Public Burning by Robert Coover Page B

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!”
    Knowland flashed me a thumbs-up victory signal and the Chamber began to empty out again, as Homer Capehart commenced his arguments on behalf of the report. That reference to the Constitution had just given me an idea. I was just about to hand the gavel back to Bill Purtell and write a note to myself when Lyndon Johnson came rushing back in from the Democratic Cloakroom with Russell Long, who cried: “Mr. President! Will the Senator from Indiana yield?”
    Oh oh. I sat back down. Knowland stayed his troops and sent Hendrickson hustling into the Republican Cloakroom. “For what purpose does the Senator from Louisiana request that I yield?” Capehart wanted to know.
    â€œI was not able to be in the Chamber at the time of the takin’ of the last vote, suh!” said