Night of Camp David Read online

  Hollenbach ignored the observation. “As for Karper, I agree he’s the smartest man in Washington and one of the most admired. But the country isn’t ready for a Jewish vice-president.”

  “Of course I think you’re wrong on that, Mr. President. Look at the polls. He runs right after you in most of those ‘most admired Americans’ things.”

  “As a Cabinet officer, yes. As a man next in line to be president, no. Besides, he took the liberty of going through with a project I didn’t approve of. He showed his arrogance.”

  MacVeagh waited, questioning, but the President did not elaborate.

  “Even if you’re right on the country’s attitude, which I doubt,” protested MacVeagh, “your popularity would carry him through without a scratch. And you’ve got to concede Karper’s tremendous ability.”

  Jim heard the echo of his own words, like a man talking into a steel barrel. What the devil was Mark driving at? And what was he doing on this mountaintop, 80 miles from home, in the middle of the night? Middle? It wasn’t far from dawn. And why wasn’t Evelyn Hollenbach up here with her husband? Jim felt disembodied, unreal, no more substantial than the pale light which hardly cast a shadow any longer in the darkened room. Why, for one tiling, had Mark turned out the only light? He decided to ask.

  “It’s one of my whims,” Hollenbach replied. “I think better in the dark. Besides, I love this view, night or day, and any lamp in the room reflects on the glass and spoils the effect.” A small smile moved the President’s lips. “Back to the subject, Jim. You’ve only given me two names. No governors?”

  He’s relentless, thought MacVeagh. He wants me to trot out every possibility in the Democratic party. MacVeagh mused silently, his eyes on the fire with its growing bed of pink-white coals. There seemed to be no pressure for an immediate reply and his mind ran idly down the list of governors as he could picture them, alphabetically in tiny print, in a page of the Congressional Directory. At last he named three men whose records were known favorably to the country.

  Hollenbach discussed each man at length, a dispassionate analysis of assets and liabilities. MacVeagh was amused by the President’s unerring talent for singling out vulnerable characteristics, and he was relieved that James F. MacVeagh was not being similarly dissected. The process reminded him of a surgeon, deftly pushing aside arteries and nerves and probing with his knife to the core of suspicious tissue. In the end, the three men suggested by MacVeagh had an excess of liabilities, as did another governor added by Hollenbach.

  “Perhaps, Mr. President, the day of the governor has passed.” The warmth of the fire lulled MacVeagh and he was growing sleepy again. He generalized more to make conversation than from a conviction in his words. “Governors aren’t identified any more with the big national issues that trouble people. They build the roads, the colleges, and the state hospitals, but even there they have to depend on federal money. Everything centers on Washington, our old friend Barry Goldwater notwithstanding.”

  “Right.” Hollenbach’s agreement had a hearty, explosive ring. Didn’t the man ever tire? MacVeagh rubbed at his eyes and suppressed a desire to yawn.

  “That brings us to the Senate,” said the President. He leaned toward MacVeagh, his arms resting on his khaki pants, but his fingers flexing as though squeezing sponges. “Suppose I narrowed it to the Senate. Whom should I pick?”

  “Now, Mr. President, please don’t prod me into discussing my colleagues.” MacVeagh was bored with a game that appeared to have no part for him. He yearned for bed. “You know, the world’s most exclusive club, and all that. One member doesn’t talk about another—much. We’re all capable, all distinguished, all Rhodes Scholar types.”

  Hollenbach would not be deflected. “How about Hempstead?”

  “The name’s against him,” said MacVeagh. “Hollenbach and Hempstead? It sounds like some old law firm that’s gone to seed.”

  Hollenbach grinned briefly, but MacVeagh could see he was really not amused. Mark cared little for bantering, and he seldom made light remarks in conversation. While the President performed superbly with witticisms in a public speech, as at the Gridiron dinner earlier, MacVeagh knew that Hollenbach felt that humor was a waste of time. And now the President was deep in one of his quests. He’s a single-minded Dutchman, thought MacVeagh wearily. God, but he could be inflexible in these moods. Hollenbach seemed to sense MacVeagh’s resistance, so he named five Democratic senators himself and again he aligned their good and bad points. Jim was amazed how much the President knew about the personal lives of the senators. His character vignettes were shrewd, his instinct for the vulnerable as keen as it had been with the governors. But the rhythm of the President’s monologue and the glow of the fire relaxed MacVeagh like a warm mist. He caught himself beginning to nod once and shook his shoulders to stay awake.

  “So that’s the lot,” said Hollenbach at last. He smiled. “Except for one man.”

  “Who’s that?” MacVeagh’s response was automatic. After all, it was the President’s problem, not his, and who could think clearly at—what time? Three-thirty? Four? Some ungodly hour.

  “You.”

  “Me!” MacVeagh straightened suddenly from the little nest his back had burrowed into the corner of the white sofa.

  “Yes, why not? As long as we’re discussing bloodlines, why not look at the pedigree of the junior senator from Iowa?”

  Well, why not? thought Jim. His mind, its torpor shed, promptly set to work unbidden. After all, his name had figured in some newspaper speculation inspired by O’Malley’s difficulties. One columnist had even pointed out MacVeagh’s assets. True, the writer was his good friend, Craig Spence, but assets were assets: youth, intelligence (a matter of opinion perhaps, that one); from a solid midwestern state where Hollenbach was weakest right now; handsome (his daughter Chinky used the word “manful” to describe his looks); sincerity on television (well, damn it, he tried to be sincere off camera as well). He’d made a good impression as chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee investigating defense costs. He was a Congregationalist, communicant in a homey faith which contrasted with Hollenbach’s somewhat aloof brand of Episcopalianism. He had a lively wife and a wholesome kid (Chinky was everybody’s breathless teen-ager). Of course, Spence hadn’t stressed his shortcomings: too easygoing, inclined to skirt the rocky way, too much of an optimist. And then there was the affair with Rita. (But no one knew about that, and it was over anyway, wasn’t it?)

  “I know you’re lazy, Jim.” The President’s voice cut into MacVeagh’s reverie on his personal balance sheet. “And you’ve come up too fast for your own good. Still, slave driver Hollenbach would work the fat off of you. All in all, I’d say you’d have to be considered.”

  “Are you serious, Mr. President?”

  Hollenbach rose again from the sofa and went to the fireplace mantel, leaning an elbow near the clock. Jim thought the hands registered 3:55, but he could not be certain in the strange half-light. The President gazed down on him, fixedly as though appraising a piece of furniture.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Jim, you’ve got the flare for politics, but you are lazy, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe you’d call it that. I take my time about things. I guess I kind of go in spurts.”

  Hollenbach grinned. “Not a headful of steam all the time, like me, eh?”

  MacVeagh made an effort to keep it light. “You’re a man apart, Mr. President. Nobody could be expected to duplicate your energy.”

  “No, I suppose not. Jim, joking aside, I want to make the right choice on this one. It’s not just the winning in November, although of course I don’t want a man who’ll hurt the ticket. But this is important for the country. A hundred things can happen to a president—any time—and the vice-president should have the capacity to take over quietly and confidently, so there’s no loss of leadership and no crisis for the country. As Johnson did from Kennedy, if
you will.”

  Through the window MacVeagh could see the curve of the snow as it blanketed Ike’s old pitch-and-putt golf fairway and then fell away to the unseen valley below. The distant range was a gray blot. Clouds masked all but a sliver of moon. No stars shone, and the denuded hardwood trees seemed to appeal to the sky with bony hands. Was the President really considering him for vice-president or merely toying with him? Probably neither. He was just thinking aloud on a problem which absorbed him at the moment. Still, a word from the President on a cold March night and he’d come suddenly awake. He wasn’t sure what it portended, but Jim wanted to tell someone. He thought of Martha and Chinky, visiting in Des Moines. He thought of his young, brash assistant, Flip Carlson. And then, almost against his will, he thought of Rita. Her number in Georgetown was Briarwood 9-8877.

  “I’m definite on one thing.” Hollenbach’s voice again thrust into MacVeagh’s thoughts. “The man I want nominated isn’t going to be another O’Malley. He isn’t going to be a man whose moral values are so lax, he doesn’t know right from wrong. I’ve had a bellyful of that for one administration.”

  Well, that would eliminate me, thought Jim, if it ever got down to the wire. Not that he regarded himself as immoral, but he was sure Hollenbach wanted no man with a Rita in his recent past. Past?

  Hollenbach stood wrapped in the glow from the crackling logs. A pink flush had spread over his cheeks. He was talking swiftly again, occasionally glancing at MacVeagh.

  “Jim, I want my second term to be a great one. A concept is forming that could reshape the world. But to carry it out I need an intelligent man at my side, a man who can think long-range. And when I think of O’Malley—trying to disfigure me from his sordid little dung heap—I’d like to throttle him. Because he sank in his own muck, he tried to pull me in too. Thank God, the American people are too smart for that.”

  “Mr. President,” protested MacVeagh, “you’ve got Pat all wrong there. He wasn’t trying to embarrass you. He was just trying to save his own skin.”

  Hollenbach dismissed the objection with a wave of his arm. He hurried on as though MacVeagh had not spoken. “O’Malley tried and he failed. Never, never again is there going to be an O’Malley in this administration if I can help it. And, by God, I can help it.”

  The President’s fervor shot ruddy streaks up his cheeks and MacVeagh’s mind jumped back, in one of those inexplicable shifts of time and scene, to his early soldiering days in Viet Nam. He saw a medic’s shack and a corporal gesticulating, but the image quickly vanished and Jim wondered why he’d been reminded of it.

  The President’s mood softened. He smiled at MacVeagh. “Well, that’s enough for tonight. It’s after four o’clock, and time to turn in. O’Malley can wait until Wednesday. Jim, I’ve got a bed waiting for you in one of the guest cabins. You can take your time getting up in the morning.”

  But MacVeagh felt an urge to leave. To be an obedient sounding board for a president was one thing, but to remain on this bleak plateau, with its darkened Aspen Lodge and its occupant obsessed with the imagined spite of a subordinate, was another. He preferred the stone house in McLean with its familiar furniture, and the walls, shutters and windows he knew. He could even hear the rattle of the metal heating ducts which he’d promised Martha twenty times to get fixed, but which he always forgot until nightime.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. President,” he said. “I’d better get home. I’ve got some documents to read before our committee session Monday…and there are some things to do around the house…Martha and my daughter are in Des Moines for a few days….So, if you can spare Luther Smith for the drive…”

  Hollenbach placed a hand on his elbow. “I understand, Jim. I think it’s senseless to drive back to Washington this time of morning, but good senators are hard to come by. You have to humor them.”

  MacVeagh smiled. “After a big night like this, I guess I need my own bed.”

  Hollenbach nodded and walked through the dark to a telephone in the pantry. “Wake up Smitty,” Jim heard him say. “We’ve got a madman here who insists on being driven back to Washington.”

  The President chatted for a minute about MacVeagh’s family and about his own son, Mark Jr., a senior at Yale. The boy was smart, he said, but college boys were inclined to taper off the last semester. He wanted to see young Mark keep the pressure on.

  They heard the squeak of tires on hard-packed snow. Hollenbach held the door open.

  “I’m glad you could come up, Jim. I think we ought to have another talk before too long.”

  “Good night, Mr. President. I don’t need to say thanks.”

  As the door remained open, MacVeagh caught a last glimpse of the dark room with its great, shadowy beams. A single shaft of moonlight, pale and delicate, pierced the big window. Mark Hollenbach, silhouetted, was pressing the knuckles of both hands hard against the doorjamb. It was cold outside. Jim zipped up his windbreaker and got into the limousine.

  2.

  Georgetown

  Jim MacVeagh was in that billowy zone between sleep and wakefulness where fragments of dreams slide into conscious thought, slip away, burst into formless greens, reds and yellows, then fade again. The drawn Venetian blinds admitted only thin bars of light. He was flat on his belly and his arms were wrapped around a pillow. Groggy, he got out of bed and opened the blinds. The sun was low in the west. God, he’d been sleeping all day. It must be four in the afternoon. His gray slacks and flannel shirt were slung over Martha’s gilt dresser chair and the debris from his pockets was strewn over the glass top of her dresser. Then he remembered. He threw himself back on the bed and lay staring at the ceiling.

  A chance for vice-president! Was Mark serious? He seemed so, but of course he’d made it plain that MacVeagh was only one of many. Still, with the others Hollenbach had hammered at the reasons why they wouldn’t do, whereas with him, Jim MacVeagh, the President mentioned only one thing—that he was lazy. Was he? No, not really. It was just that there were other things in life besides work, besides the politics that engrossed Hollenbach like a man in a cell with only one book to read. There was all manner of life to be savored, and at thirty-eight the taste buds weren’t jaded. There was a tang still. He could see the lake in northern Minnesota, a day’s drive from Des Moines. He pictured it black and glassy smooth with the first pale hint of dawn through the tall pines to the east, the air chill to the cheeks and the stillness of an empty cathedral. And then the quick whine of the reel, a hooked trout thrashing, and the pulsing tug against his wrists. In a quick shift of scene, he could see Chinky, her legs wide apart, proud of the first little bulges at her breast, grinning her affection at him. He could see the white arc of a golf ball, high into a cloudless sky from a No. 9 iron, plopping on a green and lying, egg-bright, eight feet from the pin. He could feel the sun baking his back as he lay beside a pool on Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas, while he squinted drowsily at the blinding brilliance of coral and green water. He could see Martha, with her snubbed nose and tight-clipped brown hair, chattering at the telephone, flicking him a hurried smile as she dipped, restless as a bee, from one budding enterprise to another. Her gay, skittering life sometimes appalled him and occasionally irritated him, but her vivacity and bounce were antidotes for his own languid temperament and her presence gave him a curious, amused contentment. He saw Rita, an arm thrown languorously over his chest and her face lax and half-hidden by tangled strands of black hair. Then he saw Mark Hollenbach again, intent, flexing his fingers, his crew cut as aggressive as tiny spikes…the strange pallor of Aspen Lodge at 4 A.M., a reach of unmarred snow outside and little curls of flame licking from the fireplace.

  Just how had Mark said it? “So that’s the whole list, except for one man.” He had seemed in earnest. But then Mark always was. Probably it was just Hollenbach’s way of complimenting a guest he’d yanked up to the mountain in the middle of the night, just a needed auditor for his monologue. An
d yet…what was the purpose of summoning Jim MacVeagh, a first-term senator and no confidant, to Camp David on a wintry night? He could find no answer. His brain still felt woolly. Too much high living and late hours. He yawned and stretched.

  A hot shower opened his drugged pores, and after he let final needles of cold water drill into him, he felt so good he began to whistle. He put on the gray slacks again, a clean blue jersey polo shirt and loafers, and went downstairs. He pulled in the Sunday papers, Post, Star, New York Times, with the thought that he’d beaten the morning paper boy only by minutes. It must have been 6:30 A.M. when Luther Smith delivered him in the White House limousine. The papers were still soggy at the edges from the melting snow on the stoop. MacVeagh glanced at the headlines as he fried bacon and eggs and plugged in the electric percolator. But the food tasted flat and dry, and he pushed it away with the thought that 4:30 P.M. was a witless hour for breakfast. He switched instead to a bloody Mary and sat sipping it at the glass-and-driftwood coffee table in the living room. He read the news idly, focusing only on the political stories and skimming the rest. A disorderly heap of papers grew at his feet.

  He felt puffy in the face, always a sign that the good life was becoming too good for him, and he rubbed the heel of his hand over the bristles of his jaw. His weight, he knew, was nudging 190, too much for a man who wasn’t quite six feet tall. But his stomach was flat, no middle-age pot yet. The blue eyes under the heavy black brows were still appealing to women, at least some of them still told him so. The thatch of black hair showed no signs of thinning. For a man with the blood of the Scots in him, he’d been told he had a Gallic appearance, and he wondered whose genes had gotten mixed up where and under what circumstances. He hoped they had fun. He grinned at the thought. It wasn’t a bad life, if you had a little luck—and got outdoors enough. That’s really all you need, MacVeagh, he told himself, just a little more exercise and a little less liquor on the social circuit.