Of course, it was the President who was back of the ten-day leaves that had been granted to most of the civil-service personnel in Washington and he himself must have made the decision to take a swing through the South at that time, but it must have been Manning who put the idea in his head. It is inconceivable that the President would have left Washington to escape personal danger.
And then, there was the plague scare. I don't know how or when Manning could have started that — it certainly did not go through my notebook — but I simply do not believe that it was accidental that a completely unfounded rumor of bubonic plague caused New York City to be semideserted at the time the E.U. bombers struck.
At that, we lost over eight hundred thousand people in Manhattan alone.
Of course, the government was blamed for the lives that were lost and the papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and force an evacuation of all the major cities.
If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?
Well, as I see it, for this reason:
A big city will not be, never has been, evacuated in response to rational argument. London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened to the thought.
But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.
And don't forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow — those were innocent people, too. War isn't pretty.
I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military radioactives in the Eurasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other way around — suppose that one of the E.U. ships in attacking Washington, D.C., by mistake had included Ridpath's shop forty-five miles away in Maryland?