The color screen warmed up; the announcer was revealing the crash in Spain of a Concorde with eighty-nine people on board and there was half a minute of film shot from a copter and relayed by satellite.
Television terrified him, he was appalled by the thought that tens of millions of people could be prodded by simultaneous stimuli into laughter and tension and applause and, irrevocably, opinion. But he had invited television coverage of the press conference because if the cameras didn’t cover an event it hadn’t happened; without television’s stamp of recognition it did not exist, and what did not exist could be disregarded.
A correspondent stood against a background of palm trees and campus buildings and did forty seconds on the skull-smashing arrests of fourteen black students who had attempted to close down the administration building. Four commercials extolled forgettable products and Forrester’s eyes strayed toward the glass doors and the surly wintry evening beyond. An avuncular newsman recited a report of guerrilla strikes and government counterstrikes in the hills behind Djakarta. The anchorman uttered unemployment and inflation figures and summarized in brief sentences the daily serial catastrophes of a world in unchanging flux, talking through a capped-tooth smile of destruction and disaster. A slow day for news. That was good, he thought dispassionately, a big story would have crowded him off the air.
He saw his face on the screen, squinting against the portable kliegs like a Hollywood horseman; his own appearance always startled him because he never felt subjectively as tall and rangy-rugged as the lean image on the screen. The voice sounded lower than his own, a silver rolling resonance that only just escaped being guttural.
They had edited him down to essentials but the result did not displease him because they had kept the context intact, which indicated that the news-bureau chief was probably on his side, and for openers that was a good sign.
“It’s been brought to my attention that the Pentagon and its tame mouthpieces in both houses of Congress intend to sneak their new Phaeton Three program through passage in the form of riders casually attached to unimportant defense bills. I think the people of this country need to be warned of this attempt to stifle legitimate discussions and inquiries.… We’re talking about offensive weapons, not defensive systems. We’re talking about a terrifying new form of MIRV—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle. We’re talking about deploying a system where each single missile can deliver more than sixty miniaturized nuclear warheads on more than sixty separate enemy targets—and each one of these mini-warheads will have twice the destructive power of the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’re talking about a defense establishment that’s so arrogant it expects to ram down our throats a quantum jump in the arms race—an apocalyptic program—that they want us to swallow without a murmur of dissent.”
They cut the rest of it and jumped to the Q & A period. There was some narrative commentary by the reporter and they had edited it neatly up to the beginning of the interviewer’s question: “Senator, you’ve never associated yourself with the disarmament people before. Would you say this stand of yours is a new departure?”
“I’m a firm supporter of national defense. The Pentagon wants us to believe that anybody who questions their hardware salesmen must be a coward who wants to appease the other side the way Chamberlain appeased Hitler. The fact is we have the military capacity to destroy the Soviet Union utterly—we can overkill them forty times over—and we simply don’t need another new weapons system that could prove more dangerous to us than to them.”
“Senator, you’ve referred to that ‘danger to ourselves’ several times now. What danger do you mean?”
“Two things. First, what kind of weapons will the other side be forced to develop to counteract ours? And second, what about the risk of accidental detonation? The Phaeton system would deploy thousands of armed hydrogen warheads where we now have hundreds. Multiply the stockpile by a hundred and you multiply the risk of unintentional explosion by a thousand. A calculated risk is only justifiable when you’ve got something to gain from it, and we’ve got nothing to gain by this. The odds aren’t acceptable. I’m saying it’s time, right now, to stop giving the bomb merchants free rein.”
“That’s pretty strong talk, sir.”
“I feel strongly about it. We hear a lot about boondoggles and pork barrels and Federal giveaways. I say let’s not give away another thirty billion dollars for doomsday toys nobody needs.”
The screen cut away and the moderator said deadpan, “There has been no reaction yet from the White House or the Pentagon to Senator Forrester’s remarks.” A kitchen cleanser replaced the moderator’s face and Forrester switched the set off and smiled broadly when he heard the telephone ring: whoever it was, he wasn’t wasting any time, but Forrester let it ring four times before he picked it up.
It was Woody Guest.
The elder Senator’s voice was affable and hearty. “Nice little minstrel show you put on there, boy. Marvelous coverage, too. Did you catch yourself on CBS?”
“They gave it more time than I’d expected. How are you, Senator?” Forrester settled hipshot against the corner of the writing desk and sipped his drink.
“A mite ruffled. Candidly, young friend, you caught me off guard.”
Think of that.
“If I hadn’t had an off-the-record tip,” Woodrow Guest continued, “from a journalistic acquaintance, I’d have missed your performance altogether.”
“That would have been a shame.”
“It would.”
“Since you evidently want me to ask, what’s on your mind, Senator?”
“You didn’t play fair with us, son. Why didn’t you come to me first?”
“Would it have got me anywhere?”
“Might have. After all, in our exclusive little club we have traditional ways of handling the decision-making process and getting things ironed out. You break with tradition, young friend, you make things uneasy for everybody.”
“In my judgment this is no time for clubhouse rules.”
“No issue’s too important for decent courtesy, son. You’ve made a bad error.” Guest’s voice changed. “God damn it, Alan, have you got your brains up your ass or what? What in God’s name got into you? Just what did you have in mind?”
“How about saving the Treasury thirty billion dollars, for openers.”
“Balls. You’re forgetting where you come from. I won’t be able to hold up my head in Phoenix after tonight.”
“I’m sure you’ve got time enough left to compose your suicide note.”
Guest ignored it. “I had my suspicions but now I’m sure of it. You’ve joined the liberal losers at last—the ones who find success vulgar. I should have seen it coming.”
“I haven’t joined the crazies just yet, Senator.”
“You may as well. Nobody else is going to give you a place to hang your hat after this little display.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me. Thank God I’m not the one who’s up for reelection this year. At least I won’t have to boot you off my ticket.”
“I take it that means I’m not to count on your venerable support in the primary.”
“You can put that in the bank, son. And you won’t get much support from the Republican machinery anywhere.”
“All right, Senator. We’ll just have to wait and see how it all develops, won’t we.”
“Nothing to wait for, young friend. We’ve dealt with mavericks on the Hill before. It’s not your private ball park up here—you came into our ballgame, son, you play by our rules or else you get out of the park.”
“Receipt acknowledged, Senator.”
“You think about it, that’s all. I’ll get back to you after you’ve had time to mull it over. Take care now.”
Forrester depressed the cradle button and waited with the receiver in hand until it rang again as he knew it would. He was smiling a little. “Forrester here.”
It was Les Suffield. “I’m still at your office and the phones are jumping off the desks. What do I tell the ink-stained hacks?”