Advise and Consent (2 page)
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Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
That was exactly the trouble with Bob Leffingwell, and it always had been. Supercilious, arrogant, holier-than-thou Righteous Rollo, trying to pretend he couldn’t talk to the Majority Leader because it might prejudice his case before the Senate. One of the shrewdest politicians who ever hit Washington, wrapped in his snow-white armor above the battle—or so he managed to convince people.
Recalling the last big Leffingwell fight, when he had been appointed chairman of the Federal Power Commission in the previous Administration, Bob Munson remembered that even Brigham Anderson had gotten fed up. The matter had been in his hands as chairman of an Interstate and Foreign Commerce subcommittee, and toward the end the tensions of dealing with Sir Gawain, Purest of the Pure, had proved too much for even the mild-tempered senior Senator from Utah.
“Of course in a democratic government,” he had remarked bitterly during the debate, “we deal with men as they are reputed to be, and not with men as they really are.”
Bob Leffingwell as he was reputed to be, Senator Munson reflected, could mobilize at a conservative estimate seventy-five per cent of the Washington press corps on his side on any given issue. There were any number of writers, columnists, editorialists, bureau chiefs, and commentators who were ready and willing to go to bat for him at a moment’s notice. Those who didn’t know him well and believed in him as a matter of blind faith went along automatically; those who did know him well and had their doubts managed to convince themselves that not-so-good must be forgiven because quite-good often ensued. Certain phrases and attitudes, repeated day after day during his thirteen years in federal service—“a truly liberal mind ... his profound and perceptive approach to the problems of government....America’s ablest public servant, instinctively aflame with the cause of true liberty,” and so on—had gradually produced a conditioning few reporters could resist. A protective screen of press adulation hung between him and large portions of the public. And since the opponents, though fewer in number, possessed circulations roughly equal in their millions to the circulations possessed by the proponents, of all men in government with the possible exception of the President himself, Robert A. Leffingwell was the most controversial.
The only difficulty with the state of mind which this induced in Mr. Leffingwell, Bob Munson thought, was that it had little application on the Hill. In that realistic place, where men are judged for what they are and reputations are ruthlessly reduced to size, it came down to a hard, practical matter of getting the votes. Bob Leffingwell could swing an amazing amount of weight by a careful and clever manipulation of public opinion, but Seab Cooley could swing almost as much by a careful and clever manipulation of the Senate. And although Leffingwell had twice slipped by his vindictive vigilance, on the third go-around Seab Cooley might be pretty well prepared.
Brought by this mental roundabout squarely up against the call he had been deliberately putting off to last, Bob Munson picked up the phone and gave the name. Two floors down and one wing over, an ancient hand picked up the receiver.
“Hello, Seab,” he said hurriedly. “How are things?”
“Bob?” the thick old voice said. “Is this here Bob?”
“Yes, Seab,” he said. “This is Bob.”
“Well, sir,” said Seabright B. Cooley. “I want to tell you. Yes, sir, I certainly do. You see where the President says he’s going to appoint Mr. Robert—A.—Leffingwell? I’m against it! Yes, sir, I’m surely against it. I don’t like that man. I don’t like him mentally, morally, physically, or Constitutionally. No, sir!”
“Now, Seab,” said Bob Munson. “Now Seab, don’t fly off the handle.”
“Fly off the handle!” the old voice roared. “Fly off the handle! Who’s flying off the handle, Bob? Who’s flying off the handle? You know what I’m going to do, Bob?”—and Senator Munson could see the crafty, crumpled old face becoming even craftier and more crumpled as the voice sank abruptly to a near-whisper—“I’m going to get that man. I’m going to get them both. Yes, sir, I surely am.”
“I told the President you wouldn’t like it,” Bob Munson said.
“Not like it!” Seab Cooley roared. “Not like it! No, sir, I don’t like it! I regard it as a direct, unmitigated, unwarranted, in-ex-cu-sable insult. He knows I don’t like him! He knows I’ve fought him every chance I’ve had. He knows I despise him. Why does he do it, Bob? Why—does—he—do it?”
“As a matter of fact, Seab,” said Bob Munson sharply, “I’m damned if I know why myself. But he has done it, and it’s up to me to get the man confirmed and I want to know how much hell you’re going to raise about it.”
The old voice dropped to a sly whisper, and Senator Munson could visualize the slow and sleepy smile which crept across the pugnacious old mouth.
“I’m going to raise all the hell I can,” said Seab Cooley, “and you know that’s a mighty lot. You know that’s a mighty lot, Bob.”
“Yes, I know it’s a mighty lot,” Bob Munson said. “Why can’t you just go easy, Seab? Why do you have to be so relentless?”
“Well, sir,” Seab Cooley said, “well, sir, when that man denied something he had said to me and called me a liar to my face in open committee, I made up my mind then—”
“But, Seab,” Bob Munson broke in. “That was thirteen years ago.”
“I remember it like yesterday!” Seab Cooley roared. “I resent it, Bob. I resent his calling me a liar. I’m not a liar, Bob.”
“He didn’t call you a liar, anyway, Seab,” Bob Munson began patiently. “What he said was—” The telephone erupted in his ear.
“He surely did!” Seab Cooley cried. “He surely did! Don’t tell me what he said, Bob! Don’t tell me. I remember every word. Every—single—word. And I’m not a liar! I’m not a liar, Bob! I resent it! I do, sir!”
“No, Seab,” said Bob Munson, giving up. “You’re not a liar. How many votes do you think you can round up against him?”
“One or two, Bob,” said Seab Cooley softly. “One or two.”
“Isn’t there something I can do, Seab?”
Senator Cooley considered the offer for a moment, calculated its possible benefits, rejected it.
“No, sir, I don’t rightly think so,” he said. “I don’t rightly think so, Bob. I’m sorry to have to do it, Bob, but I can’t help it. When any man calls me a liar, I resent it, Bob. I surely resent it.”
“But, Seab—” Bob Munson protested.
“I resent it!” Seab Cooley roared, and slammed down the receiver.
“God Almighty,” said Bob Munson with a sigh.
***
Chapter 2
Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown on the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through. They may stay fifty years, they may love, marry, settle down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while. Someday soon they will be going home. They do go home, but it is only for visits, or for a brief span of staying-away; and once the visits or the brief spans are over (“It’s so nice to get away from Washington, it’s so inbred; so nice to get out in the country and find out what people are really thinking.”), they hurry back to their lodestone and their star, their self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from or, once it has claimed them, live without. Washington takes them like a lover and they are lost. Some are big names, some are little, but once they succumb it makes no difference; they always return, spoiled for the Main Streets without which Washington could not live, knowing instinctively that this is the biggest Main Street of them all, the granddaddy and grandchild of Main Streets rolled into one. They come, they stay, they make their mark, writing big or little on their times, in the strange, fantastic, fascinating city that mirrors so faithfully their strange, fantastic, fascinating land in which there are few absolute wrongs or absolute rights, few all-blacks or all-whites, few dead-certain positives that won’t be changed tomorrow; their wonderful, mixed-up, blundering, stumbling, hopeful land in which evil men do good things and good men do evil in a way of life and government so complex and delicately balanced that only Americans can understand it and often they are baffled.
In this bloodshot hour, when Bob Munson is assessing anew the endless problems of being Majority Leader and Washington around him is preparing with varying degrees of unenthusiasm to go to work, various things are happening to various people, all of whom sooner or later will be swept up, in ways they may not now suspect, in the political vortex created by the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell.
At the Sheraton-Park Hotel the Senator himself completes his dressing and starts downstairs to breakfast, stopping on his way at the apartment of Victor Ennis of California to see whether he wants to share a cab later to the Hill. Vic and Hazel Ennis invite him in for coffee, which soon expands to breakfast, and before long Bob Munson has discovered that both Vic and his junior colleague, Raymond Robert Smith, a child of television out of MGM who progressed easily from Glamour Boy No. 3 to TV Commentator No. 1 and from there to the House and then to the Senate, will vote for Bob Leffingwell. They have already talked it over, Senator Ennis explains—Ray called from the Coast as soon as he got in last night from the Academy Awards dinner, “and of course you know Hollywood will be behind him, and Ray thinks he’d better be, and so do I.” This is entirely aside from the merits of the nominee, but Bob Munson, who knows his two Californians thoroughly, is quite content to accept their votes without quibbling over motives, the first and most valuable lesson he learned in Washington and one he never forgets. Senator Ennis volunteers the information that he called Arly Richardson, just for the hell of it, and the Majority Leader asks quizzically:
“And what did that sardonic son of Arkansas have to say?”
“He said, ‘I guess this will make Bobby sweat a little,’” Senator Ennis reports, and Senator Munson laughs.
“I think I’ll put him down as doubtful, but probably leaning to Leffingwell,” he says, and Victor Ennis nods.
“If you can ever expect Arly to stand hitched,” he says, “that’s where I’d hitch him.”
And as Hazel comes in briskly with the firm intention of diverting the conversation from politics for at least ten minutes, they turn to her excellent meal and start talking baseball.
While the Ennises and the Majority Leader are thus occupied they do not know—although they would hardly be surprised if they did—that at this very moment, out Sixteenth Street in an apartment high in the Woodner, the Honorable Lafe W. Smith, junior Senator from the state of Iowa, is engaged in a most intimate form of activity with a young lady. This is the fourth time in eight hours that this has occurred, and Lafe Smith is getting a little tired of it. The young lady, however, a minor clerk on a House committee and new to the attractions of living in Her Nation’s Capital, is still filled with a carefree enthusiasm, and so the Senator, somewhat against his better judgment, is doing his best to oblige. After the standard processes have produced the standard result, the young lady will shower, dress, and amid many tremulous farewells and mutual pledges will peek nervously out the door and then hurry away down the corridor, hoping she has not been seen. The Senator, who thinks he knows something the young lady does not know, which is that he will never see her again, will also shower, shave, examine himself critically in the mirror, be amazed as always at how his unlined and engagingly boyish visage manages to stand the gaff, and then will depart by cab for the Hill, where he is scheduled to meet two elderly constituents from Council Bluffs for breakfast. These kindly folk will be suitably impressed by his air of All-American Boy, and they will go away bemused and bedazzled by their meeting, never dreaming that their All-American Boy, like many another All-American Boy is one hell of a man with the old razzmatazz.
As this tender scene, so typical of life in the world’s greatest democracy, is unfolding at the Woodner, Walter F. Calloway, the junior Senator from Utah, is also standing before the mirror in the bathroom of his house near Chevy Chase Circle just inside the District-Maryland Line, muttering and whistling through his teeth in his reedy voice just as he does on the floor of the Senate. “It iss my opinion,” he is saying (downstairs Emma Calloway, preparing the usual eggs and bacon, hears the faint droning buzz and wonders tiredly what Walter is practicing this time), “that the confirmation of Mr. Leffingwell to thiss vitally important posst would seriously endanger the welfare of the United Statess in thiss most critical time...” None of Walter’s colleagues would be surprised to hear this, and later in the day, when he issues the statement to the press and takes the time of the Senate to read it into the Congressional Record, they will shrug and look at one another as much as to say, “What did you expect?” They will be convinced then, prematurely as it turns out, that it is not among the Walter Calloways of the Senate that the fate of Robert A. Leffingwell will be decided, and they will promptly dismiss the opinion of the junior Senator from Utah, who is likable as a person, mediocre as a legislator, and generally ineffective as a United States Senator.
Also practicing, although unlike Walter Calloway not on his own superb voice, is Powell Hanson, the junior Senator from North Dakota. Powell is sitting in his study in Georgetown surrounded by Powell, Jr., twelve, Ruth, seven, and Stanley, four, and he is practicing the violin, an instrument he played in high school and hadn’t touched since until about six months ago when Powell, Jr., began to play. Now by popular demand of the younger generation, he has resumed it; and since he never manages to get home from the Senate Office Building much before seven or eight, and then only for a brief meal before either going out again socially or locking himself up with legislation, it is only in the half hour before breakfast that he can manage to really see the children. The violin was Powell, Jr.’s own idea, which the Senator feels should be encouraged; under the impetus of their joint scratching Ruth now thinks she may want to start piano, and Stanley bangs a mean drum, purchased for his recent birthday. Elizabeth Hanson, who gave up a promising future as a research chemist to marry the young lawyer in whom she saw the same possibilities he saw in himself, is quite content with the uproar created by the maestro and his crew, even though it makes breakfast a rather catch-as-catch-can meal. The price exacted by public office sometimes seems more to the Hansons than they are willing to pay; but since they know perfectly well that they will go right on paying it just as long as Powell can get re-elected, they are doing what they can to protect their children and their home. As long as the half hour is set aside as a special time, they feel, as long as it comes regularly every day, it forms a small but unbreachable wall around the family; not much, but enough to do the trick.
Also living in Georgetown in houses of varying quaintness and antiquity whose price increases in direct proportion to their degree of charming inconvenience are some twenty-one Senators whom Bob Munson refers to for easy reference in his own mind as the “Georgetown Group.” The quietest of these domiciles on this morning of Robert A. Leffingwell’s nomination is probably that of the senior Senator from Kansas, Elizabeth Ames Adams, eating breakfast alone overlooking her tiny back garden; the noisiest is probably that of the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Kenneth Hackett, with his hurly-burly seven. Somewhere in between, in terms of decibels and general activity, come such homes as the gracious residence of John Able Winthrop of Massachusetts, the aunt-run
ménage
of Rowlett Clark of Alabama, and the parakeet and fish-filled home of ancient John J. McCafferty of Arkansas and his sole surviving sister, Jane.
Far from the Georgetown Group along their delightfully tree-shaded and quaintly impassable streets, certain other colleagues are also greeting the new day in their separate fashions. Twenty-two Senators are out of town, taking advantage of the lull which has come about during the debate on the pending bill to revise some of the more obscure regulations of the Federal Reserve Board. Some people, like Murfee Andrews of Kentucky, Rhett Jackson of North Carolina, Taylor Ryan of New York, and Julius Welch of Washington, can throw themselves into this sort of abstruse economic discussion with all the passion of Lafe Smith on the trail of a new conquest; but most of the Senate is quite willing to leave such topics to the experts, voting finally on the basis of the advice of whichever of the experts happens to be considered most reliable.
Consequently the experts, aware of their responsibility, are leaving no cliché unturned. All but Taylor Ryan, in fact, are already up and going busily over the economic theories they will hurl triumphantly at one another in a near-empty Senate chamber this afternoon. The small, chunky body of Murfee Andrews is already in imagination swiveling around scornfully as some scathing point sinks home in the unperturbed hide of Rhett Jackson, who in turn is contemplating the delicate sarcasms with which he will show up the ignorance of Murfee Andrews. Julius Welch, who has never gotten over having been a college president, is readying another of his typical fifty-five-minute lectures with the five little jokes and their necessary pauses to permit the conscientious titters to flutter over the classroom. Taylor Ryan, a man who likes his comfort, is still abed, but his mind is busy, and no one need think it isn’t. He has no doubts whatever that he will be able to bull his way right through the flypaper arguments of Jay Welch and Murfee Andrews with the sort of “God damn it, let’s be sensible about this” approach befitting a man who made his millions on the Stock Exchange and so knows exactly what he’s talking about in a way these damned college professors never could.
Among the absentees, there are as many interests on this morning of the Leffingwell nomination as there are geographic locations.
In the great West, Royce Blair of Oregon, that ineffable combination of arrogance, pomposity, intelligence and good humor, is up very early preparing an address to the Portland Kiwanis Club luncheon on the topic, “The Crisis of Our Times.” He has selected this title, with his small, private smile-to-himself, as being a sufficient tent to cover all the camels he wants to crowd under it; and the news of the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell, provoking from him, as it did from the Majority Leader, a startled, “Oh, God damn!” provides the biggest camel of them all. Royce Blair does not like this nomination and Royce Blair, polishing sledge-hammer phrase after sledge-hammer phrase, is going to say so in terms that will take wings from the Portland Kiwanis Club and echo across the nation by nightfall. Already he has tried, in vain, to reach Tom August and tell him what to do, but the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as usual in moments of crisis, is nowhere to be found.
Actually, by one of those happy coincidences which have characterized his turtle-like progress through three terms as Senator from Minnesota, Tom August at this moment just happens to be completely out of touch with almost everyone at a plantation in South Carolina. This is just as well from his point of view, because he knows that a lot of people are just as anxious as Royce Blair to tell him what to do and in his vague and gentle, otherworldly way, Tom August doesn’t like to be told. So he is quite happy to be out of touch, and if his host should ask him to stay another day or two—there won’t be a vote on the Federal Reserve bill until next week, so there’s no rush—Tom August would be quite delighted to remain. The time for departure is nearing, however, and the Senator is beginning to perceive that the invitation will not be extended, and so with his usual philosophical and faintly resentful air of being buffeted unjustly by an unkind fate, he is getting ready to go back and face the music. His calm is not enhanced by the fact that for some strange reason known only to their host, his fellow house-guest and fellow voyager on the flight back to Washington is Harley M. Hudson, the Vice President of the United States. “What this country needs,” Arly Richardson once remarked, “is a good five-cent Vice President,” and Harley has never gotten over it. He has been fretting about the Leffingwell nomination ever since the news came over the radio, dropping all pretense that he had been informed of it in advance and professing freely a worry as deep as it is voluble. Harley always means well, but Tom August can’t stand him when he gets in a fussing mood, and the prospect of six hundred miles of this is almost more than the soft-voiced and wistfully willful senior Senator from Minnesota thinks he can stand.