He said firmly, “That’s a matter for the internal security people, not the press secretary.”
I made my voice as stubborn as his. “Robert, sooner or later I’m going to have to either tell what I know to the press, or try to hide this from them. I won’t act in the dark; I’m not going to be a trained parrot. I want to see The Man this morning. I want to make sure that he’s the same man I agreed to work for.”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. Not for several seconds. Finally he glanced down for a moment, then looked back at me and said, “Eleven forty-five. The Vice-President will be in with him, too, but I suppose it’s a matter that you should participate in with them. And then you can stay for a few minutes after the Vice-President leaves.”
I nodded. “Oval Office?”
“Yes.”
Visitors to the White House go in through the East Wing and are guided past the showy open rooms on the ground and first floors: the library, the diplomatic reception room, the East Room, the Green Room, that stuff. The President’s Oval Office is on the other side of the mansion, in the West Wing, overlooking the Rose Garden. No tourists.
There was the predictable line of tourists winding all the way around the block and disappearing behind the tree-shaded curve of South Executive Avenue. I could see them from my office window. Somehow, even this early in the day, they looked worn and bedraggled, kids whining, heat making their tempers short. They looked like a line of refugees whose only sacred possessions were cameras and souvenir balloons.
I took the underground slideway to the White House. It saved time and aggravation. There was a uniformed Marine Corps guard at the basement entrance to the slideway in my building; a half-dozen or more of them in pillboxes along the cleanly tiled tunnel, armed with automatic rifles and God knows what else; and another squad at the end under the White House, When the elevator opened in the West Wing’s corridor, a trio of Secret Service agents, all in civvies and very polite, walked me under the identification arch.
The arch is like the old-fashioned inspection machines they have at airports, where they check you and anything you’re carrying for weapons. But at the White House, the advanced technology of the identification arch checks your fingerprints, retinal patterns, voiceprint, physiognomy, and weight, all in the three seconds it takes you to walk through the portal. All you have to do is say your name aloud and hold your hands up, palm-outward, as you walk through. The machinery in the arch checks you out against a preprogrammed list of cleared personnel. If you don’t check out, those polite and soft-talking Secret Service men will quietly ask you to wait while they check further on you. If you try to push past them, chances are you’ll be dead in less than a minute.
Nobody gets to be President without inspiring a personal loyalty in the people around him. How else do you explain such an unlikely duo as the worldly, urbane Dean Acheson and the bantam rooster from Independence? Or the men around Nixon, who would’ve rather had their fingernails pulled out than admit anything that would hurt their Chief? Or Morton Rochester, the assistant speechwriter who threw himself on top of a grenade to protect the life of his President?
James J. Halliday was my President. God knows I had a tangled web of motivations in my head when I first went to work for him. I still haven’t straightened them all out; in fact, now it all seems even more complex and involved. But from the instant I first met him, I felt—hell, I knew— that this was a man I’d be proud to work for. In fact, he always gave you the impression you were working with him, not for him. Harrison and the other guys in Boston thought I was stark crazy when I dumped my job there to go to work for Halliday. He was just a “dumb blond” governor from a sparsely populated Western state making a dark horse bid for the Presidential nomination on the strength of his father’s money and his handsome face and not much else. They thought.
I had never regretted a moment of that campaign, nor the first few months of his administration. Halliday showed me more brains, more guts, more honesty than I had ever believed possible in a politician. He was no dummy. He could be ruthless and ice-cold when he wanted to be. He sidestepped traps laid for him by the top people in his own party. He destroyed a few self-styled enemies and then allowed the rest to join him as allies. He cowed them all into working hard and playing it straight.
And, above all, he awed them with his intelligence. There wasn’t a facet of the campaign that he didn’t know in microscopic detail, From the campaign financing to the intricacies of international economic policies, from dickering with the big unions to negotiating oil treaties with the Saudis, from showing the multinational corporations that a Democrat in the White House would be good for business (and making them believe it) to balancing the Russian Premier and the Chinese Chairman against each other—Halliday displayed the knowledge, the energy, the skills of the previous seven Presidents all wrapped up in one man.
There could be only one man in the world like him, and if someone had planted a double behind his desk in the Oval Office, I would know it immediately. I had seen Halliday through all his moods, all his private agonies, all his public triumphs for more than two years. If the man behind that desk wasn’t Halliday, I’d know it.
But, I asked myself as the final security guard opened the office door before me,what will you do about it?
Wyatt was in the office, sitting in his usual rocker by the fireplace, under the Remington painting. Lester Lazar, the Vice-President, was in the caneback chair right in front of the desk. He looked like a kindly old country doctor, graying and slightly portly. Actually, he was a New York lawyer who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from a poor man’s tax adviser in Queens to a big union lawyer on Wall Street.
“Ah, Meric, you’re here,” said the Vice-President. “You tell him; maybe to you he’ll listen.”
I walked across to the Scandinavian slingback that I usually sat in during my infrequent visits. As I reached for it, I noticed The Man smiling at me.
“Do you realize you always walk around the Great Seal?” he said to me. “You never step on it.”
I eased myself into the slingback and glanced at the golden eagle with the arrows and olive branch inside a circle of fifty stars: the background of the carpet was blue.
Before I could think of something to get me off the hook, Lazar said, “Was the President’s appearance in Boston a success or not, from the public relations point of view?”
The President was smiling easily at me, but Wyatt, tucked away behind Lazar’s back, made a sharp “no-no” motion with his head. The Vice-President wasn’t in on the dead duplicate. Which wasn’t unusual. Vice-Presidents are seldom privy to the real goings on of the White House.
“It was a smashhit,” I said. “I wish I could talk the President into making more public appearances. They loved him.”
Lazar flourished a hand in the air. “You see? It’s you who should go to Detroit, not me. Nobody wants to see the Vice-President…”
The Man shook his head, still smiling. “Lester, I’m not going to Detroit. I’m not going to address their meeting…”
“Whose meeting?” I blurted.
“The Neo-Luddites,” said the Vice-President. “They’re putting together a national meeting in Detroit to plan a march on Washington.”
“To protest job losses from automation,” the President said. Then, turning back to Lazar, “Lester, they know my position. I’ve made it abundantly clear. We can’t slow down the economy by stopping automation. It’s the increased productivity from automation that’s put the lid on inflation.”