Arthur Eaton, he had accepted without hesitation. There had been two reasons for his immediate acceptance. One was the chance to get away from Washington, from Kay and her tiresome social friends, from work that was suffocating him, and the other (and more exciting) reason was T. C.’s promise. “Arthur, you help me win, and I’ll see that you have yourself a Cabinet post, not selling stamps or worrying about squaws, but a big one, the biggest. You help me now, and you can help me run this country and most of the world next year.”
It had happened exactly as T. C. had promised that it would. Two hours after T. C.’s opponent had conceded defeat on television, and T. C. had become the President-elect, Arthur Eaton had answered the ringing telephone in Georgetown. The caller had been T. C. himself. No sooner had Eaton congratulated him than T. C. had boomed out, “Arthur, you got any enemies in the Senate?” Eaton could think of none, not real enemies. Then T. C. had said, “Think they’ll give consent on your appointment?” And Eaton had asked, “To what?” And then T. C., with a delighted laugh that was almost a shout, had bellowed across the wire, “To Secretary of State, my friend. You are the first in my Cabinet, and welcome to it!”
So he had become Secretary of State Eaton, and with Talley trotting between T. C. and himself, he had assisted the President in running the country. Those had been adventurous and stimulating days, those days of the two years and seven months gone by, and they had been his Fountain of Youth. Not only had each morning, with its challenges, been a joy to wake to, but Eaton had found the independence to shake off the yoke of money that held him captive to his wife. He had been enabled to ignore her disdain, her snobbery, her petty values, her Social Register crowd and her avant-garde artist salon. He had, indeed, been able to plead devotion to something that mattered more, survival of his country. This had been the same shield he had always been able to hold up to fend off Kay’s barbed anger. Her technique had not varied from its pattern in the past; it had only intensified. She had continued to hack away at his masculinity. When she found that she could no longer bring him down, as she had always succeeded in doing in the past, she had begun to increase her trips away from Washington. She had permitted herself to be seen with her endless bright young men in public. Eaton had rarely speculated on what she might be doing with her companions in private. But more and more, freed of her, he had begun to derive pleasure from the company of attentive and appreciative young Washington women, the single ones. There had been but two short-lived affairs-for he was always aware of the dangers-but they had been gratifying enough to remind him that he was a person still capable of enjoying love and companionship, and that he was more than his wife had tried to make him.
All of this pride and pleasure he owed to the patronage and friendship of T. C., whom he had revered as a friend and respected as a leader. Twenty-four hours ago their future had seemed glowing. There were years of their joint rule ahead of them-the remainder of this term, and the almost certain second term. Twenty-four hours ago Eaton’s resurrection as an individual, a very important person, had been secure. And then, shockingly, with the crumbling of that ancient Palace in Frankfurt, his high hopes and good prospects had crumbled, too. And so he knew that his mourning was not only for the loss of his friend, but for the loss of something of himself.
Throughout the endless tragic night in Georgetown, following the swearing in of Dilman as President, he had received and listened to or overheard the members of T. C.’s bereft team and the leaders of the Party. Most of the chatter had been about how to preserve the unity of the Party, now that a Negro was its head. There had been a little talk, he remembered, about preserving the unity of the nation as well. Too, there had been talk, mostly in Southern accents, about challenging the constitutionality of the 1947 Act of Succession, and there had been talk, in harder accents, about reviving some aspect of the old 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which had once enabled the Senate to try to restrict a President from removing officers appointed to his Cabinet. In short, Eaton remembered, the concern had not been about Dilman’s ability to handle the office, and how he must best be guided, but rather about how to balk him or, failing in that, to control him, pluck his powers, so that the nation would not be tainted black and so that those present might not lose their jobs to colored men and to bleeding-heart Negro-lovers.
Through the night, Arthur Eaton had not permitted himself to be drawn into these discussions. His foresight had suffered from emotional cataracts. He had thought only of the immediate consequences of the fateful night, of the condition of the country and himself now, in the present, without T. C. as mentor. When his living room bar and then his library had emptied, and he had sought sleep, he had still not fastened on the full realization that even though another, by default, had become President, this other must be made to understand that it was still T. C.’s country and T. C.’s government and that any successor was there merely as a custodian of T. C.’s ideas and ideals, which Eaton himself might continue to spell out and present.
Not until now, in the Fish Room of the White House-a room, like the Oval Office, restored by T. C. to the decor of the Kennedy administration-had Eaton, after listening to Talley on the telephone, after reviewing all that he had reviewed in his head, finally settled on the idea of what must be done. He had a role, after all, and perhaps now it was more important than it had been before. He must ignore every one of those harebrained schemes about blocking Dilman from the Oval Office, or obstructing the lamentable Negro. He must devote himself, Eaton decided, to keeping T. C. as alive as he had ever been. Only thus could their United States be saved, and, parenthetically, only thus could Arthur Eaton have a continuing, meaningful life.
He sat straight on the sofa, saw that Wayne Talley was standing at the desk near the door, making notes on a sheet that lay beside the quaint early typewriter once used by Woodrow Wilson.
“What are you up to, Wayne?” he inquired.
“Dilman’s on his way in. He’s an absolute amateur. I’m not saying he’s stupid-hell, he’s been around the Hill long enough. But he’s ignorant of what really goes on, and of things that have to be done. It kills me when I think of it. The Majority Party senators caucus every time there’s a new Congress in the Conference Room of the Senate Office Building to select a temporary presiding officer to sit up there with the gavel and pound it. The idea is to select one of their own as a substitute or alternate for the Vice-President when he’s out of town. Nine times out of ten, they cast their caucus vote for the member among them who has seniority. There’s no rule about it, but it’s a kind of gesture of courtesy, a custom, to select the senator who’s had the most years of service. That’s why Rydberg had the spot so long. ‘Papa Methuselah’ they called him. Then his doctors make him quit, so the Senate needs a replacement, what with Porter traveling all the time. They’ve got to caucus again. So what happens this time? All those riots, the bloodshed, in Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Dallas, all of it from Negroes, with those protest marches and boycotts worsening-so a couple of smart guys get the big political brainstorm, let’s give the honorary presiding post to a Negro, a democratic gesture, and shut up those demonstrators, prove to them we mean well. So Senator Selander, the senior member, who normally would have become President pro tempore, seconds the suggestion. That makes it okay. So Selander steps out of the caucus, phones me, and tells me to pass it on to T. C. to find out if he approves. Well, T. C. was so damn busy that day he didn’t give a hoot who held that unimportant President pro tempore of the Senate job, so he said okay, maybe it’ll look good for the Party, let them do what they think best. So the Party caucus elects Douglass Dilman, and puts the resolution naming him to the whole Senate. Then, a routine thing, the opposition offers an amendment putting forth their own candidate, Senator Riggins, and a roll call is held and the opposition amendment voted down. Then the original resolution on behalf of Dilman is put to a voice vote, and the ayes have it, and Dilman has that idiotic do-nothing post. Who in the hell would know that the Vice-President would drop dead soon after that? Who in the hell would imagine that the fourth in line of succession could ever become President of the United States? In fact, who in the hell, on that day they routinely caucused and voted, even knew that the President pro tempore of the Senate was the fourth in line? I always thought it was the Secretary of State. I thought it was you, Arthur, not that it mattered a damn at the time. So for political and publicity reasons we put that poor Party hack in there, and we had our showcase colored man up there for all to see, a man with no qualifications for leadership whatsoever-”
“How do you know that?” asked Eaton quietly.
“Douglass Dilman’s been in the House four terms, in the Senate two terms, and what has he ever done or instigated?” said Talley heatedly. “He was sent to Washington because of the temper of the times, and given an honorary gavel in the Senate because of the times, and then a once-in-a-thousand accident happens, and blooey, we’re stuck with a tenth-rater whose presence means potential trouble, and plenty of it.” He lifted his hands to the ceiling. “The fourth in line becoming President-I repeat, Arthur, who could’ve imagined it?”
“It was always a possibility,” said Eaton. “I was reading this morning that what happened now might very well have happened during the last six weeks of 1961. At that time Speaker Rayburn was dead, and not replaced, and had President Kennedy been assassinated then, and Vice-President Johnson with him, we would have had the fourth in line, President pro tempore of the Senate Hayden, as President of the United States.”
“But this Dilman, anyone would have been better than Dilman.”
“Well, if he doesn’t work out,” said Eaton, “you and your senator friends have only yourselves to blame. As an
