by Allen Drury
Thinking of his career in the Senate as the cab moved out of the park and shot along the drive toward Constitution Avenue beside the steel-bright morning river, he reflected with gratitude that it had gone steadily forward with a felicity Grandfather Durham had never matched. Because he was essentially a sunny person, whose life had been free of any insurmountable stresses or strains, he won friends quickly, easily, and for life, and in a body where so much depends upon personal likes and dislikes and the blunt appraisal of character, he soon became marked for bigger and better things. A single half-hour conversation with the chairman of the party conference had won him a seat on Foreign Relations over the heads of the ten others who entered the Senate the same year he did, and over some twenty other more senior heads as well; yet because he was so good-natured and such a work horse, so unaffectedly friendly and equable, the assignment was accepted with very little grumbling and the rancor was soon forgotten. A couple of years later the same good fortune took him off his second committee, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and put him on Appropriations, thus giving him membership on the two most powerful committees in the Senate. In that same session the party whip died, and because Bob Munson had been dutiful in his attendance in the chamber, had cheerfully done all the little party errands asked of him, and also because his combination of good nature, diligence, and blustering, quick-dying, innocent temper had made him one of the two or three best-liked men in the Senate, he was given the job by a sort of majority concurrence that speedily obliterated the ambitions of one or two others who considered themselves better fitted. The Senate did not, and from that time he could date the dislike of Arly Richardson, who had really wanted the post. Nine years later, when the Majority Leadership finally fell open, Arly had made a definite campaign for it and Bob Munson had been faced with the necessity of beating him again. The Majority at that time had numbered fifty; Arly got his own vote and five others. The five others had forgiven and forgotten, but not Arly; in his sarcastic way, he wasn’t the forgiving type.
With the Majority Leadership, there came to Senator Munson not only a much more direct responsibility for running the Senate, but in a curious sense which he never expressed to anyone except May, because it would have sounded precious and pretentious, an almost fatherly sense of responsibility for the country. Now there was somewhere at the back of his mind not only a constant mental map of his own enormous Michigan flung up northward over its carpet of woods and lakes, but of the whole United States as well; and soon his steadily increasing political travels and speaking engagements, taking him as they did back and forth into every section of the land, formed in his mind an underlay of vivid scraps and pieces of America: the soft velvet light of the desert at dusk, the primeval stretches of the Mississippi from La Crosse to St. Paul, a winding road through New England hills, the Shenandoah Valley in spring, the high cold plains of the Dakotas and Montana, the dreary swamps of the Carolinas along U.S. 301, the Columbia River Gorge, booming, bustling Florida, San Francisco, daughter of conquerors gleaming on her glittering hills above the beautiful Bay, New York seen against a cloud-filled sunset looking down the river from George Washington Bridge, fat Pennsylvania with her lush, well-kept farms, the flat cornlands of Kansas, Texas with an oil well in one hand and a highball in the other, and the rest. At any hour of day or night, brought by whatever impulse brings such things, there would flash into his perception some instantaneous sense of being in some certain place in America, the view, the surroundings, the feel of it; and with it would always come, renewed again and again to infinity, the same conviction that he was somehow personally responsible for the well-being of it all, that some overriding trust and obligation had been placed upon him to see that it was kept safe and its people protected.
And so, of course, there had been. There were many in the Senate who had that feeling, but upon the Majority Leader, if he was a good one, it rested more heavily than most. Especially was this so in a troubled time in which the great promise was being challenged and the great Republic which embodied it was being desperately threatened. In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others to be hated or loved according to their own cupidity, envy, and greed, or lack of it; rise and rise and rise and rise—and then, in the sudden burst of Soviet science in the later fifties, the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it, a too complacent and uncaring people awoke to find themselves naked with the winds of the world howling around their ears, the impossible merry-go-round slowed down. Now the reaction was on, in a time of worry and confusion and uncertainty. Men walked the tight rope between brittle confidence and sudden fear, never knowing when reality would suddenly intrude and laughter fade and the dark abyss yawn open and remind them it was waiting there for a still unhumbled land.
He could not say, looking back, exactly where the blame was to be placed; except that he knew, as he had told an audience in San Francisco only last week, that “it lies on all of us.” A universal guilt enshrouded the middle years of the twentieth century in America; and it attached to all who participated in those times. It attached to the fatuous, empty-headed liberals who had made it so easy for the Russians by yielding them so much; it attached to the embittered conservatives who had closed the doors on human love and frozen out all possibility of communication between peoples. It rested on the military, who had been too jealous of one another and too slow, and on the scientists, who had been too self-righteous and irresponsible and smug about shifting the implications of what they did onto someone else, and on the press, which had been too lazy and too compliant in the face of evils foreign and domestic, and on the politicians, who had been too self-interested and not true enough to the destiny of the land they had in keeping, and not least upon the ordinary citizen and his wife, who somehow didn’t give quite enough of a damn about their country in spite of all their self-congratulatory airs about how patriotic they were. Nobody could stand forth now in America and say, “I am guiltless. I had no part in this. I did not help bring America down from her bright pinnacle.” For that would be to deny that one had lived through those years, and only babies and little children could say that.
So now there was a time of uneasiness when everyone told everyone else dutifully that, “It is not our purpose to indulge in recriminations about the past,” and tried to live up to it; and when all thinking men fretted and worried desperately about “how to catch up,” and “how to get ahead”; and also, in the small hours of the night’s cold terror, about what it would be like if America couldn’t catch up, if history should have decided once and for all that America should never again be permitted to get ahead.
And already because of this, the smooth and supple voices of rationalization were beginning to be heard, the blandly clever voices of adjustment and accommodation and don’t-make-a-federal-case-of-it and don’t-take-it-too-hard and after-all-what-will-it-matter-in-a-hundred-years and maybe it-wouldn’t-really-be-so-bad and I-guess-we-could-live-with-them-if-we-had-to. And for America it was a time of nip and tuck, and a darkening passageway with only God’s good grace, if He cared to confer it again upon a people who sometimes didn’t seem to deserve it any more, to see the country safely through.
God’s good grace, Bob Munson told himself grimly, and a few good men. The President wasn’t giving in, and he wasn’t giving in, and there were quite a few others all through the country who weren’t giving in; the majority, in fact, he believed. But people were only human, after all, and they were scared; and confronted with the possibility of a war with all the horrors it could now entail, they were not as resolute or as courageous as they once had been when they weren’t so aware of what the consequences of resolution and courage could be. They liked to tell themselves they were brave, but they weren’t; there was just enough of a feeling, just enough, to provide a very dangerous potential for an appeasement that would be fatal. Faced with an open challenge, an open att
ack, they would, if they had the time, rouse and fight back as they always had, no matter what the price, for America; but make the attack sufficiently intellectual, make the threat sufficiently subtle, give them time to think, let them mull it over and contemplate what would happen if they didn’t go along, carry it to the conference table if you liked and be sure you gave them a way to save face as they retreated, and he would not, at this moment, vouch for what her people would allow to be done to America.
Through a combination of lapses, stupidities, overidealism, and misjudgments, each at the time seemingly sound and justified, each in its moment capable of a rationale that had brought a majority to approve it, the United States had gotten herself into a position vis-à-vis the Russians in which the issue was more and more rapidly narrowing down to a choice between fight and die now or compromise and die later. And out of that fearful peril only the most iron-willed and nobly dedicated and supremely unafraid men could lead the nation.
That was why so much was involved in the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell, and that was why it would, he knew, be a grim business in which men played for keeps before it was through. The fate of the Republic, in this instance, did indeed in large measure depend on what the Senate did; particularly since, for all his verve and vigor, the President of late had not looked entirely well to Bob Munson’s practiced eye. He had hung back for a moment this last time as they left the oval office, and for a second had looked hard at the man behind the desk. The President had caught him at it, too; for a split second his face changed and a strange expression came over it. Almost as though he had wanted to tell him something, Bob Munson thought; something that he was afraid of, and thought might be mortal. It had shocked him, for he had never seen the President afraid of anything. Maybe he would tell him about it someday, he reflected; although, being a strange and unknowable man as all Presidents are strange and unknowable, he also might not. At any rate, a little cautionary thought had taken up its residence in the Majority Leader’s mind; a certain silent, unexpressed factor in his thinking and planning. He knew it would not go away until the second term ended, or until the Lord resolved it, whichever it was to be.
This, which as far as he knew only he as yet suspected, lent an even greater gravity to the Leffingwell nomination. If the dark eventuality occurred and Harley Hudson succeeded to office, he would undoubtedly in his frantic insecurity keep Bob Leffingwell on, and Bob Leffingwell, Bob Munson knew, was strong enough to be Secretary of State and unsworn President, too. And thereby, if the President had misjudged him and the Senate confirmed the misjudgment, could hang quite a story; the sort of sad story that people sit upon the ground and tell, of great hopes crushed and great states lost forever.
Therefore there devolved upon him and upon his brethren on the Hill the responsibility of being absolutely sure about this man before they approved him. This meant that Seab, who was simply an obstruction under most circumstances, would be an obstruction pulling powerful support behind him in this case; and that he, who would push through a nomination in most cases as a matter of routine party loyalty, must in this instance be positive in his heart that he was doing the thing that should be done. It could not be decided lightly, and it would not be decided lightly. Too much hung upon it.
To the task, he reflected with some satisfaction as the grimness of his mood began to slacken, he brought a good equipment. In his deceptively amiable and easygoing way he was as strong a man as his times demanded. It had taken him some years to become so, and he could remember many times when through inexperience or uncertainty he had gone too far in one direction or the other, giving in too easily to someone when he should have stood firm or being too harsh with someone when he should have been gentle. But in time—and it took time, and much study of men’s hearts and minds to be a good leader of the United States Senate—he had learned; and now he knew pretty well when to be soft, pretty well when to be tough, and pretty well when to refrain from those exaggerations of opinion and attitude which had too often destroyed bright careers in Washington. Not for him the endless, embittered, self-righteous twistings of a Paul Hendershot of Indiana, or the blind, unmoving, uncreative, unhappy conservatism of an Eldon P. Boyle of Wyoming. He stood where he stood, and he knew why he stood there; and thus his approach to the Leffingwell nomination would be what the circumstances made necessary for the good of the land. He was a mature man at fifty-seven, in a way that few men achieve maturity. It had taken him a while, and a good bit of living to get there, but he was unshakeable as a rock now, and everybody knew it.
Even Seab, he thought with amusement as the cab swung past the Washington Monument and the Bureau of Engraving, dashed across Fourteenth Street, and darted under the bridges over Independence Avenue that linked the north and south Agriculture Department buildings. Even Seab, staring straight ahead like a very formidable lump on a very formidable log.
“Isn’t that so, Seab?” Bob Munson asked out loud. Seab grunted.
“I don’t rightly know what you have in mind, Bob,” he said slowly, “but I expect it’s designed to make me look just a leetle bit ridiculous. Isn’t what so, Bob?”
“Don’t you know I’m unshakeable as a rock?” Bob Munson said.
“Who called you that, Bob?” Seab asked. “Time Magazine? You ought to see what they call me, Bob. Unshakeable, sometimes, but a lot of other things, too. Not one of them as polite as ‘rock,’ Bob. Not one.”
“I was just thinking it about myself, Seab,” Senator Munson said. “I was sure you’d agree.”
“If you’re a rock, Bob,” Senator Cooley said blandly, “you’ve met a sledge hammer. You know that, Bob, don’t you?”
“Yes, Seab,” said Bob Munson with a grin, “I know that.”
“Yes, sir,” Seab said; and after a moment, very softly to himself, “Yes, sir.”
But withstanding sledge hammers, Bob Munson reflected as the cab passed the Botanical Gardens, made its lunge up the Hill past the New House Office Building, turned left, and started around Capitol Plaza toward the Senate office buildings, was what they paid him for. And he wouldn’t want it any other way.
At the side entrance to the Old Senate Office Building on Delaware Avenue the cab stopped and its passengers got out. Senator Ennis, who, far from Russians and other matters he thought about as little as possible, had been lost throughout the journey in a tantalizing vision of the Jonathan Club beach at Santa Monica as it would be in another couple of months, came to with a start and reached for his purse. Senator Munson did the same. Senator Cooley forestalled them both.
“I’ll get it, Senators,” he said grandly, with his usual ironic little twinkle. “I come from a small state, you know, not like you big fellows who always use up all your expense funds. You know us in South Carolina, Bob; all we ever have to spend our money on is corn likker and lynching bees. You Yankees know that, Bob. I’ll get it.”
“Thank you, Seab,” Bob Munson said; and, “Thank you, Seab,” Victor Ennis echoed respectfully.
“My pleasure, Bob,” Senator Cooley said graciously; “my pleasure, Senator.” Then he grinned suddenly and waved toward the stone expanses of the office building before them.
“On your mark, get ready, get set, go, Bob,” he said. “On your mark, get ready, get set, go.”
***
Chapter 4
On your mark, get ready, get set, go, was exactly it, Bob Munson reflected as he approached the familiar door with its picture of Lake Michigan and “Mr. Munson—Come In” at the end of the corridor on the second floor. He had soon found that his job, in which there were infinite problems and many rewards, could reasonably well be summed up in just some such jibe as Seab had uttered when they left the cab. When he became Majority Leader his day automatically expanded to sixteen, eighteen hours, the Capitol, which had dominated his thoughts for twelve years, became their absolute center, and he swiftly learned that his world began and ended in ninety-nine minds whose endless surprises he could never entirely anticipate. No soo
ner had he got somebody pegged in one place than he turned up somewhere else; his plans for steering legislation had to be constantly revised to accommodate the human material with which he had to work. Even such solid citizens as Stuart Schoenfeldt and Royce Blair were quite capable of jumping the reservation when issues got too close to home, and when it came to someone of the caliber of Courtney Robinson, for instance, all bets were off. Many a time he had discussed an issue earnestly with Courtney, been assured with the greatest sincerity that he was true-blue and steadfast, and then found as the roll call neared that the elocutions rapidly became elaborate to the point of obfuscation. Finally with great pain and reluctance he would be assured that there were “just too many reasons, just too many reasons,” for the vote to be cast as he wished. Sometimes he did not even receive this courtesy, and it was only when the reading clerk called the names that he knew what would happen. Then Courtney would smile and wave graciously across the chamber, and later come over to apologize heartily for being a bad boy.
Fortunately for the orderly progress of the American government, this situation did not arise every time or with everybody. There was a bedrock he could count on, and he presently came to base his strategy upon it. He felt he had, on almost every issue, a bloc of approximately thirty sure votes; and to them it was usually not too difficult to add the nineteen or twenty more he needed for victory. Sometimes he hardly bothered to check, for many things went through more or less automatically. But on the big issues, such as defense, foreign aid, public power, the major appropriations, the major nominations, he always went automatically through the list, questioning, cajoling, sounding out, sometimes promising, sometimes warning, sometimes putting it on a basis he hated but one which occasionally proved effective when nothing else did—“Just as a favor to me.” This was Seab’s favorite gambit, and they sometimes met in battle array over the prostrate form of some poor wee, sleek, timorous, cowerin’ beastie like Nelson Lloyd of Illinois or Henry Lytle of Missouri, desperately anxious to be friends with everybody and not offend either the powerful Majority Leader or his almost equally powerful opponent. Then it all had its humorous moments.
