Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury Page B

the convention stampede by nominating President Hudson and taking nearly half the New York delegation with him.
    This had brought him the automatic condemnation of that professionally liberal world which had endorsed him so vigorously when he and Orrin Knox were having their historic battle over his nomination to be Secretary of State. But it had brought him a strange sort of regeneration in the minds of all those good citizens who felt that his action somehow canceled out his childish and dreadful mistake when he had lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his foolish youthful connections with Communism. Now he was being subjected to a steady stream of withering scorn from such as Walter Dobius, The Greatest Publication, Newsweek, the Post, the In-Group Quarterly, the Saturday Review and all their gallant band of brothers. But this was counterbalanced and perhaps outweighed by the sober and generally respectful reappraisals that were coming from less partisan and more responsible sources.
    Bob Leffingwell at the moment, Governor Jason realized, was riding rather high again. He was once more respectable with that great group of independent voters in the center who decide most elections. The man who could persuade him to come over to his side would have gained a powerful asset. Particularly if he were the same man whom Bob Leffingwell had so dramatically repudiated only seventy-six hours ago.
    At first blush, Ted knew, this would seem to many a strange flip-flop for Bob. But all it required to make it easy, in the sometimes rather fantastic atmosphere of American politics, was the right tone and the right style. Bob could say—Ted already had his statement blocked out for him—that now that President Hudson had been so tragically taken from the scene, he could not in all honesty support Secretary Knox for the Presidential nomination. He could say that his support of President Hudson had been essentially personal; that he had been further persuaded to support the President by the unfortunate trend to violence that the Jason campaign had seemed to be taking; that he now had the personal assurance of Governor Jason that this trend had developed without the Governor’s knowledge or approval and would not occur again; and that he accordingly could now with a clear conscience return to support of the Governor, whose policies of sober negotiation and peaceful compromise in foreign affairs were, and always had been, much more satisfactory than the dangerous and ill-advised military adventures of Secretary Knox.
    It could be done, and easily, and out of it Bob Leffingwell could hold his new-found conservative support and at the same time regain the support of his temporarily hostile friends of the professionally liberal persuasion. He could appear to be an honestly troubled man who was now confronted with the opportunity to reassess his position.
    Hopefully, this would be an accurate description of his present state of mind. A humble and apologetic call from the Governor might be just what was needed to bring him over. Somehow Ted had to find him. When the phone rang ten times without answer in Arlington, he hung up; but five minutes later he called the switchboard and gave instructions that the number was to be tried every half hour until he said to stop.

    I am probably, Bob Leffingwell thought, one of the few people in the Potomac basin at this moment who are foolish enough to sit outside; but his lawn, too, was green and shaded, and the tulip trees and dogwood gave it an illusion of coolness. At least it was cooler than the city across the river that shimmered and danced before him, seeming to expand and contract and expand again, as he sat staring at it thoughtfully from a chaise longue by the pool. Washington almost seemed to float suspended in the haze, evanescent, mysterious, perhaps an illusion, perhaps not even there save in the harried minds of those whose lives revolved around it.
    For a moment he was amused