Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  In the hall on his way to the Capitol he ran into Roy Mulholland of Michigan, and the Majority Leader’s colleague said without preliminaries, “Count me in, Orrin. Let me know what I can do,” which he appreciated. He also took occasion to stop by the office of his own colleague, Nelson Lloyd, a quiet little auto dealer who had been appointed Senator from Illinois to fill out an unexpired term. Nelson went around in perpetual awe of the Senate and the vigorous senior Senator who so monumentally overshadowed him. “I assume you’re with me,” Senator Knox said, and it was virtually an order. “Oh, yes, Orrin,” Senator Lloyd said fervently, “I’m with you.”

  On the subway car going over, he rode with George Keating of Nebraska, already in his customary midmorning state of well-oiled exuberance; Grady T. Lincoln of Massachusetts, enacting his customary Cautious Yankee, ay-yah, ay-yah, ay-yah; the two New Yorkers, Taylor Ryan and Irving Steinman, and Luis Valdez of New Mexico. Of these only Irv Steinman refused to join in the growing chorus of adherence; and even he, Orrin thought, showed some signs of weakening in their brief private chat on the way to the elevator. “I hope this isn’t your final position,” the senior Senator from Illinois had said, and the senior Senator from New York had given him a characteristic bland, noncommittal, it’s-your-move-Mister glance. “A lot can happen by tomorrow night,” he said; “we'll see how it shapes up by then.” “By then, Irv,” Senator Knox said quickly, “I don’t think one vote more or less will matter one little damn to me.” “Said with characteristic modesty,” Senator Steinman said with a laugh, clapping him on the back. “In the State of New York, however, it may matter to me. That is what I shall have to determine in my own mind.”

  For the most part, however, he found as he came on the floor and joined in the routine of listening to Carney’s prayer—which backslid a little into a renewed type of arch admonition to the Senate, he just couldn’t seem to resist the importance of the occasion—it all appeared to be quite simple. As the morning hour dragged on and various Senators put editorials, clippings, and contributions from constituents into the Record—“Oh, help dear America in her hour of need/We are blessed with our great Senator Hugh B. Root indeed,” began one characteristic entry from New Mexico, modestly offered by the Senator of the same name—there was a steady procession of Senators to his desk. He was the logical man to fall heir to the Majority Leader’s abandoned pledges, and by 1 p.m. when the routine business was at last concluded he could count a solid total of forty-seven votes, four votes short of the fifty-one vote majority necessary in the one hundred-man Senate. This was a gain of fourteen over the thirty-three votes in opposition noted in Bob’s calculations as of Monday, and he had no doubt at all that he could pick up the other four. What he wanted to do, of course, was pick up many more than that and make it a really devastating repudiation of the President. He had no doubts on that score either, for following Senator Munson’s withdrawal from the fray the supporters of the nominee appeared to have pretty well lost heart. Powell was much too junior to rally the necessary strength, Arly was finding himself trapped in his own reputation for erratic cussedness, and elsewhere on the floor his own lieutenants, Seab and Lafe and Warren Strickland chief among them, were at work with an organized zeal that was picking up adherents hourly. Years of experience in the Senate told him that he was in good shape, and it was quite obvious when Tom August arose to start the debate that he knew it, too.

  Perhaps because of this, the chairman’s remarks were nervous, hurried, and very brief. He presented the nominee’s biography and record of public service, he described the parliamentary situation under which the committee had been constrained to bring in an unfavorable recommendation, he stressed the fact that half the committee favored confirmation, he urged the Senate to follow suit, and then, after looking about vaguely as though he expected to be violently challenged, he sat down. From his seat beside the Majority Leader a tousled old figure in a crumpled gray suit rose slowly to his feet and said, “Mister—President.”

  “The senior Senator from South Carolina,” Harley Hudson said, and all across the crowded floor and the galleries filled to overflowing there was a stir of anticipation. Seab surveyed the chamber with a look of sleepy amusement and then with an air of sardonic courtliness be turned and bowed gravely to Senator August, who looked upset and responded with an uneasy nod.

  “Mister—President,” Senator Cooley said. “Now, Mr. President, that was a mighty fine statement just made by the distinguished chairman of the great Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. President. Yes, sir, it was filled with his typical wisdom, his typical candor on all subjects, his typical determination to e-lu-ci-date. If there ever was an e-lu-ci-datin’ man, Mr. President, it is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Then why, Mr. President,” he roared suddenly, raising his left arm high above his head and crashing it down on the desk in his typical gesture, “does he not tell the Senate the truth about this evil man who wishes to be Secretary of State? Why does he not tell the Senate all the truth about this man? Why are we denied a total e-lu-ci-dation, Mr. President?”

  “Mr. President,” Tom August said nervously, “will the distinguished Senator yield?”

  “Oh, pshaw, Mr. President,” Seab said with a comfortable chuckle. “Now the Senator has been here long enough to know I’m not asking these questions of him, Mr. President. I’m asking them of myself,” he said, as the official reporters dutifully noted [Laughter] in the Record. “And,” he said with a menacing softness, “I intend to answer them, Mr. President. Yes, sir, I surely intend to answer them. I shall tell you first,” he went on with the same gentle menace, “about a man named James Morton.”

  It was then almost one-thirty, Senator Knox noted, Seab was well-launched and it would probably be a couple of hours before he finished. It seemed a good time to leave. He paused at Warren Strickland’s desk and said, loud enough for Bob to hear, “I’m going to 1600, be back soon. Take care of things.” They nodded and he started out. At the door he met Lafe just as he turned away from a confidential chat with Bessie Adams of Kansas. “I’m going to the White House,” he said, and the junior Senator from Iowa grinned. “Give him hell,” he said. “We’ll mind the store.”

  “Thanks,” Senator Knox said. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  Just outside the door he stopped briefly once more to use the doorkeeper’s phone. “I’ve been summoned,” he said. “Good luck,” his wife said. “Wish him luck,” he said grimly. “He’s the one who needs it now.” She started to protest and then dropped it. There were moments when her husband was on his own, and she recognized from long experience that this was one of them.

  Yet for all that he departed the Senate with such a cavalier air of confidence, it was in a brown study that he caught a cab and sat through the ten-minute run to the East Gate. Many, many things were going through his mind; many things. Seven years—more than seven, eight or nine, actually—of contention and mutual mistrust were about to culminate in this confrontation which he knew instinctively would be final. He never intended to talk to the President again. The only reason he had agreed to now was that appeal to the country’s interests, and the knowledge that he was the only man left for the President to treat with. There was literally no one else for him to approach. The Majority Leader had removed himself, no one else had the stature; Senator Knox at this moment stood supreme in the Senate, and if there was any hope of an accommodation left for the President in the matter of Bob Leffingwell, it lay between these two men who had fought one another so long and so bitterly and always, basically, over so great a prize as the office which was held by the one and desired so strongly by the other.

  Thinking of this, with all its aspects and ramifications, so deep, so serious, so full of emotion and at the same time so interlaced with ironies only the two of them could appreciate, he arrived at the East Gate and was shown in quickly and taken down the long glassed-in corridor past the Rose Garden to the President’s office. But in Washington few sparrows, let alone a
United States Senator of his prominence, fall without being noticed by the press, and by sheer happenstance the AP White House man was returning from a leisurely luncheon at the Press Club just as Orrin alighted from his cab. Surprised and excited, he went at once to the press room and sounded the tocsin. Within seconds the wire services had sent out a note on the wire: “Correspondents: Senator Knox has just arrived secretly to see the President. We are watching.” This immediately stirred up the Press Club bar, the congressional press galleries, and all the newspaper bureaus in town. Within minutes there was a sudden flurry of cabs arriving at the West Gate to discharge hurrying reporters. The press secretary was annoyed but helpless. “God damn it, you guys,” he said in response to their clamorings, “I don’t know anything.” “Do you intend to find out?” somebody asked. “I may or I may not,” he said coldly in his friendly way. “We’ll wait,” the press promised coldly in theirs. The big lobby with the brown-leather sofas and the round bull-legged mahogany table in the center filled up with gossiping, smoking, arguing reporters. Half an hour later a late edition of the Washington Daily News told the town what was going on in its customary carefree fashion:

  AT THE SUMMIT!

  THE BOSS (1600 PA.) CALLS IN THE BOSS (U.S.S.)

  IN LAST-DITCH MOVE TO SAVE LEFFINGWELL.

  Inside, they knew nothing of this. The hallways were deserted except for a clerk or two, there seemed to be only the minimum of guards about, and when he was shown into the oval office with its thick carpet, its pale green walls, and its flat surfaces cluttered with the hodgepodge of trinkets most Presidents seem to collect, he had not as far as he knew been seen by anyone of any importance. He had half expected he would be made to wait, but the President was cleverer than that. He was there, and as the door closed behind the Senator he arose and stepped forward around his desk with hand outstretched. He looked, Senator Knox thought, pale and tired and not at all well.

  “Orrin,” he said, “it’s been a long time.”

  “It has,” Senator Knox agreed calmly. His host waved him to a chair. “Don’t stand on ceremony,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable and we’ll talk.”

  “Thank you,” Orrin said. “How are you feeling, Mr. President?”

  The President gave him a quick glance from eyes that looked bloodshot and poorly rested.

  “Not too well,” he admitted.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the Senator said. The President smiled.

  “Are you?” he asked.

  “I am now,” Orrin said. “I wouldn’t have been on Sunday.”

  “Yes,” the President said gravely. “Well, I want you to know that nothing turned out the way I wanted it to. No one regrets more than I what happened. That’s often the way, though, have you noticed? You set men and events in motion and before you know it they’ve gotten out of hand and things you never contemplated have occurred.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t try to play God so often,” Senator Knox suggested bluntly. The President started to look angry, then shrugged and let it pass.

  “You can’t just sit still, in this office,” he said. “You’ve got to do something. Surely you can appreciate that, if no one else can.”

  Senator Knox nodded. “I do,” he said.

  “Good,” the President said. “Incidentally,” he said with more animation, “I want to congratulate you on one thing, and that’s knocking COMFORT in the head. That thing was getting to be a real menace and I didn’t quite know how to handle it, myself. I’m certainly glad you did.”

  “Oh?” Orrin said. “How was that?” The President looked surprised.

  “Why, getting Fred Van Ackerman,” he said. “That knocked the props right out from under them. They were building him up to be their front man and he was all set to go—and then you came along and put a stop to it with that censure motion. I think it was a fine service to the country.”

  Senator Knox laughed without much amusement.

  “I didn’t think of that at all,” he said. “My only interest was in avenging Brig and ridding the Senate of a demagogic nuisance.”

  The President gave him a whimsical smile, half-rueful, half-affectionate.

  “Orrin, Orrin!” he exclaimed. “Why will you never foresee the consequences of your actions and make the most of them?”

  Senator Knox, with an angry look, rejected the whimsy, the rue, and the affection.

  “Well,” he said tartly, “I am as I am. Maybe I don’t calculate the things I do in some slick and clever fashion the way you do, but at least I do them honestly and because that’s how I feel, without worrying how they’ll come out. That’s exactly the difference between you and me and it always has been, illustrated right here in this conversation. I for one am damned glad there is a difference, I can tell you that. Damned glad!”

  And for a long moment he and the President surveyed one another in extreme annoyance.

  “Well,” the President said at length, “I suppose we’ll have to leave it to the history books to record which of us was right.”

  “As long as they record which of us won this fight,” Senator Knox said crisply, “I don’t give a damn what else they record.”

  “You think you have, don’t you?” the President asked.

  “Yes,” Orrin snapped. “Don’t you?”

  “As of this moment,” the President said slowly, “perhaps. Perhaps. If you persist in it.”

  “I see no reason why I shouldn’t,” Orrin said shortly. “But,” he added with a note of sarcasm, “I suppose that’s why I’m here. To be shown a reason.”

  “I would hope so,” the President said quietly. He turned away for a moment and stared out at the Rose Garden glistening greenly in the spring. “How can I best explain it you?” he asked rhetorically, and his visitor brought him off it promptly.

  “Well,” he said, “don’t give me the dramatic tale of how hard it is to be President, because I know how hard it is to be President.” He gave an ironic laugh. “I ought to,” he said. “I’ve thought about it enough.”

  The President laughed too and swung back quickly.

  “Well, then,” he said, “if we can’t put it on a basis of friendship, maybe we can put it on a basis of being honest about ourselves and about each other and about this office you wanted and I won. How’s that?”

  “I’m willing,” Senator Knox said matter-of-factly.

  “All right,” the President said slowly, and suddenly, in a quite unguarded way, he put up a right hand that trembled very noticeably and rubbed it across his eyes with a hard, digging motion as though he might thus drive out the devils of foreign pressure and domestic difficulty that tormented him. “I suppose you wonder,” he said, “why I have let myself get committed to Bob Leffingwell to the point where I can’t afford to back out?”

  “I can understand it,” the Senator said. “These things come on step by step. I think you’ve had plenty of opportunities when you could have backed out, however. You didn’t take them and,” he said coldly, “that’s your worry.”

  “Well,” his host said, “it began as a genuine judgment that this man, an excellent and experienced public servant with a broad view of world problems—incidentally,” he said, picking up a copy from his desk, “have you seen his book?”

  “I intend to quote from it extensively before the debate is over,” Orrin assured him.

  “An excellent and experienced public servant,” the President went on calmly, “was far and away the most qualified man, in my opinion, to name to the post about to be left vacant by the Secretary’s resignation.”

  “Why are you forcing Howie out?” Senator Knox asked curiously. “Everybody knows he isn’t sick, and he seems to have done a pretty good job for you.”

  “Well,” the President said, “I’m not saying anything to derogate Howie. He’s done a good job and I have no complaints as far as it goes. It’s just that he’s associated a little too much with inflexibility, that maybe we need someone younger and more forceful and dynamic,
in view of what faces us. Particularly now.” He paused, considered something, reached a decision.

  “They probably are on the moon, you know,” he said.

  “Oh?” Orrin said.

  “Yes,” the President said. “If everything went right for them, we think they probably landed sometime Saturday. I expect this thing tomorrow will be some sort of broadcast.”

  “From there?” Senator Knox asked.

  “From there,” the President said.

  “Why in the hell,” Senator Knox demanded in sheer exasperation, “didn’t we get there first? Time after time after time after time. What is the matter with us, anyway?”

  “I know,” the President said, and sighed. “We’re creatures of plan, you see. We always talk about how adaptable we are and how rigid they are, but scientifically we’re always the ones who get trapped in our own timetables. Our expedition was planned to go tomorrow morning, so that’s when it’s going to go, in spite of the fact that I gave the Pentagon an absolute order Thursday morning that it was to go not later than Thursday night. You can’t imagine all the sound reasons I’ve been given why it wasn’t possible. Anyway, it goes tomorrow, and if we’re lucky, as there’s every reason to think we will be, it should arrive in roughly three days and we’ll have our own broadcast.”

  “But not before we’ve taken another hell of a licking in the eyes of the world,” Orrin said bitterly.

  “Not before we’ve taken another hell of a licking in the eyes of the world,” the President agreed gravely. Then he said with a sudden sharp defensiveness. “How do you think I feel about it? You feel bad, but how do you think I feel?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Senator Knox said, more sympathetically. “Well, what do we do then, go to war with them up there?”