by Allen Drury
Evidently everything was going to be all right.
It was therefore in a relaxed and friendly mood, humming a little tune as he plowed along, that he came to the Majority Leader’s office once again and, entering, found himself confronted by the three of them. They looked, as he could instantly see, rather ill at ease and not too happy about the way things were going.
“Now, then,” he said expansively, for there was no need to keep everybody edgy, “it’s nice to see you, Congressman, and you, too, again, Bob and Orrin. I hope the world is treating you well, now, Congressman, I truly do.”
“Well enough, thank you, Senator,” Cullee said evenly. “And you, sir, I hope.”
“Oh, fine, thank you. Quite fine. Now, Orrin and Bob, why don’t you—”
“We’re just going, Seab,” the Majority Leader said quickly. “Don’t kick me out of my own office, now.”
“Offered mine, Bob, but you said—”
“Yes, Seab, we appreciate your coming,” Orrin Knox said hurriedly. “Come on, Bob, let’s go down to the floor and see Tom August. I’d like to have him get this thing through Foreign Relations Committee tomorrow morning, if we can.”
“Orrin still thinks he’s running the Senate, Bob,” Senator Cooley said with a lazy grin. “You just watch Orrin now, else he’ll be running this old Senate again. Can’t have that, Bob. No, sir, can’t have that.”
“I didn’t do so badly, in my day,” the Secretary said. “Cullee, thank you for coming. We’ll see you both later.”
“Yes,” the Congressman said, in the same even tone.
After they had gone, he and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate remained for several minutes silent and constrained in the comfortable room littered with the photographs and political memorabilia of the Majority Leader’s long career in Washington. Both seemed disposed to examine these, Cullee because he felt tense and nervous and at first uncertain how to proceed with the formidable old man before him, Seab Cooley because he felt disinclined under the circumstances to lord it over the boy but felt instead that he should give him a moment or two to calm down before Cullee began his inevitable offer of compromise. It was with some surprise therefore that he became aware that a great stillness, as palpable almost as Bob Munson’s leather armchair, had come over the Congressman; and began to perceive, with the first flickering of alarm, that it was not the stillness of diffidence but the stillness of determination that had settled upon the handsome black face across the room. More quickly than he had intended, caught slightly off balance, not yet really worried, but puzzled, he broke the silence first.
“Well, sir,” he said, intending to put the boy—or was it himself?—at ease, “why don’t we sit down, now, and talk this over quietly?”
“Would you ask me to sit down if we were in South Carolina and not in Congress, Senator?” Cullee asked quickly, and it was not at all the sort of remark Seab Cooley had expected. It was not insolent, just curious: but it was not the type of curiosity he was used to from the dutifully genuflecting Negroes he knew in South Carolina. Not that they genuflected from fear of him, because he was very well liked by the colored race; he had done a great deal for them in his years in office, and they called him “the Old Senator” and were honestly fond of him. But—they just didn’t question. At least the older ones didn’t. The younger, he was uncomfortably aware, were beginning to talk like Cullee.
“Why,” he said, “I expect I would ask you to sit down if we were in South Carolina. I’d invite any member of Congress to sit down in South Carolina and be honored to do it, sir. Honored to do it. Does that surprise you, now, Congressman? Is that a surprising thing?”
Cullee gave him a long look, his expression unfathomable. Then he gave an ironic little smile and shook his head.
“No, Senator, it doesn’t surprise me that you’d invite any member of Congress to sit down in South Carolina. Please take the Majority Leader’s chair, if you’d like. I’m going to try the sofa.”
And with the casual grace of body that those who are athletes in youth never entirely lose, he turned away and let himself sink comfortably into it while the Senator from South Carolina, feeling oddly as though the interview were getting far out of hand, moved after a moment behind the big oak desk to sit in Bob Munson’s chair. Again a silence fell.
“How soon do you think we’ll be able to adjourn, Senator?” Cullee asked finally, and Seab recognized the remark for what it must be, an indirect opening to give the Congressman a chance to make his bid for compromise. This was better, and he decided to be as helpful as possible in moving the subject along.
“Well, sir,” he said, “as soon as we can get finished with your resolution, I think. I think that’s when, when we get finished up with that. And you know more about when that will be than I do, I expect. Isn’t that correct?”
“Not I, Senator,” the Congressman said with a smile whose import Senator Cooley could not determine. “I think that’s up to you.”
“Oh, sir?” Seab Cooley said in a less friendly voice. “And how is that, may I ask?”
“I understand you are ready to accept a compromise and drop your opposition. That ought to put it through the Senate tomorrow, shouldn’t it? Then we can go home.”
“I, sir?” Seab Cooley demanded, with an ominously rising inflection. “I compromise? Who said I would compromise? It is you who I am told will compromise, not I. That is why you are here, is it not?”
“No, sir,” Cullee Hamilton said in a level tone. “I understood it was why you are here.”
“But Bob told me—” Senator Cooley began. The Congressman interrupted.
“And Orrin told me.”
Again there was silence, and now Cullee Hamilton realized he was seeing something that few men living had ever seen: uncertainty and dismay on the face of Seabright B. Cooley. Perhaps in his earliest days men had seen that—assuredly there were some far back who had—but it had been many and many a long year, the Congressman was sure, since the sight had been permitted anyone. Probably before he was born, he thought with a feeling both awed and sad; probably that long ago.
“Now, sir,” the old man said with a careful softness that somehow seemed suddenly pathetic, “let me understand this. You thought I was giving in and I thought you were giving in. Appears to me somebody’s mighty mixed up, Congressman.”
“Yes, sir,” Cullee said quietly. “I wonder which of us it is.”
“My good friends gave me to believe you wanted to see me,” Senator Cooley went on, still in the same careful way, “because you wanted to propose substantial changes in language that would help your resolution go through the Senate. Not that I’d stop opposing it, mind, but it wouldn’t be so hard for me to let it go through, finally, if that was what the Administration really felt it must ask of us. But that wasn’t the way you heard it.”
“No, Senator, it wasn’t. Not ‘substantial.’”
“I wonder how I could have heard it that way?” Seab said thoughtfully, and the Congressman had the strange feeling that the old man was talking to himself and that he, Cullee, wasn’t in the room at all as far as the Senator was concerned.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said.
“You heard that I was giving in, was that it?” Seab Cooley asked, and abruptly he was back in focus on his opponent, the sleepy old eyes examining him sharply from under their weathered lids, the pugnacious old jaw stuck out. Cullee nodded.
“Yes, sir,” he said, not the “sir” demanded of color but the “sir” required by respect. “I was given to understand that you would filibuster against the resolution as it stands, but that a very minor change that would enable you to make a protest for the record and then yield gracefully would be satisfactory to you. I said that if you asked me for it I would probably be agreeable, and I thought that was why you were here.”
“Ask a colored man?” Seab Cooley said, and Cullee knew that all chance of agreement was over. “Ask a colored man? Why, boy, what made you think that?�
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“Because we have the votes to beat you,” the Congressman said, trying hard to remain steady under the furious anger that suddenly surged in his heart, “and we will do so. With your co-operation or without it. That’s why.”
“Ask a colored man?” Senator Cooley repeated, and suddenly the Congressman’s tight control snapped into open fury.
“Yes, ask a colored man! Why is that so difficult for you to understand, Senator? Day’s coming when you and your land will be asking colored men for a lot of things, don’t you know that? At least,” and sarcasm edged the anger, “I didn’t require you to ask me in public. I gave you the chance to do it privately, though I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I knew how you’d be. I just knew it.”
“How can I be other than what I am?” Senator Cooley asked. “I was raised to think a certain way. I do think that way. Surely you don’t expect me to change now. Surely not!”
“Yet you expect me to, Senator. I was raised in a certain way, too, and not the old way of always giving in when the white man says ‘jump!’ I don’t jump, Senator. Can’t you understand that?”
“I don’t understand lots of things that go on nowadays,” Seab Cooley said, and again for a moment there was the revelation of a tired and baffled old man, touching and disturbing to Cullee Hamilton even as he knew the interview could have only one outcome now. “I thought I could end my years in honor, not betrayed by my friends into begging from a colored boy. Even,” he said with a small trace of smile, “as fine a one as I believe you to be.”
“It isn’t a matter of color any more, Senator, don’t you see,” Cullee told him, and almost in spite of himself his tone became gentler and more considerate. “It’s a matter of who has the votes. And I have. Now, I will agree to one change in my resolution”—and he read it off from the piece of paper on which he and Orrin Knox had jotted it down—“and that is all. You can take it, make your speech for the record, if you like, and be defeated; or you can refuse it, filibuster, and be defeated. Your choice, Senator. Not mine.”
“You still have the South in your voice a little,” Seab Cooley said, apparently apropos of nothing but, as Cullee was quite aware, very much to the point of their conversation. “You from Georgia originally?”
“I came from Lena,” the Congressman said, and the old man leaned forward quickly.
“Then you know what I have done for your race since I have been in Washington. Better schools, improved conditions, better housing, the school-lunch program—why,” he said, and a genuine pride came into his voice—“I expect as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee I’ve helped to pass and pay for more things to help the Negroes than any other man in Congress. And they know it and they’re grateful, too! Yes, sir, they know it and they are grateful. They know what it means to have a true friend in Washington to watch over them. They haven’t forgotten all Seab Cooley’s done!”
“I don’t deny you’ve done a great deal for the colored race, Senator, and I don’t deny that many other Southerners in Congress have done a great deal. But the thing you evidently can’t see is that it’s all been so damned patronizing. We want you to do things for us because you like us, not because you’re ‘watching over us’! Can’t you ever understand that?”
“No, sir,” Senator Cooley said with complete truthfulness, “I cannot.”
“Then it is hopeless,” Cullee Hamilton said dully. “It really is, not just this, but everything.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Seab Cooley said, “but if you mean you expect me to give in on this resolution just so you can flatter your own ego, you have another think coming. Yes, sir, another think. That’s really what you want, isn’t it, just to flatter your own ego that you made Seab Cooley beg? How are you any better than you claim we are, when you have a motive as shabby as that, Congressman? Tell me that, now!”
“I don’t know,” Cullee said in a tired voice. “Maybe I’m not. Maybe nobody’s perfect. Maybe we’re all mixed up in our motivations. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I have the votes and the resolution’s going through.”
“I consider that entire last paragraph an insult to the United States and to all the fine white people who have tried to help the Negro all these years,” Senator Cooley said. “But, sir, I sometimes think you’re beyond help. Yes, sir, I sometimes think you’re beyond help!”
“Maybe we’re all beyond help, Senator,” Congressman Hamilton said. “Maybe that’s the secret history has waiting for us … Anyway, I said it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t. I was willing to meet you halfway on a compromise, but you don’t want it, so we’ll have to go ahead as things are. Unless you want to change your mind right now.”
“No, sir,” Senator Cooley said. “It may defeat me, it may be the death of me, but I’ll fight it through my way, because that’s how I am. Yes, sir.”
“I, too,” said Cullee Hamilton. “So be it.”
And when he called the Secretary of State down in the Majority cloakroom a few minutes later to tell him the result of the discussion, “So be it” was what Orrin said, too; and within half an hour the word was all over the Senate, seeping into the press, spilling over into radio and television, circulating through the corridors and the ever-chattering Lounge at the United Nations, carried around the globe, that the Senate would enter a no-compromise, no-holds-barred battle over the Hamilton Resolution on the morrow. The plan, said Chairman Tom August of Minnesota to the AP and UPI, was to approve the resolution in the Foreign Relations Committee in the morning, take it straight to the floor under a suspension of the rules, and pass it by nightfall.
“But what if Senator Cooley filibusters?” the reporters asked.
“So be it,” said Tom August, who was not one to let a good phrase lie.
Both the Majority Leader and the Secretary of State took occasion during the evening to call the senior Senator from South Carolina, and both found him embittered by what he regarded as their betrayal and determined to filibuster if necessary to stop the resolution. Both apologized, both implored him to reconsider, both found him adamant. Both regretted it, but both were committed to the course they had chosen, and both, reluctantly but diligently, proceeded to push it forward.
Bob Munson began telephoning and firming up his votes. Orrin Knox did the same. By midnight they were sure they had enough to pass the resolution as it stood by a comfortable margin. Only one thing puzzled and disturbed the Secretary. When he tried to reach the Senate members of the U.S. delegation to the UN in New York, he was unable to; and when Bob Munson finally did get through to Lafe Smith around 1 a.m., he found him evasive and noncommittal as to whether he and Hal Fry could come down for the vote. Hal had gone to bed, tired out, Lafe said, and they would not know until tomorrow whether either one, or both, could make it.
In the meantime, Lafe said, everybody at the UN was vitally interested in the outcome of the Senate debate, and much that would occur subsequently in the house by the East River would hinge upon it.
“I know that,” the Majority Leader said with some asperity. “Why do you suppose we’re breaking our necks over this thing down here? We expect you and Hal to do the same up there as soon as we’re finished here.”
“We will,” Lafe said calmly. “I think you can count on us both.”
“I hope so,” Bob Munson told him. “Orrin doesn’t want to have to make any changes in the delegation at this late date.”
“Orrin won’t make any changes. If any changes are made—” He broke off. “Stop worrying. You do your job and we’ll do ours, Robert, okay?”
“Well,” the Majority Leader said, puzzled but perforce agreeable. “Okay.”
6
The next day, just before noon, coming down the center aisle of the Senate to his desk and the circle of alert reporters who awaited him there he was still puzzled by this cryptic conversation with the Senator from Iowa. It was not the greatest of Bob Munson’s worries, by any means; but it nagged away at a corner of his mind in a wa
y that made him know he was going to come back to it later and get an explanation. Perhaps Orrin had one. He planned to come up to the Hill later in the afternoon, and possibly they could talk about it then.
In the meantime, here were his friends of the press.
“Bob,” the Wall Street Journal said, “we hear Seab’s going to filibuster. Are you ready for him?”
“My, my, the things you do hear,” Senator Munson said, looking up at the rapidly filling galleries, many black faces among the white, an air of rustling, subdued excitement in the room. “He hasn’t told me. Where’d you get that—from the New York Times?”
“We don’t read each other except in the West Coast editions,” the Times told him, “so that couldn’t possibly be it. Anybody else going to go with the old boy on this, Bob, or will he be alone?”
“Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Seab may have a few things to say—it would be a strange day in the Senate if he didn’t, on a major issue—but I expect when he’s finished we’ll go ahead and vote on the resolution.”
“Without change?” asked AP.
“Without change.”
“We thought there was some talk of a compromise with Cullee Hamilton—” UPI began. The Majority Leader smiled.
“There’s always talk of compromise, around the Senate. These old walls are made of compromise. This old floor rests on compromise. The ceiling would fall if it weren’t kept up by the steadily blowing breezes of compromise. But on this resolution—?” He shrugged and smiled across the aisle at Warren Strickland, the Minority Leader. “I haven’t heard of any compromise, have you, Warren?”
“Not lately,” Senator Strickland said. “Not since young Cullee laid down the law to Seab, anyway.”