“A Calculated and Deliberate Assault”
February 22, 1944. Somebody in the Press Gallery can always be counted on to sum it up in an apt, sarcastic, succinct wisecrack. Today was no exception. “Well,” said someone while we were waiting around for the soldier-vote conferees to break up, “we heard two Farewell Addresses today.”
The first, according to the rules of the Senate, was by General Washington, and it was given an earnest rendition by Elbert Thomas, obviously pleased with the honor.
The second was by Franklin Roosevelt, and it had to do generally with a veto of the tax bill. A nastier attack on Congress—“like a mad dog snarling at the postman,” in the words of one reporter—has not been heard hereabouts for some time.
“It has been suggested by some,” he said with that aloof other-worldliness that always precedes a dagger-thrust and invariably infuriates his targets, “that I should give my approval to this bill on the ground that having asked the Congress for a loaf of bread to take care of this war for the sake of this and succeeding generations, I should be content with a small piece of crust. I might have done so if I had not noted that the small piece of crust contained so many extraneous and inedible materials.…
“The nation will readily understand that it is not the fault of the Treasury Department that the income taxpayers are flooded with forms to fill out which are so complex that even certified public accountants cannot interpret them. No, it is squarely the fault of the Congress of the United States in using language in drafting the law which not even a dictionary or thesaurus can make clear.…
“I trust, therefore, that the Congress, after all these delays, will act as quickly as possible for simplification of the tax laws which will make possible the simplification of the forms and computations now demanded of the individual taxpayers. These taxpayers, now engaged in an effort to win the greatest war this nation has ever faced, are not in a mood to study higher mathematics.”
Crack! Crack! Crack!—laying open the backs of his opponents with one blow after another2.
The effect has been to create, for the first time, perhaps, of all the times in which he has differed from the Congress, a really grave crisis in the relations between the Executive and the Legislature.
The House will meet tomorrow and the entire Ways and Means Committee has announced that it will make speeches in reply. The Senate will do much the same, having already set the ball rolling today with a resounding denunciation by Walter George. Not a man in the Congress has dared to voice approval of the veto—in fact, there is some serious doubt as to whether any man in the Congress does approve it. The rift this time has gone too deep for any but the most temporary healing. The words chosen were too deliberate, the basis for the action too flimsy and illogical, the thing too obviously a deliberate blow at Capitol Hill, for anyone to either forgive or forget.
In the Senate, after the session, Barkley told us in a cold fury such as we have never seen him in before, that he had gone downtown twice in the past week, the last time yesterday, and argued for more than an hour and a half in an attempt to kill the veto. He said he intends to make a speech tomorrow “without regard for the political consequences.” It remains to be seen whether he will or not, but at least the intention was there today. For a man of infinite patience and the most persevering loyalty, this is going far indeed for Alben. His anger is typical of that of the rest of the Senate. This is the last time the Roosevelt Administration will get anything but the most essential war measures out of the Congress of the United States. There is, in fact, serious doubt now that it will get even those.
Several of the few remaining New Dealers among the press show signs of wavering in consequence. One of them summed it up to me with honest candor and a troubled heart. “This is the first time,” he said, “when I have really begun to think that maybe, if he runs again, I will have to vote against him. I hate to vote against the Administration, because I think it has done many fine things, and I think in a lot of things he has a fine record. But after this, I don’t know. It’s going to be this story all over again from now on whenever he wants something, and I honestly don’t know whether or not the country can stand it.”
If one were to pursue that thesis in the press, however, he would be accused of letting partisanship obscure his objective judgment. But it is absolutely true—desperately true. Those of us who are on the ground and know the Congress and know how these glib, arrogant, unkind and unwarranted attacks affect it, know that there is growing between the Hill and the White House a real, deep and ugly hatred that can have the most serious consequences for the country.
On the soldier-vote bill, all of us swung around at the ends of our limbs and dashed back to the trunk for cover after today’s meeting. Without exception we had all played it yesterday along the line of compromise. Today Rankin did a complete about-face, refused to consider the Worley compromise, forced the House conferees to take an informal vote on where they stood, and in consequence managed to kill all attempts at a reasonable solution. As it now stands, the House has decided to insist upon its amendments to the Eastland-Rankin states’-rights bill and reject the Senate’s amendment to Section 3—the Green-Lucas bill embodying the Federal war-ballot principle. Rankin would give no explanation for this sudden switch, nor could Worley or Green offer any reason. The press believes that he thought the Worley compromise over last night, came to the conclusion that it showed a weakness, and decided that if they would yield that much, they would probably yield altogether if he would stand pat. Consequently the abrupt overnight change. Consequently, also, the calculating politician’s strategy by which the decision is rendered as if by fiat from on high, without deigning to give an explanation to anyone.
We meet for another deathwatch at 2 pm tomorrow outside the District Committee room. After a lot more instructive gossip and some jokes by Colonel Cutler, the door will open, the conferees will emerge carrying a flag-draped coffin, and we will go back to our typewriters and proceed to bury the Federal ballot. The few remaining possibilities—further votes by the two houses, the possibility of a Senate offer which might be accepted, etc.—seem very remote tonight. This thing has been bungled from first to last, and the Administration which wanted all or nothing at all stands an excellent chance of ending up with nothing at all.
On all counts it has been a disturbing day.
February 23, 1944. Barkley resigned as Majority Leader today, and the event will not soon be forgotten by those who were there.
Shortly before the session opened the rumor began to sweep through the Press Gallery and the Senate. By the time the Clerk had launched into the first quorum call, about five minutes past 12, the atmosphere—in the trite but inescapable phrase—was electric. Everyone who could possibly get away and get over to the Senate side was on hand; all the bureau chiefs rushed up from downtown; most of the special correspondents were there. As Barkley sat at his desk waiting for the quorum call to be completed, he glanced up from time to time with an almost questioning look at the Press Gallery. He saw it more crowded than he has seen it in many months.
On the floor the tension was also mounting in those opening minutes. As the Senators drifted in by twos and threes, the word spread rapidly among them. Several came over to shake his hand. Wherry was one, Scott Lucas another. Elbert Thomas walked past his desk, and noticing the manuscript rack on it, asked him if he was going to make a speech. We could see Barkley’s reply—“I’m going to resign the leadership”—and Thomas’ startled and disappointed protest, followed by Barkley’s adamant reiteration: “I’m going to resign.” McKellar entered, was informed of the situation by one of the Senate attendants, and went immediately to Barkley’s desk, shaking his hand, urging him repeatedly to reconsider. Again the adamant refusal, and the reiterated statement—“I’m going to resign.” In a moment Mack gave up and settled into his own seat beside him, a quizzical expression on his face. Once Barkley got up and crossed the aisle to Bob La Follette and Vandenberg, moved by some impulse to tell them of his decision. Both looked startled, started to protest, and then stopped in the face of an evident determination to go through with it. The quorum call droned on, came to an end; several Senators inserted material in the Record. Barkley rose and was recognized by Henry Wallace in the Chair. For a moment he looked straight ahead of him without expression, as almost the full membership of the Senate sat silently watching, and above in the gallery the press leaned forward expectantly. Then he began to speak.
For almost 45 minutes, point by point, he denounced the veto message and the man who sent it to the Hill. In a speech that very evidently came from the heart and at times rose to heights of moving passion and sincerity, he repudiated the President whose errand boy in the upper house he has been for seven years. The honor of a man who has been in the Congress for upwards of 32 years was at stake in the Executive’s “calculated and deliberate assault.” His own mind and his own conscience, he said, could not let him take it lying down. And finally, after specifically replying to every point raised in the veto message, he said that his happiness did not depend upon the office he then held, but upon the approval of his own mind and his own conscience. Accordingly he had called a meeting of the Democratic majority for 10 am tomorrow, at which time he would submit his resignation as Majority Leader. He concluded with the statement that despite the President’s veto message, he advised the Congress “if it has any self-respect yet left” to “pass the bill over his veto, his objections notwithstanding.”
He then sat down, and immediately, against all precedent, while the press dashed wildly from the gallery and began to bang furiously on its typewriters and yell hurriedly into its telephones, his colleagues and the galleries stood and applauded for a good three minutes while he remained seated at his desk. Then from both sides of the aisle Senators hurried forward and stood in line to shake his hand while business suspended and Murdock, to whom Wallace had yielded the chair hastily at the end of Barkley’s speech, banged futilely for order. Through the swinging doors across the way, Hattie Caraway could be seen from the Press Gallery, standing on the steps just outside the Senate wiping her eyes, apparently crying with emotion. Only a tiny handful of Senators remained in their seats, among them Theodore Bilbo, Joe Guffey, and kindly Jim Tunnell, whose partisanship for Roosevelt is apparently such that it traduced him into a glaringly obvious and ungenerous gesture. Aside from those, all other members were on their feet to honor a man who had finally, after many years and many humiliations, reasserted his own dignity and his own self-respect and gained thereby an increased stature among the men with whom he works.
Of the political repercussions of this day, and their effect upon the future course of the relations between the Congress and the Executive, much of a speculative nature will undoubtedly be written in the next few days. The resignation’s bearing upon the fourth term will also be gone into exhaustively. The press gallery had its own interpretation today: the man who said “we heard two Farewell Addresses” yesterday was perhaps not far from right.
The Democrats are virtually unanimous tonight in their prediction that Barkley will either be refused permission to resign or will be overwhelmingly re-elected at the conference tomorrow. When that happens, as one remarked, “he will really be the Senate majority leader and not just the Administration’s stooge.” He has repudiated the President, almost single-handedly guaranteed an override of the veto, greatly strengthened his own prestige, and probably made unhealable the breach between Roosevelt and Congress. No, the day will not be soon forgotten by those who were there. Or by those who were not there, either.
On top of all this, the decision of the soldier-vote conferees to continue talking instead of disagreeing came as a decided anticlimax, particularly since we had all predicted collapse of the conference.
Coming down from the floor, a couple of us spotted a wandering lady tourist who had just come out of the gallery. “Did you find it interesting?” we asked her. “Yes, I liked it,” she said rather uncertainly, “but I couldn’t tell just what they were doing.” “That was the Majority Leader of the Democratic Party denouncing the President and resigning in protest against the tax veto,” we told her. “Oh, was it the Majority Leader?” she wanted to know. “Yes, Senator Barkley.” The light of happy recognition broke across her face. “Senator Barkley!” she exclaimed. “I’ve heard about him.… Can you tell me where I can find the statues of all the famous men?”
We all hope devoutly that there were at least one or two tourists who realized that they were seeing something more than just routine business today.
February 24, 1944. Today was the second day in the city of Washington in which there was just one story: Barkley. This morning and this afternoon it moved step by step in a logical progression toward an outcome no one can accurately predict, but about which many speculate. It was one of those rare times when issues transcend men, and beneath the petty battles of transitory politics the basic framework of the Republic can be fleetingly discerned.
A liberal Democrat summed it up for me when he said: “Those of us who would have voted to sustain the veto, because we agree in general with the President’s objections to the bill, cannot do so now. The issue has gone beyond that. It has become an issue of the Executive versus the Congress, to determine once again which has the final say-so. Of course in the long run we do, and we shall vote in a way which will leave no doubt of it.”
By 9:45 this morning, in the hallway outside Room 201 in the Office Building where the Democrats were due to meet and receive Barkley’s resignation, upwards of 100 correspondents and cameramen were on hand, standing about in little groups, talking, joking, laughing, smoking hurriedly and nervously, with a mounting tension running through them. Presently, by ones and twos and threes, the Senators began to arrive: McKellar and Bilbo together; Scott Lucas by himself; Millard Tydings; Homer Bone of Washington on the crutches to which a bone infection has chained him; Connally and huge, portly, heavy-jowled old Dave Walsh of Massachusetts; Burt Wheeler, looking grimly pleased with the President’s misfortune; Abe Murdock, spick and span and in a hurry, brushing reporters aside as though he were shaking off a pack of terriers; Cotton Ed and McClellan and Hattie Caraway; shrewd little Maloney of Connecticut, and the rest. As each appeared down the hall and started toward us, the line formed, until by the time he reached us the Senator found himself confronted with a solid mass of reporters, pencils raised. Some talked, some didn’t; around each we surged in the instinctive mass movement that characterizes the press on such occasions. Suddenly Barkley arrived at his office, right next door. Immediately the flashbulbs began to explode and the questions began to fly. He tried to open the door, dropped his keys, stooped to pick them up; somebody cried, “Senator Barkley!” He looked up, the flash went off, the picture was taken, he dropped his keys again. Eventually he got in. Meanwhile the press services were writing running stories—and the running was literal. One man would jot down a few words of comment or descriptive color and tear off at a dead run down the hall to the press room. A minute or so later another would detach himself from the crowd and hurry away to file additional matter on the news wire. Soon the first man would return, and a third would depart. Ten o’clock came and went, 10:30 arrived. Barkley appeared again in the doorway of his office, and again the flashbulbs went off and the pictures were taken. Shaking his head and refusing comment, he stepped down the hall to the door of the conference room, about thirty feet away, stepped inside, and closed the door. The press broke up again into little gossiping, nervous groups.
Half an hour later Barkley came out, and with a rush we surged around him. He told us with tears in his eyes that he had submitted his resignation and turned the chair over to McKellar. We followed him the short distance back to his office. He paused patiently for many more pictures and many questions, some of which he parried and some of which he answered. Then he disappeared inside and closed the door. We drifted back to the conference room. By this time dead flashbulbs and cigarette butts were scattered all over the floor.
Suddenly the conference door flew open. Again there was that swift, mass rush toward it. Tall Tom Connally, with his long black coat, bow tie and picturesque long hair, lacking only a stovepipe hat to make the picture perfect, pushed his way out crying, “Make way for liberty! Make way for liberty!” Dave Walsh followed him, and Walter George, Millard Tydings, Bennett Clark and Elbert Thomas. Single-file they pushed their way through us to Barkley’s office and went in. Repeatedly reporters and cameramen pushed into the office and were pushed back by the Senator’s secretaries. Presently that door, too, was closed, and we again took up our vigil.
Fifteen minutes later the door opened and the committee came out again. “Did you re-elect him, Senator?” somebody cried. “What did you do?” Dave Walsh smiled and murmured in his soft, hurried, plum-pudding voice, “You know what we did. You know what we did.” Barkley appeared in the doorway and once more pictures were taken and questions were asked. He remained silent, walked swiftly to the conference room and went inside. The Senators rose and cheered, the door closed. Again we waited.
At 11:52 am there was applause. We all wrote it down dutifully: “Appls, 11:52.”
At 11:59 am there was applause and cheers. We noted it.
At 12:03 pm there was prolonged applause and cheers.
At 12:05 the door opened, the Senators began to stream out and the press crowded in.
At approximately 12:10 McKellar began to tell us the story of the meeting at which the Democratic majority unanimously accepted the resignation of its Majority Leader and then with equal unanimity re-elected him.
“By his one-vote margin in the 1937 contest when he was first elected leader,” Elbert Thomas told me later, “the impression was given, and it has been the impression ever since, that he spoke to us for the President. Now that he has been unanimously elected, he speaks for us to the President.”
At 6 pm the press received the letter with which the Majority Leader replied to the President’s politically desperate and cajoling “Dear Alben” telegram of last night3. Dignified, formally cordial, and firm, it reiterated Barkley’s position that the Congress had been attacked and that more important than personal friendship or political loyalty was the mutual respect of the Executive and the Legislature. He hoped this incident would serve to clarify and emphasize that respect, Barkley said, and he closed with cordial regards.
“It has become an issue of the Executive versus the Congress, to determine once again which has the final say-so,” my liberal friend told me. “Of course in the long run we do.…”
February 25, 1944. The Senate played to a full house today. The galleries were jammed, and along the walls at the side and back House members crowded in two-deep around the room. A constant hum of talk and laughter preceded the opening of the session, in the moments during which some of us went down on the floor to see Walter George, who remarked that he hoped no one would make a speech before the vote, but that with the galleries full it was a mighty temptation; and Happy Chandler, just back from Kentucky, overflowing with friendliness but completely noncommittal about his colleague’s fight with the White House. Promptly at 12 Wallace convened the Senate, the chaplain said the prayer, and the session began.
During the inevitable quorum call immediately after, all eyes were on the first seat in the first row on the center aisle. For more than 15 minutes it remained empty, as more and more members drifted in to answer to their names. When the quorum call was completed a messenger from the House appeared to deliver the message on the defeat of the veto, which came there yesterday afternoon on a vote of 299–99. The Clerk of the Senate then began to read the veto message, striving, as he always does when reading a Roosevelt message, to give an approximation of the President’s delivery. Sometime during the reading Barkley slipped in from the left, crossed to his seat, and sat down. No demonstration occurred, perhaps because he entered so swiftly that he was in his place before anyone really realized it. Wallace White stepped across the aisle from his desk opposite to shake his hand, and Nye came down from his desk two rows up to do the same. Midway in the veto message Holman surged to his feet to demand order in his querulous bleat. Wallace banged the gavel four or five times and the galleries quieted down. The Clerk read on. Barkley got up once and went up toward the back of the room to the desk where Pepper, just back from spreading the New Deal gospel in Florida, sat in morose silence. They shook hands and spoke for a moment or two. Then Barkley returned to his seat. The Clerk finished reading the message and Wallace said, “The question is on passing the bill over the President’s veto. According to the Constitution, the vote will be by Yeas and Nays.” Pepper jumped to his feet and was recognized.
There then briefly intruded upon the spectacle of a Senate about to complete the restoration of its self-respect the old, old war-cry of “Stand by the President.” Pepper spoke quietly and sincerely, and with the excellent language that always characterizes his extemporaneous speeches. More than a tax bill was at stake, he told his Democratic colleagues, some of whom were trying to duck behind the pleasant fiction that the sole issue was revenue: the fate of the party and its leader was to be decided. In proof of his own sincerity he wanted to read a letter which he, as a newly elected member of the Florida legislature, had sent to the newly elected governor of New York on Dec. 22, 1928. As the Senate listened in close attention he launched into a statement of youthful and moving idealism. Somewhere toward the middle of it Chavez rose. “The Senator says this was written after the election of 1928?” he asked with innocent blandness. “It was,” Pepper replied. “And what did Florida do in the election of 1928?” pursued Chavez gently. “In that election Florida went for Mr. Hoover,” said Pepper soberly. It brought down the house, and Chavez sat down with an amiable grin, having completely destroyed the effect of a speech which before that had been mounting toward a peroration that might conceivably have swung a few votes.
When Pepper sat down, the Republicans and many Democrats at once began to shout, “Vote! Vote!” No one else desired to speak (Langer having been talked out of his intention to do so by his colleagues on the Republican side) and Wallace ordered the Clerk to call the roll. All sound ceased, and in dead silence the Senate began to vote.
Ten minutes later, 72–14, the 1944 tax bill was passed into law despite the President’s objections.
Immediately the Senate broke up into milling groups of Senators and Congressmen, most of them crowding out the doors. In the galleries also the visitors began to leave. In the midst of the confusion Barkley rose and asked unanimous consent for the Clerk to read the President’s telegram to him and his letter in reply. Scott Lucas had been handed the chair by that time, and repeatedly while the Clerk struggled to make himself heard, he banged futilely for order and said over and over in a voice without much conviction, “The Senate and galleries will please be in order.” Barkley decided to give it up, and asked that the correspondence be printed in the Record instead. The Senate moved on to routine business, and an hour or so later recessed until Tuesday.
At 3 o’clock we received word in the gallery that the Minority Leader, Charles McNary of Oregon, had died in Florida, and for the next three hours were busy rounding up comment. Someone remarked that his death was “the worst thing which has happened to the Republican Party since it lost the Presidency in 1932.” I got here too late to know him, which I regret, for never have I heard a Senator referred to with more affection and respect by everyone than “Charlie Mack.”
February 26, 1944. Looking back in hasty retrospect, three days after the event and its aftermath, the Barkley resignation still looks like what it did on the day it happened: a basically sincere protest by a man who just got fed up. The professional cynicism of the Washington press corps, which sees an ulterior motive in everything, still has not managed to rationalize entirely the Senator’s obvious anger, or the emotion that filled his voice during the delivery of his speech. Despite such museum pieces as PM’s gala edition (congress in revolt! 7 pages!) and the vicious sniping of some irresponsible commentators closer to home, the facts seem to remain. He took it and took it and took it and suddenly one day he decided he wouldn’t take it any more. None of the wild rumors which have been going around—that it was a stage-piece framed by McKellar and the Southerners, that it was a carefully calculated maneuver to win re-election in Kentucky, that it was inspired by the Treasury, which didn’t want the tax bill vetoed—has been in any way confirmed. As for the Kentucky situation, it is undoubtedly true that it crossed Barkley’s mind, as it did everyone else’s; but at best it was only a gamble, and to think he would risk his entire political future with the Democratic Party on that would seem a rather broad assumption to make. Probably, as happens so often at the other end of the Avenue, public good coincided happily with political advantage: the percentage of the former, in this instance, being about 80, and of the latter not more than 20. No one listening to that speech, or reading the letter to the President which followed it, or hearing Barkley tell in his own words at his press conference how he had been prompted to take the action he did, could honestly believe that it was much more than the faithful camel, finally back-broken with the one last straw. Probably no one summed it up more succinctly or more soundly than did the Washington Daily News in the title of its editorial: barkley got a belly-full.
He has emerged from it immeasurably strengthened, and so has the Congress. From the professional mourner’s bench in New York dire predictions of the fate of the country, distinguished as usual solely by their tortuous felicity in removing all blame from the President and placing it squarely somewhere else, are coming as a result. They are hardly valid. There comes a point in the consideration of the issues before it when the Congress feels instinctively in its bones that the time has come to call a halt. That time came on the tax bill when the Hill received a smart-aleck veto message. The only thing left for it to do was reassert its independence and rebuff the Executive. Had it not done so, then the hysterical headline in PM that first day might have come true. BATTLE BETWEEN FDR AND CONGRESS TO DECIDE POLITICAL FUTURE OF BOTH; PEOPLE WILL SETTLE ISSUE, it read. The writer of that headline, and the newspaper that printed it, apparently had no more idea of the full implication of those words than the man in the moon. Suppose for a moment that the President of the United States should ever win a “battle” with the Congress of the United States; suppose that it did “decide the political future” of Congress in the sense that headline meant. If that day ever came it would be the last for the Republic—as a republic. In the very nature of free government, the President cannot in the long run win over Congress. In the long run it must win over him. It should give him as much power and as much cooperation and help as it honestly can in meeting the country’s problems, but when the time comes—as Congress instinctively felt this week that it had—when he attempts to turn that power back upon its creators and use it deliberately to weaken the Congress, then Congress has no higher duty than to crush the attempt. And this regardless of who, be he saint or sinner, sits at 1600 Pennsylvania.
February 27, 1944. The week end round-ups in the Sunday papers are full of “the Congressional revolt” today. From them a fairly consistent picture emerges of a Legislature surfeited with insults, an Executive too willing to be clever and too apt to be personal. Judge Rosenman is selected by some to be the whipping boy, but I cannot forget that one Democratic Senator told me Thursday: “You talk to the other Senators around here and you’ll find them blaming Jimmy Byrnes.” Nor can I forget the way in which another, normally mild and gentle-spoken, banged his desk with the first show of temper I have ever seen him display and said flatly, “You can mark this down in great big black letters: Jimmy Byrnes will never be the vice-presidential candidate.” Even those who blame Jimmy Byrnes, however, cannot totally ignore the fact that the ultimate responsibility lies above.
2 The President had other objections, basically the assertion that the bill did not provide adequate revenue, but these quoted words were typical of this tone which so infuriated the Congress.
3 The President said he was sorry to learn from Barkley’s speech that the Senator had thought he “had, in my message, attacked the integrity of yourself and other members of the Congress. Surely you know that was not my intention.” They might disagree, he said, and still not question each other’s good faith. He recalled that Barkley had objected on Monday to some aspects of the tax message, so he had “made certain changes.” He said he did not realize then “how very strongly you felt.” And finally, informed by his Senate supporters of the course of events were taking, he said he hoped Barkley would not resign as Majority Leader, but that if he did, then he hoped his colleagues would immediately re-elect him.