And there was another commercial break.
“Why are you doing this?” To everyone’s surprise, the question came from Cathy.
“Mrs. Ryan–”
“Dr. Ryan,” she said at once.
“Excuse me. Dr. Ryan, these allegations must be laid to rest.”
“We’ve been through this before. Once people tried to break our marriage up–and that was all lies, too, and–”
“Cathy,” Jack said quietly. Her head turned toward his.
“I know about that one, Jack, remember?” she whispered.
“No, you don’t. Not really.”
“That’s the problem,” Tom Donner pointed out. “These stories will be followed up. The people want to know. The people have a right to know.”
Had the world been just, Ryan thought, he would have stood, tossed the microphone to Donner, and asked him to leave his house, but that wasn’t possible, and so here he was, supposedly powerful, trapped by circumstance like a criminal in an interrogation room. Then the camera lights came back on.
“Mr. President, I know this is a difficult subject for you.”
“Tom, okay,’I will say this. As part of my service with CIA, I occasionally had to serve my country in ways that cannot be revealed for a very long time, but at no time have I ever violated the law, and every such activity was fully reported to the appropriate members of the Congress. Let me tell you why I joined CIA.
“I didn’t want to. I was a teacher. I taught history at the Naval Academy. I love teaching, and I had time to write a couple of history books, and I like that, too. But then a group of terrorists came after me and my family. There were two very serious attempts to kill us–all of us. You know that. It was all over the media when it happened. I decided then that my place was in the Agency.
686
Why? To protect others against the same sort of dangers. I never liked it all that much, but it was the job I decided I had to do. Now I’m here, and you know what? I don’t much like this job, either. I don’t like the pressure. I don’t like the responsibility. No one person should have this much power. But I am here, and I swore an oath to do my best, and I’m doing that.”
“But, Mr. President, you are the first person to sit in ‘this office who’s never been a political figure. Your views on many things have never been shaped by public opinion, and what is disturbing to a lot of people is that you seem to be leaning on others who have never achieved high office, either. The danger, as some people see it, is that we have a small group of people who lack political experience but who are shaping policy for our country for some time to come. How do you answer that concern?”
“I haven’t even heard that concern anywhere, Tom.”
“Sir, you’ve also been criticized for spending too much time in this office and not enough out among the people. Could that be a problem?” Now that he’d sunk the hook, Donner could afford to appear plaintive.
“Unfortunately I do have a lot of work to do, and this is where I have to do that work. For the team I’ve put together, where do I start?” Jack asked. Next to him, Cathy was seething. Now her hand felt cold in his. “Secretary of State, Scott Adler, a career foreign service officer, son of a Holocaust survivor. I’ve known Scott for years. He’s the best man I know to run State. Treasury, George Winston, a self-made man. He was instrumental in saving our financial system during the conflict with Japan; he has the respect of the financial community, and he’s a real thinker. Defense, Anthony Bretano, is a highly successful engineer and businessman who’s already making needed reforms at the Pentagon. FBI, Dan Murray, a career cop, and a good one. You know what I’m doing with my choices, Tom? I’m picking pros, people who know the work because they’ve done it, not political types who just talk about it. If you think that’s wrong, well, I’m sorry about that, but I’ve worked my way up inside the government, and I have more faith in the professionals I’ve come to know than I do in the political appointees I’ve seen along the way.
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And, oh, by the way, how is that different from a politician who selects the people he knows–or, worse, people who contributed to his campaign organization?”
“Some would say that the difference is that ordinarily people selected to high office have much broader experience.”
“I would not say that, and I have worked under such people for years. The appointments I’ve made are all people whose abilities I know. Moreover, a President is supposed to have the right, with the assent of the people’s elected representatives, to pick people he can work with.”
“But with so much to do, how do you expect to succeed without experienced political guidance? This is a political town.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Ryan shot back. “Maybe the political process that we’ve all studied over the years gets in the way more than it helps. Tom, I didn’t ask for this job, okay? The idea, when Roger asked me to be Vice President, was that I serve out the remaining term and leave government service for good. I wanted to go back to teaching. But then that dreadful event happened, and here I am. I am not a politician. I never wanted to be one, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m not a politician now. Am I the best man for this job? Probably not. I am, however, the President of the United States, and I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it to the best of my ability. That’s all I can do.”
“And that’s the last word. Thank you, Mr. President.”
Jack barely waited for the camera lights to go off a final time before unclipping the microphone from his tie and standing. The two reporters didn’t say a word. Cathy glared at them.
“Why did you do that?”
“Excuse me?” Donner replied.
“Why do people like you always attack people like us? What have we done to deserve it? My husband is the most honorable man I know.”
“All we do is ask questions.”
“Don’t give me that! The way you ask them and the questions you choose, you give the answers before anyone has a chance to say anything.”
688
Neither reporter responded to that. The Ryans left without another word. Then Arnie came in. “Okay,” he observed, “who set this up?”
“THEYGUTTED HIM likeafish,” Holbrook thought aloud. They were due for some time off, and it was always a good thing to know your enemy.
“This guy’s scary,” Ernie Brown thought, considering things a little more deeply. “At least, politicians you can depend on to be crooks. This guy, Jesus, he’s going to try to–we’re talking a police state here, Pete.”
It was actually a frightening thought for the Mountain Man. He’d always thought that politicians were the worst thing in creation, but suddenly he realized that they were not. Politicians played the power game because they liked it, liked the idea of power and jerking people around because it made them feel big. Ryan was worse. He thought it was right.
“God damn,” he breathed. “The court he wants to appoint …”
“They made him look like a fool, Ernie.”
“No, they didn’t. Don’t you get it? They were playing their game.”
33
REBOUNDS
THE EDITORIALS WERE EStablished by front-page stories in every major paper. In the more enterprising of them, there were even photographs of Marko Ramius’s house–it turned out that he was away at the moment–and that of the Gerasimov family–he was home, but a security guard managed to persuade people to leave, after getting his own photo shot a few hundred times.
Donner came into work very early, and was actually the most surprised by all of that. Plumber walked into his office five minutes later, holding up the front page of the New York Times.
“So who rolled whom, Tom?”
“What do you–”
“That’s a little weak,” Plumber observed acidly. “I suppose after you walked out of the meeting, Realty’s people had another little kaffeeklatsch. But you’ve trapped everybody, haven’t you? If it ever gets out that your tape wasn’t–”
“It won’t,” Donner said. “And all this coverage does is make our interview look better.”
“Better to whom?” Plumber demanded on his way out the door. It was early in the day for him, too, and his first irrelevant thought of the day was that Ed Murrow would never have used hair spray.
DR. GUS LORENZ finished his morning staff meeting early. Spring was coming early to Atlanta. The trees and bushes were budding, and soon the air would be filled with the fragrances of all the flowering plants for which the southern city was so famous–and a lot of pollen, Gus thought, which would get his sinuses all stuffed, but it was a fain trade for living in a vibrant and yet gracious southern city. With the meeting done, he donned his white lab coat and