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Sarason,
as the brain behind.
    Senator Windrip’s father was a small-town Western druggist, equally
ambitious and unsuccessful, and had named him Berzelius after the
Swedish chemist. Usually he wasknown as “Buzz.” He had worked
his way through a Southern Baptist college, of approximately the
same academic standing as a Jersey City business college, and
through a Chicago law school, and settled down to practice in his
native state and to enliven local politics. He was a tireless
traveler, a boisterous and humorous speaker, an inspired guesser at
what political doctrines the people wouldlike, a warm handshaker,
and willing to lend money. He drank Coca-Cola with the Methodists,
beer with the Lutherans, California white wine with the Jewish
village merchants—and, when they were safe from observation,
white-mule corn whisky with all of them.
    Within twenty years he was as absolute a ruler of his state as ever
a sultan was of Turkey.
    He was never governor; he had shrewdly seenthat his reputation for
research among planters-punch recipes, varieties of poker, and the
psychology of girl stenographers might cause his defeat by the
church people, so he had contented himself with coaxing to the
gubernatorial shearing a trained baa-lamb of a country schoolmaster
whom he had gayly led on a wide blue ribbon. The state was certain
that he had “given it a good administration,” andthey knew that it
was Buzz Windrip who was responsible, not the Governor.
    Windrip caused the building of impressive highroads and of
consolidated country schools; he made the state buy tractors and
combines and lend them to the farmers at cost. He was certain that
some day America would have vast business dealings with the
Russians and, though he detested all Slavs, he made the State
Universityput in the first course in the Russian language that had
been known in all that part of the West. His most original
invention was quadrupling the state militia and rewarding the best
soldiers in it with training in agriculture, aviation, and radio
and automobile engineering.
    The militiamen considered him their general and their god, and when
the state attorney general announced that he was goingto have
Windrip indicted for having grafted $200,000 of tax money, the
militia rose to Buzz Windrip’s orders as though they were his
private army and, occupying the legislative chambers and all the
state offices, and covering the streets leading to the Capitol with
machine guns, they herded Buzz’s enemies out of town.
    He took the United States Senatorship as though it were his
manorial right,and for six years, his only rival as the most
bouncing and feverish man in the Senate had been the late Huey Long
of Louisiana.
    He preached the comforting gospel of so redistributing wealth that
every person in the country would have several thousand dollars a
year (monthly Buzz changed his prediction as to how many thousand),
while all the rich men were nevertheless to be allowed enough to
getalong, on a maximum of $500,000 a year. So everybody was happy
in the prospect of Windrip’s becoming president.
    The Reverend Dr. Egerton Schlemil, dean of St. Agnes Cathedral, San
Antonio, Texas, stated (once in a sermon, once in the slightly
variant mimeographed press handout on the sermon, and seven times
in interviews) that Buzz’s coming into power would be “like the
Heaven-blest fall ofrevivifying rain upon a parched and thirsty
land.” Dr. Schlemil did not say anything about what happened when
the blest rain came and kept falling steadily for four years.
    No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know
precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip’s career was taken
by his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power
in his state, Sarasonhad been managing editor of the most widely
circulated paper in all that part of the country. Sarason’s
genesis was and remained a mystery.
    It was said that he had been born in Georgia, in Minnesota, on