Night of Camp David Page 8

  A page boy had appeared through the swinging doors and was standing respectfully a few paces away, waiting for MacVeagh to finish speaking. Spence indicated the boy with his head, shook hands with MacVeagh, and departed.

  “You’re wanted on five in the cloakroom, Senator,” the page said. “The White House is calling.”

  It was Rose Ellen, the President’s personal secretary, speaking in a soft Alabama drawl that had no “r’s” and had never known the harshness of a stone fence.

  “Senatah MacVeagh, the President would be pleased if you could come by his office at fo’-thirty. Would that inconvenience yo’ schedule, suh?”

  “If it did,” replied MacVeagh, “I’d be there anyway, Rose Ellen. Did you say four-thirty?”

  “Yes, ah did. An’ the President said to bring your cah in the back gate and come through the rose gahden.” She trilled a laugh. “We’ah off-the-record today, Senatah.”

  Now what? Two sessions with the President in five days, more than he’d had in the whole previous year. He ran over the pending legislative business in which both he and Hollenbach were involved, but could think of nothing significant. Something on vice-president? No, certainly not this soon. That was weeks away. Still speculating, he went back to his office, dictated for half an hour, then hailed a cab on Constitution Avenue for the ride to the White House.

  A White House policeman admitted him at the back gate on East Executive Avenue, and he walked up the curving asphalt driveway toward the rear balcony of the big house. The snow had melted now, and the late-afternoon sun bathed the lawn in a golden haze. There was still no hint of spring in the air, but water bubbled in the fountain and the broad leaves of the magnolia trees shone moistly. The scene had a pastoral peace, and the singsong of traffic on the wet streets behind the iron fence was a muted hum.

  The Secret Service agent standing at the rose garden was Luther Smith. He grinned, his teeth like ivory in his swarthy face.

  “Nice to see you in daylight, Senator,” he said.

  “Just looking at you reminds me of all the sleep I lost last Saturday,” said MacVeagh.

  “He’s waiting for you.” Smith motioned to the President’s office under the portico.

  Mark Hollenbach was stepping through the French doors to greet him. They shook hands, the President’s grip as strong as iron. Then they were inside the oval office and MacVeagh was seated in the short-backed chair facing the President’s desk. Hollenbach’s green eyes were alight and his thin features radiated enthusiasm. Aglow with another project, thought MacVeagh. Just where did he get this unflagging energy? It was 4:30 P.M., and a man of fifty-seven should be tapering off, feeling an ebb of the spirit.

  “Jim, I’ve decided what I want to do on the vice-presidency.” The President made a triangle of his fingers, pressing the tips firmly together.

  “Oh.” MacVeagh waited.

  “I told my press conference this morning that there were seven under consideration,” said Hollenbach. “That’s true enough, but the more I ponder this thing, the more I keep coming back to you.”

  MacVeagh experienced a pervasive tingling sensation, as though he were wired and the electricity had shot through his whole body. In the moment of exhilaration he said nothing. Hollenbach smiled shortly, watching his reaction, then got up and stood with his arms on the back of the black leather swivel chair.

  “You make sense politically, Jim, but there’s more to it than that. I’ve got some major plans for my second term, and I need a partner with youth and vigor—intelligence too. You’ve got all three, Jim, and you’ve got another great asset. You’re not wedded to any particular ideology, not opinionated or locked in the clutch of semantics. In short, you’ve got an open mind and that’s exactly what I need next time.”

  An open mind? Jim was bewildered by the speed of the President’s words. Rita would say it was an unused mind, and he guessed Craig Spence would agree with her. So it was open, was it? The thought pleased him.

  “I can’t announce anything this early.” The President was hurrying on, elated by his plans. “As I said this morning, June is soon enough for that. The climate might change, of course, but right now I see you as the man. Now, here’s what I think we should do.”

  Jim could feel the throb of excitement, a heady sensation. The President was silhouetted against the French windows, the twilight behind him softening the shrubs and seeming to lie on the lawn like orange gauze. Vice-president! MacVeagh’s eyes held to the form of the President as though hypnotized.

  “I’m going to pass the word quietly to Donovan this evening that you’re the man, and let the idea seep around the committee. We’ll try you out in a couple of those new Vice-Presidential primaries. New Hampshire is gone, of course, but we could work up a quick write-in for you in Wisconsin and Indiana, maybe Oregon. The national committee can put the muscle on for you and the word will get around that I’m for you. When I’m asked at a press conference, I won’t commit myself, just say it’s a free country and an open party. That way, you’ll make it on your own and you’ll come into office when we win in November—with much more prestige.”

  The shock had passed now, and MacVeagh was following closely. You fox, he thought. If I fail in the primaries, it’s my fault and I’m out. But if I win, it’s with your power and help, and I’m under complete obligation to you for the duration. What a torturous trade, politics. Candid as two men might be with each other, when the magnet of the White House began its powerful, circular attraction they all played the game to the limit, each according to his aptitude. And Hollenbach’s skill was matchless.

  “It will set you up.” Hollenbach sat down at his desk again and surveyed MacVeagh. “When I announce my choice in late June, everybody will say that I couldn’t do anything else. They’ll say you earned it.”

  “What are the ground rules?” Jim was cautious now. “I assume I can’t tell anyone that you’ve given me the nod?”

  “No, no. Nothing official until June. Let gossip do its own work. We want this to be your show, an exhibition of your strength in the party.”

  My strength? Jim laughed, inwardly and wryly. This show was about as much his as Ringling Brothers belonged to the man on the high wire. Hollenbach’s reversal of the facts rankled. He decided to play his own hand.

  “One question, Mr. President. What makes you think I want to be vice-president?”

  Hollenbach did not smile. “I measure my man,” he said.

  “That I won’t dispute, sir. But there are some other factors. What about my state? Iowa has only nine electoral votes. Even assuming I’m in good odor there, that isn’t much to add to the ticket. And what about my ability? Several good friends have put me down as a fair senator, but they don’t think I have—well, uh, the stature, to be next in line to run the country. I was inclined to differ with them, but I’ve about come to the conclusion they’re right.”

  “Modesty, Jim, like poverty, is an overrated virtue. Take the first point. You’ve got the stamp of the Midwest on you, and frankly if I’m weak anywhere it’s with the farmers. You’d help some. Now as to your ability. Your aversion to hard work I concede, but I know you’ve got the makings and you’re not hampered by a lot of antique preconceptions of how to operate the Republic.”

  MacVeagh grinned. “Kind of like clay, ready to be molded. Is that it, sir?”

  “If you will.” Hollenbach leaned forward over his desk, his face alive. “Look, Jim, I’m full to the brim with a new idea. I want you to hear it.”

  First, thought Jim, I wonder if he shouldn’t hear something else? Shouldn’t he be told that there is—or was—the complication of another woman? How should he say it? Jim looked at the President and saw the green eyes boring into him, the face glowing with his idea. No, this was not the time. It would sound ridiculous. Later, perhaps, when the chance occurred.

  “This new idea,” continued the Presid
ent, “has immense possibilities. I want to outline it to you and get your counsel on it. Could you come up to Camp David again Saturday night—say about nine?”

  “Of course, Mr. President,” said MacVeagh, but he wondered what he would tell Martha and Chinky, due back Saturday.

  “Good. I’ll have Luther Smith pick you up at your place a little after seven. We can think better up there, away from all this.” Hollenbach swept his hand around the oval room, as though indicating a myriad vexations of the presidency leering at him from under the tables and chairs.

  The President walked around the desk and gripped MacVeagh’s elbow, gently propelling him in the direction of the door to the rose garden.

  “I’m glad to get this thing under way,” he said. “I’ll call Donovan right away and see if we can’t get something stirring for you in Wisconsin.”

  MacVeagh walked across the lawn like a groom on his way to the wedding, dazed yet vibrant with dreams. He was halfway down the driveway before he realized that he hadn’t been asked whether he’d accept the nomination. He had been ordered into it—or rather toward it—and his own disclaimer as to his talents had been brushed aside as a parent disregards the whim of a child. He bristled momentarily, but the mood quickly gave way to euphoria again. He crossed East Executive Avenue toward the shadow of the Treasury Building as though he were treading on foam. It was dusk now, the street lamps had come on, orange circles in the lowering darkness, and the homegoing traffic drummed impatiently. He thought of walking up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, then changed his mind and stepped into the Round Robin bar of the Willard Hotel.

  With the first sharp taste of the martini-on-the-rocks, he thought of Rita. Martinis at her place at seven, they had agreed. But God, he couldn’t now, not with the vice-presidency within his reach. The risk was too great. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to mention the problem to the President. How could he have said it? “Mr. President, before you commit yourself, I must tell you there is another woman in my life.” Christ, it sounded like showboat melodrama. Besides, the affair was over, a thing of the past. Rita knew it and he knew it. He had slipped this morning and she’d called him “cruel,” but it wasn’t really that. It was the insistent pull she exerted, like a twitching rope which slackened only occasionally. That was her fault, not his. Besides, it took two to make an affair. Women always managed to arrange these emotional denouements so that the man came out the insensitive villain while the woman, bruised and crushed, appeared to weep for unrequited love. That was the cunning of the sex, and even Rita, with her factual, bookkeeper’s mind, was not above playing the woman who nurses her wound.

  He took a large swallow of the drink and ordered another. He downed the second one, then searched in his trousers pocket for a dime. By the time he got to the pay telephone booth he had become the champion of all the world’s duped males. Blast the feminine mystique.

  Rita sounded harried when she answered.

  “This is Jim again,” he said. “The heel calleth. Rita, I’ve got to cancel out tonight after all. I hate to do it, but something important has come up.”

  “I know,” she said. The tone was frigid. “Mr. Donovan got a call from the White House just now.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Rita. I guess, well, there isn’t much more to be said.”

  “Oh, yes, there is.” The ice had turned to fury and each word came down distinctly like the rhythmic blows of a hammer. “You’re not a heel. You’re a selfish, adolescent bastard with about as many moral inhibitions as a rabbit. If I were your wife I’d take you out of the house and tie you to the apron strings of my worst enemy.” She paused for breath. “And one thing more, lover boy. If you ever call me again—on any pretext—I’ll call the police and the Associated Press, simultaneously.”

  She slammed down the receiver and Jim stood in the booth looking foolishly at the telephone and feeling the ringing in his ear echo through his skull.

  Then he taxied home to McLean and that night, for the first time in two years, he got drunk. His last thought, before he fell into a sodden sleep, was that he would deliver a brilliant acceptance speech in Cobo Hall in August, and Rita Krasicki, Mark Hollenbach, and the six unknown dwarfs could all go to hell.

  4.

  Aspen

  Jim was ready in corduroy pants, flannel shirt, and his fleece-lined windbreaker when agent Luther Smith drove a White House limousine into the McLean driveway a few minutes after seven Saturday night.

  The week had sped by, for Donovan worked fast. On Thursday the Democratic city chairman in Appleton announced he was opening a vice-presidential write-in campaign for Senator James F. MacVeagh in Wisconsin’s April primary. The next day two Milwaukee businessmen revealed creation of a citizens’ committee to urge Democrats to write in MacVeagh’s name for vice-president. Jim had been kept busy on the phone Saturday, denying to newsmen that he was a candidate. “I’m flattered by the friendly advertising in Wisconsin,” he said, “but there has been absolutely no encouragement from me, nor can there be. This is President Hollenbach’s choice, and his alone.” Would he “demand” that the work in his behalf cease? No, that would be presumptuous. Wisconsin was a sovereign state. All he could do was say that he was not a candidate.

  Martha and Chinky, who arrived home that morning from Des Moines, first protested his evening trip to Camp David, but when Jim told Martha of President Hollenbach’s decision, she’d kissed him, cried just a little, and then washed and ironed his flannel shirt and pressed his old pants, complaining the while that this was no way to dress for an appointment with the President. But both mother and daughter were excited. The flurry of phone calls kindled the household.

  On the drive to the Catoctin Mountains, Jim sat in the front seat with Smith, and they talked while the agent drove. MacVeagh joked about Hollenbach’s custom of sitting in the dark at the mountain lodge, but Smith said the agents rather liked it. Despite their security precautions, some nut could always wriggle up the far side of the mountain with a rifle and take aim through a telescopic sight. If the lights were on, the President would make a fine target through the picture window. No, if a president had to have a quirk, that was a good one to have. Hearing Rita’s story of frequent light dimming at Camp David thus confirmed, MacVeagh wondered whether her source was this handsome, dark-featured agent with the shining teeth. He asked Smith if he was a bachelor. “Yeah, still lucky after thirty-two years,” he replied. Well, Smith could do worse than Rita, thought MacVeagh, even if she had shown that she could blaze like a wildcat. He cringed at the memory.

  MacVeagh had to knock at the door of the President’s lodge this time. A muffled voice bid him enter. The room was darkened again, and Jim had some trouble finding the President in the gloom. Hollenbach stood in a far corner, his back to MacVeagh, and he was looking through the big window down the stretch of parkland which served as the one-hole golf course. The snow had melted now, save for ragged clumps near the lodge and under the pines and hardwoods which framed the fairway. A half-moon rode high behind a puff of cloud, and the hilltop shadows were sharply etched as though in an engraving. In the fireplace one huge log smoked above a bright bed of coals. The room held the tang of hickory smoke.

  Hollenbach turned and walked toward MacVeagh. There was no greeting and his long face was set without a smile. He wore khaki pants, moccasins, and a black turtleneck sweater that made him look as though he had stepped from a vintage photograph of a college football team in the days before the forward pass. Hollenbach reached into his pants pocket and handed MacVeagh a crumpled newspaper clipping.

  “Just what kind of man is this Craig Spence?” he demanded. His voice rasped.

  MacVeagh tried to read the clipping, but the print was too small for the dim light. He looked questioningly at the President.

  “Because I happened to say that seven people were under consideration for vice-president,” said Hollenbach, “Spence has t
he gall to liken the situation to ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Just for the purposes of a cheap quip, he’s willing to hold the office of President of the United States up to ridicule. I thought he was a friend of yours.”

  “He is, Mr. President.” MacVeagh chuckled. The President was joshing him. “Actually, it does describe the thing pretty deftly, doesn’t it?”

  “You think that’s funny?” Hollenbach glared at him.

  “Well, sure…” MacVeagh stopped. If Hollenbach was fooling, he was the world’s best actor.

  “I definitely do not.” The President’s voice grated like rock rubbed against rock. “It’s a snide little crack designed to demean the President. Snow White! As though I were some juvenile innocent wandering around in a wicked world, ready to be fleeced.”

  “Oh, now, Mr. President,” said MacVeagh, “you’re reading too much into it. I imagine Craig was merely indicating that you’re a good president faced with a choice of men who are all a considerable cut below your ability.”

  “Nonsense!” Hollenbach shouted the word. He clenched his fingers into fists. “It was the phrase of a crafty columnist who knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to belittle the presidency and drag it down to his own smart-aleck level.”

  MacVeagh was too flabbergasted to reply. He could feel the anger flowing from the President in the shadowy room, but it seemed to have an unreal quality, like a river without a source. They stood silent for a moment. Then the President sat down heavily on the couch facing the window and motioned MacVeagh to a seat beside him.

  “Something has to be done about these irresponsible newspapermen,” said Hollenbach. He bit out the words. “Freedom of the press is one thing, but unbridled license to degrade and ridicule officials who devote their lives to this country is something else again. I know we can’t legislate responsibility, but one thing I can do. I can cut off Craig Spence’s sources at the White House.”