Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury

Author:Allen Drury [Drury, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Whether God was on the job today, however, was something of a moot point. Certainly He was rather far from both the presence and the thoughts of the ominously scowling individual who sat in his office on the fourth floor of the New Senate Office Building and waited for his visitors. Fred Van Ackerman, junior Senator from the State of Wyoming, was not in the mood to waste much time on what he regarded as two feather-headed, hysterical boobs. Helen-Anne had been a pest ever since his first run-in with her. She had begun digging around in his personal affairs soon after he took office, and although she never really found anything, she had put a couple of things in her column that had probably helped to start the trail of vindictiveness that had led to his censuring by the Senate at the time of the Leffingwell nomination. As for Bob himself—that mealy-mouthed, hypocritical pantywaist for whom Fred had done so much during the nomination battle was now deserting Fred’s candidate and thus was deserting not only Fred himself but that crusade for world peace and justice that the junior Senator from Wyoming conceived to be his particular mission in life.

The Leffingwell nomination! It had happened more than a year ago, and still its bitter divisions and suspicions were racking the Senate and influencing in a thousand subtle ways the conduct of American policy. It was amazing how such an event could continue to eat away at the American system like some constantly recurring cancer that one had thought to be excised but which apparently possessed a life of its own. So major a tangle of emotions, ambitions, likes, dislikes, ideals, nobilities, cupidities, braveries, cowardice, took a long time dying in Washington. There had been a few such back down the decades, great legislative battles that had split the Senate, the government and the country, and it was usually not until the major participants had passed from the scene that the ramifications and repercussions died away. In this instance, most of the major participants were still very much alive and kicking.

Out of the spiteful inability of some of them to accept the fact that he and Ted Jason really represented a major section of the country’s thinking had come many of the bitter aspects of the fight over the visit of Terrible Terry to the United States and the United Nations. Out of them had come most of the bitter hostility to Ted and his cause at the San Francisco convention. And now, finally, there came still the adamant and implacable opposition of such men as the President as Ted was about to try again in the National Committee for the prize that history, simple justice and the desperate need of the world said should be his.

It was what you could expect of the sort of half-assed, half-baked minds that were coming to see Fred today. Certainly the fact of his own political survival was proof enough that the cause he espoused was the right one.

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