Advise and Consent Read Online Free Page B

the half hour is set aside as a special time, they feel, as long as it comes regularly every day, it forms a small but unbreachable wall around the family; not much, but enough to do the trick.
    Also living in Georgetown in houses of varying quaintness and antiquity whose price increases in direct proportion to their degree of charming inconvenience are some twenty-one Senators whom Bob Munson refers to for easy reference in his own mind as the “Georgetown Group.” The quietest of these domiciles on this morning of Robert A. Leffingwell’s nomination is probably that of the senior Senator from Kansas, Elizabeth Ames Adams, eating breakfast alone overlooking her tiny back garden; the noisiest is probably that of the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Kenneth Hackett, with his hurly-burly seven. Somewhere in between, in terms of decibels and general activity, come such homes as the gracious residence of John Able Winthrop of Massachusetts, the aunt-run ménage of Rowlett Clark of Alabama, and the parakeet and fish-filled home of ancient John J. McCafferty of Arkansas and his sole surviving sister, Jane.
    Far from the Georgetown Group along their delightfully tree-shaded and quaintly impassable streets, certain other colleagues are also greeting the new day in their separate fashions. Twenty-two Senators are out of town, taking advantage of the lull which has come about during the debate on the pending bill to revise some of the more obscure regulations of the Federal Reserve Board. Some people, like Murfee Andrews of Kentucky, Rhett Jackson of North Carolina, Taylor Ryan of New York, and Julius Welch of Washington, can throw themselves into this sort of abstruse economic discussion with all the passion of Lafe Smith on the trail of a new conquest; but most of the Senate is quite willing to leave such topics to the experts, voting finally on the basis of the advice of whichever of the experts happens to be considered most reliable.
    Consequently the experts, aware of their responsibility, are leaving no cliché unturned. All but Taylor Ryan, in fact, are already up and going busily over the economic theories they will hurl triumphantly at one another in a near-empty Senate chamber this afternoon. The small, chunky body of Murfee Andrews is already in imagination swiveling around scornfully as some scathing point sinks home in the unperturbed hide of Rhett Jackson, who in turn is contemplating the delicate sarcasms with which he will show up the ignorance of Murfee Andrews. Julius Welch, who has never gotten over having been a college president, is readying another of his typical fifty-five-minute lectures with the five little jokes and their necessary pauses to permit the conscientious titters to flutter over the classroom. Taylor Ryan, a man who likes his comfort, is still abed, but his mind is busy, and no one need think it isn’t. He has no doubts whatever that he will be able to bull his way right through the flypaper arguments of Jay Welch and Murfee Andrews with the sort of “God damn it, let’s be sensible about this” approach befitting a man who made his millions on the Stock Exchange and so knows exactly what he’s talking about in a way these damned college professors never could.
    Among the absentees, there are as many interests on this morning of the Leffingwell nomination as there are geographic locations.
    In the great West, Royce Blair of Oregon, that ineffable combination of arrogance, pomposity, intelligence and good humor, is up very early preparing an address to the Portland Kiwanis Club luncheon on the topic, “The Crisis of Our Times.” He has selected this title, with his small, private smile-to-himself, as being a sufficient tent to cover all the camels he wants to crowd under it; and the news of the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell, provoking from him, as it did from the Majority Leader, a startled, “Oh, God damn!” provides the biggest camel of them all. Royce Blair does not like this