Politician Promise

If what goes on in Washington is more talk than action, more shadow than substance, more smoke than fire, more image than reality, more nuance than primary color, then Ward Just’s new book, ”Echo House,” is the perfect novel of Washington politics.

Mr. Just proves himself once again to be a master of the teasingly oblique, as he has done so often in his 13 previous works of fiction about politics, among them ”The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert,” ”Nicholson at Large,” ”The American Ambassador” and ”Jack Gance.” Once again the atmosphere is thick with weary disillusion, and you grope your way through it with the sense either that you are not quite getting it or that less is going on here than meets the eye.

The novel gets off to an extremely strong beginning. On an evening sometime in the 1920’s, a group of powerful Washingtonians gather for dinner in Echo House, a stone mansion overlooking Rock Creek Park that wealthy Constance Behl has acquired to promote the career of her husband, Senator Adolph Behl.

The group is awaiting word that Senator Behl’s name has been placed in nomination for the Vice Presidency of the United States. So certain are the Behls that this will occur that they have summoned home from school their son, Axel, both to celebrate his birthday and to share their triumph.

But when the telephone call finally comes, another candidate turns out to have been chosen. And when the Senator is urged by his friends to overlook the betrayal, to telephone congratulations to the Presidential nominee and to offer his support of the new ticket, he instead sees the decision as a personal insult and storms out of the room, thereby burning his bridges of influence.

His watchful son absorbs the lesson. Although he plans to follow his father into government, he will not suffer such treatment. ”I knew that I never wanted to be dependent on a promise that could be withdrawn over a telephone line,” Axel tells his son, Alec, many years later. ”I never wanted to learn the mumbo-jumbo and say that everything was fine when it wasn’t fine.” Axel carries out this vow by working for the Office of Strategic Services and then the Central Intelligence Agency.

But after its strong opening, ”Echo House” turns episodic, following the lives and loves of Axel and Alec through World War II and the Administrations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan up to some nonspecific present.

Axel ends up running a profitable bank that handles funds for the C.I.A. His son becomes a Washington lawyer whose specialty is to ”take people off the hook.” Both become the sorts of men who deliver bad news rather than receive it.

A few of the novel’s episodes are compelling enough: Axel’s adventures in wartime France and his almost fatal wounding when his jeep hits a land mine; Alec’s encounters with New Frontiersmen scheming in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. But Mr. Just seems more interested in the way people talk than in what they’re doing, more in the images and metaphors of their lives than in what happens to them.

At times his dialogue is so mannered that it comes close to satirizing the speaker. ”Axel’s a force of nature,” one character tells Axel’s ex-wife, Sylvia. ”No one laid a glove on Axel. They never do. Axel’s always way, way back in the woodwork, wearing his usual camouflage. That’s where he lives, heard but not seen. Axel’s bulletproof. The bullet hasn’t been invented that could wound Axel Behl.”

But at their best Mr. Just’s metaphors are arresting, whether they involve comparing Axel’s skills as a political bridge builder to those of a Mohawk high-altitude steelworker, or imparting Sylvia’s ”hydraulic theory of gossip in the capital, the first draft of scandal tasted on the higher slopes of northwest Washington,” or proposing the odd theory that Richard M. Nixon was ”Washington’s Jew, despised and feared.”

The man proposing this theory continues: ”He’s never had full citizenship in the Federal city. They don’t like his background, altogether too cosmopolitan. They don’t like his friends. If only they get rid of Nixon, Washington will be sound once again. They want him to put his pots and pans in his peddler’s cart and move along to the next village, where they’ll never have to see him or his like again; and his friends too. Next thing you know, they’ll want to pin a yellow star to his blue serge suit.”

The trouble is, you get so caught up by such metaphors that you lose perspective on the novel’s larger themes. And then when action does break out, as in the story’s too melodramatic ending, it seems grotesquely out of proportion to the novel’s subtle texture.

Near the end, the narrative reveals what Axel’s generation thinks of contemporary Washington, ”a self-infatuated money-grubbing iron triangle of stupefying vulgarity, vainglory, egoism and greed, worse than Rome because at least in Rome there was lively sexual license, orgies and the like.”

But what better past is this caricature to be compared with? One in which men of presumed honor break promises out of expediency? The more you try to feel the deeper currents of Mr. Just’s story, the more you realize you are caught in the surface eddies of his language. In the end you share Alec’s sense of futility, as he reflects, ”This was the house he had inherited and the life he had made and he could not rid himself of either one; he guessed he had another 30 years to live.”

5 Responses to “Learning Not to Depend on a Politician’s Promise”

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