The Senator and the Priest

by Andrew M. Greeley

  (He holds up the book)

  MORAN: That would be what the Greeks call hubris, Mr. Russell, intolerable pride. I merely wanted to test a theory that one might win an election in my state without attack ads.

  RUSSELL: It looks like you proved your theory. And you didn’t have a campaign fund?

  MORAN: We did, but I didn’t ask anyone for money and I don’t know who the major contributors were, if there were any such.

  RUSSELL: An election on the cheap. How much money did your committee raise?

  MORAN: I’d rather use the word “collect.” One of the rules I made for myself was that I did not want to know how much. I’d guess it was under five million dollars.

  RUSSELL: How much do senatorial campaigns normally cost in Illinois?

  MORAN: I have been told upwards of thirty million, ninety percent for television. I hate to cheat the networks out of revenue …

  RUSSELL: You’re not busy raising money for your re-election bid?

  MORAN: If I run again—and I’m not at all sure that I will—I’ll follow the same rules. I’ll add a new one: The campaign begins on Labor Day. Last year, since people didn’t know me, we had to start in January. If there is an “again,” never again. The never-ending campaign provides great material for you media folk which I don’t begrudge you, but I don’t want to pay for it. Besides I think people grow bored with it and politicians.

  RUSSELL: Senator, do you think there will be many candidates who will be willing to imitate your asceticism?

  MORAN: All I wanted to do was show that one could win despite making such a pledge. If someone wants to win badly and has the money available, it would be hard for him to give up negative campaigning. Should both major candidates agree to a truce before the campaign, then it might work.

  RUSSELL: And in a presidential campaign?

  MORAN: A presidential campaign in which both candidates would forswear attack ads! No attacks on each other’s virtue, intelligence, character, or marital and military history? Mr. Russell, that would be almost un-American … Did you know that there was once a blessed time in our country’s history when it was customary for a President not to campaign? Mr. Lincoln sat on his front porch in Springfield and never once budged.

  RUSSELL: Senator, you’d put me out of a job … So you were subject to many attack ads? Didn’t you ever want to fight back?

  MORAN: Certainly I did. With the help of God, the saints and the angels, I resisted the temptation.

  RUSSELL: You’re saying that the thirty million dollars which your opponent spent was a waste of money?

  MORAN: I don’t know how much he spent. All I would say is that he didn’t win the election.

  RUSSELL: He claimed that he did and that you and the Cook County machine stole it.

  MORAN: And he’s still fighting in the courts. Besides, the election was won by my twenty-thousand-vote margin in his Republican bailiwick DuPage County.

  RUSSELL: I hear that he’s already running against you six years from now.

  MORAN: New attack ads are appearing every week.

  RUSSELL: Where does he get his money?

  MORAN: I never asked him.

  RUSSELL: Some say there’s Oklahoma oil money behind him.

  MORAN: I hear that too but I have no way of knowing whether it’s true.

  RUSSELL: In this book you quote the late Mayor Daley as saying that attack ads hurt the kids of a candidate. Do you believe that?

  MORAN: Sure. What does a child think when she hears every day that her father is an immature, inexperienced demagogue? And the other children get on her at school about it. Yah, yah, your Daddy’s a demagogue. Or worse still he is an immature, inexperienced, LIBERAL demagogue?

  RUSSELL: Did your children react that way?

  MORAN: My wife and kids are pretty tough. I don’t think many people harassed them twice. But it’s still not right.

  RUSSELL: And there was an assassination attempt?

  MORAN: Two of them.

  RUSSELL: Your car and home were blown up and a rifle bullet barely missed you?

  MORAN: I began to think I was running for office in Lebanon.

  RUSSELL: I hear that you escaped because one of your lovely daughters is a psychic.

  MORAN: Oh, I wouldn’t believe that, Jim. I’d rather think it was my guardian angel. My mother-in-law says there’s a tradition of witches in her family, every other generation. Good witches of the West Side, of course.

  RUSSELL: And the insurance company wouldn’t pay for the house?

  MORAN: Anyone who has ever tried to collect an insurance claim knows how hard that is. However, they paid this one finally.

  RUSSELL: Before or after you were elected?

  MORAN: What do you think, Jim?

  RUSSELL: You’re in trouble with the Catholic Church aren’t you, because of your toleration of abortion?

  MORAN: Not in my own Archdiocese of Chicago. A bishop downstate issued a pastoral letter on the Sunday before the election. We carried his county just the same.

  RUSSELL: Weren’t you denied Holy Communion here in Washington?

  MORAN: My whole family. We went over to the Jesuits and are doing fine now … Let me say something about that, Jim. The leaders of the Church lost all their clout with their people because of the pedophile scandal. Now they’re trying to win back some of their authority by going after politicians. That’s self-destructive too because they’re making the Catholic Church look like a de facto wing of the Republican party. They should return to their old policy of leaving to us moral decisions made in the complexity of the American political system about which they know little and care less. They want us to impose Catholic teaching on the whole country, which we can’t do. They are making the Church look as bad as some of the bigots say it is.

  RUSSELL: Do you expect to hear from your brother the priest because of that statement?

  MORAN: Perhaps.

  RUSSELL: When you run for the presidency will you test your theories in that race?

  MORAN: I believe that a President or a Presidential candidate demeans himself and the Office when he permits attack ads. I have no intention to run for it, by the way …

  RUSSELL: Thank you, Senator … Senator Thomas Patrick Moran of Illinois, one of the most interesting new faces in American politics.

  My family and my three top aides were waiting for us in the Green Room.

  “We’ll never doubt you again, Senator,” Chris said.

  “You were great,” Manny added.

  “You need a stiff glass of Bushmill’s,” my wife said as she kissed me.

  My daughters, unpredictable as always, rushed after Jim Russell to collect his autograph.

  “I’m the Good Witch, Mr. Russell,” Maran announced. “Sometimes I smell bad things. Only not all the time.”

  “Certainly not in this studio!” he laughed.

  “Totally, no way!”

  A genial representative of the insurance industry stopped by my office on Monday morning. “You ought to talk to him, Senator,” Manny said. “You don’t want them to say you won’t talk to them.”

  “You’re the boss,” I said reluctantly.

  I put on my own genial face and shook hands with the man, waved him to the chair, and sat next to him on the couch. He opened his briefcase and placed three copies of my book on the coffee table.

  “Would you mind signing one for my mother and one for my mother-in-law? And the third one for myself and my wife?”

  A bit obvious. However, I asked for the names of the three women.

  “Is there anything the insurance industry can do to make peace with you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “We did straighten out the problem about your house?”

  “As I said yesterday, only after I was elected. That was a bit obvious.”

  “An overzealous adjuster, I’m afraid.”

  “If an adjuster wasn’t overzealous, he wouldn’t be an adjuster for very long.”

  “That�
��s a little harsh, isn’t it?”

  “People cheat on you a lot, I’m sure. But they cheat on you because they think you cheat on them. Which you do of course. The first thought of your industry when you see a claim is to calculate a technicality which will make it possible for you to deny liability or curtail the payment. Every dollar taken from a customer is one more dollar for your profits. My own broker said that insurance companies are whores.”

  He gulped.

  “I hope you’re not planning to say that on television.”

  “Only because my media people wouldn’t let me.”

  “What would we need to placate you?”

  “No small print. In big letters at the top of a homeowner’s policy, ‘WATERS DRIVEN BY HURRICANE WINDS ARE FLOODS NOT STORMS. WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR FLOODS.’”

  “I take your point.”

  “Then set up a system of ombudsmen to whom your clients can apply when they know they’ve been cheated but not by enough to justify hiring a lawyer. The ombudsmen would lean over backwards to defend equity, not the letter of the contract.”

  “Risky … We might lose a lot of money.”

  “Only if your adjusters didn’t know that too many awards from the ombudsman would affect their promotions. I’m talking about small claims. The big ones would still have to go to court. Our house wasn’t a big claim. Your adjuster was engaging in legerdemain. If we hired a lawyer, the adjuster would have settled for something less than our damages so we wouldn’t have to go through the motions of getting ready for a suit—an offer which would cost us something to which we had the right, but not as much as a lawyer. From where I come from that might be good law but bad morality.”

  He nodded agreement.

  “I know that there’s nothing we have that you want, Senator. No rides on the Potomac for important people from Illinois. No weekends at golf resorts, no vacations in Spain … I won’t even ask if there’s anything we might do for you. But could we ask you to meet with some of our senior executives for an informal, off-the-record brainstorming session on these matters? These wouldn’t be CEOs but a somewhat younger generation who are increasingly worried about our public image. They may be hostile, but I’m sure you can take care of yourself. Now the stipend …”

  “Should be made to Catholic Relief Services.”

  There would be no payoff for me in such a seminar. It would take time and effort and even at this stage of my Senate career I realized that I had very little of either and I was already getting tired. Nor would I collect any votes if I should run for reelection. Why do it?

  My brother used to tell me that a priest never turned down an opportunity to teach. OK, I wasn’t a priest. Maybe deviant United States Senators had a similar obligation. That evening my wife insisted, “Of COURSE, you do! I’m proud of you.”

  That made if official.

  Since I knew he would call before the morning was over, I thought about my brother. He was certainly a hardworking, zealous priest, a bit like the fire marshal of the Clementine Order—racing around the world at breakneck speed to put out the fires. He had become a troubleshooter and apparently a satisfactory one or they would have taken his fire marshal’s baton away from him. When he was a recently ordained priest, I was deeply impressed by his piety and zeal. His opposition to my marriage startled me. I didn’t think he was serious. He couldn’t possibly be serious. Mary Margaret was such a wonderful woman … But he was and I still don’t know why. It could not have been his displeasure at her father’s clearly modest pictures of women. Yet he didn’t seem to like the O’Malleys—his odd behavior at the rehearsal and then at the wedding dinner astonished me. To this day I can’t get over the embarrassment. Somehow, I thought, his zeal for traditional family standards and his dislike for Mary Margaret combined into an obsession. I’m not sure even now that he was sexually attracted to her, as she thinks, but it is certainly a possibility.

  Something was wrong with him, however. It broke my heart. Any possibility of friendship between us or between him and my family had died somewhere along the dusty road which somehow we had traveled in the opposite direction.

  “I know you don’t care about your reputation or your family’s reputation,” he began with me in that morning’s phone call, “but I’d like to think you care about the Church and care just a little about me.”

  “Oh,” I said my body tightening, as it always had when he was bawling me out in the old days. I had done something wrong and it was his solemn duty to correct me.

  “Your tirade on TV yesterday was an absolute disgrace, a vile play for media approval. Is that man Russell a Catholic?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Did he have to tell the whole world you are barred from the Eucharist?”

  “I’m only barred in one church here in the District.”

  “And then you let him bring me into the conversation!”

  “How was I supposed to stop him?”

  “I’ve already had a phone call from the Vatican … to say nothing of bishops in this country and my own brothers in the Order of St. Clement!”

  Mary Margaret was right, he was narcissistic. He had become the center of my problem.

  “What did the Roman say?”

  “He asked me if I thought you were in the state of grace! That’s what happens when you condemn the whole hierarchy!”

  I guess I had done that.

  “And you told him?”

  “I told him that I hope you made an act of perfect contrition every night before you went to bed.”

  He must know that it wouldn’t do any good unless I was serious about changing my mind about bishops and politics.

  I was now sick to my stomach and would be for the rest of the day.

  “I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” I muttered.

  “I wonder how long this will continue.”

  “Maybe until the people who tried to kill me last year are successful.”

  “You are such a disappointment to me, Tommy. I can’t figure out where I went wrong or how I failed you.”

  He hung up. I rushed to the little bathroom in my office and vomited.

  After I had told Marymarg about my visit with the insurance lobbyist, I did not tell her about the call from Tony. She had probably guessed anyway.

  CHAPTER 21

  “WE HAVE the votes for your amendment,” Dermot Kane told me a couple of weeks later. “The other side doesn’t like it, but they need a lot of our votes to pass the legislation. It’s top priority at the White House. We have them over the barrel for the moment.”

  “Then in the conference committee we can stonewall the delegates from the House.”

  “You’re a quick study, Senator.”

  “An exhausted study,” I said.

  “You’ll learn to pace yourself.”

  “I hope so.”

  I seemed to be stumbling around in a fog every day. My sleep was untroubled, except for dreams about blood pouring from Johnny Dale’s chest. There was so much to do every day, even those days like Monday and Friday when most of my colleagues were home fund-raising.

  “The leader wants you to speak for the amendment. Two minutes maybe. Four-thirty if we’re lucky.”

  “Of course.”

  “His LA tells me that the leader was very pleased with your questions at the Armed Forces hearing.”

  “The Chairman wasn’t.”

  “We shouldn’t worry too much about him.”

  That was about as close as a good, professional LA would go in criticizing one Senator to another, a relic of the past when the Senate was a more gentlemanly place. Younger LAs were less reverent.

  Dermot was Montana Irish, a tall, lanky Plainsman with a strong touch of the Mick mixed in.

  “I’m glad to hear that. My instincts said we shouldn’t.”

  “Not that you would have behaved differently.”

  “Not on that Admiral.”

  Voting on the Immigrant Reform Bill would be late on Thursday evening. Thursd
ay was the day when the Senate tried to clean up all its business for the week before many of the members dashed to National Airport to fly back to their constituencies, their fat cats, and perhaps their families. Thursday was the one day of the week when voting on legislation was likely to occur, the one day during which the real business of the Senate transpired. Not that, I had discovered to my dismay, the other days were not horrendously busy.

  The leaders would meet in the cloakroom before the session and work out the final schedule and the mechanics. Since both leaders supported the bill, there would be little conflict in the cloakroom. The difficulty would be controlling the many dissidents in both parties who wanted to go on record against anything tainted with the word “immigrants.” We would be fortunate if we could adjourn before midnight. Few senators would dare leave for the airport before the final vote on this bill.

  Our leadership would make sure that there were enough votes on the floor for my amendment to pass. The other side wouldn’t much care. They wanted to pass the bill, go home, and leave its fate to the conference committee where it would languish till just before summer adjournment. Then the White House would become nervous and insist on a report from the conference committee and a vote on the last day of the session. The members of both houses would hope that it would be lost in the other last minute measures and their constituents wouldn’t notice.

  My amendment was called at 7:30.

  “I recognize the Senator from Illinois for two minutes to speak in support of his amendment.”

  “Mr. President, I will be brief. The requirement that immigrants from Mexico pay two thousand dollars for their green cards, disguised as a ‘fine,’ is blatantly punitive and violates the Constitutional provision for equal justice under the law. Will we charge immigrants from Western Europe, England and Ireland, let us say, for their green cards? Moreover, the income tax and Social Security they will pay in their first year will be much more than two thousand dollars. If the Treasury needs income, we could make the green cards available after five years instead of six. Thank you, Mr. President.”

  “Will the Senator from Illinois, yield, Mr. President?”