Capable of Honor (51 page)

“If you insist, Mr. Chairman.”

“Now, see here—” Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania began indignantly, but it was already too late. UPI and AP were both hurrying from the room. JASON FORCES CHARGE KNOX STEAL OF OHIO DELEGATES, the next edition’s headline would read. It was Fate.

“Mr. Chairman,” Senator Munson said smoothly in the private conference room at the Fairmont, “it does seem to me that in considering this proposed plank in the platform it would be well to remember that a little more than a fight between potential Vice Presidents is involved here. I suppose we’re presenting a defense of the Administration to the country, are we not?”

“We are that,” Chairman Bill Smatters from Atlanta agreed, thinking, These smart boys from Congress always think they can come to convention and push us around, but by God, we’ve got the whip hand here and we don’t have to take it. “Is the distinguished delegate from Michigan,” he added blandly, “implying that this committee wishes to
denounce
the Administration? We thought we’d leave that to the opposition, didn’t we, friends?”

And all the way from Walter H. Hanna, National Committeeman from Montana, to Esmé Harbellow Stryke, National Committeewoman from California, they rocked and chuckled.

“Very well, then,” Senator Munson said calmly, “let’s act like it. You’ve been squabbling for a week here in a way that makes it look as though half of you aren’t for the Administration at all. How about you, Esmé? Are you for it?”

“Well!” said Esmé Harbellow Stryke indignantly, her sharp-featured little face and hard-bitten little eyes awash with annoyance. “Mr. Chairman, I don’t know that I have to sit here and be cross-examined by—by him.”

“O.K.,” Bob Munson said with a shrug, “so you’re not. Just keep in mind the other party’s watching, that’s all. I think it’s time you got to business and stopped this nonsense.”

“If this were an open committee. I’ll say to the Senator,” Bill Smatters from Atlanta said huffily, “he wouldn’t be talking to us like this.”

“It might as well be,” Bob Munson said, unimpressed. “It leaks like a sieve. Now, what is this language here that purports to be backed by the Jason forces? Tom?” he said, swinging abruptly around to the senior Senator from Minnesota at his left. “You put this thing in, didn’t you? What does it mean?”

“It means,” Senator August said with his customary air of timorous asperity when pressed, “just what it says.”

“And what does it say?” the Majority Leader demanded in a dramatic voice, holding it up for them to see. “It says”—and he peered at it closely—“damn, it looks as though eighteen pigeons have been walking on it. Isn’t there a clean draft somewhere?”

“We’re trying to work one out. Senator,” Bill Smatters said with some annoyance. He didn’t know what the Senator’s game was, or who he was for, but he was sure there was some tricky business going on somewhere and he wasn’t about to be caught. “Can’t you decipher that one?”

“I’ll read it,” Tom August said stiffly. “It is proposed by myself as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and by my distinguished friend, Representative J. B, Swarthman of South Carolina as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, because we wanted to try to arrive at something that would be fair to everyone. It says—”

“Got your pencil, Esmé?” Bob Munson interrupted. “You’ll want to tell the AP.”

“If you please. Bob,” Tom August said in an aggrieved tone. “Do let me proceed.”

“I should hope
so!”
said Esmé Stryke.

“It says,” Senator August repeated in a dogged voice, “‘Believing that the interests of world peace can best be served by halting armed aggression wherever it may exist, we applaud the declared intention of the President of the United States to conciliate and settle world differences in such areas of conflict on a basis of peaceful negotiation.’”

He gave the Majority Leader a defiant look. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Bob Munson said thoughtfully, looking around the room at faces which were about evenly divided between those which appeared to be friendly and those which appeared to be openly skeptical. “In the first place, I’ve read the rest of the foreign policy plank—that highly secret document whose major features strangely appeared in the Sunday
New York Time
s—and while it’s a fine defense of the past in ten beautifully written paragraphs, this seems to be the only place at which you touch, even by remote control, on such”—his voice became dry—“interesting issues as the trouble in Gorotoland and the fighting in Panama. Is that right, Tom?”

Senator August gave him a stubborn look.

“It has taken us a week. Bob, to arrive at this much. It has just seemed best, here in the committee, to avoid a direct mention of either Gorotoland or Panama.”

“Is it that bad?” the Majority Leader demanded with an air of not being able to believe it, though of course he had been hearing for the past five days from inside the committee that it was.

“It isn’t good, Senator,” Jawbone Swarthman spoke up suddenly from down the table where he was wedged between Elbridge W. Elbridge, National Committeeman from Rhode Island, and Anna Hooper Bigelow, National Committeewoman from New Hampshire. “No, sir, I tell you it isn’t good! It’s all very well for you to fly in here from Washington and in ten minutes decide what we ought to do in this committee, but I tell you. Senator, we’ve been here a week already and we’ve got our troubles here on this issue. We have certainly got our troubles.” He looked around the table and nodded vigorous agreement with himself. “Yes,
sir.”

“People who want assistance from the Administration in seeking other offices such as United States Senator may have their troubles, too,” Senator Munson said coldly, “if they can’t come up with something better than this paragraph.”

“Senator,” Jawbone said, “I’m not so sure the Administration could help me right now in South Carolina, and that’s the God’s honest truth. We’re faced with a bad situation here, I’ll tell the Senator frankly. You don’t know the temper of this convention. You wait ’til you’ve been here a day or two and you’ll feel it. Senator. It’s not comfortable.”

“I’ve been here an hour or two,” Bob Munson said dryly, “and I know what it is. I only regret the Speaker and I couldn’t get the session wound up in Washington in time to get out here last week. But we didn’t, and apparently the people the President should have been able to count on”—and he looked thoughtfully at Jawbone and Tom August, both of whom looked uneasily defiant in return—“haven’t been able to do the job.”

“It won’t do any good. Bob,” Senator August said in a doggedly stubborn voice, “to keep after us. I’m telling you frankly, and this whole committee will support me, and you’ve been reading hints of it in the papers, too, that if we mention either Gorotoland or Panama in this plank it’s going to blow the convention sky-high. People are too upset.”

“But, my dear old friend,” Bob Munson said, and in a sense he really meant it, for Tom, for all his old-maidish ways, was a dear old friend with whom he had worked on foreign policy matters for many years, “Gorotoland and Panama are what this convention and this election are all about. Surely you know that.”

The Senator from Minnesota shook his head.

“I don’t think these people will take it. Bob. I just don’t think they will.”

“He’s right. Senator,” Congressman Swarthman agreed, and across the table Esmé Stryke and Anna Hooper Bigelow nodded vigorously. “It just won’t do any good to argue. It really won’t.”

“Mmmm,” Bob Munson said. “Well, this week isn’t last week. In a certain sense, you’ve been operating a vacuum this past week, surrounded by the press which has been telling you incessantly that you don’t dare support your own Administration. Now the delegates are here and the convention is really beginning. Maybe I don’t know the mood of the convention, Jawbone, but neither do you, really. You’ve all been sitting in a closed room working on each other, and letting the press work on you, and you’ve convinced yourselves that the problem is tougher than it is.…
Whatever you think,”
he said in a flat, firm voice as a number of committee members stirred restively, “the White House will not settle for less than a specific endorsement of the President’s policy. Why, Good Lord!” he added with a disgusted snort, “Whatever made you think you could get away with less?” His tone became tougher. “Now this is the language the President wants. The
President
wants, I will remind you.
Your
President, of this party, with whom this party sinks or swims. With whom you sink or swim, as party leaders, in your own states and districts. So pay attention.”

“You needn’t use that tone to us, Bob,” Senator August said mildly. “We’re paying attention.”

“We’re paying attention, Mr. Speaker, I will say to you,” Old Joe Smitters from Ashtabula said testily at the Hilton. “You don’t have to lecture us about our duties in this Credentials Committee, or this convention, either. We’re doing our best to work things out here in fairness to all parties concerned.”

“Hmph,” the Speaker said. “Seems to me you’ve been mighty quick to use the word ‘steal’ this morning. That’s fairness?”

“It’s an open convention, Mr. Speaker,” Old Joe Smitters told him, not without some insolence—an insolence, the Speaker told himself impatiently, that he wouldn’t have dared to show if the President had picked his Vice President flat-out as he ought to have done, instead of causing all this mix-up. “This committee has its opinions, too.”

“If this committee had an ounce of self-respect,” the Speaker said, “it would disqualify any chairman who used a hate-word as partisan as that.”

“Now, Mr. Speaker,” Old Joe said, turning a furious red, while in the audience Belle—Mrs. Smitters, head of the Ladies’ County Auxiliary—let out a little cry and clapped a handkerchief to her mouth—“you can’t speak to the chairman of this committee like that, even if you are the Speaker and everybody’s scared of you. Joe Smitters isn’t scared of you, Mr. Speaker, and this committee isn’t, either. Now, is it?” And he glared around the table. Mrs. Mary Buttner Baffleburg of Pennsylvania held up her hand for recognition.

“I think,” she said, turning her round little head upon her round little neck above her round little figure until she was glaring straight back at Old Joe Smitters from Ashtabula, “
I
think, Mr. Chairman, that the Speaker is exactly right. I think the whole mood of this committee chairman and this committee for three days, now, has been hostile to the greatest Secretary of State we have ever had, the next Vice President of the United States—”

“Mrs. Baffleburg,” Joe Smitters shouted, while the committee began to break into a babble of talk and protest, Lizzie Hanson McWharter of Kansas waved and shouted frantically for recognition, the press scribbled furiously, the television cameras peered delightedly, and the audience sat forward with an eager anticipation on the edges of its spindly gold-gilt chairs. “Mrs. Baffleburg! Mrs. Baffleb—”

“I want to endorse that, Mr. Chairman!” Lizzie Hanson McWharter cried. “I want to join my dear, distinguished sister from Pennsylvania in that! I’ve never seen a more one-sided, more intolerant, more vicious attempt to railroad anything than I’ve seen in this committee. I think the chairman should be impeached, Mr. Chairman! Or removed or something! I do, Mr. Chairman! And that means you, Mr. Chairman!”

“It isn’t enough,” Mary Buttner Baffleburg took up the cause, as Old Joe Smitters began pounding his gavel with a heavy, battering beat that threatened to split the veneer on the table, “for you to choke off witnesses, including such a great and distinguished witness as our dear Mr. Speaker here who has served our party so long and wonderfully in the House of Representatives of the United States and in these conventions, Mr. Chairman”—she paused and drew a great gulp of breath before she turned completely crimson—“it isn’t enough to do that, but you’ve consistently favored every witness that has appeared here to speak for the other side. We’ve just spent an hour and a half listening to Mr. Leffingwell tell us how noble this Jason delegation from Ohio and this Jason delegation from Mississippi are. And who’s Mr. Leffingwell?” She glared around the table. “A man who lied to the United States Senate, Mr. Chairman, that’s who he is!” Her voice rose as Old Joe Smitters crashed the gavel heavier and heavier, and in the audience Bob Leffingwell winced with an expression of sudden, deep pain. “A liar, Mr. Chairman! That’s who comes here for Governor Jason, that’s who, a liar!”

Abruptly the Speaker stood up—so abruptly that he succeeded in stopping the uproar, which was what he wished to do. The room fell silent and he let it stay that way for several minutes as he stared at its occupants with the coldly impassive look that his youthful colleagues in the House were wont to refer to as “Mr. Bill’s deep-freeze.”

“Now,” he said finally, “we’re going to stop making a public spectacle of ourselves and we’re going to conduct this business like decent men and women should. Mrs. Baffleburg, you will apologize to Mr. Leffingwell.”

“I will not!” she cried, quivering like an indignant bowl of jelly. “It’s the truth and I won’t apologize for it!”

At this there was a scattering of applause from the audience. The Speaker swung around so sharply that it stopped at once.

“I’ll wait,” he said.

“You aren’t the chairman!” Lizzie Hanson McWharter of Kansas began. “What right have you got to—”

But Mr. Bill’s deep-freeze, if anything, became deeper, and her voice faltered.

“Well, you’re not,” she said.

“It’s only twelve forty-five,” the Speaker remarked to no one in particular. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

“I won’t do it,” Mary Buttner Baffleburg said, still breathing hard but speaking more calmly. “He’s—what I said, and you can’t make me apologize for it. I’m sorry that I stated it like that in a public place. I’m sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings. But I’m not sorry for speaking the truth.”

“Mr. Speaker,” Bob Leffingwell said, and they would never know what it cost him to rise with dignity, as he did, and speak in a calm and courteous tone, “I don’t take Mrs. Baffleburg’s remarks personally—(“How can you take them any other way, for Christ’s sake?” the
New York Times
demanded of the
Chicago Tribune
at the press table))—and, like you, I deplore the fact, if it is a fact, that partisanship has entered the committee’s deliberations. If I contributed to it, over and beyond the amount that the chairman of a candidate’s campaign can normally be expected to show, then
I
apologize—to Mrs. Baffleburg, to Miss McWharter, and to anyone else I may have offended.” He started to sit down, then paused midway for a final comment. “Incidentally, it was not I who introduced the word ‘steal,’ Mr. Speaker.”