Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  Ten minutes later the television cameras outside the headquarters of the Governor of California had picked up Harley entering there; and half an hour later they had shown him again with Orrin’s opponent, the same bland, friendly pose, the same innocuous, good-natured comments. Governor Sheppard’s whereabouts were a mystery, as far as the press could discover he had not called on either candidate, and at four-thirty when Orrin went to bed, there was still no word of him. For two and a half hours the Senator slept as one dead, getting up bleary-eyed at seven to find that the banner headlines were screaming, “HUDSON OFFERED V.P. FOR SWITCH”; “REPORT SHEPPARD TO BE SECRETARY OF STATE IF OHIO BACKS GOVERNOR”; and “MICHIGAN SWINGS AS HUDSON GETS V.P. BID.” Shortly after seven-thirty one of Harley’s chief assistants arrived with a sealed envelope containing this third headline. The first two words had been underlined and above them was scribbled, “This is not true. H.H.”

  So, because he was a gambler and a brave man and in the grip of a great ambition, he took the chance—always resented by delegates, who, after being told in no uncertain terms by their leaders how they are to vote, like to maintain to themselves the fiction that they are exercising independent judgment—of going to the Amphitheater shortly before ten. There was a roar of boos from his opponent’s supporters, swiftly drowned out in a roaring demonstration for him. Instantly apprised of this development in his room in the Stockyards Inn, the Governor of California five minutes later did the same, touching off an equally wild counter-demonstration that for a few moments threatened mayhem all around. By dint of energetic gaveling and a blaring assist from “Dixie” by the band, the chairman managed to restore order after ten minutes, directed the calling of the roll, and the secretary once more began, “A—la—bama!” Two minutes later Arizona yielded to Ohio, and Governor Sheppard blandly cast his entire delegation for the Governor of California. For a howling interval the contest seemed to be over; but abruptly there was an angry stir and fuss over by the California standard, a red-faced delegate grabbed the microphone and began bellowing for recognition. When it came he shouted something furiously unintelligible and profane, and then wound up, more slowly, loud and clear. He and thirty of his fellow delegates, he announced in high dudgeon, were tired of being bossed, and they were going to vote for Senator Knox, and they didn’t give a damn what happened to them. A hall which had produced all the sound human lungs could make found that it could produce even more. Somehow the roll was completed, the secretary and the tally clerks went into a huddle, the room that had been filled with insane noise an instant before became so still only the hurrying, sibilant clatter of a thousand typewriters and the ringing of their little bells in the press section broke the silence. The secretary stepped forward and in a trembling voice once more announced a deadlock. Sound flowed back into the amphitheater, pounded and hammered and beat and roared.

  At once there was a scramble of reporters and photographers toward the Michigan standard, for now, conceivably, there might in the wake of the California rebellion be one of those strange, frightening, mass stampedes that sometimes come when delegates finally do break loose and run wild. Harley Hudson at that moment probably stood closer to being President than at any moment until the present, when he perhaps stood even closer; but Orrin could see that he did not have the personality to make the most of it. Instead he could be observed, aided by a flying wedge of Michigan delegates and police, making his way slowly across the floor toward the podium as everybody stood up and watched in a screaming pandemonium that filled the universe.

  It was then, impelled by some instinct he could not explain, his fighting heart, his stubbornness, his ambition, his fear that Harley would go for the Governor, that the Senator from Illinois in his turn jumped up and started for the platform. Above in her box he caught a fleeting glimpse of Hank waving and shouting, but he couldn’t hear what it was—”No, no, no! Go back!”—and for once in his life it wouldn’t have made any difference what she said anyway. All he could see was Harley Hudson, apparently about to declare for his opponent—for he didn’t really believe the note; Harley wasn’t strong enough to withstand that kind of offer, it wasn’t human not to yield to a bribe of that magnitude—and the sight drove him forward oblivious of all else.

  Halfway along the long ramp leading out over the press section to the podium, he caught up with the Governor of Michigan, grabbed his arm, and swung him about by main force. “What are you going to do?” he shouted into Harley’s startled face, and for several seconds Harley was too stunned to speak. “Tell them”—he managed to shout back presently—”tell them what I—” “I suppose you’ve decided to take it,” Orrin interrupted angrily, and although Harley’s face suddenly became almost comically dismayed, he couldn’t stop, he rushed on.

  “I suppose you’re like all the rest,” he cried, his mouth close to Harley’s ear. “I thought I could count on your integrity, but I guess that wouldn’t fix you up so well, would it?” “But—” Harley protested helplessly. “But—but—” “Go ahead then!” Orrin shouted. “Go ahead then!” And quite suddenly, out of nowhere, coldly shattering and inescapable, there rushed upon him the knowledge that he was being a fool, that he was offending Harley mortally, that he had said one of those things, hasty, horrible, not really meant but gone beyond retrieving, that break a heart, destroy a friendship, ruin a plan, or lose a nomination.

  He could see Harley’s startled, changing expression, he tried to shout an apology, to change it, to retract it, but the noise in the Amphitheater was too overwhelming, he could not surmount it. They stood for a long moment staring at one another, suspended there on the platform above the hysterical sea, locked in a sort of embrace-of-the-eyes in the hissing, rustling, screaming, pounding uproar.

  Then Harley turned away, to go back to the floor, but not before an alert photographer had recorded the occasion for posterity. It was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune half an hour later. “Was A Nomination Lost In This Moment?” the caption asked. Possibly so, for when the fourth ballot started an hour later Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, and California held as before, but Colorado yielded to Michigan and across the hall as in a dream he heard Governor Hudson casting forty-seven votes for his opponent. After that he was out of the world for a while as all his hopes came crashing down.

  For anyone else, to recover from so public a loss of self-control, to erase the memory of an action so hasty and ill-advised, would have been difficult if not completely impossible; but curiously his reputation for impulsiveness came to his rescue now. “Orrin usually comes out ahead when he shoots from the hip,” people said; “so this time he didn’t, so what?” There were a few thoughtful, critical editorials—the Times, in particular, was sternly disapproving concerning the light the episode cast upon his qualifications to be President—but it seemed to be generally felt that the loss of the nomination was both sufficient explanation and sufficient punishment. There was no doubt anywhere that his analysis of the situation, however flamboyant his reaction to it, had been entirely correct: Governor Hudson was about to do exactly what he did, and the Senator’s intervention had only prevented a preliminary announcement that might have made the final stampede to the victorious candidate even more devastating than it was. And it was generally felt, too, that the Senator’s request, toward the middle of the roll call, that the nomination be considered unanimous and by acclamation had shown a fine sportsmanship that largely excused his earlier action. Hardly anybody noticed that just before he made this final gracious gesture a floor messenger had handed him a folded note which he read and then destroyed after a quick glance and a reviving grin up at his wife, who grinned back. “Come on, Abe,” the note said. “Simmer down.”

  On Labor Day, at the well-publicized request of the candidate, he appeared on the same platform with him at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles to open the campaign. His introduction—“Is it all right if I take fifteen minutes?” he had asked dryly, and the Governor had grinned and told him, sure—was a grac
eful and powerful endorsement that brought him a warm ovation and effectively canceled out any lingering reservations left from the convention. He made ten more major speeches before November and appeared again with the candidate on the final television presentation on Election Eve. After the triumphant result he issued a statement of support and returned to the Senate to tend to his knitting. The tenuous peace ended three weeks after election when the President-elect called him in and asked him to run against Bob Munson for Majority Leader; it wasn’t that he had anything against Bob, he said, he just thought a new Administration perhaps could use new blood, and what better means of showing party unity than if Orrin—? The Senator told him tartly that this might suit the President’s purposes, but it would not suit his or those of the Senate, and after a brief and frigid conversation in which their campaign-suppressed hostility broke out anew, he bade him farewell. Aside from an eight-word statement four years later—“I shall vote for the President for re-election,”—he had kept him at arm’s length ever since.

  Not that he considered him, on the whole, such a bad President, and not that he did not often vote in support of his proposals and help to ease their passage through the Senate; but there was a certain characteristic, which the President’s supporters referred to admiringly as “real political know-how” and Orrin referred to as simple duplicity, which made it impossible for any genuine bond to grow between them. He had never told Bob of the President’s suggestion about the leadership, and he doubted he ever would; it was all of a piece with a general pattern he did not like. There was too much cleverness, too much deviousness, too much going around by the back alley just for the sake of going around by the back alley, to suit him. Time and again he had brought the President up short by some blunt exposure of this process; many and many an elaborate scheme had run aground on the rock of his impatient integrity. And increasingly over the years his personal opinion of this had become more and more obvious to the public, and of course the President didn’t appreciate that either. In their many battles he would say the honors had gone about fifty-fifty. He was too direct and honest to harbor the sort of grudge Seab had harbored for so long; that wasn’t his way. Some men lived by being feudists and some lived by saying what they thought and getting it off their chests. He was the latter type, and the President had always known where he stood with him. He could trace it all the way back to White Sulphur Springs, if he liked, and he would damned well know why it had happened, every inch of the way.

  Of the President’s troubles overseas and his conduct of the nation’s foreign policy, the senior Senator from Illinois had also been critical on many occasions, although here he modified his views somewhat because he understood from his own mail and speeches and journeyings over the country what the President was up against. It was a terrible and oftentimes disheartening thing to try to lead to safety a country that sometimes appeared not to care whether it got there or not. Coming to the full scope of their powers and influence after the war, as they both did, it was easy to feel a terrifying drag against efforts to move ahead, a frightening apathy that seemed to run through the entire structure of American life.

  This was the era, domestically, when everything was half done; the era, in foreign affairs, when nothing was done right because nobody seemed to care enough to exercise the foresight and take the pains to see that it was done right. This was the time when the job on the car was always half finished, the suit came back from the cleaners half dirty, the yard work was overpriced and underdone, the bright new gadget broke down a week after you got it home, the prices climbed higher and higher as the quality got less and less, and the old-fashioned rule of a fair bargain for a fair price was indeed old-fashioned, for it never applied to anything. The great Age of the Shoddy came upon America after the war, and Everybody Wants His became the guiding principle for far too many. With it came the Age of the Shrug, the time when it was too hard and too difficult and too bothersome to worry about tomorrow, or even very much about today, when the problems of world leadership were too large and too insistent and too frightening to be grasped and so everybody would rather sigh and shrug and concentrate instead on bigger and bigger cars and shinier and shinier appliances and longer and longer vacations in a sort of helpless blind seeking after Nirvana that soothed them but unfortunately only encouraged their enemies.

  A dry rot had affected America in these recent years, and every sensitive American knew it. Being one of the most sensitive, and in a position where he felt it all as a personal challenge and a personal responsibility, he found it did not encourage restful nights or happy days. “I fear for the country,” he had said in a recent speech in Detroit, and he did, for her friends fell away, her enemies advanced, and in her heart a slow decay was working. She could have withstood anything if she had been strong inside; but somehow, with the war, she had lost her flying speed. It was as though, having been young, she had matured overnight, but not to middle age; instead it seemed at times that she had matured immediately into senescence, so that she was tired, infinitely tired, baffled and confused and either incapable of seeing the path to take or incapable of setting her feet firmly upon it if she did see it. Everywhere, in every phase of her life, there was a slowing down, an acceptance of second-best, an almost hopeless complacence and compliance with all the things that devious people wanted to do, an unwillingness to come to grips with anything unpleasant, a desire to lean back and sleep; and sleep...

  And yet there were great strengths still in the land; she had all her great heritage, all her industrial vigor, her innate decency and good will which not all the vultures who preyed off her in business, in labor, in politics, and press and international affairs, could ever entirely destroy. She needed only to be lifted up again and shown the way, and all the shabby, flabby, drifting years would vanish as though they had never been.

  To see this and to do it, however, were two different things; men of vigor and men of vision fought what often seemed a fruitless and foredoomed battle. He would say for the President, Orrin often thought, that the drift-into-crisis-and-then-do-the-wrong-thing policies of the earlier postwar years had been replaced by a much more astute and careful leadership; but too often it moved no faster than the most vocal elements of the people wanted it to, and they often did not want it to move at all. He had seen the President many times embark upon some course of action that showed imagination and a real desire to settle some long-standing international issue; but it would mean risks, and after a few trial balloons, when he saw, or thought he saw, that the country did not want to take risks, he would let it quietly die. On such occasions Orrin said what he thought; the mocking rejoinder came back, just as it had from Bob Leffingwell in the hearings, “Do you want a war, Senator?” Of course he didn’t want a war; he just wanted an end to this flabby damned mushy nothingness that his country had turned herself into. And he particularly wanted an end to the sort of flabby damned thinking that the nominee and his kind represented—the kind of thinking, growing out of the secret inner knowledge that a given plan of action is of course completely empty and completely futile, which forces those who embark upon it to tell themselves brightly that maybe if the enemy will just be reasonable the world will become paradise overnight and everything will be hunky-dory. It was quite obvious to Senator Knox that the enemy would never be reasonable until the day he could dictate the terms of American surrender, and it was with an almost desperate determination that he returned again and again to the task of trying to make this clear to his countrymen. It was doubly frustrating because it was quite obvious that his countrymen knew it. They knew it, but they didn’t want to admit they knew it, because that would impose upon them the obligation of doing something about it, and that might bother them, and they didn’t want that. In the face of such willful blindness he came as close to a feeling of kinship and friendship for the President as it was possible for him to come; the problem in the Senate and the White House was essentially the same for men who did not wish to see their count
ry cast herself away through sheer default.