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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.

He had always believed and acted in a certain way, always represented a certain “tough” attitude in foreign policy. Many millions of his countrymen had depended upon him to do this. They depended upon him still. He would be betraying them and betraying himself if he withdrew.

The skeptical, impatient expression his family, friends and colleagues knew so well momentarily touched his face.

He wouldn’t consider it!

He would be a fool if he did.

His reaction revealed that Orrin Knox, having begun to mend, was mending very rapidly.

So only one alternative remained, and that was to find somebody occupying a reasonable middle ground and do his best to persuade the Committee to go along with the choice.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, he knew instantly whom he would nominate.

He did not know how the Committee would take this.

But he knew he would do it.

For the first time since horror struck three days ago, a smile—grim, determined, ironic, not very lasting or much filled with humor, but at least a smile—crossed his face.

Their Presidential nominee, they would find, might be down but he was not out.

When Hal knocked gently on the door a few moments later, his father’s response brought a smile, relieved and deeply affectionate, to his face too.

“I’m ready,” Orrin announced in a voice still weak but scarcely reluctant. “Lead me to ’em!”

And so the National Committee returned to heavily guarded Kennedy Center, scene just four days ago of the “Great Riot” in which the enormous mob led by the paramilitary forces of the National Anti-War Activities Congress had stormed the doors after the nomination of Orrin Knox for President. Thirty-nine had died on that terrifying, bitter day. Only the subsequent nomination of Ted Jason as Vice President and Ted’s dramatically soothing speech to his hysterically violent supporters appeared to have saved the country from revolution.

The memories hung heavy on Esmé Harbellow Stryke and Asa B. Attwood of California, on Anna Hooper Bigelow and Perry Amboy of New Hampshire, on Pierre Boissevain of Vermont and Blair Hannah of Illinois, on Ewan MacDonald MacDonald of Wyoming, on Lathia Talbot Jennings of South Dakota and Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania, and on all their fellow national committeemen and national committeewomen as they prepared to reconvene.

The memories were not eased by the fact that the scene was once again almost exactly as they had left it, and for the same reasons: NAWAC and the violent again were at their stations, and again the Committee was under terrible pressure.

Again the President had ordered out the troops, again the same precautions surrounded the hundred men and women who must select a new running mate for Orrin Knox. Again they were housed at military headquarters in Fort Myer, Virginia, just across the Potomac; again they arrived at the Center in Army cars, protected by motorcycle outriders; again they found themselves under siege. And again the President, as national committeeman from Colorado and chairman of the Committee, had arranged it so that the meeting should be held in the Playhouse, its seating capacity kept to a rigid five hundred: the Committee, three hundred visitors and observers divided as equally as possible between Knox and Jason supporters, and one hundred from the media. This last restriction had produced the same anguished denunciations that had greeted it before, but the President had been adamant. The original meeting had been chaos and circus enough and he did not want this one made more so. Again the Times, the Post, The Greatest Publication That Absolutely Ever Was, Walter Dobius, Frankly Unctuous, and his network colleagues, and all the rest, had cried, “Dictatorship!” and “Suppression of the news!” But William Abbott was a tough old man and he didn’t give a damn. Grumbling and unhappy, the media too had its collective memories revivified—creating, as the Times remarked acridly, “a sense of déjà damned vu.”

Around Kennedy Center’s land perimeter the President had again arranged for riot-trained soldiers to supplement the District of Columbia police—a thousand this time instead of the five hundred before. An inner ring of riot-trained Marines—also increased from five hundred to a thousand—had been assigned to guard the Playhouse. In the Potomac’s Georgetown Channel, Theodore Roosevelt Island and Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, nearest approach to the Center from Virginia, had been closed. Across the river a strip a mile long and six hundred yards deep—again, double last time—had been sealed off to all traffic. In the channel four small armed Coast Guard cutters lay at anchor just off the esplanade, overhead a dozen helicopters were on regular patrol over the entire area, both precautions also escalated. At re-established “Checkpoint Alpha,” sole entrance for Committee members, visiting dignitaries and the media, security regulations even tighter than before, if possible, had been reinstated.

And beyond the barricades on the land side, and in hastily re-erected tent towns at the edge of the barred zone across the river, NAWAC and its friends were also back, and also nearly doubled. Just before he left the White House in his heavily guarded limousine to come to the Center, the President had been advised by the Secretary of Defense and the District chief of police that crowd estimates were between a hundred fifty and two hundred thousand, with more thousands still pouring into the capital from every plane, train, bus and freeway.

He too, Bill Abbott felt with a weary sigh as his bristling cavalcade headed west toward the Center, had a sense of repetition so heavy as to be almost unbearable. After all the bitter battling to put together the Knox-Jason ticket, after all the tension, bloodshed and horror, now another horror had been piled on top and everything had been smashed to smithereens. All the careful compromises of democracy, hammered out at such cost, destroyed in a bloody instant by those who felt only contempt for democracy and wished to destroy it … or so he analyzed their motives.

He did not know, yet, who had perpetrated the murders at the Monument, but he intended to find out. The commission he had appointed to investigate Harley Hudson’s mysterious death had a new mission now. He had conferred with its chairman, the ex-Chief Justice, within two hours after the assassinations. Already the staff was at work interviewing witnesses. He had a strong hunch that there was a link between all these murders and he thought he knew where it came from. He also suspected strongly that those responsible were very well entrenched in NAWAC. If he could find the connection, he would have them—providing he could convince some of his more skeptical countrymen to accept the facts in their columns, news stories and broadcasts. At least he would have the culprits as far as the historical record was concerned.

He was convinced that the trail led straight to the Soviet Ambassador, Vasily Tashikov, and his “agricultural aide,” long ago tagged by the FBI, military intelligence and the CIA as being the head of the Russian secret police network, the KGB, for the eastern United States.

If that was true, however, surely a great mistake must have been committed. For surely the man they wanted to kill was Orrin Knox, not Ted Jason, who, on all the evidence Bill Abbott had seen, would have been an easy mark for Soviet pressure had he become President in the event of Orrin’s death.

Orrin must have been the target—although, as it was turning out, the President could not really see that the assassins had lost much. The situation that had been created for Orrin was such a tangle that he might end up being unable to govern, too: for different reasons, but as fortuitously for America’s enemies. Perhaps, in fact, even more so, since a President under such attack as Orrin was under might be an even easier mark than, in the President’s estimation, Edward M. Jason would have been.

Except for one single factor, he told himself with the mildest glimmer of hope as the first outlying fringes of the mob began to appear along his route, screaming obscenities and shaking their fists at the old man who sat stolidly back in the cushions and gave no slightest acknowledgment that they existed.

Except for one single factor.

Long ago, watching the then freshman Senator from Illinois carry some point of debate by sheer logic and strength of character, the late Senator Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina had been moved to a remark that none of Orrin’s friends had ever forgotten.

“There comes a time,” Seab had said in his deceptively drowsy, sleepy-eyed way, “when most folks let themselves feel beaten and they give up on an issue. But not Orrin. Orrin keeps at it. You mark my words, now, Orrin will go far. And do you know why? Because Orrin’s got somethin’ jest a leetle bit extra, that’s why. Yes, sir. Jest a leetle bit extra.”

“Orrin’s little extra” had been a byword on the Hill and in American politics ever since; and since it was the quality that had carried him finally, over so many obstacles and so much bitter opposition, to his party’s Presidential nomination, it was the thing to which William Abbott was pinning his hopes as his cavalcade, coming now within sight of Kennedy Center, brought to full volume the angry wave of sound that kept him company.

“Orrin’s little extra,” needed now as it had never been before—first, by Orrin himself, and then, the President was convinced, by the country and the world.

The Secretary of State had looked wan and still in considerable pain a couple of hours ago during their talk at his home in Spring Valley, but on the whole he had appeared to be increasingly strong. Yet William Abbott the lifelong bachelor knew as well as Bob Munson and Orrin’s children how terribly much he must be missing Beth, and how terribly heartsick and weakened by her death he must be.

God knew he missed her, the President thought, recalling the shrewd, calm, comfortable presence that had contributed so much to the life and career of Orrin Knox. Beth Knox had been a rare woman, and she and Orrin had enjoyed a unique partnership in both marriage and politics. In fact, as in many great political careers of American history, the two had been so intermingled that no one, least of all the participants, could tell where the one ended and the other began. From the very first campaign for the state senate in Illinois it had been “Orrin and Beth” on the billboards and on the hustings; and during all the contentious, controversial, battling years since, in the state senate, the governorship, the United States Senate and finally the State Department, it had been “Orrin and Beth” who had together served, first the people of the state and then the people of the country, with an uncompromising integrity and an uncompromising opposition to all those attitudes and trends which they believed weakening, if not fatal, to the survival of democracy. This had brought them the unrelenting hostility of many in the media, the academic, religious, artistic and professional worlds who did not see the attitudes and trends in the same light they did. But it had not deflected or deterred either of them; nor had it jarred the steady balance or the wry good humor with which Beth, in particular, had responded to the incessant and unrelenting belittlement.

Orrin, of course, had not suffered those he believed to be fools quite so equably. Possessed of great intelligence, a lively temper and a tongue sometimes too willing to be tart and impatient, he had often responded broadside to his enemies instead of trying to go around them. More often than not, this had worked in the Senate, whose members normally favored the more subtle approach but in his case respected his sheer intelligence and the powerful will that went with it. It was not, however, until Harley Hudson appointed him Secretary of State that he became, as he himself acknowledged, a much more moderate and diplomatic soul. Not too diplomatic, for that wouldn’t have been Orrin: but at least more reasonable, more willing to compromise, a little less certain that he had all the answers to everything.

Then had come the convention, Harley’s decision to run again, Orrin’s belief that his dream of the White House was finally put to rest forever; Harley’s mysterious death, Orrin’s battle with Ted for the nomination, Orrin’s squeak-in victory and his realization that he had to give in and compromise with Ted and his supporters if he wanted to win. Out of that had come, suddenly, a man mature in a way Orrin had never really been mature before. And then had come horror at the Monument, and out of that—what kind of Orrin?

The President did not know and his puzzlement must have shown in his face to some degree when he arrived at heavily guarded “Checkpoint Alpha,” because the reporters and television cameramen waiting there rushed forward as far as they were allowed, which wasn’t much, to shout their frantic appeals for enlightenment. What was the nominee going to do?

“I don’t know,” the President called out sharply, “and if I did, you know I wouldn’t tell you. Why don’t you wait and see, as the Committee and I are going to have to do?”

“Old bastard!” the Post commented, not too quietly. “He won’t tell us anything.”

“That’s right,” the President responded with equal cordiality. “Why should I?”

“The people have a right to know!” the Post shouted indignantly; but the President’s response was a smile of such openly sarcastic amusement that it almost said aloud, “Look who’s talking!” As such it was promptly wiped off the television screens and he was allowed to enter the building without further questioning, followed by mutters quite as savage, if more muted, as any that had been shouted at him in the streets.

So there it was again, he reflected with an annoyance that again showed briefly in his eyes, that eternal hostility that crippled them all, press and politicians alike: for which, he supposed, he was just as much to blame as they were. Certainly Orrin was, for after an early period of trying to appease critics who were implacably against him on the most fundamental of issues, foreign policy, he had come finally to the conclusion that they could never be appeased, that as long as he pursued what they liked to call a “tough” or “pro-war” policy toward the Communists, they were never going to forgive him, never relent, never be even minimally fair. When he finally decided, permanently, that he must take his stand on what he believed regardless of their opposition, he had guaranteed a state of permanent warfare with the media. Sooner or later all those who supported him were drawn into the same vortex and received the same treatment.

How would it be, the President wondered for a moment as he went mechanically through the motions of greeting the troops inside the doors, smiling, confident and apparently fully in command, if the leaders of the media ever found themselves in a situation where their freedoms were really threatened by the policies they had always so vigorously advocated and supported? How would it be if they turned out to be wrong, if suddenly someone they had raised up—even a Ted Jason, perhaps—turned upon them and, using the public support they themselves had created for him, tore them down? How would they enjoy the harvest they had sown for so many long, bitter years?… But, of course, he dismissed the thought, it would never happen in America. They would always be free to pursue their harshly unbalanced attacks on all who disagreed with them. They would never have to face the reckoning. They would always be safe, always protected, always free to be unrestrained and irresponsible, for such was what they considered freedom to be. Not even if Ted Jason had become President, he was sure, would any attempt ever have been made to attack or control the media. Not even Ted’s most violent supporters would have dared. This was America, and in America such things could not be.

Certainly they would not occur under Orrin Knox, that was sure, even though the President had moments of exasperation and resentment when he almost felt they should. The attack on Orrin now was utterly disgraceful, the wildest and most vicious he had seen in some time, and he had seen a good many in his long service on Capitol Hill. It was not enough that the man must lose his wife to an assassin, he must be accused of helping to plot the whole thing in order to remove someone who disagreed with him from the ticket. What kind of minds they must be, the President thought, Walter who would promulgate such a horrid myth, and his friends who could seize upon and embellish it!

He was frowning when he reached the door of the Playhouse, and it was so they saw him as the guards snapped to attention, and the doorkeeper bellowed, “Ladeez and Gemmun, the Prezdent of the Yewnited States!”—Blair Hannah, Ewan MacDonald MacDonald, Lizzie Hanson McWharter, Mary Buttner Baffleburg and the rest of the National Committee; Robert A. Leffingwell, Patsy Jason Labaiya in heavy mourning for her brother, Lord and Lady Maudulayne, Raoul and Celestine Barre, Vasily Tashikov, Krishna Khaleel and all the other observers domestic and foreign who had been given tickets; the Times, the Post, The Greatest Publication, Time, Newsweek, Walter Dobius, Frankly Unctuous and the other members of the media who were there by virtue of personal stature, prestige of publication, or the luck of the draw. A President upset, and one obviously in no mood to waste time, or to pretend in any way that the business before them was any less serious than it was.

He strode swiftly down the aisle, mounted the small platform, moved to the lectern at its center; turned quickly to note that the official reporter was seated at the small desk to his left, turned back to look directly into the banked lights of the television cameras that flanked the room.

“Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen,” he said crisply, and waited for a moment as they did so, their expectant eyes never leaving his face. “By virtue of the authority vested in me as chairman of the National Committee, I declare this new special emergency session of the Committee to be now in session for the purpose of selecting a nominee for Vice President of the United States. If the distinguished national committeeman from the state of Washington will oblige us as he did before”—he paused and a little sigh, tired and sad, escaped his lips—“and how short a time ago that was!—then we shall be very grateful.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Luther Redfield said, his voice shaking slightly with the gravity of it; and proceeded in his somewhat florid but desperately sincere fashion to deliver the convocation while they all stood again, heads bowed, and far off the distant sea of NAWAC murmured and rumbled, seeming to lap ominously against the walls of the silent room.

“Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said into the hush that followed, “I wish to offer a suggested resolution of sorrow on behalf of myself and other friends of the late nominee for Vice President—”

“On behalf of all of us, I should think,” the President interrupted in a tone he tried to keep impersonal. “I trust the committeeman does not wish the world to think his grief and that of his friends is exclusive.”

“Mr. President,” Roger Croy said smoothly, “there may be some on this committee less saddened, perhaps, by events, than”—he paused delicately—“some others. For that reason—”

“For that reason, nothing!” the President snapped. “This resolution will be adopted unanimously by this committee. I assume you have also included in it an expression of the Committee’s condolences to the nominee for President for the loss of his wife.”

“We had thought, Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said earnestly, “that perhaps some proponent of the nominee might wish to offer such a—”

“Shame on you!” the President said angrily. “For shame, Governor! For shame, to try to introduce crude partisanship at such a cruel moment! There will be one resolution expressing the unanimous sense of this committee concerning both Governor Jason and Mrs. Knox, so if you don’t have one ready, sit down and let someone else propose it!”

“Mr. President—” Roger P. Croy began indignantly, even as Blair Hannah rose on the other side of the room to seek recognition.

“I have the resolution, Mr. President,” he said in a voice filled with contempt for his mellifluous colleague from Oregon; and read it quickly, a dignified, brief and moving valedictory for Edward Montoya Jason and Elizabeth Henry Knox.

“Is there objection?” the President asked, staring about the room with an expression that indicated, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch murmured to the Boston Globe, that there damned well better not be. “Then without objection, the resolution of condolence is adopted unanimously by the Committee.”

He paused for a moment as the room suddenly became very still. Outside, the mob, following closely on television, also fell silent.

“The business of the Committee,” he said slowly, “is to find a new nominee for Vice President. It is not only the tradition, but it is the courtesy we owe him, that the nominee for President should be allowed to make his recommendation to the Committee before we act. Therefore I shall appoint a committee to wait upon the nominee for President and escort him to this chamber at such time as may be mutually convenient—”

“Mr. President,” Ewan MacDonald MacDonald inquired in his gentle but not-to-be-trifled-with burr, “can you advise the Committee as to when—or whether—the nominee for President will be able to attend? There are reports and rumors that his health may not permit it. In that case, perhaps we should proceed at once to—”

“Mr. President!” Mary Buttner Baffleburg said, her roly-poly little body seeming to quiver all over with indignation. “Don’t you try anything like that, now, Ewan! Just don’t you try it! We’re not here to allow any railroading today, I can tell you that! Not one bit of it!”

“Mr. President,” Ewan MacDonald said patiently, “I admire the zeal with which Mrs. Baffleburg protects her candidate’s interests, I always have, but—”

“I don’t have a candidate!” Mary Baffleburg said sharply. “I’m waiting for Orrin Knox to tell us who he wants, just as I should!”

“As I say,” Ewan MacDonald repeated with a little smile, “I admire your independence, Mary. But some of us feel even more independent. We think we ought to go ahead and name a candidate for Vice President and we ought to do it today, not next week sometime.”

“Nobody is proposing ‘next week sometime’!” Mary Baffleburg snapped.

“Well, when the candidate can get here,” Ewan MacDonald said. “When will that be?”

“I don’t know,” Mary Baffleburg replied. “But I can tell you this, Ewan MacDonald, if there’s any attempt to railroad this or prevent him from speaking, or any attempt to put over somebody he doesn’t like on him, then you’re in for a fight, I can tell you that!”

And she sat down, pugnacious little face red and puffing, while the cameras lingered upon it with an amused attention.

“Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said quietly, “perhaps you can advise us when we may expect the nominee for President to appear. The distinguished committeeman from Wyoming does have a point, it seems to me, despite the rather violent response of the distinguished committeewoman from Pennsylvania. We can’t wait around forever, you know. We have to have a candidate for Vice President. Possibly, if the candidate for President does not show signs of sufficiently speedy recovery, we may even have to have—”

“Now, Mr. President, just a minute!” Blair Hannah cried, jumping to his feet, while outside a sudden excited roar welled up from the thousands in the parks. “Just a minute, now! Just what does the committeeman from Oregon think he’s trying to do here, anyway?”

“It’s obvious what he’s trying to do,” Asa B. Attwood of California shot out. “He’s trying to dump Orrin Knox, that’s what he’s trying to do, and I tell you, Mr. President, if there is any move to do that more than half this committee is going to walk out and you won’t have any committee to nominate a Vice President. So I’d suggest the great former Governor of Oregon had better not get too smart here!”

“Dump Orrin Knox!” a sudden chant came on the wind. “Dump Orrin Knox!”

“Yes, ‘dump Orrin Knox!’” Asa Attwood echoed angrily. “You just try it, you people. You just try it!”

“Well, now, Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said calmly, “I think the committeeman from California is making a great leap somewhere, I don’t know exactly where—certainly not in any sensible direction discernible to me. No one said anything about trying to ‘dump’ the nominee for President. I just said that unless his health recovers sufficiently and soon, we will be forced by the sheer logic of events to ask him to withdraw so we can nominate someone else. That’s simple fact. I don’t see how it warrants such hysteria.”

“It isn’t hysteria,” Asa Attwood said, “it’s just a statement of fact: you try to dump him and more than half this committee will leave and you’ll be high and dry without a quorum.”

“It depends on which states leave,” Ewan MacDonald MacDonald suggested calmly. “You can take bodies with you, Asa, but you can’t take delegate votes. And since we vote according to the number of votes allotted each state in the convention, I think you might find us able to nominate a candidate for Vice President and for President, without you and your friends. Maybe you’d better stick around.”

“There will be no attempt to dump Orrin Knox!” Asa Attwood said flatly, and far in the distance echo came: “Dump Orrin Knox! Dump Orrin Knox!”

“Mr. President,” Helen Rupert of Alabama said with a sudden impatient emphasis that brought quick attention, “can we stop this silly squabble and get on with it? I voted for Edward M. Jason for President in this committee four days ago, but I have no desire or intention to get rid of the man who is our nominee. We have a very distinguished nominee and I intend to support him wholeheartedly now the decision has been made—even more so, in view of recent tragic events. But we do need a candidate for Vice President, and we do need to hear from Secretary Knox. Do you, or does anyone, have any idea when he will come here, or whether he can come here?”

“I was about to appoint a committee to escort him here,” the President remarked with some asperity, “but distinguished committeemen seemed to prefer arguing about it.”

“But you said ‘at such time as may be mutually convenient,’” Roger P. Croy pointed out, unabashed, “and that immediately created speculation.”

“Only by those who wished to create it,” the President said. “As a matter of fact, I understand the Secretary is ready to come here this afternoon. In fact, I have good reason to believe he may be on his way right now. In any event, I am going to appoint a committee to escort him here, and I would suggest that the committee meet him at Checkpoint Alpha rather than try to venture further from the Center. This will avoid,” he remarked, as distant amused hooting greeted the words, “possible uneasy moments for all concerned.”

“Will the nominee be sufficiently protected?” Blair Hannah inquired.

The President nodded, his face suddenly grim. “He will be, by troops who have orders to shoot to kill.”

“Mr. President,” Roger P. Croy said in a sad, unhappy tone, not facing him but staring somberly straight into the cameras, “can’t we have an end to all this talk of shooting and killing? Is there to be no end to it, even now, after all these horrors?”

“Talk to your friends,” the President said coldly. “It is up to them.”

“Mr. President!” Roger Croy said sharply, as along the press tables at the side of the room there ran a little current of whispered annoyance, and from the mob beyond there rose an abrupt shout of angry protest. “That is no way to talk to a member of this committee! Whoever has done these dreadful things in recent days, they are not friends of mine, nor friends of anyone on this committee, nor do any of us have any kind of allegiance or obligation to them. You owe me and all of us an apology, Mr. President. I demand it.”

“Apologies will come when apologies are due,” the President said with a deliberate indifference. Outside the room the angry protest rose again; inside, many looked annoyed. But he remained indifferent, having decided upon a course of action and not intending to be deflected from it. “To escort the nominee I appoint the distinguished committeeman from Illinois, Mr. Hannah; the distinguished committeewoman from Pennsylvania, Mrs. Baffleburg; the distinguished committeeman from Vermont, Mr. Boissevain; the distinguished committeewoman from Alabama, Mrs. Rupert; the distinguished committeewoman from South Dakota, Mrs. Jennings; and”—he exchanged looks with Roger P. Croy that brought some flicker of amusement to the audience—“the committeeman from Oregon, Governor Croy. I believe if you will now proceed to Checkpoint Alpha, you will find that the nominee is on his way.”

And such indeed appeared to be the case, for distant on the angry wind came a rising wave of shouts and screams and animal sounds that portended the arrival of someone mightily displeasing to the mob. In this fashion the nominee for President of the United States arrived at Kennedy Center, on a wave of imprecations, vilifications and obscenities from his fellow Americans; not exactly, as he remarked to his son and daughter-in-law, riding in the heavily guarded limousine with him, a triumphal progress, but the only kind that could be expected, given the situation in which they found themselves.

Nonetheless, for all that he managed to treat it with an outward lightness that got him and his children safely through it despite the jeering, hate-filled faces and the occasional egg or rock or brick that bounced off the car, such a response from his countrymen could not help but make him even more heartsick and depressed than he was already. Thus when they finally reached Checkpoint Alpha and were safely inside the military cordon, it was apparent to the searching eyes of the cameras and the press that Orrin Knox was a somber and unhappy man. It was also apparent, from the way in which he leaned heavily on Hal and Crystal, and the awkward way in which he walked, very slowly, very hesitantly, very painfully, that he was still a very sick man. But he was here; and after all the detrimental things had been duly noted by the media, and by the members of the welcoming committee who watched his halting approach with worried and in most cases genuinely upset expressions, a grudging note of admiration began to sound in the comments that went forth on the air, and to appear on the faces of those who watched.

The scene also had its effect in the Playhouse, where two television screens, one on each side of the podium, kept members of the Committee in touch with the outside world. By the time the slow little cavalcade had paused, so that the Knoxes could greet the welcoming committee—even Roger P. Croy, looking somewhat embarrassed, managing a reasonably friendly handshake—a mood of quite genuine warmth had begun to develop; and as they proceeded slowly to the elevators and ascended to the Playhouse, it continued to grow. By the time those in the room heard a stir in the hall, the crack of rifle stocks as the guards came to attention and muffled voices in deferential greetings, the mood was far more welcoming and receptive than anyone would have believed possible a scant fifteen minutes before. Outside, the ominous rumble of the mob continued to surge, a hostile and unrepentant sea. But inside the room where history was to be made Orrin Knox was in far better shape politically than he or his supporters had dared to hope.

When William Abbott said gravely, “Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States!” and the doors swung open to reveal him standing, pale but erect, between his son and daughter-in-law, they found themselves instinctively on their feet, applauding, smiling, shouting their welcome.

Only a few remained aloof—some of the media, either personally unfriendly or professionally unimpressed; Patsy Labaiya, looking grim and unforgiving; Vasily Tashikov, on his feet but ostentatiously unapplauding. But these were hardly noticed in the wave of sentimental warmth that accompanied the family as they proceeded slowly down the aisle, slowly up the steps, to shake hands gravely with the President, giving him the quick, quiet smiles of old friendship, and then take their seats in the three chairs prepared for them at his left.

For a moment, while the cameras dutifully sought out the Munsons, the Maudulaynes, the Barres, Krishna Khaleel, Robert A. Leffingwell, Mr. Justice Davis and many another prominent face, the nominee stared out over the room as though he hardly sensed their presence at all. Gradually they grew silent as the more sensitive among them realized who he must be thinking about; but before the moment could become painful Hal touched his arm, he started, recognition returned, he smiled, more easily now, and acknowledged their greeting. The applause welled up again and drowned out the distant roar, still unabated in its hostility. Finally the applause died down and with it the discontented noises of NAWAC, as everyone began to concentrate, with an almost frightening intensity, on the man who sat, propping himself slightly forward to accommodate his obvious pain, at the left hand of the President.

“Members of the Committee,” William Abbott repeated gravely, “it is my privilege and pleasure to introduce to you the Honorable Orrin Knox of Illinois, next President of the United States.”

This time the applause, on the part of many, was more dutiful: but it came. Outside there was an automatic booing in response. Again it all died away and a profound, expectant silence settled gradually on the room, the city, the nation, wherever men and women listened—and there were many, many millions who did—to the nominee for President.

As always with Orrin, there was that first long, appraising moment during which he looked quietly at his audience, judged his approach, formulated it, prepared to deliver it; except that, this time, it took him a little longer because, this time, it was far more important. Emotionally, also, it was perhaps the hardest moment of all his long public career. The moment lengthened, tension rose. Finally he began, in a voice still somewhat shaky and weak but growing stronger as he went along.

“Mr. President,” he said, while beside him Hal and Crystal watched with an almost fiercely protective attention, “members of the Committee”—he paused, and with his next words, by the strange sentimental yet tough-minded alchemy of politics, they knew it was true beyond challenge, they knew there could really be no question whatsoever of removing him from the ticket—“my partners in this campaign: on behalf of my family and myself”—his voice almost broke, then grew steadier—“and on behalf, I know, of Mrs. Jason—we wish to thank you all from our hearts for your expression of sympathy in this most trying hour for us. It means a great deal to have your sympathy and support. We are very grateful.…”

He stopped; obviously mastered powerful emotions; went on.

“And so now we meet again, to come to grips with the problem created, by party or parties unknown, for reasons not yet clear but certainly inimical to all that is good and hopeful in this democracy, for you and me.

“History will have its say about Edward M. Jason. I will say only that we had reached an accommodation—sincerely, I believe—that would have permitted us to campaign together and, had we won together, to govern this country effectively together.

“Now the central figure of that hard-fought, bitterly won compromise has been violently taken from us. And together you and I must find his successor. Without too much bitterness, I hope, and without too much political strife. Because we face a very hard battle to win, and to make our ideas prevail.”

There was a noticeable stirring in the room, and at the press tables the Los Angeles Times whispered to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Whose ideas prevail?” “That’s the gist of it,” the Plain Dealer agreed moodily. “Whose ideas?”

The same thought had obviously occurred to the Committee, for it was clear, from Mary Baffleburg’s pugnacious face to Roger P. Croy’s openly moody visage, that the candidate had come more quickly and more directly than they had expected to the nub of it. He came even closer, startling them all, in his next words.

“I did not,” he said, and something of the tartness of the old Orrin crept back into his voice, “in my zeal to make my own ideas prevail, plot, plan, organize, or connive in, the murder of Edward M. Jason.”

There was an audible gasp from somewhere in the room, and from the mob outside a startled, annoyed and restless sound.

“And that,” he added quietly, and for just a moment his eyes came to rest on those of Walter Dobius, staring coldly at him from the press tables, “is the first, last and only comment I shall ever make upon that vile suggestion.… Members of the Committee,” he said, his tone suddenly conversational and candid, yet filled momentarily with an abrupt and unexpected tiredness, so that Hal rose quickly and stepped to his side, “you will forgive me if I favor my health a little, for the time being. I am on the mend and expect to be campaigning vigorously soon, but right now”—he smiled and shook his head, throwing himself upon their indulgence and understanding—“I must give in, a little. I think if you don’t mind, I shall sit down to deliver the rest of this.”

And as Hal quickly brought forward his chair and adjusted the microphone, he did so, obviously in some pain but managing to handle the situation with dignity. This did not prevent, however, a distinct shiver of dismay from running through his audience, and indeed through all friendly listeners everywhere. A certain triumphant note came into the noise from the park. At the press table Walter Dobius turned to Frankly Unctuous and murmured, “Absolutely impossible. Abso—lutely impossible!” “But they won’t get rid of him,” Frankly observed morosely. “No way.”

The knowledge that this was indeed true presently brought a quietness to the room again. Beyond its confines the concerned might question, the violent might agitate, the critical might complain. Inside, they knew that for better or worse their hopes were pinned now on the Secretary of State, who simply must get better, as he promised, because there was no one else. Much as some of them might have misgivings, much as Roger Croy might have enjoyed making mischief an hour ago, they all knew that they were drained and exhausted, both emotionally and politically, to the point where they simply could not go through again the sort of battle for the Presidential nomination that they had gone through with Orrin Knox and Ted Jason. It was impossible.

This did not mean, however, that the Vice Presidential nomination would go by default, or that there could not still be a vicious battle over it. To that eventuality the candidate now addressed himself.

“Mr. President and members of the Committee,” he said gravely, shifting a little in his chair with a fleeting grimace of pain, “it is customary for one in my position to recommend his running mate. Usually the recommendation has been accepted. Much less often, it has not. I hope today it will be.

“I have not consulted in any way with my choice for this position. Indeed,” he said simply, while the buzz of speculation raced over the room, “I have not been able. Yet I am convinced that the one I should like to have—if you agree with me—will serve, and willingly. I can think of no other who could more fittingly fill this position, more fairly and honorably perform the duties of Vice President and yes, if need be, the duties of President. I shall not waste time upon qualifications, for they will be obvious. I shall not waste time upon appeals for your support, for I hope it will be gladly forthcoming. I shall not embellish or expand. I shall simply give you a name, commend it to your most earnest consideration and hope you will agree.”

He paused to reach for a glass of water, deliberately building tension, and as Hal quickly handed it to him, his purpose was amply achieved. “God damn it,” NBC muttered to CBS, pretty well summing up the mood in the room and wherever Orrin’s words were heard, “will you get on with it!” “Orrin,” CBS said, not entirely without a grudging admiration, “still knows how to create an effect.”

After taking a quick sip of water, however, it appeared that he would not prolong it unduly. He took out a handkerchief, carefully wiped his lips, carefully put it away. Only a slightly heightened emphasis in his voice when he resumed revealed that he, too, was under tension; though why he should be, he told himself, he did not really know, since his next words would be the simplest and most obvious available—so simple and obvious, he hoped, that he would carry the Committee with him by acclamation.

This he did, though after all the excited speeches of endorsement and agreement by the supporters of Edward M. Jason, after all the mixed but basically friendly comments by his own supporters, after the unanimous vote, the excitement of the media and the naming of a special committee to escort the new nominee for Vice President to Kennedy Center, he found that despite his most earnest efforts, he must start all over again.

It was what he deserved, he told himself wryly later, for thinking he could make everything too easy.

Mrs. Jason new vice presidential nominee. Secretary Knox names her to succeed slain husband. National committee approves choice by acclamation in wildly enthusiastic scene at Kennedy Center. First time woman has ever received the honor from a major party. Choice brings enthusiastic endorsement from all elements. She is expected to address committee this afternoon. Acceptance speech to be carried worldwide. Stock market rallies sharply on news. President Abbott says, “victory of the ticket is now assured.”

“DARLING!” Patsy cried, bursting into the guest suite of her house in Dumbarton Oaks with such excitement that she didn’t even bother to knock. “DARLING, DARLING! That fantastic, crazy old Orrin Knox! Whoever would have thought he’d have the SENSE?… What’s the matter?” she demanded, giving her silent sister-in-law a sudden sharp glance in which impatience, annoyance and genuine alarm were about equally mixed. “What’s the matter? You’re not thinking of—you’re NOT THINKING OF—”

“Patsy,” Ceil Jason said, very quietly but in a tone that for once reduced her voluble and exclamatory sister-in-law almost—almost—to silence. “Will you please go away and leave me alone?”

“But—” Patsy said. “But they’re on their way right now to take you to the Center! You can’t—Ceil, you just can’t—”

“I’m going to the Center,” Ceil said, her voice filled with an infinite weariness and pain. “Go away.”

“Are you going to accept?” Patsy demanded. “You’ve got to accept! Ceil, you’ve got to—”

“Patsy,” Ceil said, “I have lost my husband, I am still in considerable pain myself, I am only just beginning to think coherently again, and there you stand screaming at me. You are beyond belief. Please go.”

“Well!” Patsy said. “Well, all I can say is—”

“Don’t,” Ceil said. “Just go.”

“Washington cannot remember,” Frankly Unctuous said from one of the special broadcasting booths set up downstairs, while all around him press telephones and typewriters rocked and clattered with the joyous news, “an occasion of such spontaneous celebration as is now greeting Secretary of State Orrin Knox’s stunning announcement that he has chosen the lovely Mrs. Ceil Jason to be his Vice Presidential running mate.

“As you all know, his choice was immediately and unanimously endorsed by the National Committee, whose members at this moment are upstairs awaiting the arrival of the widow of Governor Edward M. Jason. Her acceptance will indeed, as President Abbott truly says, guarantee the victory of what is still, one may be allowed to happily note, the Knox-Jason ticket.

“That this victory will in turn guarantee a much less rigid, much less doctrinaire Administration on the part of Orrin Knox, is as certain now as it was when Governor Jason was still alive. Indeed, it removes the fears of many, many millions both here and abroad that the Secretary might turn back to the reactionary, big-stick, arrogant, inexcusable American foreign policy he espoused during his years in the Senate, and more recently in Foggy Bottom. It guarantees the same peace-loving, moderate approach that would have been the case had Ted Jason lived to become Vice President: because the same forces which backed him and forced Secretary Knox to adopt a more reasonable policy that would make it possible for Governor Jason to accept a place on the ticket, are also behind his widow. Their influence, through her, will continue undiminished.

“For that, fellow Americans”—and he stared straight into the camera, solemn, earnest and effective as always—“the people of this nation, and the peoples of the world, may be profoundly grateful. We are too close to disaster everywhere to be able to afford a national government which does not make every possible effort to maintain peace.

“Because she does have this massive support which had gathered behind her husband, Mrs. Jason will be far from the ordinary innocuous Vice President. And because she is possessed of unusual intelligence as well as unusual beauty, she would also be, should events ever require it, a most capable and effective occupant of the Presidential office.

“Therefore, Washington rejoices, the nation rejoices, the world rejoices. In a surprising show of statesmanship, Orrin Knox has astounded and delighted everyone. The act augurs well for an Administration which may not be as reactionary as many feared, after all.”

“Yes, you snide bastard,” Hal Knox said, snapping off the television in the small, heavily guarded room where they had been escorted to wait until Ceil arrived, “maybe it won’t be, after all.… Well,” he said, turning to his father, “you surprised them, all right. That I will have to concede.”

“What’s the matter?” he inquired mildly, carefully shifting position to favor his wounded arm. “Don’t you like Ceil Jason?”

“I think Ceil Jason is such a fine lady and so infinitely above what she was married to,” Hal said, “that there’s just no comparison. But she brings with her the same crew he did, and I don’t know whether, as a woman, she’ll be any better able to handle them than he could.”

“She has character,” Crystal noted quietly. “A great deal of character. She was about to leave him because he wouldn’t break away from the violent, wasn’t she? She can handle them.”

“She won’t have to,” Orrin remarked.

“Oh, yes, she will,” Hal said. “They think they have a claim on her and they aren’t going to let her escape it. You may try to protect her and keep them out of the campaign, but they’ll be there. They’re too determined and too vicious to let go.”

“Are you saying I can’t handle them?” his father demanded sharply.

“You’ll try,” Hal agreed, “but it won’t be enough. After all, you know, you’ve made yourself even more of a sitting duck than you were before. They missed you the first time. Now they’ve got another Jason on the ticket. What makes you think they’ll miss next time?”

“I must say,” Crystal remarked, half amused, half annoyed, “you’re a cheerful soul. Why don’t you try to be positive, for a change?”

“Well, it’s true,” Hal said, his face as stubborn as his father’s often was. “It’s absolutely true and you know it. There still remains one sure way to get a Jason into the White House. So watch out. One sudden death in the Knox family”—abruptly his flippant tone dissolved, his face twisted and turned young and naked with pain—“is enough, thank you.”

“All right,” Orrin said quietly. “All right. I’ll be careful. And so must she. I think one great advantage, however, lies in the fact that she did almost leave him because of the way he let the violent move in on his campaign. She didn’t approve of that, and I have the feeling she didn’t approve of his general approach to foreign policy, either. I’m pinning my hopes to that.”

“And to the name of Jason,” Hal couldn’t resist. His wife made a movement of protest, his father gave him a steady look.

“Yes,” he said. “To the name of Jason, also. Do you really think it is not important for me to win this election, Hal?”

Their eyes held unwavering; then Hal’s looked away.

“Yes,” he said, very low. “It is important. And she is infinitely better than he was. And you have pulled a great coup. And I accept it.”

“Then let’s stop fighting about it, shall we?” his father suggested quietly. “We’re going to need all our energies to win. And there’s one other thing to keep in mind, in fairness to me: she wouldn’t be on the ticket, in spite of her name, if I didn’t really, honestly believe that she is fully capable of being President if”—he paused and gave an odd, fatalistic, almost humorous shrug—“if she had to. She isn’t just a political choice, after all. I hope I think a little more of my country than that.”

“Of course you do,” Crystal said, leaning down to give him a comforting hug and kiss as, far in the distance, they began to hear a deep, rising, profoundly ecstatic sound.

Hal reached forward and turned on the television. There appeared, to the accompaniment of an excited commentary by two of the network’s brightest young men, a sleek black limousine accompanied by a police motorcycle escort, nearing Kennedy Center through wildly cheering thousands who packed solid every foot of the way.

“Is she there?” Hal asked after a moment. “I don’t see her waving, or anything.”

“She isn’t the ostentatious public type,” Crystal observed. “That’s one of the reasons I like her.”

“She’s campaigned with Ted for years,” Orrin said. “You would think she’d be waving a little, at least. Must be some reason for it. Grief, probably.”

But, sitting back in the heavily guarded car she shared with Patsy, the Jason aunts, Valuela Jason Randall and Selena Jason Castleberry, and Herbert, the Jason uncle, she refused, for the moment at least, to play the public game. She had always done her duty when Ted was alive, almost never turning down a campaign invitation, traveling with him the length and breadth of their great, fantastic nation-state from the Oregon line to the Mexican border. Ceil Jason, so blonde, so beautiful, so obviously possessed of intelligence, wit and charm, had been, in her more glamorous way, fully as vital a help to her husband’s ambitions as Beth Knox, in more old-shoe fashion, had been to Orrin’s. Yet now all that seemed very far away: it seemed too much of a burden to wave and pretend to smile. She was still, as she had told Patsy, in considerable pain from the assassin’s wildly erratic fusillade. And she had also spent the past two hours in considerable confusion of mind as to how she should meet this most unexpected and fantastic turn in her life created by Orrin Knox.

Now as her triumphal procession began its final approach to Checkpoint Alpha past mobs even denser, noisier and more hysterically happy than those that had gone before, she felt that she had decided—on her own, this time, without reference to Ted, or to what he would have wanted, or to what his career required, or to anything but what she, Ceil Jason, knew was best for the country, and for her.

She really felt, thinking back over the hectic time since the news had begun to bombard the house in Dumbarton Oaks via television, radio, telegram and telephone, that these were her priorities: first the country, and then herself. She had always tried to put them in that order, and that was why, only one short week ago, she had come within a hairbreadth of leaving her husband and ending forever the relationship that was then, and always would be, the most fundamental of her existence.

Her feelings toward Ted now were strangely ambivalent, for a just-bereaved wife; being an honest woman, she could not help acknowledging to herself that this was the fact. To the family—Patsy, with her loud opinions and garish dresses, Selena and Herbert with their endless well-publicized espousing of Authentically Liberal Causes, Valuela with her painting, her villa at Positano and her string of never very permanent young men—she had appeared properly grief-stricken and indeed, at heart, she was.

Yet there was something else … something else.

Even though she had returned to his side from her self-imposed exile at the great Jason ranch, “Vistazo,” north of Santa Barbara, when Orrin gave him the Vice Presidential nomination, still she had rendered a judgment on Ted that she could not evade now. She had rendered a judgment by leaving, and she had rendered a judgment by returning; and essentially, although one brought her close to divorce and the other to reconciliation, they were the same.

Edward Montoya Jason was to her, as to so many, an enigma, even though her life had run beside his for the better part of twenty years. When he had married her—handsome multimillionaire scion of Spanish dons, Indian stock and shrewd Yankee traders taking to wife the beautiful daughter of a modestly well-to-do family in Redding—it had been the great occasion of the San Francisco season, an event noted in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Town and Country, Palm Springs Life, Palm Beach Life and other such knowledgeable recorders of the social scene. When he had gradually moved into full control of the family corporations, Ceil had been his encourager and confidante. When he had entered public life and won the governorship, Californians had taken pride in the most beautiful first lady in the fifty states, who was still their Governor’s encourager and confidante. But when the prize of the Presidency began to affect his decisions, his public actions and his private thoughts, his encourager and confidante began to draw away. Her flight to “Vistazo” had been only the culmination and symbol of a long, steady process that had, by then, been under way for five or six years.

So subtly yet so swiftly that it sometimes took her breath away, the Ted Jason who had been so straightforward, honest and filled with integrity when she married him began to trim, shade and equivocate in the governor’s office in Sacramento. At first gently, then more openly as she became more alarmed by this, she began to chide him for it, not to the point of open issue but in a way that she hoped would bring him back to her own original concept of him, which she knew had been his concept, too. She was finally forced to the unhappy conclusion that he was not going to come back, that he was set upon a course dictated by ambition from which he would not deflect, even for her. And this despite the fact that they had known, and still knew, a deep and abiding love for one another that seemed to go along in some separate channel quite apart from the steady erosion of integrity and firmness that she was unhappily witnessing, every day.

Until the national convention so recently concluded, and then she knew that there could be separation no longer, that it was all coming together, that the Edward M. Jason who was rising to dominate his nation’s politics was simply no longer, nor would ever be again, the Edward M. Jason to whom she still owed, in heart and body, an allegiance she thought she could never abandon.

But the day came—or the night, rather. When Crystal Knox was beaten by the thugs of NAWAC in the ghostly fog outside the Cow Palace—when she lost her baby and almost lost her life—it was a turning point for Ceil Jason as it was for all those most closely involved in the drama of the Presidential nomination.

The National Anti-War Activities Congress had become increasingly threatening, increasingly harsh, but not until that night had it burst into open violence. When it did, everyone of influence and authority had denounced it and demanded its elimination from American life—except the man who had profited most from its political support. Once again, and this time with the lines drawn so tragically that no one could escape their implications, unless it be willfully, he equivocated. And finally, at last, lost—almost—his wife.

Why he had not, she could not exactly define for herself, except that it seemed to come down to one thing—the fundamental decency of the man who was now asking her to succeed her fallen husband.

In her darkest moments at “Vistazo,” where she had fled to spend several days alone except for faithful Manuela and Tomás, riding patient old Trumpet down the long meadows to the crashing sea and back again, thinking, thinking, thinking, the thought she had kept coming back to was: Orrin Knox is willing to trust him. The corollary to that, of course, was: Then why shouldn’t I? And finally, after all the arguments were exhausted, after she had fought out all her battles with the handsome stranger who smiled at her from familiar photos in accustomed places, she had come back to that question for the last time, and answered it—as she had not, for a while, been at all sure she would—in Ted’s favor. The deciding factor, as she had never had a chance to tell her husband, had been Orrin. If a man with that much integrity and that much experience of politics and the world could place his faith in Edward M. Jason’s ultimate decency and ability to break free from the violent, then her last reservations were canceled. She knew politics too, and she knew that much of Orrin’s decision had been forced upon him by Ted’s supporters and by his own necessity to win. But she also knew Orrin well enough to know that no matter what his own self-interest or political advantage might be, if he really did not consider Ted trustworthy he would not have taken him.

And now Orrin had decided that she should run for Vice President: again, for his own political advantage, but also, she believed, because he really considered her worthy of his trust and confidence. Unlike so many of his critics, she did not underestimate the integrity of the Secretary of State. She felt flattered, humbled and grateful for his endorsement. She had no intention of using it, as many of her husband’s supporters were already urging that she do, as a weapon for political trading.

Because, indeed, what would she trade for? Basically she agreed with Orrin (though the fact was unknown to those who greeted her proposed elevation so ecstatically) on most of his major positions. She was against the violent, she was worried about the Russians, she had been privately appalled at Ted’s tendency to drift further and further toward an attitude of appeasement, if not downright surrender, in his quest for peace. She was no more certain than Orrin, in fact, exactly how sincere that quest had been. She agreed with Ted that the wars in Gorotoland and Panama must somehow be ended as speedily as possible, but she knew Orrin agreed too. Orrin’s proposed methods—or at least his frequently stated intention to get out in a way that would not leave the United States and its allies hopelessly exposed to Communist domination—had always seemed better to her than Ted’s. Basic loyalty to her husband had prompted the suppression of her own ideas, even when she had questioned his most. Now there were other loyalties remaining: to the country, to the nominee for President and to herself.

This was what her decision narrowed down to as the limousine drew up to Checkpoint Alpha, the guards snapped to attention, the welcoming committee stepped forward with friendly smiles and a sudden intense and intently watching silence descended on the world. What did she owe the country and Orrin Knox—and what did she owe Ceil Jason? And would it be possible to accommodate them and in so doing make victory in November inevitable?

She was not sure, but she knew she had to try.

Like Orrin, when she arrived she too leaned on her family and obviously favored her wounds. But her charming speaking voice rang out steady and clear as she stepped forward and held out her hand to Roger P. Croy, who somehow managed to be in the forefront of the welcoming committee.

“Governor—” she said, “ladies and gentlemen of the Committee—thank you so much for coming out to meet me. I appreciate your kindness.”

“Madam Vice President,” Roger Croy said gravely, “you confer the kindness and honor upon us.”

“I don’t know about that title,” she said, smiling a little, with the sudden shift to informality that was one of her principal appeals on the platform, “but anyway, I am glad to be here.”

“As we are glad to have you,” Blair Hannah said with a fatherly warmth that did much to wipe out the memory of his initial reservations when Orrin had first proposed her name. “Your presence confers great grace upon us all.”

At this there was a burst of applause inside the Playhouse, a great shout of happiness and approval from the throngs outside. There followed a few moments of bustle while Ceil shook hands with the rest of the committee and introduced the members of her family. Then the party moved up the steps, the doors were opened, they disappeared inside, the doors were closed again. The tensely watching silence settled once more over all.

“Ladies and gentlemen—” William Abbott said solemnly a minute later as there came again the sound of soldiers coming to attention, rifles being slapped into position, the familiar rituals of pomp and circumstance—“the next Vice President of the United States!”

And again they were on their feet in wild ovation, Committee, guests and media alike, while outside a long crowing roar of triumph rose along both sides of the placid steel-lined Potomac.

She was dressed, reporters noted and the cameras showed, very simply, in a plain black dress with a small black off-the-face hat, black gloves, black shoes. Her flowing blonde hair was severely restrained in an unobtrusive black net. She wore a single white rose over her heart. Her face was pale but composed, her expression reserved, unsmiling but not unfriendly; and no more tense and nervous than might naturally be expected.

She and her family came forward slowly down the aisle while the ovation gradually subsided. Valuela, Selena and Herbert took the seats set out for them at the President’s right. He and Orrin stepped forward and greeted her with kisses, which she returned with an obvious fondness, brushing aside tears that for a moment threatened to overwhelm her. The ovation roared up again in wild approval, gradually subsiding as she took her seat. Silence settled again. The President once more formally introduced her. She stood up and came forward to the podium. Applause roared up, terminated. The profound expectant silence resumed. Clearly and steadily, referring only to a few scribbled notes which she arranged on the lectern before her, she began to speak; and many things in American politics were immediately rearranged.

“Mr. President,” she said gravely, “Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen of the Committee: like the Secretary, I too wish to begin by expressing my thanks for your expressions of sympathy. They are very”—her voice began to tremble but she steadied it and proceeded—“very welcome and helpful to all of us, in both families. Things sometimes seem to happen that have no reason at all, but we have to assume that there is a pattern somewhere, otherwise we could not go on living. In that faith we are all going forward. Your help and support make it, if not easy, at least less difficult. We feel we are not alone.”

She paused, took a sip of water, looked up with a sudden complete candor into their eyes and the eyes of the world.

“Mr. President, I hope you will all believe me when I say that the occasion for my being here came as a complete surprise to me. It is due directly and entirely to the generosity of the nominee for President.” (“And his desire to be elected,” the Guardian whispered to the Post, who nodded and smiled an unamused, unforgiving little smile.) “I do not believe he consulted anyone before announcing his choice. Certainly”—and the briefest trace of humor touched her lips—“he did not consult me.

“Nonetheless, Mr. President,” she said, while the murmur that greeted this began as she knew it would, “I deeply and most sincerely appreciate the honor.”

Again she paused. The tension in the room and wherever people watched or listened suddenly shot up for some instinctive, undefined reason.

“I only regret,” she said clearly and distinctly, again giving them her straightforward, candid look, “that it is impossible for me to accept.”

“My God!” the Times exclaimed, as the world exploded into excited sound and at the press tables AP, UPI, CBS, NBC and ABC scrambled their way out of their chairs and raced for the special telephone booths set up in the hall. “My God, now what?”

It was apparent from his astounded and dismayed expression, which the cameras faithfully seized upon, that the same question was occurring to the Secretary of State; and it was also clear, from Patsy Jason Labaiya’s outraged squawk of “WHAT?” to the Indian Ambassador’s startled “Oh, my gracious!” that Ceil had created a universal astonishment and, for most people, an honest and completely genuine dismay. It was some measure of how much their hopes had become concentrated upon her in the past two hours, of how eagerly and with what relief the enormous burden of expectancy had been transferred to her shoulders from those of her dead husband. It was some measure of how important Ceil Jason in her own right had become since the fateful words of Orrin Knox so short a time ago.

Because of this, her own words now were more fateful still; and after giving them a few moments to sink in, and to allow the general hullabaloo to subside, she went on in her pleasant, cultured voice to explain herself more fully and to do what she could to repay the debt of gratitude she knew she owed the nominee.

“Mr. President, Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen: I do not state this decision lightly, nor have I reached it on any spur-of-the-moment impulse. Believe me, I have given it a great deal of thought in the past two hours. Yet I know if I were to consider it for a much longer time, I should still arrive at the same conclusion. I cannot, and I will not, accept—sensible though I am of the very great honor and responsibility the Secretary wished to place upon me. I do not think it would be fair to him, or to you, or to the thing we must all keep firmly in mind, now more than ever: to the country, which is the charge and responsibility of all of us, most particularly those of us directly or indirectly associated with public office and the public trust.

“I think it is impossible accurately, just yet,” she said, and her voice became more quiet, her eyes more somber and haunted, “to assess the life and career of—of my husband. I like to think he brought many good things to the people of our state, and I like to think he represented many good things to people everywhere. We will never know whether he would have achieved them. But I would like to think he would have tried.”

(“Not exactly a widow’s fervent tribute,” the Saturday Review whispered to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I heard there was something funny there a few days ago,” the Chronicle whispered back, “but I was never able to trace it down.”)

“One thing,” she said, and at the sudden note of strain and challenge in her voice an alert watchfulness seized the press and all her audience in the room, “disturbed me. That”—and her voice steadied and became quite firm—“was the nature of some of his support.”

In the distance, puzzled, uncertain, prepared if necessary to be hostile, an uneasy rumble came from the gangs of NAWAC. It was obvious she heard it, but aside from a heightened color and an even greater firmness in her voice, she gave no sign.

“At the end, I believe he intended to repudiate once and for all the ugly gangs that had gathered behind him under the general banner of the National Anti-War Activities Congress.” The uneasy sound howled up instantly into an angry roar. “For his memory, and for my own self,” she said clearly above it, “I repudiate them too, in everything they do and everything they truly stand for, under the pious pretense of peace-loving with which they seek to fool the country.”

Now the angry roar knew no limits, beating in upon the Committee without challenge for several moments. Then suddenly, started by Ewan MacDonald MacDonald and Blair Hannah, joined in enthusiastically by the President, Orrin and many others, joined in dutifully because they did not dare refrain by Roger P. Croy, Esmé Harbellow Stryke, Patsy, her aunts and uncle, and some others, applause for her courage began and rose until it drowned out, at least in that small room, the ugly sound.

Out in the world the ugly sound continued and would be a long time dying, with fateful consequences for them all.

“I know very well,” she said finally, “that in taking this position I am inviting great hostility from these elements, and that is one of the reasons I am withdrawing from the ticket.” She smiled slightly. “Secretary Knox has enough burdens without carrying me.” The smile faded. “If I accepted the support of the violent, I should be a heavy weight upon him. Now that I have repudiated their support, as I must or betray everything I believe in, I should be a heavy weight upon him. I think I can help him better acting independently from outside. This,” she said, and the firmness grew in her voice, “I intend to do.”

The angry roar rose again in the distance, again it was drowned out in the crowded room by the applause of her audience, this time wholehearted and, except for some obvious dismay along the press tables, unanimous.

“I intend to do so,” she said, “because I believe that in Orrin Knox we have a candidate for President who honestly and forthrightly stands for what he believes, who has nothing but America’s well-being at heart and who will not hesitate to do what he thinks is right to achieve that well-being.”

(“And Ted wouldn’t have?” the Saturday Review whispered quizzically. “I told you,” the Chronicle reiterated. “There was something there.”)

“I intend to do so,” she went on, “because I firmly and completely believe that in his election lies the best hope for our country at this time. He will not appease, he will not trim, he will not equivocate. The whole world knows where he stands, and while some don’t like it, I do. And so, I hope and believe, do a majority of our countrymen.

“Orrin Knox repudiates the violent, he repudiates the appeasers, he repudiates the weak of heart and the flimsy of purpose. He will extricate us honorably and effectively from the wars in Panama and Gorotoland, he will preserve our independence and that of the free world in the face of the ongoing threats and subversions of the Soviet Union in its voracious and implacable imperialism. Domestically, also, I believe he will find the way to national unity—”

The noise outside rose in a sudden hoot, disbelieving, exaggerated, elaborately skeptical and sardonic. She flushed but lifted her head with a sharp motion that recalled her husband, and went on.

“—the way to national unity,” she repeated firmly, “which can only lie in the repudiation of the violent and the re-establishment of decent compromise and cooperation among all the elements of our society that genuinely want to preserve it.”

The careful and deliberate distinction again brought angry noises from outside, a counter of heartily approving applause from within the room.

“For myself,” she said quietly when it all died away, “I pledge my full and active cooperation to the election of Orrin Knox in November. I thank him again for his confidence and trust, I thank you for your support, I urge you to help him find a running mate who will do justice to the job that lies ahead for all of us. I will be with you all the way. Goodbye for now, and God bless you.”

And with a little bow to the President and Orrin, who led the standing ovation that immediately ensued, she left the platform and moved up the aisle, followed by her family, whose faces were studies of complex emotion. So swiftly yet so gracefully did she go that she seemed to pass among them like some elusive golden presence that they attempted, with a hungry yearning, to touch and hold, yet could not; and was gone, out the door, past the guards, down the steps, into the waiting limousine and away through the now jeering and hostile crowds, almost before they knew it.

There occurred then in the crowded little room an odd phenomenon that no one present ever forgot: a great silence and then a sudden, instinctive, unanimous sigh, a release of pent-up breath and emotion, deep and profound, as they all realized with a shattering impact the loss of certainty that they had suffered in her refusal.

It was followed almost immediately by a sudden restless stirring.

The President, an old veteran who knew all the signs, moved instantly to head off the uproar that was about to occur.

“Without objection,” he said smoothly, banging the gavel with a loud crack! that startled them into silence and carried the point over many tentative, half-formed protests, “the Committee will stand in recess until noon tomorrow.”

“But, Mr. President—!” Roger P. Croy, Blair Hannah, Mary Baffleburg and Esmé Stryke all cried at once. “But, Mr. President—!”

But the President was out and gone, too, as fast as he could move; and after a moment Orrin and Hal and Crystal followed, and then, by ones and twos and threes, the rest, upset, baffled, uneasy, uncertain, beginning as they went the angry and disputative chatter which would now, until such time as they had selected a successor to Edward M. Jason, become the burden of their days.

Mrs. Jason rejects vice presidential nomination. Repudiates violent, pledges all-out campaign for secretary Knox. Decision leaves party stunned and without candidate. Battle lines drawn between war and peace factions as pressures mount for quick decision. Overnight recess may give secretary chance to work out new compromise.

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Framed