“Mr. President, that’s not enough for me. You have to perceive your responsibilities in this mess to the people of this country as a whole. Me, I have to perceive mine in terms of those six million people up there that that fanatic is threatening to kill. What are we going to do to save them, Mr. President?”
The President rose and walked to the window. His countrymen had elected him to this high office because they yearned for a return to the simpler, sterner values he’d tried, in his campaign, to incarnate. Now his abilities as a leader were being tested as no American President’s had been since the war. In the last great national crisis President Kennedy had been able to stand eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev, he knew, because he had behind him the awesome power of the United States. That was denied him here. How could he even threaten Qaddafi with the U.S.‘s military power when the Libyan well knew its use would mean three or four American dead for every Libyan killed?
“Abe, for God’s sake,” he said, his voice cracking slightly as he spoke, “don’t you think if I knew something more we could do for those people we’d be doing it?”
“How about evacuating the city?”
“You read his letter, Abe. If we start doing that, he says he’s going to explode the bomb. Do you want to risk that? Before we’ve even talked to him?”
“What I don’t want to do is let that son of a bitch dictate his terms to us, Mr. President. Can’t we find some way to clear the city without his finding out about it? Do it at night? Cut the radios, the television, the phone systems? There’s got to be a way.”
The President turned from his window. He could not bear the beauty of that sight this morning, the clean sweep of snow, the Washington Monument soaring into the blue sky, the spartan rigidity of its design bespeaking another, simple time.
“Abe.” His voice was quiet and reflective. “He’s thought this through very carefully. The whole key to his strategic equation is the fact that in New York he’s got that uniquely vulnerable dense concentration of people. All his calculations depend on that. He knows if we clear the city he’s dead.
He’s got to have someone hidden up there with a powerful shortwave radio transmitter ready to flash him the word the moment someone says ‘evacuation.’”
“Mr. President, there’s only one thing I can think about and that’s the six million seven hundred thousand people in New York City this thing may kill.
The least I can do for them is to warn them. Get on radio and television and tell them to run for the bridges.”
“Abe.” There was no reproach in the President’s voice. “Do that and maybe you’ll save a million people. But they’ll be the rich with cars. How about the blacks, the Hispanics in Bedford 5tuyvesant and East Harlem? They’ll barely be out of the front door when the bomb goes off.”
“At least they’ll write on my tombstone, `He saved one million of his people.’”
The President shook his head, agonizing with the little man in his dilemma.
“And the history books may also say, Abe, that you helped cause the death of five million others by acting precipitously.”
For a minute, neither man said anything. Then the President went on.
“Besides, Abe, can you imagine the pandemonium you’d cause trying to evacuate New York?”
“Of course I can.” Petulance flared from the Mayor like a flame spurting from a sharply struck match. “I know my people. But I’ve got to do something. I’m not going back up there and sit around Gracie Mansion for the next thirty hours, Mr. President, waiting for your charm and persuasive talents to save six million New Yorkers from a madman.”
The Mayor thrust an outstretched index finger toward the vista beyond the window. “How about all those guys over there in Civil Defense at the Pentagon, been spending millions of dollars of our money for the last thirty years? What are we waiting for? Let them start earning their money.
Give me the best people you got. I’ll take them back with me and sit them down with my people. We’ll see if they can’t come up with something.”
“All right, Abe,” the President replied, “you got them. I'll have Caspar Weinberger get them out to Andrews right away.” He placed one of his outsized hands on the Mayor’s shoulder. “And if they come up with something, anything, that looks like it might work, we’ll do it, Abe. I promise you.” He squeezed the old man’s shoulder. “But it won’t come to that. Once we get through to him, we’ll find a way to talk him out of this.
Believe me. In the meantime,” he sighed, “we’ve got to put up a good front.” He took a slip of paper from his desk and stood up. “I guess the time to start is right now.”
A score of White House journalists were waiting outside. The President smiled, bantered with a couple of them, then read the innocuous three-line statement on his paper. They had discussed the question of federal aid for New York in the new budget, it read, and had agreed to close, continuing discussions on the matter over the next few days.
“Mr. Mayor,” a voice called from the circle of reporters, “what the hell’s going to happen to New York if you don’t get the money?”
The President could see that the question had caught Abe Stern by surprise, his thoughts far closer probably to the East River than to the Potomac.
“Don’t you worry about New York City, young man,” be snapped, when his mind had returned to the White House. “New York City can take care of itself.”
Jeremy Painter Oglethorpe spooned the egg from the double boiler at the first tinkle of his three-minute timer, flicked a slice of Pepperidge Farm stohemill oatmeal bread toast from the toaster, and poured a cup of coffee from his Mr. Coffee machine. With meticulousness born from twenty years of habit, he set the ingredients of his breakfast down in the breakfast nook of his Arlington, Virginia, split-level. Breakfast, like the rest of Oglethorpe’s life, was a series of well-worn rituals. He would close the working day now opening before him as precisely as he had begun it, a rigid eight and a half hours hence, with the rattle of the ice in a pitcher of martinis on the sideboy in the dining room.
Oglethorpe was fifty-eight, stout, myopic and given to wearing floppy bow ties because a secretary had once told him they gave him a debonair look. Professionally, he was an academic bureaucrat, a product of that curious union between the groves of academe and the capital’s corridors of power spawned by the nation’s universities in their insatiable thirst for federal funds. “Think tanks,” research institutes, government consultancies-the organizations which employed men like Oglethorpe had sprung up like mushrooms after a warm rain along the Potomac in the years since the war. A projection of the impact of zerobase population on housing starts in 2005; the future oadmium-stockpile requirements of the computer industry; the impact accuracy of the MX missile over a spectrum of reentry speeds-no subject was too arcane for their scrutiny. Even, as Senator William Proxmire had learned to his fury, a study of the social pecking order in South American whorehouses.
Oglethorpe belonged to one of the most prestigious among them, the Stanford Research Institute attached to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. His specialty was figuring out how to evacuate American cities in the event of a Soviet thermonuclear attack. Except, of course, that the word “evacuation” was never used in his work to refer to the operation. The government bureaucracy had decided it was a negative-association word like “cancer” and had replaced it with a more palatable term, “crisis relocation.”
For thirty years, Oglethorpe had devoted himself to the subject with a zealousness no less total than the devotion offered by one of Sister Theresa’s nursing nuns to the poor of Calcutta. The crowning achievement of his career had been the recent publication of his monumental 425page work The Feasibility of Crisis Relocation in the Northeastern United States. It had required the services of twenty people for three years and had cost the U.S. government more money than even Oglethorpe cared to admit. Since then, he had devoted most of his working hours to the most difficult challenge that report had posed, evacuating New York City-and that despite the fact that he had never lived there and personally couldn’t stand the place. His lack of firsthand knowledge of the city whose evacuation concerned him, however, had never troubled the federal bureaucracy; such things seldom do.