Read Advise and Consent Online
Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
Advise and Consent (5 page)
He could not say, looking back, exactly where the blame was to be placed; except that he knew, as he had told an audience in San Francisco only last week, that “it lies on all of us.” A universal guilt enshrouded the middle years of the twentieth century in America; and it attached to all who participated in those times. It attached to the fatuous, empty-headed liberals who had made it so easy for the Russians by yielding them so much; it attached to the embittered conservatives who had closed the doors on human love and frozen out all possibility of communication between peoples. It rested on the military, who had been too jealous of one another and too slow, and on the scientists, who had been too self-righteous and irresponsible and smug about shifting the implications of what they did onto someone else, and on the press, which had been too lazy and too compliant in the face of evils foreign and domestic, and on the politicians, who had been too self-interested and not true enough to the destiny of the land they had in keeping, and not least upon the ordinary citizen and his wife, who somehow didn’t give quite enough of a damn about their country in spite of all their self-congratulatory airs about how patriotic they were. Nobody could stand forth now in America and say, “I am guiltless. I had no part in this. I did not help bring America down from her bright pinnacle.” For that would be to deny that one had lived through those years, and only babies and little children could say that.
So now there was a time of uneasiness when everyone told everyone else dutifully that, “It is not our purpose to indulge in recriminations about the past,” and tried to live up to it; and when all thinking men fretted and worried desperately about “how to catch up,” and “how to get ahead”; and also, in the small hours of the night’s cold terror, about what it would be like if America
couldn’t
catch up, if history should have decided once and for all that America should never again be permitted to get ahead.
And already because of this, the smooth and supple voices of rationalization were beginning to be heard, the blandly clever voices of adjustment and accommodation and don’t-make-a-federal-case-of-it and don’t-take-it-too-hard and after-all-what-will-it-matter-in-a-hundred-years and maybe it-wouldn’t-really-be-so-bad and I-guess-we-could-live-with-them-if-we-had-to. And for America it was a time of nip and tuck, and a darkening passageway with only God’s good grace, if He cared to confer it again upon a people who sometimes didn’t seem to deserve it any more, to see the country safely through.
God’s good grace, Bob Munson told himself grimly, and a few good men. The President wasn’t giving in, and he wasn’t giving in, and there were quite a few others all through the country who weren’t giving in; the majority, in fact, he believed. But people were only human, after all, and they were scared; and confronted with the possibility of a war with all the horrors it could now entail, they were not as resolute or as courageous as they once had been when they weren’t so aware of what the consequences of resolution and courage could be. They liked to tell themselves they were brave, but they weren’t; there was just enough of a feeling, just enough, to provide a very dangerous potential for an appeasement that would be fatal. Faced with an open challenge, an open attack, they would, if they had the time, rouse and fight back as they always had, no matter what the price, for America; but make the attack sufficiently intellectual, make the threat sufficiently subtle, give them time to think, let them mull it over and contemplate what would happen if they didn’t go along, carry it to the conference table if you liked and be sure you gave them a way to save face as they retreated, and he would not, at this moment, vouch for what her people would allow to be done to America.
Through a combination of lapses, stupidities, overidealism, and misjudgments, each at the time seemingly sound and justified, each in its moment capable of a rationale that had brought a majority to approve it, the United States had gotten herself into a position
vis-à-vis
the Russians in which the issue was more and more rapidly narrowing down to a choice between fight and die now or compromise and die later. And out of that fearful peril only the most iron-willed and nobly dedicated and supremely unafraid men could lead the nation.
That was why so much was involved in the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell, and that was why it would, he knew, be a grim business in which men played for keeps before it was through. The fate of the Republic, in this instance, did indeed in large measure depend on what the Senate did; particularly since, for all his verve and vigor, the President of late had not looked entirely well to Bob Munson’s practiced eye. He had hung back for a moment this last time as they left the oval office, and for a second had looked hard at the man behind the desk. The President had caught him at it, too; for a split second his face changed and a strange expression came over it. Almost as though he had wanted to tell him something, Bob Munson thought; something that he was afraid of, and thought might be mortal. It had shocked him, for he had never seen the President afraid of anything. Maybe he would tell him about it someday, he reflected; although, being a strange and unknowable man as all Presidents are strange and unknowable, he also might not. At any rate, a little cautionary thought had taken up its residence in the Majority Leader’s mind; a certain silent, unexpressed factor in his thinking and planning. He knew it would not go away until the second term ended, or until the Lord resolved it, whichever it was to be.
This, which as far as he knew only he as yet suspected, lent an even greater gravity to the Leffingwell nomination. If the dark eventuality occurred and Harley Hudson succeeded to office, he would undoubtedly in his frantic insecurity keep Bob Leffingwell on, and Bob Leffingwell, Bob Munson knew, was strong enough to be Secretary of State and unsworn President, too. And thereby, if the President had misjudged him and the Senate confirmed the misjudgment, could hang quite a story; the sort of sad story that people sit upon the ground and tell, of great hopes crushed and great states lost forever.
Therefore there devolved upon him and upon his brethren on the Hill the responsibility of being absolutely sure about this man before they approved him. This meant that Seab, who was simply an obstruction under most circumstances, would be an obstruction pulling powerful support behind him in this case; and that he, who would push through a nomination in most cases as a matter of routine party loyalty, must in this instance be positive in his heart that he was doing the thing that should be done. It could not be decided lightly, and it would not be decided lightly. Too much hung upon it.
To the task, he reflected with some satisfaction as the grimness of his mood began to slacken, he brought a good equipment. In his deceptively amiable and easygoing way he was as strong a man as his times demanded. It had taken him some years to become so, and he could remember many times when through inexperience or uncertainty he had gone too far in one direction or the other, giving in too easily to someone when he should have stood firm or being too harsh with someone when he should have been gentle. But in time—and it took time, and much study of men’s hearts and minds to be a good leader of the United States Senate—he had learned; and now he knew pretty well when to be soft, pretty well when to be tough, and pretty well when to refrain from those exaggerations of opinion and attitude which had too often destroyed bright careers in Washington. Not for him the endless, embittered, self-righteous twistings of a Paul Hendershot of Indiana, or the blind, unmoving, uncreative, unhappy conservatism of an Eldon P. Boyle of Wyoming. He stood where he stood, and he knew why he stood there; and thus his approach to the Leffingwell nomination would be what the circumstances made necessary for the good of the land. He was a mature man at fifty-seven, in a way that few men achieve maturity. It had taken him a while, and a good bit of living to get there, but he was unshakeable as a rock now, and everybody knew it.
Even Seab, he thought with amusement as the cab swung past the Washington Monument and the Bureau of Engraving, dashed across Fourteenth Street, and darted under the bridges over Independence Avenue that linked the north and south Agriculture Department buildings. Even Seab, staring straight ahead like a very formidable lump on a very formidable log.
“Isn’t that so, Seab?” Bob Munson asked out loud. Seab grunted.
“I don’t rightly know what you have in mind, Bob,” he said slowly, “but I expect it’s designed to make me look just a leetle bit ridiculous. Isn’t what so, Bob?”
“Don’t you know I’m unshakeable as a rock?” Bob Munson said.
“Who called you that, Bob?” Seab asked. “
Time
Magazine? You ought to see what they call me, Bob. Unshakeable, sometimes, but a lot of other things, too. Not one of them as polite as ‘rock,’ Bob. Not one.”
“I was just thinking it about myself, Seab,” Senator Munson said. “I was sure you’d agree.”
“If you’re a rock, Bob,” Senator Cooley said blandly, “you’ve met a sledge hammer. You know that, Bob, don’t you?”
“Yes, Seab,” said Bob Munson with a grin, “I know that.”
“Yes, sir,” Seab said; and after a moment, very softly to himself, “Yes, sir.”
But withstanding sledge hammers, Bob Munson reflected as the cab passed the Botanical Gardens, made its lunge up the Hill past the New House Office Building, turned left, and started around Capitol Plaza toward the Senate office buildings, was what they paid him for. And he wouldn’t want it any other way.
At the side entrance to the Old Senate Office Building on Delaware Avenue the cab stopped and its passengers got out. Senator Ennis, who, far from Russians and other matters he thought about as little as possible, had been lost throughout the journey in a tantalizing vision of the Jonathan Club beach at Santa Monica as it would be in another couple of months, came to with a start and reached for his purse. Senator Munson did the same. Senator Cooley forestalled them both.
“I’ll get it, Senators,” he said grandly, with his usual ironic little twinkle. “I come from a small state, you know, not like you big fellows who always use up all your expense funds. You know us in South Carolina, Bob; all we ever have to spend our money on is corn likker and lynching bees. You Yankees know that, Bob. I’ll get it.”
“Thank you, Seab,” Bob Munson said; and, “Thank you, Seab,” Victor Ennis echoed respectfully.
“My pleasure, Bob,” Senator Cooley said graciously; “my pleasure, Senator.” Then he grinned suddenly and waved toward the stone expanses of the office building before them.
“On your mark, get ready, get set, go, Bob,” he said. “On your mark, get ready, get set, go.”
***
Chapter 4
On your mark, get ready, get set, go, was exactly it, Bob Munson reflected as he approached the familiar door with its picture of Lake Michigan and “Mr. Munson—Come In” at the end of the corridor on the second floor. He had soon found that his job, in which there were infinite problems and many rewards, could reasonably well be summed up in just some such jibe as Seab had uttered when they left the cab. When he became Majority Leader his day automatically expanded to sixteen, eighteen hours, the Capitol, which had dominated his thoughts for twelve years, became their absolute center, and he swiftly learned that his world began and ended in ninety-nine minds whose endless surprises he could never entirely anticipate. No sooner had he got somebody pegged in one place than he turned up somewhere else; his plans for steering legislation had to be constantly revised to accommodate the human material with which he had to work. Even such solid citizens as Stuart Schoenfeldt and Royce Blair were quite capable of jumping the reservation when issues got too close to home, and when it came to someone of the caliber of Courtney Robinson, for instance, all bets were off. Many a time he had discussed an issue earnestly with Courtney, been assured with the greatest sincerity that he was true-blue and steadfast, and then found as the roll call neared that the elocutions rapidly became elaborate to the point of obfuscation. Finally with great pain and reluctance he would be assured that there were “just too many reasons, just too many reasons,” for the vote to be cast as he wished. Sometimes he did not even receive this courtesy, and it was only when the reading clerk called the names that he knew what would happen. Then Courtney would smile and wave graciously across the chamber, and later come over to apologize heartily for being a bad boy.
Fortunately for the orderly progress of the American government, this situation did not arise every time or with everybody. There was a bedrock he could count on, and he presently came to base his strategy upon it. He felt he had, on almost every issue, a bloc of approximately thirty sure votes; and to them it was usually not too difficult to add the nineteen or twenty more he needed for victory. Sometimes he hardly bothered to check, for many things went through more or less automatically. But on the big issues, such as defense, foreign aid, public power, the major appropriations, the major nominations, he always went automatically through the list, questioning, cajoling, sounding out, sometimes promising, sometimes warning, sometimes putting it on a basis he hated but one which occasionally proved effective when nothing else did—“Just as a favor to me.” This was Seab’s favorite gambit, and they sometimes met in battle array over the prostrate form of some poor wee, sleek, timorous, cowerin’ beastie like Nelson Lloyd of Illinois or Henry Lytle of Missouri, desperately anxious to be friends with everybody and not offend either the powerful Majority Leader or his almost equally powerful opponent. Then it all had its humorous moments.
In the main, however, it was a serious business for the most part, and to a considerable degree a labor of love that had its own compensating satisfactions. He sometimes wondered, when he was arguing earnestly with someone as vapid as Walter Calloway of Utah or bargaining with someone as crafty as George Hines of Oregon, whether those who began it all had foreseen the down-to-earth applications of their monumental idea. Sometimes he would come out of the chamber and walk past the statue of Benjamin Franklin, who stood just off the floor at the foot of the stairs to the gallery, fingering his chin with a quizzical smile, and wonder if old Ben and the rest of them had ever had any idea, that steamy summer in Philadelphia, that their brain child would develop into as practical and bedrock a human process as it had. But then he would remember some of their discussions and decide that he probably knew why Ben was smiling. Dealing with prickly John Adams was probably no different from reasoning with prickly Orrin Knox, and certainly Arly Richardson in a pet could be no more difficult than Edmund Randolph.
Thus comforted by his wry imaginings of the past, he would reflect that this, in essence, was the American government: an ever-shifting, ever-changing, ever-new and ever-the-same bargaining between men’s ideals and their ambitions; a very down-to-earth bargaining, in most cases, and yet a bargaining in which the ambitions, in ways that often seemed surprising and frequently were quite inadvertent, more often than not wound up serving the purposes of the ideals.
In this eternal bargaining there were five principal middlemen: the President of the United States, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and the House Minority Leader. Through these five changing-houses flowed the passions, the prejudices, and the purposes of the land, and on their particular skills in leading men depended that delicate balancing of dream and desire which moved the nation forward. At a time such as the present when all five were for all practical purposes equally adept, this made for a good deal of genuine progress in many matters. There had been times, as under the Roosevelts or Eisenhower, when one of the middlemen had either been strong beyond proportion or weak beyond proportion, when the balance was knocked out of kilter and the government either raced forward at a speed too fast to be comfortable or stalled at dead center and drifted helplessly through desperate crises without purpose, plan, or conviction at the heart of it. This was a penalty, and one that Ben and Company perhaps had not foreseen; but it was a penalty inseparable from freedom, and so far, despite great risks and perils, the country had survived them all. Whether it would under present circumstances was of course the question; and on that, it was too early to tell. All we can do, he told himself as he unlocked the door giving into his private office, took off his coat and hat, and prepared to buzz Mary to bring him the mail and start the day, is the best we can; aware that he was not alone in this, and that already, on the Hill, around town, and out in the country, others were already at work on the complex situation created by the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell; some to help, some to hinder, but all, according to their lights, to do the best they could.
It wasn’t that you objected to these little duties you had to perform, Lafe Smith told himself as he paid his cabbie, ran up the steps into the Senate side of the Capitol, and hurried down the poorly lighted hallway toward the Senate restaurant. You liked people, usually, or you weren’t in this business. But the juxtaposition of breakfast with his upright constituents from Council Bluffs and a night with Little Miss Roll-me-over-and-do-it-again was one of those little ironies they didn’t tell you about in the civics books. They told you about the machinery, but they never let on that human beings were what made it run; they talked grandly about a government of laws, not of men, concealing from the idealistic and the young the apparently too harsh fact that it is men who make and administer laws, and so in the last analysis it is the men who determine whether the laws shall function. They made it all so unreal, somehow; and it wasn’t unreal at all; at least he didn’t think it was. Certainly he didn’t feel unreal, hadn’t last night, and didn’t now. It all hung together candidly in his pragmatic mind: Senators like it just as much as anybody, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less Senators for that. It was the sort of insight into the world that not very many of his colleagues knew he had. They all knew he had enough experience to have insight, but few were aware he had developed any.
However, he had, and those who realized it kept it in mind. That was why Bob Munson, for one, was so fond of him, totally unlike as their basic characters seemed to be; and that was why Lafe Smith was moving closer to the little group around Bob who generally called the tune for the Senate. And that was why, without even being asked, but just because he knew Bob would want to know, that he was about to make a quick, smooth, accurate, and reliable survey of what the Midwest thought about the nomination. Sometimes a single conversation could illuminate a whole region for you, if the people were representative and voluble enough; he knew his breakfast guests were. He had a good idea what their reaction would be: the Midwest wanted none of it. He wasn’t so sure he did himself, as a matter of fact, though that would depend on Bob and a lot of other things.
Just ahead of him, white-haired, kindly, and a little nervous about this venture into the great world of government, he saw his company, and with the engaging, comfortable grin that put constituents and conquests equally at ease, he stepped forward, held out a hand to each of them, said, “I’m Lafe Smith, sorry to be late,” and led them on into the restaurant.
At the press table in the restaurant as Lafe and his guests went by, Associated Press stopped in mid-coffee, looked up at United Press International and the
New York
Times
and asked:
“What do you think he’s going to do?”
“Him?” UPI said. “Whatever Bob tells him to do.”
“I’m not so sure,” the
Times
remarked. “I don’t think this one is going to be so easy for Remarkable Robert.”
“A presidential nomination?” AP snorted. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
“But Bob Leffingwell,” UPI said. “And the Russians. And Seab Cooley. And what have you.”
“When Bob holds his press conference before the session we’ll have to ask him if this nomination is an example of that bipartisan unity we’ve been hearing about so much,” AP said. “I’ll bet it is.”
“I’ll bet he won’t tell us,” UPI said. “He’ll consider it a secret.”
“Oh, well,” AP said with a dry chuckle, “by noon he’ll have it all sewed up anyway.”
“That I doubt,” said the
Times
.
Dolly’s bedroom window, like most other windows in Vagaries, looked right out into the trees, and that was where Dolly was looking, too. The morning papers were spread across the bed and Dolly—Mrs. Phelps Harrison, generally described as “one of Washington’s most prominent hostesses”—was dreamily observing the first feathering green tips of spring along the branches. The sun was shining brightly, a crisp, fresh wind came in from the slightly opened window. It was a sparkling day out, and one of Washington’s most prominent hostesses knew she ought to be up and doing.
Instead, she was lying here thinking that once again events had conspired to guarantee the success of a party at Vagaries.
Things couldn’t, she reflected happily, have dovetailed more conveniently for her. When she had sent out the invitations she of course hadn’t the remotest idea that the date would fall on the day the President finally decided to appoint a successor to Howie Sheppard as Secretary of State. It was simply fate and her favoring star, therefore, that the guest list should include not only Howie, but Bob Leffingwell as well; and not only those two, but Bob Munson, Tom August, most of the Foreign Relations Committee, Orrin Knox, half the Cabinet, Lord and Lady Maudulayne, Raoul and Celestine Barre, Krishna Khaleel, and even Vasily Tashikov, to say nothing of a wide scattering of other Administration, Hill, and diplomatic people. This was
the
party of the spring at Vagaries—in three years’ time the society columns had become trained to the point where they automatically referred to it as “the Spring Party,” without other identification—and it was always big. This time, though, she had an idea it was going to be positively sensational. Once again in a time of crisis, Vagaries might hold the key.
This, as she had congratulated herself so often before, simply confirmed again her great wisdom in deciding to settle in Washington in the first place. She had always had a lively interest in politics and world affairs, had fortunately been blessed with the native intelligence and shrewdness to give it point, and after the divorce when she was more or less at loose ends as to what to do next the idea had suddenly shot into her mind, “Why not go to Washington?” She and John used to visit there occasionally on business trips in the past, she had always liked and been thrilled by it, and now that she was adrift at forty-three with the family millions and no particular geographic ties, there was no reason why she shouldn’t.
“I’m going to live in Washington,” she had told everybody, and everybody had exclaimed; but not half so much as they did when they subsequently learned from press, radio, television, and newsreel just how overwhelmingly successful the move had proved itself to be.
Of course, that was the thing about Washington, really; you didn’t have to be born to anything, you could just buy your way in. “Any bitch with a million bucks, a nice house, a good caterer, and the nerve of a grand larcenist can become a social success in Washington,” people said cattily, and indeed it was entirely true. Dolly was no bitch, but the principle applied. First came the house—Vagaries, gleaming whitely, secretly yet hospitably among its great green trees on ten beautifully landscaped acres in the park, just happened to go up for sale less than a month after Dolly reached Washington and Dolly bought it outright at once—and then you began the routine. You got somebody you knew to introduce you to somebody
she
knew, and then you gave a small tea or two, and then a small cocktail party or even a small dinner, being careful to include the society editors of the
Star
, the
Post
and the
News
in one or more of them, and you were on your way. Then after the word had begun to get around a little, and you perhaps had been introduced to a Senator or two, and maybe a Cabinet officer and his wife or one of the military, you could sail right into it full steam ahead, set a date, send out invitations broadside to a couple of hundred prominent people, hire yourself the best decorator and caterer you could find, and sit back to await results. Since official Washington loves nothing as much as drinking somebody else’s liquor and eating somebody else’s food, the results were all you could hope for, and after that there were no problems. The quick-leaping friendships of stylishly dressed, scented, powdered, and bejeweled women screaming “Darling!” at one another, together with the amused tolerance of their amiable and almost always thirsty husbands, could quickly be parlayed into an endless round of party-going and party-giving that very soon took you to a social pinnacle limited only by your wealth and stamina. Before long you would find that
Time
and
Newsweek
were beginning to mention you in coy little asides in their news columns, and then would come the day when you picked up a magazine from the rack and found that all those carefully staged photographs at your last affair had finally resulted in a LIFE GOES TO A PARTY AT DOLLY HARRISON’S, and you could relax, at last, for you were finally, indubitably, beyond all peradventure of doubt and beyond all fear of challenge by mortal man—or, more importantly, woman—In.