Hollywood by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780375708756
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2000-08-01T16:02:27+00:00

SEVEN

1

THE SENATE CLOAKROOM WAS NOW DIVIDED by an invisible wall across its narrow middle. On one side the Republicans exchanged whispers with their leader Lodge, and on the other the Democrats brooded under the benign if not particularly able leadership of Gilbert M. Hitchcock, Claude Swanson and Burden himself, by no means, in his view, the ablest managers to see the treaty through the Senate.

Outside the cloakroom the sergeant-at-arms had thoughtfully assembled a number of army cots and blankets in case the senators filibustered today as they had the previous day, March 2, when La Follette of Wisconsin took the lead in exploiting the right of any senator to speak as long as he liked. Ostensibly, the bill to be talked to death concerned the leasing of public coal and oil reserves by suspect private interests. But as the Sixty-fifth Congress was obliged to expire March 4 and as a seven-billion-dollar Victory Bond bill had not yet passed, La Follette and his liberal friends were threatening, in effect, to leave the government without funds until the Sixty-sixth Congress assembled in December.

Since Wilson had no intention of calling Congress back between March and December, there was considerable urgency on the part of the Democratic minority to see that the appropriate bills were safely passed and the Congress sent home. If Congress were to come back in an emergency session, Lodge and his allies would then be able, in leisurely fashion, to dismember Wilson’s covenant while the President was still in Paris at work on the final peace treaty.

In full health Burden enjoyed this sort of maneuvering, but nowadays he was in half-health at best. In the flu’s aftermath, he was permanently, mortally tired, with an alarming tendency to fall into a sudden sound sleep no matter where he was. Kitty had begged him to stay away from the Capitol. But the President had begged him to stay at his post. So now he sat with Hitchcock at the Democratic end of the cloakroom, his feet resting on an army cot.

Thus far, everything that Burden and Hitchcock had tried to arrange kept coming undone. La Follette and his friends had given up their filibuster at six-forty on the morning of March 2, at the request of the Republican caucus, which did not want the party blamed for the failure of the Victory Bond issue to pass. There had been a trade-off. La Follette took seriously the stealing of the people’s wealth. Lodge took seriously the destruction of Wilson’s treaty. As party leader, Lodge had promised to aid La Follette later if he would end the filibuster now. La Follette obliged; the bond issue had been passed. But the financing of the government through a general-deficiency bill of $840 million was still pending. The Senate had then adjourned until ten in the morning, March 3, which meant that there would be only twenty-six hours in which to appropriate money to pay the federal government’s debts. If the money was not forthcoming, Lodge would get his wish and Congress would be obliged to come back in the spring.

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