Advise and Consent

by Allen Drury

  “I shall go to New York to formally certify this hegemony to the General Assembly of the United Nations.”

  “When?” the Majority Leader asked in the lobby, and somebody said, “Shh!” tensely.

  “So much,” the President said, and he said it with scorn, “for the arrogant assertions of little men that they have ‘claimed’ the moon. And so much for their hopes that they can intimidate the United States from doing its duty for mankind.

  “It will take more,” he said, and by now his marvelous recuperative powers were coming to his aid, he was looking much more vigorous and much less strained, “than little men shouting in the vastness of the universe to block the forward progress of humanity.

  “Our expedition will do what it has been instructed to do. In the unlikely event that it lands near the Soviet expedition, or has any contact with it, it will continue to do as it has been instructed to do. I do not anticipate that it will be interfered with. If it is,” he said calmly, “it will know how to deal with the situation.

  “And now,” he said, “let me turn to the courteous note which I received this afternoon from the Soviet Government. This communication, couched in typical friendly language, full of that genial co-operative attitude that has long distinguished the Soviet Government in its dealings with other governments which, unlike the Soviet Government, strive sincerely for the welfare of the world, invites me—indeed, it commands me—to be in Geneva on Saturday for a conference of unspecified nature with the Soviet Government.

  “My own instinct is the same as that of the great Senator from Illinois, the Honorable Orrin Knox—”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” UPI whispered to the Cleveland News, “look at that face.” The Cleveland News glanced across the lobby at Senator Knox and nodded with a grim little smile.

  “—who,” the President said, “in his great speech in the Senate this afternoon following the Soviet broadcast stated the unchangeable fact that the United States is not, and cannot be, frightened with such blatant threats. I hereby reaffirm that magnificent statement of American principle. It bespeaks my own views exactly.”

  He paused and reached for a glass of water. His hand trembled hardly at all, and Senator Knox paid silent tribute once more to the awesome will power of the man.

  “Under ordinary circumstances,” the President went on, “I should reject out of hand any such arrogant, discourteous, dastardly, and unprincipled message as that sent me by the Soviet Government.” He paused and looked squarely into the cameras.

  “I have given very serious consideration to such a course,” he said. He paused again, long enough to raise the tension all over the world. When he deemed it sufficiently high he resumed.

  “I have decided,” he said, “insulting and unprincipled and despicable though this message is, to take another course. Even though the leaders of the war-mongering ruling clique of the Soviet Union—”

  “Good for you!” Hal Fry said happily. “Give the bastards their own medicine!”

  “—ignore their responsibilities to mankind, the President of the United States cannot. The President of the United States knows that his country wishes him to strive unceasingly for peace, and that all decent peoples everywhere wish him to do so. He knows that he will be judged by God, by humanity, and by history if he does not.

  “Therefore,” he said, “I shall go to Geneva. Not because the war-mongering ruling clique of the Soviet Union demands it, but because humanity and conscience and the cause of peace demand it. Because I feel a duty to mankind even if the war-mongering ruling clique of the Soviet Union does not. Because I desire, and my people desire, true peace even if the war-mongering ruling clique of the Soviet Union does not desire it.

  “I shall not, however,” he said, “be there on Saturday, for it will be impossible to complete preparations in so short a time. I, and my delegation, will be there on Monday.

  “I wish to tell you that we will be bound by no rules of secrecy. This will be an open conference in which the United States will make everything known to the world. The Soviet Union pretends that in some way this conference will be decisive in world events. Very well, we shall see. We shall all see. The world will judge who is the war-monger and who the servant of peace.

  “I pledge to humanity,” he said, and in conclusion his head came up and his eyes gave their old, challenging look and he suddenly seemed to dominate the world, “the heart and mind, and if need be the blood and treasure, of the United States in the cause of peace.

  “We shall see who profits from this childish exercise in arrogance put forth to us by Moscow!”

  His face, strong and powerful and no longer looking tired, faded from the screen, the great seal of the Presidency came on again, and heavy and insistent the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” crashed around the globe.

  The world did not see, and did not know that even before he rose from the desk he had paled suddenly again, and, looking around desperately for his doctor, had been helped from the room. But all the reporters and the visitors and the television newsmen and technicians saw, and in ten minutes’ time the news was racing like wildfire over the town, in the Press Club, the newspaper bureaus, the press gallery and the Senate as its members streamed back to the floor for statements of approbation and support and the concluding hours of the matter of Robert A. Leffingwell.

  And now they came at last, the Majority Leader thought, to that final, almost anti-climactic time when the final arguments were offered and the last words were said and the Senate could dispose of its pending business and get on to something else. Thirteen Senators had spoken yesterday afternoon and last night, another fifteen had spoken today; many others had interrupted with questions and comments clarifying their own positions. Raymond Robert Smith of California had made his views known in his indefinably willowy way; he was for the nominee. Tom Trummel of Indiana in his ponderous fashion had been against; Murfee Andrews and John Baker of Kentucky had openly joined Orrin’s forces, Alec Chabot of Louisiana and Billy Canfield of Mississippi had fallen away. Magnus Hollingsworth of Wisconsin, small, neat, and precise, and Dick Mclntyre of Idaho, small, loud, and bouncy, had had their say, and many another had spoken in the past forty-eight hours while other events moved on outside the Senate.

  The debate had finally entered that rather sporadic, desultory, uninteresting last few hours which always preceded the concluding, climactic drive to the finish.

  This was always the way with Senate debate: there were hours, days, sometimes weeks of preliminary skirmishing, formal statements of position, speeches for the record; the pace slackened, the Senate jogged along, members got caught up on other matters, tended to office routine, kept speaking engagements across the country, were busy on other things. Then the agreed time came and in a last flurry of controversy, sometimes very pointed and very sharp, the end came and the Senate moved on to something else and the process started all over again.

  Not that this debate had been cut quite to the pattern of others; there had been factors that lifted it above them, made it more tense and more bitter, gave it a character of direct association with the fate of the country that only the most major Senate controversies had. This debate had acquired its own extraordinary character, compounded of the clash of great principles and great personalities. It would be a long time before the Senate, and the country too, forgot the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell; many and many a future day’s decisions, a future day’s triumphs or failures, would go back to the complex of men, motives, and events that had swirled around this brilliant and ill-starred character.

  What sort of Secretary of State he would have made, no one now would ever know; whether his rejection in the long unfolding of history would prove to be good or bad for his country, no one could ever say, for it would be only speculation what he might or might not have done, whether his actions would have affected in any way the fundamental course of events, whether he would have been help or hindrance to America. Now, the Majority Le
ader reflected, he would be completely removed from the direction of the nation’s foreign policy; and for this his friends would be aggrieved and his enemies would be happy, and who could say, in the ultimate assessment of the record, which would have the more cause for their emotion?

  He looked around the chamber, almost filled now, as the clerk moved toward the end of a quorum call, and at his desk Orrin impatiently waited for recognition. His eye fell on Orrin himself, looking firm and determined as always, victor at last in his long contest with the President, and on an issue that would hurt the President as few things could; he wondered if Orrin were really satisfied with his triumph, in his heart, and knowing Orrin he expected he probably was. He saw Seab, just entering down the main aisle, gesturing to the clerk to record his name on the tally, a lock of hair falling over one eye, a sleepy, satisfied expression on his face like a great old cat that was about to dine well: and so he would. And he saw, too, Stanley Danta, quiet and kind, Powell Hanson, who had earnestly tried to stem a tide he did not entirely in his inexperience understand; Arly Richardson, sardonic and shrewd, jaunty as ever even in the defeat of a cause for which he had not really, in his heart, fought so very hard; and Warren Strickland, neat and pleasant across the aisle, piloting the Minority smoothly into line behind the vigorous lead of the Senator from Illinois. And finally he saw, sitting uneasily in his seat far at the back, the symbol of the steady, inexorable continuance of the American Government, the new Senator from Utah, a doctor from Logan hastily appointed by the Governor yesterday immediately after Brig’s interment in Salt Lake City and rushed to Washington to be sworn in; one more vote against Leffingwell and a reminder of the grimness of this issue to help Orrin sap the President’s powerful address of its effect insofar as it might be used by the nominee’s few remaining supporters to bolster his cause.

  And surveying all these men, and thinking about them and about this old Senate which he had known so long and loved so much, the senior Senator from Michigan could not find it in his heart to be so concerned about his country, when all was said and done. The system had its problems, and it wasn’t exactly perfect, and there was at times much to be desired, and yet—on balance, admitting all its bad points and assessing all the good, there was a vigor and a vitality and a strength that nothing, he suspected, could ever quite overcome, however evil and crafty it might be. There was in this system the enormous vitality of free men, running their own government in their own way. If they were weak, at times, it was because they had the freedom to be weak; if they were strong, upon occasion, it was because they had the freedom to be strong; if they were indomitable, when the chips were down, it was because freedom made them so. He said a little prayer of thankfulness, sitting there at his desk in the United States Senate, to all the men and women back over the centuries who by their dreaming and their striving and their working and their dying had made it possible for their heirs to take with them into so dark and fearful a future so great and wonderful a gift and so strong and invincible an armor.

  But now the quorum call was almost over, the clerk said, “Mr. Wanna-maker!...Mr. Welch!...Mr. Whiteside!...Mr. Wilson!” with an air of finality. The Vice President declared the presence of a quorum, and Orrin Knox said, “Mr. President!” in a commanding voice.

  “The Senator from Illinois,” Harley said quietly, and on the floor and in the galleries silence descended as his countrymen gave him their sober and undivided attention.

  “Mr. President,” he said gravely, “let me say first that I associate myself, as in effect I did earlier, with the speech of the President. It was a magnificent speech, and one to which I know every American subscribes. We are not to be intimidated, Mr. President; no more are we to be beaten. We must all hope the men in the Kremlin will realize this fact once and for all; it will save the world a lot of time and save them from errors which well might be fatal for them.”

  His tone changed and became more businesslike.

  “And so we return, Mr. President, to the pending business before the Senate. On this matter, many Senators have already spoken; all yesterday afternoon and evening, all day today except for the interruptions to hear the Soviet broadcast and the President’s address, members have been stating their positions and their sentiments. Rarely in the history of the Senate, I think, has there been a matter to concern us so deeply; and though he comes here under tragic circumstances, the distinguished junior Senator from Utah—successor,” he said quietly, “to another who but lately was in this body—I think will someday realize that he has been privileged to join us in a truly historic moment. This will be looked back upon as a major event, one of the few times when the Senate has rejected a nominee to the Cabinet of the President of the United States; probably the only time that it has ever rejected a nominee for Secretary of State. History will wonder why, and the importance of the event will increase from our reasons.”

  “Mr. President,” Senator Richardson said, “will the Senator yield to me? Does the Senator not think that—”

  Senator Knox shook his head with an emphatic motion.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “virtually everything that can be said on this subject has been said; virtually everything that can be thought has been thought. I should like to make this brief summation of the position of those of us who oppose the nominee, then let the distinguished Senator from Arkansas summarize the position of those who favor him, and then vote. It hardly seems to me that prolonged personal controversy now would help the Senate or the country, and so I must respectfully decline to yield at this time.

  “Our reasons,” he went on, “briefly, are these. There is, first, the personal integrity of the nominee, which has shown itself in a lie direct to a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee. There are those who would attempt to dismiss this as a mere youthful peccadillo; so the event itself may have been. The concealment of it under oath, however, was a deliberate decision of maturity, and it is on that, I submit, that judgment must be rendered. To me it casts a light upon the character of the nominee so intense and so merciless that I do not see how any man could trust him further; certainly not, it seems to me, with the foreign affairs of this nation, beset as she has never been.

  “There is, second, the philosophy of the nominee, entirely aside from the episode in his past; his attitude toward the Soviet Union, toward the world in which we live, toward the future we must try to achieve.” He paused and thoughtfully, rather absently, held up a copy of the nominee’s newly published book. “I do not know, Mr. President,” he said, “whether all Senators have yet read this interesting volume, but it merits perusal. It is all of a piece with his testimony before the subcommittee. It is all of a piece with the speeches he has been making around the country.

  “It is the philosophy of a man who would, in effect, turn tail and run if the defense of principle and policy created the risk of war with the Soviet Union. Rather than stand firm, he would retreat; rather than pursue firm policies that would ward off long-run defeat, he would compromise them so severely that defeat would eventually be inevitable.

  “This book,” he said, “sets forth a program of flexibility so flexible as to be flaccid. There is nowhere in it to be found the strength that was apparent in the President’s speech. There is nowhere in it the strength which was apparent in mine. The President and I, I submit without false modesty—”

  “No one,” Jack McLaughlin of Georgia murmured to Bob Johnson of Connecticut with a chuckle, “could ever accuse Orrin of that.”

  “—draw our strength directly from the basic mood and the basic spirit of the American people. This book, and this man, do not.

  “Accommodation here is projected to the point where it would come, I think it is fair to state, dangerously close to surrender. Compromise is carried to the point of capitulation. He does not say where he would stop this process. It can be argued, with ample evidence which he himself has provided, that he would not attempt to stop it, or would attempt to stop it so late that it very like
ly could not be stopped. This is a blueprint for adjustment which verges directly upon appeasement.

  “I submit to you, Mr. President,” he said, “that America cannot afford it. Only firmness will save us now. Only a steadfast adherence to principles we know to be sound, and an absolute and unhesitating willingness to die for them if need be, will rescue America from the plight which confronts her.

  “Senators will say,” he said, and his voice grew sarcastic, “as the press says and as the nominee himself said, ‘Oh, then you want a war, Senator!’ By God,” he said, “I do not! But I know something that too many Americans, including this nominee, forget, and that is that unless we are prepared to accept the possibility of war and act fearlessly in defense of our principles in spite of it, then war will come as certainly as that clock above the Chair will presently strike the hour of twelve midnight.

  “Either we are fearless and firm, or we will be nibbled away, paralyzed by our own fears which this man so suavely and smoothly reflects and expresses.

  “Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I am done. There are many reasons of my own why I oppose this nominee, and many of them are known to you. The overriding reasons, and the one I think the Senate should endorse, is the one I have just discussed. He is weak in a time when we need strength. We simply cannot afford him.”

  There was a burst of applause from the galleries as he sat down, instantly met by a wave of hisses, and the Vice President used the gavel vigorously.

  “The Chair will advise visitors,” he said sharply, “that they are here as guests of the Senate. They will be silent, or they will be removed.”

  “What’s with Harley?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch whispered to the Chicago Tribune. “He sounds almost presidential.” “Maybe he’s heard the word,” the Chicago Tribune said with a rather grim chuckle. “Lord, I hope not!” the Post-Dispatch exclaimed.