A Shade of Difference (6 page)

Contemplating the results of it all, Senator Robert Munson of Michigan will be inclined to think that the first reactions in Washington were the right ones; although, being aware with what imperfect knowledge and imperfect understanding the human race moves toward its mysterious and shrouded destiny, he will conclude honestly that, after all, the decisions taken may have been the right ones, or, at any rate, no worse than any others that might have been adopted.

Right now, however, as he takes his position at the first desk, center aisle, of the Senate and prepares to bow his head to another of the Senate Chaplain’s maundering prayers, the senior Senator from Michigan is not concerned with such philosophic musings as this. Right now the M’Bulu of Mbuele and all the events and people about to be involved with him are among the least important items in the world of Bob Munson. He is aware that the United Nations is engaged in one more controversy about one more would-be African state, and he has followed its general outlines in the press. But he is much more concerned at the moment with the practical problems involved in bringing to conclusion the Senate’s debate on the foreign aid bill, and in pushing his balky and cantankerous colleagues toward an adjournment that is already, in late September, several weeks overdue.

It has not been his idea, Senator Munson reflects with some impatience as the clock reaches noon, the President Pro Tempore bangs his gavel, and the Rev. Carney Birch, Chaplain of the Senate, snuffles into another of his admonitory open letters to the Senate and the Lord, to let the Congressional session run on so long. Certainly he and the Speaker of the House would have liked to wind it up a month ago; only the President has seemed to want it prolonged. Since his return from Geneva and the growing public praise and acclaim which have mounted steadily as the world has begun to realize that it will not be blown up because of his actions, Harley has been displaying what Senator Arly Richardson of Arkansas has referred to with his customary sarcasm as “a great urge to play President.”

Leaving aside the fact that Harley of course is the President and definitely not playing at it, Arly’s casual cloakroom crack nonetheless does express a certain wry attitude on the part of the President’s former colleagues on Capitol Hill. The Executive whom
Time
magazine now hails respectfully as “the man the Soviets couldn’t scare,” and whom the editorial cartoonist of the
Washington
Post
now pictures with a certain homespun strength that was hardly noticeable in his drawings when Harley first took office, is obviously enjoying his job. Not only that, he is using it to attempt to push through certain reforms which, like most other reforms of the human, haphazard, peculiar, and peculiarly successful American system, are long overdue. Possibly spurred on by Robert A. Leffingwell, who is receiving great press commendation as director of the President’s Commission on Administrative Reform, the President has already proposed a sweeping overhaul of the Defense Department and its allied missile and space programs, a streamlining of the Foreign Service and the overseas information activities of the government, and even, God save the mark, a new farm program. This last has already caused some revision in the Congressional estimates of what he will do next year when his party holds its national nominating convention, “I really believed he meant it when he said he wouldn’t run again,” Senator Stanley Danta of Connecticut has just been quoted by
Newsweek,
“but when I saw that new farm bill I knew he’d changed his mind.”

Whether he has or not (and, queried at his press conference a week ago, the President would only chuckle and say, “My, my, you boys must be hard up for news if you can’t think of a better question than that”), and whether his burst of executive activity since returning from Geneva has been his idea or Bob Leffingwell’s, the fact remains that he has given Bob Munson a busy summer. The Majority Leader has been held to his duties as rigorously as he ever was during the tenure of the President’s predecessor. He has not complained about this, for, after all, it is his job, and it has also given his wife Dolly a chance to hold at least four extra garden parties at “Vagaries,” that great white house in Rock Creek Park, that she wouldn’t have held if they had returned to Michigan earlier in the summer. But the instinct of twenty-three years in the Senate, the last twelve of them as Majority Leader, tells him that the time has come to get the Congress out of Washington and give its members a chance to rest up from one another.

There comes a point, as Bob Munson is well aware, when Senators and Representatives have been together long enough and it is much better for the country if they can just go away, return home or travel or whatever, and forget the problems of legislating for a while. In a system resting so subtly but inescapably upon the delicate balances of human likes and dislikes, familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt but it does breed an eventual irascibility which, toward session’s end, makes the functionings of American democracy rather more subject to personal pitfalls that they should ideally be.

A fast windup to the aid debate—about two more days, Bob Munson estimates—an opportunity for a few last-minute speeches and dramatics by those Senators and Representatives who always have to have the last word for the sake of the political record and whatever headlines it may bring them, and then—home.

So thinks Robert M. Munson as Senator Tom August of Minnesota rises in the Senate to make his concluding speech on the aid bill and at the United Nations the M’Bulu of Mbuele begins to set in train the series of events that will add another ten days to the session and bring to the UN and to both houses of Congress one of the most violent and embittered controversies of recent years.

Unaware of these thoughts of adjournment passing through the mind of the Majority Leader, but fully in accord with their general import, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is also anxious to get away. Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina is just turned seventy-six—his colleagues spent all day yesterday trying to outdo one another in paying him tribute, except for Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who deliberately stayed away with the sour comment to the press that he “wasn’t interested in soft-soaping senility”—and he fully apprehends that he had best get on home to South Carolina and do some visiting around the state if he wishes to retain his gradually slipping hold upon it. The basic sources of his political power are as ancient as himself, and many of them, indeed, are gone. A great name and a great reputation, great battles in the cause of Carolina and the South, have carried him through election after election; but he is conscious now that new generations, new interests, new industries, and new money in the state are threatening his position as never before.

“Seab won’t leave the Senate until they carry him out on a stretcher,” Senator John DeWilton of Vermont remarked the other day. The old man knows with a lively awareness that he can be carried out just as effectively on a ballot box. New leaders walk the streets of Barnwell and new voices exchange the softly accented passwords of power in the moss-hung gardens of Charleston. Seab Cooley still commands great respect in his native state, but his instinct is not playing him false: there are whispers everywhere, an urge for someone new, a feeling, sometimes vague but increasingly articulate, that South Carolina should have a younger and more vigorous spokesman in the Senate.

“Younger and more vigorous, my God!” his junior colleague, H. Harper Graham, comments to his fellow Senator. “Could anybody be more vigorous than Seab?” But Harper Graham knows the talk, too, and Seab Cooley has good reason to believe that among those who would not be at all averse to seeing him defeated is Harper Graham himself, melancholy, dark-visaged, filled with ambition and temper almost as great as his own, burning like a dark flame in the Senate. He would not put it past Harper at all to actively seek his political downfall, Seab concludes, and the thought brings an ominous scowl to his face for a moment as he sees his colleague entering at the back of the big brown chamber. Then the look passes almost as it comes and is replaced by the sleepy, self-satisfied expression his fellow Senators know all too well. “What’s that old scallywag cooking up now?” Powell Hanson of North Dakota murmurs to Blair Sykes of Texas as they enter the Senate together, and they speculate for an idle and amused moment that he is probably dreaming up some way to get Harper Graham: so well-known to the Senate is the nature of the bond that unites the senior and junior Senators from South Carolina.

Actually, as is so often the case with Seab, the somnolent look conceals a mind at work on much more far-ranging matters than merely how to remove the threat of a bothersome colleague. “Getting Harper” is part of it, but his entire political problem is what engages him now, and the self-satisfied expression is really due to one of those flashes of intuition—or inspiration—“or hashish, or whatever it is,” as Senator John Winthrop of Massachusetts once put it—which occasionally show the senior Senator from South Carolina how to work his way out of difficult situations.

It is not even, in this case, anything particularly specific, nor is it associated with the man on whom his eye happens to fall just now; it is just that Seab is reminded that on one issue, at least, neither Harper Graham nor any other successful politician in South Carolina can afford to take a position different from his. The man he sees is Cullee Hamilton, the young colored Congressman from California, but the thought Cullee immediately inspires in the mind of Seab Cooley is not one that directly concerns him; it is simply a generalized reaction, prompted by his presence, going back into the bitter past of a troubled region, stirred by emotions as new as tomorrow’s headlines, as old as the tears of time. It is not an especially original thought, but in a political sense it works; and contrary to much violently expressed northern opinion, which conveniently forgets such areas as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem, it does not work simply because politicians both white and black make use of it for their own selfish purposes. It works because the overwhelming majority of his fellow southerners, like Seab himself, are absolutely convinced of it by birth, by tradition, and by belief. This poses many deeply tragic problems, but the Senator and his fellow citizens can no more change on that particular subject than they could fly, unassisted, to the stars.

By the same token, neither can Cullee Hamilton, as he stands at the center door of the Senate chamber looking about for California’s junior Senator, the dashing and slightly over dapper Raymond Robert Smith. There is a bill involving a proposed water viaduct in the San Fernando Valley which is on the Senate calendar awaiting action, and Cullee, aware that this is important to a number of constituents in his sprawling district just north of Los Angeles, wants Ray Smith’s help in persuading Bob Munson to pass it through the Senate by unanimous consent in what everybody believes to be these closing hours of the Congressional session.

Cullee already has the Speaker’s promise to pass it through the House tomorrow—the Speaker has always been fond of him, personally as well as politically, and Cullee has been well-favored by that powerful gentleman ever since the start of his first term five years ago—but the Senate Majority Leader is another matter. He has rather more on his mind than the Speaker does at the moment, the Senate being customarily more cluttered up with last-minute odds and ends than the House each year when adjournment approaches, and it will take a little extra assistance to get Cullee’s bill approved.

Not that he anticipates any great difficulty, but it is a matter of timing and that takes care. In this Ray Smith, for all that he is something of a laughingstock to his colleagues in their cloakroom conversations, can be of real assistance; particularly since those San Fernando Valley constituents are vitally important to him, too. Ray is up for re-election next year, and he is as sharply conscious of his constituency as Seab Cooley is of his. The fact that he too is in rather shaky condition may provide the extra spur to successful action on Cullee Hamilton’s bill. An extra spur to Cullee, too, Cullee thinks wryly, if only he were as ambitious as Sue-Dan and as full of git-up-and-go as she constantly tells him he ought to be.

The thought of his wife, though it appears to be a circuitous and indirect way to approach it, and though they would both be surprised at the parallel and for the moment unable to see it, brings him to the very point that is just passing through the clever old mind of the President Pro Tempore of the Senate as their eyes meet for a brief moment across the crowded chamber. He and Seab Cooley do not really know one another, having had only one brief and uncomfortable talk on carefully innocuous matters when Cullee testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing three years ago, but there is a certain instinctive understanding between them; “perhaps,” as Cullee told himself dryly at the time, “because we’re both Southerners.” Possibly for this reason it occurs to each of them in this fleeting instant now that the other may be thinking of the subject of race. Both are right, though there is a shade of difference in their thoughts. Seab is thinking of it in terms of his problem in South Carolina, Cullee, much more basically, in terms of his wife.

“Why don’t you run against fancy-nancy Smith for the Senate next year?” she keeps asking in her taunting way. “Because you’re afraid a nigger can’t make it, even in California?” And when he winces at the expression she laughs and says it again three times. “I know you don’t like that word, my poor little Cullee,” she tells him in mock-soothing tones. “That’s a bad word us enlightened people don’t use. But it’s true, isn’t it, nigger, nigger, nigger?”

It is all he can do at such moments, Cullee admits to himself, to keep from slapping her straight across the face; except that it is, as the M’Bulu of Mbuele has already indicated to the Secretary of State, a beautiful face, and it happens to belong to a girl with whom the young Congressman from California is in love in a way so fundamental he can’t help himself. So his only response is a tired sigh and the comment, “Why do you say things like that, Sue-Dan? You know it only bothers me, and what does it gain for you? Do you like to bother me? Haven’t you got better games to play than that?” But her response, as so often, is an apparently instant loss of interest. “You sigh an awful lot, lately,” she says, and with another little laugh she picks up the cat and a magazine, sinks into a chair, and seemingly becomes lost to the world as she studies the printed page and croons soft endearments to the cat.