Irving Wallace - The Man

“Are you all right?” Abrahams asked.

“I won’t be insulted!”

“I don’t think you are in any condition to go on, and I do believe I’ve heard all I want to hear. Thank you, Miss Watson. As far as the defense is concerned, you may be dismissed.”

He turned his back on her and returned to the table. When he resumed his seat, he could see that she had a handkerchief to her eyes, and, assisted by the Sergeant at Arms, was stumbling, then half running from the Chamber.

In the third row of Senate desks, Abrahams could also see Senator Hoyt Watson, livid, white mane wagging, as his colleagues crowded about him.

Abrahams sighed. He had challenged an ego, and when he thought that he had demolished it, he had found the id in its place, the immortal id that could not be demolished.

He looked up to realize that Zeke Miller was standing before the bench, glaring at him. Then Miller directed himself to the magistrate on high. “Mr. Chief Justice, the House managers offer their final witness in the trial of impeachment against the President. I shall examine the Honorable Secretary of State of the United States, Arthur Eaton.”

Abrahams’ eyes followed the tall, slender, faultlessly attired Secretary of State as he made his way to the raised dais. While Eaton ascended the podium and took the oath, Abrahams touched the arm of Walter T. Tuttle beside him.

“Walter,” Abrahams said in an undertone, “I can handle ordinary people, for better or worse, but I’m not sure I’d be any good at cross-examining someone who believes he wrote the Constitution. Think you can take him when the cross-examination comes?”

Tuttle glanced up at the witness stand, then said dryly, “Not sure anybody’s going to take him, Nat.”

“I suspect Miller will handle his last star witness on a loftier note,” said Abrahams. “He’ll evoke T. C. and Congressional dignity and the law of the land, and argue that Eaton was a symbol for all three, and in firing Eaton, our client sullied T. C.’s grave, spat on the Senate, and broke the Federal law. If that’s the gambit, I suggest we leave personal considerations out of the cross-examination. Equate the unconstitutionality of the New Succession Act with the proved unconstitutionality of the similar Tenure of Office Act back in 1868, and say it was slyly slipped through to keep Doug from performing as President and to keep Eaton serving as T. C.’s proxy in the White House, as evidenced by Eaton withholding CIA information from the President. I think that should be the note. That’s your cup of tea.”

“I think my cup of tea is weak, and so is theirs,” said Tuttle in a whisper. “I think it’s the stronger stuff everyone swallowed, or refused to, upon which the trial vote will depend. Legally, the Article supporting Eaton is the important one. Popularly, in fact, it will be the other Articles that will determine acquittal or conviction.”

Abrahams said, “I still say this technical stuff is your cup of tea. Want to handle it?”

“Gladly, even though the potion turns out to be hemlock.”

Exchanging smiles of agreement, Nat Abrahams and Walter Tuttle settled back to listen to Representative Zeke Miller begin his respectful examination of the closing witness, the man he was trying to make the new President of the United States.

For almost a half hour, Douglass Dilman had been gloomily sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, watching the spectacle on the portable television screen, watching and listening to Arthur Eaton grandly offer himself to the United States and the Senate as T. C.’s mind and conscience. Eaton had given the impression of being one who had done his utmost to save the country from a pretender, on T. C.’s behalf, in everyone’s best interests, but could do no more unless the nation took legal steps to oust the pretender and fill the vacancy with the one who alone was qualified to give the voters what they had wanted in the first place. His behavior was that of a person who fully realized he was giving a preview of what the next President would be like, and who displayed each patriotic and learned digression on domestic and foreign affairs like a model showing off a new garment the public might, and should, buy.

As Eaton’s underplayed performance, responding to Miller’s direction, came to a close, Douglass Dilman silently acknowledged its magnificence. For a while he stared out through the windows at the White House south lawn, with its stark elm and oak trees, and the long shadows of the late afternoon creeping across the expanse of brown-patched grass.

He was faintly depressed. Eaton’s poise and sophistication, his modulated eloquence, the ease with which he faced questions about farflung nations and their problems and America’s historic role in their future, his impeccable attire, above all his superior whiteness-these, and not his actual replies to the interrogation, were what depressed Dilman. The Secretary of State appeared to be the perfect archetype of a national leader, while he himself did not, and never would. If the Senate vote came down to a popularity vote, a vote for an image, then Eaton would be in this chair next week, and he himself would not see this view of the White House lawn again in his lifetime, except in tortured memory.

A familiar voice brought him back to the television screen. Abrahams’ colleague, and The Judge’s friend, the redoubtable Walter T. Tuttle, had begun his cross-examination of Eaton.

Tuttle’s stature in political history would match Eaton’s own. Tuttle’s tart sarcasm, his piercing inquiries, thrown from catapults built out of his wide knowledge of precedent and the country’s past, appeared to jolt the witness. Now and then Eaton’s invincible and arrogant confidence would give way to human uncertainty, and there were glimpses of a man no more a man than was Dilman or any other man. Did others see this, or was it only Dilman himself? Imperceptibly, his depression lifted.

He was entirely absorbed in the cross-examination when the telephone buzzer sounded. Absently, eyes still focused on the screen, his hand brought the receiver to his ear.

The voice was Edna Foster’s.

“Mr. President, it’s your son Julian, telephoning from New York City. He says that unless you are terribly tied up, he must speak to you, and even then he’d like a minute-he sounds-”

“Put him through, Miss Foster.”

He reached out, shut off the television set, then cupped the earphone and mouthpiece closer, and tensely waited.

“Hello, Dad?”

“Yes, Julian, what is it? You said-”

“Don’t be alarmed, everything’ll be fine,” Julian was saying in great agitation, “but I felt it best to call-it’s about Mindy-I’m in her apartment right now. Dad, she tried to kill herself, she tried-but she’s going to get well-everything’s working out-”

“Kill herself?” Dilman was aghast, chilled and shivering. “Are you sure she’s all right? Is there a doctor there? How is she, Julian? What happened?”

“After she saw the newspapers-the ones telling about her passing-and then heard the radio-she finally made up her mind and took an overdose of sleeping pills-my God, the amount of pills! Then, when she thought she was beyond help and ready to go, she telephoned me at Trafford. She wanted to clear her conscience before dying, I guess. Anyway, I could hardly understand her. She kept mumbling about some reporter who found her out, and to save her own neck she got him after me and my Turnerite membership, and now she was sorry and wanted to apologize. I tried to keep her talking, because I couldn’t understand her and knew something was wrong. Finally she blanked out, but luckily, when I got the long-distance operator to say we were cut off, she gave me Mindy’s unlisted number-then I made the operator get the police and police doctors. Whew, it was close, Dad. They found her sprawled on the floor, but the stomach pump did it. A few more minutes and she’d have been a goner. She’s all right, though. By the time I got her address from the police, and whizzed into New York from Trafford, she was half sitting up in bed, and her own doctor was-he’s still here. She’s okay now.”