The Capital: More Money for the Biplane Set

To hear Everett Dirksen tell it, Vice President Agnew was going broke just keeping his wife in party dresses. Mrs. Agnew, the lugubrious Dirksen fretted, “can wear a fancy dress about three times and then he [Agnew] has got to whip down there and have another made. That’s $700 or $800.” There was quite a bit of Dirksen hyperbole in that, and Judy Agnew was quick to set the record straight. “The most expensive gown I own is my inaugural ball gown,” the Second Lady protested. “That cost under $500, and I don’t expect to pay that much again for a long time. I wear my clothes over and over again.”

Dirksen had made his point, nonetheless. Congress is expected to approve pay raises for Agnew and the top congressional leaders. The legislators will hike the salaries of Agnew and House Speaker John McCormack to $62,500 and raise Dirksen and four others to $49,500. Inflation has pushed up the cost of living and entertaining, and the bill is designed to ensure that the nation’s leadership cadre will not be forced into penury.

Vibrations. In fact, there is little chance of that, since the Agnews and the Senate and House leaders are among the least entertaining folks in Washington. They constitute a sort of vestigial Biplane Set, taking their social life at a less frenetic pace than the jet-setters of the capital’s party-go-round. Society columns vibrate to the tempo of glittering embassy dinners, chic Georgetown cocktail parties and white-tie soirees at the White House—but few of Congress’s leaders are there. Instead, unpretentious, homebody lives are the preference of the Agnews, the McCormacks, the Dirksens, Senate President Pro Tern Richard Russell, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, House Majority Leader Carl Albert and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford.

The Vice President, for example, gets $10,000 a year for expenses, but so far has had a hard time using it. The Nixons entertain so much that Agnew has been called on only once to throw an official dinner. The Agnews live in a four-bedroom Sheraton-Park Hotel suite, which they find adequate despite its obvious contrast with their previous quarters, the 54-room Maryland Governor’s mansion in Annapolis. Their counterpart of San Clemente is the same paint-flecking seashore cottage in Maryland that they have rented for years. A big Saturday night at the Agnews’ consists of Judy cooking spaghetti and the family then settling down to watch a current-run movie screened at home. (Recent showings: True Grit and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.)

Suite Hearts. The Dean of the Biplane Set is House Speaker McCormack, 77. He came to Washington as a freshman Congressman in 1928 with his bride Harriet and moved into a furnished suite in the then brand-new Washington Hotel. They are still there. The suite, the hotel and the McCormacks have grown into dignified and genteel old age together. The McCormacks never entertain and rarely go out in the evening. One party they never miss: the annual White House dinner in the Speaker’s honor. Mrs. McCormack invariably wears the same black dress. The rest of the year, it is just the two of them. McCormack boasts that in more than 50 years, “we’ve never missed having dinner together.” His wife, no longer spry at 85, is still eager to meet her husband for lunch or go for a drive with him in his long black Speaker’s limousine.

Equally ascetic is Richard Russell, 71. The Georgia Democrat lives alone in a frugal one-bedroom apartment across from the sumptuous Watergate apartment-house complex. He breakfasts early at the Senate and works a twelve-hour day. A bachelor, Russell could dine at prestigious tables every night, but would rather go home to his favorite rocking chair. Says a friend: “Give him grits and a hamburger and he’s happy.”

Chase the Squirrels. Minority Leader Everett Dirksen tends to be more gregarious, but his home life is just as simple. He lives in rural Broad Run, Va., an hour out of Washington. “When he gets home from the Senate,” says his son-in-law, Senator Howard Baker, “he changes into the most decrepit clothes you ever saw and gets out into his garden. He loves getting dirt under his fingernails.” Baker adds that Dirksen “likes to sit out on the terrace with a bourbon in one hand and a BB gun in the other to shoo the squirrels away from the seeds he puts out for the birds.” The Dirksens resist dinner invitations, and keep their own entertaining informal. One fellow Senator had to cook his own chicken at a Dirksen party, and guests on another occasion picked the fruit to be served at their meal. “This is the cheapest way to get the picking done,” explained Mrs. Dirksen.

The leaders’ reasons for the simpler social life vary. Most cannot afford the time; unlike the ordinary Congressman, with his Tuesday-Thursday work week, congressional leaders put in long hours on the Hill and are grateful for a little solitude. Mike Mansfield is an example. “He leaves for the Senate at 6:30 every morning, and he stays till he puts the cat out,” says his wife. “We don’t have any kind of weekend or country place because we’d never have time to use it.”

Others, such as Russell and McCormack, are too old to stand a brisk pace, or still cling to the simpler tastes of their humble beginnings. But younger congressional leaders, such as Carl Albert and Gerald Ford, also avoid convivial Washington, finding their pleasures in home and family. Like the patriarchs of Congress, they feel no need for the social acceptance so avidly sought by many in the Washington whirl. As one Senate wife observed: “They don’t go out a lot or entertain, except for close personal friends. They don’t need to. They’re there.”