Even before he had finished, Gordon knew his effort had been a failure. It wasn’t just his voice — weak and faltering unexpectedly every dozen or so syllables. Daryl had wandered to the back of the semicircle and stood there now shaking his head very slightly. Gordon’s attempt to win support had clearly been found lacking.
And he hadn’t yet made his strongest argument. He hadn’t expressed his deepest fear. What if America’s grand social experiment with democracy was losing steam? What if the anarchists were right and liberal democracies were in incipient decay? What if they’d lost their vigor and were on the long, slow slide into decline? Did some immutable physical law make anarchy the eventual result?
The House Democratic Majority Leader on the front row cleared his own throat. It was, Gordon thought, a reaction to listening to the unpleasant tones emanating from Gordon. ‘Mr President, I think I can speak for everyone here on at least one matter. I think we all appreciate the considerations that you so eloquently expressed just now. They are surely weighty matters, and I feel certain that all of my colleagues on the Hill have paused to reflect on them in a thoughtful manner. But I also can tell you,’ he looked around the front row at the leadership, ‘that I think the issue of continuing this war has been so clearly resolved by the members of Congress as to be a thing decided. We will debate the issue, of course, beginning a few weeks before the final funding vote. But I’m sure your people will tell you the same thing that mine do: that vote won’t even be close. I’m sorry, Mr President, but the American people don’t want this war. And Congress is listening to their voice. I must respectfully counsel you, sir — as a friend — to listen to that voice as well.’
As if on cue, a feint roar rose up from the protesters on the street.
‘Gordon,’ the Minority Leader of the Senate and a good friend said, ‘you inherited this thing from Tom Marshall. We opposed the deployment on the Hill.’ The ‘we’ was the Republican Party. ‘There were ample warnings that the Chinese were spoiling for this fight. It’s a war between Russia and China, not China versus the world. It’s never too late to start talking to Beijing. We don’t have to cede them anything. Just get their agreement to a halt in exchange for a ceasefire. Then we can get the hell out of this awful mess. You were pointing out the great forces at play in the world, and I totally agree with your analysis. But those forces are natural ones. Siberia is Asia, not Europe. It was taken from Asians by Russians in the last couple of hundred years. We are standing in the way of a natural realignment of geopolitical boundaries, and that opposition might well be beyond our capabilities. And, Gordon, it is clearly beyond the mandate with which this government has been vested by the American people. I have to agree with my Democratic colleagues on that one.’ He nodded at the House Majority Leader — normally a bitter political enemy.
That left Gordon all alone. His own party — the leadership of the Senate in which he had been a member until the election — was closing ranks with the Democrats. The force of their stand seemed insurmountable. It came on the crest of a popular backlash that had left Gordon — who had not even been elected to the office which he now held — at an historic low in public opinion polls. Gordon knew they would not be persuaded.
They were consummate politicians, all of them. They were cowed into submission by critical letters, faxes, phone calls, polls, press. But when all that feedback was on their side of an issue, they were emboldened and would fight to their political deaths. After all, they had to have some principle to live by. They had to believe in something. And it was those ‘voices from the heartland’ in which they believed.
‘It’s one, two, three, what’re we fightin’ for?’ the singer blasted over the loudspeakers outside. The muffled tones of the song drifted through the silent hospital room. No one turned to look at the window. But they all heard the lyrics — the calls from the heartland.
‘Do you have a date set for the funding vote?’ Gordon asked.
‘April 19th,’ the House Majority Leader said quietly. ‘The Senate will vote in the morning. The House in the afternoon. The cut-off would take effect immediately, Gordon.’
It was a clash of titanic proportions. White House lawyers had made a good case that Congress’s authorization of the UN deployment gave Davis the authority to fight the war. But on April 20th, there would be no funds to prosecute it. Any attempt to purchase war materials, to ship them to the Far East, to do any of the million and one things that the executive branch was charged with doing to keep the effort going would be illegal. And it wouldn’t be Gordon who would be confronted with violating the law. He had presidential immunity. It would be the tens of thousands of bureaucrats who manned the tens of thousands of offices who would each personally be faced with criminal prosecution. No matter how bravely Gordon stood, he knew, those men and women would falter. All it took was one person in some procurement office to refuse to follow Gordon’s unlawful orders. Any one functionary could gum up the machine of government and bring the war effort to a grinding halt. And there would be not just one, but hundreds — thousands — who would hesitate, defer, seek clarification, consult lawyers. The Congressmen there knew that. They knew they held the winning hand. It would cost America the war, but that loss would be blamed on Gordon. And the end they achieved of bringing the troops home would be welcomed by a hair over eighty-eight point two percent of the population.
Gordon took a deep breath. ‘Then, if the funding vote is April 19th, I will deliver my State of the Union address on April 18th.’
Clark could barely bring himself to watch the disgusting spectacle. A closed hearing in an underground briefing room. ‘Please state your name,’ the Congressman said into the microphone.
‘Henry Adams,’ the shaken officer replied. He faced the committee, the microphones, the cameras that were there for ‘historical purposes.’ ‘Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army.’
‘And you were commander of the artillery supporting 2nd Battalion, 263rd Light Infantry?’ the committee’s chairman asked. His suit jacket was bunched up around his fat neck as he leaned forward.
‘Yes, sir. I was.’
‘And on the day of that battalion’s engagement with the Chinese, how many guns did you field?’
The lieutenant colonel cleared his throat. ‘I layed thirty-two 155-mms on the battlefield.’
‘And how many rounds did those thirty-two guns fire?’ The ashen man hung his head. ‘One hundred and three.’
The Congressman nodded. He already knew the answers to the questions. They were all in the colonel’s after-action report. He asked them only to ruin an officer who already looked shattered by the experience. ‘That’s a little over three rounds per gun. Is that the amount of fire support your battalion was expected to deliver?’
The colonel shook his head. ‘No, sir. The support plan called for concentrated fire once the enemy was massed in the open for their attack. We should’ve gotten off at least two dozen rounds per tube — seven to eight hundred total.’ He couldn’t even look his accusers in the eye.