Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“Senator Hopper.”

“I have no statement to make at this time, Mr. Chairman,” the Iowa Republican said in a voice so soft the audience had to strain to hear it, despite the loudspeaker system. “I relinquish my time for opening remarks while stipulating that I wish to retain my time for direct questions to Senator Marshall.”

“No problem,” Hugh Green promised. Then he leaned forward in his chair. “Senator Marshall, I would like to formally introduce you to our special counsel for this proceeding, Mr. Brent Hammond.”

Sitting alone at the bench to the left of the senators, Hammond looked up from his notes and nodded toward the witness chair, although he had twice talked to Marshall during the previous week. The introduction was standard procedure.

“Senator Marshall, would you introduce the committee to the gentleman seated with you at the witness table?” Green continued.

Marshall cleared his throat. “Senator Green, members of the committee, Mr. Hammond. The gentleman on my left is Woodrow W. Vredenberg, my attorney.”

Green jumped right in. “Mr. Vredenberg, we’re glad to have you here today,” he said. “But I must tell you, sir, that you have no official standing. You may consult with your client at any time, but I will not tolerate you injecting yourself into these proceedings at any point, under any circumstances—”

“Senator Green, I must object—” Vredenberg tried to interrupt, but he’d miscalculated the will of his adversary.

“No, sir, you may not object,” Green said. “You may not say anything at all, except very quietly and very privately to your client. You were neither called nor accepted as a witness, and therefore you may say nothing to this committee. Is that understood?”

Vredenberg glared at Green and said nothing.

“Mr. Vredenberg,” Green continued, “so far as this committee is concerned, you are a potted plant in this room today, and we will hear no more from you than we would hear from any other ficus in our presence. There will be no debate on that point.” As the observers in the room rocked with laughter and Woody Vredenberg turned purple, Green turned to Marshall.

“Senator Marshall, please stand and be sworn.”

Marshall took the oath to tell the truth, which left him open to a perjury charge should he fail to keep the sworn promise. But the oath required only that he tell the truth regarding those things about which he chose to testify. Keeping some secrets did not equate to perjury.

Green continued. “Senator, since you requested this hearing, I presume you have something you would like to say. So if you wish to make an opening statement, the floor is yours for as long as you choose to keep it.”

Marshall was rubbing a spot on his lower forehead, above the bridge of the nose. He felt slightly dizzy, fighting off the same spells he’d been living with for weeks. He pulled a pair of glasses from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and began reading from a sheaf of papers. As he did so, clerks handed out copies of the statement to the media.

“Mr. Chairman, members of this distinguished committee, I want first to thank you for agreeing to this unusual public session.” He thought his voice sounded weak and unsteady. He tried to project more authority. “For weeks now, the reputation I spent so many years building has been reduced to dust by constant pounding, hammering, and pummeling in the press. The stories have been filled with innuendo, half-truths, and some outright lies. I could have waited the weeks and months it would have taken you—given the complexities of this case and the myriad other tasks that face you—to finish your investigation before speaking out. But by that time there would have been nothing left of me to salvage, nothing at all worth keeping, because I don’t believe the ongoing public assault of Harold Marshall will abate until I am exonerated of wrongdoing beyond all reasonable doubt or driven from this town in disgrace.”

Marshall rubbed his forehead again and asked Vredenberg to pour him a glass of water from the pitcher between them. He took two sips and pressed on, speaking slowly.

“Let me give you a little history I think you will find useful. It is no economic secret that the American steel industry has been decimated as the Japanese undercut American steel prices on world markets, including right here in our own country. As our steel dominance, then our automotive dominance, slipped away across the wide Pacific, that belt of great cities that gird the Great Lakes saw jobs disappear, factories and foundries close, homes abandoned and repossessed by lending institutions that could not recoup their losses because there were no buyers. It is no accident that those cities—Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo—became known as the Rust Belt.

“I would ask you: have any of you ever seen a once-mighty factory that has been shut down for five years with no maintenance, no refurbishing, no life? It rots and turns to rust, figuratively and factually. And rust is not a static thing. It spreads slowly throughout a community, eroding everything in its path. It erodes commerce. It erodes the quality of life. It erodes public confidence. The major cities of the Rust Belt are not the only ones to feel the spread of this rot. Satellite communities like Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, Flint and Pontiac, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, and so many more, are quickly diminished by the spread of the same economic plague that affected the larger cities. Many of the smaller communities don’t have the economic diversity to survive the death of their prime industry. Milwaukee can always sell beer. Chicago can always sell beef and tourism and commodities futures. But what is Youngstown, Ohio, going to sell after its steel markets are gone? The answer is—or was: nothing.”

Marshall paused and took another sip of water. Green, who was watching him closely, thought he was growing pale, but he brushed aside the concern. It probably was the television lights. Marshall cleared his throat and resumed.

“Several years ago, this was the condition to which my city, my Youngstown, had fallen. There were other serious economic problems statewide. As the eighth largest defense-contracting state in the Union, Ohio was feeling the economic pinch of the reduced number and decreased size of defense contracts as the Soviet threat diminished. The companies feeling the pinch were high-tech companies, and with state and federal aid, many of them were able to retool and retrain and reconfigure to meet the demands of new markets. But what do you do with 800 acres full of old, dirty buildings that the world and modern technology have passed by? And what do you do when you don’t have one 800-acre site but dozens? I pledged to northeastern Ohio I would do everything in my power to turn the Mahoning Valley around.

“I knew the Converse Corporation was not happy in southern California. The company’s financial problems, coupled with the high cost of labor and the high cost of living, threatened the firm’s very survival, despite the fact that it had a most promising line of new jet aircraft engines. So I went to the governor of Ohio, I went to the Legislature, I went to the mayor of Youngstown, I went to the City Council, I came to the Congress and the U.S. Commerce Department, and I put together a package of incentives that prompted Converse to close up shop in California and move to Ohio. Setting up the new shop was a long, tedious process. But it got done. And when Converse opened its new doors, the impact cut unemployment in half, created dozens of ancillary businesses that in turn created spin-offs of their own and gave Youngstown back its pride and dignity. So why do you question, why do you doubt, that I would do anything, anything, in my power to save the company that saved northeastern Ohio?”