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Ashurst stayed on in Washington—"It was a duty and a doom for me to stay away from Arizona." For two years, he held a job as a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals in the Justice Department. Then he retired altogether, emerging only occasionally into the spotlight. He appeared on TV's $64,000 Question, missed a question, won a consolation prize of a Cadillac, which he promptly sold. Hollywood gave him a bit part in Advise and Consent as "Senator McCafferty," who dozes through most of the picture except for intermittent mouthing of flowery rhetoric. When he had nothing else to do, Ashurst spent hours chatting with elderly ladies in the lobby of Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, where he lived. Always courtly and sprightly, he would sweep off his hat, bow deeply, and set the ladies swooning with his resonant "Good afternoon!" After Nebraska's Senator George Norris went down to defeat broken and embittered in 1942, Ashurst wrote to console him: "You speak of 'great'; no man is great unless he has had suffering, sorrow and humiliation . . . Defeat, at the summit of a notable career, is a symbolism so symmetrical that poets and dramatists never ask a more nearly perfect theme." The theme did not fit Henry Fountain Ashurst. But he had his own, which was to say what he felt, with eloquence.