Ronnie sucked in her breath and the sound couldn’t be mistaken for anything but disapproval. He looked at her. “You don’t like it, do you?”
“It has a smell of blackmail—extortion. You’re playing dirty pool.”
“Do you think this is a game? The hardware lobby has too many of my honorable colleagues in its pocket—bought and paid for. I can’t outbid the giants but I’ve got to equalize the pressure somehow. The Pentagon has a hundred billion dollars a year to sling around and how many Congressmen are going to bite a hand that feeds them that well? Don’t you think I have a right to offset that pressure? We’ve got one hundred Senators and fourteen of them are officers in the military reserves; we’ve got more than five hundred Congressmen and almost a hundred and thirty of them are reservists. Including Webb Breckenyear and Ross Trumble and two dozen other key members of Congressional committees that handle foreign policy and appropriations and defense.”
Spode said to Ronnie, “I hope you took that down, it’s a nice campaign speech.”
She said, “I still don’t like it, Alan.”
It was the first time she had done that in the office and he noticed Spode’s quick glance of interest. A spot of color showed at Ronnie’s cheek and she hurried on: “Have you thought about what will happen if it backfires? They’ll resent being exposed.”
“Let them. I want the public stirred up—I want the Senate flooded with mail. That’s what pressure’s for.”
Spode said, “You’ll likely get just as much mail against as for.”
“Doesn’t matter, Top. The pressure on Lyndon Johnson didn’t come from the majority but it was enough to reverse his Vietnam policy and that happened only because the peace movement drove everything else off the front pages. I want to make Phaeton the number-one headline issue—the point where we draw the line on this hardware cancer. If we have to drag a few skeletons out of closets then let’s drag them out.”
Spode pulled the side of his mouth back with a click as if he were dislodging something from his back teeth. “You’re a lot more politician than you look.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant it as compliment or rebuke.
“Just get me the Phaeton figures from Trumble’s file, Top. Let me make the policy decisions.”
“I always do, don’t I?”
He took Ronnie to dinner at Cliff House and they sat at a corner-window table with Tucson on the plain below them, three hundred square miles of incandescent lights. Half a dozen tablehoppers made ritual pilgrimages to their table and Forrester gave them all a smile and a handshake and a few words, and when the last of them departed Ronnie said, “Do you have to put up with that all the time?”
“You have to tolerate them—it’s no job for an introvert.”
“You must get sick of it.”
“I usually have Les Suffield around to remind me I need their votes.”
She searched his face with an odd intensity. “How important is it to you?”
“Let me quote Grover Cleveland: ‘What’s the use of being elected unless you stand for something?’ I’d turn it around: ‘What’s the use of standing for something unless you can get elected?’”
“You meant it the first way around. You’re a poor liar.”
A piece of a smile shaped his mouth. “You’re a hard girl to lie to.”
“Then why try? If you meant that cynical-sounding remark you wouldn’t have involved yourself in this Phaeton mess. It’s likely to destroy your political career.”
“Evidently you don’t believe my opponents when they claim I’m trying to feather my political nest.”
“Don’t you stand to lose more votes than you could possibly gain? The whole state of Arizona lives on Pentagon money. But then that column in Time did accuse you of turning your back on your own constituents to woo the votes of the big liberal states and I haven’t heard you deny that. Are you really running for the Presidency, Alan?”
“If I can jump from Cleveland to John Kennedy, every woman wants her man to become President but no woman wants her man to become a politician in the process. Or in the words of our good friend Woody Guest, that’s a bridge I’ll double-cross when I get to it.”
“What about speaking for yourself?”
“What’ll you have for dessert, Ronnie?”
“In other words, let’s change the subject.”
She was cross with him. She buried herself in the menu—he watched the way her dark hair swayed with silken weight when she tipped her head down to read, and swung back when she straightened. “You know what really annoys me? You’re trying so desperately hard to be a nasty ruthless son of a bitch. It just doesn’t fit you.”
She was so earnest he had to laugh at her and his laugh was the kind that demanded one in return, but afterward Ronnie said, “I’m serious—you’ve got so much going for you, why throw it over? You’re everybody’s picture of the American political messiah—big, good-looking, sincere, involved with people’s problems.… Am I making you blush? It’s true, you know—you’re genuine, under all that grade-B tough talk you’ve been spouting. Don’t you see you’re only going to hurt yourself if you try to make yourself over into an ordinary conniving politician, using people, greasing squeaky axles, making cheap deals? Why degrade yourself?”
“Aren’t you asking me when I stopped beating my wife?”
“It wasn’t a loaded question and you know it.”
He had to organize it in his mind and when he spoke it was slowly and in a low tone to make her see it was important. “I suppose I’ve been all those things, Ronnie. Big, dumb, honest, painfully sincere. And immature and totally useless. Following the trends and beating the right dead horses and plodding dutifully along in the tracks of the groundbreakers. God knows I’m no hysterical revolutionary, but a little while ago I woke up to the fact that I’ve been elected to a position that calls for responsible leadership and all I’ve done is to be a follower.”
“And when did this great revelation come to you?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I just wondered if your wife’s death had anything to do with the change in your thinking.”
He thought about that. “I suppose it did. I’m not sure. It’s true I made up my mind after Angie died—you always go through a stage of introspection and reappraisal when something changes your whole life in a moment that way. But I’m not sure you could trace it to cause and effect. To tell the truth I never knew how insanely trivial death could be until I lost Angie—all the stupefying casual life-must-go-on business, the petty everyday details of funeral arrangements and insurance and that whole mountain of impersonal rubbish, it’s all so stupid and irrelevant but in a way it’s exactly what you need at a time like that because it gives you things to do and worry about. I didn’t just sit down and bawl and think everything out deliberately and decide to change the course of my life then and there. There was never any time for that kind of thing. But you must know all this—you lost your husband.”
“That was a long time ago and you’ve changed the subject again. It’s taken me all day to work up the nerve to talk to you this way and I want to finish before I run out of steam. I’m worried because I think possibly this Phaeton thing popped up at just the right time for you to clutch it to your breast. Something to occupy your attention—you’re compulsive that way, you need an obsession, you’re not the kind of man who can be at loose ends for long. It might just as well have been a woman—it happens to everybody, doesn’t it? Don’t you think it’s possible you dived into this Phaeton fight without even stopping to see if there was water in the pool? And when you found out what a desperate chance you were taking you panicked and decided you had to use every dirty weapon you could lay your hands on because if you can’t have Angie maybe you’ll take the Presidency of the United States as a consolation prize?”