Advise and Consent (46 page)

Chapter 2

Reflecting upon it soberly as his thoughts moved on in the sun-swept day, he came again, as he had so often, to the conclusion that his had been in the main a remarkably sun-swept life. It had known its problems and its trials, and it had not of course been free from all unhappiness and strain, but in general he had been much luckier than most at avoiding the more unpleasant aspects of human living. Often this had come about, not deliberately, but just because he was what he was, and so it was not something for which he took any particular credit. Both by religion and observation he had come to believe that luck or God or destiny or fate or whatever men chose to call it had much to do with human endeavor and the tides of life; and his own experience seemed to bear it out. He had been given much, and he had used it, on the whole, he thought, wisely; so his luck had held, and the end result had been a felicity that had touched the high peaks of a generally constructive life even as it had helped him across its few dark valleys.

This had been true in the beginning because he had been born into a prominent family in Salt Lake City, high in the councils of the Church, which had made for a major initial advantage; it had been true thereafter because of his own character and the uses he had made of it. Almost from the first, if his family could be believed, there had been about him a certain aura that drew people to him; “Brig’s fatal charm,” his oldest sister called it, and they had all been pleased when its effectiveness proved out far beyond the family’s limits.

Even in earliest childhood there had been a quick alertness, an immediate response to others, a sunny friendliness that won the hearts of his elders even though it did not always entrance some of his more jealous contemporaries. He had known his share of troubles in the savage jungle where children grow up, but unlike those of so many others they were not brought upon him by any meanness or pettiness or over-aggressiveness on his part, and he found that his family background permitted him to survive them without serious damage. He was fourth in a household that included two older girls, one older boy, and two younger girls, and this in itself provided a fair proving ground. There was always somebody above to alternate between smothering him with affection and beating his head in, and there was always somebody below to whom he could accord the same type of running shock-treatment. A personality clearly self-reliant from the start was strengthened in self-reliance even more; and when he grew to an age to be running about and going out to play, he found himself able to cope with the mercurial tides of liking and disliking, playing together and not playing together, being in the group or out of the group at a moment’s notice, having his toys stolen, being in fights, bearing the brunt of mean remarks and at the same time making a few, without much jolt to his nervous or emotional systems. He went through a lot of that at home and he was prepared for it; even though, he was quite sure now, his character from the first had been such that he could have surmounted its challenges quite successfully under any circumstances.

Physically he was solid and stocky from the first, which proved an invaluable asset both at home and around the neighborhood when the chips were down; and combining with it as he did a relatively placid and tolerant character, he had what he eventually came to realize was a close to unbeatable combination. He didn’t go out of his way to push anybody else around; neither did he stand for it too long when anybody else tried to push him around. By the time he had gone through grammar school this was an established and accepted fact, and so in high school the way opened out for him without the necessity for proving himself that plagued the adolescence of so many. Even in Deseret people were human, kids most of all; but they didn’t bother him. He went his way with a certain unshakeable self-possession, already marked by his teachers as mature and reliable far beyond his years, making the highest grades, participating incessantly in school activities, going out for all the sports available, becoming a football hero, and winding up in his senior year as captain of the team. He could also have foreshadowed his later career more actively than he did, had he so desired, for there were opportunities to run for student-body office and in his sophomore year he had been president of his class. But his closest friend on the team, whom he had grown up with since age three, wanted very badly to be student-body president, and Brig deferred to his ambitions—not because he had to, but just because he decided gravely in a mind that had its own areas of private contemplation, far more extensive and sometimes more moody than his teachers would ever have believed, that this was what his friend wanted and that if he was truly a friend to him he would help him have it. So he managed his campaign for him, which in the fashion that occurs at surprisingly many .levels of American life, gave him an early taste of the practical side of politics. In his more philosophical moments after coming to Washington the thought would strike him how early it is, in schools, in clubs, in church classes, and kindergartens, that Americans become used to the idea of casting votes, electing officers, exercising political judgment, bowing to the will of the majority. This habit, he had an idea, had rather more to do with the general self-propelling elements in the American system, rather more to do with the profoundly stabilizing effect of the state of mind that this-is-the-way-it-is-done-because-this-is-the-way-we-have-always-done-it than the political scientists had yet realized or given proper emphasis to.

So he had deferred to his friend, who at that particular moment meant more to him in an innocent way than all the little girls eager to make life happy for the football team who meant a good deal to him right then in a less innocent way, and the election had come off a smashing success. Now his friend was president of a bank in Ogden and when they got together with their families they often talked with amusement of that first early trial run in which he had been campaign-manager for the successful candidate who subsequently, when the time came, repaid the compliment with great astuteness and skill as manager of Brig’s races for the Senate.

Coming as he did from a household that had as its head an Apostle of the Church, he was under some family pressure to become a missionary and then make the Church his life’s work, but this he resisted with a quiet determination that soon crumbled parental opposition. His older brother was going into the Church, he pointed out, and he thought that was enough; the world was moving on, even in Eon’s pleasantly self-sufficient land, and he had dreams and ambitions beyond that. Basically, he supposed, although it was not until he had gone to the Coast to enter Stanford that he realized it, he really did want to enter public life; and on the beautiful campus of the Farm, where, as in all colleges, the emphasis on political activity sharply increases, he soon found himself actively engaged. At one point in his third year he was running for vice president of his fraternity, running for president of the junior class, and running for a position on the executive committee of the student government; and he made them all. Along with it he also kept up a grade average that was close to straight A, went out successfully for the football team, and continued his attention to the girls, if anything more numerous in college, who are anxious to be of assistance to anyone of any prominence in campus life.

Nowhere among them, however, did he find one that seemed to appeal to him so fundamentally that he felt he must have her for life or die. There were some he felt he must have, period, and those he usually did have, period; but there it ended, and he left school to go to war heart-whole and fancy free; or, at any rate, as free as he ever was in the quiet places of his heart where he faced himself.

To him the Farm gave what it gives to all who are lucky enough to do their most serious growing-up in that beautiful place: a certain common-sense approach to life, a certain equipment, much more important than anything noted in the grade averages, for decent, constructive citizenship; an undying love for San Francisco and the Peninsula; a realization that of all the springs on earth none is quite as sweet as the long, lingering, all-enveloping hypnosis of spring in the Santa Clara Valley; above all, a clear perspective and a far view, of men, of issues, and of life. He left it to go to battle with gratitude in his heart, for his time there had been well-spent and for the most part very happy, and he knew that he had made many friends and won a wide popularity that would always be a strength and comfort to him through the years.

Throughout his college life he continued to show to the world the same aspect he was always to show it: steady, earnest, tolerant, easygoing, filled with a friendly attitude toward humanity that humanity found flattering and always responded to. If he had his moody times, and there was a strain in him that prompted them more often than his friends could have imagined, he kept them to himself, and hardly anyone ever suspected they were there. Only once had one of his fraternity brothers, sitting across from him one night in some little bar south of Market Street and noting a fleeting expression of restless melancholy on his face, dared to take a long gamble and ask quietly, “It isn’t easy, is it?” But this particular friend had problems Brigham Anderson suspected and didn’t want to get involved with, problems he didn’t think were his problems, so he turned it off with a grin and some noncommittal jest. For a while after that his fraternity brother looked at him with a little speculative expression in his eyes, but Brig was so matter-of-fact, so pleasant, and so straightforward about everything that after a time the speculation stopped and their friendship was back as close as ever, but on a plane from which his friend never dared try to shift it again.

No one else had ventured to challenge the blond head and calm dark eyes, the independent carriage and the level, candid, glance; nor had he given anyone permission to. It struck him as ironic, sometimes, when he realized how many thought they knew him and how few did. None, in fact, for all his popularity on campus and all his many friends; which could have accounted for the moods, a certain underlying feeling of incompleteness, of not having found something, he was not sure what, that he felt might make him really happy. He didn’t find it in the girls he had, and he had them often enough and enjoyed them sufficiently so that he was pretty sure he didn’t want what his fraternity brother wanted. Maybe, he decided as the war closed in and took over the world, his moods just went with growing up; maybe it was just that he was basically impatient to get out and get going, and now with the war he knew he couldn’t but must face interruption of unknown extent and possibly even death that could nullify all his hopes and ambitions.

So he put it out of his mind and volunteered for the Air Force, which sent him first to Lowry Field in Denver and then into the Pacific, where he remained for the duration. Somewhere in those endless skies and endless seas he thought he might find the answer, and for a time he searched for it in all the frantic tension of the war, the here-today-gone-tomorrow atmosphere, the days and nights when life was divided into long spells of boredom, little spells of killing, and the precious furloughed times when the hoarse cry of a single saxophone in a smoke-filled room seemed to be saying something terribly profound about life if only you could find it through the haze of too much liquor and the girl beside you. Through it all, though his body profited, his heart remained untouched, and not all the hundreds of casual encounters, the hectic and never-ending sexuality, the desperate clinging together in affirmation of something the war every moment made mock of, made any particular impress upon him. Traveling down the skies and far over the gleaming islands flung helter-skelter on the sea, he would sometimes think perhaps he had found it, but he never did. Women came easy, friends were plentiful, he moved through the military life with the same steady exactitude with which he had moved through life from grammar school on, but always there was a restlessness that nothing quite appeased. It was true he found a certain satisfaction in being a pilot, but that was principally, he realized one morning over Rabaul, because it permitted him to be on his own; with responsibilities towards others and supervision over them, but with a certain basic freedom remaining for himself. In battle he confirmed what he had observed of his own nature in college, that he did not mind being responsible for others and doing what he could to help them and keep them safe, but along with, it also he must always have a certain separate area of independence for himself. Responsibility he preferred to be a one-way street, and he would give of himself without stint for others; but he did not enjoy being managed, or being responsible to, rather than for, his fellows. Among other ironies, he saw, was the fact that after the war he intended to submit himself to the voters as soon as possible and thus, if successful, subject himself to their many-faceted managing for the rest of his life. But he knew that they would never really control him, that he would always go his way essentially alone, that while this might not be what others wanted it was right for him.

Or was it? Sometimes he would wonder, passing handsome, earnest, and unmoved through all the feverish promiscuity of the war. “You’re lucky,” someone told him once in Darwin when he had declined with tolerant thanks an offer he felt no particular necessity to accept, “you don’t need anybody.” He had only smiled and gone his way, but his heart had cried out bitterly, Do I not? For he did, and he knew it, though the search seemed never-ending.

As far as his service career went, there was of course no stopping him. He was one of those officers, exercising authority with an appealing grin and an air of being born to it, whom enlisted men worship and superiors mark for speedy promotion; and so it came to him. All the qualities that had brought him instantaneous liking and respect all his life up to now seemed to find their ultimate flowering in the war, and he was by far the best-known, most popular, and most promising young man in his outfit. Promotions came swiftly and by his third year of duty he was a captain with a majority promised soon. It came one day in the Marianas after a Jap coming out of the sun eluded all their vigilance and shot his bomber down. For five days he kept himself and three other survivors alive in the jungle principally by main strength of character; and the promotion was conferred on shipboard, on radioed instructions from his commanding general back down the islands, as soon as they were rescued.