Advise and Consent (69 page)

Chapter 7

“It seems to us,” the
Times
said editorially next morning, “that the Leffingwell nomination has passed suddenly into a strange, hazy state in which motives are confused, decisions are unclear, and the future is in doubt. With all the world literally waiting upon the Senate, it is as though the principals had disappeared suddenly behind a screen.

“The Senator from Utah, Mr. Anderson, apparently the main road block at the moment to Mr. Leffingwell’s speedy confirmation, is aloof and uncommunicative with the press. No one knows what he wants.

“The President of the United States, confronted with a mysterious but apparently severe challenge to his nominee for Secretary of State, is similarly uncommunicative. No one knows what he intends.

“Mr. Leffingwell, though recipient forty-eight hours ago of the most ringing public endorsement from his chief, has received no public encouragement since and is remaining discreetly incommunicado, too.

“The incumbent Secretary of State goes about his remaining duties with an air of knowing where the bodies are buried, though they may be the wrong bodies and he may conceivably be looking in the wrong graveyard.

“In the Senate, all is confusion, with everybody puzzled and nobody sure of what is going on. Guesses are a dime a dozen and rumors that the President will withdraw Mr. Leffingwell, that he will not withdraw him, that at Senator Anderson’s importuning he has agreed upon a substitute, that he has defied Senator Anderson and has refused to consider a substitute, are flooding through Washington and over the country. It is as though someone had reached up suddenly and yanked the lights on the capital’s most dramatic political performance in years, leaving the actors to move about in darkness while the audience shuffles nervously and wonders whether it should hiss or applaud.

“We think it is time the lights went back on and the actors got on with the play. It has been eight days since the President submitted Mr. Leffingwell’s name to the Senate. Searching hearings were held during which all sorts of embarrassing questions were asked and answered, we believe completely, by the nominee. But now suddenly everything seems to be at sixes and sevens. Rumor says this is because Senator Anderson has received information of a nature damaging to Mr. Leffingwell that was not disclosed at the hearings. If this is so, Senator Anderson owes it to the country, the Senate, the President, the nominee, and himself, to state what this new evidence is. If there is no new evidence, he owes it to all concerned to say so unequivocally.

“Similarly, the President should make a statement or take some action that will indicate where he stands in the matter. Despite his dramatic endorsement of Mr. Leffingwell at the White House Correspondents’ banquet Thursday night, his silence now lends weight to growing speculation that for political reasons he is in the process of abandoning Mr. Leffingwell and seeking some other course.

“We could think of nothing more disastrous, to his own prestige, the success of his Administration, and the future of American foreign policy, than to allow this second-rate melodrama to continue. This is doubly true if the Russians, as seems possible, are actually on their way to the moon with a manned expedition. If Mr. Leffingwell is unfit—a contingency we cannot conceive of or accept—then it should be stated and he should be removed at once from further consideration for Secretary of State. If he is fit—and we heartily believe he is—he should be swiftly confirmed without further dilly-dallying.

“It is time, in other words, to fish or cut bait.”

And so, he thought as he put the paper slowly down and began going with a tired determination through his mail, it was: time to come to grips with the President, time to come to grips with himself, time to decide once and for all what he was made of and what, in the face of all the pressures now bearing so fearfully down upon him, he would do.

For a while last night, after Mabel had left the room and he had felt so utterly alone, he had descended into the depths of an agonized despair and it had seemed to him that he might conceivably never recover, that the pressures would be too great and the burden too frightful and the difficulties too overwhelming to surmount. Fortunately the black mood had been too black to last; before long his native courage, stubbornness and tenacity had begun to reassert themselves. So someone knew, the one thing he had hoped no one in the world, particularly the world of Washington, would ever know, and in some way apparently connected with the nomination someone was making use of it. Was that enough to make him give in? If he had been able to reach the President when he tried, it might have been; he was glad now that he had failed, for the delay had given him the chance to recover. It had taken him quite a while, fighting all alone with the television babbling on senseless and unnoticed across the room, to decide that he would not give in that easily; it was almost midnight before he reached that conclusion. When he did it was final. He decided then with a fatalistic acceptance of the consequences that he knew he would not change, that his obligation to the country—the country, in whose name they all were acting, the country, which imposed upon them all a single high duty pursued through paths as many and various as the men who owed loyalty to it—was such that he could not abandon his position, no matter what the pressures were or might become.

The decision made, he had begun to appraise the situation in the light of political and social realities as he had come to understand them in his seven years in office. Although the calculated cruelty of attacking him through his wife had temporarily thrown him off balance, the more he thought about it the more he came to see that it was what might be expected of the type of mentality that would use such a weapon at all. Whether that mentality possessed much more than a shrewd guess to go on, he did not know; evidently it did possess a little more, for the reference had been specific enough for him to understand and the time and place had been exact. But whether there was real proof beyond that, he was unable to tell, and the only assumption he could make was that this was the limit of it, and that if he handled it with sufficient calmness and steadiness he might see it through and emerge relatively unscathed. It was the type of attack that most decent men rejected, no matter what lay behind it, and he thought his friends would. Furthermore, there was the self-protective nature of a political community, the instinctive drawing-together prompted by the feeling that an attack on one was an attack on all, and that what might be turned upon one today might, if allowed to succeed, be turned with impunity upon another tomorrow.

He had had occasion to note from time to time when personal scandals, some much more current and much less innocently connected with the tensions of wartime, had shaken the fabric of the higher echelons of Washington, that it was possible for such things to be smoothed over and hushed up and forgotten and everything to proceed as before. There was a sort of necessary workaday hypocrisy, as inescapable here as it was back home on a thousand Main Streets, that imposed its own adjustments on a society caught in the overriding need to keep things going. More often than the country suspected this enforced a combination of front-door idealism and backdoor acceptance of human realities that worked its own imperatives upon such situations. The government went on, people who knew the most startling things about one another met with bright unblinking urbanity at Georgetown cocktail parties, Washington conversation rattled chattily along its appointed customary courses, and few echoes, or none, reached the country. So, with a little luck, it might be with him—looking at it from the most practical and cold-blooded standpoint.

Unfortunately for any really genuine peace of mind, or even adequate pretense of it, however, he was not, of course, a cold-blooded man. Rationalize it how he might, he could not escape the brutally appalling reality of what had happened last night: someone, with absolute ruthlessness, appeared to be out to destroy him, and given the weapon he apparently possessed, might well succeed. For there was just one little qualification to be made about the self-protective nature of official Washington society: anything could be forgiven in the capital if the troops were with you and the right ox was being gored; but if the troops weren’t with you, if the White House, the press, and all the combinations of interest and pressure surrounding a popular nominee were on your trail, if you had chosen the wrong ox to go after and all its friends were in alliance against you to protect it, then you had better look out, for there would be no mercy shown you. And this, he knew, was his situation now.

Therefore there were certain things he might have to do, he felt, if he were to hold out and survive it; assuming he could, which of course any man who was not a coward had to assume. The first was to get in touch with Orrin and tell him all he knew about the nominee and James Morton; and quite possibly, for he thought their friendship could stand it, all there was to know about himself. This last would not be easy, but it would be honest and fair to Orrin, if he were to ask him to help; and he had an idea Orrin would understand and forgive him and think the more of him for his candor, for he was a man of fifty-eight and not an hysterical child. Another thing would be to take Harley up on his offer, which he knew had been entirely genuine, and which he was quite sure the Vice President would not hesitate to validate if he should ask him. And a third would be to make use of
Meet the Press
and any other means at hand to get across to the public the truth about Robert A. Leffingwell.

These, however, were desperation counsels, and as his spirit and confidence and fighting stubbornness returned he felt that he wanted to wait a little and see how things developed before yielding to them; for if it should turn out not to be necessary, if the anonymous phone call had been just a one-shot attempt to scare him that he would hear nothing more from, then it would be foolish to provoke a public showdown. More immediately and much more imperatively for the sake of peace in his own house, he must reconcile the situation with his wife; and shortly after midnight this became possible, for she came back in, red-eyed and exhausted, accepted, or seemed to accept, his calm statement that the call had been nothing but the evil mouthings of a crank, and clung to him crying bitterly at her lack of faith in him and her leaving when he needed her; too late to recapture the moment when she might have put their marriage on a basis it had never known, but not too late for his purpose of restoring their life together to some basis of rational stability from which to repel any further attacks that might be made upon it in the ugly turn of events that had now come about in the nomination.

Or so, at any rate, he thought; and though it did not re-establish any real happiness, it re-established enough of the customary to bring the day eventually to an end in a more or less normal manner. There was no question of love, but there was a reasonable calm. Mabel took a sleeping pill, sobbed quietly for a while, and drifted off. He took one too, which did no good and only left him feeling even more logy in the morning than he would have been otherwise. He slept only fitfully and his mind raced most of the night; less and less panic-stricken, more and more practical, increasingly confident it could cope with the situation, but never happy. He wondered if he would ever be really happy again.

Now he found as he tried to wade through the Saturday morning accumulation of mail, telephone calls, and telegrams that he was even tireder than he had thought. A sort of dull weariness, compounded of lack of sleep and terrific inner tension, seemed to be dragging him down, an all-pervading exhaustion that put chains on his mind and sapped his physical energies. This was not, he realized, a good condition for a man who must stand off the world and all the pressures he was under, but there was no help for it. He could not stay home this day, he had to keep going, he had to be on the job, he had to be ready on the firing line for whatever new attack might come. When it came shortly after eleven it was from an unexpected quarter, and he could not say afterwards that it had exactly been an attack. Rather, he supposed, both an encouragement and a warning; not really necessary in view of his own decision, but one which revealed to him that even if he wished to change course, it would not be without unpleasant consequences, not so drastic as those which might attend his present course but not so very enjoyable either. The buzzer sounded and he was informed that the senior Senator from South Carolina was in the outer office. He put aside his mail with a sigh and said to send him in.

“Seab,” he said, rising and shaking hands, “make yourself at home. How are you?”

“Well, sir,” his visitor said, slumping comfortably into one of the leather armchairs and surveying him with a sleepy smile that did not entirely conceal the thoroughness of his study, “I’m fine, Brigham. But I think—I just do think, now—that you look rather tired. Yes, sir, you do. Very tired. Did you stay up late?”

“Rather late,” Senator Anderson agreed. “I slept very little last night.”

“I thought possibly that was it,” Senator Cooley said. “I wonder why, now? Surely you weren’t having second thoughts about your talk at the White House. Surely you weren’t disappointed by the appointment.”

“It had to do with the nomination,” Brig admitted. Seab smiled again.

“He wants you to back down, doesn’t he?” he said. “He wants you to turn tail and be a coward and give in and let this evil man become Secretary of State. Two evil men together, running the country into the ground in the face of her enemies. Yes, sir. That’s what he wants, isn’t it?”

“That’s what he wants, Seab,” Brigham Anderson said shortly. The Senator from South Carolina looked at him sharply.

“Are you going to do it, Brigham?” he asked softly. “Are you going to do what that bad man wants?”

His young friend thought for several moments, staring out the window, his eyes, looking glazed from lack of sleep, wide with considerations whose nature Senator Cooley did not know but whose seriousness he could easily perceive.