Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  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.

  There is not, in fact, any guarantee at all that Tom August will remain with him, for the chairman of Foreign Relations, while one of the fuzziest damned citizens Orrin thinks he has ever known in his entire life, is also at heart a very decent one. If it is true, as Senator Knox suspects, that Brig was driven to the wall by some sort of blackmail, Tom August will not condone it. Orrin does not yet know how this can be proved, if it should be the fact, but he decides he had better add Tom to the little caucus he is planning, for the next step after that of course is to call a meeting of the remaining members of the subcommittee; get a vote, which he is sure will be unfavorable to Bob Leffingwell; and then try to carry the same strategy through the full committee. Tomorrow afternoon, after the session ends and the memories of the eulogies and the full impact of Brigham Anderson’s death are still sinking in, will be the time for that. In his own way, more blunt and obvious and often more emotional than the President’s, Senator Knox too is fully as capable of seizing upon the tides of time and circumstance and the deeper feelings of men and making the most of them.

  As for what will come next, he does not at the moment know with any exactitude, for almost thirty years in politics have told him that men can only build up to a certain point upon the thoughts and emotions of other men, and after that it has to be played by ear with a quick adaptation to whatever develops. If he can persuade the full Foreign Relations Committee to report out the nomination of Bob Leffingwell with the recommendation, in the traditional language, “that the Senate do not advise and consent to the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State,” it is quite likely that he can carry the day after that simply on the strength of the unfavorable recommendation and his own righteous anger at the treatment of Brigham Anderson. The Senate is a funny place, he knows, and sometimes a thoroughly righteous cause can win in ways that are completely unforeseen by those who think only in terms of votes pledged and favors conferred. Just when things seem at their most cynical, something comes along that appeals to idealism and fair play, and the forces of deceit go down before it like tenpins. He has seen it happen on many occasions, it is on just that basis that he has built his own reputation and influence, and this time he thinks it may happen again; particularly since this time there will be an alliance of himself and Seab and Stanley and Lafe and very likely several other commanding men to give idealism the boost it needs from years of experience, intimate knowledge of the Senate, and long exercise of the uses of power.

  Then, he tells himself with a grim satisfaction, they will see what Mr. Big can pull out of the hat to salvage himself. It will not be very much, he believes, and it will not be enough to save Bob Leffingwell or his own prestige. Then there may come at last the time the Senate has long been waiting for, the long-cherished moment when it is he who will come to the Senate, hat-in-hand, instead of vice versa; and awaiting him on the doorstep will be the man who couldn’t enjoy it more, the senior Senator from Illinois, ready to impose the terms and indeed name the man whose substitution for Bob Leffingwell will finally provide the nation with its new Secretary of State.

  And here he is again, he realizes with a wry smile in the silent night as the first birds begin to twitter outside and the first tiny graying begins to soften the blackness, with his thoughts where they are at least half the time, in the White House, revolving around its occupant. Yet he knows that he can say honestly that while they have had many differences in the past seven years, he has never opposed him just for the sake of opposing, and indeed in the careful statistics worked out by Congressional Quarterly has session after session ranked among those who have supported him better than eighty per cent of the time. Of course, as Arly Richardson once pointed out dryly, the remaining twenty per cent only involved most of the major legislation coming before the Congress, but even there he thinks he has been constructive in his stands. Frequently proposals have come up from the White House to the Hill, he has sniffed and snorted and damned them up and down in the first ten minutes, only to buckle down in due course and get to work patiently devising the compromises that have not only made it possible for them to pass but have substantially improved them as well. “The President is the best assistant Orrin Knox has in administering the country,” somebody had put it in a crack at the Press Club bar that soon made the rounds of the capital; and there was enough truth in it to make them both smile, genuinely if a little grimly, when it came to them.

  On this nomination, though, the situation is different, and, he knows, it has been different from the first. The President has obviously felt that his entire Administration, prestige, and standing in history were committed to the cause of Bob Leffingwell, and there has been an adamantine quality about it that has puzzled the Senator from Illinois. Under ordinary conditions the inevitable result would have been to harden his own opposition, except that in the case of a Cabinet a
ppointment, and particularly the most important one of them all, he had felt like all Senators bound by the tradition that a President has a right to name his own official family and have around him the men he wants. If the incumbent had just left Brigham Anderson out of it, this would still in all probability be Senator Knox’s position. But that is impossible now.

  What defeat would do to the President’s health, Orrin does not know, though it would not be accurate to say that he could not care less, for he does care, and seriously. Wishing the President dead in an angry reaction to Senator Anderson’s death is of course an emotional extravagance that serves to satisfy pent-up tensions, but actually contemplating a situation in which he did die is something far more serious. As he had told Bob impatiently and more accurately on Thursday, nobody wants a President to die, it causes too much of an upset in everything. Yet there are sufficiently strong rumors, confirmed, it seems to him, by his own studies of the man on the rare occasions recently when they have attended something together, that this may not be beyond the realm of possibilities. Given what would appear to be the President’s current condition, this is an event Orrin must consider, as he must consider also the possibility that by his own actions he may help to precipitate it. For this he feels no compunction, for did the President feel any compunction when he was setting in train the events that resulted in the death of Orrin’s young friend? He did not, and by the same token, neither does Orrin.

  Still and all, there are fundamental changes to contemplate if this should turn out to be the case. What Harley Hudson would be like in the White House, Senator Knox cannot exactly imagine; except that he is quite sure, with a unity of view with his opponent that would not particularly surprise either of them, that it would create a most bothersome and unhappy situation for the country. Men may differ on many things, but they all agree on Harley; and the possibility that he may just surprise them once the office and the power are his does not enter even minds as astute as the two most directly interested. What Orrin foresees is another John Tyler, or possibly even a Buchanan, presiding with an amiable inability over the continuing disintegration of his country’s hopes. And he decides with an impatient movement of his head that they will just have to prop him up, they will all just have to stand by and give him advice and hold his hand and help him out, because, God knows, if they don’t, things will be in a hell of a mess. The chance that Harley may have ideas of his own and be able to find in himself under the pressures of responsibility strengths they cannot imagine he has, does not occur to Orrin any more than it does to anyone else; which may eventually turn out to be just one more proof that you can’t always judge people by appearances, that they are often unpredictable, and that those who happen to be dumped unexpectedly into the White House sometimes turn out to be most unpredictable of all.

  In any event, on the basis of what he knows now, the Senator from Illinois wishes that things had turned out differently at the convention seven years ago, and that it had been possible for him to submerge his pride and his dislike—to say nothing, he thinks dryly, of his principles—and accept the Vice Presidency. He knows this would have been out of the question, so astringent is his honesty toward other people and so clearly had he made his personal opinion of his opponent known to all the world, and so deeply did he feel it; but it might have been better for the country, and for him, if he had. Now he suspects impatiently that Harley will want to run in his own right next year, and that just means one more bruising battle in the next convention and the possibility once again, even considering their respective qualifications, that the Senator from Illinois may find himself on the outside looking in when the final balloting is over. This is if Harley reacts normally to his new position and the possibilities for re-election that it opens before him; though here, too, Senator Knox, may be assuming too much.

  And so here he is, he thinks with an impatient wryness, with the President dead and buried and Harley in the White House and his own hopes thwarted once more—and all on the basis of brooding too much at four o’clock in the morning. He tells himself with a stern annoyance to, damn it, stop thinking and go to sleep or he won’t be worth a damn in the morning, nervous buoyance or no nervous buoyance. So for three short hours before the house begins to stir again with a day that will be filled with sorrow and conflict that will be fateful for them all, he does manage to doze off fitfully; knowing with a drowsy annoyance that, despite his firm intention each time he drifts partially awake again his thoughts are instantly in the great white house where his antagonist lies. For he realizes that they are approaching their final showdown, that everything which has gone before, both in their relationship and in his own life, has been but preparation for this.

  ***

  Chapter 2

  For a man who had twice sought the presidency and was seriously considering another bid next year, his life seemed to him to have been in many ways a remarkably rounded preparation. It had provided him with about the right proportion of victories and defeats, about the right number of satisfactions and disappointments, to create the kind of balance that seemed capable of holding him steady through most things; and it had done so despite a basic personality that reacted far more sharply than most in politics to the shifting tides of circumstance and the triumph or betrayal of ideals. Growing up, as he came to understand after he had gotten safely through it, was essentially the process of learning not to care. The fact that he had never and entirely learned this, that there was at heart something incorrigibly innocent and direct and almost childlike about his reactions, that he was still at fifty-eight a man who deeply cared about many things and was not afraid to show it, gave him a certain distinction in a flaccid and flabby age. It strengthened his honesty, increased both his ideals and his prejudices, made him one of the people in public life about whom it was generally and truly said, “You may not agree with him, but at least you always know where he stands.” This could not be said about too many in recent years, and it was perhaps the chief thing that gave him his difficult, prickly, controversial, and commanding eminence in the history of his times.

  That this could not have been foreseen in his youth was one of life’s little whimsies, for there was not much then to indicate that he was destined to be United States Senator and a leader of his land. His people had been moderately well-fixed, his father a kindly but mediocre lawyer in Alton, and they had enjoyed a modest middle-class standing in their modest little town.

  None of the family had ever been in public life, none, in fact, had ever done very much of anything; back on both sides the genealogies disclosed some farmers, several handymen, a dry-goods clerk or two, one small storekeeper, a few lawyers, the vice president of a little bank. They were not the kind of people to stick their heads above water; a genteel capacity for being unnoticed was their principal characteristic, and while this had not brought much distinction, it also, of course, had not brought much trouble. His father carried on the pattern of his side of the family, and his mother, a quiet, pleasant little lady who seemed sunnily reconciled to the placid level of their existence in Alton, carried on the pattern of hers. Where this violently controversial son of theirs had come from they had never really been able to understand, though they had puzzled over it many times before going quietly off to their respective rewards. The bafflement was compounded because for quite a while it had seemed that Orrin would fit neatly into the family pattern, build up a quiet law practice of his own, have a quiet marriage, raise a quiet family, live a quiet life, and die a quiet death. In the early part of his life there were few indications of anything else.

  This was so because he had started off, at least outwardly, to be one of the mildest and most timid twigs of a mild and timid tree. It is true that there had been noticeable in him from the first a profound capacity for feeling that jarred rather sharply with the family norm, but he soon learned to conceal it, for a long time most successfully; it was only later that he came to appreciate its public uses and make the most of them.


  His was not a mind to treasure up slights and count them over in later years, but looking back he could remember that there had been a long, hazy period, now mercifully softened by time and distance, when he had not been a very happy boy. This had centered not only around slights and snubs at school but also in some inner fear and insecurity that for quite a while made a good many things an agony for him. Bit by bit as he grew older he managed to dissemble this with increasing skill until finally it seemed to go altogether; but the memory of it lingered on in his being, his own private remembrance of things past, so that sometimes, for instance, if he was out driving or walking and came suddenly upon a group of Boy Scouts, say, bicycling off to an overnight camp, he would know that somewhere among that laughing, confident group there would be one, there would always be at least one, tight and tense and worried and uncomfortable amid all the shouting and the fun. He knew, because he had always been that one. Even now, somewhere deep inside while the crowds roared and the voters turned out by the millions to return him time and again to office, he was still that one, always secretly girding himself to an effort just greater than necessary, to a pitch of endeavor that would permit him to fulfill expectations which were never quite as great as in his own mind he imagined them to be.