Free Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury Page A

foreign commitments, ever more entangling military involvements—or it follows the course of prudence, decency and peace.
    “I offer myself again, as I did before, as one who believes our best course to lie in negotiation, reasonable compromise, and an end to jingoism and bullying belligerence.
    “I speak now, as I did before, for peace. I call upon all of you who believe America can best be served by sanity and prudence to join me in the renewed battle.
    “We must not fail.”
    Rereading the two statements as they lay before him on the front page of the Sacramento Bee, the Governor reflected that his own accomplished several things. It paid graceful tribute to the man who had so brutally shouldered him aside at the convention, thereby displaying a forgiveness he could never have shown had Harley lived—an absolutely necessary forgiveness if the votes of many goodhearted citizens were to come his way. It cleared his mind of the heavy burden of self-contempt that had dragged it down since the bleak post-convention moment when Senator Fred Van Ackerman, that savagely unprincipled demagogue of the irresponsible left, had telephoned and virtually forced him to accept the third-party idea. And it established him again as the champion of all those forces that were so bitterly and vociferously opposed to American involvement in the twin conflicts of Gorotoland and Panama.
    Thus he had freed himself of the fatal incubus of the hodge-podge “Peace Party,” something he would never have agreed to at all had he not been so absolutely stunned by the convention’s repudiation and President Hudson’s bitter speech attacking him. At the same moment he had skillfully re-established his claim upon the position favored by those who had supported him but could not follow him down so blind an alley. The Greatest Publication was such a one: it had warned him against the third party even though its editorial board was unanimously for him and had given him every possible break in friendly news-coverage, flattering photographs and editorial endorsement during and before the convention. Some of the major columnists and commentators were equally hesitant, aware that American history gave little encouragement to third parties.
    Of the small but enormously powerful group who influenced and in large measure dominated public opinion, only Walter Dobius, carried forward furiously on the wave of his angry hatred for Harley Hudson and Orrin Knox, had openly endorsed and encouraged the third party idea. Even he, Ted Jason was willing to wager with some irony, was greatly relieved that Harley’s death made it no longer necessary to carry through on a cause so devoid of practical hope.
    For Walter, for The Greatest Publication, and for all their friends and fellow-believers of press, television, church, drama, campus and periodical, everything was now all right again: Despised Harley was dead, Orrin stood exposed alone to the attacks of those who could once more reunite against him with a good conscience and a strengthened will, and the Governor of California was in the clear. Once again he was the hero of all those who, either sincerely or for purposes not so sincere, devoted their time and energies to opposing, hindering, demeaning and generally weakening their own country as it sought, with an uncertain success, to stand firm against its enemies and the enemies of freedom everywhere.
    Respectability and the support of many of the nation’s most powerful institutions and individuals were his again, and it was with some confidence that he looked forward to the next few weeks: confidence and, much more important, the renewed self-respect which, coming out of the angry morass of the convention, seemed almost a miracle to him now.
    Miracle, because it had followed upon things that could have destroyed a weaker man and had almost destroyed him: the increasing, politically motivated violence in the convention which, he was sufficiently confident to admit