Advise and Consent Read Online Free

self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from or, once it has claimed them, live without. Washington takes them like a lover and they are lost. Some are big names, some are little, but once they succumb it makes no difference; they always return, spoiled for the Main Streets without which Washington could not live, knowing instinctively that this is the biggest Main Street of them all, the granddaddy and grandchild of Main Streets rolled into one. They come, they stay, they make their mark, writing big or little on their times, in the strange, fantastic, fascinating city that mirrors so faithfully their strange, fantastic, fascinating land in which there are few absolute wrongs or absolute rights, few all-blacks or all-whites, few dead-certain positives that won’t be changed tomorrow; their wonderful, mixed-up, blundering, stumbling, hopeful land in which evil men do good things and good men do evil in a way of life and government so complex and delicately balanced that only Americans can understand it and often they are baffled.

    In this bloodshot hour, when Bob Munson is assessing anew the endless problems of being Majority Leader and Washington around him is preparing with varying degrees of unenthusiasm to go to work, various things are happening to various people, all of whom sooner or later will be swept up, in ways they may not now suspect, in the political vortex created by the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell.
    At the Sheraton-Park Hotel the Senator himself completes his dressing and starts downstairs to breakfast, stopping on his way at the apartment of Victor Ennis of California to see whether he wants to share a cab later to the Hill. Vic and Hazel Ennis invite him in for coffee, which soon expands to breakfast, and before long Bob Munson has discovered that both Vic and his junior colleague, Raymond Robert Smith, a child of television out of MGM who progressed easily from Glamour Boy No. 3 to TV Commentator No. 1 and from there to the House and then to the Senate, will vote for Bob Leffingwell. They have already talked it over, Senator Ennis explains—Ray called from the Coast as soon as he got in last night from the Academy Awards dinner, “and of course you know Hollywood will be behind him, and Ray thinks he’d better be, and so do I.” This is entirely aside from the merits of the nominee, but Bob Munson, who knows his two Californians thoroughly, is quite content to accept their votes without quibbling over motives, the first and most valuable lesson he learned in Washington and one he never forgets. Senator Ennis volunteers the information that he called Arly Richardson, just for the hell of it, and the Majority Leader asks quizzically:
    “And what did that sardonic son of Arkansas have to say?”
    “He said, ‘I guess this will make Bobby sweat a little,’” Senator Ennis reports, and Senator Munson laughs.
    “I think I’ll put him down as doubtful, but probably leaning to Leffingwell,” he says, and Victor Ennis nods.
    “If you can ever expect Arly to stand hitched,” he says, “that’s where I’d hitch him.”
    And as Hazel comes in briskly with the firm intention of diverting the conversation from politics for at least ten minutes, they turn to her excellent meal and start talking baseball.
    While the Ennises and the Majority Leader are thus occupied they do not know—although they would hardly be surprised if they did—that at this very moment, out Sixteenth Street in an apartment high in the Woodner, the Honorable Lafe W. Smith, junior Senator from the state of Iowa, is engaged in a most intimate form of activity with a young lady. This is the fourth time in eight hours that this has occurred, and Lafe Smith is getting a little tired of it. The young lady, however, a minor clerk on a House committee and new to the attractions of living in Her Nation’s Capital, is still filled with a carefree enthusiasm, and so the