“Ah submit that if’n the muhjority of the Senate is gunna legislate in thet way,” he blustered, lifting one big hammy fist, “it is legislation bah suhprise! it is a patronage grab in the dark, without notice! it is legislation bah steamroller!”
While he raged, spicing his argument with raunchy Texan broadsides, which his staff would later patiently excise from the record, the Chamber filled up behind him, the party Whips keeping tabs and waiting for the right moment to call for a quorum. There was an increasing racket and both sides were trading a number of more or less friendly insults without first asking for the right to speak. Like a bunch of bored and drunken cowboys, aching for a little action to liven up the town saloon. I tried to maintain a semblance of order for the sake of the visitors up in the galleries, and watched the doorways (seven, like the holes in a man’s head) to see who was coming and going. Over each of the three principal doors there was a statue: “Patriotism,” “Wisdom,” and “Courage.” Perhaps, in time, there would be a statue of me in here, I thought. Not just a bust like the other Vice Presidents, but a real statue. “The Fighting Quaker.” It fit. The motto over the east entrance translated, “God Has Favored Our Undertakings,” and over the south door: “In God We Trust.” Tailor-made for me, just like the “E Pluribus Unum” over my head. But the slogan that excited the imagination was the one attached to “Courage” over the doorway to the West, my part of the country: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Yes, this was what America was all about, I thought, this was the true revolution of our era — Change Trains for the Future! — and I was lucky enough to be alive just at the moment we were, for the first time, really getting up steam. It was our job now — it would be my job — to bring this new order of the ages to the whole world. My boyhood engineering dreams were coming true! Naturally, it wasn’t in the bag, there was already a lot of talk about jettisoning the Vice President, I knew I’d have to fight to stay on the ticket in 1956. And friends were few: my legislative power base was gone and I was a lonely outsider in Eisenhower’s administration of hoary-headed millionaire amateurs — but then I’ve always been a lonely outsider, that was my power. Besides, Ike, disliking me, was in fact helping me, constantly labeling me the “politician,” the pro, the Party man, and so identifying me with the real power structure of the actual nominating conventions. Yes, in reality, the old General was only setting the scene for me, preparing the way for the New Order that it was my destiny, and through me the destiny of my generation, to bring to the world! Of course, you had to be careful — revolution, new order, it was the kind of language people like the Rosenbergs used, too — but in ignorance, in darkness: yes, the truth about the Phantom was that he was a reactionary, trying to derail the Train of Progress! I was enormously pleased with this insight. Maybe this was why Uncle Sam got me mixed up in the Rosenberg case, I thought. Another object lesson in American dynamics for the heir to the throttle. I took out an index card and made a note. On the bottom, I wrote: START THE 1954 CAMPAIGN NOW!
“What? What?” I asked. Johnson had just addressed me. He’d been shouting something about “any gahdamn Senator” and “gunna ram it down yore throat!” The Parliamentarian whispered that he’d asked for a quorum call. “Oh…”
“Mr. President,” Knowland interrupted, “will the Senator withhold his suggestion of the absence of a quorum so as to permit the acting Majority Leader to make a statement?”
“Suttinly, Bill…”
Knowland launched a counterattack then, giving his reasons for pulling this surprise vote today, and making it clear he’d given Johnson fair warning, so I was able to settle back again. Knowland and I had known each other since my very first campaign in 1946. You could almost say we were friends, were there such a thing in politics. We’d fought a lot of political battles together, had both had our problems with Honeybear Warren back home, and we’d fought shoulder-to-shoulder out here against the Eastern Establishment. Bill had shown me the ropes when I reached the Senate, had sworn me in as Vice President, and it was his shoulder I wept on in that famous photo after the Fund Crisis. “Everything’s gonna be all right, Dick,” he’d said, mothering me, and I’d bawled: “Good old Bill!” On the other hand, we’d had our differences, too. I’d more or less stolen Murray Chotiner away from him and with Murray as my strategist had jumped over Bill’s head to the Vice Presidency in what looked to him like a sellout to the Eastern internationalists, and now I was fighting him still. During the Fund Crisis, he’d been the man called in to replace me after all, and neither of us could get over that overnight. Well, it’s an old truism, just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests. Uncle Sam taught me that — or maybe I learned it somewhere in grade school. Knowland and I would be real friends again only when we wanted something from each other. Like when I’m President and he and his newspapers are looking for a job in government.
As Knowland carried on, I glanced about the Chamber: it was going to be close. The Whips were scurrying in and out of their respective Cloakrooms, counting adversaries across the aisle, sending staff out in search of missing partisans. I looked down on all this old-man bustle from my marble rostrum, toying with the fragile old gavel — ivory capped with silver and said to have been in use since the first Senate meeting in 1789—and trying to imagine what it felt like to be the Incarnation of Uncle Sam, the physical feeling of it as the transformation came over you. Terrible, some said. I had the conviction Uncle Sam preferred Republicans for this process: somehow he never seemed to fit just right in Democrats, and he had left a number of them in pretty bad shape after. We Republicans were closer to America’s sacred center than the Democrats, which was what made it easier in a way to be a “good” Republican: the catechism belonged to us. But the people, living their day-to-day profane lives, were closer to the crude worldly pragmatism — the bosses, boodle, buncombe, and blarney — of the Democrats, and so, except on ritual or crisis occasions, tended to vote for them. Who listens to his conscience unless he must?
Bill asked for a quorum call and I said: “The Secretary will call the roll.” I realized, as the roll was called, that I was getting keyed up. It was like an election. “A quorum is present,” I said, and Knowland moved that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the conference report. The Democrats tried to stall and there was a lot of individual playing to the galleries, but when the vote was called, there were 39 “Yeas” and 39 “Nays.” “Under the Constitution,” I announced, feeling very good about it, “the President of the Senate, who has the right to vote in the case of a tie, casts his vote in the affirmative; and the motion to proceed to the consideration of the conference report is agreed to!”