Night of Camp David Page 2

  Mark Hollenbach, wearing an open-necked shirt and cardigan, stepped to the side of the car and opened a door for MacVeagh.

  “Welcome to Aspen, Jim,” he said. “Come on in. It’s colder than the hinges out here.”

  MacVeagh entered, uncertainly, and found himself in a low, rough-beamed room in which firelight flickered at one end and a single floor lamp burned at the other. The room was illuminated largely by shifting patches from the veiled moon which came through a huge picture window. Outside, on a stone patio, stood a pedestal with mounted binoculars similar to those placed in public parks for scenic viewing. Inside the room, sofas, wooden tables, and a big easy chair made moundlike shadows. President Hollenbach walked to the fireplace, rubbing his hands. Jim followed and they stood there warming themselves, backs to the fire.

  “Want a drink?” asked Hollenbach.

  “A drink I don’t need, Mr. President, not after Scotch and five wines tonight. But I could use a glass of tomato juice, if you’ve got one.”

  “Good idea,” said Hollenbach. He walked into an adjoining pantry and came back with two tall glasses. “I put a little A-1 sauce and some pepper in this. Is that all right?”

  “Fine.” MacVeagh raised his glass to Hollenbach’s. “Here’s to a great speech tonight, Mr. President. It was right on the nose.”

  “They did seem to like it.”

  What was this all about? MacVeagh wondered. Here he stood at two o’clock in the morning, drinking tomato juice with the President of the United States and looking out a window which framed an expanse of lonely white. The lodge, Aspen, stood on a shelf of the mountain. A one-hole golf course, MacVeagh knew, ran to the brow. He could see the flagless pin, marking the green which had been sodded years ago for President Eisenhower. Just beyond was a stand of hardwood trees, and through their bare branches could be seen the next mountain range, merging into the gray blur of the horizon like a distant fleet at sea.

  A mantel clock ticked behind them. Firelight fingered the side of Hollenbach’s face and Jim found himself thinking of this unusual man in khaki pants and the ragged gray sweater. Hollenbach’s crew cut, stiff as an old wire brush with its mixture of sandy and gray hair, made him seem younger than his fifty-seven years. The neck above the open collar of his green sport shirt showed wrinkles, but no sagging flesh. His long face, with its thin bone structure, was not handsome, yet it etched a sensitivity that lured women voters. Not a delicate face, but possibly a professorial one. Jim could imagine Hollenbach expounding the style of Hawthorne and Poe to freshman classes in American literature. Actually, he recalled, it was history that young Mark Hollenbach taught at the University of Colorado in the days before he got into politics.

  The President was trim. No stomach bulge, no flabby muscles. Physical fitness was part of his creed; ten minutes of vigorous setting-up exercises before breakfast, a swim in the White House pool at noon and always two late afternoons of golf a week at the Burning Tree Club when weather permitted. A call to excellence had been his campaign appeal to America, and in the White House, President Hollenbach tried to live an example for the people. Excellence in all things, including the care of the human body, he said time and again.

  “What did you think of the dinner, Jim?” he asked.

  “I liked it. That Republican skit dragged, but those on us were great, really funny. They sure picked on us where we’re vulnerable.”

  “O’Malley was duck soup for them, of course,” said Hollenbach. “And it’s always easy to kid the President. He’s everybody’s fall guy.”

  “Your little speech at the end was terrific. And you know why—because you spent half the time ribbing yourself after you kidded the opposition.”

  “What did you think of my wiretap suggestion?”

  “I got a kick out of it,” said MacVeagh with a grin. Then he recalled Sidney Karper’s strange reaction. “But apparently it misfired with some people. I guess the idea of a wiretap on every phone jolted them and they couldn’t take it as a joke.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke,” said Hollenbach.

  “You what?” MacVeagh stared at him.

  “Oh, of course I was jesting in that context—of listening in on the Republicans,” said the President. “But I’ve thought a lot about the rising crime rate and, Jim, we’ve got to do something drastic. Access to every phone conversation would give the FBI and other federal agencies a terrific weapon against criminals. And it’s quite feasible, you know, if worked through the Bell System.”

  “You can’t be serious, Mr. President.” Fragments of a dozen of his own indiscreet telephone remarks whipped through MacVeagh’s mind and he thought briefly and guiltily of Rita. “Good Lord, that’s police state stuff. There isn’t enough privacy left as it is.”

  “I am very serious, Jim,” said Hollenbach. “It would have to be done carefully, with great legal restraints and protection, naturally. But no respectable citizen would have a thing to fear. It’s the hoodlums, the punks, the syndicate killers, and the dope peddlers we’re after. Automatic wiretapping, aided by computers to store the telephone calls, would drive them all out of business.”

  MacVeagh was dumfounded, unable to find words for an immediate reply. He thought he knew this President fairly well, could sense the trend of his political philosophy without asking, yet here was a proposal suddenly dropped from the skies, like a giant boulder in a cyclone, to block a familiar and well-traveled roadway.

  “Mr. President,” he said slowly, “I’m no civil liberties fanatic, but I do understand our basic freedoms. This thing of yours could be an awful weapon for evil in the wrong hands. Who knows what type of man may succeed you? And then, there are the political repercussions. A proposal like that could murder you this fall.”

  Hollenbach’s jaw line tensed and he waved a hand as though to dismiss the subject. “All novel ideas involve a political risk,” he said. “That doesn’t frighten me. But enough of that tonight. I’ve other things I want to talk to you about.”

  Hollenbach set his glass on the mantel and pressed the tips of his fingers forcefully together. Isometric exercises were part of his formula for the fit body. Often, when sitting at a conference table, he would curl his toes and try to push them through the soles of his shoes. At other times he jammed his elbows against the back of a chair, hardening his biceps and chest muscles. In a crowd the movements were invisible, but with friends he made no effort to mask the practice—even after two o’clock in the morning. Now he motioned to a long, white monk’s-cloth sofa which faced the wide window and the stretch of white beyond. He sat at one end and half turned toward MacVeagh, sitting at the other.

  “Jim,” he said, “let’s talk business. Those Gridiron fellows didn’t tromp on O’Malley as hard as they could have. A matter of not kicking a man when he’s down, I suppose. But you and I know the Republicans won’t be that easy in the fall. I just won’t have O’Malley on the ticket with me again.”

  Hollenbach’s flat statement of intent on the vice-presidency came as no surprise to MacVeagh, even though this was the President’s first mention of it, as far as he knew. Leading Democrats assumed it was only a matter of time until the President announced that Vice-President Patrick O’Malley would not be his running mate in the fall campaign for re-election. O’Malley had been muddied beyond scouring in Senator Bryce Robinson’s one-man investigation of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Sports Arena. The Republican senator, tracking as always like a wolf who scorns the pack, had found favoritism in the building contract. It was not fraud. No bribery had been uncovered, no venality, no mysteriously fattened bank accounts.

  Instead, the case evolved as a classic Washington example of influence buying through campaign contributions. The contractor for the sports arena had contributed heavily to O’Malley’s primary campaign fund when O’Malley was challenging Hollenbach for the Democratic presidential nomination four years earlier. The contracto
r was Art (Jingles) Jilinsky, a Pittsburgh Democrat long a fringe figure in party councils. O’Malley’s role had not been particularly impure. He merely introduced Jilinsky to the chairman of the Fine Arts Commission and followed up with telephone calls asking the status of the contract awards. If O’Malley had admitted the whole affair at the outset, if it had not been a presidential campaign year, and if the building had not been dedicated to a martyred president, the incident might have withered after brief partisan combat. But it was a Kennedy memorial, it was a campaign year, and O’Malley had not come forward at once with the full truth.

  Senator Robinson, a master at trapping the unwary, first revealed that Jilinsky contributed $3,000 (the limit before the start of gift taxes) to O’Malley’s futile presidential bid and that three years later—last year—O’Malley had introduced Jilinsky to the Fine Arts chairman who had a major role in awarding such memorial building contracts. When reporters questioned Vice-President O’Malley, he conceded that he had received the contribution and made the introduction. But, he protested, he had received hundreds of similar contributions and made scores of introductions of American citizens to officeholders. It was a political smear of the lowest sort, he contended, to link the contribution with the introduction. He would, he said, have done the same for any voter.

  The episode flared briefly, then sputtered out. But two weeks later, Senator Robinson took the Senate floor to reveal a $3,000 campaign gift to O’Malley from Mrs. Jilinsky. O’Malley brushed this aside as a matter beyond his recollection. Two days later Robinson released a chart showing a total of $36,000 in gifts from Jilinsky, members of his family, and six of his subcontractors. Questioned by newsmen, the subcontractors confessed that they actually had given Jilinsky’s money in their own names, since each received three $1,000 bills from Jilinsky several days after making the contributions. “Six Give and Get Three Grand,” headlined the Washington Daily News.

  Vice-President O’Malley, badly jolted this time, said that he had never inspected the list of campaign contributions, that all finances had been handled without his knowledge by his campaign treasurer. This appeared to conflict with his first ready acknowledgment of Jilinsky’s own gift. Senator Robinson let this controversy rage for a week before tripping his last political land mine. O’Malley, he charged with supporting affidavits from the personal secretary to the Fine Arts chairman, had made three telephone calls asking the progress of contract negotiations on the Kennedy arena. This contract, Robinson showed, was awarded to Jilinsky & Sons, Inc., on a cost-plus basis with potential profits to the Jilinsky family running as high as $600,000.

  The episode had its irony, for O’Malley could not have leased the arena for a week without borrowing. He produced his income tax returns for the past five years, showing only a trickle of income outside his salary as vice-president and earlier as a congressman. Clearly, O’Malley had not enriched himself. What he had done was in the hoary political pattern—permitting a friend to “buy access” to a federal official via campaign contributions. Politicians in both parties sympathized with O’Malley, realizing that his conduct differed only in timing and degree from that of thousands of elected officials from county courthouses to Congress. But, they shrugged, that was the ill luck of the Irish. O’Malley had been caught in the old game in the wrong year, on the wrong contract, and the penalty, they assumed, would be the loss of the vice-presidency.

  None of this recent history had to be recounted by the President and the senator as they sat together in early morning. Both had writhed through the slow unfolding of Senator Robinson’s tale of money and Democratic politics. Both assumed that President Hollenbach’s personal popularity remained uncharred despite the scandal, yet they knew the country expected the President to act promptly.

  “I’m going to announce at my Wednesday press conference that O’Malley has decided not to be a candidate for re-election,” said Hollenbach. “That’s just between us, of course.”

  “Has he told you that?”

  “No.” Hollenbach stretched out his legs and MacVeagh noted that he wore battered moccasins. “But I’m going to phone him tomorrow and ask for such a statement in writing. He can’t refuse.”

  “No, of course he can’t.” Jim knew it had to come, but hearing O’Malley’s fate stated so irrevocably, he felt a twinge of sorrow. Pat was not a venal man. Jim doubted he had ever taken an illegal dollar in his life. He had merely played the game as he had learned it in Pennsylvania. Pat’s real weakness was his readiness to help a friend—and Jilinsky had been a friend. It was a frailty endemic among those who plied the trade of politics. Or any trade, for that matter.

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for Pat, Mr. President,” said MacVeagh. “He’s a big, likable Irishman who goes by a code he never thought much about, I guess. But if I were in trouble myself, he’s probably the first man I’d go to.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Hollenbach. The words exploded, as though fired from a gun. “O’Malley did it for the express purpose of embarrassing me in an election year.”

  The President’s eyes locked on MacVeagh’s, but the younger man grinned. “Oh, come now, Mr. President. Pat made the introduction and those calls last year. I doubt if he thought about the election, one way or the other.”

  “No, no.” Hollenbach shook his head impatiently. “I mean the way he handled it. Instead of making a clean breast of things right at the start, he let Robinson paint him—gradually, one coat at a time—until he looked like a crook. That was intentional, Jim. O’Malley did it to defeat me in November. I know.”

  MacVeagh was startled by the velocity of the President’s speech. Words tumbled out in a rush and Jim noted that color speared upward in Hollenbach’s cheeks.

  “But that’s not logical, Mr. President.” Jim thought his own voice unduly subdued after the President’s eruption. “After all, in trying to beat you, O’Malley would be ruining himself. He has no future except on a ticket with you.”

  Hollenbach rose from the sofa and began pacing the floor. On one turn he clicked off the floor lamp, leaving the room with only thin moonlight, reflected from the snow outside, and the lazy orange tongues curling from the fireplace. The President’s features were shadowed, but MacVeagh felt eyes searching his own in the half-light.

  “You don’t understand a man like that,” said Hollenbach. The words hurried from him as though fleeing an unseen enemy. “His own future is nothing compared to his objective….He’s out to grind me down….All right. I’ll say it…to destroy me….What does Patrick O’Malley risk? He’s fortunate to be vice-president. Even that office stretches his limited talents….He had nowhere else to go….So let’s face facts. His entire aim was to soil me, to rub some of his mud off on me, to make people think that I’m the kind of man who winks at sordid political payoffs in his official household….”

  Hollenbach came close and MacVeagh felt uncomfortable, as though he had unwittingly intruded on another’s privacy. A disquieting emotion nettled him. Outside the snow lay blank and cold. MacVeagh saw a dead tree, its branches missing. Then he noted that the trunk moved and he realized, with relief, that it was a guard, probably a Marine, on duty. The man blew on his hands and moved away, out of eye range.

  Hollenbach walked in small, nervous steps to the big window. He stood there, mute, looking at the gray mass on the horizon. For a minute the ticking of the mantel clock and the pop of burning logs were the only sounds. Then MacVeagh heard a familiar, booming laugh, so deep in tone from such a thin, wiry body that it always seemed to come from some hidden spring of resources. Hollenbach returned to the sofa and slouched in the corner.

  “Forgive me, Jim, for getting so worked up,” he said easily, “but the man has always irritated me. The country paid attention when I spoke of excellence, but not O’Malley. As far as he was concerned, I might as well have been gabbling in Bantu. He never heard me.”

  Hollenbach smiled and fingered the fraye
d border of his sweater. “O’Malley will soon be ancient history,” he said quietly. “What we have to do now is pick the best man available for vice-president. Time’s passing. It’s only five months until the Detroit convention.”

  “Five months and eight days,” corrected MacVeagh. They both laughed. Jim felt at ease again.

  “All right, five months and eight days. What do you think I ought to do, Jim? Who’s the right man for us?”

  “That’s strictly your business, Mr. President. I may be a new boy, but not so new that I start advising presidents on their running mates.”

  “Put it another way, Jim.” The tension was all gone now. Hollenbach stretched out his legs again and his moccasins found the end of an unfinished cherry coffee table to rest on. “Suppose you were in my place. Whom would you pick? I’m not going to hold you to anything. Just think out loud for me.”

  MacVeagh recognized Hollenbach’s most persuasive mood. When the President slid into this informal but persistent quest for advice, it was useless to deny him, for he would wheedle, coax and implore until the wall was breached and the besieged came forth, laden with the gifts of tribute—a name, a place, a policy.

  “You’ve got me,” MacVeagh sighed. “Well, I see only two men and there isn’t much to choose between them—Karper and Nicholson.”

  William Nicholson was the able, if too ponderous, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Sidney Karper, beside whom MacVeagh had sat that evening, was the keen, blunt Secretary of Defense whose sometimes acid comments on the nation’s dilemma abroad gave a kind of curious comfort to Americans in a world obviously devoid of solace.

  “Nicholson is too heavy.” Hollenbach held up a palm as if warding off a falling object. “He smothers me with that elephantine way of his.”

  “I know,” said Jim, “but he’s steady and the people like that feeling of reliability.”