The 45th, page 40
“Churchill was a great man,” she replied, defiantly. “He was -”
“The leader of the effort to bring what we call social security to Britain; the leader of the effort to create a national health service so that every citizens gets the medical care they need. Churchill understood - what you seem unwilling to concede - that government has an obligation to make sure no one gets left out or left behind. There is something more. By the end of the Second World War, which, without Churchill, would probably have been lost, he believed the upper classes had forfeited the right to lead the country the way they had in the past. The Battle of Britain, the air battle in which the RAF beat back the German air force, the battle that meant Britain would be safe from invasion, was not won by pilots who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge. It was not won by pilots from wealthy, titled families. The pilots who won the Battle of Britain came from the British middle class. Churchill understood where the people who had thought first about their country had come from and that these were the people who should now begin to lead. That, it seems to me, is what a conservative should do: make sure that those who give the most to their country are in the best position eventually to lead their country.”
Julian looked around the room, his gaze resting for a brief moment on each member of congress, encouraging them to take seriously what he had just said.
“The question before you, ladies and gentlemen, is not so much how you are going to vote as why. Vote what you think is right and, if you do that, whether you vote in favor or against the bill, you will always have my respect. I wish you well in your deliberations.”
He started for the door at the side, but then stopped to whisper something in Ismael’s ear. The meeting was over. Ismael stood at the main entrance, as he had nearly four hours earlier, and shook hands with everyone as they left. He did not shake hands with Angela Murray.
“The president wants to see you.”
“When?” she asked, irritably. “This week is really -”
Ismael did not let her finish. “Now,” he said, abruptly. “Follow me.”
She walked beside him down a long corridor to the Oval Office. He did not speak a word. He opened the door for her and immediately shut it behind her. She was alone with Julian Drake.
“Come in, come in,” he said, motioning to her from behind his desk. He was sitting with his legs crossed, leaning back in the leather chair, glancing casually through some document. He did not look up, and when she came nearer, gestured toward the straight back chair in front. “Sit down. I just wanted to….” He finished what he was doing and for the first time turned to her, a faint smile on his lips and something deadly serious in his eyes. “You might want to look at this.” He said this in a way that seemed to imply a question, though what that question might be she had no idea. When he handed it to her and she saw what it was, she almost laughed.
“I’ve seen this,” she remarked with studied indifference as she put it back on his desk. “Your Mr. Cooper gave it to Conrad Wilson and told him to use it to threaten me - and Rufus Chambers and everyone else who is standing in your way.”
“Yes, I know what Ismael did; he told me after he did it.”
“I doubt he would have done it if he did not think you would approve.”
“Ismael did what I would have done under the circumstances. He did what I expected he would do, knowing what he thought he knew.”
“What he thought he knew?”
“And you did what I thought you would, knowing what you thought you knew.”
“What I thought I -”
Raising an eyebrow, Julian seemed to taunt her with her own ignorance. There was something she did not know; something, he seemed to suggest with that look of his, that changed everything.
“You thought - Ismael thought - that your telephone had been tapped and that you had been recorded talking with Rufus Chambers about my assassination. You thought -”
“No one was serious! It was just talk, that’s all it was,” she insisted, indignant that anyone could think otherwise. “It was stupid. I admit that. I was angry, upset; I didn’t like - I don’t like - what you’re trying to do. And so I said some things that I’m sure I shouldn’t have said, but -”
“But you didn’t just say things, did you?” he asked with a piercing, lethal stare. “You did more than that.” He pointed toward the FBI report that lay just beyond her reach. “Read it again.”
“Read it…? All right, but I don’t….” she said, as she turned to the first page.
“No, not the first few pages - that’s what you read before, what Ismael read before, the reason he went to New York, the reason he did what he did. That was all I let him see. He doesn’t know about the rest. No one does. And if you do what I ask, no one ever will.”
She glanced through the first few pages, the ones she had seen before, and then, suddenly, she froze.
“It’s all there,” said Julian, in a calm, strangely soothing voice. “The payment that was made, the name of the hired assassin, the time, the date, the place where it is supposed to happen, everything, every last detail.”
Her mouth was so dry that when she tried to speak her voice cracked.
“What is it you want me to do? You want me to tell everyone I’ve changed my mind, that after our meeting I’m now convinced that you’re right after all, that the bill should pass. I can do that; I can make it sound like its true.”
Julian seemed almost sympathetic, and in a way he was.
“No, I don’t want you to do that. I meant what I said in there: I want everyone to vote the way they think they should. No, I don’t want your support. I was something else, something you’ll never understand, something no one would ever understand. Let me explain.”
An hour later, when Angela Murray finally left the White House, her hair had turned white.
Chapter Twenty Six
It was late, or was it early? Time lost all meaning when Julian wanted to talk. It was two-thirty in the morning, everyone else in Washington was asleep. Ismael had gone to bed a little after eleven, knowing there was always the chance that long before daybreak there would be something Julian would suddenly want to discuss. He was used to it; more than that, he looked forward to it. Five minutes after the telephone next to his bed rang, he was dressed and on his way to the Oval Office. Julian, wearing a coat and tie, looked completely rested.
“I got a couple of hours,” he explained. “This is the best time to be awake: when everyone else is asleep. No one can bother you. It’s quiet; you can think - you can study.”
Ismael took the chair on the side of the desk, a quarter turn from Julian.
“It’s been an interesting few weeks, don’t you think?”
“Interesting? I wonder if that is what F.D.R. said after his first hundred days. It isn’t the word most people are using. They’re a little more emphatic: ‘revolutionary,’ ‘catastrophic’, ‘visionary’, ‘foolish’, ‘the work of genius,’ ‘the work of idiots.’ But, yes, you could say it has been an interesting few weeks.”
“And now Louis is in the hospital, dying. He did what he said he would - what I said he would - stayed alive to finish his work. He got the votes we needed in the senate. Without that….”
“That isn’t what he thinks. I was with him at Bethesda yesterday. He’s convinced it’s all because of what you did in that meeting with the undecideds. No, that isn’t exactly right,” said Ismael, correcting himself. There was a shrewd gleam of recollection in his eyes. “He said it was all because of Rachel Good.”
“I know that. If she hadn’t….”
“Louis said if you hadn’t invited her nothing would have changed, everyone would still have been afraid of what would happen to them in their next election. But once Rachel reported the threats that were made, the threats that were repeated, then the question became one of political courage.”
“And courage in politics can be a very great political advantage,” said Julian, with a wry grin, “as long as it isn’t kept hidden from the public.”
“Every undecided senator and three quarters of the congressmen voted in favor, and so did four senators and more than a dozen members of the House who had gone on record in opposition.”
“A cynic might say that the lesson in all this is that if you want to buy a senator or a congressman make sure you do it in private,” remarked Julian with a frown. “The better lesson is that the same ambition that makes them vulnerable to those who can threaten their political careers, makes them understand the importance of their own reputations. That was the reason I wanted Angela Murray there, the reason I said I didn’t think I could win without her.”
Ismael sat back, crossed his left arm over his chest, and with his right hand began to stroke his chin. He studied Julian with more than curious interest, with something that almost seemed a challenge.
“You want to know what happened in that private meeting I had with her.” For a brief moment he held Ismael’s gaze in his own, and then looked past him. “Nothing, really. I told her I knew what she had done, that I had read the FBI report; I told her that what happened next was up to her.”
Ismael did not entirely believe him. He was certain that was more to it, that more than what Julian had just described had taken place. Julian was holding something back, but Ismael knew better than to ask.
“You’ve heard what happened?” Julian looked at him with a blank expression. “She resigned her position, quit without notice, and seems to have pretty much disappeared. No one knows where she is or what she is doing. But you…?”
Julian ignored the question. There were other things on his mind.
“It worked, the bill passed. It’s done. Everything is done.”
“Everything? I don’t understand.”
“There were two things that needed to be done, two pillars that needed to be built. Everyone now has the right - which will soon enough be seen as almost an obligation - to serve four years in the military, four years learning the lessons of discipline and honor and shared sacrifice, the importance of looking out for one another. There aren’t any differences of wealth, there aren’t any inherited privileges, in the military. No one worries about whether someone else is having a good time. They aren’t going to be entertained. This isn’t some kind of mindless game and they aren’t going to be idle spectators. Four years of training, four years learning what makes both an individual and a nation great.
“That is one pillar, the other is what we have just done: making the space program the highest national priority we have, getting Congress to approve as much money as can be spent. These people who criticize it, who say that it is the stuff of Hollywood, the movies, science fiction, they’re more right than they know. What has caught the American imagination more than the possibility of exploring the universe? Remember when I told you it was all a question of what you look up to, what a country looks up to? We have always looked up to the stars. That’s the reason those movies have always been so popular. They appeal to the natural curiosity about our own existence, why we’re here, what it means to be a human being, why we inhabit this one particular planet in what seems an endless universe. Look around you. What is missing from American life? - A common sense of purpose, a dedication to something of lasting importance, something that together we can all help achieve, something that will let us leave our mark.”
Ismael did not entirely disagree. There had been too many late night conversations in which he had heard Julian, as he had just now done again, the importance of those two accomplishments. But those were not the only things Julian wanted to achieve. The list was endless. there did not seem anything he did not want to change. When he reminded him of that, Julian tapped his hand on a thick, thousand page volume that sat on top of a stack of things he had been reading.
“Plutarch. Everyone, at least everyone who wants to be reasonably well-educated, should read this and learn what great men there used to be. Read how Lycurgus, when he gave the Spartans their laws, made them agree that they could not be changed without his consent; read how he then left Sparta and did not come back for ten years. They had ten years to get used to their new way of life; ten years so that what was at the beginning an innovation, a change from how they had lived before, could become a habit, a tradition. When the ten years ended, no one wanted change; they understood that if Sparta was to endure no one could even think to question what the laws required. Which isn’t to say that they did not understand that conditions, circumstances, sometimes change and the laws then have to change as well. That was the reason they allowed anyone to propose a change in the laws if he thought one was needed. If everyone agreed, he was honored as having benefitted the city; if his proposal did not pass, he was killed,” explained Julian with a look of such eager malice that Ismael started to laugh.
“Shall I call the Speaker in the morning and tell him you think they should add that to the House’s rules of procedure?”
“That would be unkind. He would spend all day trying to figure out if you were serious, and he’s so dull-witted he might decide you were.”
Julian’s eyes were darting all around; his mouth, even when he was not speaking, could not stop moving, as if he were in mad pursuit of so many different thoughts that as soon as the words to express one of them came into his mind, they flew away, chased off by another, more insistent thought.
“That is the problem, don’t you see? We did what we said we would, we did what scarcely anyone thought we could - but only because we moved as quickly as we did. Louis understood. When you’re first elected, when you first become president - if you have won it in a way that leaves not doubt you have the country with you - the hopes of everyone are with you, everyone wants you to succeed. It doesn’t last; it can’t. Once you have done something, especially if it is as fundamental as this, a reaction sets in. Once you’ve done something, there is something to criticize, something with which to find fault. The question isn’t what you can do in the first hundred days; the question is how you can protect what has been accomplished; protect it long enough that it becomes part of the very fabric of American life.”
“For ten years, like Lycurgus?”
Julian stared out the window at the darkened sky. A strange, enigmatic smile moved slowly across his mouth.
“Or like Empedocles,” he said in a low, almost inaudible voice. He turned to Ismael with a sparkle in his eye. “Do you know the story? Empedocles, if he is remembered at all, is remembered as a footnote in the brief history of pre-Socratic philosophers. He lived in Sicily, in Agrigento with the ten Greek temples arranged like step stones to the sea. He was a physician who, it was said, once brought a dead woman back to life, but he was also, like Pericles in Athens, the dominant, the controlling force in that city’s democracy. Other less able, more ambitious, men drove him out of power. He left Agrigento and, according to the legend, threw himself into the volcano, Mt. Etna. One of his golden sandals was found just inside the crater. He left a message telling the citizens of Agrigento that he had gone to take his place among the gods. Lycurgus left for ten years so that the Spartans would not change the laws he had given them. Empedocles left forever, left this earth to join the gods, so that the city would not be quite so willing to make the kind of changes those who had replaced him had in mind, to say nothing of his desire to make them take seriously just who he had been.”
Julian looked at Ismael in a way that told him there was more to the story, something that gave it a whole new meaning.
“A single golden slipper! The only proof that Empedocles did what he said he was going to do. And just how do you suppose that single slipper was not destroyed, consumed by the molten lava into which Empedocles had leaped? Or did he die at all? Did he instead, as some later thought they had reason to believe, that it was all a grand deception, that Empedocles had left that single golden slipper in exactly the place where it would be found, and then continued on his way, across the Strait of Messina and eventually to Greece where he lived out the rest of his life, undetected in his honorable deception?”
“Are you thinking of doing something like that: jumping into a volcano?”
“Or making everyone think I did,” laughed Julian. “And what kind of note would I leave? - Tell everyone that, like Empedocles, I have gone to join the gods? Don’t you think enough people already think I’m a little strange? No, suicide doesn’t really work,” he said, rolling his eyes. He became serious. “The question is how to give permanence to what we’ve done. We need time, a few years, four or five, so that millions have done four years service, time for the idea to take hold that life is a great adventure, that we don’t have to involve ourselves in other people’s quarrels, that we can lead better by example, by what we set out to do, exploring everything the eye can see.”
Twisting around, Julian bent forward, his left hand on the arm of the chair, his right elbow on the desk. He began to draw circles in the air as he talked.
“People talk about American exceptionalism, that the laws of history don’t apply to us. There are two problems. There are no laws of history; history does not have a purpose. But there are laws of human conduct, there is a difference between good and evil, and a nation that forgets that difference is almost always doomed to pay a price for its ignorance. What is exceptional about America is how often the best presidents have been lucky, not just in their lives - the way that, sometimes from the most unlikely beginning, they became president - but lucky in their deaths. Adams and Jefferson both die the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Astonishing, when you think about it; singularly fitting that it should happen that way, political rivals who became great friends. It is the story of America. Then consider Lincoln. If he hadn’t died when he did, if he had not been murdered by John Wilkes Booth, the country might have been saved a lot of what happened in the years of reconstruction, but we would have lost the sense of tragedy that will always surround Lincoln’s greatness, the belief that Lincoln embodied what was best in us and always would. Always would - that is the point. Without Lincoln, without Lincoln’s death, we would be a different people. Whatever depth we still have we owe to him. And then, if Kennedy had lived - well, who knows what might have happened - but with his death he became someone everyone looked up to, a memory people wanted to honor by following where they thought he wanted to lead.”
