consumed him for a moment. Haven’t You done enough to me? he demanded of a God he had always considered basically impersonal, impartial and generally uncaring of ordinary mortals, although possibly somewhat more concerned about Orrin Knox. Apparently He wasn’t, though: Orrin Knox had another river to cross, and there was no way around it.

  And this time, as never before, he was entirely alone.

  Again the desperate desolation of the fact savaged his mind, and again, after a titanic struggle with himself, he forced it back and forced himself to go on with the careful calculations an experienced politician in his situation had to make. Grief had to be put aside: for the present, at least, there was simply no time for it.

  His alternatives were four, as he saw them.

  He could recommend someone exactly
in line with his own thinking, someone like Bill Abbott or Bob Munson. Walter Dobius and his colleagues had already made clear that they would do everything in their power to stop that. If Ted Jason had lived and he had died, he knew they would have been 100 per cent in favor of a Vice Presidential candidate whose views exactly paralleled Ted’s. The argument of “balance” would be forgotten, all thought of compromise would be hooted down, it would be presented as the greatest possible good for the country that both men on the ticket should reflect the same point of view. But Orrin was the one who had lived, and therefore “balance” was the slogan, compromise was the ideal, and only a ticket that faithfully reflected the sharp divisions in the party could possibly be supported.

  So unless he wanted to fight what could well be a losing fight—for he knew there were enough in the sharply divided Committee who felt the same way Walter and his friends did to make it at best a razor’s-edge proposition—he had best give up the idea of a completely compatible Vice President.

  He could, instead, choose Roger P. Croy or someone equally devoted to the Jason point of view on foreign policy. This would mean that in the event of his own death, all his policies would be reversed, whatever he might have achieved in foreign policy by a sensible and carefully calculated firmness would be wiped out, the world would be—as he saw it—delivered sooner or later to the twentieth century’s great new imperialists who operated under the guise of Communist liberation, brotherhood and good will. This he could not countenance, nor could those in the country who looked to him for leadership.

  Or he could resign the nomination this afternoon, get out of the fight and let the Committee start afresh. This thought, which he had volunteered so listlessly to the President only a few short minutes ago, now seemed utterly repugnant. Such a move would indeed be to guarantee victory on all fronts to those he regarded, with a considerable contempt, as the appeasers, the trimmers, the equivocators, the foolish and the weak.