Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  This, he supposed, was why he was so successful a politician, for he brought to everything a little extra. Indeed, that was what Warren Strickland called it, in his cloakroom philosophizings: “Orrin’s little extra.” “When Orrin adds that little extra,” he would say, “then watch out.” And the Senate did watch out, just as people had been watching out ever since a point along in his senior year in high school when, for some reason he had never been able to understand since, except that he was apparently just ready for it, he had begun to relax and get along with the world.

  He sometimes thought, sardonically, how neatly it would fit into the psychological jargons of the present day if this had been brought about by some profound emotional or physical experience, some shattering event, an accident, a tragic first love or the overwhelming impact of some older teacher or mentor. But he had been in no accidents, his teachers, save for the average number of slightly-above-average exceptions, had not been the impact type, and he certainly hadn’t had any tragic love affair. He hadn’t loved anybody at all, in fact, until he went to college and met Elizabeth Henry, whom everybody called Beth, or Bee, or sometimes Hank for Henry, and then he loved her and after that he never loved anybody else. So there wasn’t anything dramatic about it at all, which he thought dryly was undoubtedly a damned shame for all the people who liked to do profound analyses of public figures. You see old Orrin Knox there, boy? Well, you can turn in that leather couch and snap off that shuttered light, because old Orrin, there, he just grew up one day, in due course and in his own time and when he got good and ready; and after that he was free to use the very powerful capabilities that had been hidden away behind a personality that theretofore had seemed to be afraid the world was always after it. As soon as he discovered it wasn’t, he began to move. He hadn’t stopped since.

  This emergence from the moted keep, coming as it did late in his high-school career, did not permit him to recoup much ground in his few remaining months, but he managed to make up for it at the university in Champaign. There he could acknowledge one profoundly important experience, and that was living in a fraternity house where he had to get along with other people and persuade them to get along with him, and where, having been taken in largely on his high-school grades and their potentials for the house’s scholastic rating on the campus, he soon began to be accepted for a tartly humorous personality that asserted itself with increasing confidence as the months moved on. “Guess we have to have at least one grind,” one of his older brethren, a football player, had remarked sarcastically to a pal as they passed the door of his room one night soon after he joined. Prompted by some impulse he had long since forgotten but which he knew now had marked a considerable turning point in his life, he had stuck his head out the door without a second’s hesitation. “One grind,” he had snapped, “and lots of grime. You can be damned glad you’ve got the one, because there’s plenty of the other around here.” For a moment he had thought he was about to be immolated by Saturday’s hero, but the other had suddenly burst out laughing, reached out and mussed his hair in a friendly way, invited him to come down to the Student Union for a hamburger, and after that he was in. The next day he could tell that by the subtly implacable processes by which the young judge the young he had been appraised and found worthy of acceptance and approval, and from then on he could relax even more. For the first time he really began to enjoy life, and though he still had many broad areas of sensitivity, though he still cared much too much for his own peace of mind about the way things went, or the way people acted, there had begun the slow, insistent, inexorable development of a mature personality.

  Aiding it were his grades, which continued to stay at a level that evoked stunned respect from his fraternity brothers; his participation in the politics of the house, largely at the insistence of his football buddy, which made him first secretary, then vice president, and in his senior year president; the debating society, where he began to learn the thrilling fact that emotion could be controlled and diverted into spoken channels that could move his listeners to reactions that surprised them both; and his meeting with Beth, or Bee, or Hank—“I suppose that’s a sign of lots of friends, when you have three nicknames,” he remarked wistfully once, soon after he first knew her; she had laughed in a way he couldn’t quite analyze and it was not until long after that he realized that this had been one of the remarks which, added to some more insistent feelings suited to her youth and nature, had contributed to the protective emotions which eventually culminated in her decision to say yes, she would be very happy to be Mrs. Knox. It was a while coming, this decision, but he was quite sure from the first day he saw her in an English class that it would someday arrive, and patiently in that belief he had suffered—and there were a good many times when he really did suffer—through the years until it came about. These years had consisted of three more in college, at the end of which he had asked her to marry him and been told with a practicality as blunt as his own that he had better get his law degree first, and then the three years of law school. Seven years after they met, equipped with his B.A. from the University of Illinois and his LL.B. from Yale, he asked again, she said yes, and they were married in her home town of Galesburg amidst some mild, pleased Knoxes and some livelier but equally pleased Henrys.

  By this time he had begun to discover in himself a driving ambition, something else that made him a sport in the Knox clan, and he was delighted to find that it had its complement in his bride. Hank, which continued to be his private name for her, was, in her humorous, friendly, and outgoing way, fully as intent upon his success as he was. To it she contributed her beauty, which was great, her brains, which were impressive, and her personality, which won everyone. “I’ve never known anybody who didn’t like you,” he had told her not six months ago; and even now with all his fame and power and prominence there had still been in his remark something of the same wistfulness of that other long ago, just as it had brought from her the same amused and affectionate response. “How do you account for your success, Governor?” a visiting high-school journalist had inquired gravely soon after he went to the Mansion in Springfield. “I married Elizabeth Henry,” he said promptly, and the remark got picked up by the city papers and carried over the state and over the land and now was part of the legend.

  He meant it, too, even though she knew, and always told him, that he possessed qualities that would have carried him high regardless of who went along with him. “But you must admit you’ve helped,” he said, “surely you aren’t going to deny it. I know you’re modest, but you aren’t that modest.” This always made her chuckle, before she turned back to the list of bazaars she was supposed to open, or the church groups she was supposed to talk to, or the campaign schedule she was supposed to help him fulfill. One time in his first campaign for re-election to the Senate they had swung into a little town in the northwest part of the state; “VOTE FOR ORRIN AND BETH,” a banner swinging over Main Street had admonished the citizenry. His managers had picked up the idea with delight, and ever since, in a very real sense, it had been the two of them that the voters endorsed. “I don’t know about that,” people would say on cool verandas along shady streets in sleepy towns, “but as long as we’ve got Orrin and Beth in the Senate, we don’t have to worry.”

  The practice of law, in the mild way of his father, leading the mild life of his father for the mild purposes of his father, was not for him, and he had long known it. He tried not to hurt his parents when he told them of his decision to move to Springfield and go into practice there, but he knew it could not help but hurt them. Nonetheless they accepted it, as they had always accepted the things he wanted to do, and presently he was in the state capital, living in a pleasant little house in a pleasant little neighborhood and working with a rising law firm to which he had become attached through his father’s intercession. “I guess your old man can do something for you,” his father had said with a shy humor, and so he had, writing a letter to a schoolmate who had traveled high and far alo
ng ways that quiet Billy Knox had never known, and in two weeks’ time Billy Knox’s son had a job and a desk and was part of a growing practice.

  For ten years this kept him occupied, and by the end of that time both he and Beth were beginning to perceive possibilities for him far beyond the practice of law. His oratorical abilities were not diminished by his employment, and before long he was beginning to receive requests to speak here and there, talks which he spent hours polishing and perfecting and then delivered with an easy power that inevitably brought standing ovations at the end. In the inner life of the capital he began to make his mark, his life and his work impinging more and more closely upon the operation of the legislature, his purpose increasingly magnetized toward government. One day on a visit home some family friend had remarked casually, “I guess you’ll be running for the legislature, one of these days.” The comment seemed to crystallize everything and he had replied quickly, “Yes, I guess I will. I think,” he added thoughtfully, for it had just come to him that of course this was what he intended to do, “that I will run for the state Senate.”

  This, as it turned out, proved to be one of the first of the many blunt remarks which were to shock and startle and upset people in the course of his public life, for he had not really bothered to check the situation before his quick reply. If he had, he would of course have found out that the mayor of Alton intended to run for the state Senate himself, and that everybody had agreed that he should be allowed to do so, and that the whole thing was cut and dried. Into this peaceful scene Billy Knox’s boy stepped with an impatient candor, an unyielding honesty, and a tart determination, fortified by his wife, to do as he damned pleased and let the chips fall where they might. It was quite a falling, what the chips did, and after they were all down the mayor of Alton had taken a shellacking, and Orrin Knox was a member of the Senate of the sovereign state of Illinois.

  He got there, as he was to get to the governorship two years later and the Senate of the United States two years after that, by standing up on his hind legs and letting fly with the things he believed in with all the earnest vigor and oratorical ability at his command. He believed in Illinois and he believed in the United States and he believed in Abraham Lincoln; and he believed in them, and in all their implications and ramifications and refinements, with all the capacity of a powerfully determined, deeply emotional, and thoroughly decent heart. No ordinary opponent could stand against the passionate impact of his platform personality, any more than ordinary opponents could stand, in the arena of committee hearings and floor debate in Springfield, against the bluntly incisive tongue with which he cut them down to size. “If you do that you won’t be liked,” a fatherly fellow Senator had advised him on some controversial matter soon after he arrived. “I don’t give a damn about being liked,” he had retorted impatiently, “but I sure as hell intend to be respected.” This remark, too, went winging around the corridors and out into the newspapers and over the state; and another cubit was added to his stature in the legend.

  In one of those tragically fortuitous blendings of misfortune and opportunity—others’ misfortune and his opportunity—by which many and many a public man has been lofted into his first national prominence, there occurred a mine disaster two months after he took office. It was followed for about a week, for reasons older hands cynically understood but he did not, by a vast silence in Springfield. During this the baby Senator from Alton went sniffing about in high dudgeon asking why nobody was doing anything about the mine laws; and after about four days, as he began to understand the answer, a terrific indignation started boiling inside. In another three days he had himself a speech written and on the eighth day after the disaster he blew the top off the capitol. When the pieces gradually settled into place again he was found to have introduced a resolution for an investigation, rammed it through by the sheer force of a towering indignation, and thereupon become the chairman of a special committee which consisted of one somnolent uncaring oldster, one terrified political hack, and himself.

  For a period of six months—for as was often the case with him, violent indignations were succeeded by periods of calmly cold-blooded appraisal of where he had put himself and how to make the most of it—the investigation went on; not too fast, as the admiring capital press agreed, and not too slow, but at just the right pace to keep Orrin Knox constantly on the front pages and constantly in the public mind. Out of it he emerged with some powerful enemies but also with a solid and constructive mine-safety bill and a growing reputation, not only in Illinois but also nationally, where the gallant and dramatic fight of this youthful Galahad against the Interests was not overlooked. The fact that his bill was defeated in that immediate session didn’t stop him at all. “Go to it, Orrin,” some miner bellowed from the galleries as the tally was announced; “you can lick ’em next time!” “You bet I will!” he had shouted back exuberantly, and aided by a wave of public indignation which he fanned assiduously during the adjourned period of the legislature by a series of speeches all over the state, he did just that. His bill passed by the dramatic margin of two votes, went through the lower house by a tally almost as narrow, and was signed into law by a governor who was under pressure to balk at every step of the way and did so. The drama of this, too, was not lost upon anyone and when one of the reporters asked him, immediately after the signing ceremony in the governor’s office, “What will you do now, Senator?” he gave the answer the state expected. “I think it would be nice to have somebody administering this law who really believes in it,” he said with a scornful look at the angry executive. “I think I’ll run for governor.”

  And so he did, in one of the wildest and bitterest campaigns in state history, out of which he rode angry but triumphant, having yielded not an inch to anyone on anything. “Honest Orrin,” his more enthusiastic supporters dubbed him in their broadsides and banners; and beneath it, emphasized with heavy underlining, “I intend to be respected.”

  “Senator Knox may have achieved this aim, now that he has bulldozed his way into the governor’s chair,” the Chicago Tribune remarked in cold disapproval on the morning after election, “but he has also achieved the other part of it too: he isn’t liked.”

  The Tribune to the contrary, however—as, he found, and he came to welcome it, the Tribune always would be to the contrary where he was concerned—he was liked a great deal by a great many people. Although the public personality did not show too much of the warmth beneath, although he had already developed at thirty-seven a sort of tart, protective brusqueness, basically very shy, that kept people off, there was an instinctive affection for him among the great majority of his fellow citizens. He had an ability to phrase things in a bluntly sarcastic way that got to the heart of things, and he never hesitated to speak up. Nor did he hesitate to take on any and all comers who, in his opinion, planned things inimical to the best interests of the people and the state. In his basically conservative fashion he turned out to be a surprisingly liberal governor, just as he was later to be, in just the same way, a surprisingly liberal United States Senator. This could easily be forgotten by those who wished to forget it, because he usually approached things with a critical air and often a critical welcome, and it was easy to portray this as something close to reaction. When the record was totted up, however, it wasn’t, and he often thought that he must have built a good foundation in his years in the Mansion in Springfield, because while his later record had a great deal to do with his continuing tenure in the Senate, much of the reason for it went back to the days when “Orrin was the best governor the state ever had.”

  In all of this his wife was his constant companion and his constant help. When his public personality got too tart, when the sarcasm got too cutting and the honesty approached arrogance, it was the Beth half of Orrin and Beth who stepped in and saved the day or lightened the atmosphere with an amiable wit which had its own edge, too, but managed to make its point without hurting. And in the deep hours of the night when honesty sometimes did not s
eem sufficient to be its own reward, when it sometimes did seem that a dogged and invincible stubbornness, no matter how high its purposes, might not be enough to fend off the attacks of enemies and the opposition of the selfish, it was Hank beside him who gave him comfort and encouragement and made it possible to return to battle the next day as independent and ornery as ever.

  Along the way, out of their love and companionship, they produced Hal, and young Elizabeth, who died of rheumatic fever when she was five years old and left a void that nothing ever quite filled up again. On the remaining child they concentrated all the love of two powerful personalities, and he was worthy of it. He was born sturdy, grew sturdy, thought sturdy, and walked sturdy: they never quite dared express, even to one another, their emotions now that he had safely negotiated childhood and adolescence and stood on the eve of marrying Crystal Danta. If anything ever happens to him—Orrin had thought when young Elizabeth died; but nothing ever had, except what was good and favoring. His parents felt most humbled.

  During his time in Springfield he found that, like many an Illinois politician and many an American everywhere, he was, inevitably, affected and influenced by Springfield’s most powerful ghost. It was impossible to escape that brooding presence, which here, of course, had not been brooding at all but rather had been just a crafty young politician on the make, possessed of too much guile and not enough prospects. Like most people, he found this character almost impossible to think into any land of reality; he knew intellectually that it had existed, but the years of anguish and the years of glory kept blotting it out. When he went, as he sometimes did after tourist hours, to the house on Eighth Street to stand in the parlor among the horsehair chairs and sofas and think about his problems and those of its onetime owner, he told himself that this was the parlor of the man who jumped out the window of the old statehouse to avoid voting on a difficult bill; but somehow all he seemed to see standing in the doorway was the tall gaunt figure in the black cape and the stovepipe hat, saying farewell to all this and not knowing when, or whether ever, he might return. For Orrin as for the world, it was the patient, compassionate face, the tenacious, unbreakable purpose, the far-viewer of the centuries, knowing, as he demonstrated so clearly at Gettysburg, that he spoke not only to his own land but to all lands and all times into the unforeseeable future; knowing that it was not only the South that had been impaled upon the fatal fish hook of Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Ridge, and Little Round Top, but all the forces everywhere in all ages that would defy free government and attempt to bring it down; and knowing that they must not be allowed to triumph in a future day any more than they had triumphed in his own stumbling, bumbling, tragic, bloody war.