by Allen Drury
Senator Hanson absorbed this confidence for a moment.
“If that’s the case,” he said, “you are in trouble, Mr. President.”
“Oh, I’ll keep trying,” the President said cheerfully. “In the meantime, if you see him try to smooth him down for me a little, will you? I’d appreciate it.”
“I will,” Powell promised automatically, though it occurred to him a second later that this threw a startling light on the President’s position at this moment, that he should appeal to a junior in the ranks to smooth down the Majority Leader for him. “In any event,” he added, “you can count on me. I am very upset indeed about Brig’s death, but I don’t feel that it should have any effect on judging the nomination. I think we should be able to separate the two when we come to vote.”
“Thank you,” the President said. “I think you should too. I think that shows real statesmanship, which of course is exactly what I expected from you. It’s why I called, in fact. Will you do some work on it for me, then? Talk to some of the others and try to hold them firm?”
“Well—” Powell Hanson said doubtfully.
“It could be a big opportunity for you in the Senate,” the President suggested. “It could lead to many things.”
“I know,” Senator Hanson agreed, though he wasn’t sure he did.
“After all,” the President said, “Bob won’t be Majority Leader forever.”
This so startled Powell that he exclaimed right out loud.
“Oh, I expect he will,” he remarked. “At least in my lifetime. However,” he said, “I do appreciate your confidence, Mr. President. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Maybe you can hold a council of war yourself,” the President proposed. “Call in the press, and give them something to speculate about.”
“A counterirritant, if nothing else,” Powell remarked with just the faintest trace of sarcasm. The President chuckled.
“All you young fellows are too clever for me,” he said. “You see through everything.”
“Yes,” Powell said on an impulse he couldn’t explain except that it sprang from his own decency. “All of us but Brig.”
There was an abrupt silence and for a second he thought he too had ruined himself forever with the President. But the stakes were obviously too high to let an unfortunate truth jeopardize them.
“I can count on you, then?” the President asked calmly, as though the other remark had never been made.
“Yes,” Powell said. “I’ll see who I can round up right away, and we’ll
do some planning.”
“Don’t forget the press conference,” the President said.
“I’ll take care of all aspects,” Senator Hanson promised. “Just one thing, though, Mr. President—don’t call Van Ackerman. He’s finished in this place.”
“I know that,” the President said. “I was just testing to be sure.”
“What sort of reaction are you getting?” the Miami Herald asked the Philadelphia Inquirer as they met shortly before ten in the corridor outside the silent and deserted Caucus Room. The Inquirer thumbed quickly through his notes.
“Jack McLaughlin of Georgia,” he quoted rapidly, “‘I believe in view of the event of last night that it will now be quite difficult to confirm Mr. Leffingwell.’ Clement Johnson of Delaware, ‘While there is no evidence on the record that Mr. Leffingwell was involved in this tragic development, it is inevitable that it will have some effect upon the Senate in passing judgment upon his nomination.’ Courtney Robinson, that old stupe: ‘There has been a grave turn of events in the nomination. I question now whether it can be confirmed.’ Sam Eastwood of Colorado: ‘I was for him. I’m not now.’”
“Well, good for Sam, a man who knows his own mind and isn’t afraid to say so,” the Miami Herald remarked dryly. “That’s pretty much what I’m finding, too. I’ve got Don Merrick, Lacey Pollard, Bill Kanaho and Dick Suvick, if you want them.”
“I do,” the Inquirer said, scribbling busily. “Same thing?”
“Pretty much,” the Miami Herald said. “I expect we’re going to find it pretty general all through the Senate.”
“In spite of—Brig?” the Inquirer asked.
“A lot of them don’t know the story yet,” the Miami Herald said. “We didn’t use it, and apparently nobody else did either. For once our great profession seems to have kept its mouth shut, all over the country.”
“Didn’t anybody anywhere have it this morning?” the Inquirer asked in some disbelief.
“Apparently not,” the Miami Herald said. “Nothing on the wire services, and they would have picked it up if anybody had. We’re really being very decent.”
“That’s nice of us,” the Inquirer observed, “seeing as how we helped to hound him to death....Well, I still think there’s somebody left who’s for Leffingwell.”
“I’ll bet its dwindled to less than fifty overnight,” the Miami Herald estimated. “Papa in the White House had better be talking fast, because he’s got his work cut out for him.”
“I’m still betting on Bob Munson,” the Inquirer said. “He'll pull it through yet, wait and see.”
“He might as well,” the Miami Herald said indifferently. “He hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”
But this judgment, rendered out of the cold distaste for politics which occasionally sweeps the press in the wake of some particularly flagrant development—closely akin to the bitter annoyance which sometimes grips politicians following the latest bit of slanting by the press—was perhaps a little unjust. The Majority Leader was not in the position he was in by free choice, exactly, even though there had been a moment when the choice could have been his to make. Nor was he in a position anyone could envy, as he sat now at his desk, staring absently at his hands as they played idly and pointlessly with a letter opener. Like Justice Davis, he felt that he would carry a heavy burden for a long, long time, although there was a difference in that he was quite sure, too, that his own life was full enough and busy enough so the day would come when the burden would not weigh quite so heavily upon him as it did right now.
There was no minimizing it at the moment, however, any more than there had been in the long night when he had lain awake and reviewed without hope the bitter sequences of events that had ended in the Office Building yesterday afternoon. He had not spared himself in this review, and he was not sparing himself now. He had been grievously, terribly, unforgivably at fault; and finding some way to live with himself again was not his only problem. Knowing the Senate, he knew that perhaps the most serious and difficult challenge of all was the problem of somehow regaining the respect and approval of his colleagues. For his own peace of mind this far transcended anything else; and he was gradually coming to the conclusion that there was probably only one way to do it.
That it must be done he had known as soon as the news flash came over the radio. His instinctive appreciation of what it meant for him personally had been confirmed half an hour later when he had received a call from a voice he barely recognized, it sounded so muffled and heavy with pain. The junior Senator from Iowa, though he obviously could hardly talk from emotion, was straight to the point. “I just wanted you to know,” he said with a slow determination more terrible than abuse, “that you and I aren’t friends any more. You and your God damned Administration that you toady for can go to hell. Maybe you can count on me for a vote now and then, but inside here, where I live, there isn’t anybody home to you, any more, Senator Munson. So just keep your distance and ... leave ... me ... alone.” And he had hung up abruptly, because he obviously couldn’t trust his voice to hold steady any longer. The Majority Leader had braced himself for other calls of a similar nature, and when none had come he had understood that Senator Anderson’s close friends were telling him their reaction in a way more crushing than words could ever have been.
And there was the nomination. There, too, he had known at once what the effect would be, and so he had made no attempt to call anyone and again no one had
called him. His judgment had been confirmed on that when he reached the Capitol an hour ago. He had not planned to see anyone, but as he neared the restaurant he saw a small group of men bursting out, in their center a large, disheveled, disorganized figure, obviously the life of the party. He heard someone say something he didn’t quite catch, gurgled on a burst of laughter, followed by a reference to “—good old Sam!”
How often, he could not help thinking wryly even as he suddenly decided to move forward and intercept the senior Senator from Colorado, had he witnessed just that scene, and in how many places. On the Hill, at the White House, downtown, in the Departments, on the Coast, down South, up North, at four national conventions, and once, very late at night, in a little town near the Continental Divide when he had been traveling with the President and Sam had come aboard to ride through the state. “—And that’s what we think of Sam in Washington!” the President had said and clapped him on the back, and on a roar of laughter the train had pulled out and the little round white dots of faces split by eager grins had receded faster and faster and finally disappeared altogether, swallowed up in the cold night air of the high, lonely plains.
But now Sam had seen him coming, and the amused memories vanished at once as a veiled expression came into his eyes. He was a big fat man with a smile on his mouth, but it wasn’t anywhere else.
“Oh, hi, Bob,” he had said slowly, and the Majority Leader was aware of a wall between them as palpable as though it had been of stone.
“I was just wondering—” He began, and started over lamely. “That is, I was just wondering—”
“I wouldn’t if I were you, Bob,” Senator Eastwood said. “If you mean Leffingwell, the answer is no.”
“But, Sam,” Bob Munson protested, “you told me last week—”
“Last week and last night were two different times, Bob,” Sam told him. “Isn’t that right?” And suddenly he wasn’t smiling any more at all anywhere.
“I suppose so,” Senator Munson said slowly. “I suppose that’s right, Sam.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam Eastwood said, “it is.” And then he saw someone he knew off on the other side of the corridor, and, “Well, hi, there!” he shouted happily, and turning his back on the Majority Leader he was gone, apparently just a big jolly man bursting with friendliness and good will for the world. Only he wasn’t.
And so it was with many of his colleagues now, Senator Munson knew; perhaps enough to defeat Bob Leffingwell. Certainly enough to make his own problem infinitely more difficult if he continued to fight for him.
Finally, there was the business of the Senate to be considered. Some way or other, the thing had to be cleaned up, and soon. It was true there had been the Fed bill and a couple of commercial treaties and fifty or sixty routine private-claims bills disposed of in the past few days, but there was no doubt the Senate was snagged on Bob Leffingwell. Half a dozen important things were piling up, a tax-revision bill, amendments to Taft-Hartley, the space-control bill, amendments to Euratom, and so on. Entirely aside from all the other aspects of it, he thought impatiently, it was time to get moving and get it out of the way; they had wasted enough time on it. His habit of mind as Majority Leader told him not much more could be tolerated. Eulogies today, services and Crystal’s wedding tomorrow, burial on Wednesday and a delegation from the Senate attending so there could be no vote then; that meant that the first day to vote would be Thursday. Well, then, he would try to get a vote Thursday and finish it one way or the other. If, he caught himself short, it was still his decision to make by Thursday. The one he was in process of making right now might interfere, providing he went through with it. He was increasingly sure he would.
Aside from Lafe, only Dolly had called last night, to invite him to come over, but he had said with thanks that he would stay where he was. “You’re all right?” she had demanded anxiously, and he had said, “Yes, as much as possible under the circumstances. I won’t pretend I’m happy.” This had made her start crying again, for him, and for Brig, and for all of them. But he had remained right where he was, ordering dinner from room service, tossing restlessly most of the night, eating again in his room in the morning and then going down a back elevator to catch a cab alone and go to the Hill. He didn’t want to see anyone for a while yet. Sam Eastwood had been unexpected, and he had only forced a conversation with him because he wanted to prove to himself that his fears and assumptions about the effect on the nomination were correct.
So, now what? He didn’t know, exactly. He had refused a call from the President at the hotel, and ten minutes after he reached the office Mary had informed him of another. “Tell him I’m not here,” he said sharply, and she had. But there would be another call in a while, he supposed, and the President would keep it up until he answered. He might as well, next time, though he did not know right now whether he could manage to be civil or not. He would feel a lot better, he thought, if Orrin were the one trying to reach him; but Orrin, he knew, was busy on purposes of his own, and he knew they boded no good for Robert A. Leffingwell. At the moment he found it hard to care.
“I think something is going on in Orrin Knox’s office,” AP said, turning away from a phone in the press gallery. “They’re awfully coy about his whereabouts over there.”
“I haven’t been able to raise Tom August,” UPI offered.
“And I can’t find Seab or Warren Strickland,” The Wall Street Journal remarked.
“I don’t suppose anybody would be in the mood for a stroll to the Office Building?” AP inquired.
“I’m with you,” the Times said, throwing down a copy of his own paper. “I keep hoping that some morning I’m going to find enough time to read this thing, but it obviously isn’t going to be today.”
“It’ll keep,” The Wall Street Journal said. “It’s history.”
“You think you’re kidding,” the Times said with a grin, “but we know you’re not.”
And collecting the Birmingham News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Paris Soir, who all happened to be in the gallery at the moment, they headed for the elevators and, they hoped, the news.
This was one of the times, Beth thought as she moved quietly about the big old house in Spring Valley, when she wondered how she had ever gotten mixed up in politics. But even if she hadn’t, she decided, things probably wouldn’t have been so very different. Sooner or later these moments came; it seemed to fall to men to create disasters and to women to come around and mop up after; and even in some other context there might well be a household of unhappy people depending upon her to keep things going while they gradually untangled themselves from the web of sorrow and despair in which they had become entrapped.
Politics, she had decided long ago, was neither as good nor as evil as people said; it was somewhere in between, with aspects of both, and on occasion one or the other predominated as it had now. Up to now the evil had been in control, but this, she knew, marked the turning point—a terrible turning point, but a turning point which for that very reason could not be evaded. From this point forward the good guys were going to triumph over the bad guys because in the curious development of the ever-changing American story there came a time when they always had to, and this was it. And leading the posse as it thundered toward the pass would be the volatile, stubborn, cantankerous, brusquely tender-hearted man she had married, his emotions rubbed raw, his feelings completely engaged, his whole being devoted with a grim single-mindedness to his purpose.
Thinking upon the number of times she had seen this happen, she could not refrain from a smile in which amusement and affection were inextricably mixed. From college right on through, she had always found it the most touching characteristic of the many she had discovered in her husband, and she had seen it take him from a modest beginning in the law straight to the top of his country without a pause along the way. The pauses had come after he had reached the top, when he had tried to go even higher and been stopped by factors composed about equally of organized political oppositi
on and his own prickly character. It had been one of her own personal triumphs, which she never mentioned to anyone but which gave her much quiet satisfaction, that she had gradually over the years brought him to understand his own responsibility in this. And she had done it without conflict or tenseness or nagging—the note she had sent him at the convention had been only one of many such quietly humorous summons to sensibility that she had sounded—and without in any way jeopardizing their deep understanding and partnership. Indeed it had only become stronger all the time, so that she could not remember a period when their relationship had not been undergoing a process of growth. “I suppose that’s a sign of lots of friends, when you have three nicknames,” a wistful boy who didn’t then have too many friends had remarked soon after they met; and at that moment, though he didn’t know it at the time, Elizabeth Henry had decided irrevocably that helping him was what she wanted in life. And so she had, in the early years, the Springfield years, the Washington years, in all the triumphs and defeats of a gallant and controversial heart, knowing that because of her support the defeats were far less devastating than they might have been, and that because she was part of them the triumphs meant far more to him than they ever could have otherwise. “Orrin and Beth,” the sign had said, and it had unknowingly paid tribute to far more than a shrewdly powerful political team; it had also paid tribute to a marriage as near perfect as any she knew.
All of it, she felt now as she went softly about the house while the Andersons still slept and the day’s sorrow had not been fully taken up again to be carried until sleep could come once more, had in a sense been preparation for this supreme test arising out of the Leffingwell nomination. So much hung upon it: what would happen to the nominee himself, in the first instance; what would happen to the country, in the second; above all, from her standpoint, what would happen to her husband’s future and to hopes and plans which she knew were temporarily dormant but still very much alive.
