The General's President Read online

  None of them knew what they were making, though they thought they did. Not even the U.S. Patent Office knew what they really were. The designs and models had them in miniature as part of something else entirely.

  A nearby warehouse stood half full of the devices, ready for freight cars. And assembly lines were being installed in new buildings at International Falls, and at Fort Frances, Ontario.

  Phase Two, to be financed by Phase One, would produce small, lightweight units in several sizes.

  As he turned and started back for his office, Dave Fiori had both a sense of exhilaration and a nervous stomach. This time, he told himself, it's really on. This time we're going to do it.

  EIGHT

  The Chamber of the House of Representatives contained almost a hundred senators and more than four hundred representatives, plus media people and guests—all the room would hold. One of them was Senator Robert Morrows, and for the moment he was hardly aware of the crowd around him. His attention had turned inward, and backward in time.

  It had been hard to do anything the last week and a half. The word of the week was futility. For a couple of days it had seemed that the country was starting its death throes, and government had been frantic. But since Donnelly's resignation, it was as if everything in Washington had gone suddenly on hold—everything but the media and hopefully the Pentagon. And even the media were notably less frenetic than usual. Except in the area of emergency relief—especially food distribution—almost no one in civilian government was doing more than the absolute minimum, if that. A sort of lethargy—a waiting to see what would happen next—hung over everything. Congress was getting very little input from the agencies, and none at all from the White House. But then, Congress wasn't doing much with what it did get.

  It had been a time for talking in corridors in small groups, mostly talk with little heat or any other energy. What heat there'd been was over Donnelly's use of the Emergency Powers Act to appoint his successor without congressional approval, but it was a heat that hadn't spread. Donnelly was under psychiatric care at Bethesda, and somebody had been needed fast. And as Grosberg and Kreiner had pointed out, under the circumstances they'd undoubtedly have approved the appointment without debate. This was no time for campaigning for favorite candidates, and according to Blake, the White House legislative affairs assistant, the option had been Cromwell. In fact, Blake admitted, Cromwell had recommended Haugen.

  They'd find out soon enough whether the goddess Serendipity was with them, or whether Murphy's law applied.

  The rumor was that Chief Justice Fechner had been so angry with the whole situation that he'd refused to swear the new president in, or attend the swearing in. So Justice Killian had done the honors. Who swore a president in was a matter of tradition, not law.

  Months before the violence began, Morrows had had this recurring sinking feeling that the country was going to founder and fail. The exchange of all-out bombing raids between Iran and Iraq, that had resulted in crude oil prices of $67 a barrel, had been the trigger. Followed by wage and price controls, rationing of gasoline and fuel oil, demonstrations when work was accelerated on nuclear power plants, and violent counter-demonstrations against the antinukes...

  Most of the Congress, on both sides of the aisle, had felt as he did—that the country was going down. That's why, with the collapse of Wall Street and the banks, it had been possible to so quickly ram the Emergency Powers Act through the resistive minority in each house. Just hours ahead of the first major street fighting. Some said it had triggered the fighting, but hardly anyone in Congress really believed that. There'd been some ugly riots before that.

  Meanwhile here he was, Robert Jesse Morrows, Bachelor of Political Science magna cum laude from Cal State Northridge, junior United States senator from California, ex-state senator, ex-state assemblyman, attending a state-of-the-nation address by a president who'd never been elected to anything and apparently had no training in government or politics.

  He was probably a Pentagon front, a false face for military dictatorship. Which might be what was needed. If it hadn't been for martial law, this building would be a looted, burnt-out shell right now. But sooner or later, if the country was to mean anything, if democracy and freedoms were to persist here—maybe if they were to persist anywhere—the United States would have to return to representative democracy.

  Benjamin Franklin had said it after the Constitutional Convention, and Lincoln, generations later: Democracy was an experiment; there'd been no assurance it would persist, or any real instruction manual on how to keep it running decently. But what a damned shame if it should end.

  Two men walked out onto the dais. The bald-headed one was Kenneth Lynch, Irish-born Speaker of the House. The bandylegged Jewish leprechaun was Senate president pro tem Louis Grosberg. Grosberg was eighty-one, but he'd aged well, standing straight and moving briskly, his shock of white hair semi-erect above bushy black brows.

  Then Haugen walked out. From his seat close to the dais, Morrows examined him. The President of the United States was heavy-set, and looked solid and strong in his precisely fitted dark blue suit. He stood perhaps five feet eight. His hair had long since thinned, but there was enough of it, showing enough yellow amid the white, to mark him as a genetic blond. The skin beneath it was tanned: His mouth was wide, the broad face square rather than round, the cheekbones prominent. Thin-rimmed glasses perched on a blunt nose. Haugen had never been close to handsome, Morrows decided, but he emanated a sense of power that grew only partly from thick shoulders, chest, and neck. And a sense of relaxed self-control that aligned well with the impression of physical strength.

  If people wanted a strong man with an aura of stability and judgment, the senator told himself, Haugen might be the one. Morrows glanced at his watch: 6:30 P.M. and thirteen seconds. Apparently the new president was also punctual.

  He was looking down at the lectern, arranging cards or papers there. Morrows caught himself wishing this Arne Haugen well, at least for the time being. His arranging finished, the president scanned the audience, then seemed to choose someone among them to direct himself to.

  "My name," he began, "is Arne Haugen. And to my surprise, as much as yours, I find myself President of the United States. I want to thank Congress for letting me speak here. This talk, however, is to the whole nation, and not to the Congress alone.

  "This will not be the usual kind of inaugural address. Because while ordinarily a president takes office well-known to the people, in this case you do not know me. So while I'll be telling you how I intend to operate as president, I'll also use part of our time together to let you know something about me.

  "I won't cover everything you might like me to tonight, but I promise to speak to you frequently as things develop. More frequently than has been usual for presidents.

  "To begin with, let me point out that the emergency is not an emergency of violence. We were in a crashing emergency, in serious danger as a country, before the recent violence broke out. The violence was simply an offshoot of what came before, a sign of how bad things had gotten. And of course, as is commonly the case, violence made them worse.

  "The violence is over now, at least for the present, but the country remains in serious, perhaps even critical, condition. We have a lot to do to get it running decently, and to reform certain institutions so that it doesn't go off the tracks again. The financial system is in collapse. The production and distribution of goods, including the orderly distribution of food and fuel, has been seriously disrupted, as most of you know all too well.

  "Things have continued as well as they have, only because many people have been willing to keep working with no assurance that they'd see a paycheck. Those people are part of the solution. Some others have been part of the problem.

  "Many businesses have closed, folded, due to the unwise practices of government, banks, corporations, speculators, and the businessmen themselves. Apparently few of these practices were criminal in a legal sense, but many were irresp
onsible. More commonly they were the actions of people following more or less established ways, which we now see were destructive."

  Haugen paused to scan the audience in the chamber.

  "Obviously we need to change some things," he went on. "And we will.

  "It is appropriate to be critical, and to start criminal proceedings where called for. But almost all of us share responsibility for the catastrophe. We all saw the direction in which things were going, have been going for years. Yet political parties, candidates, office holders, weren't willing to bite the bullet and make the changes necessary. And why not? Because we the people of the United States of America didn't tell them to. We didn't insist on it. Many of us didn't even want them to.

  "We gimme'd our way into this mess. Now we need to create and work our way out of it. And my job is skipper, captain, the person at the wheel."

  It occurred to Morrows that the president didn't seem to be reading, only glancing down now and then as if at notes. He'd heard of people like that, who could look at a page, then look up and recite a paragraph or two verbatim. It made them seem to be delivering extemporaneously. And when Haugen looked up from his speech, it was at someone, apparently a different someone each time. Morrows wondered how much of that was deliberate and how much unconscious.

  "To begin with," the president was saying, "I'll continue to take stopgap emergency steps, as President Donnelly did, while putting together a broad rebuilding program, using the best data I can get. Meanwhile I'll update you from time to time, telling you what we're doing, what we plan to do, and what we need you to do if we're going to salvage and rebuild this country.

  "I'll talk about specifics later, as we work them out. I'll be discussing economics, health care, the legal system, the environment, and anything else that seems necessary."

  He paused as if to emphasize what came next, scanning the audience again. "This isn't going to be your standard democratic process, you know. When a ship is in danger of foundering, of sinking with all hands, that's no time to sit around and play tug-of-war, or argue, or protect cherished prerogatives. The government, with me at the wheel, will continue to operate under emergency powers and martial law.

  "Incidentally, President Donnelly first offered the vice presidency to General Cromwell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He felt that strongly that a firm hand was needed. But General Cromwell declined; he felt that the country might not accept a general as president, and that at any rate a civilian viewpoint was preferable."

  He leaned forward now, forearms on the lectern, peering at the audience as if in confidence. "So now you have Arne Haugen as president," he continued. "Why me? Why was I asked to serve? I don't know all the thinking on that, but I can tell you a little about myself that may have influenced the decision.

  "I'm an electrical engineer, which reflects enough personal discipline and enough organized intelligence to get through a tough, not much nonsense set of university courses. I'm also a highly successful inventor, which reflects a considerable ability to apply what I know to the solution of previously unsolved problems."

  Haugen paused and straightened. "And to ignore standard ways of doing things, when they aren't working. That's been important in the way I work. It may prove important on this job too.

  "I'm a self-made multi-millionaire who started out with very little. Which does not make me holier than thou. But I did it by manufacturing useful things that I, and people who work with me, invented or improved. And not by the greed-oriented financial gamesmanship that many others have gotten rich by.

  "I also did it by living frugally, with minimal borrowing, and working lots of hours, in order to get started and establish a well-developed operation."

  He paused again, then grinned unexpectedly. "Incidentally, I'm the first president in more than a century to have been born and raised in a log house. People can use that information someday in playing Trivial Pursuit. And I personally know something about poverty. Though in important respects, farm poverty during the 1920s and 30s was a much less demoralizing experience than urban poverty in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps nothing helps morale more than production does, and we did a lot of that. As a matter of fact, I didn't know we were poor, and I doubt that my parents thought of us that way. We just had very little money. And there was no television, no full-color commercials, to show or tell the Haugen family what it didn't have, what it wasn't able to buy. As far as that's concerned, there wasn't even electricity in our part of the country. And our neighbors were hardscrabble backwoods settlers just as we were.

  "I'm also the first American president ever who grew up in a foreign language household—three foreign languages, actually. My mother knew almost no English when I was small; her native language was Finnish, but she could also speak, somewhat, a Swedish dialect. Which was close enough to my father's Norwegian that they could converse effectively. Also each of my grandmothers, one Finnish and one Norwegian, lived with us much of the time, neither speaking English. So I grew up speaking Finnish and a sort of Swedified Norwegian.

  "Finnish, incidentally, is utterly different from Norwegian, and learning both at once, I developed a very flexible subconscious program for learning languages. Since then I've found languages both interesting, and easy to learn, and I speak and read a number of them. Which should prove useful in foreign relations."

  The president looked up at the video cameras. "And as far as war is concerned," he went on, "I have firsthand experience. Incidentally, the information that found its way to the media was not entirely correct. I trained with the independent 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment and fought with it in New Guinea and on Noemfoor Island where I was wounded. After rehabilitation, I was then assigned to the Eleventh Airborne's 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and later wounded on Leyte. After that I fought in southern Luzon and took part in the Los Baños drop. I lost both my brothers to combat, one in Normandy and the other on Peliliu, not Okinawa as reported.

  "I do not look on war as something desirable."

  He scanned the chamber then, the congressmen. "And now for some things I am not: I am neither politician nor lawyer. There is nothing wrong with being a politician or a lawyer; Lincoln was both. But because I am neither of them, I look at government and many other things from a different viewpoint, a different tradition, than lawyers and politicians do.

  "Also, I am not, and never have been, a military supplier. I say that not from any sense of superiority; I'm not putting down the arms industry. I'm simply saying that I nave no vested interests in weapons production. If it was not for the arms industry, however, we'd be in a lot worse trouble than we are."

  He paused again, brows drawn down for a moment in a severe line, but when he spoke, it was casually.

  "And I don't particularly care whether people like me or not. I'd prefer they do, but it isn't important to me. The compulsion to be liked is a trap. I'm going to do what seems to me most likely to salvage the situation and leave the United States of America stronger and more effective, and a better place to live, than ever before.

  "Let me restate that, because it needs to be understood. I'm going to do—or try to do—what seems to me most likely to salvage the situation and to leave the United States stronger, more effective, and a better place to live than ever before."

  Once more he paused, and when he spoke again, his words were slow and measured. "And to do that—to leave it stronger and better—we'll need to change how we do some pretty basic things in this country. Which I'll talk about later when I've sorted them out more fully.

  "And while it's now my responsibility to plot a course and see that the ship's officers steer that course ...the rest of you have responsibilities too. This is not a luxury ship; it's not even a passenger ship. You're not passengers, you're the crew.

  "But on the other hand, this is not a slave galley, and I will not make it one.

  "There are others who'd like to run this government. Some would like to run it from outside, through puppets. To some
of them, even the idea of democracy, of a people free to run their own lives and their government, is utterly unreal. And if those others ever take over, forget freedom for a long time. For lifetimes.

  "On the other hand, I am committed to the principle that people should run their own lives. You'll see my dedication to that very soon. I also believe they should run their own government, and I intend to move us further in that direction than this country has been for a while.

  "Not that I'm guaranteeing we'll make it. This nation has gone a long way down the road to hell, and it didn't happen in just the last few months or years. It took a long time to slide this far. Also, I can't promise you that I'm wise enough to plan a workable course back out.

  "Nor—Nor that you've got the guts and self-discipline to travel such a course. I'm sure that some of you do—that many of you do. The question is, do enough of you?

  "But—" He looked the audience over, his expression blunt, then he eased and smiled. "But it's the most interesting, and challenging, and potentially rewarding task that any nation, by which I mean any people, has taken on for a long time. Or any president. And if we pull it off, we'll be a greater nation than ever. I do not exaggerate. If we pull it off, we'll be the greatest nation in history. Young again. Energetic. And more able than ever. Because we'll have learned a lot, and had the experience of overcoming as a people. And we'll have gained a viewpoint that the founding fathers, with all their genuine wisdom, didn't have, couldn't have had back then."

  Jesus! thought Morrows. This man can be inspirational! Now if he's only competent—competent enough.

  The president seemed now to be ignoring his notes. For a moment he contemplated the center camera, his left forearm resting on his abdomen, right elbow propped on left hand, chin cupped thoughtfully for a moment between thumb and forefinger. Morrows watched, intrigued; the man was an even better, a more varied stage performer than Reagan had been.