A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [148]
Quinn had deftly drawn a line in the sand and taken the moral high ground. Clever or political genius?
Fat Tuesday.
The primaries said that O’Connell was in to stay. He won Maryland by an eyelash, lost Georgia by the same amount, but he polled forty percent of the South Carolina vote. Do the West and South identify with one another? Perhaps in being treated as a cultural wilderness. This stranger from a strange place was no stranger at all.
Quinn and his people staggered into New York for a hit-and-run visit. This was Greer Little-Crowder country, and she filled the Plaza grand ballroom with a bursting crowd of financial wizards, stars of the entertainment business, developers, attorneys, CEOs, tall athletes, bankers.
(Gawd! He is gorgeous!)
(Well, she’s not exactly chopped liver.)
Quinn went to them as a successful businessman. “To retain our exalted commercial status in the world, let us run a gut check on ethical standards. Hey, soft money is greed money. Greed money is soft money. Soft money erodes our underpinnings.”
Just about everyone in the ballroom was uncomfortable but emptied their wallets to the limitations. Maybe Quinn was not for them, but it was nice to have a spokesman for the conscience before reelecting Thornton Tomtree.
Now for the grand entrance in a late rally at Columbia University with students bussed in from NYU and St. John’s and Fordham and Yeshiva and City College.
“We can no longer afford racism. A short century and a half ago we fought a civil war to erase the ogre of slavery. The twentieth century was all about people liberating themselves, declaring their freedom and dividing the planet into a hundred and eighty-five independent nations. This new century is the century we will get rid of one of mankind’s oldest scourges. We will rid ourselves of the curse of bigotry.”
A hundred cameras ate up several thousand exposures of Quinn shaking hands with Warren Crowder, of Quinn shaking hands with Warren Crowder and Greer Little-Crowder.
Meanwhile, Rita had garnered a great deal of attention of her own.
The Madison Square Garden fund-raiser turned away over three thousand people. The fever was like a Lindbergh parade down Broadway. Quinn left New York with over a million and a half dollars and fifty-eight percent of the Democratic vote.
* * *
“Governor O’Connell, Charles Packard, Reuters. Would you care to comment on the Newsweek story concerning your campaign chairperson, Greer Little-Crowder?”
“Without Greer my campaign would have never gotten off the ground, nor could it run so well.”
“Follow-up question, Governor. Were you and Ms. Crowder romantically linked?”
“We sure were. We were sweethearts at the University of Colorado thirty years ago. She was also an excellent baseball coach and raised my batting average almost forty points.”
“Doesn’t it seem newsworthy, sir, that Greer Little-Crowder is now a powerful person, throwing herself into your campaign?”
“Obviously, she was anguished by the Four Corners tragedy and, along with millions of Americans, believes the Second Amendment must be repealed.”
“Louise Markham, Washington Times. Have you and Ms. Crowder had contact in the intervening years?”
“Well, not the kind of contact you are hinting at. We’ve met on public occasions.”
“Governor, Chance Spencer, MSNBC. Did Ms. Crowder resign or simply take an extended leave?”
“Hold the phone, ladies and gentlemen. You’re leading me down a dirt road to the woodshed. For God’s sake, don’t throw us back to the dark ages of 1998 and the damage it wrought, and the torture imposed on a great but imperfect man.”
“What about the public’s right to know?”
“That right ends at my front door. I hope I will be able to invite everyone into my parlor. The rest of my home is a private place between me and my wife and family, and God.”
* * *
Showdown time in Dixie. Six of the eight primaries were in the South. Florida and Texas, two of the mega-states, loomed in front of Quinn. A favorite son candidate from Florida, Governor, and later Senator Chad Humboldt, girded to stop the O’Connell train.