Irving Wallace - The Man

In the immediate days ahead, Miller went on to explain, the House managers would fill in the details of this traitorous design. They would provide witnesses, from Vaduz employees to White House employees, to prove-to prove beyond a shadow of doubt-that the President of the United States had this close relationship with Miss Gibson. They would bring to the stand the President’s own personal secretary, and enter a diary she had kept as Exhibit A, and they would bring to the stand the President’s own social secretary, to prove his extramarital liaison with Miss Gibson. They would bring forth subpoenaed witnesses, ranging from the leftist-minded professor who had taught Miss Gibson at the University of West Virginia, to the Director of the FBI, to prove that the President’s indiscretions had opened every file in the Pentagon, in SAC, in Cape Kennedy, to the Premier of Russia.

Now Miller read Article II, and in his explanation of it, gave it little elaboration. Because the President had placed a blood relationship above his oath of office, because of “a natural and unfortunately understandable passion for a member of a minority race and a desire to help militant members of that race,” the President had been in secret collusion with the infamous Turnerite Group and its condemned and soon-to-be-executed leader, Jefferson Hurley. There would be ample evidence to convince the eminent Senate members of the President’s criminality. There would be entered into the record Exhibit B, a letter in the hand of Julian Dilman, confessing his intent to become a secret member of the Turnerites. There would be subpoenaed witnesses who had seen the President and his son holding their surreptitious and questionable meetings in the White House and at Trafford University. There would be read an affidavit signed by the Attorney General of the United States himself, to reveal by what means the President had obstructed the Department of Justice in his effort to protect the Turnerites, and thereby protect his son. And because of this prejudiced interference, it would be shown how the President was as responsible as the murderer Hurley for the death of a noble and selfless Southern magistrate, namely, Judge Everett Gage, now in his Mississippi grave, a martyr to executive selfishness and conspiracy.

With the lip-smacking, leering delight of a young boy slowly turning the pages of a nudist periodical, Representative Zeke Miller fluently rolled out the charges specified in omnibus Article III.

“We are grown men, men of the world, and we know that Babylon has existed, and that weak men are weak in the flesh,” said Miller, his words winking out across the Chamber. “Seduction of the innocent, the fair, the frail, lechery imposed upon other men’s daughters and wives and widows, exists. However ”-and his high-pitched voice rose several decibels, like a Confederate bugle, until its shrillness knifed across every portion of the auditorium-“when the leader of our democratic and spiritual renaissance, through wicked and sinful behavior, profanes the sacred sanctum where once slept the illustrious Abe Lincoln, profanes the hallowed halls of the President’s House where the tread of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and both Roosevelts was once heard, it is a time not for revulsion but for retribution.”

The President, said Miller, grown coarse and intemperate in his long years of solitary bachelorhood, often inflamed by drink, had become disrespectful of the opposite sex. One extramarital love affair, with one of his own race, had not been enough to satiate him. He had sought out and hired the sweet and innocent daughter of one of the nation’s most respected and beloved legislators. He had brought close to him this young lady, little qualified though she was for the position he had offered her, baiting her with it for no other purpose than ultimately to satisfy his carnal needs. Yes, he had degraded his office, and his manhood, and his race, by attempting to force himself upon Miss Sally Watson while intoxicated, seduce her, and only through the grace of the Lord had she escaped. In due time, the victim herself, agonizing as reliving the experience would be for her, would recount the details of the horrifying episode. Photographs of her injuries, taken immediately after the terrible experience, would be entered into the record as Exhibit C by the managers of the House.

Miller went quickly over the other specifications in Article III, and from his table Abrahams grudgingly had to concede the effectiveness of his tactic. Miller sensed that he had made an impression with the details of the Sally Watson charge. It had been strong stuff, as the faces of the senators indicated, and Miller was too clever to water it down.

He glossed over the Wanda Gibson affair. Mainly, he emphasized that the President had dwelt under the same roof with this single woman for five years, encouraged by the Reverend Spinger (who would be a witness to the fact), because the Reverend had offered her up as a bribe to get preferential treatment for his Crispus Society. Suffice it that, even after leaving his licentious house on Van Buren Street and moving into the White House, the President had been compelled to return in the night, against all security advice, in order to be by the side of his mistress.

Dilman’s veto of the Minorities Rehabilitation Program required little explanation, according to Miller. There would be a host of specialists of every race to show how severely the veto had hindered America’s economic advance and had damaged domestic peace. Soon enough, the House managers would spell out in detail the reasons behind the President’s incredible veto: his inability to study the bill with a brain sodden with alcohol, his persistent desire to placate Afro-American extremists who had no desire for the domestic tranquillity that passage of the bill would insure, above all, his determination to insult Congress and take all the reins of government into his own hands.

As to the President’s history of alcohol addiction, that would be put forth in irrefutable affidavits collected throughout the Midwest, and in Washington, D.C., and its environs.

Now, his voice having become ragged, Zeke Miller paused and swallowed a few times. He laid aside his notes, and then standing wide-legged, hands on his hips, he surveyed the crowded Senate Chamber.

“At last,” he said, “we have come to Article IV, the gravest crime we can charge against the President, the one beside which all others seem petty misdemeanors in their meaning and portent. For, in commission of this single misdeed, the Chief Executive has, like an insane Samson, attempted to crumple the pillars of our institutions and bring our proud temple of democracy down into rubble and ruin. It was mainly for this high crime that Andrew Johnson was haled before the bar of justice, and it is for this same act of arrogant lawlessness, if for no other, that we are met here this afternoon.

“Once more, permit me to quote Ben Butler’s remarks, on a similar issue, in the first impeachment trial. ‘Has the President, under the Constitution, the more than kingly prerogative at will to remove from office, and suspend from office indefinitely, all executive officers of the United States, either civil, military or naval, at any time and all times, and fill the vacancies with creatures of his own appointment, for his own purposes, without any restraint whatever, or possibility of restraint by the Senate, or by Congress through laws duly enacted? The House of Representatives, on behalf of the people, join this issue by affirming that the exercise of such powers is a high misdemeanor in office.’ ”

Miller halted, pulled himself to his full bantam height, and scanned the rows of senators directly before him.

“Honorable gentlemen, need more be said today? Has there been, in this century, in these United States, a Presidential act more overtly and nakedly tyrannical? No, never, never, in any century. The offense may be read on your desks. The crime admits of no discussion. What remains is only punishment for the crime.