by Allen Drury
“Only what’s right,” Brig said calmly.
“I doubt very much if he’ll be receptive to that idea,” the Majority Leader said. “He read me a lecture on it a little while ago.”
“Maybe he’ll feel differently after I talk to him,” Senator Anderson said.
Bob Munson made a skeptical sound. “That I doubt. He said unless you’d found Leffingwell guilty of a morals conviction or a murder rap or membership in the Communist Party, he wouldn’t budge. You haven’t found any of those, have you?”
“Not exactly,” Senator Anderson said, and Senator Munson said, “Hmm.”
“Serious enough to warrant withdrawal, you think,” he remarked thoughtfully.
“I think so.”
“Well, maybe I will, too, when you tell me what it is,” Bob Munson suggested. His colleague laughed.
“Which will be when I see the President,” he said with pleasant firmness.
“You’re a stubborn cuss,” Senator Munson told him.
“It’s the way I am,” Brig said in a tone that dismissed it. “I’d like you with me, Bob. When can we set it up?”
“I’m going back to the house with him after the White House Correspondents’ banquet tonight for a drink and a chat. He thought you might like to come with me.”
“Oh, he’s already got it set up,” Brig said with, some surprise. The Majority Leader decided there was no point, with Brig, in beating around the bush.
“Yes, except that he expects that by that time you will have changed your mind, canceled further hearings, and come out with a statement to the effect that further study has convinced you the nominee should be speedily confirmed.”
“Oh, he does,” Senator Anderson said in an entirely different voice. “Oh, he does. Are those the conditions on which I’m to be allowed into the presence?”
“No, no,” the Majority Leader said hastily. “Calm down. That only expresses the utmost limit of his fondest hopes. He’ll be glad to see you in any event.”
“No, he won’t,” Brigham Anderson said calmly. “So that’s what’s behind this call. You’re supposed to head me off and then we can have a victory drink on it tonight. His victory. Well, that’s not the basis on which I’m coming to see him, you can tell him for me. Any change in plans I may or may not make will be after I see him, not before. For Christ’s sake,” he added in an exasperated tone, “I’m only doing this to protect him. What in the hell’s the matter with him, anyway?”
Bob Munson sighed.
“You’re making this awfully difficult for everybody,” he said, and in reply his young friend sounded completely serious.
“I’m sorry, Bob,” he said soberly. “I don’t mean to. It just seems to me this way is best, that’s all. I’ve thought it all over, and that’s my judgment on it. I’m trying to do what seems right to me. I can’t help it if this is the way it comes out.”
“All right,” Senator Munson said, deciding to capitulate, at least for the time being. “All right, you do it your own way. We’ll go ahead with it after dinner and you can talk the whole thing out with him.”
“Maybe this will give us all a chance to re-examine our positions,” Senator Anderson said. “Maybe we all need to.”
“Maybe,” Senator Munson said, not sounding very convinced of it “You’ll have some trouble avoiding questions at the dinner, I’m afraid.”
“I doubt it,” Brig said. “I’ll just be pleasant and noncommittal, as usual.”
“As usual,” the Majority Leader said. “Suppose it comes out somewhere else during the day, whatever it is?”
“Well, then I’ll just be justified in what I’m doing,” Brig said. “Look, Bob. I’m only trying to play this by the rules. I’m only trying to protect my gallant leaders, the one in the White House and the one in the Senate. What’s your problem, pal?”
“Someday,” Senator Munson said thoughtfully, “you’re going to go it alone just once too often, Brigham, and it’s going to trip you up.”
“Maybe,” the Senator from Utah said calmly. “Maybe. But I don’t think it will be this time.”
“I hope not for your sake,” the Majority Leader said. “I’ll tell the President you’ll be coming along with me as planned tonight.”
“Not quite as planned,” Brig pointed out, “but I’ll be there. Unless Fred Van Ackerman has led a lynch mob of COMFORT members out here and strung me up by that time.”
“Maybe he will,” Bob Munson said, not entirely in jest “By the way,” he added casually, “is Tommy Davis mad at you about anything?”
“Not that I know of,” Senator Anderson said. “I gave him a ride to work the other morning and he seemed the same as ever. I’m sure he isn’t happy about what I’m doing right now, he’s such a Leffingwell partisan, but I can’t think of anything personal. Why?”
“Nothing, I just wondered.”
“You never ‘just wonder,’ Robert. What’s on your mind?”
“That’s all right,” Bob Munson said airily. “You have your little secrets. I have mine.”
“Bastard,” Senator Anderson said affectionately, and the Majority Leader laughed.
“Come see us at the Capitol someday,” he said.
“I’d rather you wouldn’t advertise it,” Senator Anderson said, “but I’ll be in my office after lunch if you need me. And don’t worry, Robert. I’m doing all right.”
But after he had hung up and gone thoughtfully back out into the yard, there remained in his mind the uneasy feeling that perhaps he wasn’t entirely. Despite his outward calm about the attacks of press and television, he had been somewhat dismayed by the extreme virulence which had greeted him with the dawn. He had realized that many people were emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he had not realized quite the fanaticism that seemed capable of flaring from it at an instant’s notice. He still, after seven years in office, retained some slight, idealistic belief that if you treated people in Washington and the great world of politics and the press fairly, they would accord you the same fairness; he was still shocked occasionally at the extremes of bitterness which often cropped out on what sometimes seemed the slightest of provocations. “You know,” Stanley Danta had once remarked wryly, when his unexpected criticism of some proposal put forward by one of the more popular favorites had suddenly brought an avalanche of personal attack upon his own head, “I think I’ll introduce a resolution to change the motto of the Republic from ‘E pluribus Unum’ to ‘It all depends upon whose ox is gored.’ That would be more fitting, I think.”
Senator Anderson had watched the process involve others, and now it was involving him; it was not pleasant, and basically, although he had meant it when he said it was just something to ride out and he was confident he could, there was a savagery about it that he found very disturbing. The debate over Bob Leffingwell was no longer—if it ever had been—a discussion on the merits; it was now simply a matter of personal attack and personal smear, with no holds barred and no weapons unused where weapons could be found. By doing what he thought was the right and honorable thing to protect the country, the President, and the party, he had apparently tipped over a witch’s cauldron; and as he stood once more gazing thoughtfully about his yard, he wondered with a recurring sense of foreboding that threw into shadow the bright golden day whether he really could emerge without being genuinely and perhaps permanently scalded.
It was in this mood, which was not conducive to relaxed domestic conversation, that he looked up to see his wife and daughter emerging from the house to come toward him over the lawn. Pidge, dressed in bright blue blouse and jumper, looked her most angelic this morning, but he could see that Mabel, whose feelings were always close to the surface and ready to be rubbed raw, was as disturbed as he was. Because he was beginning to find lately that this state of mutual concern led too rapidly to argument, he knelt down and held out his arms, and Pidge with a glad cry hurled herself into them. As he stood up with her blond head and dark eyes alongside his, the sun playing upon th
em both, Mabel felt as though a giant hand had reached in and squeezed with implacable determination and great pain upon her heart, so touching and perfect a picture did they make together, and so certain was she that there was menace in the morning for them all.
And because she knew her husband would be annoyed when she said what she felt she must, it came out with a certain doggedly challenging air that she knew desperately even as she said it would prompt a defensive and probably hurtful rejoinder. But she couldn’t stop, she felt she had to say it, and she did.
“I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” she said in the direct, tactless way of people who aren’t quite sure of themselves, when they feel they must come to grips with something unpleasant, “and I wondered if you were doing the right thing.”
“Were you listening on the upstairs phone?” her husband asked pleasantly, and she felt like crying, “No, no!” But with considerable effort she managed a little smile and said, “Nope, I was working in the kitchen, remember?”
“Oh,” Brig said in the same pleasant tone. “I do remember. Pidge, why don’t you run on down and take a look at the goldfish and I’ll come join you in a minute?”
His daughter, who was not the child of two intelligent people for nothing gave him a quick look, gave her mother another, and then turned away with a sunny smile.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t talk too long.”
“We won’t,” Brig said, and for a moment he and Mabel were laughing at the same thing. It passed.
“Now,” he said soberly, “what’s the matter?”
“I’m worried for you,” she said, trying hard to make it come out calmly. “Everybody seems so—so hostile toward what you’ve done, that it just worries me terribly. I just wondered if you really—really had to do it this way.”
“My dearest,” he said patiently, “you’ve known me now, for—how long is it now?—nine years. Nine years, almost ten. Don’t I always do things the way I feel I have to do them? And don’t I always think them over pretty carefully before I move? Of course I must feel I have to do it this way, or I wouldn’t do it this way.”
“You always have an answer,” she said in a remote voice, while somewhere a cardinal called quickly to another and the warm capricious wind rustled the new leaves in the trees, “and it’s always such a—such a lonely answer, somehow.”
“Lonely?” he said in a puzzled voice. “How do you figure that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just is. You always do what you think is right, and you don’t care what other people think about it, and if they think you should do something different it doesn’t matter to you, because you know you’re right. And somehow it always seems awfully lonely to me.”
He gave her a long look, and there was an emotion she could not fathom deep in the level eyes.
“I’m not lonely,” he said. “Whatever in the world gave you that idea? I have you, and I have Pidge, and I have hundreds of friends in Washington and thousands out in the state, and more thousands of thousands I like to think, across the country. How could I possibly be lonely?”
“Well, maybe that isn’t the right word for it,” she said, “but—yes, yes, I think it is. You’re always so sort of set apart from everybody, somehow.” And she almost added, “even from me,” but she knew she would cry if she did, so she hurried on. “You take these independent stands and up to now it hasn’t mattered; but this time there seem to be all sorts of pressures involved and forces at work for Mr. Leffingwell that are bigger than anything you’ve ever tried to challenge before. I’m afraid they’ll hurt you if they can.”
“Please,” he said gravely. “Please don’t fail me now when it really does matter. You’ve been a politician’s wife long enough to know that there comes a time sooner or later for everyone in politics when he just has to stand and take it, that’s all. There just isn’t any way out, sometimes. And now it’s come for me. Sure, I could give in to the President, and to Bob; I could make another statement and close the hearings again and say hurrah for Leffingwell and join the mob and do it the easy way. Would you think better of me for that? I wouldn’t think better of myself, I can tell you that.”
“Couldn’t Bob help you work it out so there wouldn’t be any embarrassment about it?” she asked, aware off on the edge of her mind that somewhere a neighbor was running a power mower and somewhere children were shouting happily in the street.
“Yes, he’d like to,” he said dryly. “I’m sure he’d like to. That’s what the President told him to do, in fact.”
“Why don’t you talk to the President?” she suggested. “He seems like a nice man.”
“Oh, Mabel,” he said with a sudden real impatience in his voice. “The President is a nice man as long as it doesn’t interfere with his concept of what he ought to be doing as President. Then he stops being a nice man. That’s the way Presidents are.”
“Then what will he do to you?” she asked, trying not to sound frightened. He shrugged.
“What can he do to me?” he asked. “I have my own responsibility as United States Senator, just as much as he does as President. I assume we’ll talk it over after the banquet tonight and see what we can work out together.”
“But if you insist on his withdrawing the nomination—” she began, and her husband smiled.
“You weren’t working very hard in the kitchen, were you?” he said pleasantly, and her right hand went to her mouth to stop a cry of protest.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and she could see he was beginning the process of withdrawal that lately had proved so killing to her heart. “I’ll manage. Apparently I’ll have to manage alone, but I’ll manage.”
“Oh, that isn’t fair,” she said out of a sudden pain so deep she wasn’t quite sure she could speak at all. “That isn’t fair. You don’t have to be alone unless you want to be.”
His eyes widened suddenly, and because she feared he was on the very verge of saying, “Maybe I want to be,” and that if he did they might never find one another again, she did cry out, a strange, harsh, awkwardly muffled sound in the bright spring day.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Please don’t worry about me, Mabel. I’m not alone. I have you and I love you, and everything’s going to be all right. I think I’ll go talk to Pidge for a while now. If the phone rings I’ll be at home to Bob, the President, Orrin, or Lafe. Nobody else. Come out later and maybe we can decide what to plant in the back garden.”
“I will,” she said, very carefully and politely. “Yes, I will do that.”
“Good,” he said, and turned away to walk slowly along the lawn to where Pidge was busily poking in the water of the goldfish pond. The sun fell brightly on the two golden-headed figures she loved, and Mabel Anderson felt as though she might actually die right there in her own yard in Washington, D.C.
“It’s just that I don’t want you to be hurt,” she whispered as her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry. “That’s all. I just don’t want you to be hurt.”
There were times, Seab reflected, when he felt every bit of seventy-five, but this morning was not one of them. Today he felt somewhere around forty, or possibly even thirty-five, tip-top, in the pink, with everything going the way he wanted it to, firmly in control of the situation and thoroughly content with the pattern of events as it was developing in the wake of his call to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Economic Affairs.
The inspiration to make that call and then to handle it as he had he regarded as among the shrewdest of all his long life, and he could not refrain from a certain feeling of profound self-satisfaction about it; a feeling he perforce had to keep to himself, for to disclose it would be to emerge as the man responsible for the new turn of events in the Leffingwell nomination, and this would automatically change the pattern, divert attention, turn the hue and cry back upon him, revive all the tired old animosities that always surrounded everything he did, and upset the delicate balance of the political d
evelopments now under way. For Seab Cooley to be the pivotal figure in such a striking change of course was one thing, for it would be immediately discounted and obscured by all the standard attacks; for Brigham Anderson to be the pivotal figure was quite another, because, for all that the nominee’s supporters might turn upon him savagely, he simply could not be discredited and discounted in the way Seab could be. If Seab did it, it could be dismissed as part of the same old feud; if Brig did it, people had to stop, look, and listen. That was why Seab had arranged for Brig to do it, and made the arrangement with such deliberate care that not even Brig knew why Brig was doing it.
To arrive at the true identity of James Morton had not in and of itself been so great a feat, he felt, for all it took was an ability to approach the testimony of the witness Gelman afresh and take note of the points that seemed to be bothering him most; and the one that kept recurring, despite the nominee’s scornful dismissals, was his dogged conviction that Bob Leffingwell in some way had been involved in getting him his new job in the Bureau of International Economic Affairs. This would seem to indicate some personal relationship or friendship or knowledge between the nominee and either the director of the Bureau or the man in over-all charge of it, the Assistant Secretary. And since a long memory reminded Seab that among other facts brought out about the Secretary at the time of his confirmation three years ago had been his age, which was roughly that of the nominee, and the fact that he had taught law at the University of Chicago for a time while building up his personal practice, all that remained was to have the gamblers instinct and the gambler’s will to take a chance that in this case Herbert Gelman might be right, and to act upon it in a way that would permit of no evasions. This he had done, calling the Secretary’s home and announcing in a tone of soft menace when he answered, “This is Senator Cooley, James Morton.” The man had gasped and before he had found time to recover, Seab had gone on in a voice he made increasingly cold and frightening, “And now, Mr. James Morton, this is what I want you to do for me, if you will be so kind.” And he had told him with great exactitude that he must call the chairman of the subcommittee and make a full confession and volunteer to testify, if the chairman so desired; and with a skillful combination of holding out the promise of future assistance in salvaging his career if he complied, and promising flatly to help destroy it utterly if he refused, he had extracted the assurance that James Morton would not disclose to the chairman the true origin of his call. Indeed, he had put it squarely on the basis of the man’s own welfare. He really thought, Seab said gently, he really did think, that the chairman and the subcommittee and the Senate and the country would all be much more kindly disposed toward James Morton if they thought his coming forward had been prompted by true patriotism and love of country, and not because anyone had forced him to do it. Even in his shattered mental and emotional state at that moment James Morton had been able to see that; and he had promised with great fervor to do it just the way Senator Cooley suggested. And evidently he had, for if he had not, Seab was sure that he would have received a call right away from Senator Anderson to confirm it. Apparently desperation had given James Morton’s call a sense of conviction and truth that had been sufficient to carry the day. And now the future was unfolding as the senior Senator from South Carolina wished.
