Books: Corruption Within

THE CASE AGAINST CONGRESS by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. 473 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

THE SENATOR by Drew Pearson. 447 pages. Doub/eday. $6.95.

Privately, Drew Pearson can be a charming fellow, and even mildly self-depreciatory. He proposes, for instance, to package and sell manure from his large farm outside Washington under the label “Drew Pearson’s Best.” But professionally, he is an angry man. He makes it his business to doubt the probity of anyone in public life until he has checked him out. He has often been irresponsible, a journalistic guerrilla. Still, on balance, Pearson has dug out more ugly facts than any rival muckraker. In The Case Against Congress, written in collaboration with his associate Jack Anderson, Pearson compiles a forceful indictment of venality in Congress after 35 years of watching it in action and writing about it in his daily column.

Glass, Right or Wrong. For the most part, The Case Against Congress reports conflict-of-interest cases, many of them unblushingly straightforward. Congressman Sam Gibbons, a Democrat from Florida, sponsored a special bill for construction of a veterans’ hospital on land to be purchased from a corporation represented by his own law firm. Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a millionaire cotton farmer, fights strenuously for higher price supports for cotton. Though he vociferously opposes “big Government spending,” Eastland received $129,997 last year in farm subsidies. Representative Arch Moore Jr., a Republican from West Virginia, belongs to a law firm that has Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. for a client. In the House, Moore “champions” restrictions on imports of competing glass.

Pearson and Anderson concentrate much of their fire on L. Mendel Rivers, the crustaceous South Carolina Congressman, and on Connecticut’s Senator Thomas J. Dodd. They cite Rivers as a classic example of the seniority system gone awry. A man of limited talent, Rivers rose to his exalted position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee only through the process of aging and the political savvy to be rhythmically re-elected by his constituents. Thanks to his influence, charge Pearson-Anderson, his home town of Charleston had military installations lavished upon it. “His district has prospered from his service on the military committees like a tick on a fat dog.” But the authors wander astray when they maintain that he is “America’s top security risk” because of his drinking problem. He has gone on the wagon since he became committee chairman.

Disintegrated Man. Their case against Dodd is more persuasive here because it seems less petty and vindictive than it did in the some 50 columns they wrote on the subject. In a not unsympathetic review of Dodd’s career, the authors acknowledge his early promise and courage. They feel that his later troubles were due largely to the “permissiveness and indulgence” of the Senate, an atmosphere in which Dodd’s integrity faltered. How he sank ever more deeply into the debt of assorted acquisitive interests makes grim reading indeed. In return for favors in the Senate, say the authors, Dodd eventually took outright cash from his benefactors. After an officer of a Connecticut-based rifle-trigger company co-signed a loan made to him, Dodd put him on his congressional payroll. But then, say the authors, it is not an uncommon practice for Congressmen to put creditors on their staffs as a way of repaying them. Of course, they do not actually work or even have to be in Washington. “Much of the story of Tom Dodd,” write the authors, “is, in microcosm, the story of Congress.”

Facts Askew. Once the Pearson-Anderson book is read by Congress, Pearson will no doubt be called the name regularly applied to him in the course of his career: liar. Often enough, he and Anderson get their facts askew through careless checking or the fear of losing a story. Pearson, for example, claimed that Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage was ghostwritten. The Kennedys promptly produced evidence to the contrary. Pearson taunted Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for fleeing in fear when a burglar held up his wife; in fact, Forrestal was elsewhere and unaware of the robbery. Not long after the accusation, Forrestal committed suicide, and many people blamed Pearson for contributing to his depression. “There were awful moments when I woke up in the night,” Pearson later wrote repentantly, ”fighting back an almost paralyzing urge to join Forrestal.”

The book is obviously written from the standpoint of a staunch liberal, and Pearson makes no effort to disguise that fact. His targets are usually—though not exclusively—conservatives. But he not only smites his foes; he also helps his friends. Liberals who furnish the column with tips are celebrated as outstanding statesmen. Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, for example, fall into this category. President Johnson is an on-and-off friend. Pearson cites as an example of dubious ethics Johnson’s service on the Senate Commerce Committee (which oversees the FCC) while his family TV and radio stations in Texas were making him a millionaire. On the other hand, Pearson has been helpful to L.BJ. too—on the assumption that the two men can be useful to each other. In 1964. a life insurance salesman charged that he had been forced to buy advertising on a Johnson TV staton after selling the President a policy. To discredit the salesman, the White House leaked his spotty military record to Pearson, who duly printed it.

Compendium of Sins. Through all of Pearson’s aberrations—the near-toadying to friends, the relentlessness toward enemies—there runs a thread of consistency. He has been the inveterate foe of powerful and protected interests that have overreached themselves. This crusade is much in evidence in Pearson’s first novel. The Senator, written with an assist from Novelist Gerald Green (The Last Angry Man), to be published this month. Its hero-villain is a walking compendium of all the sins that Pearson sees committed in Congress. Rich enough to begin with (a construction magnate worth at least $150 million), the hero is a willing and corrupt tool of Conglomerate, a group of large corporations that plan to exploit national lands for their own interest. He expects to become Conglomerate’s chairman, and is obviously a bigger rascal than most Congressmen. But the plot is familiar, and the novel admittedly originated as an agent’s suggestion designed to capitalize on Pearson’s role in exposing Dodd.

Pearson explains that the book is “more fact than fiction.” That is just as well, since Pearson’s fiction is pretty lifeless, even ranked with the this-is-how-it-really-is political novel. Pearson has the advantage when it comes to describing the intricacies of congressional maneuver. Still, none of the acts of avarice or ambition in the novel are half so convincing—or so appalling—as the real-life instances set forth in The Case Against Congress.