THE CONGRESS: Voice of the 84th

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The U.S. Congress is a complex and subtle organization, but sometimes its changing character and mood can be understood through a single individual. The First Congress, determined to keep alive a newborn nation by profiting from the mistakes of past civilizations, listened respectfully to cautionary historical precedents presented by scholarly James Madison. The 25th Congress, struggling to maintain unity in a divided nation, listened fearfully as John C. Calhoun mobilized the minority to arrest the will of the majority. The 39th Congress, filled with anger as it viewed the ashes of civil war, followed the vengeful leadership of Thaddeus Stevens. In 1955 the 84th Congress represents a nation long weary of crisis and war, panaceas and promises. It is symbolized by a man whose son says: “He doesn’t have a remedy for everything that ails the universe.” The 84th’s most influential figure is Georgia’s Democratic Senator Walter Franklin George.

Walter George’s favorite word is “reasonable.” He pronounces it fondly, strongly stressing and dragging out the first syllable. To every problem that comes up before him, George applies the test of reasonableness. Example: during World War II, when the profit margin that should be allowed certain industries was a subject of boiling political controversy, a newsman asked Finance Committee Chairman George for his views. Replied George: “I’d think about 8% would be re-e-eason-able. Maybe 6%. Possibly as high as 10%. But 8% is probably the most re-e-eason-able.” In U.S. politics reasonableness has not always been the way to leadership. But Walter George’s approach, leading him inevitably to the middle of the political road, is peculiarly fitted to the present mood of the nation and the problems of the 84th Congress.

The 84th Congress is deeply concerned with the destiny of the U.S. in a world of upheaval. So is Walter George. The Congress is vitally interested in a stable national economy. So is George. The Congress does not seek to spoonfeed the nation with welfare cure-alls or sociological pink pills. Neither does George.

A Superb Job. At 77, Walter George is in his 50th year of public service, his 33rd year in the Senate. As the Senate’s dean, George holds the respect that the politicians give a man who has been consistently successful in the business of winning elections. As the longtime chairman of the Finance Committee, he is the Senate’s acknowledged tax expert. As the current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he is the Senate’s Democratic spokesman on foreign policy. And as a Southern moderate, he is on the friendliest terms with the Northern liberals, e.g., he wangled a place on the U.S. delegation to the SEATO conference for his protege, Montana’s able Senator Mike Mansfield, and he offered to campaign last year for Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey (who gratefully declined because he wanted a Minnesotans-only campaign).

With Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson skillfully backing him, George has effortlessly become the outstanding figure of the 84th Congress: ¶ He led the Formosa resolution, the SEATO pact and the Paris agreements to overwhelming Senate approval. When he arose to speak on the Formosa resolution one January day, there were worried, even hostile faces in the chamber. Nearly a score of Democrats were ready for a last-ditch fight against the resolution, and several Republicans had grave doubts. By the time he sat down after a brilliant oratorical display, the opposition had been shattered. Next day the resolution passed, 85 to 3. President Eisenhower wrote thanking George for a “superb” job, later telephoned additional congratulations. Secretary of State Dulles went to George’s Mayflower hotel apartment and escorted the Senator to the White House for the ceremony of signing the resolution. The united front that the U.S. had turned to the world was a direct result of George’s work. ¶ George took the initiative in urging that a four-power conference be held this year. The suggestion quickly became a rallying cry for other Democrats (none of whom George had consulted beforehand). Only after the plan was established as a politically attractive Democratic idea did President Eisenhower let it be known that his thoughts were—and had been for some time—much the same as George’s. ¶ The climactic battle of the 84th Congress will come on the Administration’s liberalized foreign-trade bill. Walter George, in his dual role of Democratic fiscal and foreign-affairs expert, will play the key part. A longtime reciprocal trader, still holding firm against protectionist pressures from Georgia’s textile and plywood industries, he may make the difference between an adequate bill and one riddled with amendments granting tariff sops to individual industries. ¶ When House Speaker Sam Rayburn pushed a patently political $20-a-head income-tax cut through the House, it faced a humiliating defeat in the Senate. Lyndon Johnson came up with a formula for watering down Rayburn’s bill that was so appealing that it lost (by six votes) only because Walter George did not support it. If he had, it would have passed by six or seven votes.

Democratic Leader Johnson had had high hopes of swinging George to the side of the tax cutters. When he failed, he learned only what others (notably Presidents Roosevelt and Truman) had learned before him—that Walter Franklin George is a highly independent man. But unlike most political independents, he steers clear of the extremes of left and right.

A Scotch Verdict. George’s dogged adherence to the middle of the road has sometimes caused him trouble. The New Deal regarded him as the darkest sort of reactionary (just as some reactionaries suspected him of being a New Dealer). During the first six years of the Roosevelt Administration, George voted with the New Deal some 60% of the time, supporting NRA (reluctantly), AAA (even more reluctantly), the invalidation of the gold clause, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Social Security and TVA. But he fought the New Deal on the wage-hour bill, the Wagner housing bill, and the Roosevelt plan to pack the Supreme Court. The late Pundit Raymond Clapper summed up the New Deal quandary: “I don’t consider Mr. George a New Dealer. Yet, when I try to diagram the proof out of the record, I can’t do it. You have to give Mr. George a Scotch verdict—guilty, but not proven.”

Franklin Roosevelt, unforgiving of George’s leadership in defeating the court-packing plan, thought he could diagram the man from Georgia as a reactionary. On Aug. 11, 1938 Roosevelt went to Barnesville, Ga., spoke as the “adopted son” of “my other state,” and laid his prestige squarely on the line against George in a three-cornered race for Senator. His message: Senator George, having listened too closely to the “dictatorship of the small minority of individuals and corporations” who opposed the New Deal, should be denied renomination; Candidate Eugene Talmadge, as a “demagogue,” should be defeated; Candidate Lawrence Camp, as a New Dealing U.S. district attorney, should be nominated. While F.D.R. spoke, Walter George sat behind him on the platform, listening gravely. When the President turned to sit down, George arose, walked over, shook F.D.R.’s hand and said: “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.” Replied Roosevelt: “God bless you, Walter. Let’s always be friends.”

Four days later, George opened his campaign. At Waycross, a railroad town near the steaming swamp country, George spoke to 1,500 white-shirted Georgians. He was nearly blind from cataracts (later removed), the sweat poured from his forehead, the red rose in his lapel wilted in the 100° heat, and the tears streamed down his cheeks. His voice choked, and he had to pause as he answered Roosevelt’s charge that he was a pawn of big business. Cried he: “I was born in south Georgia, the son of a tenant farmer. I have known how it feels to want things that I cannot have. Back there in the days when as a boy I plowed the white soil . . .”

He beat Talmadge soundly; F.D.R.’s man, Camp, ran a poor third.

Cowpeas & Sweet Potatoes. Walter George, the only son of Robert Theodric and Sarah Stapleton George, was born in a sun-blistered pine house in Webster County, where his father scratched the hard clay to bring forth thin crops of cotton, cowpeas and sweet potatoes. Young George’s reading material was his grandfather’s collection of the Congressional Record. Recalls George: “The congressional style was ponderous in those days, but I learned to like it.” One day George rode into nearby Preston on the back of an elderly mule. The village belle saw the youth, laughed at him, and found herself on the receiving end of one of Walter George’s first public speeches. Its peroration: “This mule of mine is a worthy burden-bearer on our farm. He does his work most uncomplainingly. To laugh at me, Miss, is a reflection cast upon this good animal.”

George worked his way through high school (taking a year off to teach grade school), and toyed with the idea of becoming a dentist. But the drill-and-chisel profession lost a recruit when Judge U. V. Whipple, an orator of local renown, failed to show up for a Masonic convention on the Methodist camp grounds in Preston. Someone suggested that 16-year-old Walter George, the best high-school orator in those parts, stand in for the missing speaker. George was willing, spent 30 minutes preparing himself, then delivered a rousing 40-minute oration on the duties of a citizen to the Government, using Robert E. Lee as his shining example. It was a whopping success; George decided that the law was the field for him. Medals & Mobs. He went to Mercer University (which, in 1947, named its law school after George), won medals for extemporaneous speaking four years in a row, took the Georgia and Southern States oratorical championships in his first year of law school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and received his law degree in 1901.

Just as George was looking for a place to start practice, a young lawyer in the little (pop. 2,200) county-seat town of Vienna (pronounced Vy-enna) decided to move on. George bought his practice and 5O-volume library for $300, hung out his shingle on a weather-beaten frame building just off Vienna’s courthouse square.

With only two weeks to prepare his cases for the new court term, George figured that opposing attorneys would expect him to ask for delays and would therefore neglect their own homework. He was right: when court opened, George was ready, and the others were not. In that term George handled more cases than any other Dooly County lawyer, won nearly all of them. Vienna’s attorneys were delighted when, six years later, George took himself from competitive practice to run for prosecuting attorney of the Cordele judicial district. In 1912 he was appointed a district court judge, once broke up a lynch mob (the intended victim was the white killer of a county official) with the eloquence of a speech from the steps of the Cordele Opera House.

George moved up to the State Court of Appeals, then to the Georgia Supreme Court as an associate justice. He resigned in 1922, and went back to Vienna to handle the estate of his late father-in-law, hard-bitten old Joseph Heard, a cotton grower, undertaker, warehouseman, building contractor and mule trader, whose bouncing, irrepressible daughter Lucy had become George’s wife in 1903. One lazy summer afternoon George was fishing on the Flint River near Vienna when he got word of the death of rabble-rousing Senator Tom Watson, bitter isolationist and onetime Populist Party candidate for President. George ran for the vacant place, and won. On Nov. 22, 1922 Walter George took his seat in the U.S. Senate, has been there ever since.

He arrived in Washington as an avowed dry and an outspoken opponent of the League of Nations and of U.S. loans to foreign countries—especially Negro Liberia. He rapidly became less doctrinaire, and moved toward the middle course.

In 1928 George got 52½votes for President at the Democratic National Convention, but he loyally supported Nominee Al Smith, the champion of the wets (George later voted for repeal, and now enjoys sipping a bourbon and water, preferably when his wife is not around). George has been a member of twelve Senate committees and has been chairman of five, but his assignment in 1926 to the tax-writing Finance Committee and in 1928 to the powerful Foreign Relations Committee started him in the fields that became his specialties.

Know-Nothing. After Pearl Harbor George worked with the Roosevelt Administration to raise the billions necessary for war. Only once was there anything that approached a raking-over of past unpleasantness. That came when George was called to the White House to discuss a new tax proposal. President Roosevelt, arguing that the tax would be good politics, said expansively: “Walter, if I know anything at all about Georgia politics …” Into George’s eyes came a warning glint. The President caught the look, laughed sheepishly, concluded hastily: “And I certainly don’t.”

While George’s tax theories have remained nearly constant since his early Senate days, it took years—and personal tragedy—for him to arrive at his present foreign-policy views. He tended toward the isolationist side (although, as in all things, he was far too moderate to rank alongside the Burton K. Wheelers and the Gerald Nyes), he supported the neutrality laws, and argued eloquently against any U.S. participation in Europe’s affairs.

On Sept. 1, 1939 George was in a New York hospital undergoing eye surgery. His wife, worried lest he be upset, withheld from him for several days the news that Hitler had marched on Poland. After he learned that Europe was aflame, George realized that the time for neutralism was past, returned to the Senate to help lead the fight for lend-lease. But he was still by no means a convinced long-term internationalist.

The final turn came in 1943, when Navy Flyer Marcus George, the younger of the Senator’s two sons, was lost in the Atlantic while searching for a downed plane. The effect on George was seen in the debate on the United Nations Security Charter, when the old League of Nations foe, his personal loss raw in his mind even after two years, stood in the Senate chamber to make one of his greatest speeches: “Our best men have died on the earth. The blue waters have swallowed them up. From the flaming skies they have gone down to death—to win this war and to make possible a better world for another generation of Americans.” The U.S. had held out to its sons a promise of peace, for which the U.N. seemed the best hope of fulfillment. Said George, his emotion welling high in his voice: “I am sure every member of this Senate means to keep that promise.” He was awarded a rare tribute: every member of the U.S. Senate arose to applaud his words.

The Bargain. When the Democrats took over the Congress this year, Middle-Reader George was just the man for Middle-Roader Dwight Eisenhower. Shortly after the elections, Secretary Dulles talked to George urging him to waive his chairmanship of the Finance Committee (which would thereby fall into the trusted hands of Virginia’s Harry Byrd) to head the Foreign Relations Committee. George had one objection: the Foreign Relations job carries with it heavy social demands, and Walter George has strict early-to-bed habits (9:30 o’clock every night). A few weeks later, George went to the White House to see President Eisenhower, who also urged him to take Foreign Relations. In the middle of the conversation, Ike was called on the telephone. Hanging up, he told George with mock anxiety: “I understand there is a very serious complication about your chairmanship.” Then, laughing, he explained that Dulles had just called and told him about George’s rule against evening engagements. The President promised to observe George’s wishes; George promised to head the Foreign Relations Committee. Said he: “Of course, if I am summoned to a White House function at night, I will come —once.”

Ike’s social concession was cheap at the price, for Democrat George has been the Republican Administration’s strong right arm in Congress. Yet Opposition Leader Lyndon Johnson is also pleased with George’s position in the 84th, since his fellow Democrats have fallen in behind the old man to make for a party united as it has rarely been before. It is this unity that the Democrats may be able to take to the country next year against a Republican Party still angrily split. If Dwight Eisenhower does not run, the Democrats think they have a good chance to take the presidency.

Walter George enjoys his role as the most powerful member of the 84th, and he has been able to maintain the even tenor of his ways.

Parakeet’s Perch. His day begins at 5 a.m. in his three-room suite in the Mayflower hotel, where he has lived since 1926, the year after it was built (recalls Mrs. George: “I’d been watching the building go up, and one day I said, ‘Mr. George, I don’t know where you’re going to live, but I’m going to live right there’ “). He reads the morning papers, shaves (sometimes with a parakeet named Bobbie perched atop his head eying the lather hungrily), breakfasts on grapefruit and coffee with his wife, who is known throughout Washington as “Miz Lucy” (says Miz Lucy: “I always call him Mr. George, no matter how sweet I feel, or how mean”). Once a week, usually on Thursday mornings, Secretary of State Dulles comes by to join the Senator at breakfast and brief him on the latest foreign-policy developments. At 8:30, except on the Dulles mornings, George is driven to Capitol Hill in the limousine he rates as the Senate’s president pro tempore.

He lets himself into his third-floor office and, since he is the first one there, opens the mail himself, carefully putting each letter back in its envelope to be answered by his five-woman staff. Surprisingly little of his mail conies from Georgia—George’s constituents seem to be reluctant to take up his time. While the Senate was in recess one summer, a Vienna lumber dealer drove 200 miles to complain to George’s colleague, Richard Russell, about trouble with war orders. Russell asked why the man had come all that way, since he lived just a few blocks from George in Vienna. The reply: “Oh, we wouldn’t think of bothering the Senator with things like this.”

After morning committee meetings, George gets to the Democrats’ Senate cloakroom by 11:45 and holds informal court in a brown leather chair, smoking filter-tipped cigarettes (doctor’s orders) and strewing ashes all over his coat front. Younger Democrats know that they can find him there, often drop by for aid or advice, e.g., when a junior Senator, heading his first subcommittee, recently asked George how he could get a reluctant Cabinet member to testify at hearings, George said he would look into the matter. The Cabinet officer dutifully appeared before the subcommittee early the next week.

“Huuuuuuh, Huuuuuuh.” When the Senate convenes, George enters the chamber and sits alongside Lyndon Johnson for a 20-minute briefing session on the day’s agenda. Because of his heavy work load on his own committees, George does not overburden himself with details in other legislative fields. One recent afternoon George walked over to Armed Services Committee Chairman Russell and said: “Dick, they tell me you’ve got a little bill coming up this afternoon. Now tell me about it.” Russell spent two minutes outlining the main features; George nodded his agreement, later supported the measure. The “little bill”: a $750 million pay raise for servicemen.

George does, however, pay close attention to floor proceedings, follows roll-call votes from a printed roster on his desk. When a Senator’s vote surprises him, he marks the name carefully and exhales deeply, often punctuating the roll call with a series of “huuuuuuh, huuuuuuh” sounds. Senators hearing him for the first time are always amazed, wonder what the old man is up to. The answer: nothing. After the roll call George throws away his roster and forgets about it.

Promptly at 5 o’clock each afternoon, the protective ladies of George’s staff lock his office doors to keep out newsmen and other callers, and begin an intensive campaign to tear the Senator away from his desk by 6 o’clock at the latest. Back at the Mayflower, Mr. George and Miz Lucy eat alone in their apartment. After dinner she settles down to her needlepoint work, while George reads a mystery (recently Homicidal Lady) or watches television. One of his favorites is Comedian Bert Parks (Stop the Music), whom George proudly identifies as “an old Atlanta boy.” From time to time he asks Miz Lucy to switch channels for him, which she does with the unvarying complaint: “Mr. George, you’re just spoiled.”

Despite his fondness for televiewing, it was not until this year that George appeared on one of the panel programs that other politicians have made their main platform. When he finally agreed to go on Meet the Press, Miz Lucy went with him to the studio. Before the program she marched up to waspish Panelist Lawrence Spivak and said: “If you’re not nice to Mr. George, I’ll put a spider in your dumpling.” She need not have worried: Spivak was kindness itself, especially when George made news by advancing his suggestion for a four-power conference.

“The Cause of Peace.” This month George was out of Washington—but by no means out of the news. In Vienna, where a huge bronze bust of Walter George gazes across the courthouse square, and where the loiterers will look up from their checkerboards to point out the Senator’s old law office, the Senator sat on the oak-shadowed porch of his remodeled sharecropper’s home, and pondered his future. Winston Churchill had resigned a few days before, an event that deeply affected George. Said he: “When you pass 77 milestones, it’s hard to realize that you may be approaching the point where things may not be as easy, and you should slow down.” Then he added softly: “I think I’m capable of doing some good work yet. I would like to be useful up to the end.” Three days later, he announced that he expects to run for re-election next year. His probable opponent: Georgia’s vote-getting demagogic ex-Governor Herman Talmadge, who will use as his main issue the fact that George did not stand up and denounce the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision.

Having planned for the future, George returned to the present, with all its grim problems. Last week he motored to Augusta (where Vacationer Dwight Eisenhower made a point of calling him in for a visit) for a television speech on U.S. foreign policy, a speech in which he took open issue with Adlai Stevenson.

Said George: “There exists, unfortunately, in this country a disposition to hinge all policy in the Far East on what the President does about Quemoy and Matsu. If it would advance the cause of peace, I would be happy for the President to declare his policy. But how would it advance the cause of peace to inform the enemy of what we intend to do? No one can say that it would advance the cause of peace to invite Red China to take more land held by free China.”

The deep voice wavered as he reached his conclusion: “I know one thing. If we do fulfill our high mission and our high destiny, it will be because we have resolved to do our dead level best to advance peace, to advance security, to shore up a shaky world. Only by doing that can we vindicate the sacrifice of those who died on land and sea, and fulfill the hopes of men and women in every free land.”