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ambitious man. He could not only be forgiven, he could be protected, as they always protected those who agreed with them. Around his essential weakness could be drawn the cloak of an incessant and unvarying drumbeat of press and media adulation. The public could never get through to him because the media kept the public out. Inside the charmed circle of their determined protectiveness, Edward M. Jason flourished and grew great in the eyes of his countrymen, who “only knew what they read in the newspapers or saw on television.” What they read in the newspapers and saw on television often was not the truth, but that was beside the point. The point was to defeat that irresponsible, headstrong, desperately dangerous, warmongering fool, Orrin Knox. Anything could be excused and justified in the pursuit of that goal. And anything was.
    For some strange reason, however—no doubt caused by the essential frivolity, stupidity and unworthiness of the American people, characteristics often observed and commented upon by their mentors—the massive onslaught of the media had not been enough. Orrin, though politically battered and bloodied, had somehow managed to hang on to a basic constituency in the country whose members persisted in seeing him as a man whose personality was sometimes prickly but whose honesty, courage and integrity were constant. This hard core the media had not been able to erode; and when the showdown had finally come earlier in the week at the National Committee meeting, it had proved to be something more than just a hard core. By some miracle of direct communication that rested more on what people sensed about him than on what they were told by those who tried to persuade them differently, he had been able to get sufficient support to win the nomination. Enough genuinely spontaneous public pressure had descended on the committee to persuade enough—just enough—of its members to vote for Orrin. It had been a very narrow victory but there was no doubt it had been approved by a majority of his countrymen. And even his opponents had been disposed to fall in line when Orrin had decided, with what Walter and his friends could only regard, grudgingly, as genuine statesmanship, to pick Ted for his running mate.
    Thereby, as Walter shrewdly knew from his twenty-five years in Washington, Orrin had drawn most of the teeth of his liberal critics—while at the same time producing an erosion of doubt in his basically conservative constituency that he would have a hard time overcoming. A hard time, that is, as long as Ted lived and could exercise an influence on Orrin’s policies—as long as he provided a focal point for the liberal point of view that would hold Orrin in check.
    But now Ted was gone and the check was no longer there. Why was it no longer there?
    Suddenly, as he later told his chum the executive director of the Post, it was as though Walter heard a great voice from the sky, a genuine revelation. Into his mind like a slither of lightning came the question: Why was Ted Jason no longer there? One of the shrewdest political brains in the world came to a dead halt. Across its owner’s face passed a strange look of astonishment, speculation and the beginnings of an almost gleeful triumph. Not openly gleeful, for such blatant satisfaction would not have suited Walter’s image of himself, but a genuine satisfaction, nonetheless.
    He drew a sharp breath and his mind began to race. Out of its headlong plummeting came the column that was to mark the beginning of the last great attempt to get Orrin Knox—the attempt that would carry Walter and his friends into strange and dangerous alliances with deadly enemies of theirs whom they believed, in their naïve sophistication, to be friends.
    It was to be an attempt undertaken, by those who launched it, with an absolute self-righteousness and an unshakable, uplifting, thoroughly comforting self-congratulation. Walter and his friends would be convinced, as they had been