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nomination and Royce Blair, polishing sledge-hammer phrase after sledge-hammer phrase, is going to say so in terms that will take wings from the Portland Kiwanis Club and echo across the nation by nightfall. Already he has tried, in vain, to reach Tom August and tell him what to do, but the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as usual in moments of crisis, is nowhere to be found.
    Actually, by one of those happy coincidences which have characterized his turtle-like progress through three terms as Senator from Minnesota, Tom August at this moment just happens to be completely out of touch with almost everyone at a plantation in South Carolina. This is just as well from his point of view, because he knows that a lot of people are just as anxious as Royce Blair to tell him what to do and in his vague and gentle, otherworldly way, Tom August doesn’t like to be told. So he is quite happy to be out of touch, and if his host should ask him to stay another day or two—there won’t be a vote on the Federal Reserve bill until next week, so there’s no rush—Tom August would be quite delighted to remain. The time for departure is nearing, however, and the Senator is beginning to perceive that the invitation will not be extended, and so with his usual philosophical and faintly resentful air of being buffeted unjustly by an unkind fate, he is getting ready to go back and face the music. His calm is not enhanced by the fact that for some strange reason known only to their host, his fellow house-guest and fellow voyager on the flight back to Washington is Harley M. Hudson, the Vice President of the United States. “What this country needs,” Arly Richardson once remarked, “is a good five-cent Vice President,” and Harley has never gotten over it. He has been fretting about the Leffingwell nomination ever since the news came over the radio, dropping all pretense that he had been informed of it in advance and professing freely a worry as deep as it is voluble. Harley always means well, but Tom August can’t stand him when he gets in a fussing mood, and the prospect of six hundred miles of this is almost more than the soft-voiced and wistfully willful senior Senator from Minnesota thinks he can stand.
    In Albuquerque at this moment the first Senator to give a comment to the press has been waylaid by reporters on his way to the plane for Washington. Hugh B. Root of New Mexico, chewing his cellophane-wrapped cigar and giving the whistling, wheezing, mushlike wail that passes for his particular version of the English language, is blurting something that the wire-service reporters hear as, “—mushn’t shpend our time on sucsh shtupid—sucsh shtupid—mushn’t—I’m opposhed—opposhed—we shimply mushn’t—” which they agree among them must mean, “The Senate must not spend its time and energies on such stupid nominations. I am unalterably opposed to the nomination of Robert A. Leffingwell to be Secretary of State.” When they read this back to Hugh Root for confirmation he gestures with his dripping cigar, looks at them with sudden sharpness like an old badger unearthed in the sunlight, nods, waves, and clambers aboard, shaking his head indignantly. Then he takes the wings of the morning and is gone into the cold bright wind of the desert dawn.
    In something of the same vein, though more quietly and cogently, the senior Senator from New Jersey, James H. La Rue, bravely fighting the palsy which always afflicts him, says in his quavering voice in St. Louis that “the Senate must and will reject the nomination of Mr. Leffingwell. Mr. Leffingwell’s views on world affairs do not agree with those of many patriotic and intelligent Americans. It would not be safe to have him in the office of Secretary of State.” It is not an opinion Bob Munson will like to hear about, but Jim La Rue, a good weather vane, has indicated the ground on which the nomination battle will really be fought. It is ground to which Seab Cooley