Foreword
On October 1, 1943, I was discharged from the Army because of an old back injury and came East from my home in California to look for a job. On November 29 I found one with United Press in Washington and three days later was assigned to the Senate. I soon realized how little most Americans know about the very human institution which makes their laws and in large measure runs their country.
I began, at once and deliberately, to keep a diary of the Hill; partly to send to my family, partly because I had hopes that it might eventually be of some slight assistance in making my fellow countrymen better acquainted with their Congress and particularly with their Senate. There is a vast area of casual ignorance concerning this lively and appealing body. Its members in their deliberations do a great deal to decide your future and mine, and that of our country and of our world. Who are they? (Today, as twenty years ago, you have heard of a scattering, those who appear consistently on television or make the headlines regularly. The rest you couldn’t name if you had to.) “What are they like? How do they look, how do they act, what is their institutional slant on things? And over and beyond the special emphasis of the days here recorded, the days of the War Senate on its way to becoming the Peace Senate, how does the Senate function from day to day? What is this Congress?”
I attempted to set down what I saw and heard in a time of testing. This is how we fought the war on Capitol Hill: not too nobly in some respects, not too meanly in others; no worse, on the whole, and no better, than everyone else who had some part to play in victory.
Here is the soldier-vote fight, the subsidy battle, OPA and FEPC, Barkley’s resignation, the State Department debate, the Wallace nomination, the change in Presidents from Roosevelt to Truman, the manpower bill and reconversion, the Bretton Woods Agreement and the United Nations Charter.
Here are the people from downtown who came to the Hill to testify: Frank Knox, Donald Nelson, James Forrestal, Henry Stimson, General Brehon Somervell, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Philip Murray, Sidney Hillman, Francis Biddle, Fred Vinson, Chester Bowles. Here are Franklin Roosevelt and the Duke of Windsor, Clement Attlee and Colonel Robert McCormick. Here is Harry Truman—Senator, Vice President, President of the United States.
Here are they all, all honorable men—or, at least, entertaining men. No one can deny them that.
Here also is the flavor of that special and fascinating amalgam that is life on the Hill. Here is the easygoing intimacy between politicians and press that makes of the latter virtually a formal branch of government; here is the pattern of the Press Gallery days, some slow, some hectic, the interviewing, the waiting outside committee rooms, the covering of debates and hearings, the exciting sense of being at the storm center of the government which, for good or ill, probably has the ultimate decisive impact upon these middle years of the twentieth century.
Here it is, caught in a time of tension when bitterness between President and Congress was rising to a point rare in American history; when the last of the eloquent isolationists were doing their best to turn the course of American involvement in the world; and when generations had not yet changed in the Senate, so that we still had delightful characters, one or two of them still in tail-coats and possessed of flowing hair, all filled with a lively awareness of their own egos, all imbued with a massive sense of the dignity and power of being a Senator of the United States. The egos and the dignity remain, but this is a newer day: the suits are Brooks Brothers, the air is junior-executive, the average age is much younger now than then, and heavy sits the weight of time upon these earnest brows. Understandably so, of course: these are serious days, and a Senator now has even more demands upon his time and ability than a Senator then. The rush of history no longer allows much scope for characters. But it is permissible, perhaps, to say—too bad. For they contributed much, in their own cantankerous ways, and it is symptomatic of times grown grimmer and grayer that there is no longer much place for such individuality, even in the one body which above all others in our system gives free rein to individuality.
Many of those you will meet in these pages are no longer with us on the Hill. Bob Taft no longer bestrides the Capitol like Colossus. Arthur Vandenberg has smoked his last cigar and gone to rest. Ken Wherry, seemingly too alive ever to die, sleeps in his native Nebraska. Bob La Follette, dead by his own hand, trudges no more with dogged earnestness down the marbled corridors where his father walked before him. Barkley is gone, and Walter George.
Many are gone—but some are still here. More importantly, the Senate is still here. And here in these pages, unchanged, unchanging, indeed unchangeable, you will find it pickled in its own sometimes acerbic juices.
The editing I have done, with the perspective of two decades, has been slight—a word deleted here, a sentence or paragraph there, mostly because they have seemed too harsh or hurtful now, where once it seemed they must be said. On some things, particularly the soldier-vote bill, the manpower bill and the basic weaknesses of the United Nations Charter, the judgments were harsh and I have let them stand. Twenty years have not changed conclusions which seemed valid to me then, and to me seem valid still.
In a few places I have inserted a present-day comment to illuminate the flow of narrative. And here and there I have added an occasional historical clarification, such as the full name War Production Board for the casual WPB which in wartime was familiar to every informed American.
The record stands as it was written. In the interests of an honest account I have even decided to leave in something of the youthful wide-eyed approach that I find upon rereading characterized my first days on the Hill. Especially have I done so in my first impressions of Senators and Congressmen, even at the risk of arousing some antagonism among the gentlemen themselves. Henry Cabot Lodge, I imagine, will not be pleased to know that he first impressed me as somewhat supercilious, though I soon came to like and respect him. And it seems laughable now that my first impression of Kenneth McKellar was “a trifle slow on the uptake … shrewd but not in the way some people are shrewd.” I swiftly learned that there were few people indeed as shrewd as Old Mack from Tennessee, in his day the most powerful and the most ruthless man in the United States Senate.
These things I have left in, however, for a very good reason: they were a lesson for me and will, I hope, be a lesson for the casual visitor who wanders into the gallery and wanders out and dismisses his Congress with a casual shrug. To him I would say: don’t underestimate politicians; they didn’t get where they are without abilities. With some exceptions, they are earnest, worried, overworked people who have a lot to recommend them. They wouldn’t have gotten to Washington if they didn’t.
One thing further I would say to this casual visitor:
This is your Senate I am writing about. These are the 100 men and women (96 then, before the admission of Alaska and Hawaii) whom you have elected to represent you in “the greatest deliberative body on earth.” That is what they call it, and after twenty years’ close acquaintance, that is what I call it too.
You will find them very human, and you can thank God they are. You will find that they consume a lot of time arguing, and you can thank God they do. You will find that the way they do things is occasionally brilliant but often slow and uncertain, and you can thank God that it is. Because all these things mean that they are just like the rest of us, and you can thank God for that, too.
That is their greatness and their strength; that is what makes your Congress what it is, the most powerful guarantor of human liberties free men have devised.
You put them there, and as long as they are there you’re going to remain free, because they don’t like to be pushed around any more than you do.
This is comforting to know.
One final word—because his partisans, I suspect, may be overly angered, his detractors overly happy. There has been no retouching, and no purpose other than honest reporting, in the portrait of Franklin Roosevelt that emerges from these pages. If he appears in a critical light, that is because this is how we saw him from the Hill. In his closing months in office there was an ugly hostility, a bitter jockeying for political advantage and power, a mutual mistrust and dislike that constantly clouded his relations with the Congress. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that in those final days they despised each other, and not all the eulogies that flooded the April air in 1945 can obscure the underlying emotions that candid men voiced in the privacy of their offices or, often, in the public debate of both chambers.
They and the President appraised each other as politicians, and there were no illusions left in the glances they exchanged across a mile of Pennsylvania Avenue. Indeed, by that time there could not have been: he had simply been around too long, they knew each other too well. The time for pretense had long since passed.
He was still in such a commanding political position with the country that Congress, although its members understood his methods and could almost always see them coming, was powerless to do much about it. This made for a bitter resentment on their part, a spiteful arrogance on his. Toward the end there was precious little patience, and almost no charity whatsoever, left on either side—and this in a period when the close and friendly cooperation of White House and Hill was imperative to the making of peace and a smooth return to civilian economy. The hatred which existed threatened to become one of the major tragedies of American history. His death assuaged the immediate situation, though it did not solve many of the problems that had arisen, and would continue to plague the country long after, because of it.
And yet he was, of course, a fabulous and fantastic man—the most complex and unknowable human being that this observer, for one, has ever seen. Who was he, what was he? Who ever really knew—who, now, ever really can know? His mystery was great and that, too, fanned the resentment on the Hill. It gave him an advantage he unceasingly pressed. It presented them with a frustration they never resolved.
In a certain sense, for all Americans who lived through those years with him, the words the President will always mean just one man. Here in these pages is a view of him from one major vantage point—one portion of a portrait that neither his contemporaries nor history, in all probability, will ever see quite complete.
Allen Drury
Washington, 1963