by Allen Drury
What would come of it, he could not of course predict exactly, for one thing he had learned far back and very early was the futility of making exact predictions about either the Senate or the course of a political development All you could do was assess the likeliest possibilities and build your plans upon that. The likeliest possibility in this case was the complete discrediting of the nominee, for Senator Anderson had already made it clear that the hearings would be reopened, and when they were Robert A. Leffingwell was not going to look very good. He was, in fact, going to look very bad; a proven liar, an evasive and unreliable man, a man to whom no thinking citizen would wish to entrust the country’s foreign policies in a time of such dangerous international tension. The nominee, as Herbert Gelman had made very clear under Arly Richardson’s prodding, had not done anything so very terrible, when all was said and done; he had just acted like a fool when he should have known better and then had made the mistake of lying about it In the office of Secretary of State, however, this was not a trait his countrymen were inclined to look upon kindly or forgive. Now there would be no rationalizing it and no getting around it; he would be pinned down as neatly as a beetle on a piece of cork, and the President would inevitably have to withdraw the nomination, and would undoubtedly in the process be considerably damaged himself. This too the senior Senator from South Carolina thought he could manage to contemplate without dismay.
And all of this would come about because Seab Cooley had accurately judged two men: James Morton, whom he hardly knew at all, and Brigham Anderson, whom he knew quite well and had studied with considerable care. His instinct had told him that the man Washington knew under his right name would crumble when suddenly presented with the ghost of James Morton from the past; and his instinct had told him that Senator Anderson, confronted with equal suddenness with the same knowledge, would act as directly and forcefully as he had. The only point where Seab had not quite judged the chairman correctly lay in his belief that by now he would have told Bob Munson about it, that Orrin Knox and Lafe Smith would know, that the knowledge would be spreading already through the Senate and within a matter of hours or even minutes would be reaching the press and thus very shortly would hit the front pages and thereby create a situation that nothing could change. The one point where he misjudged his young colleague was that he believed him to be already committed, not only in his own mind and heart, but in the general knowledge of his friends and the Senate and the press which for all its partisanship would never hesitate to print the facts, however damaging to Leffingwell, once the facts were openly at hand. Thus Seab believed the situation to be already in the process of congealing, with no way out for anybody but to move forward along the lines to which each was bound by character, circumstance and overriding interest.
He was so convinced of this, in fact, that it was only the experience and judgment of almost half a century that prompted him to consider the alternative. It was possible he could just conceive of it, that Brigham might not yet have told anyone about it, that the situation might still be fluid, and that he might in some way yet yield to what Seab was sure would be the angry and ruthless pressures of the White House that the matter be dropped without a full disclosure. Senator Cooley could imagine no pressures sufficiently great to persuade Senator Anderson to change his course once he was fully set upon it, but there again long experience of men and their motives told him he should keep at least one little door open in his mind for that possibility. He was not a close friend of Brig’s, but like most of Brig’s elders in the Senate he was very fond of him in a fatherly sort of way, and he could not imagine anything in his past that would make him subject to the sort of pressures that could be brought to bear upon some men. Even so, he was a human being, and one thing Seab had learned both in his own life and the many he had observed in seventy-five years was that human beings occasionally act more human than a prudent balancing of present need and future interest might make advisable; and conceivably, just possibly, there might be a lever somewhere in Senator Anderson’s past that the President might use, were it ever to come to his hand.
In that case, Senator Cooley knew, he would simply use the lever he himself possessed. Assuming Brig had not told his other colleagues, there still was someone else who knew, a co-proprietor of the secret, someone else who could, by offering to expose the whole situation in the form of a shabby and underhanded collusion between the White House and the Senator from Utah, make a man stop and think twice if he wished to save his own reputation. And from many things he had observed, Seab knew that Brig was very sensitive about his own reputation. This admittedly was a somewhat cold-blooded way to look at it, possibly a calculation that might seem out of place in the heart of a man who really was genuinely fond of his young colleague, but at this particular moment on this particular day Senator Cooley was much more interested in getting Bob Leffingwell and the President than he was in protecting Brigham Anderson.
So he decided, as he prepared to leave his office and walk across to the Capitol in the sparkling spring sunshine for an Appropriations Committee meeting, that he would just bide his time and see what happened. Many things in politics come to him who waits, he had found, and as he emerged blinking a little into the bright clear day he was waiting, bland and sleepy-eyed and noncommittal and shrewd and monumentally indestructible as ever.
“—and therefore,” the Majority Leader finished dictating, “much as I would like to attend your fine meeting in Hamtramck on Monday next, this new turn of events in the Leffingwell nomination makes it impossible for me to leave the Senate at this time. With all best wishes to you and your lively and progressive group, I am, etc.”
He snapped off the machine and pushing it aside on the broad desk, swung his chair around to stare out the window, down across the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the lush green hills of Virginia beyond. It was certainly a beautiful day, and he had half a mind to play hooky; except that there were occasions when you damned well knew you had better not play hooky, and this was damned well one of them. Things were breaking too fast on this gorgeous spring morning, and there was no place for the Majority Leader of the United States Senate to be except right spank in the United States Senate.
Thinking with one layer of his mind as he had dictated—the political level that never went to sleep—he had pretty well decided upon his next move even as he conferred his regrets and blessings upon the good citizens of Hamtramck. In politics and the Senate, he was vividly aware, the shortest distance between two points is very often not a straight line. If you wish A to do something, for instance, you frequently are well advised to go to B, who knows him intimately, or even to C, who is an old pal of B, to start the wheels in motion. The matter of who asks who to do what often assumes a major importance; the whole future of a bill, the whole course of a committee action, the whole completion of a debate, can frequently be changed entirely by the personality of the man who sets it in motion; and while it might have seemed at first glance that he should have continued to hammer at his stubborn young colleague from Utah until he beat him around to the President’s point of view, Senator Munson knew better than that. There were some with whom it could be done, but Brig was not one of them; and in any event Bob Munson was far too adept and far too capable and experienced a legislative operator to use such tactics on anyone as valuable, as close to him, and as strong and undisposed to yield to pressure as the senior Senator from Utah.
In the delicate region of who-asks-whom he had by now concluded that the man for him to talk to was Orrin Knox, who could be persuaded to talk to Lafe Smith, who in turn was young enough to meet Brig, as it were, on his own level, with the shared attitudes of a generation, memories of the war, sex, women, old friendship, reactions to their elders, and all the rest of it, to form a common meeting-ground. By this chain of personalities, the Majority Leader hoped, the subtle skein of events leading to a change in Senator Anderson’s position and a re-establishment of the status quo ante could be brou
ght about in a smooth and painless way that would leave few scars.
For the Majority Leader was aware from the President’s tone that he was not, as he had said, about to abandon his commitment without a struggle; and it had been quite apparent from the iron in his voice the kind of struggle it would be. Occasionally in the past Bob Munson had seen the normally equable temper—equable as long as things were going his way—flare up; he had watched the force of that personality lash out at obstacles in its path, and he had known of actions taken with complete ruthlessness that had for all practical political and national purposes completely destroyed some of the men who had gotten in his way. Most Presidents who had an ounce of historical conception of the powers and responsibilities of their great office were bad business when crossed; and this one had considerably more than an ounce. He was not one to tangle with lightly; and the Majority Leader, still certain that the Senator from Utah had underestimated both the Chief Executive’s present intentions and his basic general character, was anxious to ease him out of the situation before it reached a showdown where neither man would retreat. If that occurred, he would not vouch for what might happen to Senator Anderson; and he cared enough for him, both as friend and as a valuable Senator whose serious bruising in a battle with the White House would be a real blow to the Senate and the country, to want to do everything possible to head off any such clash, which at the least would be unpleasant and at the most might be tragic.
So it was with a serious heart that he lifted the phone and put through a call to Senator Knox’s office, and after ascertaining that he was in, told his secretary to convey the information that he would be dropping by very shortly. He noticed that she sounded a little constrained, and a couple of minutes later as he turned the comer and started down the long corridor to Orrin’s door he understood why. The area around the doorway was bathed in floodlight, three or four television cameras were at the ready, a large crowd of reporters was standing about, a few tourists were watching in an awestruck way on the outer fringes. It was quite obvious that some quarry had gone to ground inside, and it was also quite obvious that the next step in the Leffingwell matter had been taken out of the Majority Leader’s hands without so much as a by-your-leave. Orrin in his blunt, pragmatic, impatient, and independent way, had obviously decided to move in.
There were some in the Senate toward whom the Majority Leader would have felt a considerable annoyance under such a circumstance, but Orrin was in a different category. Old friendship and complete personal trust, plus the fact that Orrin was Orrin and overlooked the subtler niceties not because he wanted to be nasty but just because he was too busy thinking about something else to pay any attention to them, prompted forgiveness. Whatever Orrin had decided to do, Bob Munson was quite ready to go along with it; and with complete calm and good nature he headed toward the inevitable onslaught of the press as he neared the door. “Here comes Bob,” he heard the Washington Star announce, and instantly he was confronted by a circle of questioning faces and raised pencils.
“You know,” he said comfortably, “you’ve no idea how happy it makes me to be greeted by all these bright morning faces. How do you manage to look so fresh and. eager all the time?”
“I,” said the Baltimore Sun dryly, “will have you know I was up half the night and then got up again at five to try to solve this little mystery.”
“Poor you,” Senator Munson said with a chuckle, “You should have gone into some other business.”
“Now he tells us,” AP said, and the Majority Leader laughed.
“Come on, now,” he said. “You wouldn’t be doing anything else and you know it.”
“What’s the purpose of this meeting, Senator?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch inquired in a businesslike way, and Senator Munson shrugged.
“I assume Senator Knox has told you as much as he wants you to know,” he said blandly.
“He hasn’t told us anything,” the Herald Tribune remarked in a tone of some reproach. Bob Munson smiled.
“That’s what I mean,” he said.
“Well, can’t you tell us anything?” the Washington Post insisted. “There must be something we can be told.”
“Who’s arrived so far?” Senator Munson asked.
“Arly Richardson, John Winthrop, and Tom August are already in,” the Star reported. “Johnny DeWilton is on his way, and I guess you complete the list, right?”
“I guess so,” the Majority Leader said comfortably. “Won’t you have fun speculating out here for the next hour and a half.”
“Well, obviously you’re going to decide whether to take the matter out of Brig’s hands and go ahead with the nomination regardless,” the Post-Dispatch said. Senator Munson raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Oh?” he said. “Is that what we’re going to do? Thanks for telling me, boys. I’ll pass the word along to the others when I get inside.”
“Well, what else would you be meeting for?” the Providence Journal demanded, and the Majority Leader adopted an air of mock gravity.
“Many important matters are now before the Senate,” he pointed out solemnly. “Just because you’re all excited about one little old bitty nomination doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty else. Appropriations; a fishing treaty with Canada; whether or not to have a tax bill this year; foreign aid; reciprocal trade—oh, the subjects are endless. Just endless.”
“Oh, now,” UPI said amicably, “stop being cute. There’s only one subject before this subcommittee, and that’s Bob Leffingwell. Why else would Orrin Knox have called a subcommittee meeting, and why else would he want you and Tom August to be in on it?”
“You fellows are so sharp,” Senator Munson said with equal amicability. “Just keep guessing, and the time out here will just fly by.”
“What do you think of Brig’s action, Senator?” the New York Daily News asked in a more serious tone, and the Majority Leader dropped the banter and replied seriously.
“I’ve talked to him,” he said, “and I’m satisfied he has his reasons, and that they may be good ones. At least they seem sufficient to him to warrant the action he has taken. Therefore I for one am prepared to refrain from passing judgment until he makes his reasons clear.”
“Has he asked to see the President?” CBS inquired.
“I’d say it’s mutual,” Senator Munson said with a grin. “They want to see each other.”
“When?” the Washington Post demanded.
“I don’t know yet,” Senator Munson said.
“This morning?” the Newark News suggested, and Bob Munson smiled.
“It isn’t definitely settled yet,” he said.
“Supposing the subcommittee does decide to take it out of his hands,” the Washington Star asked. “What then?”
“I can’t conceive of it,” Senator Munson said flatly. “It would be a most unusual demonstration of lack of faith in a member of the Senate.”
“How about faith in Bob Leffingwell?” the Baltimore Sun inquired, and the Majority Leader grinned.
“There,” he said, “you open up a whole new field of study. Now if you gentlemen will part your ranks like the Red Sea, little Moses will go on in.”
“Will you have a statement for us when the meeting is over, Senator?” the Newark News asked.
“Orrin may,” he said. “Or I may. Or we all may. Somebody will, so don’t go away.”
“Senator,” the Herald Trib told him, “two thirds of our lives are spent waiting outside closed committee hearings. We won’t go away.”
“Well, make yourselves comfortable,” Bob Munson advised. “Maybe you can spend your time thinking up some more nasty things to say about us for delaying the nomination. There must,” he said with a grin that took some but not all the sting out of it, “be one or two left.”
But as Senator DeWilton came along the corridor and they went on into Orrin’s reception room together, he decided that there was little point in ragging the press. They were nice people, for the most part, very astute and
very intelligent, and they were human like everybody else in Washington; so close to government, so much a part of politics, that it was almost impossible for them to refrain from developing strong opinions, and almost equally impossible for them to keep their opinions from showing. He was certain that none of them, confronted with the point-blank question, “Do you really want to hurt Brigham Anderson, or Bob Munson, or whoever?” would give an affirmative answer. It was just that their feelings got involved and they got swept along and one thing led to another and frequently, somehow, it all seemed to come out in a way that indirectly but forcefully promoted the causes and the people they believed in and did damage to those they did not. He knew this was a failing that afflicted everyone who got involved in Washington, and he was not going to set himself up to judge it. When they turned on you, as Brig had truly said, all you could do was ride it out. A week from now, with Bob Leffingwell confirmed and the bitter battle forgotten, they would be your friends again. It was just part of the game.