Martin Steelman, a senior United States Senator, has always trodden the path toward power and the Presidency, with which he was obsessed. Towards that end he has sacrificed friendship, his marriage, daughter and grandchildren, from whom he is estranged. But now he has been given a terminal medical diagnosis: his cardiac condition is incurable and irreversible and soon he will die. Resigned to this, faced with the end of ambition and the hollowness of the life that his ambition has left him, Steelman moves to reconcile with his divorced wife, his estranged daughter and through them establishes.