Harry Turtledove: Joe Steele

“Christ, I already gave ’em Mikoian and Kagan and Scriabin. Wasn’t enough. They say, ‘You’re as bad as they were. You gotta go, too.’”

“Shame about Scriabin,” Charlie remarked.

“Ain’t it?” Garner chuckled, coughed, hawked phlegm, and chuckled again. “I wonder if anybody came to his funeral.”

“Don’t know. I wasn’t there.” Charlie thought he would have gone had Mikoian died before heading for Kabul. He might have gone for Lazar Kagan. But Scriabin? It would have been too much like attending the memorial service for somebody’s pet rattlesnake.

“But I mean, how’re they gonna impeach me and convict me? How can they do that?” Garner dragged his mind away from pleasure and back to the business at hand. “If they do, they shoot the whole executive branch right behind the ear. I’m all there is of it, for Chrissake. They can’t make laws by their lonesome, not if there’s nobody to approve ’em. Not even the chickenshit Supreme Court Joe Steele left us’d let ’em get away with that.”

“Mr. President, every single word you just said is true.” Having told John Nance Garner what he wanted to hear, Charlie also told him once more what he needed to hear: “But you know what else? I don’t think Congress gives a damn. They’ve got the atom bomb, and they’re gonna drop it.”

“I only wish I could tell you you were full of crap. That’s how it looks to me, too, though,” Garner said gloomily. “What happens if they throw me out and twenty minutes later, Trotsky, he starts somethin’ in South Japan or West Germany? Who’s gonna give our soldiers orders then? If somebody does, why should the soldiers do what he says?”

“I have no idea.” Charlie figured Trotsky had to be laughing in his beer, or more likely his vodka. He’d outlived his American rival, and now the USA was in a hell of a mess. The only thing that might hold him back was the fear of reuniting America-against him. That was a thin, weak reed to lean on.

“Me, neither.” John Nance Garner reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He didn’t bother with ice, or even a glass. He just swigged. Then he slid the bottle across the stone desktop to Charlie. Charlie had a belt, too. He needed one. Garner went on, “But I don’t know what I can do to make ’em see it. I don’t know what I can do to make ’em show any common sense. They look at me, and all they see is, they’re givin’ Joe Steele one in the eye. Biting the hand that fed ’em, half the time. Hell, more’n half.”

“Joe Steele’s dead,” Charlie said roughly.

“I thought so, too, when we planted him,” Garner said. “But right after Antony talks about burying Caesar, not praising him, he goes, ‘The evil that men do lives after them,/ The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Boy, did old Will hit that nail square on the head. We’ll still be untangling ourselves from Joe Steele when your kids get as old as I am now.”

That had the unpleasant ring of truth. “Do we need a Constitutional crisis straight off the bat, though?” Charlie asked.

“Need one? Shit, no, sonny. It’s the last goddamn thing we need. But we’ve sure got one.” Garner stood up, leaned across the desk, and retrieved the whiskey bottle. He took another stiff knock. “This here, this is what I need.”

Drunk and sober, he politicked as long and as hard as he could against the impeachment charges. Charlie wrote speech after speech, trying to sway public opinion against the proceedings in the House. None of that did any good. Charlie hadn’t really expected it would.

The House Interior Committee reported out three articles of impeachment, passing them by votes of 37-1, 33-5, and 31-7. The whole House passed them by almost equally lopsided margins. For the first time in eighty-five years, a President was impeached. The case went to the Senate for trial.

Chief Justice Prescott Bush presided with the look of a man who acutely wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else. An Associate Justice who was a real lawyer sat at Bush’s elbow to guide him through whatever legal thickets might crop up. The President’s attorneys tried to make the thickets as impenetrable as they could. The Chief Justice ruled in their favor whenever he could without making himself look completely ridiculous.

It didn’t matter. The three Congressmen who managed the push for conviction dealt with legal thickets by driving over them with a Pershing tank and crushing them flat. Joe Steele had committed all kinds of impeachable offenses. Everybody knew it. Nobody’d done, nobody’d been able to do, a thing about it while he was alive to commit them. Now that he was dead, John Nance Garner made a handy scapegoat.

When the Senate voted on whether to convict, the tallies on the three articles were 84–12, 81–15, and 73–23, all well over the two-thirds required. Watching from the visitors’ gallery, Charlie saw Prescott Bush lick his lips before stating the obvious: “President Garner has been convicted of the three articles for which he was impeached. Accordingly, he is removed from office and disqualified from holding and enjoying any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States. He remains liable to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law.” He banged his gavel. “These proceedings are concluded.”

“Who runs things now?” someone yelled from the gallery. Two cops grabbed him and hustled him away. Nobody answered the question.

Charlie got back to the White House just in time to hear a young reporter ask John Nance Garner, “What do you think of your conviction and removal, sir?”

“Fuck ’em all,” Garner said.

The kid turned red. Whatever he put in his story, that wouldn’t be it. Gamely, he tried again: “What will you do now?”

“Go on home to Uvalde and eat worms,” Garner answered. “You reckon the country was goin’ to hell with me, just watch how it goes to hell without me.” And that was the end of the press conference.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Charlie told him.

“Me, too, Sullivan.” John Nance Garner shrugged. “What can you do, though? Let’s see how those damn fools run this damn country, that’s all. Like I told that little punk, fuck ’em all. If it wasn’t for the assholes who done this to me, I’d be glad for the excuse to leave.”

“Good luck,” Charlie said. They shook hands. Charlie hoped nobody would throw Garner in jail for however much time he had left. He’d been in Joe Steele’s administration, but not of it. The policies weren’t his fault. Of course, he also hadn’t done anything to stop them.

Well, neither did I, Charlie thought uncomfortably. If they were still on the prowl after scapegoats, he was around.

After finishing his good-byes with John Nance Garner, he went home. “What are you doing here at this time of day?” Esther asked in surprise.

“Honey, I’m a presidential speechwriter in a country without a President,” he said. “What’s the point to sticking around?”

“Will they pay you if you don’t show up?” Yes, she was the practical one.

“I dunno. To tell you the truth, I didn’t worry about it. As long as they don’t arrest me, I figure I’m ahead of the game.”

“Arrest you? They can’t do that!” Esther made a face. “Or I guess they can if they want to. That’s what you get for working for that man for so long.”

Charlie sighed. “Yeah, I guess that is what I get. What I’m liable to get, anyhow. But we both know I would have got it a lot sooner if I hadn’t gone to work for him.”

“It isn’t fair,” Esther said. “What can you do when all your choices are rotten?”

“The best you can. That’s all you can ever do.” After a moment, Charlie continued, “My senior year with the nuns, we did some Tacitus. You know-the Roman historian. God, that was tough Latin! But I remember he talked about how good men could serve bad Emperors. That crossed my mind a few times while I worked for Joe Steele. I tried to be a good man. I’m sure I wasn’t always, but I tried.”