Free Promise of Joy by Allen Drury Page A

troops inside the doors, smiling, confident and apparently fully in command, if the leaders of the media ever found themselves in a situation where their freedoms were really threatened by the policies they had always so vigorously advocated and supported? How would it be if they turned out to be wrong, if suddenly someone they had raised up—even a Ted Jason, perhaps—turned upon them and, using the public support they themselves had created for him, tore them down? How would they enjoy the harvest they had sown for so many long, bitter years?… But, of course, he dismissed the thought, it would never happen in America. They would always be free to pursue their harshly unbalanced attacks on all who disagreed with them. They would never have to face the reckoning. They would always be safe, always protected, always free to be unrestrained and irresponsible, for such was what they considered freedom to be. Not even if Ted Jason had become President, he was sure, would any attempt ever have been made to attack or control the media. Not even Ted’s most violent supporters would have dared. This was America, and in America such things could not be.
    Certainly they would not occur under Orrin Knox, that was sure, even though the President had moments of exasperation and resentment when he almost felt they should. The attack on Orrin now was utterly disgraceful, the wildest and most vicious he had seen in some time, and he had seen a good many in his long service on Capitol Hill. It was not enough that the man must lose his wife to an assassin, he must be accused of helping to plot the whole thing in order to remove someone who disagreed with him from the ticket. What kind of minds they must be, the President thought, Walter who would promulgate such a horrid myth, and his friends who could seize upon and embellish it!
    He was frowning when he reached the door of the Playhouse, and it was so they saw him as the guards snapped to attention, and the doorkeeper bellowed, “Ladeez and Gemmun, the Prezdent of the Yewnited States!”—Blair Hannah, Ewan MacDonald MacDonald, Lizzie Hanson McWharter, Mary Buttner Baffleburg and the rest of the National Committee; Robert A. Leffingwell, Patsy Jason Labaiya in heavy mourning for her brother, Lord and Lady Maudulayne, Raoul and Celestine Barre, Vasily Tashikov, Krishna Khaleel and all the other observers domestic and foreign who had been given tickets; the Times, the Post, The Greatest Publication, Time, Newsweek, Walter Dobius, Frankly Unctuous and the other members of the media who were there by virtue of personal stature, prestige of publication, or the luck of the draw. A President upset, and one obviously in no mood to waste time, or to pretend in any way that the business before them was any less serious than it was.
    He strode swiftly down the aisle, mounted the small platform, moved to the lectern at its center; turned quickly to note that the official reporter was seated at the small desk to his left, turned back to look directly into the banked lights of the television cameras that flanked the room.
    “Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen,” he said crisply, and waited for a moment as they did so, their expectant eyes never leaving his face. “By virtue of the authority vested in me as chairman of the National Committee, I declare this new special emergency session of the Committee to be now in session for the purpose of selecting a nominee for Vice President of the United States. If the distinguished national committeeman from the state of Washington will oblige us as he did before”—he paused and a little sigh, tired and sad, escaped his lips—“and how short a time ago that was!—then we shall be very grateful.”
    “Yes, Mr. President,” Luther Redfield said, his voice shaking slightly with the gravity of it; and proceeded in his somewhat florid but desperately sincere fashion to deliver the convocation while they all stood again, heads bowed, and far off the