Free A Song in the Night by Bob Massie Page A

level of intensity. They began to consider issuing subpoenas and holding hearings in order to get to the bottom of what was going on. This process unfolded over many months. We made progress, but the staff became distracted because Senator Jackson was preparing to run for president of the United States in 1976. At the same time, they kept me working on the project.
    One morning I received a surprise phone call from the minority counsel, the head of the Republican staff of the committee. He wanted to meet with me personally—now. I was perplexed. Senior Senate staff members of one party do not usually summon interns from another party to hold urgent private meetings. I mentioned this to my immediate boss at the time, and he said, “Go see what he wants.”
    I walked through the immense hallways of the Russell Senate Office Building, passing office after office of different senators, with their great mahogany doors and American and state flags standing majestically in the hallways. My feet clicked and echoed on the vast marble floor. When I reached my destination, I was ushered immediately into the minority counsel’s office. He was seated behind his desk with his hands folded.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    I did.
    “I have asked you to come here because I understand that Senator Jackson is considering issuing subpoenas in the pharmaceutical investigation.”
    I said nothing.
    “I have consulted with the ranking minority member of the subcommittee, Charles Percy, and he has a problem with that. Specifically, he has a problem with
you
.”
    I was shaken. Percy was one of the most famous senators in the country, widely considered a decent man and a Republican moderate. He was also from Illinois, the home of most of the pharmaceutical manufacturers. The minority counsel continued with an edge to his voice.
    “We believe that your personal medical situation makes it completely inappropriate for you to be involved in any investigation of this industry. So we have decided that we will consider supporting this investigation only if you withdraw from it. You must recuse yourself immediately and completely. If you don’t, we will block any subpoena. So it’s your choice—the investigation either stops here or you quit and give it the chance to go forward.” He paused for effect and then waved his hand. “Now you can go.”
    I walked back through the long corridors in shock, realizing that I had just been exposed to my first direct case of political hardball. When I returned, I told the majority counsel, who was furious. Together we went to Senator Jackson, who was equally angry that the Republicans had called me inprivate. Jackson was a realist, and he said to me, “Bob, you know this presidential thing is coming up, so I would have a lot of trouble forcing this through right now. If I am elected president, you will come see me at the White House and we will use my authority to find out what is going on. And if I lose, I will return to the Senate and we will crack this resistance right here.”
    I left his office and thought, Well, something is going to happen; there is just going to be a delay. But Jackson did not win the nomination—that went to Jimmy Carter—and I gave up my position in the Senate. When Jackson returned to the Senate, he was swamped with foreign policy problems. A few years later he died suddenly, at the age of seventy-one. The subpoenas, the investigation, and the hearings never took place.
    Between Watergate, the endless agony of the Vietnam War, and the crushing of the pharmaceutical investigation, I decided that I had seen enough. I was finished with politics.

    In the fall of 1974 I had enrolled as a freshman at Princeton University, a bastion of dazzling opportunity and privilege. My father, my uncle, my doctor, and my godfather had all earned scholarships from Tennessee to attend Yale, and my initial idea had been that this was where I might go. When I applied to Yale, however, I encountered some