Many of the marchers, disgusted, began to lug their belongings back to their vehicles, preparing to leave.
* * *
On the first day, the arrival day, Florence Metzger had several times stood at a White House window and looked out—out across the Rose Garden and South Lawn, and over the Ellipse, at the growing tent camp in the park. Something like this was almost inevitable, she told herself. She had no doubt the troops would handle the situation properly, and probably no serious harm would come of it. But it was a damned nuisance, and all it would accomplish was distraction from the tasks at hand—hers and everyone else’s.
Showers had been forecast for the evening of the second day. Perhaps, she thought, rain will shrink and shorten the demonstrations.
On the second morning, the marchers were still arriving, but at nothing like the rate of the day before. Near noon the Weather Service warned of a squall line approaching, but no one seemed to realize what it might mean; certainly no one in the White House. When the storm hit, the President was in the Oval Office, having just finished talking on the phone with the secretary of commerce. Hearing the first great thunderclap, she hurried upstairs to the living quarters to watch from a window. The violence of the initial downpour hid the stampede from her, but when the rain thinned a little, she could see well enough to recognize the potential for serious problems.
When reports of vandalism and looting began coming in, she turned grim, and called in a standby marine battalion. They would, she was assured, be on site within an hour.
Before nightfall, gangs of looters ranged in earnest and in force, and she ordered the marines and rangers to clear the streets of them. What they succeeded in doing was dispersing the rioters into peripheral neighborhoods, where they filtered among buildings in clusters too small for choppers to keep track of. There was sporadic gunfire, some by automatic weapons. Around 1 a.m., eight mortar rounds landed in bivouac areas. Remarkably they didn’t kill anyone, but military ambulances hauled away more than fifty wounded.
It was the veterans who prevented panic, grizzled old men from the Vietnam War, middle-aged vets of Desert Storm and the Balkans, and younger vets who’d served during the Troubles. They surprised both themselves and the troops on duty.
* * *
In the morning, Florence Metzger addressed the nation on television, reading statistics from sheets, but mostly speaking off the cuff. She’d scared the hell out of her staff with her determination to do it that way, and after she’d finished, she was sure she’d blown it. She couldn’t remember anything she’d said, and afterward feared to watch and hear it on the cube—though she did of course, when at last she found time.
But everyone around her, journalists and staff, told her it was as good as any speech she’d made. Not polished, but rational and compelling. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d lived with the problems since before her election, been crammed with information, briefed daily by experts, semi-experts, and quasi-experts.
She’d begun with numbers—the known casualties and arrests, mostly of rioters, looters, and vandals. Then she went on to the Depression, its roots, its consequences, and what needed to be done by the government, the public, business . . .
The rest of the day and the evening were spent conferring with joint operations command, the mayor and police commissioner of D.C., the FBI, and various cabinet members, who were told to unlimber emergency plans for serious work projects. And she spoke with the heads of various interest groups, who promised to call back as many as they could of their marchers.
She wasn’t sure what she’d accomplished with all that, but hopefully something. Better to charge into it, she told herself, than wring my hands.
At 2:30 a.m. she finally lay back in her Flex-Bed with half a glass of brandy, and began watching True Grit. Before 3 o’clock she was asleep.
52
Father Thomas Edward Glynn—or a facsimile thereof—settled into a room in Jesuit House, at Gonzaga University in Spokane, in the state of Washington. He was there on the same pretense he’d used at the Cote—research in comparative religion.