Debt of Honor

assembled right here in Kentucky, failed to meet long-standing D-O-T standards for automotive safety. As a result, first, the U.S. Department of Transportation has issued an immediate recall notice for all Cresta-type private passenger automobiles…' Trent paused, looking around. The players in the room knew that there would be more, and they knew it would be a big one.

'Second, I have advised the President of this tragic incident and its larger ramifications. It has been also determined by the Department of Transportation that the same fuel tank for this particular brand of automobile is used in nearly every Japanese private-passenger auto imported into the United States. Accordingly, I am today introducing a bill, HR-12313, which will authorize the President to direct the Departments of Commerce, Justice and of the Treasury to…'

'By executive order,' the White House press spokesman was saying in the White House Press Room, 'and in the interest of public safety, the President has directed the Bureau of Customs, Department of the Treasury, to inspect all imported Japanese cars at their respective ports of entry for a major safety defect which two days ago resulted in the deaths of five American citizens. Enabling legislation to formalize the President's statutory authority is being introduced today by the Honorable Alan Trent, Congressman from Massachusetts. The bill will have the full support of the President, and we hope for rapid action, again, in the interest of public safety.

'The technical term for this measure is 'sectoral reciprocity',' she went on. 'That means that our legislation will mirror-image Japanese trade practices in every detail.' She looked up for questions. Oddly, there were none at the moment.

'Moving on, the President's trip to Moscow has been scheduled for—'

'Wait a minute,' a reporter asked, looking up, having had a few seconds to digest the opening statement. 'What was that you said?'

'What gives, boss?' Ryan asked, going over the briefing documents.

'Second page, Jack.'

'Okay.' Jack flipped the page and scanned. 'Damn, I saw that on TV the other day.' He looked up. 'This is not going to make them happy.'

'Tough cookies,' President Durling replied coldly. 'We actually had a good year or two closing the trade gap, but this new guy over there is so beholden to the big shots that we just can't do business with his people. Enough's enough. They stop our cars right on the dock and practically take them apart to make sure they're 'safe', and then pass on the 'inspection' bill to their consumers.'

'I know that, sir, but—'

'But enough's enough.' And besides, it would soon be an election year, and the President needed help with his union voters, and with this single stroke he'd set that in granite. It wasn't Jack's bailiwick, and the National Security Advisor knew better than to make an issue of this. 'Tell me about Russia and the missiles,' Roger Durling said next.

He was saving the real bombshell for last. The FBI was having its meeting with the people from Judiciary the following afternoon. No, Durling thought after a moment's contemplation, he'd have to call Bill Shaw and tell him to hold off. He didn't want two big stories competing on the front pages. Kealty would have to wait for a while. He'd let Ryan know, but the sexual- harassment case would stay black for another week or so.

The timing guaranteed confusion. From a time zone fourteen hours ahead of the United States' EST, phones rang in the darkness of what in Washington was the early morning of the next day. The irregular nature of the American action, which had bypassed the normal channels within the American government, and therefore had also bypassed the people who gathered information for their country, caught everyone completely unaware. The Japanese ambassador in Washington was in a fashionable restaurant, having lunch with a close friend, and the hour guaranteed that the same was true of the senior staffers at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, NW. In the embassy cafeteria, and all over the city, beepers went off commanding an immediate call to their offices, but it was too late. The word was already out on various satellite TV channels, and those people in Japan who kept watch on such things had called their supervisors, and so on up the information chain until various zaibatsu were awakened at an hour certain to draw sharp comments. These men in turn called senior staff members, who were already awake in any case, and told them to call their lobbyists at once. Many of the lobbyists were already at work. For the most part, they had caught the C-SPAN coverage of Al Trent and gone to work on their own initiative, attempting damage control even before they received marching orders from their employers. The reception they got in every office was cool, even from members to whose campaign funds they made regular contributions. But not always.

'Look,' said one senator, contemplating the commencement of his own reelection bid, and needing funds, as his visitor well knew, 'I'm not going to the voters and saying that this action is unfair when eight people just burned to death. You have to give it time and let it play out. Be smart about it, okay?'

It was only five people who'd burned to death, the lobbyist thought, but the advice of his current mendicant was sound, or would have been under normal circumstances. The lobbyist was paid over three hundred thousand dollars per year for his expertise—he'd been a senior Senate staffer for ten years before seeing the light—and to be an honest broker of information. He was also paid to purvey campaign funds not-so- honestly on one hand, and to advise his employers what was possible on the other.

'Okay, Senator,' he said in an understanding tone. 'Please remember, though, that this legislation could cause a trade war, and that would be bad for everyone.'

'Events like this have a natural life, and they don't last forever,' the Senator replied. That was the general opinion reported back to the various offices by five that afternoon, which translated to seven the following morning in Japan. The error was in overlooking the fact that there had never been an event quite 'like this.'

Already the phones were ringing in the offices of nearly every member of both houses of Congress. Most expressed outrage at the event on 1-40, which was to be expected. There were a few hundred thousand people in America, spread through every state and all four hundred thirty-five congressional districts, who never missed the chance to call their representatives in Washington to express their opinions on everything. Junior staffers took the calls and made note of the time and date, the name and address of every caller—it was often unnecessary to ask, as some callers were identifiable by voice alone. The calls would be cataloged for topic and opinion, become part of every member's morning briefing information, and in most cases just as quickly forgotten.

Other calls went to more senior staff members, and in many cases to the members themselves. These came from local businessmen, mostly manufacturers whose products either competed directly in the marketplace with those from overseas, or, in a smaller number of cases, who had tried to do business in Japan and found the going difficult. These calls were not always heeded, but they were rarely ignored.

It was now a top story again on every news service, having briefly faded into the normal old-news obscurity. For today's newscasts family photographs were shown of the police officer, and his wife, and their three children, and also of Nora Dunn and Amy Rice, followed by a brief taped interview of the heroic truck driver, and distant views of Jessica Denton, orphan, writhing in pain from her burns inside a laminar room, being treated by nurses who wept as they debrided her charred face and arms. Now lawyers were sitting with all of the involved families, coaching them on what to tell the cameras and preparing dangerously modest statements of their own while visions of contingency fees danced in their heads. News crews asked for the reaction of family members, friends, and neighbors, and in the angry grief of people who had suffered a sudden and bitter loss, others saw either common anger or an opportunity to take advantage of the situation.

But most telling of all was the story of the fuel tank itself. The preliminary NTSB finding had been leaked moments after its existence had been announced on the floor of the House. It was just too good to pass up. The American auto companies supplied their own engineers to explain the scientific side of the matter, each of them noting with barely concealed glee that it was a simple example of poor quality-control on a very simple automobile component, that the Japanese weren't as sharp as everyone thought after all:

'Look, Tom, people have been galvanizing steel for over a century,' a mid-level Ford engineer explained to NEC 'Nightly News.' 'Garbage cans are made out of this stuff.'

'Garbage cans?' the anchor inquired with a blank look, since his were made from plastic.

'They've hammered us on quality control for years, told us that we're not good enough, not safe enough, not careful enough to enter their auto market—and now we see that they're not so smart after all. That's the bottom line, Tom,' the engineer went on, feeling his oats. 'The gas tanks on those two Crestas had less structural integrity than a garbage can made with 1890's technology. And that's why those five people burned to death.'