Night of Camp David Read online

  Jim was taken aback by the harsh use of his last name. “Oh, you were?” he said.

  “Yes, I was,” said Hollenbach, biting off the words. “It took a little investigative work, Senator, to come up with the name Rita Krasicki, but fortunately I took the precaution of ordering an FBI security check on you.” The President was speaking swiftly now. “I admire your taste, MacVeagh, but I abhor your duplicity in failing to tell me the other day in this office that you had this—this thing—in your record.”

  Hollenbach’s indignation triggered something in MacVeagh, and the image flashed before him of Tina Faraday, the actress, standing beside a fountain and drunkenly describing the day Mark Hollenbach, as a college boy, fled from her house in Columbus.

  “You double-crossed me, MacVeagh,” continued Hollenbach, his speech seeming to stab over the phone lines. “It was a complete lack of square shooting on your part, and there’s nothing I detest more. The Republicans would have been sure to find out about anything as filthy and dirty as that, and so we would have faced it right in the middle of the campaign. And I, in my innocence, thought you were many cuts above O’Malley.”

  The President halted, as though for breath, and MacVeagh said: “I did consider telling you, Mr. President, but frankly the affair was over, and besides, well, I was too excited that afternoon to think straight, I guess.”

  “That’s a pallid excuse,” replied Hollenbach. His voice rose in key. “And it doesn’t pass muster with me. Frankly, I don’t believe you. But what I do suspect is that you’re in league with O’Malley and the rest of that cabal. You’ve joined the plot to discredit me and disgrace the administration—for what exact purposes, I don’t know yet.”

  The accusation, delivered on a piercing, rising inflection, tore something loose in MacVeagh. All the frustration of days boiled up suddenly in him and the words began to fly from his mouth uncontrollably.

  “That’s a baseless charge, Mr. President,” he said, “but I’ll tell you something that is a fact. You are guilty of snooping and now you want a national wiretap law that will let your administration snoop on a grand scale. No wonder you want such an ugly law. You called in the FBI to ferret around in a man’s private life. Is that what you call playing square with a man you asked to run with you? I didn’t ask to run. It was all your idea. And tell me, what vice-presidential candidate in all history had to suffer the indignity of being shadowed and investigated by the footpads of the President of the United States?” MacVeagh, in his rush of anger, was about to add the Secret Service, but he caught himself with the thought that undoubtedly Hollenbach did not know of that agency’s surveillance.

  “And if there had been no security check?” Hollenbach laughed harshly. “You wouldn’t have said a word about the voluptuous Mrs. Krasicki, would you? You’d have passed yourself off as a respectable family man. And then, the Republicans would have found out and we’d all have been destroyed—you, your lovely wife, your daughter, the administration, the party.”

  “And Mark Hollenbach?” asked MacVeagh. He couldn’t resist it.

  “Yes!” The President almost screamed it. “Yes, and Mark Hollenbach too. You were out to get me, weren’t you, MacVeagh? But you didn’t bring it off. You’re lazy and ineffectual, and you can’t even succeed in the department of dirty tricks.”

  MacVeagh’s anger ebbed now before the President’s swelling outburst. Jim felt as fragile as tinfoil from lack of sleep, and an ineffable sadness came over him.

  “Again, Mr. President,” he said in a low voice, “we understand each other, but in a way I regret with all my heart, believe me, sir.”

  “At least,” said Hollenbach in a more normal tone, “you were man enough to make a clean breast of the thing, even if you were late as usual, Senator. I feel sorry for you. I wish it could have ended as it started.”

  “I do too, Mr. President.”

  There was another pause. Then Hollenbach spoke quite formally. “I’d appreciate it if you would mail that silver fountain pen back to me.”

  “Of course, sir. Good-by.”

  “Good-by, Senator.”

  Bruised, feeling as though his muscles had been pummeled in a street brawl, Jim walked slowly from the room and down the stairs.

  Martha was standing in the living room, nervously straightening the new draperies. She turned to him.

  “I told him,” said Jim. “He understands. I’m off the ticket.” He sniffed in disgust. “Not that I was ever on.”

  Wordlessly Martha crossed the room and put her arms around him. She fastened his lips with a longing kiss, one that seemed to be filled with all the blind and nameless hurts that human beings inflict on one another. He held her tight for long moments and when he released her, she smiled.

  “Jim,” she said, “I think you’ll make a fine senator from Iowa—for a long time.”

  “Even with a wife who’s neutral about urban renewal?”

  “Neutral?” She smiled her old bantering, teasing smile. “Honey, I’m anti.”

  They kissed again, briefly this time, and Jim knew that the home in McLean was a warm place again, no matter how cold and forbidding might be the White House and the maniacal world of the man who inhabited it.

  13.

  Out and Down

  By noon that day Jim MacVeagh sensed that the FBI surveillance of him had been withdrawn and the bureau’s security investigation ended. There were two small signs in the morning: no young men in snap-brim hats at the McLean shopping center where he stopped to leave a suit at the dry cleaner’s, and no casually sauntering man in the corridor along his Senate office. Then, when he returned to his office just before noon, Flip Carlson brought confirmation.

  Carlson sat on the edge of Jim’s desk as he briefed the senator on a variety of trifling legislative and constituent matters.

  “Say, Jim,” said Carlson, “something funny is going on around this place.”

  “It’s your talent for attracting oddballs,” retorted MacVeagh with a grin.

  But Carlson wasn’t in his usual playful mood. “Seriously, Jim, I’ve got a hunch this thing involves you in a way you’re not telling.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Last night,” said Carlson, “I get a call from a guy named Phillips who says he’s an FBI agent. He wants to come around to the apartment to interview me, but I say I have a date and I’ll see him this morning at the office. Right? The guy says he’d prefer to meet me some place else, that it’s a matter of some delicacy involving the office. So I agree to meet him at the Carroll Arms for lunch today. Then, about a half hour ago, he calls and says the interview won’t be necessary after all, that the personnel check he’d been working on had been closed out.”

  “Nothing unusual about that,” said MacVeagh. “The bureau must call off a dozen checks a day, for one reason or another. Why do you jump to the conclusion that I’m involved?”

  “Oh, sometimes you get a feeling. Right? So why wouldn’t this agent see me in the office? I bet I’ve talked to a dozen of them since I came to work for you, and none of ’em minded sitting around the office.”

  “Still, it doesn’t sound peculiar to me.” Jim feigned a yawn.

  “Not alone, no,” said Carlson, “but how about that Secret Service agent who came around asking me questions about my trip to La Belle and the West Coast? That was damned funny, if you ask me. And now this. Listen, Jim, are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Of course not, Flip.” MacVeagh laughed, swung his feet up on the desk, and leaned back in his swivel chair. “Everything’s going okay. As for the Secret Service, they just got interested because somebody in La Belle thought you were extra-thorough in your questioning. Routine stuff.”

  Carlson, frowning, studied MacVeagh’s face. “So how’s that biography of Hollenbach coming?”

  “Pretty good,” lied MacVeagh. “It’s keeping me up nights,
but I guess I’m about half finished.”

  “Damned if I see where you get the time.” Carlson got off the desk and folded his shirt-sleeved arms. “I dunno, I got a feeling something offbeat is going on. Anyway, if you need help, Jim, don’t forget I’m your man.”

  “Thanks, Flip. Everything’s all right, but I’ll remember the offer.”

  Yes, thought Jim when Carlson had left, the FBI undoubtedly had been called off by Hollenbach this morning, probably right after Jim’s phone call to the White House. The fact should have brought him a measure of relief, but despondency clung to him like a rain-soaked shirt. He could imagine Mark Hollenbach as he read the FBI dossier, probably late last night in his upstairs study. The President, with his starched view of sex, probably tightened his lips as he read the fragrant implications of the government report. The thought repelled Jim. What right had Mark Hollenbach, whatever his position in the nation, to intrude on the private lives of men and women as though he were a common Peeping Tom? And remembering Tina Faraday’s guess as to Hollenbach’s own bedroom behavior—“he gets as much loving as a Tibetan monk”—Jim surmised that Hollenbach got a vicarious thrill from the report. Jim felt useless and soiled, and he found himself beginning to detest this relentlessly encircling power of the White House.

  And now the nice big fat file on MacVeagh and Rita Krasicki probably rested in a cabinet of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Since the bureau seldom threw anything away, the folder would lie there unseen for years, perhaps never to be inspected again. But there it was, nevertheless, a sapless chronicle of suspected passion and adultery. The very existence of such a dossier on a U.S. senator carried an implied threat—to vote right on FBI appropriations and all legislation desired by the bureau. With data like that about himself in the FBI raw files—and the word “raw” carried a caustic connotation in this case—what legislator would take the chance of raising questions about how the bureau spent the taxpayers’ money? Oh, well, he thought, on balance he had to admit the FBI was a fine institution. Not under J. Edgar Hoover, or since, had there been any indication of such tacit blackmail. The bureau drew a steel curtain between its files and its legislative operations. But still they had MacVeagh catalogued now, and for decades, perhaps, his trysts with Rita would lie in some air-conditioned government recess, microfilmed for posterity. Thank you, Mark Hollenbach.

  MacVeagh sighed, lifted his feet off the desk, and buzzed for Carlson.

  “Flip,” said MacVeagh when his aide entered, “my mind’s wandering today. I forgot to tell you that I want you to call the press galleries and tell them I’m having a press conference this afternoon. Let’s make it two o’clock so it’ll hit the late evening papers and still get a good ride in the A.M.’s.”

  “You decided to campaign in Wisconsin?” Carlson’s eyes lighted.

  “No. I am going to announce that I am not a candidate for vice-president.”

  “You’re what?” Carlson stared at him, stupefied.

  “I’m not going to run, period.”

  Carlson stood staring down at him.

  “Jim, are you out of your mind?”

  No, thought MacVeagh. You’ve got the right idea, Flip, but the wrong man.

  “Never been more sane,” he said with an attempt at cheeriness. “I’ve thought it out, Flip. I can be a senator from Iowa for a long time, but I’m too young, too inexperienced for the other job.” Seeing the look of incredulity deepen on Carlson’s face, Jim winked at his aide. “Besides, I’ve got an inside tip that Hollenbach will never pick me, so I’m quitting before he can turn me down in public.”

  “God Almighty, Jim,” protested Carlson, “the dope is all the other way. The White House is fanning this thing for you. Joe Donovan’s working for you. Unless I heard it otherwise from Hollenbach himself, I’d swear the President is backing you one hundred per cent.”

  “Was, maybe,” corrected MacVeagh, “but no longer. Believe me, Flip, I’ve got the straight word. Whoever Mark picks, it won’t be me.”

  Carlson flopped into a chair, his beefy form seemingly as deflated as a spent balloon. Carlson, Jim knew, had envisioned soaring onward and upward with MacVeagh, perhaps to the very pinnacle of power—the White House.

  “Aw,” said Carlson, “why don’t we make a fight of it? Even if you’re right on your dope, you could put on a campaign that would carry you to the top of every poll in the country.”

  “And the descent would be all the more precipitous,” said Jim. “I don’t aim to make a fool of myself. Some other year maybe, Flip. Now go call the press galleries. Tell them it’s a good political story. We might as well get maximum mileage out of it.”

  “Okay,” said Carlson. But the bounce was gone, and he left with a slump to his shoulders.

  By a quarter of two the throng of reporters and photographers in the corridor outside MacVeagh’s office had grown to such size that the conference had to be shifted to the Senate Office Building’s large caucus room, scene of countless hearings and investigations over the years. A sprinkling of Senate employees and a score of the usual roaming, eager-eyed tourists had joined some two hundred newsmen when MacVeagh walked to the center of the long committee table and faced the crowd. He held up his hands to quiet the gesticulating cameramen who were bombarding him with querulous orders.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am here to announce that I will not be a candidate for vice-president and that I will not permit my name to be presented in nomination at the Detroit convention.

  “Accordingly, I am requesting that all activity in my behalf, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, should cease. I appreciate the support I’ve received in Wisconsin, but I request that no Democratic voters in that state write in my name for vice-president, as such votes would be wasted.

  “As you all know, President Hollenbach has made no effort to discourage evidence of support for vice-presidential candidates. Since he, in a sense, welcomed such evidence, I thought it only fair to inform him first of my decision. So I called the President early this morning and told him. He indicated that he respected my wishes. Well, that about ends the short-lived MacVeagh-for-vice-president business, ladies and gentlemen. Any questions?”

  They came flying at him like projectiles. A dozen voices shouted at once: “Why?”

  “Frankly,” he said, “I just decided that I don’t have the seasoning. I’m only a first-term senator and I have a lot to learn. While I feel certain I could handle the office of vice-president, we must never forget that this office is only a heartbeat from the presidency. It would be a disservice to the country to pretend that I have the capacity and the experience to deal with the grave issues facing the President of the United States.” He grinned. “Now, five, ten years from now, it may be another story. Right now, no.”

  “Come off it, Senator!” shouted one newsman. “What’s the real reason?”

  Jim smiled easily as the crowd laughed.

  “Seriously,” he said, “I think every voter in this country should pay just as much attention to the caliber of man running for vice-president as that of the presidential candidate. The vice-president, as we all know too well, could become president in a fraction of a second. And again, seriously, I think our party has a number of men who are far more qualified to run this nation than I am.”

  Who? they chorused. Well, there were at least seven, he said, adopting Hollenbach’s figure. Were Karper and Nicholson among them? Of course. Both were exceptionally capable men.

  “Jim,” asked a reporter, “did the President try to argue you into remaining a candidate?”

  “No, he didn’t.” MacVeagh smiled. “I assume he does not dissent from my view that I need more seasoning.”

  “Senator MacVeagh, are you willing to take a Sherman?”

  “Indeed I am,” replied Jim. “In the words of General William T. Sherman—now don’t hold me to them exactly—if nominated I will not acce
pt, if elected I will not serve. Now, having said that, it sounds a bit presumptuous, since the selection of a vice-president is entirely in President Hollenbach’s hands. Still, it does mirror my feeling and my intentions.”

  “Good Lord,” remarked one newsman, “I’ve been around here thirty years, and this is the first time I ever heard any politician take a Sherman.”

  “Mind you,” warned MacVeagh, “I don’t promise to emulate Sherman forever. Come talk to me a few years from now.”

  The press conference broke up in good-natured ribbing. MacVeagh was well liked on any day, but on this afternoon the newsmen regarded him with special fondness. He had provided the only thing a newspaperman ever really wants from a politician—hard news.

  Craig Spence walked back with Jim to MacVeagh’s office. The columnist matched Jim’s long stride with his own gangling gait.

  “You beat me, Jim,” he said. “You looked like you had the world by the tail. I just don’t understand it, especially, who knows, the way Hollenbach drives himself, you might have ended up as president in a couple of years.”

  “Craig, I’d like to level with you, but I just can’t. Someday, when this thing is all ancient history, maybe I can tell you. It’s quite a story.”

  “Then there is another reason?” asked Spence.

  “Don’t press me, Craig. Let’s just leave it that I was completely honest in what I did say. I am too young and I’ve a lot to learn—some of which has to be learned pretty quickly.”

  “But you didn’t tell the boys everything?”

  “Does anybody ever tell everything?” asked MacVeagh. “Does he ever know enough to tell everything?”

  Spence shook his head. “You’re being enigmatic, Jim, and it’s not like you.”

  “Craig, you’ll just have to trust me for a while—maybe a long while.”

  There’s that word again, thought Jim as he parted from Spence. Trust. He’d asked Rita to trust him, and Martha, and Pat O’Malley—and now Craig Spence. But trust resembled credit at the bank. The notes had to be redeemed someday, not on time perhaps but within a reasonable period. Otherwise, the credit withered like the smile on the banker’s face. The brief feeling of excitement provoked by the skirmish of wits at the press conference melted away, and Jim’s mood of dejection returned.