"Advise and Consent"

[fiefoe]

Allen Drury made the Senator from Utah out to be such a paragon that you know he's in for a world of hurt even before the coy allusions to his orientation. The book is majesticly eloquent, and makes high drama out of senate roll-calls, but it's also distinctively from another era, when a political novel can get away with not identifying the party affiliation of any character in the book.

• “I’m not so sure,” Bob Munson said dourly. “I’m not so sure. Any mind that can reduce the appointment of a United States Secretary of State to a parochial political problem of how to lick Seab Cooley has a lot of staying power.…
• they hurry back to their lodestone and their star, their self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from
• They come, they stay, they make their mark, writing big or little on their times, in the strange, fantastic, fascinating city that mirrors so faithfully their strange, fantastic, fascinating land in which there are few absolute wrongs or absolute rights, few all-blacks or all-whites, few dead-certain positives that won’t be changed tomorrow; their wonderful, mixed-up, blundering, stumbling, hopeful land in which evil men do good things and good men do evil in a way of life and government so complex and delicately balanced that only Americans can understand it and often they are baffled.
• the soft-voiced and wistfully willful senior Senator from Minnesota
• Inexorably, perhaps inevitably, May had become like so many wives of famous men in Washington—not exactly loved by her husband, not exactly disliked, not exactly criticized, not exactly tolerated, but just someone who had been married a long, long time ago when the world was young and who was inextricably part of the show now with no way to get around it.
• Of course, that was the thing about Washington, really; you didn’t have to be born to anything, you could just buy your way in. “Any bitch with a million bucks, a nice house, a good caterer, and the nerve of a grand larcenist can become a social success in Washington,” people said cattily, and indeed it was entirely true.
• “Darling,” she had said firmly, “You know as well as I do that the first thing people have to forget is their sense of the ridiculous. Otherwise nobody could ever do anything.”
• The sures, Stanley explained, were Murfee Andrews of Kentucky, Dick Althouse of Maryland, Cliff Boland of Mississippi, Powell Hanson of North Dakota—and Stanley Danta. “That’s a handsome nest egg to start with,” Senator Munson remarked dryly. “What about Brig?”
• Anyway, I take it you’re in a position of benevolent neutrality at the moment.” Senator Knox snorted. “A rather flowery way to put it,” he said.
• Charles Abbott of New Hampshire observed, coming over and breaking in as was his wont. His face of a very old angel who had taken a detour through hell looked even more raddled than usual today,
• Under the swinging chandeliers in the great white portico at Vagaries the Cadillacs, the Chryslers, the Chevys, and the Fords were driving up to discharge their chattering, self-important cargo, the men encased in tuxedoes like a stream of glistening beetles, the women gussied-up fit to kill.
• This was heightened by the inevitable he’s-on-his-way-out atmosphere that was already beginning to surround him. This inexorable attrition of prestige, which could reduce a man’s influence in Washington overnight, was now at work on the outgoing Secretary; the greetings he was receiving were just a little vague, a little absent-minded, a little oh-so-you’re-still-here; the fervent cordiality of yesterday was giving way to the half-puzzled, half-forgetful greeting of tomorrow.
• Just behind them there was a slight commotion and on a burst of cold air, a wave of perfume, and the little extra excitement that always accompanied their entrance no matter what the troubles of their ancient and indomitable land, the British Ambassador and his lady swept into view,
• he knew with a calm certainty that in his presence K.K. would never relax, that in the presence of the British it would be generations before any educated Indian could really relax, that there would always be this self-conscious, faintly hostile, faintly cringing relationship, and in spite of himself he felt a mild but satisfied contempt.
• The author of the story obviously didn’t know exactly what, but by keeping his eyes open and his intuition untrammeled, by mixing a scrap of information with a hunk of conjecture and building twenty bricks with two pieces of straw, he had managed to come up with a good, sound, typical piece of informed Washington correspondence.
• “How does the State Department do it?” And sure enough, in came Howard Sheppard in a dark blue pin-stripe suit whose cuffs and pants-legs appeared to be cut just a trifle too short for him; and in after him came ten assistants. Some were in their thirties, some were in their forties, some were in their fifties, but to them all there clung an ineffable effluvium of faintly seedy youthfulness. Some had pipes and some had briefcases and all had the same expression of secret purpose and superior knowledge; and each was clad in a dark blue pin-stripe suit whose cuffs and pants-legs appeared to be cut just a trifle too short for him.
• Confronted by these determined and forceful gentlemen, the Corps of Engineers is not in the least dismayed. Serene in the knowledge that they are proprietors of the lobby which is, year in and year out, the most ruthless, the most effective and the most untouchable on Capitol Hill, its high-ranking officers are going through this annual charade with unperturbed suavity. In the comfortable Siamese-twin relationship which exists between the Corps and the Appropriations committees of the two houses, the Engineers know that when they reach to scratch their own backs they will also give solace to some solon, in the process ease the Corps of Engineers. In close harmony and perfect accord they will spend the public monies together and both will be happy.
• Because he was violent in his rages and monumental in his public passions, and because he staged his effects with a shrewdly calculated flamboyance that increased over the years as he grew surer of his power, he was easy to label. But his colleagues knew, as they always know, that the easy label very rarely fits a United States Senator,
• “That’s a safe prediction,” Verne Cramer observed. “When egghead meets egghead it’s no yolk, right, Robert?” “You’re a real funny man,” the Majority Leader told him. “Or,” Senator Cramer said, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggheads. How’s that?”
• the two men seated at opposite ends of the witness table, the one so dignified, handsome, steady and sure, the other so wisplike, isolated and alone, yet filled with the fearful tensile strength of the righteous weak. Then someone coughed, the nominee leaned forward, the press tables stirred, the committee members shifted, there was an angry exclamation from somewhere among the television cameras, the moment broke, the picture moved and was lost.
• he concluded in a tone from which he made no attempt to exclude the triumph, for he knew he had caught them all flat-footed, “I do now so move.” At this suggestion, unorthodox, dramatic, and, as the older and more experienced heads could instantly see, exactly the sort of arbitrary move of which ideal headlines and ideal demagoguery are made, there was a stir all across the Senate and a number of Senators jumped up and began demanding recognition.
• Even as he did so he had time to reflect how little opportunity one had to ever really delve very far beneath the surfaces of these ninety-nine utterly independent and crotchety prima donnas,
• “Mr. President,” he said with the deliberate slowness that any good strategist uses when things have rushed to a peak of tension and time-gaining is the principal objective,
• Munson and many another on the floor and in the press gallery kept score on the long white tally sheets; Arly Richardson saying a scornful No, his distant cousin, chubby little Leo P. Richardson of Florida countering with a firm “Aye!”; Courtney Robinson, Hugh Root, Taylor Ryan, all No; Stu Schoenfeldt of Pennsylvania, Aye; Raymond Robert Smith of California, over-dapper and over-elegant, Aye; the Ts, the Vs, with Luis Valdez of New Mexico saying No, and Fred Van Ackerman a defiant Aye; Julius Welch, Aye; Allen Whiteside of Florida, Aye, Herbert Wilson of Georgia, No, and a great expulsion of pent-in breath from the Senate and the press as a hasty tabulation showed the vote at forty Yeas, forty-one Nays.
• 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.
• 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 treetops 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.
• a friendly attitude toward humanity that humanity found flattering and always responded
• If he had his moody times, and there was a strain in him that prompted them more often than his friends could have imagined, he kept them to himself, and hardly anyone ever suspected they were there. Only once had one of his fraternity brothers, sitting across from him one night in some little bar south of Market Street and noting a fleeting expression of restless melancholy on his face, dared to take a long gamble and ask quietly, “It isn’t easy, is it?”
• Quite often he found, first with surprise and then with his usual calm acceptance of life, it would be fellow officers or enlisted men, many of them married, to whom his unfailing kindness and decency seemed to indicate possibilities they felt they must test out, apparently with the idea that it probably wasn’t true, but wouldn’t it be wonderful for them if it were. With a sort of diffident hunger their eyes had looked at him and in them all he had read the same message.
• He was not a “mimeograph Senator,” one of those frantic types who get themselves elected, usually quite young, and then spend their days sending handout after handout to the press gallery and making speech after speech in the Senate on every conceivable topic under the sun to the point where they are soon dismissed with a grin and a shrug. Such desperation for the limelight was not in him, and furthermore both instinct and a shrewd appraisal of the Senate told him that this was not the way to get along, or to achieve the position of influence and power he foresaw for himself.
• solid, easygoing, and likeable exterior there lived what was basically a highly independent and lone-wolf character: if anything, the years had strengthened the tendency to that. The self-reliance he had shown so early, the ability to smile and keep his counsel and go his own way had been steadily strengthened, in school, in war, in politics.
• And since a long memory reminded Seab that among other facts brought out about the Secretary at the time of his confirmation three years ago had been his age, which was roughly that of the nominee, and the fact that he had taught law at the University of Chicago for a time while building up his personal practice, all that remained was to have the gambler’s instinct and the gambler’s will to take a chance that in this case Herbert Gelman might be right, and to act upon it in a way that would permit of no evasions. This he had done, calling the Secretary’s home and announcing in a tone of soft menace when he answered, “This is Senator Cooley, James Morton.”
• 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,
• “So we affirm our belief in the validity of Brig’s action at the start and then turn right around and cast doubt on it at the end,” the Majority Leader observed wryly. “And by approving the validity of his action we imply we believe Leffingwell’s at fault and then we turn right around and say we aren’t judging whether he is or not,” Senator DeWilton added. “And all in three sentences,” John Winthrop said with a chuckle. “Rarely has there been a finer or more outstanding example of the unequivocal and unflinching stand of this great body on anything.”
• “We have met this morning to discuss the decision of the chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Anderson, to reopen the hearings on the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State. “We are satisfied that his reasons for this action are valid and warrant further study. “This in no way indicates that we have reached a final judgment on Mr. Leffingwell, or on the wisdom of reopening the hearings.
• “We will,” he said, and for a moment his eyes held hers with some expression she could not understand, one of the many she could not, and never had been able to, understand. “Be of good cheer,” he quoted softly. “The troops are with me.”
• “Oh, hell,” Lafe said. “Now this will be all over town and everybody will know I’ve been deputized to bring you back onto the reservation. But here we go.… Ladies,” he said graciously. “See No Evil,”—he bowed to Dolly—“Hear No Evil,”—he bowed to Kitty—“and Speak No Evil.”—he bowed to Celestine, who smiled. “Since we’re in the presence of chastity and purity,” Dolly said with a little twinkle, “it would of course be impossible to see, hear, speak, or even think of evil.”
• But presently, being a fair and decent man, his native calm and tolerance returned and he reflected that after all, the President had his problems too and was of course as fully concerned as he was, and so soon he came back to the assumption that they were both reasonable men who could talk it over quietly, once they were face to face, and work out a solution together. He did not understand then that in the short space of ten minutes he had made solution of their disagreement forever impossible; and looking back later when he finally did understand and fully realized all the terrible consequences it had brought upon him, he knew, so well did he know his own character, his own integrity, and his own high concept of duty to the country, that even so he could have done no differently than he had.
• Nor, indeed, could Mr. Justice Davis, approaching the Majority Leader’s office shortly before 4 PM with that combination of inner trepidation and defiant determination with which basically well-meaning men become involved in enterprises they know they shouldn’t really be engaged in, but nonetheless feel impelled to.
• “If he is standing in the way,” Senator Munson said soberly, “it is because he is being true to his own integrity and his own concept of what is best for the country. Can you and I,” he asked slowly, “say the same thing at this particular moment?” At this Justice Davis became very still, and, if anything, paler. But he also began to look a little stubborn and a little resentful. I believe I am doing this for the country,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly do it otherwise, Bob. Don’t you know me well enough to know that?” The Majority Leader gave a sad and bitter smile. “Nobody in this town,” he said, “ever does anything except for the best of motives. I’ve never known a major issue yet in which all sides didn’t claim, even as they slaughtered one another, that they were inspired by the noblest of reasons. Well, what is this—thing you have?”
• “No, indeed,” he said. “I thought I should talk to you first. This is a Senate matter.” Bob Munson shook his head with a helpless air. “What a set of values,” he said, “that you could think of such a nicety in such a connection.” Justice Davis flushed.
• for nature had favored him well, and tonight everything seemed to conspire to set it off. As he reached the car he turned back for a moment to wave, and the flat rays of the late afternoon sun, flooding through the trees and over the world, bathed his compact figure in a sudden glow, highlighted the sunburn in his cheeks, lent a ruddy tinge to his hair. She always remembered him as he looked at that moment, on that clear, gentle evening with a warm wind blowing, standing there in his white coat, black tie and black trousers, a smile on his lips, a confident look on his face, the level dark eyes carrying an expression of kindness and decency, his whole aspect steady and sure, his being caught and held in one of those rare moments of absolute physical perfection that come only fleetingly even to the most favored.
• the Senator from Utah is looking disapproving, and you all know what a monumentally disapproving young man he can be—this is your story.” His head came up in its challenging way and the fatherly eyes no longer looked fatherly but cold and strong and unyielding. “You can tell your readers that the President of the United States is standing by his nominee. You can tell them he hasn’t heard anything to persuade him that he shouldn’t.
• Now. Is it not possible that a mind that self-protective, a mind that strong—yes, if you like, a mind that arrogant and unyielding—may be just exactly what we need in dealing with the Russians? Isn’t it possible that exactly those qualities that have enabled him to go through a public hearing under the eyes of the whole world and deny his own past without ever turning a hair may be exactly the sort of qualities that would enable him to give the Russians blow for blow and match them iron for iron?
• I think any ordinary mortal would have some difficulty in portraying duplicity as a strength, or even considering it as such, but you seem to have managed.” “Presidents aren’t ordinary mortals,” Brigham Anderson said shortly. “That’s what he’ll tell you.” “That’s right,” their host agreed, quite without egotism. “Ordinary mortals don’t reach this chair.
• No, I won’t give you my word not to do something, when it may be the very thing I will have to do to protect the country. Now let me see the picture.” The Majority Leader felt for one wild second that he should turn and run, that he was so close to the absolute essence of the American Presidency, in the presence of a dedication so severe, so lonely, and so terrible, so utterly removed from the normal morality that holds society together, that he should flee from it before the revelation proved too shattering and some great and dreadful damage was done to Brig, to him, to the President, the country, and the world. But men do not often act on such impulses, which are immediately thwarted by reminders that this is the workaday world, after all, and here they are, after all, and such gestures would be completely irrational, after all, and what in the hell are they thinking about, after all; and so they do not do them. Instead with a bitter expression on his face he extracted the envelope from his pocket and tossed it on the President’s desk with much the same desperate unhappiness that Mr. Justice Davis had initially felt when giving it to him.
• But this change, so abrupt, so uncharacteristic, so utterly unexpected in one who had always seemed so strong and above any real need for her, so terrified her that she could hardly speak; and so instead of realizing that this was the moment to go to him, to accept and not ask questions, to give him the strength he had never asked from her but desperately needed now, and that if she did they might weather whatever it was and he would be hers forever, she gave a sudden cry and ran from the room.
• that it was possible for such things to be smoothed over and hushed up and forgotten and everything to proceed as before. There was a sort of necessary workaday hypocrisy, as inescapable here as it was back home on a thousand Main Streets, that imposed its own adjustments on a society caught in the overriding need to keep things going. More often than the country suspected this enforced a combination of front-door idealism and backdoor acceptance of human realities that worked its own imperatives upon such situations.
• For there was just one little qualification to be made about the self-protective nature of official Washington society: anything could be forgiven in the capital if the troops were with you and the right ox was being gored;
• Bill Kanaho. The senior Senator from Hawaii nodded. “Gone downhill some in recent years, as I told Fred,” he said, “but it’s still there.” And for just a second he looked very quickly and shrewdly at his young colleague with the appraising, dispassionate curiosity of a thousand years of China and Japan and Malaysia and Polynesia that had come out of the far reaches of the Pacific to settle in the Islands and produce one day a Senator of the United States.
• “Thought it best to take Pidge to Beth’s,” it said. “Will be back to fix your dinner and talk later.” Attached to it with a straight pin was an envelope with Mabel’s name typed on it, apparently delivered by Western Union messenger.
• But I urge you to read what I have to say in the Senate on Monday. There in that great forum where this pretender of moral virtues presumes to sit”—and where, his victim reflected bitterly, he would be protected by legislative immunity and could not be sued or silenced, except by a claim of personal privilege it would be an admission to make—“there, I will tell you exactly how morally unfit he is.
• the Lincoln Bed: proud George and two tart Adamses, thoughtful Tom and angry Andy, careful Van the Used-up Man, Tippecanoe and Tyler too, patient Abe and steady Grover, bouncing Teddy and farseeing Woodrow, prickly-pickley Calvin, stolid-solid Herbert, dashing Franklin, headstrong Harry, General Don’t-Tell-Me-Your-Troubles, and the rest. See them pass, calm, imperious, frozen into history, all passion spent, all battles over, defeats forgotten, victories recorded, everything neat and orderly and ruffled no more by the bitter passions and emotions that swirled about them in their time. Impassive and impervious, they stare back at him in the night, unable or unwilling to respond when he asks them, as he always does, the constantly recurring question for which there will never be an answer: “What would you have done?
• Harley Hudson had smiled. “I’m going to see him after I leave here,” he said, “and maybe there is. Still and all, I would like to do the right thing—if I can.” Senator Knox had turned away, for this was a decision he had made months ago, and as far as he knew, none of his delegates had been bought with any pledge of Federal preferment. “I’m sorry,” he said, staring out the window across almost-deserted Lake Shore Drive to the dim emptiness of Lake Michigan beyond. “Certain fundamentals a man has to stand by in this world. I’m standing by that. I hope you’ll be with me tomorrow morning.”
• then wound up, more slowly, loud and clear. He and thirty of his fellow delegates, he announced in high dudgeon, were tired of being bossed, and they were going to vote for Senator Knox, and they didn’t give a damn what happened to them. A hall which had produced all the sound human lungs could make found that it could produce even more. Somehow the roll was completed, the secretary and the tally clerks went into a huddle, the room that had been filled with insane noise an instant before became so still only the hurrying, sibilant clatter of a thousand typewriters and the ringing of their little bells in the press section broke the silence. The secretary stepped forward and in a trembling voice once more announced a deadlock.
• that he had said one of those things, hasty, horrible, not really meant but gone beyond retrieving, that break a heart, destroy a friendship, ruin a plan, or lose a nomination. He could see Harley’s startled, changing expression, he tried to shout an apology, to change it, to retract it, but the noise in the Amphitheater was too overwhelming, he could not surmount it. They stood for a long moment staring at one another, suspended there on the platform above the hysterical sea, locked in a sort of embrace-of-the-eyes in the hissing, rustling, screaming, pounding uproar.
• the bright new gadget broke down a week after you got it home, the prices climbed higher and higher as the quality got less and less, and the old-fashioned rule of a fair bargain for a fair price was indeed old-fashioned, for it never applied to anything. The great Age of the Shoddy came upon America after the war, and Everybody Wants His became the guiding principle for far too many. With it came the Age of the Shrug, the time when it was too hard and too difficult and too bothersome to worry about tomorrow, or even very much about today, when the problems of world leadership were too large and too insistent and too frightening to be grasped
• Of course he didn’t want a war; he just wanted an end to this flabby damned mushy nothingness that his country had turned herself into. And he particularly wanted an end to the sort of flabby damned thinking that the nominee and his kind represented—the kind of thinking, growing out of the secret inner knowledge that a given plan of action is of course completely empty and completely futile, which forces those who embark upon it to tell themselves brightly that maybe if the enemy will just be reasonable the world will become paradise overnight and everything will be hunky-dory. It was quite obvious to Senator Knox that the enemy would never be reasonable until the day he could dictate the terms of American surrender,
• the problem in the Senate and the White House was essentially the same for men who did not wish to see their country cast herself away through sheer default.
• But you can believe what I said about Leffingwell. As sure as Shiva made little naked statues, you can believe that.” “I hope not, Hal,” the Ambassador said. “I really think my government desires him very much to be in that position.” “It’s a family matter,” Senator Fry said. “Even in India you must know enough to stay out of family matters. Goodbye again, K.K. I’ve just decided which it’s going to be. I’m going to cry.”
• “Apparently not,” the Miami Herald said. “Nothing on the wire services, and they would have picked it up if anybody had. We’re really being very decent.” “That’s nice of us,” the Inquirer observed, “seeing as how we helped to hound him to death.… Well, I still think there’s somebody left who’s for Leffingwell.”
• there had been a monumental nerve and gall about it that had both repelled and fascinated him. This, he supposed, was greatness—this ineffable combination of sincerity, insincerity, straightforwardness, duplicity, determination, adaptability, and sheer downright guts. Thank God he wasn’t great, he told himself with a surge of innocent relief. He would settle for being just what he was, which might not be so very brilliant but at least left him feeling comfortable with himself. He would settle for that, and so, he hoped and believed, would the country, if it should have to come to that.
• “I understood it,” Hal said, “but it hardly seemed logical.” He grinned. “Doesn’t yet, as far as that goes, only now it doesn’t matter whether it’s logical or not. That’s the least of the things that matter.” “I thought it was a clear and objective discussion,” Orrin observed. “Factual, straightforward, and to the point.” “It was,” Hal agreed. “It certainly was. It was a good basic presentation. I felt I was well-launched.” “When did you get your pilot’s license?” his father asked dryly, and was pleased to see that it was his son who was blushing.
• “Orrin,” the Speaker said, “this is a nice surprise for us lowly characters of the House. To what do we owe the honor?” “It isn’t an honor, Bill,” he said with a smile. “I’m just hiding out.”
• 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.
• For this of course was by no means an ideal solution for anything, but rather an astute and practical move to both mollify and win the active support of the many vocal and powerful elements that had backed the nominee. In this it was both politically perceptive and quite symbolic of the government in which it occurred. In a way, he thought sardonically, this was a perfect democratic solution, not wholly satisfying anybody, not wholly antagonizing anybody, not white, not black, not good, not bad; pragmatic, realistic, sensible within the context and climate in which the President, any President, must operate if he would lead his widely diverse land; and gratifying completely neither the idealistic who had opposed Robert A. Leffingwell nor the idealistic who had supported him.