Advise and Consent (76 page)

Nor, though he thinks party loyalty and their many years of working together will be sufficient to stand the strain, is he at all sure what the Majority Leader will do. He too was very fond of Brigham Anderson, and it was only by exerting the full strength of his personality and his office that he had been able to force him to play his part in weaving the web of circumstance that had entrapped his young friend. Again, he wishes bitterly now that he had not; but the event is over, there is nothing to do but try to pick up the pieces and recoup as best one can. If Bob draws away, the cause of Robert A. Leffingwell will be in jeopardy indeed, for then there will have to be a falling back upon such second-line defenses as Tom August and Powell Hanson and possibly George Hines and even Fred Van Ackerman; and without the Majority Leader it will not be the same. He does not think Senator Munson will oppose him openly, even though he too must be lying awake—in fact, he suspects, a good many men all over town must be wakeful this night, thinking of Brigham Anderson and searching their hearts for answers to things to which there may be no answers—but that the Majority Leader might abandon all attempts to help is a prospect he must consider. There will have to be a phone call in the morning, a sounding out to discover where he stands and what he will do, an appeal to all those ties of old friendship, mutual advantage, and the party which will convince him that he should continue to work actively for the nomination. He sighs, for he is very tired and he knows that before this is over he will be much tireder still; and he wonders
whether a system already strained so near its limits can come through it as well as he would wish, or whether his martyrdom is going to come rather sooner than he had expected.

It is to Orrin that he keeps returning, however, for it is Orrin who holds the key. He wonders whether Orrin is thinking of him, and he is sure he must be. If hatred were a palpable thing he is quite sure he would feel it thudding against the walls of the historic old house right now, rising against his window ledge, threatening at any moment to flood into the room and swallow him up. But somewhere, if Orrin is the key, there must be a key to Orrin; and he sets himself now to considering practically what it can be, knowing that it does not lie in the methods used upon Brigham Anderson, for even if there were cause—which he long ago satisfied himself there is not, in any way—those methods have been destroyed by their own terror and cannot be used again upon anyone in the present controversy. He feels there must be some way to appeal to the senior Senator from Illinois, and much as he knows Orrin is despising him at this very moment, he would not be the powerful man he is, President of the United States and worthy to be, if he did not begin the slow, patient, stubborn process of trying to reason out for himself what it is.

If the President’s astute mind could project itself but a little further in this tragic hour it would be ironically amused to know that in his own grief-filled house in Spring Valley the senior Senator from Illinois has anticipated him and is promising himself with a quiet implacability that no appeal of any land from the man he dislikes so utterly will move him one iota. A long-standing contempt, the withering contempt of the honest for the dishonest, has always clouded his vision in that quarter; it has been replaced now by a hatred so deep and so cold that it lies upon his heart like a stone. Behind his brusque exterior there lives an emotional personality unsuspected by all but a few, and all of its force is concentrated now upon the objective of defeating Robert A. Leffingwell and making of the President’s remaining months in office a frustrated hell as unpleasant as it can possibly be. He has rarely wished another man dead in his life, but right now, as violently as he once wished Hitler dead or Stalin dead or Khrushchev dead, he thinks he wishes the President dead. He believes now that nothing can sway him to change in this; and he is telling himself that not all the wiles of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will be sufficient this time to divert from the head of its occupant a justice he has often invited but almost always managed to escape.

This mood, which he is deliberately implanting in his being so deeply that he believes it can never be dislodged, is understandable enough, given the tragic events of the night and their profound impact upon him. Somewhere around six he had had a sudden hunch, inexplicable, elusive, but insistent, that it was important that he get in touch with Brig; there was no way to explain it, it had just come to him, and for some reason equally inexplicable he had put his call through to the Senator’s office instead of his home. It was obvious at once that something was wrong, someone took up the phone but did not answer, there were shouts and movements in the background—he thought he heard someone cry. “Hold the light over there so I can get a shot of his head!”—and for several moments he simply waited on the line until someone spoke. “This is Senator Knox,” he said, “is Senator Anderson there?” “Just a minute, Senator,” the voice said in a startled way, and he heard it call to someone, “Senator! Senator! This is Senator Knox.” And then a voice he could hardly recognize came on the wire and said, sounding so old and so tired, “This is Seab, Orrin. We have lost our young friend, Orrin. He has shot himself.” “But he didn’t have to do that,” he said foolishly, and Seab, seeming to understand the way a man could say something as stupid as that at a time like that, only said, “I think you had better come home right away, Orrin. We all need you here.” “Yes, Seab,” he managed to say. “Call Beth and tell her I’m on my way.” And in a daze he had asked his administrative assistant, who was traveling with him, to cancel his three remaining speeches of the day, the local party people had rushed him to the nearest airport, and he had caught the next plane and come straight to Washington.

On the plane he had tried not to think about it too much, but it was of course impossible to shut out. Around and around and around his mind went, and over and over and over the same hopeless ground. The whys were never resolved, the futile protests went unanswered and only became more insistent. So too did his personal grief. At first he was in such a state of shock that he was unable to grasp it in terms of tragedy or even of human reality; but suddenly after about an hour it began to hit him very hard. He felt as though he might be about to cry, so he turned and stared earnestly out the window and pretended to be looking intently at the gradually dimming land below while his eyes filled with tears and the appalling finality of it struck him squarely with all its force. He remained so for quite some time until finally he put on a pair of dark glasses and leaned back, pretending to be asleep. He would allow himself an hour to cry, he thought grimly, because there would be no time to cry later. He had people to see and things to do, and he would do his mourning for Brig right now so that he could approach them unhampered by emotion and unclouded by a bitterness that could only interfere with efficiency.

At National Airport in Washington, still wearing his dark glasses but by now beginning to feel an iron inner calm, he found that the
Post
had put out an extra, filled with headlines, pictures, and political speculation. The photographers had done their jobs well, as befitted their experience and ability, which was great, and the taste and consideration of their editors, which was virtually non-existent. There was a picture of Mabel in tear-stained horror, a shot of Pidge looking sleepy, frightened, and totally lost. The cameras had been right there, stuck in their faces in keeping with human decency and the tragedy in which they were involved.

Most of the time Orrin found himself passably tolerant of this sort of thing, which was always excused on the ground that it was giving the public what it wanted to see at breakfast; but this time it only served to goad him even further into a harsh, black anger. It did not lighten his mood at all to be photographed himself as he stood studying the papers near the plane and to have some eager young television reporter ask brightly, “Senator Cooley says you are now the leader of the anti-Leffingwell forces, Senator, and he expects the nomination will now be defeated. Do you expect the nomination will now be defeated?”

The fellow was not one of the Capitol regulars, from whom Orrin might have taken such a question at such a time, and he had given him a look so full of distaste and disgust that the man involuntarily stepped back a pace.

“The nomination,” he had replied with a tenuous self-control, “will be defeated.”

“You think it will be defeated, Senator,” the fellow had repeated automatically, as though he couldn’t quite believe Orrin would want to be that positive.

“I said it will be defeated,” he had said angrily. “It will be defeated. How many more times do I have to say it for you?”

“Thank you, Senator,” the man had said hurriedly, and he had gotten quickly out of the way as Orrin brushed him aside and strode forward angrily into the terminal to get his luggage and catch a cab for home.

There he had found that the emotional storms of the evening were not yet over, for the Andersons of course were there, as were Hal and Crystal and Stanley Danta, and there had been an unhappy couple of hours getting everybody quieted down and off to bed. Pidge mercifully fell to sleep early, her mother went to bed in Beth’s room about ten after breaking them all up by remarking wistfully, “I never really knew him, and now I never will,” and after a time there remained only the immediate family to settle down and then he himself could get some rest. First, however, there had to be some fast planning for Hal and Crystal, who at first were determined to postpone the wedding on Wednesday afternoon, until their-fathers talked them out of it. Brig, it was explained, wouldn’t have wanted that at all, and while it was agreed that they should cancel most of the guest list and restrict it to just a few close friends, there was no reason to put it off altogether. Dolly was called and consulted; said she was canceling the reception but thought they should go ahead with the rest of it as Orrin and Stanley suggested; after a while Hal and Crystal agreed reluctantly and went off, much troubled, to bed, Hal to his room and Crystal back to the Westchester, where she said she would make some coffee and sit up for her father. A call came from Brig’s brother in Salt Lake City that he would be flying in in the morning, and Stanley volunteered to meet him and assist during the day Monday with the many details of liquidating the remnants of a life. It was decided that a memorial service would be held at National Cathedral at 2 p.m. Tuesday, with burial in Salt Lake on Wednesday. The Senate would devote itself to eulogies tomorrow, and because of the services on Tuesday and the fact that a recess for the wedding on Wednesday had been promised long ago, there was now no possibility of a vote on the nomination until Thursday. Orrin told Stanley bluntly that he was out to beat it and would use every means at his command; Senator Danta looked grave and unhappy and finally said he thought possibly he would go along with this. Shortly after he left the house Seab called to say he had already contacted fifteen of their colleagues, including Sam Eastwood of Colorado, Stuart Schoenfeldt of Pennsylvania, Ray Smith and Vic Ennis of California, Roy Mulholland of Michigan, and Powell Hanson. Of them all, he reported, only Powell Hanson and Victor Ennis had refused to abandon their commitments to vote for the nominee. Of the rest, ten were now opposed and three were leaning their way. Seab said he would go on telephoning until about 2 a.m. and then start in again at six-thirty in the morning. Senator Knox thanked him with satisfaction and suggested several others he might work on. Senator Cooley promised grimly to do his best. There was no word from the Majority Leader, and Orrin made no move to call him. He imagined Bob was having a rough time and he was damned glad of it. He will get to him tomorrow, he thinks now, and he will see then what remains of an old friendship and a close alliance in the face of these somber events. He does not know exactly what part Bob played in the tragedy of their young friend, but instinct tells him it was not helpful to Brig when the chips were down. If it was something really bad, he tells himself grimly, he may never forgive him.

It was not until two-thirty that he had finally gone to bed, by himself, on the sofa in the den, and between that time and this his mind has raced without let-up. Now at 4 a.m. he knows he should be asleep if he is to have the energy to be as busy tomorrow as he will have to be; but a sort of nervous tension, somewhat similar to that which sometimes follows sex, won’t let him sleep, and the only comfort in it is that he expects it will probably carry him through whatever he has to face in the week ahead. Although he cannot now imagine the full extent of what this will be, for there are events of major and surprising import lying just ahead for his country, for him, and for the world, he does know that it will include the funeral of someone who was almost a son to him; the wedding of his own son; the settlement one way or the other of the fate of Robert A. Leffingwell—which in spite of his positive attitude at the airport he knows is still in some doubt, not much but enough so he will have to work hard at it—the
breaking of Fred Van Ackerman, which is now inevitable; and perhaps some further point of development in his own long-standing ambition to reach a position where he can run the country as he thinks the country ought to be run.

“Why do you want to be President, Senator?” UPI had asked him candidly once.

“Because there are things I want to accomplish for the country that I can’t accomplish in any other office,” he had replied with an equal candor that had been greeted with that national mixture of approval, amusement, criticism, and scorn that seemed to greet everything he did. It is not, he thinks, that he particularly wants to be a controversial figure, or that he ever consciously set himself that goal; there is just something in him that makes him one, and every time he opens his mouth the legend of it grows.

And, he reflects grimly, there will be a lot for the legend to feed on this week, for he has no intention of softening either his words or his actions in any particular. Whatever the ultimate reasons behind the death of the senior Senator from Utah, he knows that they were directed and stage-managed, and made use of by two men, the junior Senator from Wyoming and the President of the United States, and both must be made to meet a reckoning. The first thing to do in the morning, he decides, is to call in Seab and Stanley and Lafe Smith, try to ascertain from their best guesses what the trouble was, and then plan strategy on what to do about it. Since Stanley has already shown a disposition to leave the Administration and the Majority Leader, there has already been a major gain, and the Senator from Illinois does not intend to let him back out on it. They are about to become members of the same family, in effect, and he intends to use every power of persuasion he has to assure that the highly respected Senator from Connecticut will not only give tacit support to the anti-Leffingwell cause but active support as well. If Bob Munson by any chance persists in standing by the nominee, Senator Danta’s defection will be the first step in isolating him, and through him the President; it will spread like wildfire through the Senate, and before long the Majority Leader, if he does remain obdurate, will be leader of nothing but a rag, tag, and bobtail little army whose principal lieutenants will be people of no more stature than Tom August and Fred Van Ackerman.