Free The Echo of the Whip by Joseph Flynn Page B

at the clerical level for a Boston congressman who would eventually rise to become speaker of the House. Dad had told him to keep his head down and let the quality of his work speak for itself. That was the right way to attract attention.
    It took only two months for his father’s advice to prove correct. The future speaker stopped by the desk where Whelan was laboring, grinned at him and said, “I’ve shaved with straight razors that aren’t half as sharp as you, young man. Come into my office and let’s talk a bit.”
    Whelan followed and once seated was offered a huge cigar.
    Taking it, he said, “I don’t smoke, sir, but if you don’t mind, I’ll keep this as a memento.”
    The congressman laughed and said, “Damn, boy, you’re a natural. Charm, good looks and family money. You could run for office next year, and I’d back you.”
    “Thank you,” Whelan told him, “but I don’t see that as my ambition.”
    Surprised, the pol asked, “No, how do you see your future then?”
    “More as a trusted adviser. Someone well-read, versed in the important issues, aware of political directions and crosscurrents.”
    “A plotter and a schemer when necessary?”
    Whelan, truthfully, had yet to think of himself in those terms, but once they were suggested, he said, “I suppose things could come to that for the right cause.”
    “And what cause might that be?”
    The younger man shrugged. “Keeping the right people in office, what else?”
    “Damn right, starting with me,” the congressman said.
    He made Edmond Whelan his deputy chief of staff when he was just twenty-four years old. There was no doubt he would have bumped his nominal superior, the chief of staff, out of the top spot had he elected to stay with the congressman, but he felt his thinking needed more intellectual depth. So he applied to the doctoral program in government at Georgetown University.
    Besides the stellar grades from his undergrad and master’s level programs he brought with him, and his practical experience of two years’ work in the congressman’s office, Whelan also added to his Georgetown application the beginning of the treatise he was writing on how either the Democrats or the Republicans might become the dominant political party for an indefinite, but certainly decades-long, period of time. He called his burgeoning collection of thoughts on that subject Permanent Power.
    The first and only person to read his application and his strategy for one-party government was Thomas Winston Rangel of The Maris Foundation, a Washington non-profit and ostensibly non-partisan think tank. T.W. Rangel, on a voluntary basis, helped Georgetown University screen it’s Ph.D. in Government candidates.
    When he’d read Edmond Whelan’s application and especially his nascent notions on permanent power, he arranged an interview. Meeting in a private room at a Washington club, Rangel asked Whelan first thing, “Young man, is there any chance you’re as ruthless as you are smart?”
    “Might well be, sir,” Whelan replied, “as I don’t yet know how smart I am.”
    Rangel sat back and offered a skeptical look.
    Whelan told him, “Honestly, I keep thinking one day I’ll walk into a room where everyone is smarter than me.”
    “Not likely in this town or any other I know. How many times have you entered a room where anyone was smarter than you?”
    “It’s happened once or twice, and my father has a gift for encapsulating thoughts I feel I should have come up with long before hearing them from him.”
    Rangel smiled. “My compliments to your father. Be sure to show him your appreciation at regular intervals.”
    Whelan already did, but he promised to do so anyway.
    Never hurt to butter up your elders; everyone knew that much.
    Rangel told Whelan. “I’m going to recommend you for admission to the doctoral program. You should give it a try, see if it suits you. If you feel less than completely satisfied, call me and we’ll talk