Groans and curses crackled in the crowd and ran like a lighted fuse out of the room into the overflow filling the corridor and part of the lobby.
"Okay, okay," shouted Simon. "Could we have some quiet, for God's sake? Stan, get down from there or somebody's going to get hurt."
A photographer had boosted himself on top of a filing cabinet to get a picture of the crowd. He stood precariously on one leg. He paid no attention to Simon's order.
"Whose idea was this no text?" It was the booming voice of Hal Brennan of the New York Times, a hulking extrovert who regarded his trade as a primeval struggle between reporter and news source.
"Nobody's," snapped Simon. "It just isn't written yet. Now listen, dammit! We're putting a relay of stenotypists by a TV set, and you'll have transcript, in takes, starting right after the President begins speaking. We'll set up a distribution table in the lobby. You'll have the whole thing by one-thirty."
"Frank," asked a voice from somewhere in the rear, "there's a report General Dieffenbach has quit as Army chief of staff. How about it?"
"I'm sorry," Simon answered, "I don't know a thing. There are a lot of rumors. We'll just have to wait until one o'clock."
"Who's writing the speech?"
"The President. And I honestly don't have the least idea of what he's going to talk about."
A derisive laugh sputtered through the crowd, but the throng began to break up. Within a few minutes, by chattering threes and fours, it had been transplanted to the lobby to wait in customary bedlam.
Malcolm Waters lingered by Simon's desk. The press secretary nervously lit a cigarette and leaned confidentially toward the AP correspondent.
"So help me Hannah, Milky," he said, "I don't know any more about this than you do. Probably less."
Waters dropped his voice. "Something funny's going on. They had about thirty Treasury agents in the Secretary's office across the street last night until almost midnight. None of them knew why they'd been called in. And I heard Art Corwin had his whole detail on duty last night."
"I know, I know," Simon said bleakly. "Milky, he won't tell me a thing. Whatever it is, he cut me out completely."
Several reporters had lingered inside Simon's doorway. Waters put his face close to the press secretary's ear. "Was General Scott over here last night?"
Simon looked startled. "Scott? You got me, Milky. For all he's told me, he could have had Alexander the Great in here last night."
Sixty feet away President Lyman sat at his office desk in shirt sleeves. A half dozen sheets of paper, covered with scribbling, were strewn around the desktop. Christopher Todd, immaculate as usual in gray suit and figured tie, sat across from the President, writing on a large yellow lined pad. Ray Clark, his collar undone and tie drooping, sat at the corner of the desk. He tapped his teeth with a pencil as he stared at a page of notes. Outside, the noon heat of the first real summer day shimmered on the rosebushes and the shiny magnolia leaves, but the air conditioning kept the President's office comfortable.
"I didn't feel easy about all those troops at Site Y," Lyman said, "but Barney says they can't go anywhere without planes. He thought it would be better not to spring that on the Army vice chief until after the speech."
"He's right." Todd nodded. "That gang has to be broken up with the utmost care or we could have some ugly stories on our hands."
"I don't see why we can't keep the base," said Clark, "for the same type of training, and just bring in some new officers, maybe make Henderson the C.O., and weed out the bad apples in the noncoms. It's a pity to break up an outfit with that much morale."
"Maybe that's not such a bad idea, Ray," said Lyman. "I'll talk to Barney about it."
"Does Admiral Palmer know about his future yet?" asked Todd.
"No." Lyman grinned. "If he listens this afternoon, he'll get a surprise. I'd like to see his face. Well, come on. I like the beginning, but the end's still pretty weak."
The three men worked on, largely in silence. Occasionally Todd or Clark, reviewing a page, would offer a phrase. If the President nodded, it would go in. A Filipino messboy brought in three sandwiches, milk and coffee. Soon crumbs and coffee stains marred the scattered papers.
At 12:30 Esther Townsend opened the door.
"The girls will have to have that in five minutes," she said, "if you want a clean copy to read."
Lyman handed her a sheaf of papers. Whole lines were crossed out. Smudges mingled with inked insertions.
"You read it to the girls," he said. "That's everything but the last two or three minutes."
She was back again at 12:45. "You'll have to give me the rest now, or we can't make it."
Lyman handed her two more pages. "That's enough," he said. "I'll go with this for the last page or so. It isn't all legible, but I know what I want to say now anyway."
A few minutes before one o'clock, the three men walked into the Cabinet room. Lyman held ten sheets of clean manuscript, typed in large print on the special speech typewriter for easy reading. On the bottom were two handwritten pages, messy with last-minute corrections.
At the door of the Cabinet room Lyman paused in front of Esther.
"How do I look?" he asked. "Doris and Liz will be watching in Louisville, and I don't want the family to be ashamed of the old man."
Esther grinned at him and pointed her forefinger at her temple in their private code: Quiet, secretary thinking. Then she checked his appearance, straightened his tie, and flicked a crumb off his shirt.
"Okay, Governor, you'll do," she said. "Of course, those bags under your eyes are big enough to frighten a redcap, but they make you look more like a statesman."
Clark whispered to his friend, "Be good."
The room was in hushed turmoil. Five television cameras, one for each major network, were aimed at the center of the long Cabinet table. A half-dozen sound engineers, wearing earphones, tried to avoid tripping over the tangle of wires and cables as they checked their control boxes and connections. Still and newsreel photographers squeezed in on both sides of the big TV cameras.
Lyman took his place behind a small portable podium, adorned with the presidential seal, which rested on the table. On each side of him stood a flag standard, one bearing the national colors, the other his own flag. Esther, Todd, Clark and Art Corwin stood against the side wall behind the three "pool" newspapermen who would report personal touches and color for the rest of the press contingent, now crowded around four television sets in the pressroom, lobby and Simon's office.
As the door closed, Lyman caught a glimpse of an Army warrant officer, his face blank, sitting in the outer hall, a black briefcase lying in his lap.
One of the men wearing earphones held up his index finger to the President: one minute to go. He bent his finger: 30 seconds. The murmuring in the room quieted. The director closed his fist as five television newsmen said, each into his own microphone, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States."
The fist came up again, the index finger shot imperiously at Lyman, and the President was on the air.
My fellow citizens:
I am sorry to interrupt you in the middle of a pleasant day when you are relaxing after a busy week of work. It is beautiful here in Washington today, and I understand it is pretty much the same all across the country-really the first day of summer for all of us. So I am grateful to you for taking a few minutes to listen to me.