Acts of Mercy (6 page)

Briggs was seated at his desk, and he had apparently been studying a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him; but now he blinked at Justice, swept the papers together hastily, put them into a manila folder and his hand on top of the folder as if guarding it. His expression, Justice saw with some surprise, was like that of a child caught at some sort of mischief.

“I’m sorry if I’m intruding, Mr. Briggs,” Justice said. “But the President asked me to stop by.”

“The
President
asked you—?”

“Yes sir. He’s busy and he couldn’t come himself. He’s planning to go to California this weekend and he’d like you to cancel the press luncheon scheduled for next Monday. He’d also like you to prepare a media release saying that he intends to remain at The Hollows for from three to five days for private policy discussions with members of his staff.”

Briggs seemed nervously flustered, uneasy; he ran a hand through his hair, ran his tongue over his lips, and reached for a cigarette from the pack in front of him. Though they were approximately the same age, he appeared very young to Justice—had seemed that way from the first moment they’d met. Maybe because there was a certain obvious immaturity in the man.

“I don’t understand,” Briggs said. “Is this some sort of joke?”

“Joke, sir?” Justice felt himself frowning. “Of course not. Why would you think it’s a joke?”

Briggs cleared his throat. “Well, it’s just that going to The Hollows again while the press is still in an uproar over the Israel remarks ... well, I’m not sure it’s such a wise decision.”

Justice said, “It’s the President’s decision, Mr. Briggs. If you’d like to call him later on ...”

“No,” Briggs said, “no, that won’t be necessary. All right, I ... I’ll take care of the cancellation and the release.” He got up jerkily, like a man struggling out of water, crushed his unlighted cigarette in the heavy White House ashtray on his desk, and caught up the folder and tucked it under his arm. And went out past Justice, leaving the door open, hurrying.

Justice stood for a moment, confused and bothered by the press secretary’s curious behavior. What was in those papers he had been studying? Did they have something to do with the presence earlier of the attorney general and Senator Kineen? Was he up to something, and had he been guiltily worried that Justice would realize it and inform the President?

He hurried back to the Oval Office.

For Augustine it had been a typically grueling day.

To begin it there had been a seven A.M. conference with the national energy advisor to discuss several of his bottlenecked energy proposals. Then there had been a brief meeting with the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, followed by a meeting with the security affairs advisor on intelligence matters. Shortly past nine he had gone upstairs to the Oval Study for a brief and painful consultation with Maxwell Harper, who had not told him anything he didn’t already know or suspect; but he was damned if he would listen to any more accusations that he was starting to make serious political blunders, and he had cut the meeting short.

At ten o’clock he’d met with members of the cabinet, minus Oberdorfer who was still in Tel Aviv, and Wexford whose absence was unexplained. Discussion of economic imperatives—going over the same ground he had covered with the economic council chairman—and then of the grave status of the French franc (during which he had had a fleeting feeling of sympathy for Nixon, who’d at least had the courage to admit that he did not give a damn about the Italian lira). At twelve-thirty, just as he was preparing to go to lunch—alone, because Claire was with Elizabeth Miller at a UJA luncheon downtown—Justice had returned from his errand to the press secretary’s office to tell him about Briggs and Wexford and Kineen. That had spoiled his appetite and he hadn’t bothered to eat at all.

But he had not had time to dwell on the news. At onefifteen there had been a brief meeting with a ceremonial delegation from the National Council of Ministers, who were in town for their annual convention; the bishop said he would pray for the presidency. At one forty-five there had been a conference with Senate Majority Leader Gordon Parkson on S-1, a dangerous bill authored several years before by Nixon (no sympathy this time) and John Mitchell which would severely repress civil liberties and which was now out of committee after nearly two years and would be put on the Senate floor for debate. Parkson had had no constructive ideas on how to get it back into committee or to otherwise block it.

At two-thirty Vice-President Jim Conroy had telephoned from Phoenix. Conroy had been making a week-long swing through several Western states, doing a little preconvention stumping, but had been having a fairly rough time of it: in Montana he had had to be hurriedly taken away from his hotel to escape an unruly crowd gathered to demonstrate in favor of a Cheyenne Indian takeover of their reservations; and in Wyoming he had suffered a mild case of food poisoning at a banquet which he was convinced had not been accidental. He said there was radical unrest in Arizona, too, and wanted to know if he could cut the trip short and come straight back to Washington. Augustine told him no, repressing the urge to tell him flat out that he was not only a whiner but a coward.

No sooner had he broken the connection than Oberdorfer had telephoned from Tel Aviv to discuss the “Israeli crisis.” Which turned out to mean that Prime Minister Stein was angry and demanding an immediate public retraction, and unless he got it was intimating that the Augustine administration would face the loss of financial and political support from the American Jewish community. Oberdorfer said ominously that careful consideration must be given to Stein’s demand “or I will not be held responsible for the consequences”; Augustine said he would be in touch shortly on the matter and then hung up on him, the bastard.

Now it was after three, and he had a half-hour open before another meeting with Hendricks and Wade and Sandcrane on the damned Indian problem, and what he planned to do was to lie down on the Oval Office couch, just lie down and rest for thirty minutes. So, naturally, George Radebaugh buzzed him from the outer office and said that the attorney general wanted to see him on a matter of considerable urgency.

Christ, Augustine thought,
now
what? He picked up one of his pipes, tapped the bit wearily against his teeth. “All right,” he said, “send him in.”

Wexford entered immediately, and the first thing Augustine noticed about him was that he looked nervous and haggard. There was a thin coating of perspiration on his florid face that gave it a polished sheen, like a block of old carved wood. As he approached, his eyes drifted from side to side, never quite meeting Augustine’s.

“Thank you for seeing me, Nicholas,” he said, and sat stiffly in one of the facing chairs.

“What’s the problem?”

Wexford seemed reluctant to speak. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and patted at his damp cheeks; he cleared his throat, seemed to find something to stare at on the terrace beyond the French doors. Intuition touched Augustine, tightened his mouth and narrowed his eyes; he was remembering what Maxwell had said to him this morning and what Justice had told him at noon. But he did not say anything, watching Julius, waiting for him to get on with it.

“Nicholas,” Wexford said finally, and then stopped and cleared his throat again. “Nicholas, I’ve been taking soundings on this Israeli thing and I just received advance word on the new Harris poll from Austin. It looks like a twenty-two percent approval rating. Now I don’t have to tell you how serious that is—”

“Get to the point, Julius,” Augustine said. “You didn’t come to tell me about the Harris poll.”

Wexford seemed to draw himself up. “No, you’re right,” he said, “I didn’t. I might as well be direct; the situation is painful enough without beating around the bush. The fact of the matter is, there was a rump meeting of the National Committee in Saint Louis last night, and I’m flying out there again this evening for the formal procedural discussions on the convention, and ... well, there’s been a considerable amount of sentiment that it might be best for everyone—the nation, the party, even yourself—If you would decide not to seek renomination.”

“I see.” Carefully, Augustine laid his pipe on the desk, put his hands flat on the litter of papers before him. There was anger in him, but it was cold, controlled. He had known for weeks that something like this might happen, although he had deluded himself into believing that it would not. “And am I to believe this sentiment is based on a twenty-two percent preliminary Harris? Or is there more to it than that?”

Wexford still refused to meet his eyes. “There is no single causative factor; it’s a whole pattern of feeling which has developed over recent months. And you know what’s been happening in the primaries, Nicholas.”

Nothing much had been happening in the primaries. Kineen had won all but one of them—the favorite-son candidate had beaten him in Pennsylvania—but he had done so over a widely split field of test-case candidates. The primaries meant little against an incumbent president anyway; even LBJ, who had lost in New Hampshire and Wisconsin in 1968, could not have been denied renomination on their basis. What primaries were, in truth, was shadow plays: clever little exercises exactly as important as the National Committee cared to make them. You could build a nomination on a series of victories, yes, as Jimmy Carter had done, as he himself had done to a lesser degree four years ago; but there were subtle ways to make sure that no victories came to a candidate the committee did not really want, and subtle ways of making even victories seem inconsequential.

Augustine said, “Either you share this sentiment, Julius, or you’re the one who got the ball rolling in the first place. Which is it?”

“I share it, that’s all.”

“Then who did get the ball rolling? Briggs, maybe?”

“No,” Wexford said, but his eyes flicked even further aside as he said it: Briggs had been a major factor, all right. “No one got the ball rolling, Nicholas. It was simply a consensus feeling on the part of the National Committee.”

“Who else in the administration goes along with it?”

“Quite a few people,” Wexford said. “I’m sorry, I dislike having to do this, but—”

“But you’re still doing it, aren’t you? Did you volunteer to be the hatchet man, or did they give you the job because no one else wanted it?”

“It was felt that because of our long-standing friendship—”

“Friendship? You’re a goddamn Judas.”

Wexford looked pained. “Please, Nicholas. It’s not that we feel you haven’t done a good job. It’s just that the time has come for a change if the party is going to remain strong and unified. You must understand that.”

“I understand nothing of the sort.”

“It would be an unselfish and magnanimous act—”

“You’re presupposing that I might be pressured into going along with the idea,” Augustine said in a deceptively soft voice. “But what if I refuse? What if I decide to take my case to the people?”

A look of shock spread across Wexford’s face; he was such a party politician, Augustine thought, that it was difficult for him to conceive of anyone bucking the National Committee, even the President himself. “You wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Wouldn’t I? I still have a few friends left.”

“Yes, but not enough. My God, you’d tear the party apart.”

“Not the way I see it. The party can unify around me just as easily as around Kineen; it unified around me four years ago, didn’t it?”

“That was a different situation entirely,” Wexford said. He was using the handkerchief again and his face had gotten as red as it had at dinner last night. “You’d better think this over carefully—don’t make any hasty decisions that you’ll regret later. I’ll tell the committee you need time to—”

“You can tell the committee to go to hell,” Augustine said. “And then you can give them my final answer: I will not make a withdrawal announcement; I am a firm candidate for reelection. Period. Now get out of here, Julius. I have nothing more to say to you.”

Wexford stood up. “You’re making a serious mistake, Mr. President. I urge you to reconsider.”

Mr. President, Augustine thought. He did not look at Wexford. Instead he busied himself filling his pipe, tamping tobacco into the bowl from a brass humidor.

“Very well,” Wexford said in flustered tones. “You have my resignation as chairman of your reelection campaign.” Which was a pathetically thin exit line but one typical of the man: he turned on his heel and stalked out of the office.

Augustine got up immediately, holding the pipe between his thumb and forefinger, and opened the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. He stood next to one of the white stone pillars, looking past the rose garden to the Jefferson Memorial in the distance.

All right, he thought, so it’s come to this. A dogfight between me and Kineen. With the National Committee behind him he won’t waste any time accelerating his campaign, and that means I can’t waste any time with mine. Appoint a new campaign chairman right away, Ed Dougherty maybe. Make preparations for an early whistle-stopper in the Presidential Special. Challenge Kineen to a public TV appearance to debate issues. First thing, though, is to get some of the more prominent press people in here for a backgrounder; sit down with them, philosophize a bit on the presidency, answer their questions, strengthen my media image. Then-He realized abruptly that he was putting voice to his thoughts, mumbling aloud again as he sometimes did in moments of stress. He put the pipe between his teeth, clamped down on it resolutely, and then turned back inside his office with the intention of calling Austin Briggs and having him set up the backgrounder for tomorrow morning. But just as he reached his desk the intercom buzzed—and when he flipped the toggle, George Radebaugh told him it was three forty-five and Hendricks and Wade and Sandcrane were waiting in the anteroom.