Advise and Consent (78 page)

This, as it turned out, proved to be one of the first of the many blunt remarks which were to shock and startle and upset people in the course of his public life, for he had not really bothered to check the situation before his quick reply. If he had, he would of course have found out that the mayor of Alton intended to run for the state Senate himself, and that everybody had agreed that he should be allowed to do so, and that the whole thing was cut and dried. Into this peaceful scene Billy Knox’s boy stepped with an impatient candor, an unyielding honesty, and a tart determination, fortified by his wife, to do as he damned pleased and let the chips fall where they might. It was quite a falling, what the chips did, and after they were all down the mayor of Alton had taken a shellacking, and Orrin Knox was a member of the Senate of the sovereign state of Illinois.

He got there, as he was to get to the governorship two years later and the Senate of the United States two years after that, by standing up on his hind legs and letting fly with the things he believed in with all the earnest vigor and oratorical ability at his command. He believed in Illinois and he believed in the United States and he believed in Abraham Lincoln; and he believed in them, and in all their implications and ramifications and refinements, with all the capacity of a powerfully determined, deeply emotional, and thoroughly decent heart. No ordinary opponent could stand against the passionate impact of his platform personality, any more than ordinary opponents could stand, in the arena of committee hearings and floor debate in Springfield, against the bluntly incisive tongue with which he cut them down to size. “If you do that you won’t be liked,” a fatherly fellow Senator had advised him on some controversial matter soon after he arrived. “I don’t give a damn about being liked,” he had retorted impatiently, “but I sure as hell intend to be respected.” This remark, too, went winging around the corridors and out into the newspapers and over the state; and another cubit was added to his stature in the legend.

In one of those tragically fortuitous blendings of misfortune and opportunity—others’ misfortune and his opportunity—by which many and many a public man has been lofted into his first national prominence, there occurred a mine disaster two months after he took office. It was followed for about a week, for reasons older hands cynically understood but he did not, by a vast silence in Springfield. During this the baby Senator from Alton went sniffing about in high dudgeon asking why nobody was doing anything about the mine laws; and after about four days, as he began to understand the answer, a terrific indignation started boiling inside. In another three days he had himself a speech written and on the eighth day after the disaster he blew the top off the capitol. When the pieces gradually settled into place again he was found to have introduced a resolution for an investigation, rammed it through by the sheer force of a towering indignation, and thereupon become the chairman of a special committee which consisted of one somnolent uncaring oldster, one terrified political hack, and himself.

For a period of six months—for as was often the case with him, violent indignations were succeeded by periods of calmly cold-blooded appraisal of where he had put himself and how to make the most of it—the investigation went on; not too fast, as the admiring capital press agreed, and not too slow, but at just the right pace to keep Orrin Knox constantly on the front pages and constantly in the public mind. Out of it he emerged with some powerful enemies but also with a solid and constructive mine-safety bill and a growing reputation, not only in Illinois but also nationally, where the gallant and dramatic fight of this youthful Galahad against the Interests was not overlooked. The fact that his bill was defeated in that immediate session didn’t stop him at all. “Go to it, Orrin,” some miner bellowed from the galleries as the tally was announced; “you can lick ’em next time!” “You bet I will!” he had shouted back exuberantly, and aided by a wave of public indignation which he fanned assiduously during the adjourned period of the legislature by a series of speeches all over the state, he did just that. His bill passed by the dramatic margin of two votes, went through the lower house by a tally almost as narrow, and was signed into law by a governor who was under pressure to balk at every step of the way and did so. The drama of this, too, was not lost upon anyone and when one of the reporters asked him, immediately after the signing ceremony in the governor’s office, “What will you do now, Senator?” he gave the answer the state expected. “I think it would be nice to have somebody administering this law who really believes in it,” he said with a scornful look at the angry executive. “I think I’ll run for governor.”

And so he did, in one of the wildest and bitterest campaigns in state history, out of which he rode angry but triumphant, having yielded not an inch to anyone on anything. “Honest Orrin,” his more enthusiastic supporters dubbed him in their broadsides and banners; and beneath it, emphasized with heavy underlining, “
I intend to be respected.
”

“Senator Knox may have achieved this aim, now that he has bulldozed his way into the governor’s chair,” the
Chicago Tribune
remarked in cold disapproval on the morning after election, “but he has also achieved the other part of it too: he isn’t liked.”

The
Tribune
to the contrary, however—as, he found, and he came to welcome it, the
Tribune
always would be to the contrary where he was concerned—he was liked a great deal by a great many people. Although the public personality did not show too much of the warmth beneath, although he had already developed at thirty-seven a sort of tart, protective brusqueness, basically very shy, that kept people off, there was an instinctive affection for him among the great majority of his fellow citizens. He had an ability to phrase things in a bluntly sarcastic way that got to the heart of things, and he never hesitated to speak up. Nor did he hesitate to take on any and all comers who, in his opinion, planned things inimical to the best interests of the people and the state. In his basically conservative fashion he turned out to be a surprisingly liberal governor, just as he was later to be, in just the same way, a surprisingly liberal United States Senator. This could easily be forgotten by those who wished to forget it, because he usually approached things with a critical air and often a critical welcome, and it was easy to portray this as something close to reaction. When the record was totted up, however, it wasn’t, and he often thought that he must have built a good foundation in his years in the Mansion in Springfield, because while his later record had a great deal to do with his continuing tenure in the Senate, much of the reason for it went back to the days when “Orrin was the best governor the state ever had.”

In all of this his wife was his constant companion and his constant help. When his public personality got too tart, when the sarcasm got too cutting and the honesty approached arrogance, it was the Beth half of Orrin and Beth who stepped in and saved the day or lightened the atmosphere with an amiable wit which had its own edge, too, but managed to make its point without hurting. And in the deep hours of the night when honesty sometimes did not seem sufficient to be its own reward, when it sometimes did seem that a dogged and invincible stubbornness, no matter how high its purposes, might not be enough to fend off the attacks of enemies and the opposition of the selfish, it was Hank beside him who gave him comfort and encouragement and made it possible to return to battle the next day as independent and ornery as ever.

Along the way, out of their love and companionship, they produced Hal, and young Elizabeth, who died of rheumatic fever when she was five years old and left a void that nothing ever quite filled up again. On the remaining child they concentrated all the love of two powerful personalities, and he was worthy of it. He was born sturdy, grew sturdy, thought sturdy, and walked sturdy: they never quite dared express, even to one another, their emotions now that he had safely negotiated childhood and adolescence and stood on the eve of marrying Crystal Danta. If anything ever happens to him—Orrin had thought when young Elizabeth died; but nothing ever had, except what was good and favoring. His parents felt most humbled.

During his time in Springfield he found that, like many an Illinois politician and many an American everywhere, he was, inevitably, affected and influenced by Springfield’s most powerful ghost. It was impossible to escape that brooding presence, which here, of course, had not been brooding at all but rather had been just a crafty young politician on the make, possessed of too much guile and not enough prospects. Like most people, he found this character almost impossible to think into any land of reality; he knew intellectually that it had existed, but the years of anguish and the years of glory kept blotting it out. When he went, as he sometimes did after tourist hours, to the house on Eighth Street to stand in the parlor among the horsehair chairs and sofas and think about his problems and those of its onetime owner, he told himself that this was the parlor of the man who jumped out the window of the old statehouse to avoid voting on a difficult bill; but somehow all he seemed to see standing in the doorway was the tall gaunt figure in the black cape and the stovepipe hat, saying farewell to all this and not knowing when, or whether ever, he might return. For Orrin as for the world, it was the patient, compassionate face, the tenacious, unbreakable purpose, the far-viewer of the centuries, knowing, as he demonstrated so clearly at Gettysburg, that he spoke not only to his own land but to all lands and all times into the unforeseeable future; knowing that it was not only the South that had been impaled upon the fatal fish hook of Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Ridge, and Little Round Top, but all the forces everywhere in all ages that would defy free government and attempt to bring it down; and knowing that they must not be allowed to triumph in a future day any more than they had triumphed in his own stumbling, bumbling, tragic, bloody war.

To that purpose as he understood it the young Governor of Illinois too took a personal pledge, and when a Senate seat loomed up midway in his gubernatorial term he took the purpose with him into his campaign and with him to Washington after he had won. This came about by another of those fortuitous combinations of opportunity and enterprise that often characterized his career, for while he had fully intended to go to the Senate as soon as possible, the chance came early only because the incumbent suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack two years before the end of his term. Governor Knox, as somebody in the press corps put it dryly, took one fast look up and down the street to see if anybody was coming, and then grabbed for it—not that he need have bothered to look, as the wagster went on to admit, because nobody could have come between him and the voters at that stage in his career, anyway. He allowed one day to pass and then announced. This occurred early in the year, and he met the immediate cry that he was a governor with half his mind on Springfield and half on Washington by appointing a trusted old party regular to keep the seat warm for ten months, and then by announcing a program of social legislation that pretty well tidied up all the loose ends of his administration that he could still see lying around. In one of his abrupt tornadoes of energy he not only proposed the program but got out and stumped the state for it, fought the legislature for it, and wound up achieving just about all of it. So in November he won handily for the Senate, and with steadily growing pluralities he had won regularly since, until now he was into his fourth full term with the path open if he wished to try once more to follow in Father Abraham’s footsteps and seek the lonely eminence of 1600 Pennsylvania.

To the Senate he contributed the honesty, the candor, the determination and drive and tart integrity that had brought him so much already in public life. On Capitol Hill it brought him much more. Because of his comparative youth on arrival, thirty-eight, because of his record as governor and his national reputation and because, unlike so many who come to the Senate with big statehouse build-ups only to fade quickly and quietly into the background, he did not let himself be inhibited by seniority but plunged vigorously into the life of the Senate, he soon achieved a position of prominence that was not accorded to many.

The Senate, generally not conducive to meteoric rises by widely heralded newcomers, bowed like so many before to his intelligence, unassailable purpose, and blunt, brusque ways. He began like many another freshman on District Committee and Public Works, but in three years’ time he had wangled assignment to Foreign Relations and Appropriations, the real focal points of power in the Senate, adding Finance a year later during a period when he was educating himself in national monetary matters and the leadership thought it would be a good idea to encourage him in it. And always, along with the prodigious work he accomplished in committee and on the floor, the famed tongue kept right on going. There was always some tart comment to be had from Orrin, a colorful and forthright interview that usually had the self-propelling quality, dear to the hearts of the press, of arousing some colleague to a violent rejoinder. Reporters would come to his office on a dull day and get him to sound off on something, and then in their enterprising way they would go trotting off to somebody else’s office and get him to sound off against Orrin’s views. Next day, having laid the groundwork for a first-class newspaper row, they would trot back to Orrin. Fortunately everybody involved understood this game, and it was always played with a fair amount of good humor on both sides so that very few lasting animosities grew out of it; only Arly Richardson, snagged on the sharp point of some comment about, “Apparently the Arkansas Traveler hasn’t traveled far enough yet to understand what’s going on east of the Mississippi,” developed a really lasting grudge. Mostly it just meant headlines, which he soon began to manage skillfully so that his cracks usually related themselves to the work he was doing, neatly calling it to public attention and, more often than not, commendation. It was not long before he was a big national name and highly respected by most of the Senate and a wide segment of the public. Then he made his first strategic error and decided to run for President. It was not, as his colleagues pointed out kindly but to no avail, Orrin’s year.