At 6:45 A.M., Leonard Thompson, the President’s valet, knocked on the door and came in with breakfast. The couple sat up in bed. The night’s conversation was an unmentioned presence between them. As a husband, Stark was relieved that he had confided in his wife. As the leader of the nation, he felt no let-up in his anxiety. And the malevolent influence of the laser continued to intrude into the Presidential bedroom. Almost thirty-two hours were gone; less than forty remained.
The valet switched on the television for the morning news, and Stark listened halfheartedly to the supposed state of the world as seen from New York. The announcer was saying something about an important meeting in Washington, and then Stark saw a picture of Sam Riordan fill the screen. The announcer spoke of rumors circulating through the capital that some unforeseen situation must have prompted the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to spend an evening at the White House with the most important advisor in the government. The broadcast switched to Washington and the suave Alexander Barnett, who told viewers that he had personally witnessed the rendezvous the night before and had also seen Mr. Randall called away hurriedly from a restaurant to attend the conference. Barnett took off his glasses, looked into the camera, and asked: “Why has the President postponed his trip to Bar Harbor and why the hush-hush meetings at the White House late at night? The American people would like to know, I’m sure.”
Bill Stark turned to his wife. “Any advice for a rainy day, dear?” She leaned over and kissed him on the stubble. He rose to meet the deluge.
It was a special day in Washington for other reasons. The concerned members of the organization called Save Our Unborn Legions, popularly known as SOUL, were about to march through the city.
From all sections of the country, left, right, and center, they had come to voice their opposition to a bill before Congress that they felt was immoral and unconscionable. The measure had been proposed by Senator George T. Stratton of Colorado in the Senate and by Congressman Amos Seligsohn of Cincinnati in the House.
The Stratton-Seligsohn bill responded to a decade’s alarmed attention to ecology, the study of man’s environment. Scientists, viewing the deterioration of the planet’s resources, had been making more and more dire predictions about the future of man. Some foresaw extinction within thirty-five years. Others wondered openly whether he would rot in our own garbage. Governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain had been laboring to cope with the universal menace. Billions were appropriated to eradicate smog and reduce water pollution, but efforts were too diffuse to combat the insidious byproducts of man’s technological development.
Two years before, a World Congress on Environmental Problems had been held in Vienna. Interested parties from seventy-four countries had presented their proposals. Birth control, the absolute limiting of procreation, was the antidote recommended by seventy-one delegations.
Just one year back, the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and Poland had asked for and received an audience with the Pope. Specialists from each country produced graphs and charts to illustrate the tragedy facing man. They expressed their conviction to the Pontiff that the best solution was a limitation of the number of people on the earth.
The four nations wanted the Pope to make a pronouncement to the Catholic masses endorsing the concept of birth control by artificial means. The Pope promised an answer within one year.
On March 14 that year, he published an encyclical known as De populis mundi, from its opening words. In it, the Pope reiterated his belief that birth control by artificial means was contrary to God’s law and therefore forbidden to billions of Catholics throughout the world.
In the United States, the disaffected and disenchanted condemned the Church for its blind obedience to what it termed “antiquated and irrelevant dogma.” More and more enlightened priests broke with Rome over the position of the Pope.
When William Stark took office, certain forces in the nation were determined to override interference from outside interests. A campaign was mounted in all fifty states to educate voters to the calamity awaiting them if something was not done immediately to stabilize the country’s population.
Television time was bought to explain the peril. One advertisement brought the viewer to a flat plain in Kansas. At first only a small group stood on it. Then hundreds and finally thousands arrived, pushing and shoving each other to maintain footing. At the end, children and old people were being trampled in a desperate attempt to salvage a piece of soil for themselves. A somber voice asked: “Is this the future for your unborn?”
Senator George Stratton was convinced his bill was the only reasonable solution. A religious man, himself, Stratton was immediately denounced by church groups and other factions, which characterized him as an insensitive monster, a gauleiter not unlike Adolf Hitler.
Stratton endured the vilification stolidly. His biggest problem was encouraging other legislators to support the controversial bill. His colleagues had a terrible choice. Though most of them were convinced of the need to act, they had to face a divided constituency at home. When they read the significant passages in the proposed legislation, they quailed at two items. The first endorsed a fifty percent additional income tax on couples who insisted on having more than two children. The second asked that repeated violators of the limitation clause be forced to submit to sterilization at government expense.
Lawmakers in Washington knew that these provisions, if passed, could mean the end of their careers. Voters had not yet signaled a majority sentiment to the Congress, and the men on Capitol Hill could only sift the evidence at hand and relate it to their own precincts.
In large urban areas, where the black vote had to be cultivated, militant leaders told the people that the Stratton-Seligsohn bill was a thinly camouflaged scheme for black genocide by the white racist society — and many young radicals agreed. Moderate elements from coast to coast saw the Stratton measure as perhaps unfortunate but necessary. Though they deplored its possible infringement of personal liberty, they could see no alternative. In some conservative strongholds, rightists castigated Stratton as a tool of the left, who was trying to cripple the country while the Communists burgeoned on all sides.
In Washington, the members of Congress read these omens with growing apprehension. As the date for voting on the Stratton-Seligsohn bill neared, Capitol Hill was a wary camp of troubled politicians, wrestling with their consciences and their ambitions for continued power.
Into this uneasy situation marched thousands of people who saw the bill as an attempt by the government to practice Big Brotherism on them. Many of them had come to Washington before to protest the war in Vietnam and the oppression of black people and to advocate disarmament by the great powers.
Sharon McCandless had never demonstrated for or against anything in her life. But SOUL had brought her forth from Indiana to make her plea for sanity. A nineteen-year-old sophomore from Butler University, the hazel-eyed brunette had come by bus from Indianapolis with her boy friend, Tom Samuels. The overnight ride to Washington had been carefree and filled with gaiety. As the vehicle ghosted through sleeping towns in southern Pennsylvania, riders had drifted off to cramped naps. At 6 A.M., Tom shook Sharon awake at the base of the Lincoln Memorial where the bus had parked in a long line of vehicles. They tried to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they had brought in a knapsack, but it did not feel like breakfast, and the couple walked down past the Smithsonian Institution buildings on the Mall to a cafeteria on a side street. Inside were several cops munching doughnuts and coffee. When the proprietor saw the students approaching the door, he ran to it and pulled down the curtain. A sign waved from it: “Sorry, Closed for the Day.” Sharon and Tom went elsewhere in pursuit of breakfast.