by Allen Drury
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.
This was something he had to learn for himself, and it also marked the occasion when he learned for the first time that national politics are a good deal different from state politics. The latter could carry a man up to the national level, particularly when aided by circumstances which he could see now had been largely sheer luck, but after that he was on his own and the going got much rougher. It wasn’t enough, he realized after he had been trounced in several primaries and made a poor fourth-place showing at the Philadelphia convention, to decide that you wanted to be President, announce for it, and go after it; it demanded an approach much subtler than that. Enormous factors went into the selection of a nominee for President, an outgrowth of many conferrings by many people, a process of touching base with big labor, big business, big press, all the conglomeration and amalgam of wealth and influence and interest which, sometimes in united phalanx and sometimes by a sort of informal agreement to move in the same direction, runs the country. The only time a dark horse won, he found, was when the combination wasn’t seeing eye to eye; and sometimes, for the combination was quite clever and had its own way of doing things that was not always apparent at first glance, it turned out later that the combination had seen eye to eye after all—on the dark horse.
To this interlocking directorate of interests he obviously had not yet found the key, and all his first try did, in effect, was to give him a reputation in some quarters that were important for being “too ambitious,” “always running for President,” “too anxious for the White House,” and all the other easy sarcasms that have brought down many a white hope and high ambition. It did not, however, diminish his standing in the Senate or in the eyes of those of his countrymen who valued integrity, for he showed it on every occasion that could possibly destroy his chances.
On one big issue, for instance, an expansion of the draft, the press had asked the top contender, the clever young governor of a big eastern state, where he stood.
“In my opinion,” he said with a winning, candid smile, “this is a matter of such gravity that it has to be considered in relation to all the relevant factors involved. If an examination of these factors should show it to be desirable to take this course, then it would perhaps be best to do so; if on the other hand such examination should show the better wisdom to lie in some other course, then it is possible that the other course would have to be followed. It will be my intention to study all the pertinent factors before determining whether it should be that course, or the other, which should be followed.”
Asked the same question on the same subject Orrin Knox said:
“I’m against it.”
So, for this and other reasons all tying in with the fact that he not only hadn’t contacted the big boys but they also knew very well that they couldn’t manage him if he did get into the White House, he lost the nomination and retreated to the Senate to fight again some other day.
It was not, however, an experience without its rewards, and he learned a great deal from it. Looking back upon his previous successes in the light of this defeat, he felt that in a sense he had just been playing at the game of government in Springfield. For all that he had been governor of one of the Union’s biggest states, for all that he had done great things, made strong enemies and fierce friends, been a mover and a shaker in his own home country, those years, when matched against the realities of national politics, seemed in some way to be only a pale preparation for what he found in Washington. His defeat gave him several things, not least among them the beginnings of a wryly self-perceptive humility. “I think,” he told Bob Munson humorously several months after that first convention, “that I probably let myself get sold a little too much on this ‘out of the haunted prairies comes another Man for America’ myth. It sounded good in the nominating speech, but Orrin ain’t Abe.” This ability to kid himself, which
had heretofore been the more or less exclusive property of his wife, was a great step forward in itself.
Out of it also he acquired a love for and grasp of America that he had never known before. His preconvention campaign in the primaries, taking him back and forth across the country from one end to the other, putting him in touch with all the tides and trends and physical aspects of the great Republic, produced in him a profound emotional growth that he was never to forget. All this abundant, beautiful land, as moving to him in the early dawn of the Mojave Desert as in the high noon of a Michigan forest or a bare promontory in Maine, became something infinitely precious in a way it had never been before. He set his mind even more firmly on the goal of someday being its President; but he knew now that it must be carefully and patiently done, if it was to be done at all.
So for a while, though he did not in any way modify his basic ambition, he went about it in a way that for him was unusually patient. Two years in advance of the next convention he announced that he would not be a candidate; offered his services to the National Committee and at their behest made a total of sixty-three speeches over the country prior to the convention; agreed to place the leading candidate in nomination, and worked for him hard and faithfully up to the November which brought his defeat. That party obligation done, he began to work again for himself, and this time with most encouraging results. He devoted himself for the better part of three years to the assiduous cultivation of the sources of party power; not abandoning in any way his honesty or his candor or his vigorous statement of his views, but engaging rather upon what he thought of as his private educational campaign to make the party understand that these were qualities that could win a man election and make of him a good President once he was elected. He had gone about this carefully and with great thoroughness, for in addition to his tendency to be impatient and shoot from the hip he also possessed the ability to be both patient and thorough when he needed to be.
He had again traveled widely over the country, spoken in a great many places, taken the time to sit down for little private, friendly chats with state chairmen, national committeemen and women, big backers of the party, all the others of the combination who would see him, and many gladly did. Even though some, while professing great and sincere admiration, wound up with the feeling that was always to plague him—“He’s a fine man, but he couldn’t be elected”—he still went into Chicago with firm pledges of 473 votes, a scant 100 from victory. It seemed to him as he and Hank got off the train on that tense, hot, suffocating day and prepared to plunge into the maelstrom of the convention, that he had every right to consider the nomination almost as good as his.
Almost, but not quite; for although they entertained a steady stream of delegates and well-wishers in their lake-front apartment high in the Hilton, and although great crowds swarmed around him with wild excitement as he made his way through the lobbies of the Hilton and the Blackstone, and although the bands played in the corridors and the enthusiastic kids milled around everywhere with his banners and placards and out in the streets the throngs cheered happily as he passed, there was a disturbing sense of the presence of the Governor of California, who also got the bands and the crowds and the placards and the cheers, who also moved like a magnet through the masses of humanity that packed the lobbies and clogged the elevators and caroused and dickered and politicked all day long and all night, too.
This was an opposition he had known since spring he must meet, for their paths had crossed in April at the Governors Conference at White Sulphur Springs, and sparks had flown at once, lending the conference an extra excitement for the public and the press. Orrin as a former governor and former chairman of the Conference, as a leading Senator and a leading candidate for the presidential nomination, had been invited to address the State Banquet that always climaxed the annual gathering of state executives. It was already clear by then that the Governor of California intended to make a try for it too, and the drama of their meeting was heightened still more when the conference chairman, the Governor of West Virginia, suddenly announced that he was ill and turned the gavel over to the Governor of California for the evening. This obvious political move, outcome of an obvious political arrangement, angered both the Senator from Illinois and those governors, and their number was sizable, who looked with favor upon his candidacy. For a tense and well-publicized hour or two he had let it get about that there was some serious question as to whether he would speak at all; when he did it was with an air of elaborate courtesy all around that managed to survive the Governor of California’s graceful and politically pointed fifteen-minute introduction. “In the time remaining,” Orrin began tartly; but he made his speech with a good humor nonetheless, knew it was one of his best, and had them on their feet applauding at the end. Then he and the Governor of California were photographed together and shook hands with a fair show of cordiality. It was a gesture not often repeated later.
Now in Chicago their preliminary battle was fought out for three days in the credentials committee, in the platform committee, in hotel suites and delegation headquarters and on the floor of the Stockyards Amphitheater. His delegation from Indiana was seated, the Governor’s was thrown out, the Governor’s delegation from New Jersey was seated, his was thrown out. Wisconsin caucused and came over to him; Pennsylvania caucused and split, with the Governor picking up almost half; Michigan, with Governor Harley Hudson at its head, and Ohio, with Governor Howard Sheppard in command, began to become more and more important to both headquarters. The convention, in the way of all national conventions, became a world unto itself, bounded by the hotels and the Amphitheater, in which there was no time, no outside world, nothing but the rising contest between two strong men vying for the greatest prize men could hope to achieve. There was no rest, little sleep, no surcease; five thousand increasingly tired delegates, reporters, and politicians—of whom two in particular, and their wives, had forgotten what it was to relax—began to brace themselves for the hour of balloting. At 3 p.m. on the fourth day the nominations were made and the wild demonstrations began, around and around and around the screaming, roaring hall, two hours and twelve minutes for him, two hours and fifteen minutes for the Governor of California; half an hour, until he withdrew, for Bob Munson, an hour for Harley Hudson and another for Howie Sheppard. There was a recess for dinner, eaten so hastily in the midst of last-minute conferences that nobody knew what was being consumed and nobody cared. At 9 p.m. the chairman of the convention banged the gavel and the proudest roll of names Americans know began to boom over the loudspeakers: “A—la—bama!... A—laska!... Ari—zona!” Destiny paused in the stockyards and the world settled down to watch. An hour later the hall went wild again: he and his opponent had finished neck-and-neck, but without a clear majority. Harley and Howie held the key.
There was a recess, then, for half an hour, and during it the great amphitheater buzzed and stirred; conventions are never still, humanity is always in motion, people milled and moved and crowded up and down the aisles, and in the galleries chants kept breaking out, first for him, then for the Governor, once in a while, rather feebly and ending in good-natured laughter, for Governor Hudson or Governor Sheppard. On its suspended platform at the far end of the hall the band played, “California Here I Come,” the University of Illinois “Fight Song,” and now and again “Dixie,” with all its burden of poignancy and memory that do things to the American heart no other music can. The half hour passed, the roll began again. He had tried desperately to see Harley and Howie in the interval, had reached the latter for a noncommittal but fairly encouraging two minutes, but Harley was remaining aloof. When the roll began Harley was on the platform, as though wishing to speak, which caused great excitement in the Amphitheater; but he did not, the roll started; Michigan continued to stand firm for its Governor, Ohio did the same; Wisconsin broke and went to the Governor, but Minnesota came over to Senator Knox. Deadlock again. The chairman held a hasty conference with the managers of the two top contenders, a quick ag
reement was reached, the convention was adjourned until 10 a.m. next day. The supreme effort by both candidates began and lasted through the night.
Shortly after 3 a.m. Harley came to Orrin’s suite, trailed by most of the press, who considered it highly significant that he was coming to see the Senator first. The Senator thought so too, and when they were finally alone he did his best to be persuasive. It was not an hour or a situation in which tired and exhausted and ambitious men could give much time to being circuitous with each other, so he tried to be frank but friendly. “Governor,” he said, “I think I’m going to win, and I’d like to have you with me.” Harley had given him a hesitant smile and Orrin had felt his good will, the kindly, rather bumbling, but essentially good personality. At the moment, however, it was a personality that knew it held strong cards. “I’d like to be with you, Senator,” Harley said, “but I wonder if I should do it for nothing.” “I said when I got off the train that I would make no deals for the nomination,” Orrin replied. “Did you mean it?” Governor Hudson had inquired, rather dryly, and Orrin had given him a sudden smile. “Do you really think I didn’t?” he asked, and he would say for Harley that he had stopped smiling and looked respectful. “I believe you did,” he said, “but under the circumstances—” And his voice had trailed away. “He said the same thing,” Orrin had said with just a trace of sarcasm. “Maybe there’s better hunting there.” Harley Hudson had smiled. “I’m going to see him after I leave here,” he said, “and maybe there is. Still and all, I would like to do the right thing—if I can.” Senator Knox had turned away, for this was a decision he had made months ago, and as far as he knew, none of his delegates had been bought with any pledge of Federal preferment. “I’m sorry,” he said, staring out the window across almost-deserted Lake Shore Drive to the dim emptiness of Lake Michigan beyond. “Certain fundamentals a man has to stand by in this world. I’m standing by that. I hope you’ll be with me tomorrow morning.” The Governor of Michigan had given him a long look and a firm hand shake before they had gone back out to face the blinding flashbulbs and the television cameras and put off with bland and friendly wisecracks the eager questions of the press. “I hope I will be able to,” Harley had said as they opened the door. “I hope everything works out.”
