Advise and Consent (33 page)

Bob Leffingwell spread his hands again in that curious, candid gesture.

“All I can tell you,” he said patiently, “is that it would have to depend on the situation as it then existed, Senator.” Then his voice strengthened and he straightened in his chair. “But I tell you this, and I care not who challenges it: I will never recommend war to the President of the United States if I become his Secretary of State. Never!”

There was an excited burst of applause in the room and Brigham Anderson gaveled for order. Senator Richardson leaned forward again.

“You’re so afraid of war that you’d give up anything to avoid it, wouldn’t you?” he asked softly. “You wouldn’t draw a line anywhere, would you? You’d just keep giving and giving and giving, until there wasn’t anything left for us to give, wouldn’t you?”

“Do you want war, Senator?” Bob Leffingwell asked. Senator Richardson snorted and slapped the table with the flat of his hand.

“By God, I do not,” he said in a cold tone. “But I am not afraid of it if it should have to come in defense of the things we stand for. Let me make you a little speech, Mr. Leffingwell: I had rather go out of this world standing on my two hind legs like a man, fighting for the things I believe in, than yield and yield and crawl and crawl until nothing is left. Nor am I afraid of the consequences, which I grant you would be horrible beyond belief. But nobody ever achieved anything by running away, and I don’t think we can achieve anything now by running away except the disappearance of the United States from the stage of history, quietly and neatly and without any muss or fuss, which is just the way the Russians want us to go. As for me, I had rather go ahead in the cause of what I believe in than scuttle and run for fear of something that might or might not happen.”

“If it did happen, Senator,” the nominee said quietly, “nothing would be left of the world.”

“And if it did not, and we found that we had yielded ourselves beyond redemption simply because of the fear that it might, nothing would be left of us,” Arly said with equal quietness. “So there we are. I have no further questions of the witness at this time, Mr. Chairman.”

“I have one of you, though, Senator,” Bob Leffingwell said with a smile as the room began to relax to normal.

“What’s that?” Senator Richardson asked, and when the answer came a strange little expression came momentarily into his eyes.

“Have you tried to find Herbert Gelman?” Bob Leffingwell asked. “Not,” he added with an easy smile, “that it matters one way or the other, but I’m curious.”

“Yes,” Arly Richardson said slowly, “I have. I called the president of the university and he had it checked for me, but he said they couldn’t find any record of any such student in the past ten years and the records for four of five years before that had been destroyed in a fire. He said he personally was unable to remember any such name.”

“As a matter of fact, then,” the nominee said pleasantly, “we don’t even know that he exists, do we? It could be just a figment of somebody’s imagination, couldn’t it; some crank who wants to embarrass me, which as you know often happens to people in the public eye.”

“So far as I know,” Arly Richardson said in the same slow way, “all there is of Herbert Gelman is on this piece of paper.”

“Then don’t you think, Senator,” the nominee suggested with perfect courtesy, “that possibly I am due an apology for the implications made here?”

Senator Richardson looked at him steadily for what seemed a long time, and then he smiled too and spoke with equal courtesy.

“Perhaps you are,” he said pleasantly. “But long experience on this Hill tells me that perhaps the record should stand as it is for the time being. If nothing further supports it on the day your nomination comes to the floor of the Senate I shall be glad to speak in your behalf and vote for you. Fair enough?”

Bob Leffingwell smiled again.

“If that is the extent of your concession, Senator,” he said, “I guess I’ll have to accept it as fair enough.”

“Good,” Senator Richardson said. “Then we understand each other.”

“As you wish, Senator,” Bob Leffingwell said with sudden indifference, and reached to light a cigarette as Arly sat back slowly in his chair. There was a stir and buzz in the room and in the midst of it Stanley Danta
observed that his young colleague, who had been watching intently without a word through Senator Richardson’s entire questioning, was about to comment.

“Why, hell,” Fred Van Ackerman said, with an intensity made curiously disturbing by the fact that he did not raise his voice above a half whisper, “they’re crucifying him, Stan, that’s what they’re doing, they’re crucifying him. This has got to be stopped.
This has got to be stopped
.”

“You’re hurting my arm,” Senator Danta said quietly, and Senator Van Ackerman let go with an embarrassed laugh.

“I didn’t even realize I had hold of it, Stan,” he said. “Honest.”

Below the city lay before them; the rain had stopped and a’ sharp wind was driving the clouds apart; great shafts of sunlight slanted down. Each in its accustomed place the Capitol, the White House, the Library of Congress, the Court, the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson memorials, the medieval spires of Georgetown University, and the bulk of the Washington Cathedral stood out. The river wound brown and muddy under its bridges, stretching away south and east toward the Chesapeake Bay; over the rolling countryside of Maryland and west along the Virginia hills to the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah the first light carpetings of green were beginning to show; around the Tidal Basin the cherry trees awaited the warming winds. Any day now—any minute, perhaps—spring would arrive in sudden glory and the world would be a lovely place.

Looking down upon the great white city, the winding river, the kind and gracious land stretching off into the hazy blue of the clearing horizons, Krishna Khaleel sucked in his breath in a small appreciative sound as the plane climbed swiftly and moved into its course for New York.

“It is beautiful,” he said, “It is a beautiful city and a beautiful land, Hal. You should be proud.”

“You can’t know,” Hal Fry said softly. “You can’t know.” But the Indian Ambassador smiled.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I can know. I come from a bare brown land, but it has its beauties, too, Hal, some of them equal to these. And it is mine, which makes it beautiful beyond all other lands to me. Yes, I know.”

“Why can we never—” Senator Fry began in a tone of angry frustration, and stopped.

“—get along together?” Krishna Khaleel completed for him. “Why must all this beauty in the world be so misused by the men who live in it? Why do we live and work and strive, only to achieve no more than new destructions of one another? It is a time to ask, with spring about to come; though there will be no answer, I think, in spring. Or summer. Or winter. Or fall.”

“But we try,” Hal Fry said bitterly. “We try. Why does it mean so little? Why is it all so pointless?”

“Oh, it is not pointless,” K.K. said, more lightly. “For instance, there were gains at Dolly’s Friday night. And though we may feel some doubts at times, you and I at least are going back to the UN, drawn by some compulsion of hope as well as duty, I assume. At least I should hope it is hope, Hal.”

“It is for us,” Senator Fry said, frowning a little. “Some others, I doubt. As for Dolly’s, I’m glad you thought gains were made. I’m not sure.”

“A start,” K.K. said, “a modest start. There was some indication from Bob, was there not, of a new inclination to make new approaches? Much, I presume, depends on what is happening down there”—and he gestured toward Capitol Hill, now far back and growing tinier by the second—“right now.”

“I expect we’ll confirm him,” Senator Fry said. “It would be most unusual not to.”

“I think you should,” Krishna Khaleel said. “It is none of our business, really, but yet you all have asked our opinion, and of course it is our business, as it is all the world’s, who is Secretary of State of the United States. Especially if he is to lead the way to a new arrangement with Russia.”

“Don’t jump too fast,” Hal Fry said, “or too far. A new approach doesn’t necessarily mean new negotiations, and new negotiation’s don’t necessarily mean a new approach. Particularly when our good friends rush us into it with such overwhelming urgency that our hands are tied and we are automatically foreclosed from any real bargaining.”

“But, Hal,” the Indian Ambassador said. “We do not do that. It is simply that we all desire peace, and we think for all your faults, which, my dear friend, you must recognize you do have, you are probably most likely to achieve it for the world if we can but bring you to see the way.”

“I feel we’re losing hold of things,” Senator Fry said, staring out the window as Maryland sped beneath. “I feel that somehow the United States isn’t going to get anywhere unless it hangs onto the things that have always meant the United States. I feel you want us to give them up, if necessary, to win agreement; and I don’t see how we can and still retain the inner conviction we need and have got to have if we are to survive and help the world survive. This is what troubles me.”

“Possibly some of those things are not quite so—so applicable as they once were, Hal,” K.K. said. “That is our only thought.
Do you know
what is best for the world?
Do you know
what is best for peace?
Do you know
what is best for yourselves, even? Sometimes we wonder.”

“You have asked us so many questions like that in recent years,” Senator Fry said, “that you have got us asking ourselves; and we have asked ourselves so much that sometimes I think we have forgotten how to do anything but question ourselves in one vast paralysis of self-doubt. There are times when men shouldn’t ask questions, they should just go ahead and do what they know is right, or the chance is lost. But first our enemies, and now our friends, have told us we must question ourselves on everything we do; we must sit around and debate with each other instead of acting; and so while we have debated, others have acted, and often the chance has gone. Or does that seem a too one-sided view to you?”

The Indian Ambassador too looked down thoughtfully upon the pleasant land as it rushed away, and shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said, “whether those chances should have been taken or whether history will say that it was best for you to miss them, and so best that you should have asked and argued and talked and debated instead of doing something rash and precipitate that might have changed your course in a way that could not be modified? Perhaps it has saved you from commitments that would have brought you down, and with you the world.”

“So what has it left us to be committed to?” Hal Fry asked moodily. “Anything? That is the American problem right now, it seems to me: we aren’t committed, and we don’t really care, about anything. Our enemies and our friends together have succeeded in paralyzing us with self-doubt, and under the tutelage of all of you we have become afraid to really care, because to really care has become unfashionable and rather laughable; and also, of course, because to really care would impose upon us the necessity of acting in support of the things we really care for; and nobody wants us to do that anymore. We don’t even want to do it ourselves
....
So what purpose do we serve in the world any more, in your mind? Any?”

“Oh, Hal,” the Indian Ambassador exclaimed impatiently. “What purpose do you serve! Why do you say fantastic things like that?”

“Well,” Senator Fry said, “it seems the only logical conclusion, doesn’t it?”

“It does not,” Krishna Khaleel said firmly, “and you don’t believe for one moment that it does, either.”

“Then what is it?” Hal Fry persisted; and after a moment his companion laughed.

“Always joking,” he said comfortably. “Dear old Hal. Tell me, do you not think Mr. Leffingwell will have some answers that will reassure even you, my dark, gloomy friend?”

Senator Fry gave him an appraising glance and suddenly he relaxed and laughed, too.

“Dear old Akbar,” he said mockingly. “Always joking too, I suspect, and somehow, I suspect, always at the expense of the United States of America. To answer your question, all I can say is, I hope so.”

“We hope so too,” Krishna Khaleel said. “In fact, we are confident of it. So all the dark worries and doubts are rather foolish, are they not?”

“We have a saying,” Senator Fry said, “that it won’t matter in a hundred years.”

“There, you see?” K.K. cried triumphantly. “Now you begin to regard it as we do!”

Below Maryland sped away, the flat gray roofs and white stone stoops of Baltimore, the pleasant enclave of Havre de Grace beside the Susquehanna, the kindly, gentle, greening land.

“Mr. Chairman,” John DeWilton said, “I shall also try to be brief, if the witness will co-operate.”

“Gladly, Senator,” Bob Leffingwell replied with a smile. “This is six to one, you know; I’m as anxious to speed it along as you are!”

“I’d say the one has done pretty well so far,” Senator DeWilton observed. The nominee laughed, against the comforting background of friendly laughter from the room.

“A little bloody, but unbowed, Senator,” he said.

“I too,” Johnny DeWilton said, quickly becoming all pink-faced, white-topped business, “would like to advert to your recent speeches. I believe you said in Des Moines two weeks ago that the Soviet Government, and I quote, ‘now gives evidence of an earnest desire to negotiate in good faith.’ I wonder if you could cite one specific piece of evidence to back up that assertion, Mr. Leffingwell.”

The nominee smiled again and gave again his candid, ingratiating shrug and gesture with his opened hands.

“Senator,” he said, and stopped to start anew with the thoughtful pause that lent so many of his words their little extra impact. “How shall I answer you? Of signed commitments and formal promises, no; there are none of these. Of an attitude of greater willingness and understanding, of a friendlier aspect toward the West and toward us in particular, yes, I think I do see signs. Certainly there is every evidence of their desire to negotiate with us; almost daily they urge it upon us; I think some candor must underlie such diligent appeals.”