The Cloakroom was filling up in anticipation of Knowland’s big play. Not everybody was happy about it. A lot of them had planned to be well out of the city by noon today. Hendrickson popped in asking for Bill, but nobody knew where he was.
“Do you think he’s drunk?”
“Not with this vote on, he hasn’t touched a drop.”
Somebody said they’d seen him in Joe McCarthy’s committee room, and Hendrickson sent a staff member down there to ask Knowland if two o’clock was still the target. I glanced at my own watch: just minutes away. Bob hurried back out on the floor, and the talk shifted to Joe McCarthy’s latest act. I stayed out of it. Tail Gunner Joe was dangerous to the peace around here, which it was my job as a kind of double agent — doubled and redoubled — to preserve.
“Jesus, it’s a real fucking carnival down there, the whole place wired up with klieg lights and microphones, reporters and photographers everywhere, crawling under the tables, on their knees in front of Joe’s table, perched up on windowsills — he’s really got something going, all right!”
My main problem was how to keep McCarthy safe inside the Party with all the enormous power he now commanded, here on the Hill and throughout the nation, and at the same time prevent him from getting out of hand and setting the whole house on fire. This wasn’t easy, old Joe could wax pretty evil at times, especially when he saw a crowd gathering around a speech of his and lacked a climax to what he was saying — he became increasingly reckless and impulsive then, and could get very dangerous. “Joe,” I’d say, “the best tactic in the face of suspicion from a large segment of the press and public is to be certain you can prove every statement you make about Communist activities.” But when I said things like that, his eyes would just spread apart and focus on some point way behind the back of my head, far out on the horizon. Ike could say, “I am not going to engage in personalities,” and so keep his lily-white fanny clean, but I couldn’t. And Joe was a tough sonuvabitch, he had energy to spare, a killer instinct, access to secret files, and a lot of allies. He didn’t fit the genial Foghorn image when he came here, and he’d had a hard time at first establishing a power base — so, like me, he’d formed his own club, picking up dissidents and outsiders, going out and working the vineyards, getting his own men — guys like Butler, Welker, Goldwater, Dworshak, Dirksen, and the like — elected. We had other things in common, too, Joe and me: we were both born poor and were shy as kids, both worked in grocery stores, went to Bougainville during the war, came back to make careers in politics off the Communist issue, and both of us had helped make Wheeling, West Virginia, famous. Also we were both Irish, but this was in fact what separated us. And Joe — like all those young beavers around him, Scoop Jackson, Cohn, Kennedy, Schine — lacked my patience, my thoroughness, my iron butt.
“I hear he’s got some sonuvabitch down there today who was supposed to be the head of a Phantom goon squad assigned to knock Joe off!”
“Ho ho! No shit! Who says?”
“Some guy from the FBI, used to be a double agent.”
“Fantastic! Where the hell does Joe dig up these guys?”
“You gotta admit, it’s the best show in town! I mean, he’s a legend in his own goddamn lifetime — how many of us can say that?”
Just then, through the Cloakroom doors came the missing Majority Leader, Bill Knowland, puffing in on us like an old World War I armored car, snorting and bellowing: “Okay, goddamn it! muster the troops! the vote’s on!” Bill slapped my back as he roared by. “C’mon, Dick! History calls!” And he barreled on out into the Chamber. A few of the Senators trailed out after Knowland, others came pouring in, genial with booze and rumor. I stood at the edge of the activity, moving my lips as though counting heads, just to give them the idea I was acknowledging their presence, and remarking to myself on the essential plainness of this famous “anteroom to history”: just a bunch of old sofas strewn with papers and pillows, some tables for signing correspondence, a couple of old typewriters, and upended jugs of Poland Springs bottled water — I remembered the time when, still green and as always overeager, I had made the mistake of going over to one of them to get a drink, breaking one of the innumerable idiotic traditions of this place. Now, not to get caught in another and to avoid the tensions when Joe McCarthy came storming through, I returned to the Chamber.
There weren’t that many more people out here than there had been when I’d come through earlier, but the atmosphere had completely changed. It was wonderful how you could feel this, the sense of an impending drama, the agitation, the swelling excitement: “King Cong” aroused. Movements were quicker, expressions less jaded, conversations more intense. Joe McCarthy’s Maryland protege John Marshall Butler and the Democrats’ Pat McCarran were on the floor arguing about our new hanging bill — Judge Irving Kaufman’s idea — which would restore the wartime death penalty for espionage (McCarran wasn’t arguing against the bill, he was just trying to steal it), and the court reporters were hustling about the Chamber with an augmented sense of purpose, tuning in on each Senator as he spoke, working their fifteen-minute shifts before running back to the Reporters’ Office to feed their shorthand notes into a dictaphone. The pages were suddenly awake and dashing back and forth with chairs instead of idly goosing each other, the chairs mostly for staff members who now came bursting through the swinging doors at the back — and it was filling up now, the tide was rolling in.
I waited for Purtell to order the reading of the conference report by the Chief Clerk, then, while it was being recited, bumped him from his seat as presiding officer. Nobody applauded my arrival. Not that I expected it, but I remembered how warmly old Alben Barkley was always received whenever he came over here while I was in the Senate. Why didn’t they greet me that way? I was an ex-colleague, too. Of course, I didn’t have Barkley’s length of service, nor did I share his fawning admiration for this bunch of rummies. I was always too independent for this place. I’d liked the House, I could operate there, but I could never get used to the Senate, and stayed away as much as possible. Coming here two years ago I had that same lost feeling I had in the war when I first went into the Navy and got shipped out to Ottumwa, Iowa. Since my school days, I’ve always been allergic to smart-ass private cliques and fraternities, avoiding the tuxedo snobs of the other outfits by forming my own. This place with its almost medieval exclusivity was even worse than most, because, in spite of the surface camaraderie, there was no real interaction here, just obedience to some primitive unchallenged customs and a blind loyalty based on the blood of Party. Each of these clowns lived in a world of his own, like a feudal baron, each one isolated from the other by his retinue of clerks and lawyers, trading favors, garnering wealth and power, loyal only to his own fiefdom. No wonder the Presidents always had trouble with the Senate: Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages.
“Mistah President…”
“The Senator from Texas is recognized for five, uh, minutes.”
Johnson, I could see, for all his surface composure, was hopping mad. Knowland had really pulled a fast one on him today, and Lyndon didn’t like to get outdrawn by anybody. It tickled me to see the old operator so discomfited. He had been feeling pretty smug that TIME had been running about the world this week wearing his face, calling him everything from “Rope Dealer” and “Combination Man” to “The General Manager” and “Landslide Lyndon.” What TIME didn’t talk about was all the tills the General Manager had his hand in; the Depression had been a real goldmine for Lyndon, and he didn’t do bad during the war either. Well, hell, why not? he had the smell of magnolias about him, as they say, magnolias and cowshit, no chance ever to be President, he might as well get rich instead. Anyway, I’d had my day with the Poet Laureate as the “Fighting Quaker,” and deep in my heart I knew, unlike Johnson, that if I stayed clean and on my toes, I’d have more. I wondered what kind of mail Lyndon was getting. I thought of some other alliterations besides “Landslide” and a good play or two on “Rope Dealer.” You could do plenty with “Combination Man,” too. Maybe I ought to send him one, I thought. He’d never guess. Take him down a peg.