Capable of Honor (68 page)

Chapter 1

From somewhere, in some distant place, he begins to be aware that a voice is speaking gently, that a hand is moving on his arm, that it is time for him to return to the world he left six hours before with a tiny skin-prick, a second’s swift swirling, and oblivion. He sighs heavily and shakes his head to clear it.

“Yes?” he says dully without opening his eyes.

“It’s time for you to get up and eat a little breakfast, Mr. Secretary,” the nurse says calmly. He opens an eye.

“Thank God you’re not one of the cheerful ones,” he says, and for a moment she permits herself a smile.

“That’s better. Your clothes are in the closet. I’ll be back with breakfast in fifteen minutes.”

“How’s Mrs. Knox?” he asks, sitting up. “My Mrs. Knox?”

“She’ll be along soon. Your son’s Mrs. Knox is doing all right, too. She isn’t skipping rope, but she’s coming along.”

“That’s good,” he says inanely, and she remarks.

“Yes, I should think so. Now get up and get dressed. I understand you have a very important engagement at the Huntington at noon.”

“The President?”

She shakes her head.

“I honestly have no idea. I was just told it was very important and to get you up. So please continue when I go out, all right?”

“Nurse,” he says, “what do you think of all this? Would you be happier if Governor Jason were President of the United States?”

She stares out the window for a moment, watching the galloping fog with a native’s thoughtful and approving eye.

“What does my opinion matter?” she asks finally. “Things are going to happen whether ordinary people like it or not, aren’t they?”

“I’m too tired,” he says with a touch of returning tartness, “to give you my Civics 1-B lecture this morning. Of course they’re going to happen, you silly girl, and ordinary people—of whom I’m sure you’re not one, that’s part of the cliché too”—she smiles and looks quite unimpressed—“can do a lot to influence how they happen, if they will just realize it and take hold. I repeat, would you be happier if Ted—”

“No,” she says crisply, “since you ask. I would not. Now, will you get moving? It’s getting late.”

“I think I’m going to withdraw,” he says, abruptly crystallizing all his horrified, tumultuous reactions of the dreadful hour before he was put under sedation.

“I think you’re a fool,” she says bluntly, “since you’ve invited my opinions. And quite inconsistent, too. But that’s your problem. I shall be back with the tray in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks so much,” he says, knowing that as soon as she leaves the dark terrible unhappiness that Seconal killed will return.

Sure enough, it does.

How arrogant he has been, he thinks, and how deserving of punishment from the Lord! As he had remarked wonderingly to Stanley—how many years ago, in what other world?—two deaths had occurred, and still he had not been humbled. However worthless the dead and however slight his own responsibility, at least they had been human beings; and still it had taken an attack upon his own daughter-in-law, the loss of his own grandson, before he had been moved to abandon his selfish worry after votes and realize the monstrous position into which ambition and events had forced him.

And how could he honestly say that his own responsibility was slight? It was slight in the vicious sense that Walter and Ted and all their friends and allies were trying to maintain, it was slight in that he had not ordered, condoned, or excused any of the violence that had crept into the convention … but was there not a general guilt in which he inevitably shared, a joint responsibility for the swift deterioration of decency that was his through sheer lack of attention, sheer self-absorption, if nothing else?

Two are dead—three are dead if one remembers the child—and he remembers it now with a sudden despair so great that he actually staggers and has to sit down again abruptly on the bed. His own grandson,
his own grandson,
Hal’s first child—maybe, though his mind can barely admit it, so agonizing is the thought—Hal’s last child. This is what he, Orrin Knox, has done, simply by not being strong enough, not selfless enough, simply by not speaking out with sufficient firmness and insistence.

Simply by not speaking out … simply by not getting out.

“Orrin Knox doesn’t run away,” Stanley Danta had said, and it was a tribute to all the years that lay between the Secretary and the idealistic boy who had married Elizabeth Henry, gone on to become state senator in Illinois, Governor of Illinois, United States Senator from Illinois, Secretary of State, one of the great powers of Washington and of his time. He never had run away—but that had been when he faced antagonists he could understand and fight with all the vigor of a candid and impatient heart. Now he was contending against something again, the monster of violence that stalked the unhappy twentieth century: an evil grown great, come to visible life, rampant and voracious in a land that perhaps had been lucky too long in escaping it, and now must be made to pay the price by the jealous Furies.

How could he fight that? He could condemn it, as he had—he could order his people to refrain from it, as he had—but it came nonetheless. Good intentions and decent behavior were not enough, when confronted by this Thing; certainly not enough when the citizenry were not unanimous in their rejection of it. The Thing only needed a few friends to open the gate and let it in; unless everyone stood firm it entered. And where it entered, the world tore open and society collapsed.

It has entered in Union Square, it has entered in blankly hostile faces at the Cow Palace—it has entered, at the start, in savage columns and hysteric editorials and slanted headlines and one-sided photographs—it has entered in suavely supercilious and blandly ruthless rearrangements of the facts in commentaries and roundups and special programs and news reports. The marvelous things that can be done with an adverb, the masterful ruinations of character and purpose that can be accomplished with an adjective, the delicious ability of one lying picture to destroy the effectiveness of a thousand truthful words! And how well the little knowing smile, the ironic expression in the eyes, the polite reservations in the voice, the cordial, chuckling deprecation, can reinforce and keep them company!

It is amazing how many weapons the age provides for the misusers of truth.

It is not surprising that so many should succumb, with so few pangs of conscience, to the temptation to employ them.

No qualms of conscience because, when all is said and done, many of them utterly and sincerely believe in the righteousness of their own point of view. Thus the constant implacable attack upon opposing thought becomes, not the result of a struggle of conscience but the result of the suave use of practiced techniques in the service of a genuine conviction.

Orrin has been in Washington too long to discount the sincerity of his enemies in Walter’s world. A few are hypocrites and self-servers. But by far the majority absolutely and sincerely believe that he is a detriment to the country and must be exorcised from public life without the slightest mercy or regret. He knows that they acknowledge his character, respect his integrity, calculate him to be a most determined and formidable opponent—who deserves, therefore, their biggest and most ruthless guns.

Now again, as they had in the bitter battle over the nomination of Bob Leffingwell to be Secretary of State, and later in the controversies arising from the visit of Terence Ajkaje to the United States and the UN, they are in effect dismissing the President and concentrating their fire on the man they consider most responsible for events and the most dangerous to the future success of their own beliefs. They do not fully know—of course they have not had the insider’s privilege of knowing—the iron that has come into the soul of Harley Hudson; they still cling to the lingering belief that someone else is putting it there, and that only one man could logically be responsible. The raucous attacks upon the Administration’s foreign policy, the pre-convention campaign, the general tone of the opposition speeches within the convention, have come down essentially to an attack upon that one man. He is the target, now, as he has been before. This time his enemies have succeeded. He can survive their attacks upon him personally, he has taken their measure a hundred times and found himself strong enough to stand it. But he cannot stand the results, now, for his family.

Probably no one from Walter Dobius to Frankly Unctuous and back again has seriously desired real hurt and damage to Orrin Knox and his family; still he knows the horrible yet fascinating feeling that has gone through their ranks nonetheless. “That’ll show the bastard,” they have thought, though he doubts that any has been so crude—or so honest with himself—as to say it aloud: but a sort of tortured, quivering satisfaction, a visceral elation they have doubtless been ashamed of but have not been able to withstand, has shivered deliciously through them all.

None would of himself or herself have raised a hand against the Knoxes. But they have been responsible, as surely as though they have done, for they have deliberately and knowingly created the atmosphere of hatred and hysteria in which the deed could happen.

That is the trouble with these terribly righteous people who play so cavalierly with the explosives of the age, he thinks: quite frequently the explosives go off. And they are really not too sorry about it, they really rather enjoy it, in some sick, near-vomiting fashion that nonetheless enthralls them, so deeply has violence penetrated the fabric of their age.

But it is time, now, to end such philosophizing and acknowledge that they have won. Ambition and idealism and the conviction that he was right carried him triumphant through the testing posed by Harley’s predecessor when he offered Orrin the Presidency if he would drop his opposition to Bob Leffingwell; carried him six months later through the difficult decisions and violent attacks connected with Terrible Terry’s visit; carried him through many and many a crisis in his long public life. But they cannot carry him through his grandson dead and Crystal alive only by the miracle of her youth and good health. His opponents have reached him at last, and the battle is over.

It is over because of what they have done, but even more—and he realizes it with an agonized self-reproach he knows they could not conceive him feeling and for which they would not give him credit—it is over because of his own sense of guilt for what has happened.

They can settle the argument with their own consciences, if any.

He knows only one way to settle it with his, and that is by offering expiation in the form most meaningful to public men—the voluntary abandonment of dear ambition.

He cannot foresee now, as he slowly rises and begins to apply himself seriously to the business of getting dressed, how Harley will make out in this new contest with Ted Jason. However it is, he realizes with a disheartened exhaustion, he will be unable to help. He would like to, but the heart is out of it—out of him. He just wants to take his family and go away somewhere, out of sight and out of mind—even though he knows, with a sudden contemptuous self-anger, that of course he can’t do that, he’s Secretary of State. Life is rushing on, policy is rushing on, there’s a job to be done and he can’t get out of that. But he can get out of this—this madness, here in San Francisco, and that he will.

He knows what Harley wants to say to him, at the Huntington at noon, and he knows equally well what he is going to say to Harley.

“And don’t you try to argue me out of it!” he calls out in a strange, harsh voice that his wife and son hardly recognize as they tap on the door and come in. “We have a right to be let alone,” he adds, and in a curious, defiant, crazy fashion he is half-crying as he speaks, “and by God, we’re going to be!”

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