Read Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders for Free Online Page A

walls, Jack reflected, then this building would have a very different name. But there was greatness here, too, and that was more intimidating than the pettiness of politics. Here James Monroe had promulgated the Mon-roe Doctrine and propelled his country into the strategic world for the first time. Here
    
    
     Lincoln
    
    
     had held his country together through the sheer force of his own will. Here Teddy Roosevelt had made
    
    
     America
    
    
     a real global player, and sent his Great White Fleet around the world to announce
    
    
     America
    
    
    . Here Teddy's distant cousin had saved his country from internal chaos and despair, with little more than a nasal voice and an up-angled cigarette holder. Here Eisenhower had exercised power so skillfully that hardly anyone had noticed his doing anything at all. Here Kennedy had faced down Khrushchev, and nobody had cared that doing so had covered a multitude of blunders. Here Reagan had plotted the destruction of
    
    
     America
    
    
    's most dangerous enemy, only to be accused of sleeping most of the time. What ultimately counted more—the achievements or the dirty little secrets committed by imperfect men who only briefly stepped beyond their weaknesses? But those brief and halting steps made up the sort of history that lived, while the rest was, mainly, forgotten—except by revisionist historians who just didn't get the fact that people weren't supposed to be perfect.
    But it still wasn't his house.
    The entrance was a tunnel of sorts, which headed under the East Wing, where the First Lady—until ninety minutes earlier Anne Durling—had her offices. By law the First Lady was a private citizen—an odd fiction for someone with a paid staff—but in reality her functions were often hugely important, however unofficial they might be. The walls here were those of a museum, not a home, as they walked past the small White House theater, where the President could watch movies with a hundred or so close personal friends. There were several sculptures, many by Frederic Remington, and the general motif was supposed to be “pure” American. The paintings were of past presidents, and Ryan's eyes caught them—their lifeless eyes seemed to look down at him with suspicion and doubt. All the men who had gone before, good and bad, whether judged well or poorly by historians, they looked at him—
    I'm an historian
    
    , Ryan told himself. I've written a few books. I've judged the actions of others from a safe distance of both time and space. Why didn't he see this? Why didn't he do that? Now, too late, he knew better. He was here now, and from the inside it looked very different. From the outside you could see in, looking around first to catch all the information and analyze it as it passed by, stopping it when you had to, even making it go backward, the better to understand it all, taking your time to get things exactly right.
    But from the inside it wasn't that way at all. Here everything came directly at you like a series of onrushing trains, from all directions at once, moving by their own time schedules, leaving you little room to maneuver or reflect. Ryan could sense that already. And the people in the paintings had mainly come to this place with the luxury of time to think about their ascension, with the luxury of trusted advisers, and of good will. Those were benefits he didn't have. To historians, however, they wouldn't matter for much more than a cursory paragraph, or maybe even a whole page, before the writer moved on with pitiless analysis.
    Everything he said or did, Jack knew, would be subjected to the 20/20 vision of hindsight—and not just from this moment forward. People would now look into his past for information on his character, his beliefs, his actions good and bad. From the moment the aircraft had struck the Capitol building, he was President, and every breath he'd drawn since would be examined in a new and unforgiving light for generations to come. His daily life