Preserve and Protect Read Online Free

Chance” and they weep together, he sits in Carmel and stares down at the rolling sea from the beautiful cliffside home on Spindrift Drive that Esmé Harbellow Stryke, National Committeewoman from California, has given them to use for as long as they wish. Esmé is an odd one, he thinks now, fighting him as bitterly as she did at the convention and then turning around and giving him the use of her summer home. He hadn’t known she had a conscience, but apparently she has: in her strained, embarrassed voice when she called the St. Francis Hotel and made the offer, he thought he detected an apologetic guilt for the terrible episode in which his daughter-in-law, Crystal Danta Knox, lost her baby after being pummeled in the fog outside the Cow Palace by ferocious black-uniformed bullyboys backing Governor Jason. It wasn’t Esmé’s fault, but she was nice enough to try to make amends.
    And now, he thinks with an ironic amusement, she is stuck with it, because as surely as that wave just smashing on the rocks will be succeeded by the next, Esmé is going to be back fighting him the moment it becomes clear when and where the battle is to be joined. He is as certain of that as he is certain that he is going to have to meet Ted again for the Presidential nomination. Now that Harley is gone there is no question whatsoever in his mind that he must step up and take the nomination; and he knows that Ted, for all his fiddling with a “Peace Party” is going to have exactly the same idea.
    “Peace Party!” … Orrin is willing to bet, with a grim little smile, that at this moment the “Peace Party” meeting at the Hilton is being dismantled as swiftly as it was put together.
    In this he is entirely right, but the curious thing about it is that it is being done without any real communication between the “Peace Party’s” organizers and their assumptive candidate. The Governor of California is still incommunicado. No one has been able to reach him, and aside from the correct and formal statement which he has issued through his press secretary on hearing of the President’s death, he might as well not exist.
    Who really knows, at this frightful moment when the gagging crews at Andrews Air Force Base are still cleaning up what remains of Air Force One and trying to rake together enough human scraps to fill a Presidential coffin—at this moment when the nation is still stunned by the enormity of the catastrophe that has taken not only Harley Hudson but three Cabinet members, four members of Congress, three members of the diplomatic corps, six of the press corps’ ablest reporters and thirteen members of the general public—who knows what Governor Jason will do?
    His wife Ceil has left him, at least for the time being, apparently because of his tacit approval of the violent methods of some of his supporters at the convention. His ex-campaign manager, Robert A. Leffingwell, who still carries great influence with many of the nation’s liberals despite his recent defections from their cause, has gone over to the Hudson camp. The ruthlessness with which he has pursued the Presidential office has created an uneasy, insistent questioning in the minds of many of his countrymen.
    What will he do? Many would like to know, but none has the word. Like Orrin Knox in Carmel, Ted is sitting in his Mark Hopkins Hotel room, thinking. Presently he picks up the telephone and calls the man whom Orrin has already tried to reach. But there is no answer for anyone in the room of Robert A. Leffingwell, and no one knows what he will do, either. True, he left Ted Jason to place Harley Hudson in nomination. But he has not said yet how he feels about Orrin Knox, who as Senator from Illinois led the successful Senate fight to defeat Bob Leffingwell for Secretary of State a year ago. Bob’s loyalties yesterday lay with Harley, the man who rescued him from political oblivion after that defeat. Where do they lie now? Two or three times again, from Carmel