Lindsay's face was passive, but his blue eyes darted around the room angrily.
"If we were all last time," he said slowly, "we could be nothing next time."
"If that's a threat," Lyman said, "I must say your timing is poor. If we don't show some unity now, with the Russians watching us over this treaty, there might be no next time."
"You got to give me time to work this thing out," Lindsay said, less aggressive but still stubborn.
"I'll give you a week," Lyman said. "If you can't clean it up by next Monday morning, I'll have to send the Attorney General into court."
He escorted Lindsay to the door. Again the union chief took the offered hand but said nothing. Lyman let it pass. Cliff was all right, and he had a few political problems of his own.
Lyman buzzed for Girard. "Paul, tell those West Virginia people that the Secretary of the Interior will handle the Rhododendron Queen. Tell them I've got a special Security Council meeting or something."
"Any real reason, Mr. President?"
"Yes, dammit. I need to plan some strategy and if I'm going to do it, I need to think-for a change."
Girard bowed slightly, grinning. Lyman knew no other man who could smile with quite that mixture of cynicism and warmth.
"I know, boss," he said. "It comes over all of us now and then."
Jordan Lyman knew he had handled Lindsay right and was sure he had come out ahead, but he was angry and frustrated. I came into office after that mess in Iran had this country's stock down to almost nothing, he thought. I had to do something about that and I did. I sat down to negotiate a disarmament treaty, something every President since Teddy Roosevelt tried to do, and I got one. What do I get? Labor is down on me. Business has always been hostile, and now that they'll have to make something besides nuclear warheads they're madder than ever. And if you believe Gallup, the public-whatever that is-is mad too.
It was hard for Lyman to understand the country's apparent hostility toward the treaty. Neither he nor anyone in his administration would ever forget the wave of relief that swept the nation and, in fact, the world the day the treaty was signed. A photographer had snapped a picture as Feemerov left the United States embassy in Vienna after the all-night session that buttoned it up. Lyman and the Russian, shaking hands on the steps, were haggard and unshaven after the final bargaining, but morning sun flooded the scene with the promise of a new day. The picture was printed in every city in the world. Men looked at it, felt the weight of nuclear holocaust lift from their shoulders, and wept.
But later the reaction set in. He began to understand how Wilson felt after Versailles. No matter how many times you explained, publicly or privately, the safeguards so painstakingly built into the treaty, someone always made a splash by charging "appeasement" or "sellout." The Senate debate on ratification gave every member of the lunatic fringe plenty of chance to rant. People started to worry about their jobs, as if the United States couldn't prosper without making bombs. As if Marx and Lenin and Khrushchev had been right.
God knows, Lyman thought, I don't trust the Kremlin either. That's why it took seven weeks to negotiate that treaty instead of seven days. But how can we possibly lose? If they cheat, we know it and we're back in business on twenty-four hours' notice. We don't dismantle a single bomb until they do.
And it had to be done. That was the one thing that finally compelled the Russians to sign a self-policing treaty and force their Chinese allies to do likewise. With atomic weapons already stacked like cordwood and Peiping boasting of a third hydrogen test, there wasn't much time left. This country will understand that eventually, he thought. I hope to God it doesn't take too long, but they'll understand.
President Jordan Lyman could lament the fickleness of public opinion, as this morning, and still retain his faith in the eventual soundness of collective public judgment. He had thought it out often during a public career that ran from district attorney through state senator, state attorney general and governor to the White House. Question: How do you know that the electorate will wisely exercise the power it is given in this republic? Answer: You don't-but it always has, in the long run. Lyman's wrestle with the problem was no matter of past decades, either. Even now the windows of his study were lighted late on many nights while he sat inside, feet propped up, shoulders pushed back in an easy chair, reading anything that bore on the American government, from Jefferson's letters to Eisenhower's press conferences. He rarely went back from his office to the mansion at night without picking a volume off the shelves in the Cabinet room that held the writings of the Presidents. Most people took the American system for granted even while they proclaimed its perfection. Lyman pondered it, questioned it, wondered about it, and so knew why it worked so well.
The intellectual curiosity that led Lyman into this long study, and the knowledge gained from it, also gave him a poise and balance that served him well now. He could lose his temper, but he never made an important decision when he was angry. He would weigh the pros and cons of an issue until his aides were in despair, then make up his mind and never waver again. Yet even as he stayed on a course so carefully charted, Lyman could always make himself see the other side. This was not modesty but breadth of understanding, although it did not always seem so. He would candidly concede, for instance, that under certain circumstances General Scott or Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Todd, the "brain" of his Cabinet, might have made a better President than he. Lyman did not find it necessary to add, on such occasions, that under existing circumstances he was better fitted for the job than they. He knew it. Those who heard his remarks, however, sometimes wondered whether he was afflicted with self-doubt. Lyman, having thought it out, would have been willing to disabuse them of this notion if they had asked about it. But they did not, for the associates of the President of the United States do not voice such notions to him, and so the question lingered in their minds-and perhaps in the mind of the public too.
Certainly Lyman was a good deal more complex than one would guess from a glance at his record, a record of unbroken political triumphs in every election he ever entered and of consummate skill as well in the art of back-room politics. He obtained the presidential nomination by making a deal with the man who came to Chicago with the greatest number of first-ballot votes. Lyman, accompanied by Clark, simply took a back elevator to Vince Gianelli's room and told him he could not possibly win the nomination. Gianelli exploded indignantly, but Lyman, who of course had thought it all out before, explained the situation to Gianelli so precisely that the only remaining question was whether the New Yorker would accept second place on the ticket. He did, within the hour.
Lyman's race against President Edgar Frazier that year was never a contest. He won it at the very start with a single sentence in his speech accepting the nomination: "We will talk till eternity, but we'll never yield another inch of free soil, any place, any time." The Republicans could never overcome the public distaste for the Iranian War and the national revulsion against the partition that ended it. They privately derided the Lyman-Gianelli ticket as "The Cop and the Wop," trying to turn Lyman's pride in his Ohio law-enforcement record and Gianelli's ancestry against the two Democrats. The analysts guessed later that this whispered slur cost the G.O.P. more votes than it gained. The Democratic ticket carried all but seven states in the first real landslide since Eisenhower.
Yeah, Lyman thought, I carried forty-three states a year and a half ago. Now I'm trying to do something for all those people, and I don't think I could carry ten states today.