Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  But in the homes of the subcommittee the mood was more serious, for there men were at work going carefully over three days of transcript in preparation for their vote tomorrow. And on the second floor of the Old Senate Office Building in one of the last offices still alight as the hour neared ten, a similar mood held sway, for there the senior Senator from South Carolina, having dismissed his staff, was similarly engaged; and for the process he was mustering all the skill and experience he had ever known in one last supreme effort to work his will on Robert A. Leffingwell.

  First, by a conscious effort that he had found effective many times before, he deliberately drained his mind, as much as was humanly possible, of every preconception, every emotion, every prejudice, every thought that had filled it on the subject heretofore.

  Then he read through the transcript slowly and carefully from beginning to end, approaching it as though it were brand new and he a reader who knew nothing at all of what was involved, making a note or two from time to time on a large pad of lined Senate notepaper in his spidery old hand.

  Then he laid the transcript aside and went patiently and slowly over his notes in the same open-minded, emotion-drained, first-reading way, methodically and deliberately tearing up each note as he finished considering it and dismissed it from his mind.

  At the end of all this he had just one note remaining before him, and so he sat, his chin supported on the knuckles of his hands, staring down at that small piece of white paper in the little circle of light on the green blotter in the silent office in the great deserted building.

  Thus Seab thought.

  He thought for quite a long time.

  And then suddenly the instinct which made him the fearfully shrewd old man he was came once more and for the last time in the Leffingwell matter to his assistance, and with it a flashing inspiration; and with a softly exultant little exclamation of triumph and certainty the brightest boy who ever grew up in Barnwell stopped thinking and started acting.

  First he put through a phone call to a home over the District Line in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and asked a question so blunt and unexpected that its recipient gasped and admitted the answer before he had time to think of evasions.

  And then Seab told him with a terrifying fury in his voice exactly what he should do if he wished to preserve his honor and serve his country well.

  And then Seab hung up.

  An hour later the phone rang at the Andersons’ in Spring Valley and Brigham Anderson went to answer. A strangely muffled, strangely tired voice came over.

  “I have something to say,” it said, sounding far away and desolate.

  “Who is this?” the Senator demanded sharply, and the voice seemed to gather itself together and make a great effort.

  “There was a time when I was known as James Morton,” it said.

  ***

  Book Three

  Brigham Anderson’s Book

  ***

  Chapter 1

  Now spring has come, suddenly, in a day, as it always comes to Washington. Over all the District, Maryland, and Virginia the winds are warm, the trees are abruptly green, the golden fountains of forsythia rise in every street; and the voice of the tourist is heard in the land. At this very moment on this brightly sparkling morning he is arising in his thousands in his myriad hotels, motels, and other temporary warrens and gathering himself together for another day of mass assault upon the noble monuments and busy offices of his government: There will be some of his kind who will make the excursion with friends or relatives; some who will take guided tours in sight-seeing buses; and still others who will start out on their own with cameras, dogged determination, and a rather hazy concept of what they will find. “Where does the President work?” some of them will ask when they go through the Capitol. “We’ve seen the Senate and the House, now can you tell us where we can see Congress?”

  The first wave is here, tramping with weary tenacity through the Smithsonian and the zoo, paying their hasty camera-clicking tributes to Abe Lincoln in his temple (“Stand over there by his right foot, Kit,”), allowing half an hour for a quick run through the National Gallery of Art, hurrying one another along in a pushing, shoving, exclaiming line through Mount Vernon, the White House, and Lee House in Arlington, peeking in quickly at the massive red-draped chamber of the Supreme Court, viewing with suitable awe the blood-stained relics of the FBI, ascending the Washington Monument for a glimpse, all too brief, of the city, the river, the surrounding countryside, all the monuments and buildings, the great scheme of L’Enfant laid out before them with its broad avenues, its carpeting of tree tops everywhere, its veneer of world capital still not effacing a certain gracious, comfortable, small-town aspect that not all the problems nor all the tourists in Christendom can quite obscure.

  The city has prepared itself for the onslaught by a sort of instinctive battening down of the hatches. “Just wait until the tourists come,” people have been saying warningly to one another for weeks; or, “Well, I guess if we can’t make it now we’d better wait until fall, because the tourists will be here in a little while and you know what a mess that is.” Yet it is not done unkindly, nor is it entirely devoid of appreciation for the excitement of those who visit for the first time. There are enough who can remember their own first days here, when all the streets were golden and everyone who passed was ten feet tall and bound upon secret missions of high import. Although the streets have long since returned to asphalt and the unmoved eyes of experience now see that most of those who pass are not ten feet tall but just tired little government workers worrying about the mortgage, something of the aura lingers still; and so the visitors are patiently suffered and forgiven much.

  Among those who really are, in a manner of speaking, ten feet tall, the sparkling morning is bringing with it both a heightened sense of being alive and a spreading interest, excitement, and in some cases dismay, as a result of Brigham Anderson’s summary action of last night, announced in the Washington Post, the New York Times and all other morning papers across the land, echoed and restated and repeated and re-emphasized at regular intervals on every radio station. Interest in this is balanced about equally by interest in other news, coming out of Turkey suddenly and without warning as such news has been coming all too frequently in recent years, possessed of a significance no one can accurately assess but serving to fan through the world that stalking fear that is inspiring COMFORT and other manifestations of the mood of desperation gripping many in the West. MASSIVE NEW SOVIET LAUNCHING TRACKED, the papers say; TELLER, VON BRAUN FEAR MANNED MOON SHOOT; BASE COULD GIVE REDS TEMPORARY SPACE RULE; RESULTS MAY BE KNOWN IN WEEK; MOSCOW SILENT.

  The reaction to this is partly a deepening of the constant worry that nags at all free men, partly a recurrence of that sort of tired oh-dear-what-now mood that comes upon them when confronted with the latest evil invention of the enemy. Possibly the news means nothing at all, based as it is on rumors, half hints, unconfirmed reports, and nervous guesses; or possibly it means terribly much. Unmanned satellites to the moon have been in orbit for some time, and the fantastic adaptability of the human mind has long since relegated them to the commonplace; manned satellites that could conceivably establish bases would be something else again. American preparations are nearing completion at Cape Canaveral, but Project Outward hasn’t gone yet; is this one more race lost to the fleet and the crafty? Right now no one knows; and since the mind possesses also the ability to push back and shove away and place in some remote spot along with other to-be-thought-about-later things the possibility that bad news may be true, it is the news of Brigham Anderson that concerns Washington most directly now. Whatever the news from Ankara may mean, time will have to tell; there is little doubt in the capital that the news prompted by Brigham Anderson means a great deal right now.

  Thus it is that he is the most immediate and pressing worry on top of all the other worries in the minds of those most concerned with the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell. At the Sheraton-Park the senior Se
nator from Michigan contemplates the news with profane dismay even as the senior Senator from South Carolina contemplates it with placid satisfaction; at the White House the President, pausing by his bedroom window to look down across the pleasant prospect of the Ellipse, the Washington Monument, the river, and green Virginia beyond, shakes his head in a puzzled way and determines upon an early call to the Majority Leader; at the UN Senator Fry and Krishna Khaleel, breakfasting together in the Delegates’ dining room, discuss the event with equal bafflement on both sides; Lord Maudulayne, Raoul Barre, and Vasily Tashikov all decide to advise their governments at once on everything they can find out about it; on Arlington Ridge Road the phone rings unanswered in the nominee’s home as the inevitable flood of calls comes in from the press; in the homes of the subcommittee, where the phones are answered, the reaction is approximately the same: a puzzled, “What the hell?” followed by “No comment,” except in the case of Orrin Knox, who finally sums up the prevailing attitude for the Times by admitting that he was not consulted and then adding firmly, “However, I am quite sure that I speak for the subcommittee when I say that we have every confidence in Senator Anderson’s judgment and are quite willing to abide by it.” And in Spring Valley, where the phone is ringing too, Mabel Anderson patiently answers with the kind of lie that senatorial wives, aides, and assistants often have to tell: “No, I’m sorry, he’s left for the office, possibly you can find him there.” In the same way later in the day his office will say politely, “No, I’m sorry, he’s not here. He had an appointment downtown. We don’t know when he’ll be back.” The Senator wants to talk to certain people and he knows certain people will want to talk to him, and he does not intend to be interrupted by the necessary, understandable but distracting importunings of the press.

  Actually at this moment, while the news of his action is spreading out along the news wires and over the airwaves to encircle the globe in company with the rumors from Ankara, Brigham Anderson is right outside in his own back yard studying the earth and doing his best not to think about anything but the felicities of the season. He still does not know what kind of roses to plant alongside the house, and his thoughts are divided about equally between his horticultural problem, the news from Ankara, and the twin problems posed by the telephone call from James Morton and his own instinctive and far-reaching action in response to it. It is significant of his attitude toward this last, four short days before it reaches a climax he could not now imagine, that at the moment, despite a feeling of deep trouble and unease about the rush of domestic events in which he knows he has become at least for the time being the central figure, it is the problem of the roses which briefly weighs the heavier.

  But it is spring, the sun is bright, the winds are warm, and he is using his garden for the purpose men have gardens for: to relax, however briefly, to make appraisal and take stock, to get away for a few precious moments from the crushing responsibility which now has devolved upon him in the wake of the call last night. It seems safe to say that there is hardly a householder in the capital who is not at this moment turning about with pleasant anticipation in his mind the question of what to do with roses, whether it would be best this year to build the garden around dahlias, zinnias, or glads, whether to make the annual surrender to temptation and buy more azaleas and if so where to put them, what to do about the bare spots in the lawn and what preparations to make for the inevitable onslaught of crab grass later on. Momentarily one with them, even though beneath the surface of his mind dark questions and grave worries swirl, the Senator is occupied for the most part with the pleasant problems that go naturally and inevitably with spring. The other problems revolving around Robert A. Leffingwell he knows he will have to face soon enough as the day develops, so for this short half hour or so of wandering around the yard he is consciously making himself enjoy what spring has to offer.

  When all this is said, however, it still must be confessed that even though he is applying himself to the task with great determination, the attempt is not entirely successful. He is an honest and a conscientious man and it is not possible for him to keep the world out for more than a minute or two at a time. Then it comes rushing back upon him as it must upon any responsible citizen. He too has seen the Turkish reports, and it seems to him all the more reason, if they should by any reach of the imagination be true—and indeed have the scientists not been saying since 1957 that they inevitably and very shortly would be true?—why he should have done what he did following the call from James Morton. Even more now, he feels, does the integrity and reliability of the nominee become an issue. Being right, however, is sometimes a rather fragile shield against the questionings of the world. He knows exactly the reaction his action must now be arousing in the minds of the Majority Leader and the Minority Leader, of Orrin Knox and Stanley Danta and all the other friends with whom he rates so high even though he knows they will stand by him patiently awaiting his reasons; he also understands the feelings that must be going through the mind of the nominee, who knows now that the past has presented its bill after all, just when he thought he had it safely canceled; and he is aware of the black, irresponsible yet fiercely clever anger that must be assailing the ruthless mind of Fred Van Ackerman, who will make trouble for him if he can over this, as a part of his own long-term ambitions. And with all these things passing through his thoughts, he is reminded with a sudden inexplicable feeling, coming out of nowhere and blighting the perfect day suddenly into shadow, of his own uneasy foreboding when it was first proposed to him that he take an active hand in the Leffingwell matter. He knew then, and he knows now, that it is bad business for him; he doesn’t know why, yet, but he knows.

  Nonetheless, he reflects with a sudden impatient kick at a gopher tunnel in the lawn, he is not about to back away from it, nor is he about to give in to any such feelings, which a split-second recapitulation convinces him are so much hogwash. He is a good public servant, doing what he knows to be a good job, filled with an honorable purpose and a high integrity; and he is not going to cut and run, he tells himself, just because events have now suddenly made him the focus of all the violent emotions, hopes, dreams, suspicions, dislikes, prejudices, ideals, and passions of the Leffingwell nomination. He has conducted the hearings with an impartial justice, he has done his level best to be fair to all concerned, and now he knows he has taken the only action an honest man could take. He knows it will bring down upon him all the organized, massive anger and criticism of those who are emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he is not worried about his ability to defend it before his peers in the only forum that really matters now, the Senate of the United States.

  At this thought, which fortifies him considerably as he reflects upon all the many friends he has in that body, the dark mood lifts a little and he tells himself with a quick impatience that he is a fine one to be driving himself into a stew with that kind of nonsense. He reminds himself with a swiftly rising optimism that he is after all a most highly thought-of, well-liked, and respected young man, with a wife who complements his career and a daughter he adores, an electorate with which after seven years he is still carrying on a mutual honeymoon, and a standing in the Senate which few can equal. And it is not just the present that lies bland and happy about him, for he faces a prospect such as few men in America are fortunate enough to contemplate.

  At thirty-seven he is established in the Senate, secure in his state, one of the rising young men of the country, already accorded by his elders, as witness their insistence upon entrusting him with the delicate and demanding task of chairing the Leffingwell hearing, a confidence and respect very seldom given to men his age in the august body to which he belongs. Ahead lies a life of ever more satisfying and worthwhile public service, and nothing he can see before him on this bright golden day gives any indication to the contrary.

  Only one immediate worry keeps coming back to nag him, and that is the thought that just possibly he had acted a little too hastily last night when, upon receipt
of James Morton’s call, he had telephoned the wire services and announced that the Leffingwell hearing would be reopened at 10 a.m. tomorrow. This action was taken on his own and without consultation with anyone else on the subcommittee or anyone else in the Senate, and as such it was to some degree an uncharacteristic action, one of the few impulsive and uncareful moments in a life which has not known many. Underlying his attempt to enjoy the day is the uneasy thought that possibly he had moved too fast and may regret it. Yet such had been the desperate urgency of James Morton’s call, and so deep its anguished intensity, that he had perforce been swept into the conviction that it was genuine; and when he had called the number back within ten minutes to check for sure, the man had displayed an even greater anxiety. This had strengthened his own general tendency to be essentially a lone wolf, and he had felt further that in this case there were party matters involved, the commitment of the President and the Majority Leader to the nominee, all the matters of party prestige and political standing now riding on the shoulders of Robert A. Leffingwell, which he felt imposed an obligation upon him not to divulge his reasons to the press or anyone else until he could have a chance to discuss them at the White House. Compounding this reaction also was his shock and surprise, for he had been coming around in his own mind to a point where he could actively support the nominee. Now all bets are off, and there is, indeed, the very strong probability that he will move into active opposition.

  Nonetheless, he supposes, he might have taken the time to call Orrin Knox, at least; but Orrin, though his closest friend in the Senate, would have been just returning from a family party for Crystal and Hal, and Brig had decided not to bother him when his mind was filled with that pleasant occupation. This morning he is inclined to wish he had, for he knows Orrin would have agreed with him and he might feel easier in his own mind about it at this moment. There might not be the steady, insistent recurrence of the thought that he had committed an irrevocable act whose consequences might somehow, in some way, bear out his earlier forebodings about the Leffingwell matter and his own involvement in it.