Advise and Consent (47 page)

After that, for most of the closing months of the war, he was attached to the general’s immediate staff and so was directly involved in all the planning for the final move on Japan. He left the service finally with medals, commendations, fervent good wishes and the gratitude and friendship of all with whom he had come in contact in all those years of blood and boredom and smoke-filled bars.

Through it all, however, he still remained essentially untouched, though there were many who would have wished otherwise and some who made it very plain to him. Not always did this come in conventional context. 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. All but one he had refused to answer, and with the same pleasant, straightforward, matter-of-fact elusiveness with which he always eased himself out of situations he did not wish to be in, he would gently extricate himself from all such episodes and go on his way with liking and friendship intact. Yet always he found he could count on it, wherever he went, and he knew that if that were really the answer for him he lacked no opportunities. With one exception, however, something always held him back; and in that case, he came to feel later, it was basically just the war and probably nothing very fundamental or long-lasting in his character. Yet such was his rigid and unsparing honesty with himself that he never tried to deny to his heart that it had, for a little while, been all-consuming.

Very late in the war, returned to Honolulu for two months’ rest, he had been lying on the beach one afternoon when someone deliberately came over and lay down beside him on the sand. For the better part of an hour they lay there hardly moving, hardly looking at one another; to this day in unexpected moments he could hear again as though it were yesterday the crash of the waves and the exultant cries of the surf-riders, far out, on that fateful afternoon. Suddenly the whole surging loneliness of the war, his own tiredness and questioning of himself, the burden of so much agony everywhere in the world, the need for a little rest and a little peace without fighting any more with himself or anybody, had seemed unbearable, and like two children in a trance they had returned to the hotel together and from then on for nearly a month they were never apart for long. Any other time, any other place, he knew it would never have happened; but many things like that happened in war, he had observed, and no one noticed and no one cared. For four weeks he was happy, and he was unsparing enough in his honesty with himself to realize that it was a perfectly genuine happiness. Then for reasons which he could never analyze exactly, but which he became convinced later were probably sound, he became suspicious, and with suspicion came jealousy, and, for a time, an agony of heart such as he never hoped to undergo again. A savage, rending bitterness took the place of happiness; the beautiful island became a place of torment for them both. He asked to be returned to the front, the request was granted; against the windows and the sea as he left the hotel they saw one another for the last time, looked, and looked away. He knew then that they would never be together again, but he knew also that in all probability few things for either of them would ever again be as deep.

Very shortly thereafter the war ended and he returned to Salt Lake City, where he found his older sisters married, his older brother in the Church, the younger girls coming along, his parents, if possible, even more the unshakeable pillars of society than they had been. With his high school chum from Ogden he got away for a couple of weeks of camping in the Uintas and fishing along the Green, and then returned to his tidy little mountain capital to sit down and formulate more definitely the plan for his future he had developed during the war. It did not take him long to do so, and as a first step he went back to the Farm in the fall, this time to enter law school. Some instinct for what would be most appealing to the voters, some lingering feeling of his own against the East, prompted him to remain in his own general area for this final stage of his education; and, too, he had a feeling about the West that, like Antaeus, he should keep one foot on his own plot of ground. Western-born, western-reared and western-schooled, he knew, would be very attractive when the time came; and he felt better about it in his heart.

Coming back to an academic atmosphere after the war he found as difficult as many did, but he brought to it not only his many natural gifts of intelligence, determination, stability, and character, but a maturity that now had been refined and honed down to the point where he was ready to make the most of his final spell of schooling and also establish again that friendly link between himself and his immediate community from which flowed so much of his strength as a person and, later, as a vote-getter. The story was the same here as it had been everywhere: great popularity, great respect, almost universal liking. The time passed without disappointments and virtually without flaw. Once in his second year he got a letter from somewhere in the Midwest, forwarded from his home in Utah, an attempt to re-establish something he felt was completely gone, or at least gone for all the practical purposes of the life he had laid out for himself; he kept it for a day and a night, read it many times, thought of replying, started to jot down the address, and then changed his mind, finally tore it up completely and threw the fragments out of his car as he drove up the Bayshore to San Francisco the next afternoon. But it hurt still, and hurt badly; he was a little frightened to realize how much. For twenty-four hours he was not as sunny, open and friendly as usual, and this was noted by his friends; but exams were nearing, tension was high, and they put it down to that. Next day he was as outwardly serene as ever. He never heard again, even though there was a time after he first became nationally prominent when he was afraid he might hear, in some way that would be detrimental to him. But he never did, and as the years passed he came to feel that by a sort of tacit, long-distance understanding they had agreed with one another to let the dead past bury its dead.

He was president of the Law School in his senior year, edited the Review, began looking, more seriously and directly now, for a girl to love and marry and settle down with; failed to find her despite many candidates and opportunities which he accepted as calmly as he always had, and went home after three highly successful, years to enter his father’s law firm and begin the calculated process of making himself known from Logan to Kanab and from the Nevada border to the Colorado line. The cases his father handled, largely land, water, and range matters, gave him a steadily growing acquaintance over the state, and with it there presently began to come invitations to speak, at first about the war and his experiences and then, more seriously, about the problems confronting the country. It became apparent that within another two years a Senate seat would be open for the taking, and after another fishing trip with his high school chum from Ogden, during which they spent long hours at the campfire planning the campaign, he sharply increased his travels over the state, his speaking engagements at church suppers and social gatherings, service clubs, and professional groups. Because he was his father’s son, many doors were automatically opened to him; because he was himself, he walked through them with ease, gathering friends and supporters everywhere as he went. One night in Provo he met a shy, plain girl who seemed to like him; in six months’ time he was convinced he liked her too, and by the end of the year they were married in a ceremony that climaxed the social season and made his nomination virtually certain. He did his best sincerely to make Mabel Anderson happy, and for the most part felt that he succeeded. Sometimes old memories would return like a knife, but he was sure she never knew it, and he put them aside ruthlessly and concentrated on his home and his career. When the party held its nominating convention his only opposition was a former governor, an aging man unable to cope with Brig’s splendid war record and earnestly handsome, youthful appeal. He won the nomination, won the election by a margin of 61,000 votes, which in Utah was sensational, and went to the United States Senate at thirty with a secret, almost superstitious determination to be a good man, a good Senator, and a good public servant. For seven years in an undeviating line he had pursued this purpose with a success the great majority of his fellows on both sides of the aisle were unfailingly quick and generous to acknowledge. A year ago he had won re-election as easily as though he owned the Senate seat; a few more years, he knew, and he would.

In the Senate he found his niche very quickly, because he was astute about his elders as he was about most men, and there as everywhere those who held the power were swiftly attracted by his courteously pleasant, respectful, and forthright ways. He was, as
Time
remarked shrewdly in a cover story when his colleague had died of a heart attack and he had become senior Senator at the age of thirty-four, “an old men’s young man”; and to it he added many sound touches of his own. 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. He had been in office seven months before he made his first Senate speech, and then it was on a reclamation matter on which he was thoroughly informed; the Senate listened attentively and gave him a good hand afterwards, as it does with maiden speeches, and so when he spoke again a week later on the growing threat of Soviet power his audience was receptive, ready to listen, and predisposed in his favor. This speech was a soundly reasoned, well-prepared and well-practiced exposition of the facts as he saw them, concluding with several specific suggestions of his own; its effect was exactly as he had planned. In the leadership and on the Foreign Relations Committee the thought got around that maybe it would be well to consider him when a vacancy arose. Seniority interfered with this for four years during which he cheerfully went about his tasks on the District and Commerce committees, but on the third occasion when a seat fell open Bob Munson, Orrin Knox, and Tom August were able to swing it for him, and the assignment was his. Soon after he was also given a seat on Interior to replace the traditional freshman bane of the District Committee, and so was set as he wished to be for the future. He had resigned his post on Commerce—where he had received his first rather trying taste of Robert A. Leffingwell when the latter was appointed chairman of the FPC—and had immediately made foreign policy his specialty. Now further attritions in seniority had put him fourth in line for the chairmanship, and he was generally considered one of the ablest and most promising members of the committee and the Senate.

In his first year, after his self-imposed seven months of being seen but not heard during which he had carefully studied the personalities of the men around him and thoroughly familiarized himself with the functioning of the Senate, he began to gravitate into that little group around the Majority and Minority leaders who had so much to do with making the machinery go: Orrin, Stanley Danta, John Winthrop, Seab, and a handful of others among whom he found quick acceptance. He and Lafe Smith, who had been elected two years earlier at the age of thirty-four, were the two youngest members of this group, and an easygoing friendship such as he had known so often in college and the war had sprung up rapidly between them. They generally hailed each other amiably as “buddy,” and they were buddies, in a pleasantly non-obligational way that permitted them to work in tandem when it suited them and work at cross-purposes when that suited them, without any personal strain. He and Mabel and Lafe and Lafe’s latest—there was always a latest, rarely the same latest as it had been the last time—often double-dated in a quiet, hometown sort of way, going to the Shoreham in good weather for dancing on the terrace, occasionally taking in a play at the National, once, before Pidge’s birth, even taking a week-long cruise to Bermuda with the latest who seemed at the time most likely to become Mrs. Lafe. She didn’t, but he and Mabel got a kick out of doing their best to bring it about. Lafe just grinned and wisecracked and stayed uncommitted with an independence Brig could understand, even though he assured him sincerely that he was making a mistake and didn’t know what he was missing.

Whether this was true or not, he was not always completely sure; but the storms were gradually dying in his heart, and he thought it was true most of the time. Certainly he did his best to make it true. Mabel was a thoroughly sweet and decent person, and he had no intention of letting his marriage become like so many he could see around him, a few islands of ease in a sea of tension. He devoted himself consciously to preventing this, and on the whole was quite happy with his bargain, fortified and strengthened as it was by time and circumstance and the public position in which he found himself which made a solid married life obligatory upon most ambitious men. How Lafe managed to be such a gay blade, coming from respectable Iowa, he could never understand until he happened to discuss the matter casually one day with a member of the Iowa delegation in the House. “What does the state think of all this chasing around?” he had asked humorously, and the Congressman shrugged. “They don’t hear about it,” he said, “and if they did, they wouldn’t believe it.” He sounded as though he really didn’t, either. Obviously it was a matter of faith.