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University Daily Kansan Friday. April 20, 1962
The Legislative Machinery...
The Capitol Building
Everett M. Dirksen:
He Leads Senate Republicans
By Zeke Wigglesworth
Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois is known to his enemies as a man who "no matter what he says, sounds like a snake oil salesman."
To his friends and fellow Republicans in the Senate, he is "a master of parliamentary strategy" or "sugary, but palatable."
Dirksen has been in public eye and voice range for 30 years. He began his political career in his home town of Pekin, Ill. in 1933.
DIRKSEN IS ONE of the most outstanding orators of our time, for as one biographer puts it: "When he gets up to speak, he resembles the venerable solons of a bygone age. Like a mighty pipe organ, he has merely to regulate the wind volume to achieve awesome effects."
AGAINST THE recommendations of his political advisers, Dirksen ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. He had been advised to start first in the Illinois legislature, but he felt that he would only stagnate there. Thus he ran for the House in 1933, defeating the Democratic incumbent.
He served in the House until 1949, with a record of being very anti-New Deal and anti-Roosevelt. He was more or less opposed to Truman, following the lead of the Republican leadership in the House.
In 1949, he felt the calling of another order, and with typical Dirksen prose and poetry, launched a successful campaign to get himself elected to the U.S. Senate.
It was during the 1950s in the Senate that Dirksen became one of the chief spokesmen for the Eisenhower administration. He served in the Senate under the Majority Floor Leader, William Knowland of California, as the Majority Whip.
The story goes that every Tuesday morning during the Eisenhower years, a legislative meeting was held with the President. Eisenhower generally attended, but being a general at heart, and having only a rudimentary knowledge of politics, was usually bored or uninterested.
DIRKSEN AND ANOTHER Republican leader, Rep. Charles Halleck of Indiana, began to attend these meeting. They began telling the President what his veto would do to such and such a bill, or what chance he had for getting an ambassadorial appointment through the Senate.
As a result of these Tuesday meetings, Dirksen became popular with
Washington reporters. He answered their questions with clarity, speed and thoroughness. And of course he orated.
As one critic phrased it, "His every scene is overplayed and rich in rhetoric."
Throughout Eisenhower's term of office, Dirksen was the "President's Man." One reason for his popularity with Eisenhower has been shown above. Another one was his voting record. He had one of the highest voting records in the Senate for supporting Eisenhower policies and stands.
IN THE 88TH CONGRESS, Dirksen continued his role as Eisenhower man. He had 87 roll call votes for Eisenhower, 7 against him. Goldwater scored 52 for and 18 against.
To describe Dirksen's voting record in the Senate, one would have to use the phrase "moderate conservative." He believes in change, true, but change at a slow rate.
For example: Dirksen served on the Senate subcommittee which is investigating aging and the aged. When the medical bill for the aged was proposed, he and Barry Goldwater dissented. Dirksen said: "Such aid must be voluntary and must be at the state level. It must also involve no increase in the social security taxes."
Of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, Dirksen said: "It is a moderate bill, yet a significant step. The bill provided for, among other things, action against bombings by segregationists.
As William Furlong put it, in an article in the New Republic in December, 1558, "Everett McKinley Dirksen is an able, unctuous individual who has achieved influence by the use of finesse, not fight."
Dirksen has also created an image in the Senate, not only with his voting record, but his actions. He is regarded by many of his fellow senators as a political opportunist.
But, Furlong reluctantly admits, "He is probably the best technician the Senate Republicans could have advanced to leadership."
Which points another fact about the Illinois Senator. While being accused of being a "honey-marinated snake oil salesman" and a "political profiteer," he is respected by everyone in the Senate as being an able political leader. He showed his mettle during the Tuesday morning meetings with Eisenhower. He has shown it by the use of clever maniination as he delves into the political intracacies of the Senate.
J. William Fulbright
An Egghead Senator
By Clayton Keller
A fellow senator once said of J. William Fulbright: "He'd rather make a commencement address to young eggheads than a good, rousing Jackson-Jefferson Day dinner speech."
Sen. Fulbright of Arkansas, a former University of Arkansas president, remains interested in education after 20 years in Congress. This interest, with his obvious dislike for back-slapping, beating around the bush, and shifting with public opinion, would bear out his colleague's remark that Sen. Fulbright still is more an educator than a politician.
THE MANNER IN WHICH Sen. Fulbright entered politics shows his feelings on politicians and "public images." He ran for the House of Representatives in 1942 after he had been fired as president of the University of Arkansas. He was fired because he had refused to employ one of the governor's men as a public relations man for the University.
"I need another good professor more than I need a public relations man," he had told the governor.
Once in Congress, Sen. Fulbright wasted no time in making his presence known. During his term in the House, he introduced a resolution calling for "international machinery with power adequate to establish and maintain just and lasting peace." The resolution passed overwhelmingly, and the stage was set for the United Nations several years later.
While still a freshman senator in 1946, Fulbright pushed through the bill for which he is probably best known today. This, of course, was the act which set up the Fulbright exchange scholarships, under which American students go abroad to study and foreign students are brought to American colleges and universities.
SEN. FULBRIGHT MADE headlines the same year when he blandly suggested that President Harry S. Truman should resign because the Republicans had taken control of
Congress. This remark led President Truman to refer to Sen. Fulbright as an "overeducated Oxford S.O.B."
Relations also were cool between Sen. Fulbright and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sen. Fulbright was a constant critic of the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Fulbright maintained, was giving Congress and the public a falsely optimistic picture of the international situation.
Sen. J. William Fulbright
"The truth is that our foreign policy is inadequate, outmoded, and misdirected," he once said. "It is based in part on a false conception of our real, long-term national interests and in part on an erroneous appraisal of the state of the world in which we live. Worse, it reflects a dangerous apathy and a quite incomprehensible unwillingness to look facts in the face."
Sen. Fulbright criticized the heavy spending on military assistance and
Wilber Mills
The Arkansas Non-Traveler
The conspicuous wooing of Wilbur Mills, a stocky, slightly jawed man of fifty-two, has extended to the general public the celebrity that he has long held among professional politicians. He is a phenomenon peculiar to the House of Representatives. He came there in 1939, still a very young man, to represent a rural Arkansas district that was the second least populous in the nation. A banker's son, he grew up in the tiny railroad junction of Kensett, Arkansas, attended a Methodist college fifty miles from home, married a childhood sweetheart, and served a brief spell as a county judge. He did, however, venture outside Arkansas long enough to attend Harvard Law School.
MILLS HAS MAINTAINED his provincial ways. In Washington, he and his family live in the same not-so-fashionable apartment building on Connecticut Avenue that they moved into twenty years ago, and socialize very little even at Arkansas state functions. The day Congress adjourns they drive home to their simple frame house in Kensett. Mills remained in Congress throughout the Second World War, and to this day he has not traveled abroad.
His devotion to his constituency is hardly a matter of strict political necessity, since Mills has faced opposition in the Democratic primaries only twice, both times prior to 1944, and has never had a Republican opponent. The recent redistricting more than doubled Mills' constituency and threw him up against Dale Alford, the segregationist congressman from Little Rock. But Alford has decided to try for governor.
QUITE EARLY, Speaker Rayburn, reportedly recognizing a first-class mind when he saw one, assigned Mills to the Ways and Means Committee. There, far removed from the more dramatic spectacles of Congress, he has labored at legislation that few of his colleagues pretend to understand. He has had time and inclination for little else. Four years ago, after the long ascent up the seniority ladder, Mills became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
—Excerpted from an article by Douglass Cater in The Reporter, March 29, 1962.
the lack of interest in economic and cultural aid to foreign countries
Sen. Fulbright has been called a pessimist. Actually, however, he appears to believe that there is some hope for the world through education.
"THE (FULBRIGHT) EXCHANGE program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life," he explained to an interviewer in 1358. "It's the one activity that gives me some hope that the human race won't commit suicide, although I still wouldn't count on it."
Whether or not he is "over-educated" is debatable; certainly, Sen. Fulbright is one of the most educated men in Congress. He entered the University of Arkansas at the age of 13, receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1825. He applied for and received a Rhodes scholarship his senior year, and received his B.A. degree from Oxford University in England in 1928. Next, he attended George Washington University, where he received his law degree in 1934, finishing second in a class of 135.
After practicing law with the U.S. Department of Justice for a year, during which time he also taught at George Washington University, Fulbright returned home to Arkansas where he farmed and taught at the University of Arkansas until he was chosen president in 1939. He was fired two years later.
The touchest situation Sen. Fulbright has faced has been the school integration issue. While not a segregationist to the extent that many Southern politicians are, Fulbright nevertheless has disappointed many of his liberal supporters for his moderate stand on the issue.
Sen. Fulbright signed the so-called Southern Manifesto, but he was one of the men who succeeded in toning it down. When Gov. Orval Faubus used the national guard to keep Negroes out of Little Rock Central High School, Sen. Fulbright refused to endorse the governor's action. He has criticized the Supreme Court desegregation decision, maintaining that desegregation will come about if the states are allowed to solve it in their own way, but he has been a moderate in the integration situations.
HE HASNT LET the segregation issue enter into his votes for federal aid to education, despite the tieup, but he has consistently fought civil rights legislation. In 1960, he voted "yes" on motions to table two pieces of civil rights legislation, one which would have given the attorney general power to seek injunctions to protect civil rights, and the other which would have a court or the President appoint an officer to register Negroes who proved they were discriminated against.
Perhaps the vote which marked the high point in his career came in 1554. In that year, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was at his peak in power and influence, Sen. Fulbright was the only member of the Senate to cast a vote against appropriating McCarthy's committee more money with which to carry on its investigation.
This could have marked the end of Sen. Fulbright's career, but public opinion soon changed and McCarthy fell into disfavor. Today, some people are predicting that Fulbright's moderate stand on integration will cause him to be rejected this year when he runs for another term in the Senate.
But if Sen. Fulbright is defeated for the Senate, he likely will have other opportunities to work for the betterment of education. He once was offered the presidency of Columbia University, which he turned down to remain in the Senate. In any case, Sen. Fulbright likely will continue to work toward improving education.
"We've done a poorer job educating our people than anything else we've done," he once said. It can safely be said that if this statement is true, it is no fault of Sen. William Fulbright.