Fenstemaker for President

THE GAY PLACE by William Brammer. 462 pages. Crest. 95-c-.

William Brammer's The Gay Place first appeared in 1961, and Lyndon Johnson was not amused by the politickin', manipulatin', connivin' chief character who was all too plainly modeled after himself. He told Bill Brammer, 35--a sometime speechwriter for Johnson when he was a Senator--that the book was not worth reading. Now that the novel is out in paperback, the President might take another look at it. It is a lampoon on Texas politics, but the book's L.B.J. character, Governor Arthur Fenstemaker, is warmly portrayed. Fenstemaker is a little cruder than the real-life Lyndon, maybe kindlier; and he stands head, shoulders and ten-gallon hat above all the other heroes of the current political fiction.

It takes an uncommonly big man to run a state like Texas, or "Coonass country," as the Governor calls its rural hinterland. Fenstemaker goes with the job as red beans go with fatback. His instincts are generous, his vision broad, even if his political methods are not exactly taught in civics class. To ram a school bill through his ornery legislature takes all the wiles of a sagebrush Machiavelli.

First, after picking a not-too-friendly legislator to manage the bill on the floor, Fenstemaker wears him down with Bible-belt hectoring: "World's cavin' in all round us; rocket ships blastin' off to the moon; poisonous gas in our environment; sinful goddam nation laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers. My princes are rebels and companions of thieves." Next Fenstemaker prevails on the speaker of the house to move the bill up on the calendar. "He's a reasonable and honorable man," explained the Governor. "All I had to do was threaten to ruin him." Then he persuades a left-wing newspaper editor to oppose the bill so that it will be more palatable to the conservatives, who are "all stirred up and worried about taxes and socialism and creepin' statesmanship." Fenstemaker gets his bill.

Texas liberals, who are unhappy with their Governor because he settles for so many half-loaves and refuses to talk like a liberal, are scathingly portrayed as a cynical, ingrown coterie that spends most of its time boozing and rutting. Fenstemaker, groans one liberal, is "Mahatma Gandhi and Rasputin, the Prince of Darkness and the goddam Mystic Angel." But he concedes that the old fox "knew what absolutely had to be done; he could engage himself and then withdraw without losing that commanding vision."

By the novel's end, Fenstemaker has managed to elect an upstanding young Senator, destroy a McCarthyite type, arrest a crooked lobbyist who has been bribing legislators, stave off a segregationist march on the capitol, and give many a liberal a lesson in Coonass politics. That ought to make even Lyndon Johnson proud.

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