Mark Coffin, U.S.S., page 4
Linda, child of politics, had announced at fifteen that she was going to marry a senator like Daddy. Jim Elrod, then forty-eight and four years into his first term, had greeted this with a laugh that started to be a little patronizing but changed hastily to one of respect when he saw her absolutely earnest and solemn expression.
“You’re sure you really want that, baby?” he asked, tousling the hair that was still today as full and golden as it had been then. “It’s a tough life, being a senator’s wife.” “Mommy did it,” she said—the first time, he realized, that she had used the endearment since the skidding auto accident on a dark swamp road three years before that had abruptly removed the brightest thing in both their lives. “Well,” he had said, his mind and heart flooding with many things—sadness, regret, desolation, guilt—many things, “I guess she would like you to do it, too, if you want to. But don’t fool yourself: it isn’t easy being a senator’s wife.” “I know,” she said in a tone that made him realize suddenly that she had probably known more than he ever suspected, “but I’m tough.”
And so she was, his “right hand” who had been his only child and, after her mother’s death, his principal companion. At seventeen she became his official hostess, beginning the series of small monthly dinners that soon were to become famous on the Hill. The same year he brought her into the office during her summers home from Smith; and a year later when she met Mark Coffin, she really was his right hand, not always agreeing with his conservative view of things, but always there as sounding board, idea-challenger, confidante, companion, adviser—understander.
Foolishly, he knew, he would dream from time to time that this situation might continue unchanged, but he knew he had a very bright, very determined and very beautiful daughter, and he was not really surprised when nature took its course. He was a little surprised, at first, that it had happened so early; but as he came to know Mark, he began to think that perhaps Linda had chosen more shrewdly than she knew. Their potentials together were very great.
Mark was handsome as she was beautiful. There was about him at twenty-two an air of steadiness and maturity considerably beyond his years, plus the easygoing generosity and good will that drew most people instinctively to him. And he was heir to the Sacramento Statesman, even though he appeared to be engaged in some sort of mild rebellion against the family destiny that was taking him out of the newspaper business into the academic life. When Senator Elrod met Harry and Margaret Coffin he knew that they regarded this as a temporary aberration that would presently yield to what Margaret in her gently firm way called “the realities.”
At first Jim Elrod thought this, too; but the more he studied his son-in-law, the more he decided Mark knew what he was doing. The Statesman was a generally conservative paper: Mark would separate himself from this by joining the teaching staff at Stanford, where he would be free to express his own ideas and not be tied to his father’s. At the same time he would get out from under the burden of the paper’s reputation among California voters whose often erratic swings between conservatism and liberalism did so much to give the state’s politics their reputation for crazy-quilt unpredictability. And he would write a book or two, which he proceeded to do, which would distinguish him even further as his own man. Mark, Jim Elrod decided quite early, knew exactly what he was doing; though he did not quite see how Mark would make it from the Stanford campus to the national arena.
And actually, Mark thought now, he had wondered sometimes himself. He remembered the number of times his father-in-law had said, “You ought to be in the Senate, boy, but I’m blamed if I see how you’re goin’ to get there from Palo Alto. You’ve got to get into the mainstream. Can’t swim with the big fish off there in a little puddle on the side.”
“Stanford,” he always objected mildly, “isn’t a little puddle, Jim. And anyway, maybe I don’t want to be in the Senate.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be in the White House,” Senator Elrod replied humorously, “but like all senators over thirty and under ninety, I’d rather like to have the chance.”
So would he, Mark acknowledged silently, so would he. And here he was on the first rung of the ladder, so apparently his strategy had paid off after all.
Not that it was at first a conscious strategy, and not that he had ever really acknowledged to Linda that he had one; but bit by bit, sometimes not very clearly or directly but always with a general drift, he seemed to have been able to shape things that way. On many occasions Linda had suggested that he run for office locally, “just to get your feet wet.” Each time he had gently repulsed the idea, until finally one day, in a rare show of exasperation, she had snapped, “Well, I guess you’re always just going to be a stick-in-the-mud professor, then!”
“Getting to be a better-known one,” he pointed out—again, mildly, because she had great ambitions for him and her devotion to him and his welfare was absolute. “I’ve written a book that hasn’t been so badly received, I’m working on another, I’m getting along well here. Why,” he said with a teasing glance, “I may be dean of the poli sci department some day. Who could ask for anything more?”
“Oh, Mark, for heaven’s sake!” she said, still impatient but beginning to smile at his teasing. “You’re not going to be content with that, and you know it.”
“Certainly you’re not, anyway,” he observed, and she nodded with a sudden thoughtful frown.
“That’s right. Washington is in my blood, and I want it. I want it for me, but more than that I want it for you. You’ve got the ability, Mark. When I think of all the jackasses I’ve seen on that Hill-”
“You think one more wouldn’t hurt the country,” he completed with a chuckle. “Well, maybe not. But it’s a long way from Stanford to the Hill, as your dad points out to me from time to time.”
“Not if you play your cards right,” she said. “You can always work it through the governor.”
“I’m aware of the governor,” he agreed, “as indeed, who is not? I’m working on him.”
“Mark Coffin,” she said, dropping into his lap for a sudden kiss, “I’ll bet you have it all figured out already.”
“I’m working on it,” he said, returning the kiss with interest. “A little more yogurt, and I’ll have it made.”
But there was of course more to California’s governor than the yogurt-eating, self-conscious, humble-pie down-to-earthiness that made him such an easy target for the sarcasms of the press. (The voters loved it, so who cared what a few columnists and editorial writers had to say about it?) For one thing, he had been encouraged in his career, and really been boosted into statewide prominence, by Harry Coffin, a lifelong friend of his father’s. The Sacramento Statesman was the first paper in California to hail the youthful mayor of Pasadena as an up-and-coming potential for the governor’s mansion. (One thing he did do after he got in was live there, unlike one predecessor who had made a well-publicized point of nonoccupation.) Once the ball had begun rolling it had picked up a surprising momentum: California’s electorate was once again itchy and anxious for a change. A “walk-the-state” campaign and a carefully calculated television blitz (financed principally by the oil companies, upon whom he turned with noble fanfare immediately after election, which did not surprise them and made him great points with a lot of people) brought him into office at thirty-four. With great skill he managed to please enough of the people enough of the time so that the many who viewed him with considerable skepticism were successfully fooled and frustrated. Even Harry P. Coffin, who thought he had backed a conservative, still thought so, although he was forced to admit from time to time that “some things” made him “a little uneasy.” They were always carefully balanced by “some things” on the other side. The governor, bland, equivocal, and as difficult to attack as a fog bank over his native San Francisco, sailed along happily. So far Harry Coffin had not asked any particular favors in return for his early support; but Mark was sure he would if his son requested it.
Furthermore, his own relationship with the governor was close, since the governor had become a family intimate when Harry Coffin adopted him politically, and the closeness in age between Mark and himself had soon made them good friends. He told Mark frequently that he considered Mark “the first man in my brain trust,” and made a great point of consulting him about many things. Mark noted, however, that he never really took his advice on anything, and also that he kept their relationship an informal one, with no offers of a job in Sacramento. Mark probably would not have accepted in any event, being by then well ensconced at Stanford; and he presently came to feel that it was just as well to be referred to in the media as “a member of the governor’s shadow cabinet.” It gave him the aura without the responsibility, an air of mysterious influence that glamorized him for his students and could not help but impress his teaching colleagues, even though the more jealous faculty gossips tried to denigrate his influence and play down his standing in Sacramento. He knew it didn’t mean much himself, but he wasn’t about to tell them that; and it was only when California’s senior United States senator died after a long illness that he suddenly perceived that things might at last fall into place for the ambitions he was beginning to nurture. Even so, the governor’s decision came as a surprise. It was logical, from the governor’s standpoint, but still surprising.
Two candidates, divided as usual between northern and southern California, loomed for the party’s nomination in the coming national election that would take into office both a new senator from California and a President of the United States. One, an aging former governor of the state, came from Eureka on the far northern coast; the other, Charles Macklin, was the stoutly law-and-order district attorney of Los Angeles County. The former governor was the darling of the state’s liberals; Charlie Macklin led the troops of Orange County and the state’s equally vociferous conservatives. The governor was caught neatly in the middle between the two contending wings of his party. His chagrin was concealed but inescapable, since he planned to run for re-election two years hence and then make a bid for the presidential nomination two years after that. It was no time to take sides with one faction or the other. Something had to be done, particularly since Harry Coffin, the governor’s own first booster, had been a friend since childhood of Charlie Macklin and had, more times than once, murmured to his family that if he’d had any sense he would have helped send Charlie to Sacramento instead of the two-faced puzzle he had supported.
When intimations of this mood began to appear in strong editorials in the Statesman backing Macklin for the senatorial nomination, echoed by a good many other papers up and down the state, the governor told his press conference amiably that he would “have to put on my thinking cap” and make a decision.
“Please do,” the dean of Capitol correspondents requested dryly, “since the primary is little more than three weeks away.”
“Just the right time to decide, isn’t it?” the governor inquired with a happy smile; and about eleven o’clock that night had done so with a couple of quick telephone calls.
“Harry,” he said in the first one, “I’ve decided we’ve got to break the deadlock between Macklin and Governor Davis by getting a new face into the race.”
“Who?” Harry Coffin asked skeptically. “You?”
“No, sir,” the governor said crisply. “Mark Coffin, whom I believe you know.”
For several seconds there was no response. Then Harry P. Coffin said, “Well, I’ll be damned!” Then he said, “You clever bastard!” And then he said, “Whoooooeeeee! Margaret! Come here and see if you hear what I hear from this screwy, marvelous character!”
That took care of Harry P. Coffin, who was back in the fold with a vengeance. It left the call to Mark.
“Hi,” the governor said two minutes later. “Everybody watching the news?”
“Yes, we are, Larry,” Linda said, her voice getting the slight defensive edge it acquired with him. “What can we do for you?”
“You can help me make tomorrow morning’s news something worth listening to. Is your able and distinguished husband there?”
“Yes,” she said cautiously, and he could almost hear her trained Washington mind reacting to these rhetorical adjectives so characteristic of Senate debate. “What do you want of him?”
“If the distinguished and able lady will yield to the distinguished and able gentleman who presently teaches at Stanford University,” he said with the laughter in his voice that came when he felt he had really pulled a shrewd one, “I’ll tell him. It has something to do with Charlie Macklin being too harsh on civil rights and too much of a law-and-order man for me. Get on the extension, if you like, and we’ll talk it over together.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said slowly but with a rising excitement, “I just don’t believe it. Mark! It’s Larry in Sacramento.”
And from that moment until this triumphant one seven months later, Mark remembered as Linda shifted and murmured something unintelligible at his side, their lives had no longer been their own; a condition he now knew, with an odd mixture of elation and revulsion, would be permanent.
The announcement had taken the state by surprise. “His sole merit appears to be a liking for yogurt which he shares with our casual governor,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “Mark Coffin, an extremely young man with no particular qualifications, wants to take his vast inexperience and his bag of Pampers to Washington,” said the L.A. Times. But the governor, having made his decision, went all out. Three weeks remained in which to make Mark a statewide figure and if possible win him the nomination. The first step was to take leave from the university, which was granted willingly in the state of general campus euphoria created by the announcement of his candidacy. The second was to form a hasty campaign organization, largely composed of Stanford students, led by his favorite pupil, Johnny McVickers, a lanky, brilliant senior from Redding in Northern California. Most of them took leave, too, some officially, others informally: “Mark’s Flying Squad” became an instant media favorite. The third step was to co-operate with the immediate novelty-interest that brought him exposure on all major state and national news and talk shows. Within ten days he had appeared on seventeen. And the fourth step was simply to slog up and down the state speaking at every possible appearance that could be arranged for him—one hundred twenty-three, they figured by primary day, reaching from Calexico on the Mexican border to Crescent City near the Oregon line; sometimes as many as eight or ten a day.
The sum total of all this was that when the primary votes were counted, Mark Coffin of Stanford had narrowly squeaked in between Charles Macklin of Los Angeles and the ex-governor. The first of my great overwhelming victories, he told himself now. That boy Mark Coffin is really a vote-getter!
Nonetheless, he had won the election, just as he had today, and that was all that mattered. He had been suitably humble and earnest after the primary, and it had been quite genuine. “I’ve got a hell of a long way to go yet,” he told his first press conference next morning; and truer word, he decided, he had never said. His opponent in the other party was also an ex-governor, also aging but possessed still of a tremendous force, vitality and attractiveness.
“You’re going to have to scramble, boy,” Senator Elrod told him when he came out to join him for a week of campaigning in Orange County, where Jim’s brand of conservatism could be of help in allaying fears that Mark might be “too liberal”; and scramble Mark did. For six months he rarely saw his home, rarely saw his children. He and Linda were on the road every day, all day and often far into the night. And her help, he acknowledged freely to everyone but most especially to her, was invaluable. Counseling, consulting, advising, she helped as only a child of politics, who wanted desperately to be back in it, could.
“Having been lucky enough to marry into the United States Senate,” he would say when introducing her, “I now want to get there on my own. My greatest assist in this is known as Linda Elrod Coffin.” There would be a tremendous roar of approval and welcome, Linda would step to the microphone and deliver a few gracious and charming remarks astutely aimed at the interests of whatever locality they happened to be in at the moment, and he would know he had added another thousand votes to his tally.
But California, as he sometimes remarked ruefully to Johnny McVickers, was a lot bigger than he had ever realized, when you saw it from the grass-roots level. At times it seemed to loom above him like some great elusive cloud he was never going to really penetrate.
“I feel I’m just skimming the surface,” he remarked once in frustration to the governor.
“It always feels that way,” the governor said, “but you just have to keep going. You’d be surprised how much filters down to influence the general judgment.”
So he took fresh heart and went on; and gradually, in some instinctive way that he could not explain and did not reveal, he became convinced that he was getting through to the electorate, and would win. But he had never dreamed, of course, that his winning, narrow and photo-finish as it had been, would also carry with it a President of the United States.
That was a burden, he thought now with a sigh more worried than he wanted to admit, that Young Mark Coffin could very nicely do without, thank you. He had professed himself to be unconcerned about it earlier this evening, and his remarks to the President-elect had been far more respectful and humble than Linda and his immediate circle had desired; but how else was he to handle the handicap of having the nation’s most powerful man feeling beholden to him? Inevitably it would make the President, for all Mark’s meticulous respect and all the President’s outward amicability in the moment of their mutual triumph, feel jealous and resentful. And having a jealous and resentful President at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue was no way to begin a promising senatorial career.
