Advise and Consent (4 page)

Chapter 3

“Oh, damn,” Victor Ennis said as the elevator deposited them in the lobby of the Sheraton-Park. “There’s Seab. Shall we look the other way?”

“No,” said Bob Munson, “maybe he will.” But of course he didn’t, and they met at the door.

“Good morning, Senator,” Seab said slowly to Victor Ennis. “Good morning to you, too, Bob.”

“Good morning, Seab,” Senator Munson said gravely. “I trust you breakfasted well.”

“Poorly, Bob,” Senator Cooley said. “Poorly. I kept seeing that man. I kept thinking about them both. I kept thinking, Bob. It made me mad.”

“It’s got us all a little concerned, Seab,” Victor Ennis said heartily, “but I imagine we’ll get it all worked out in time.”

“I suppose you’re for him,” the Senator from South Carolina cried with sudden vehemence, stopping dead in his tracks in front of two bellboys and a wide-eyed young couple from Montana who were trying to get in. “I suppose you’re all for him and nobody but poor old an-ti-quated Seabright B. Cooley is against him. I suppose that’s how it is, Senators. I suppose I’ll have to fight alone.”

“I dare say it will be another of your magnificent, lonely battles, Seab,” Bob Munson broke in dryly. “How about sharing a cab to the Hill?”

For a second the wizened old face glared at him without expression; then it changed abruptly and a little twinkle came into the heavy-lidded eyes.

“Why, that’s the kindest thing you’ve said to me all morning, Bob,” Seab Cooley said softly. “You’re a kind fellow, Bob. I like you. One of God’s noblemen, I always say when people ask me. That’s what I say about Senator Munson, Bob.”

“I tell them you’re one of God’s most amazing creations, too, Seab,” Senator Munson said. “I tell them He really outdid Himself when He made you. I tell them we may not see your like again.”

“I’ll bet you say, ‘Thank God for that, too,’ Bob,” Seab Cooley said. “I’ll bet you’ll all be glad when poor old Seab Cooley is dead and you can get on that funeral train to South Carolina and stand by his grave and say, ‘Thank God he’s gone.’ That’s what I’ll bet, Bob!”

“These people are trying to get by, Seab,” Bob Munson said calmly. “Shall we let them?”

“That’s all you think about, getting rid of me!” Senator Cooley cried bitterly. “Poor old Seab Cooley, seventy-five if he’s a day, and they’re all ganging up on me, ma’am. They’re all ganging up on me! Now you pass right on through, and excuse me for blocking your way, ma’am. When you get home, you tell your folks you saw Senator Cooley of South Carolina and his enemies trying to lay him low. But you tell them it didn’t work, ma’am. You tell them Senator Cooley is still here battling for the Republic. Yes, ma’am!”

“For
heaven’s
sake, Seab,” Bob Munson exclaimed, leaving Christ out of it, because the young lady from Montana was getting wide-eyed to the point of explosion, “will you come on and get in the cab?”

“Here’s one now,” Victor Ennis observed brightly. “Just in time.”

“Just in time for what?” Senator Cooley asked ominously. “And take your hand off my arm, Bob. I’m not an old man, Bob. I can manage. You don’t have to help me. I can manage very well, Bob. I don’t have to be helped. I’m not senile, Bob, though you’re all trying to drive me there as fast as you can.”

“No, Seab,” Bob Munson agreed patiently. “You’re not senile, and I imagine you’ll drive all of us crazy before we drive you anywhere. Except to the Capitol.” He added to the driver, “Old Senate Office Building, if you will, please.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and with Senator Ennis on one side, Senator Munson on the other, and Senator Cooley squeezed in unyieldingly in the middle, they set off on their fifteen-minute ride to the Hill, while behind them the bellboys smiled and the young couple from Montana told each other excitedly that their Washington visit had certainly begun with a bang.

Sitting on his side of the cab as it passed down the curving drive, made the short turn on Connecticut Avenue, and then angled right and plunged down past the Shoreham into Rock Creek Park, Bob Munson reminded himself as he had often before that he needn’t have been Majority Leader and let himself in for all this if he hadn’t wanted to. The paths of ambition lead to strange places sometimes, but in his case he could hardly claim that he hadn’t known where they would take him. Grandfather Durham had been in the Senate from Massachusetts, and that was enough to decide that. A relatively undistinguished man who, to be frank about it, had accomplished very little in three terms, he had nonetheless imposed from his grave an obligation upon his likeliest male descendant to set his sights for Capitol Hill. By general family agreement, this meant the only son of the old man’s only daughter; and after graduating from the University of Michigan in the state where his parents had moved shortly before the First World War, he had gone on to Harvard Law School and then had come home dutifully to apply himself to the task of winning a seat in the United States Senate.

At the start, this did not appear to be a simple project, but in the first of the events which were ultimately to give him a certain sense of personal destiny—a modest one, which he never tried to push too far, but satisfactory enough, since it got him where he wanted to go nine times out of ten—he made a fortuitous connection with one of the leading law firms in Detroit and soon after discovered to his pleased surprise that he had been gifted with the ability to make quite a speech. Shortly after this revelation he happened quite by chance to be invited to address a group of auto workers, and since Grandfather Durham in any event was not a political fool and had transmitted some savvy down the line, his descendant perceived from their response and an astute study of changing economic conditions that this might be a sound foundation for the goal he hoped to achieve in Washington. He thus became one of the first to ally himself with the rising political power of labor, and because he was Bob Munson and not some other, he managed to do so without making himself its slave as well. Looking back, he was not always entirely sure how he had managed to do this and still retain his independence, and there were still occasions now and again when it was sometimes nip and tuck even at this late date. But on the whole he had managed to work out a very satisfactory accommodation which had seen him through his only failure, a close but unsuccessful race for the governorship at the age of thirty-four, two successful campaigns for the House, and four consecutive terms in the Senate. Along the way on his walk in the shadow of Grandfather Durham he had done all the things that people do in America to reach the Congress: made the speeches, shaken the hands, joined the clubs, formed the friendships, established the loyalties, created the ever-widening web of favor and counterfavor which forms the basis of so many lives that ultimately find their way into the close-packed pages of the Congressional Directory.

Also he had married well, to the daughter of one of the larger auto manufacturers, an interesting match from a political standpoint which was accepted pleasantly on all sides and which, because he was Bob Munson and somebody quite genuinely and universally liked, gave him a foot in each camp which neither held against him. There had been no children, and in the final ten years before her death, from cancer, a tragic event now six years in the past, they had found increasingly little to talk about; but there was no doubt that May had been a help to him all along the way. In the early days she had been his faithful companion at meetings, rallies, county fairs, and union conventions; after he won election to the Congress, she had turned her energies to the task of winning a steadily increasing standing in the life of the capital. She had loved Washington, as most people do who spend any time there, and aside from her activities in the Senate Ladies Club, to whose presidency she had aspired and presently risen, she had given any number of cocktail parties, dinners, and “conversations” at the big, old-fashioned place they used to own in Cleveland Park in Northwest Washington before her death. A “conversation” at the Munsons, usually held on a Sunday afternoon, drew its participants from politics, government, diplomacy, and the press with an astute and well-managed abandon that always guaranteed a good time; two Presidents and three Chief Justices had occasionally dropped in, and all in all the whole business had been a great success and a great assistance to the Senator in his gradual evolution from prominence, which so many have, to power, which is achieved by so few.

If over the years of this process he and his wife had become friendly strangers who happened to be devoted to the same ends, that was a condition not without precedent in the world in which they moved. Inexorably, perhaps Inevitably, May had become like so many wives of famous men in Washington—not exactly loved by her husband, not exactly disliked, not exactly criticized, not exactly tolerated, but just someone who had been married a long, long time ago when the world was young and who was inextricably part of the show now with no way to get around it. Many a man in the capital showed just that air of rather tired sufferance Bob Munson developed in their closing years together; and for her part, May made the best of it, continuing her extensive visits to the state, her work on his campaigns, her entertaining in Washington, her bright, brisk way of going about things. She had loved him rather more than he had her, he suspected, even in the days when they were in love, and he still felt guilty at times that this had been so; but life is the way it is, and he had done his best for her. If she had perceived the absence of the added ingredient of genuine caring whose presence would have made her really happy, that was sad but not uncommon, and in material comforts and the position which went with being the wife of a United States Senator and one of the best of them, she had not been neglected. It was not a perfect bargain, but it held its own with the best that most people managed, and indeed there were many who never came near it; so the Senator did not feel too badly. He had never been unfaithful to her, and he knew she knew it, and since that was something that seemed to mean so much to women, maybe it had made up for the rest of it. He hoped so, anyway.

Thinking of his career in the Senate as the cab moved out of the park and shot along the drive toward Constitution Avenue beside the steel-bright morning river, he reflected with gratitude that it had gone steadily forward with a felicity Grandfather Durham had never matched. Because he was essentially a sunny person, whose life had been free of any insurmountable stresses or strains, he won friends quickly, easily, and for life, and in a body where so much depends upon personal likes and dislikes and the blunt appraisal of character, he soon became marked for bigger and better things. A single half-hour conversation with the chairman of the party conference had won him a seat on Foreign Relations over the heads of the ten others who entered the Senate the same year he did, and over some twenty other more senior heads as well; yet because he was so good-natured and such a work horse, so unaffectedly friendly and equable, the assignment was accepted with very little grumbling and the rancor was soon forgotten. A couple of years later the same good fortune took him off his second committee, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and put him on Appropriations, thus giving him membership on the two most powerful committees in the Senate. In that same session the party whip died, and because Bob Munson had been dutiful in his attendance in the chamber, had cheerfully done all the little party errands asked of him, and also because his combination of good nature, diligence, and blustering, quick-dying, innocent temper had made him one of the two or three best-liked men in the Senate, he was given the job by a sort of majority concurrence that speedily obliterated the ambitions of one or two others who considered themselves better fitted. The Senate did not, and from that time he could date the dislike of Arly Richardson, who had really wanted the post. Nine years later, when the Majority Leadership finally fell open, Arly had made a definite campaign for it and Bob Munson had been faced with the necessity of beating him again. The Majority at that time had numbered fifty; Arly got his own vote and five others. The five others had forgiven and forgotten, but not Arly; in his sarcastic way, he wasn’t the forgiving type.

With the Majority Leadership, there came to Senator Munson not only a much more direct responsibility for running the Senate, but in a curious sense which he never expressed to anyone except May, because it would have sounded precious and pretentious, an almost fatherly sense of responsibility for the country. Now there was somewhere at the back of his mind not only a constant mental map of his own enormous Michigan flung up northward over its carpet of woods and lakes, but of the whole United States as well; and soon his steadily increasing political travels and speaking engagements, taking him as they did back and forth into every section of the land, formed in his mind an underlay of vivid scraps and pieces of America: the soft velvet light of the desert at dusk, the primeval stretches of the Mississippi from La Crosse to St. Paul, a winding road through New England hills, the Shenandoah Valley in spring, the high cold plains of the Dakotas and Montana, the dreary swamps of the Carolinas along U.S. 301, the Columbia River Gorge, booming, bustling Florida, San Francisco, daughter of conquerors gleaming on her glittering hills above the beautiful Bay, New York seen against a cloud-filled sunset looking down the river from George Washington Bridge, fat Pennsylvania with her lush, well-kept farms, the flat cornlands of Kansas, Texas with an oil well in one hand and a highball in the other, and the rest. At any hour of day or night, brought by whatever impulse brings such things, there would flash into his perception some instantaneous sense of being in some certain place in America, the view, the surroundings, the feel of it; and with it would always come, renewed again and again to infinity, the same conviction that he was somehow personally responsible for the well-being of it all, that some overriding trust and obligation had been placed upon him to see that it was kept safe and its people protected.

And so, of course, there had been. There were many in the Senate who had that feeling, but upon the Majority Leader, if he was a good one, it rested more heavily than most. Especially was this so in a troubled time in which the great promise was being challenged and the great Republic which embodied it was being desperately threatened. In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others to be hated or loved according to their own cupidity, envy, and greed, or lack of it; rise and rise and rise and rise—and then, in the sudden burst of Soviet science in the later fifties, the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it, a too complacent and uncaring people awoke to find themselves naked with the winds of the world howling around their ears, the impossible merry-go-round slowed down. Now the reaction was on, in a time of worry and confusion and uncertainty. Men walked the tight rope between brittle confidence and sudden fear, never knowing when reality would suddenly intrude and laughter fade and the dark abyss yawn open and remind them it was waiting there for a still unhumbled land.