Advise and Consent (51 page)

“Then what will he do to you?” she asked, trying not to sound frightened. He shrugged.

“What can he do to me?” he asked. “I have my own responsibility as United States Senator, just as much as he does as President. I assume we’ll talk it over after the banquet tonight and see what we can work out together.”

“But if you insist on his withdrawing the nomination—” she began, and her husband smiled.

“You weren’t working very hard in the kitchen, were you?” he said pleasantly, and her right hand went to her mouth to stop a cry of protest.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and she could see he was beginning the process of withdrawal that lately had proved so killing to her heart. “I’ll manage. Apparently I’ll have to manage alone, but I’ll manage.”

“Oh, that isn’t fair,” she said out of a sudden pain so deep she wasn’t quite sure she could speak at all. “That isn’t fair. You don’t have to be alone unless you want to be.”

His eyes widened suddenly, and because she feared he was on the very verge of saying, “Maybe I want to be,” and that if he did they might never find one another again, she did cry out, a strange, harsh, awkwardly muffled sound in the bright spring day.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Please don’t worry about me, Mabel. I’m not alone. I have you and I love you, and everything’s going to be all right. I think I’ll go talk to Pidge for a while now. If the phone rings I’ll be at home to Bob, the President, Orrin, or Lafe. Nobody else. Come out later and maybe we can decide what to plant in the back garden.”

“I will,” she said, very carefully and politely. “Yes, I will do that.”

“Good,” he said, and turned away to walk slowly along the lawn to where Pidge was busily poking in the water of the goldfish pond. The sun fell brightly on the two golden-headed figures she loved, and Mabel Anderson felt as though she might actually die right there in her own yard in Washington, D.C.

“It’s just that I don’t want you to be hurt,” she whispered as her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry. “That’s all. I just don’t want you to be hurt.”

There were times, Seab reflected, when he felt every bit of seventy-five, but this morning was not one of them. Today he felt somewhere around forty, or possibly even thirty-five, tip-top, in the pink, with everything going the way he wanted it to, firmly in control of the situation and thoroughly content with the pattern of events as it was developing in the wake of his call to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Economic Affairs.

The inspiration to make that call and then to handle it as he had he regarded as among the shrewdest of all his long life, and he could not refrain from a certain feeling of profound self-satisfaction about it; a feeling he perforce had to keep to himself, for to disclose it would be to emerge as the man responsible for the new turn of events in the Leffingwell nomination, and this would automatically change the pattern, divert attention, turn the hue and cry back upon him, revive all the tired old animosities that always surrounded everything he did, and upset the delicate balance of the political developments now under way. For Seab Cooley to be the pivotal figure in such a striking change of course was one thing, for it would be immediately discounted and obscured by all the standard attacks; for Brigham Anderson to be the pivotal figure was quite another, because, for all that the nominee’s supporters might turn upon him savagely, he simply could not be discredited and discounted in the way Seab could be. If Seab did it, it could be dismissed as part of the same old feud; if Brig did it, people had to stop, look, and listen. That was why Seab had arranged for Brig to do it, and made the arrangement with such deliberate care that not even Brig knew why Brig was doing it.

To arrive at the true identity of James Morton had not in and of itself been so great a feat, he felt, for all it took was an ability to approach the testimony of the witness Gelman afresh and take note of the points that seemed to be bothering him most; and the one that kept recurring, despite the nominee’s scornful dismissals, was his dogged conviction that Bob Leffingwell in some way had been involved in getting him his new job in the Bureau of International Economic Affairs. This would seem to indicate some personal relationship or friendship or knowledge between the nominee and either the director of the Bureau or the man in over-all charge of it, the Assistant Secretary. And since a long memory reminded Seab that among other facts brought out about the Secretary at the time of his confirmation three years ago had been his age, which was roughly that of the nominee, and the fact that he had taught law at the University of Chicago for a time while building up his personal practice, all that remained was to have the gamblers instinct and the gambler’s will to take a chance that in this case Herbert Gelman might be right, and to act upon it in a way that would permit of no evasions. This he had done, calling the Secretary’s home and announcing in a tone of soft menace when he answered, “This is Senator Cooley, James Morton.” The man had gasped and before he had found time to recover, Seab had gone on in a voice he made increasingly cold and frightening, “And now, Mr. James Morton, this is what I want you to do for me, if you will be so kind.” And he had told him with great exactitude that he must call the chairman of the subcommittee and make a full confession and volunteer to testify, if the chairman so desired; and with a skillful combination of holding out the promise of future assistance in salvaging his career if he complied, and promising flatly to help destroy it utterly if he refused, he had extracted the assurance that James Morton would not disclose to the chairman the true origin of his call. Indeed, he had put it squarely on the basis of the man’s own welfare. He really thought, Seab said gently, he really did think, that the chairman and the subcommittee and the Senate and the country would all be much more kindly disposed toward James Morton if they thought his coming forward had been prompted by true patriotism and love of country, and not because anyone had forced him to do it. Even in his shattered mental and emotional state at that moment James Morton had been able to see that; and he had promised with great fervor to do it just the way Senator Cooley suggested. And evidently he had, for if he had not, Seab was sure that he would have received a call right away from Senator Anderson to confirm it. Apparently desperation had given James Morton’s call a sense of conviction and truth that had been sufficient to carry the day. And now the future was unfolding as the senior Senator from South Carolina wished.

What would come of it, he could not of course predict exactly, for one thing he had learned far back and very early was the futility of making exact predictions about either the Senate or the course of a political development All you could do was assess the likeliest possibilities and build your plans upon that. The likeliest possibility in this case was the complete discrediting of the nominee, for Senator Anderson had already made it clear that the hearings would be reopened, and when they were Robert A. Leffingwell was not going to look very good. He was, in fact, going to look very bad; a proven liar, an evasive and unreliable man, a man to whom no thinking citizen would wish to entrust the country’s foreign policies in a time of such dangerous international tension. The nominee, as Herbert Gelman had made very clear under Arly Richardson’s prodding, had not done anything so very terrible, when all was said and done; he had just acted like a fool when he should have known better and then had made the mistake of lying about it In the office of Secretary of State, however, this was not a trait his countrymen were inclined to look upon kindly or forgive. Now there would be no rationalizing it and no getting around it; he would be pinned down as neatly as a beetle on a piece of cork, and the President would inevitably have to withdraw the nomination, and would undoubtedly in the process be considerably damaged himself. This too the senior Senator from South Carolina thought he could manage to contemplate without dismay.

And all of this would come about because Seab Cooley had accurately judged two men: James Morton, whom he hardly knew at all, and Brigham Anderson, whom he knew quite well and had studied with considerable care. His instinct had told him that the man Washington knew under his right name would crumble when suddenly presented with the ghost of James Morton from the past; and his instinct had told him that Senator Anderson, confronted with equal suddenness with the same knowledge, would act as directly and forcefully as he had. The only point where Seab had not quite judged the chairman correctly lay in his belief that by now he would have told Bob Munson about it, that Orrin Knox and Lafe Smith would know, that the knowledge would be spreading already through the Senate and within a matter of hours or even minutes would be reaching the press and thus very shortly would hit the front pages and thereby create a situation that nothing could change. The one point where he misjudged his young colleague was that he believed him to be already committed, not only in his own mind and heart, but in the general knowledge of his friends and the Senate and the press which for all its partisanship would never hesitate to print the facts, however damaging to Leffingwell, once the facts were openly at hand. Thus Seab believed the situation to be already in the process of congealing, with no way out for anybody but to move forward along the lines to which each was bound by character, circumstance and overriding interest.

He was so convinced of this, in fact, that it was only the experience and judgment of almost half a century that prompted him to consider the alternative. It was possible he could just conceive of it, that Brigham might not yet have told anyone about it, that the situation might still be fluid, and that he might in some way yet yield to what Seab was sure would be the angry and ruthless pressures of the White House that the matter be dropped without a full disclosure. Senator Cooley could imagine no pressures sufficiently great to persuade Senator Anderson to change his course once he was fully set upon it, but there again long experience of men and their motives told him he should keep at least one little door open in his mind for that possibility. He was not a close friend of Brig’s, but like most of Brig’s elders in the Senate he was very fond of him in a fatherly sort of way, and he could not imagine anything in his past that would make him subject to the sort of pressures that could be brought to bear upon some men. Even so, he was a human being, and one thing Seab had learned both in his own life and the many he had observed in seventy-five years was that human beings occasionally act more human than a prudent balancing of present need and future interest might make advisable; and conceivably, just possibly, there might be a lever somewhere in Senator Anderson’s past that the President might use, were it ever to come to his hand.

In that case, Senator Cooley knew, he would simply use the lever he himself possessed. Assuming Brig had not told his other colleagues, there still was someone else who knew, a co-proprietor of the secret, someone else who could, by offering to expose the whole situation in the form of a shabby and underhanded collusion between the White House and the Senator from Utah, make a man stop and think twice if he wished to save his own reputation. And from many things he had observed, Seab knew that Brig was very sensitive about his own reputation. This admittedly was a somewhat cold-blooded way to look at it, possibly a calculation that might seem out of place in the heart of a man who really was genuinely fond of his young colleague, but at this particular moment on this particular day Senator Cooley was much more interested in getting Bob Leffingwell and the President than he was in protecting Brigham Anderson.

So he decided, as he prepared to leave his office and walk across to the Capitol in the sparkling spring sunshine for an Appropriations Committee meeting, that he would just bide his time and see what happened. Many things in politics come to him who waits, he had found, and as he emerged blinking a little into the bright clear day he was waiting, bland and sleepy-eyed and noncommittal and shrewd and monumentally indestructible as ever.

“—and therefore,” the Majority Leader finished dictating, “much as I would like to attend your fine meeting in Hamtramck on Monday next, this new turn of events in the Leffingwell nomination makes it impossible for me to leave the Senate at this time. With all best wishes to you and your lively and progressive group, I am, etc.”

He snapped off the machine and pushing it aside on the broad desk, swung his chair around to stare out the window, down across the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the lush green hills of Virginia beyond. It was certainly a beautiful day, and he had half a mind to play hooky; except that there were occasions when you damned well knew you had better not play hooky, and this was damned well one of them. Things were breaking too fast on this gorgeous spring morning, and there was no place for the Majority Leader of the United States Senate to be except right spank in the United States Senate.

Thinking with one layer of his mind as he had dictated—the political level that never went to sleep—he had pretty well decided upon his next move even as he conferred his regrets and blessings upon the good citizens of Hamtramck. In politics and the Senate, he was vividly aware, the shortest distance between two points is very often not a straight line. If you wish A to do something, for instance, you frequently are well advised to go to B, who knows him intimately, or even to C, who is an old pal of B, to start the wheels in motion. The matter of who asks who to do what often assumes a major importance; the whole future of a bill, the whole course of a committee action, the whole completion of a debate, can frequently be changed entirely by the personality of the man who sets it in motion; and while it might have seemed at first glance that he should have continued to hammer at his stubborn young colleague from Utah until he beat him around to the President’s point of view, Senator Munson knew better than that. There were some with whom it could be done, but Brig was not one of them; and in any event Bob Munson was far too adept and far too capable and experienced a legislative operator to use such tactics on anyone as valuable, as close to him, and as strong and undisposed to yield to pressure as the senior Senator from Utah.