Line of Succession Read Online Free Page A

much anger in the world already.”
    â€œA lot of it incited by that pisspot Napoleon in the White House.” McNeely had a Yale Ph.D., he had been an Oxford fellow, he had written eight volumes of political analysis, he had served two Administrations—one in the Cabinet—and he persisted in calling the incumbent President of the United States “this flimflam fuehrer” and “the schmuck on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
    It was an attitude not without some justice. President Howard Brewster was a man who specialized in answers, not questions; he had the kind of mind to which Why-not-victory? oversimplifications were very attractive. Brewster represented to uncanny perfection that large segment of the populace which still wistfully hoped to win a war that had been lost a long time ago. To quick-minded sophisticates he stood for Neanderthal politics and nineteenth-century simplemindedness. Brewster was a man of emotional outbursts and political solipsism; to all appearances his attitudes had ceased developing at about the time the Allies had won World War II; and in the age of celebrity, when candidates could get elected because they looked good on a horse, Brewster’s total lack of panache made him a genuine anachronism.
    But that view of Howard Brewster was incomplete: it did not take into account the fact that Brewster was a man of politics in the same way that a tiger is a creature of the jungle. The pursuit of the Presidency had cost Brewster almost thirty years of party-climbing and fund-raising dinners and bloc-wooing within the Senate in which he had sat for four consecutive terms. Yet the unresponsive Administration of the unresponsive Government, which McNeely deplored with vigorous sarcasms, was not really of Brewster’s making. Howard Brewster was not so much its architect as its inevitable and typical product.
    It was no good condemning Brewster out of hand. He had not been the worst President in American history, not by a wide margin, and the election results had shown it: Fairlie hadn’t so much won the election from Brewster as avoided defeat, and by an incredibly small margin: 35,129,484 to 35,088,756. There had been a madness of recounts; Brewster supporters were still crying foul, claiming the Los Angeles machine had delivered to Fairlie the bloc votes of Forest Lawn Cemetery and the Pacific Ocean, but neither election officials nor Brewster’s campaigners had been able to furnish proof of their allegations and as far as Fairlie knew they weren’t true anyhow—the Mayor of Los Angeles wasn’t that fond of him, not by any means.
    In the end Fairlie had eked out 296 votes in the Electoral College to Brewster’s 242, carrying the big states by small margins and losing the small states by large margins. Brewster’s support was in the South and in rural America and the confusion of party allegiances had probably cost him the election because he was nominally and loyally a Democrat while his Republican opponent was in fact somewhere to the left of him.
    â€œDeep thoughts, Mr. President?”
    McNeely’s voice lifted him from reverie. “God. I simply haven’t had enough sleep. What have we got laid on for tomorrow morning?”
    â€œAdmiral James and General Tesworth. From NATO in Naples.”
    â€œCan you move it back to the afternoon somewhere?”
    â€œHard to do.”
    â€œI’ve got to get some rest.”
    â€œJust hold out a week, Mr. President. You can collapse in the Pyrenees.”
    â€œLiam, I’ve been talked to by too many admirals and generals as it is. I’m not doing a big-stick tour of American military bases.”
    â€œYou could afford to touch a few. The right-wing press likes the idea that you’re doing a world tour of leftist capitals to cement relations with Commies and pinkos.”
    London. Bonn. Paris. Rome. Madrid. Commies and pinkos? But Fairlie did not laugh. America’s cross to