The Shadow Cabinet (15 page)

Looking at this frazzle-headed woman with the arrogant smile, the condescending quip, and the viper eyes, Shy Wooster knew she was his enemy. He even knew the slur she was now preparing in her quick little mind. “How'd you know I was a Clemson man?” asked the old joke describing the meeting of two Carolinians at the Cosmos Club in Washington. Shy Wooster had heard it three times during his first year on the Hill. “Easy,” replied the suave Chapel Hill graduate, hoisting his brandy and soda as the Clemson grad lifted his bourbon and Coke. “I saw your class ring when you were picking your nose.”

“Well, it's a mighty fine school, Chapel Hill,” Shy Wooster said as the familiar voice of Senator Bob Combs lifted from across the room. The other ladies had moved in his direction, but the younger woman had lingered behind.

“I don't suppose you've got any pull with any of those Senate committees, do you?” she asked. “I've been thinking about finding a job here.”

“Well, I just might,” he admitted, admiring her bulky sweater beneath the small jacket. “What might be your particular line of endeavor?”

“You must write the senator's speeches,” she said, eyes lifted toward Combs. “I haven't heard that line in years. I'll bet you used to sell Fuller brushes. Political science, part-time journalism, like I'm doing now.”

Up yours, sister
, he thought tardily as the barbs quivered home. “Try the
Washington Post,
” he offered instead.

The irony escaped her, as his quips usually did with the literati. The only music they heard was their own. “I wouldn't have a prayer,” she said. “That's why I was thinking of the Hill. I wrote them some letters last year, through the local congressman, but I didn't hear squat. What kind of pull do you have?” She was standing on tiptoes, head lifted toward Bob Combs, whose voice was barely audible. “Jesus, don't tell me he's going to start that again. How many times has he given that speech, anyway?”

“The folks I know over on the Hill wouldn't much appreciate that kind of remark,” he said, smiling.

“What's wrong—don't you know any Democrats?”

Wooster chuckled. “Sugar, lemme tell you something. Handing you over to the Democrats would be like giving your own mugger a Saturday night special. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy.”

“Don't worry, I can go either way.”

He chuckled again. “I'll bet you can.” An English transvestite he'd met in a smoky Soho nightclub during his first trip to London had told him the same thing. Wooster had thought he was in a singles bar. “You sure got spunk, I'll say that for you. That's what it takes to get ahead in this town.”

“I need the experience; I'd work anywhere. I'm in a rut working part-time for this chamber of commerce rag.”

“I know what you mean.” He leaned closer and said softly, “Only fast lanes down there are on the track over at Darlington.” She didn't retreat.

“What about Combs's staff? Doesn't he need someone who could write fast copy?” They were quite close, moved together by the guests behind them who were pressing toward Senator Combs's mumbled valedictory.

“Only trouble is he's got them standing in line,” said Wooster, encouraged. “There's an awful lot of folks that want to go to work for Senator Bob Combs.” But that was only part of Wooster's problem. After Wooster's escapades in Athens and Rome had drawn State Department notice, a State security officer had had a quiet confidential talk with the senator and Shy Wooster had been duly warned. Now when Wooster helped young women find Hill employment, he scattered his wares in the various office buildings, caching them about squirrel-like, where they wouldn't be obvious to the predators about.

“Yeah, I suppose so,” she responded. He leaned forward again, subjecting her to the second Shy Wooster shrink test. If a woman held her ground and didn't flinch from physical contact, whether it was their shoulders touching, or his face near her ear, close enough to brush her hair, she was the kind he might put a third move on. She didn't budge, but instead seemed drawn to the contents of his wineglass. She leaned down and sniffed it, then dipped her finger in the contents. “You hypocrite,” she said. “That's not cranberry juice, it's wine.”

“Well, I'll be,” Wooster declared, sniffing the glass himself. “I reckon it is. Someone musta switched glasses with me. How do you like that.”

“I'll bet.” But her expression wasn't one of disapproval or even disappointment. She seemed to understand.

“Better finish it off before someone notices,” he said. He drained the glass quickly. “Sure went down like cranberry juice, didn't it?”

“Yeah, it sure did.” She opened her purse and now was sorting among its contents. “Tell you what,” she proposed. “People like us have got to stick together. Especially overweight people like us. You give me your card where I can get in touch with you and I'll give you mine. Someone like you has got to have the right connections in this town.”

“You can never tell,” he said, searching for his card case. “Like they say around here, ‘The opera's never over until the fat lady sings.' What hotel are you staying at, little lady?”

Fifty feet away, Senator Combs droned on in his deep but not always audible voice. Of medium height, with a smooth face and wide blue eyes, he wasn't an imposing figure and was in fact rather ordinary-looking. There was little hint of intelligence in the wide blue eyes. They were usually expressionless, sometimes vacuous, as lifeless as the stiff neck and shoulders, or the wooden face in which only the small cherub's mouth moved, as pink and wet as a baby's. His detractors said he had no style, no wit, and no grace, and they were right. In the South Carolina legislature, where he'd begun his career, he was referred to in private by his critics as “The Sunfish” because of the goggle-eyed stare and the fixed rapacity of his ugly little mouth—a small-pond fry too limited for the oceanic prizes for which he hungered. Even to his sympathizers he was often as dull as a Methodist vestryman standing at the back of the church, lips moving unconsciously not in devotion but in phansaical calculation as he counted the house. Only when he was demeaning his opponents did the eyes become animated, but the gray glint was not amusement but sullen malice, like the churn of a brackish old pond filled with alligator gar. Because he steadfastly refused to compromise with his Senate colleagues on legislation of high principle, he was ineffective as a lawmaker, not so much a politician as a moralist, not so much a man as a set of rigid, inflexible attitudes, as familiar as the pasteboard figures in a child's card game. Sophisticated analysts of government, perplexed by his popularity, were usually the victims of their own techniques. There was no mystery to Combs's appeal among the people who voted for him. The confusion existed only in Washington or in those other insular communities of expertise where government and its study was a way of life and even the barbers in the federal office basements were on the government payroll. For the country beyond, Bob Combs was the spokesman of those who knew nothing about politics or politicians but their abiding contempt for both. Bob Combs, the antipolitician, was the exception who proved the rule.

Most of those listening to him that evening had voted for him and would vote for him again. They were average people, decent, law-abiding, and hard-working for the most part, people for whom politics was not a way of life but an unwelcome intrusion. For them, the fundamental reality was the one they faced every day in their jobs, their office or plant communities, in the cars and buses that took them there, in the house or apartment to which they returned, as well as in the locations where they spent their leisure hours and their children spent their classroom days. For them, attempts to make other kinds of reality more a part of their daily lives seldom succeeded. Distant or complex events, like Washington political chicanery, the London gold market, some popular uprising in Nicaragua, astrophysics, or the efficacy of the MX missile, had only an abstract relation to their livelihoods and intruded only randomly upon the burdens that crowded their lives to the limit. Most of them were skeptical of the plea that government was the guarantor of their individual liberties or that politicians were necessary for their preservation. For them, the reverse was true. Government intruded to make their lives more complicated, not less; and politicians, like government bureaucrats, lived a kind of parasitic existence battened upon their own lives, dignity, and income.

One of the earliest jottings in Shyrock Wooster's political notebook was an entry made following a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, after Bob Combs's election to the state legislature. Combs had been invited to inspect a port authority project, but at the luncheon afterward had been treated contemptuously by the lawyers and businessmen, who saw him as just another political pumpkin from the state capital, with the red clay from the hill country on his tan shoes and the white sidewalls of a county seat haircut on his rube head. In the dog-eared spiral notebook that was to become a kind of
Poor Richard's Almanac
for Combs's political ambitions, Shy Wooster, sensitive to such slights to his patron, wrote:

Americans are, by & large, contemptuous of politicians. There are few cabdrivers, barbers, small-town hardware clerks, city editors, fancy-pants industrialists, or ambulance-chasing lawyers who can't edify you about the basic crookedness of American politics and who don't spend a lot of time sneering, making jokes, and looking down their noses at politicians.

They don't raise their sons to be politicians. They want them to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, or baseball players. Ask a farmer what a politician is and he'll tell you it's what's left in the corncrib or the silo after everything else has been busheled out.

To this was added these observations made a few months later, after he had observed the South Carolina legislature in action:

Any fool knows that someone who spends all his time talking about something isn't doing anything about it. In the factory, the garage, the office, and the classroom, the fellow with the biggest mouth is the one quickest to get fired or thrown out when hard times come.

So if you're going to be a successful politician with the people, don't talk like one. If you're going to talk, talk about things there isn't any doubt about—God, or country or patriotism or all those things people know in their hearts are true.

Also, when you talk to the folks back home, don't get too fancy or talk like an expert. It's plain old common sense folks will listen to when they won't listen to anything else.

When he wrote those words, Shy Wooster had in mind audiences like the one now listening to Bob Combs. Decent, proud, practical people, they didn't have the time or the leisure to reflect often or deeply upon the larger problems confronting the country, and when they did they didn't address those problems in the same way as the intellectuals, journalists, historians, or professional politicians who lived on the peripheries of the American office or workshop experience—unlike those who made up Bob Combs's constituency—and whose sole justification for existence was the words they wrote and the expertise to which they pretended. That déclassé group of rationalists and libertarians so atomized the metal of hard fact by their infinitesimal questions and answers that they succeeded only in dissipating the national will.

As practical men and women, those listening to Senator Combs that evening weren't indifferent to distant or complex problems, but unless these intruded upon their private lives in some immediate way, their consciousness of them was occasional rather than systematic—a marginal awareness of national uncertainties and foreign events less as imminent dangers than as lurking threats. Like a bothersome tooth that one day might require a trip to the dentist's office, remote problems had a kind of nagging claim on their daily attention, but until a crisis was immediately at hand, they would hope that the discomfort would heal naturally, whether in Poland or in El Salvador, the nagging pain relieved by whatever natural remedies were inherent in the mysterious international anatomy itself and in those hidden subcutaneous processes that keep presidential aides scurrying, soldiers alert, and the historical engine noisy but intact. But until that time came, they were prepared to live with the uncertainty. In the meantime, they would turn away from the headlines and the editorial pages, where nothing is ever settled, and find relief in the Dow Jones averages or the sports pages, where doubt is eliminated, victories are affirmable, tactics relished, and heroes identifiable.

During Bob Combs's campaign for the U.S. Senate, Shy Wooster wrote in his notebook:

Intellectuals have doubts, leaders have answers, voters have jobs to keep, mortgages to pay, troubles all day long.

Never add to a voter's problems. When you tell your voters about a problem, tell the answer too, and make it simple enough so they can understand it on the spot.

Spot answers were Bob Combs's stock-in-trade. By the time he'd taken his seat in the South Carolina legislature, he'd had considerable experience in product merchandising. He'd put together his savings-and-loan and automobile empires in South Carolina through effective radio and television advertising, promoting quick answers to daily problems: “Five Minutes for Five Hundred Dollars! That's a Bob Combs Signature Loan!” “Credit Risks No Problem at Bob Combs' Auto Mart!” “Trade In! Trade Up! Bob Combs' Chevrolet!”

The fine print on car liens, second mortgages, and home improvement loans, as well as his usorious interest rates, might have required something more than five minutes, even for a Federal Trade Commission lawyer, but these details, like the more technical language of some of his subsequent Senate legislation, didn't dim popular enthusiasm. Similar techniques were used in his first campaign for the South Carolina legislature, during which he demonstrated how timely was his grasp of those complicated social issues that left many South Carolinians of good conscience troubled and uneasy.