Advise and Consent (75 page)
Read Advise and Consent Online
Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
“Well, thank you, Seab,” he said dully, for what was there to say? “I appreciate it.”
“So,” Senator Cooley said. “Therefore. You just do what you think best to save yourself, and if that means giving in to them, I want you to feel free to do so without any worries about me. As far as I am concerned, I have forgotten already that I ever knew about James Morton, and nobody will ever know that I did. No, sir. Nobody ever will.”
“Thank you, Seab,” he said again in the same dull voice. “I wish I could tell you how much I appreciate—”
“Now, then,” Seab interrupted briskly. “I think the first thing we should do tomorrow morning is talk to Bob and Orrin and decide what to do about that twisted little man from Wyoming. I told Bob before the vote Wednesday that he ought to destroy him, and I suspect now he may agree with me. So you don’t worry, Brig. We’ll take care of him, and everything will be all right.”
“That’s good,” he said weakly. “That’s very good.”
“Are you feeling poorly, Brigham?” Senator Cooley asked in some alarm. “You don’t sound very well.”
“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.”
“I tell you,” Seab said after a moment. “Are you planning to be down there awhile?”
“Yes,” he said. “Awhile.”
“I’ll come down presently and we’ll go eat something,” Seab said. “Unless you are planning to go home?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not planning to go home.”
“Good,” Senator Cooley said. “I’ll see you later, then, hear?”
“Thank you so much for everything, Seab,” he said.
“It wasn’t worth it when I really realized how they meant to act,” Seab said. “I’ll see you later, Brigham.”
“I’ll be here,” he said.
Two minutes later the phone rang again.
“Hi, buddy,” Lafe said. “I tried you a couple of minutes ago, but the line was busy.”
“I was talking to Seab,” he said.
“Oh, is he working too?” Lafe asked. “The old war horse never stops, does he?”
“He’s very kind,” Brig said.
“I know he is, at heart,” Lafe said, “even if it’s hard to find the heart now and then. I just heard about your canceling out on ‘
Meet the Press
.’ What’s wrong?”
“Maybe you could say Fred scared me out,” he said. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” Lafe said. “Do you want me to go and see him? Nothing would give me more pleasure than to mop up the floor with the slimy two-bit bastard.”
“Thanks, Lafe,” he said, and if it had been in another world he would have felt amusement, but there was no time for it now. “I don’t think there’d be much point.”
“Are you all right?” Lafe asked sharply. “You don’t sound good at all.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Lafe asked suspiciously.
“I’m okay,” he said, trying to make it vigorous.
“I don’t think you ought to be alone,” Lafe said in a worried tone. “I can be up there in ten minutes if you need me.”
“No, I wouldn’t want you to do that,” he said. “I’m all right, Lafe. Honestly I am.”
“Well,” Lafe said doubtfully. “I just think I might come up anyway. You don’t sound good to me.”
“No,” he said hastily. “No, no.”
“I think so,” Lafe said firmly.
“Look,” he said desperately. “Seab said something about coming down for a bite to eat later on. Why don’t you come up in—say in a couple of hours.”
“Well,” Lafe said, still sounding doubtful, “if you really feel that would be better—”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“Okay,” Lafe said, not very convinced. “If that’s the way you want it.”
“I do,” he said. He hesitated. “Lafe?” he said.
“Yes?” Lafe said.
“Thank you for everything too,” he said.
“Now what the hell?” Lafe demanded in alarm. “I’m coming up there, buddy. I’m damned worried about you.”
“A couple of hours,” he repeated dully. There was a silence.
“All right,” Lafe said slowly. “Unless I decide to come up earlier.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “Please, Lafe. I’ll—I’ll be here later.”
“Is that a promise?” Lafe asked.
“That’s a promise,” he said.
“Well, all right,” Lafe said doubtfully, “but I still don’t like it.”
Now there remained only the letter to Orrin, and slowly, trying to be as coherent as possible though not always succeeding, he typed it out: the call from James Morton, the negotiations with the President, the White House meeting, the developments of the past two days. With an absolute candor, for now there was no longer any need for false pretense and he was talking to an old friend for the last time, he told him also the basis of the President’s ruthless action, Fred’s speech to COMFORT and the speech he was threatening to make in the Senate tomorrow. If Orrin was to make the fight he would now have to make, he needed to know it all; and quite simply the Senator from Utah told him, wasting no time on apologies or justifications beyond the absolute minimum that would be fair to himself, trusting to Orrin’s friendship to understand and forgive. When it was done he put it in an envelope, typed “SENATOR KNOX—PERSONAL” on it, and leaving his office quietly, walked down the deserted corridor, turned right down the connecting wing to Orrin’s door, and slipped it underneath. No one was about as he went down, and no one was about as he returned. Apparently he and Seab and Powell Hanson up on the fourth floor were the only Senators in the whole vast building on this quiet Sunday afternoon.
Back in his office, he remained for some little time seated at his desk. Through his mind in a final mustering there passed the arguments for and against what he had done in Honolulu, for and against what he had done in the nomination. The one had appeared to be something over and beyond his own volition, the other had been a deliberate course of action. Knowing what he knew now, the terrible consequences of that course, he still could not tell himself that he could in any fundamental have done differently. He might have knuckled under to the President, he might have turned tail and run at the threat of blackmail, he might have been a coward to his political principles and betrayed what he conceived to be his duty to the country: but he would not have been Brigham Anderson if he had. Some people had the hard road to follow, if they would be true to themselves; and high and hard and lonely his had been, to bring to so tragic an ending a character of such great promise and such great worth, cast away like chaff on the wind.
Except that this was not how it had been cast away, of course. It had been cast away for a purpose and a cause which he deemed valid and which, being himself, he had had no choice but to follow where it might lead. Nor was he unaware of the cruel irony of it. Here was he, carrying a secret in his past, fighting the nominee, who carried a secret in his past; and what, essentially, except that his secret was purely personal and harmed no one else, while the nominee’s went to his public philosophies and could conceivably be of great harm to his country, was the difference between them? Both were guilty of concealment, both were guilty of lying to the world, both had protected their reputations as best they could, and both had been discovered. The major difference then became that the nominee’s was the popular cause, backed by all the combination of power and politics and press of Washington, while his was the unpopular, bitterly opposed by that combination; so that the nominee, if his luck held, might yet emerge unscathed, while he, driven to the wall by all the latent savagery of politics, must be a sacrifice. For he knew as surely as he knew Washington that if he had been a supporter of the nominee his past would never have been used against him; and by the same bitter token he knew that if it had been the nominee who had kept an inadvertent wartime rendezvous the fact would have been hushed up and covered over and hidden from the public, and under the protections of a bland, united conspiracy of silence his nomination would have been triumphantly confirmed. It had happened, and in the history that is not written but lives in the memories of the capital, there were examples men remembered very well
As it was, he was the ideal sacrifice to ease the conscience of them all. The ruthless and the righteous could rejoice equally, for the one could say, “See? He stood in our way.” And the other could say, “See? He broke our rules.” And they could join hands together and dance around his bier.
And for that, was a man to stop judging when he had been chosen to judge? How could society continue if all whose hands were soiled with human living permitted themselves to be forever after paralyzed? It could not be. In any case, the distinctions were not clear enough. Who were the judges and who the judged, and who among them perfect enough to say, I am right and you are wrong? And what, essentially, did it matter?
Judge not that ye be not judged, the injunction said; let him who is without sin cast the first stone. But the practical needs of society had made the admonition impossible to affirm. First there came responsibility and then, if there were integrity enough and courage to face the consequences whatever they might be, there came the hard necessity to step forward and say, I will cast it, for someone must. And if the troops were with you, you succeeded in rendering judgment fairly or unfairly according to your lights, humbled as you might be, if you were lucky, by your own human failings: and if the troops were not with you, the stones were hurled back upon you, and the judgment was reversed.
But all of that was beside the point now, and in a dazed somnambulistic way he realized it. It was late, the time for philosophizing was over, there was little left to do and he did it with a dreamlike efficiency that was the only way it could be done. He closed the Venetian blinds, turned off all the lamps but one, unlocked his outer door, so they would not have to break it in when Seab came by for him, got a towel from the washroom, returned to his desk, and sat down; saying to the Deity to whom he had been taught to pray as a very little boy, God, please help me. Please let me be brave just a little while longer. Please. He wanted to cry and he tried to, but the agony was too deep, the tears would not come.
At the last he took a sheet of Foreign Relations Committee stationery bearing his name and wrote upon it in a large, irregular hand that was far from his usual careful script two words:
“I’m sorry.”
And he was sorry, with a sorrow deeper than words could ever convey; sorry for himself, sorry for his family, sorry for the boy, sorry for all his friends and his country and the world and for all the things in human living for which there are no answers and from which there is no escape. And not the least of these, he knew now, were a man’s weakness and a man’s strength, for each in its time he had obeyed the commands of both, and together they had brought him down.
Somewhere in a crowded hall a loud voice was saying, “And so I present to you the man who—” On Bethany Beach a tiny figure was wetting the water, a lost boy was crying on the telephone, and on the floor of the Senate the senior Senator from Utah, that nice guy that everybody liked so much, was rising to seek recognition from the Chair.
Then it all ended, but not before, in one last moment of rigid and unflinching honesty, he realized that it was not only of his family that he was thinking as he died. It was of a beach in Honolulu on a long, hot, lazy afternoon.
The waves crashed and he heard for the last time the exultant cries of the surf riders, far out.
Above in his office Senator Cooley stopped reading abruptly. He had heard something, and with a sudden prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck he was almost sure he knew what it was. And he was almost sure it had come from the office directly beneath. He closed his book very carefully, got up very slowly and deliberately, and moving with great care, because he was beginning to tremble and knew if he didn’t hold himself in he wouldn’t be able to stop, he got up and left his office, locked the door neatly behind him, walked down the corridor to the stairs, down the stairs and back along the corridor until he stood before the door below.
“Brigham?” he called softly in the empty hallway. “This is Seab, Brig-ham. Are you in there, Brig?”
But there was no answer; and feeling suddenly very old and very tired and every bit of seventy-five, weighted down with the world’s sorrow to which he now knew more was about to be added, the senior Senator from South Carolina took a deep breath, stepped forward, and opened the door; aware with a flash of thankfulness as he did so that he would not have to face it alone, the corridor was no longer empty, far down it the junior Senator from Ioway was hurrying, calling his name. He paused and waited, so that they could go in together.
Much later that night, after the news had babbled out over the airways and across the nation and around the globe, a tall young man with haunted eyes got drunk in a shabby cafe in a little town in Indiana and jumped off a bridge. There were no papers on his body and nobody knew who he was. No banner headlines heralded his demise, and far away in the beautiful city where ruthless men had used him ruthlessly for their purposes no one even knew that he was gone.
***
Book Four
Orrin Knox’s Book
***
Chapter 1
Now it is 4 a.m. and ghosts walk. See them as they march across the counterpane of the man who allows himself, as a small egotistical prerogative of his office, the privilege of sleeping in the Lincoln Bed: proud George and two tart Adamses, thoughtful Tom and angry Andy, careful Van the Used-up Man, Tippecanoe and Tyler too, patient Abe and steady Grover, bouncing Teddy and farseeing Woodrow, prickly-pickley Calvin, stolid-solid Herbert, dashing Franklin, headstrong Harry, General Don’t-Tell-Me-Your-Troubles, and the rest. See them pass, calm, imperious, frozen into history, all passion spent, all battles over, defeats forgotten, victories recorded, everything neat and orderly and ruffled no more by the bitter passions and emotions that swirled about them in their time. Impassive and impervious, they stare back at him in the night, unable or unwilling to respond when he asks them, as he always does, the constantly recurring question for which there will never be an answer: “What would you have done? Just how would you have handled it?”
They never indicate by so much as a lifted eyebrow that they have heard, and of course they never deign to reply, now in this haunted hour or any other time, though when they ask him the same question he finds it easy enough to respond. He would have bought Louisiana, he would have broken the Bank of the United States, he would have put upon the South the moral burden of opening conflict, he would have taken Panama, he would have offered Fourteen Points and maneuvered the Japs into striking first and gone into Korea and sent the troops to Lebanon. He is willing enough to endorse what they have done, why can they never give him comfort, particularly when he needs it most?
But they never do, of course, nor will they now when he is confronted with a consequence of his actions so unexpected and so tragic that it imposes a sort of paralysis on his being when he contemplates it. He is not only a very powerful official, he is also a very powerful man, and it is not very often that he pauses to consider the non-political results of what he does. He is not, however, entirely without conscience even though conscience has been diminished over the years, and he knows that what he has done to the senior Senator from Utah has been deeply and fundamentally wrong in a way he will not easily exorcise. The knowledge is hammering against him everywhere, in his head, which is aching, his heart, which is beating with a painful rapidity, and his body, which feels tired and cramped and uncomfortable as he turns restlessly from side to side in the big old bed.
His error, he sees now, was in miscalculating the natures of both the Senator from Wyoming and the chairman of the subcommittee. He did not foresee, when he had his valet take the picture to Fred Van Ackerman three nights ago, that it would be used as fearsomely as it was; and this was because he did not realize the full extent of the irresponsible viciousness of that particular character, nor did he understand fully the bitter jealousy it felt toward Brigham Anderson. That there is something psychopathic there he is quite sure, now that it is too late; there have been such types in the Congress before, and this is one more in a tradition that goes back to the Founding. Every once in a while the electoral process tosses to the top someone smart and glib and evil, without basic principle, without basic character, and without restraints. Sometimes these are on the conservative side of the fence, sometimes on the liberal; but the essential personality pattern is the same, the gambler, the sharpie, the thug in the blue-serge suit. Such men can be used for certain purposes, but there is always the risk that they will get out of hand. This had happened with the Senator from Wyoming, and he knows now that in using him he has not only done a terrible thing to a fine young man and the Senate he belonged to, but he has put himself in pawn. For Fred can come to him and demand favors, and it will not be so easy to refuse unless he wishes to embark upon the project of destroying Fred; and who will help him in it now? Assuming Fred can be destroyed, which is not so certain now that he has become the darling of COMFORT and is beginning to head up a growing movement in the country. He suspects that he has created a baby Moloch who will continue to demand sacrifices, and this too inhibits sleep.
As for the Senator from Utah, he realizes, again too late, that instead of being clever and devious—as his critics have so often, with some justice, bitterly charged—he should have been straightforward and forthright, flung down the gauntlet and beaten him in fair fight on the Senate floor. It could have been done: the nominee’s past could have been argued away by a party united behind himself and Bob Munson; but he is aware with a devastating bitterness that all hopes of party unity have been utterly destroyed by the death of Brigham Anderson. The Senate will regard this as a personal affront, the ancient instinctive antagonism between the White House and the Hill will be rekindled a hundredfold. No pledge given yesterday to the Majority Leader, no promise conveyed to him in private telephone conversation or intimate White House chat, is worth anything tonight. He will be fantastically lucky if a handful of Senators is with him at this moment. All bets are off, the issue is wide open, and no one can predict the outcome now.
And because he is basically a decent man when he has the time to stand aside from his office and his responsibility and permit the kindlier side of his nature to come forward, he cannot help but be saddened and appalled by the human tragedy involved. He would give anything now to have the senior Senator from Utah alive just because he was a good man, and a fighter, and a stubborn battler with a tenacity of purpose that he could not help but admire even as he was moving most ruthlessly against him; in their brief clashes he had come to feel, almost in spite of himself, a real admiration and affection for him. It had been impossible to convey this, and the responsibility for friction had not been all on his side, by any means; but he had still genuinely hoped, in their last telephone conversation, that they could indeed sit down someday and have a drink and bury the hatchet. He had not known then, of course, how far Fred had carried it, and he had not known the fearful tensions that obviously must have been pressing in upon Brigham Anderson; and to that extent he might perhaps absolve himself and his conscience of a little of their burden for Brigham’s death.
But even when that is said, he knows he cannot absolve himself very much. His was the basic motivating decision, his the act which placed the weapon in Senator Van Ackerman’s hand, his the finger that touched the button that triggered the tragedy. His only consolation is that Tommy Davis too must be going through hell this night; and that is little enough consolation, for it is no help to him and it does nothing to solve the personal problem of finding serenity again that he faces himself.
This problem, in fact, he reflects as he rises restlessly from the bed and goes to the window to look down upon the silent streets, is becoming increasingly difficult, and it is not only the tragedy of the events surrounding the nomination—which has now become a somber thing that decent men, he knows, are beginning to curse—which are making it troublesome. Increasingly in recent weeks it has seemed to him that events have been moving too fast, that pressures of a global nature have been rising too rapidly. Now the Russians may be on their way to an actual landing on the moon, and even though he knows things about his own country’s plans in this respect that very few men know, he is not overly comforted, even so. The evil machine that has pounded for almost half a century against the fabric of a reasonably secure and decent society in the world has never been more active everywhere; and it has seemed to him at times that it will be a miracle if he who carries so much of the burden of it can stand it much longer. No one outside his personal physician, one outside specialist, his wife, and his press secretary knows what happened to him two months ago; but the memory of that sudden blackout in his office never leaves him now. A warning, his physician said; a warning to be extra careful, and slow down.
But how slow down? In sixty-two years he has never really slowed down, and the insistent imperatives of his personal drive have taken him first to the House for four terms, then back home to the governorship of his native California, and then to the greatest office in the gift of his country. He has never slowed down; it is not his nature. Always there has been the steady drive, the voracious ambition, the ruthless achievement of goals which have left behind them a trail of thwarted opponents and blasted careers. And also, the party orators declare and he himself is certain, a trail of high achievements and sound contributions to his country and her place in the world.
“Our grrrrreatttt President!” his party colleagues always cry; and appraising himself with the scarifying candor which only those who have sat in 1600 Pennsylvania can appreciate, he is satisfied that it is not all partisan exaggeration. In many ways he has not been a bad President, and in some he has been an outstanding one. At least, he reflects grimly, he has understood that he was chosen to provide leadership, and provide leadership he has. From the day he set foot under the portico after coming down the wildly cheering Avenue from his inauguration at the Capitol there has never been any doubt who was boss; and for this, he knows, much can be forgiven and much can be overlooked. There are stresses in America which demand of a leader that he lead; and he who refuses to lead, he knows, betrays them and himself in a way so fundamental as to make himself a thing of pity in the history books. He himself will never be that; he will go down, in the neat little game of Categories that historians play, as one of the “strong Presidents”; quite possibly, also, as one of the great ones. It has been, in some ways, at a fearful price; but it is one he made up his mind to pay when he first began to perceive the possibility that he might someday achieve the office, and he has few regrets now.
But the doctor says slow down; and there is no slowing down. Far too often in recent weeks his heart has begun to beat too fast, there has been a sudden all-gone feeling for a split, terrifying moment, a sensation of going away that has caught him in Cabinet meetings, on public platforms, quite frequently right here in the historic bed in the middle of the night. Fortunately it is here that the most obvious and lengthy attacks have come. More and more often he has come awake gasping for air, has had to turn himself very carefully upon his back or his right side and begin the slow, delicate, deliberate process of breathing very slowly and carefully, trying not to panic, trying not to let it get out of hand, until he has managed to restore the normal rhythm of his heartbeat; and increasingly, he has noted, the rhythm has not seemed to return to quite what it was before. Inevitably, he supposes, the moment will come, a day from now, a month, a year, when this will occur full scale in public; and then, even if he recovers from it, men will know in truth that the hurrying gossip of the town is correct and a dying man sits in the White House.
This he is grimly determined to prevent if he can. He does not mind the thought of dying in office, for there is no surer guarantee of martyred greatness in the history books than to die at just the right moment when people will remember the good deeds and forget the bad ones and somebody else can clean up the mess you may have left behind; so in that sense he rather welcomes the idea of a dramatic demise with his hand on the helm, a great man sacrificing his life in the cause of peace, a gallant soldier giving his all for his country, a fearless, peerless leader taken from us at the very height of his—And so forth and so forth and so forth. But he cannot contemplate without a shiver the possibility of being partially paralyzed, of lingering on too long while the government deteriorates and the country drifts and the enemy, ever vigilant, takes advantage of the national preoccupation to press forward wherever he can.
So it is that he has given some real thought to his condition in recent weeks; so it is that far more often than anyone outside suspects he is in bed and asleep by nine, that he takes two-hour naps in the afternoon and carefully husbands his energies for the great occasions on which he must appear in public and for the major legislation he must read and study. More and more he finds himself doing business on the telephone, requesting, suggesting, advising, cajoling, recommending, threatening, as he often must. Now the personal conference at the White House is becoming increasingly rare; and the press conference, for one excuse and another, always logical, always rational, always carefully calculated for reasonableness and acceptability, is more and more often put off so that the press is beginning to become accustomed to gaps of two weeks, three weeks, even four, between them. His entire thought now is to conserve himself for the major things and let the minor go by the board; for even though he would not mind dying in office and rather expects he will, there is one other reason why he wishes to remain alive: he has little respect for, and he is damned if he wants to turn the country over to, the well-meaning, goodhearted but unfortunately rather blundering, inept, and unimaginative man who occupies the office of Vice President.
Contemplating Harley Hudson in the White House, in fact, is one of those things that makes him extra determined to stay alive. He would be much more at ease about it all if things had gone differently at the convention seven years ago and his principal opponent then had been willing to take second place. But of course Orrin Knox never would, it was out of the question from the first, and even though he had requested his lieutenants to make some tentative soundings in the frantic turmoil of Chicago, nothing at all had come of it. He feels a great respect for Orrin, even though he knows the Senator despises him; and he wishes now in this lonesome hour as he looks out across the silent trees and lawns that things had worked out differently, that events had moved to bring Orrin into office as his running mate, so that together they could have worked for the country instead of being eternally at cross-purposes as they are now.
Thinking of their constant frictions over the years, he knows with a grim certainty that they will seem as nothing compared with the situation that has arisen as a result of Brigham Anderson’s death. One thing he is quite aware of is the high regard held for the young Senator among his elders, and in particular he knows of the close family relationship between the Knoxes and the Andersons. Having studied Orrin very attentively, as a man will study the one who has been for many years his principal opponent in party affairs, he knows how fond the link has become, and he knows Orrin will fight him now with merciless intensity that will ask, and give, no quarter. And for the first time in many a day there comes into his mind the dismaying possibility that he may be beaten, and not only that he may be beaten but that all the shabby double-dealing behind Brigham Anderson’s death may be displayed to the public which, after its first shock at the revelations concerning the Senator’s private life, is quite likely then to turn with a bitter contempt upon the men who used it to kill him. There are many times, he knows, when politics violates fair play and decency, and as long as the public does not know it, little detriment results. But let it once break through the surface and an innate fairness in the country reasserts itself, and never after that do the people involved have quite the same stature that they had before. And since stature is very important to him, both presently and in the history books, it is not a prospect he regards lightly.