Nation: Skunk at a Lawn Party

Perhaps Connecticut’s unpredictable Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd just wanted to liven things up. He rose in the Senate chamber early one evening last week and demanded to know why his colleagues were preparing to recess, when it was only a little past 6 p.m. The Senate has been keeping Wall Street hours of late, he complained.

With that for a starter, Dodd proceeded to unleash a lengthy criticism of both the Democratic and Republican leadership. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, he said, was a kind, gentle, understanding, noble fellow, and all that. But “I worry about his leadership … I wish our leader would be more of a leader. We are being frivolous with the people’s business.” Dodd did not refer to Minority Leader Everett Dirksen by name but called the Republican opposition “so soft, so cozy, that it does not count for much.”

Well, it has indeed been a tedious Senate year. But Dodd’s outburst was most unclubby, and his victims had to answer him when they got there—which was next day. An exchange of insults is rare in the Senate these days, and it was plain that there has been some decline in the art of invective.

As if to illustrate Dodd’s charge, Mike Mansfield offered a kind, gentle, understanding, noble explanation of why things are slow at the Senate (everything is locked up in committees). He admitted that he himself is “dull and dreary” but insisted that he was not about to turn the Senate into a “Roman holiday or sideshow.”

Ev Dirksen was in his most Vesuvian oratorical humor. Dodd’s criticisms, he cried, amounted to “incoherencies.” Noting that Dodd had not yet arrived on the floor, Dirksen said that “the brave crusader from the Nutmeg State on his white charger has great zeal for being here and getting on with business, and he is not here.”

Soon Dodd arrived to detail his complaints. “I do not believe a similar situation can be found in the entire history of the Senate,” he said. “The whole Senate seems to be pervaded by a spirit of lethargy.”

Based on the record of the 1963 Senate so far, Dodd had a point, but Dirksen still felt mortally wounded. “Mr. President,” he cried, “I would be the last Senator ever to use the Senate chamber for a glorified wailing wall.” It so happens, said Dirksen, that he and many others have a lot of chores to keep them busy. But “it may be that the distinguished Senator from the Nutmeg State does not have anything to do in his office.” And if Dodd wanted an answer to his complaint about Senate inaction, Dirksen shouted, “I will answer the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, and he will know well that he will have been answered when I am through!”

Dodd: 1 would be happy to have the Senator make his answer!

Dirksen: I will answer in my own good time!

Dodd: I hope the Senator will have the courtesy to let me know.

Dirksen: The Senator is not around enough. I can prove it … If the Senator wishes to stay here until midnight, we can keep him here! . . .

Dodd: He does not frighten me if that is his purpose with his menacing words addressed to me, and the implications. So I say to the Senator from Illinois, “Come on with your answer. I will be here too.”

Dirksen: The answer will come, but it will not come to the floor in a 20-page effusion, first having delivered it to the press, to make it appear what a great crusader the Senator from Connecticut purports to be, emotionalizing on a 24-hour Senate day!

Dodd: I did not.

Later that day Tom Dodd sheepishly rose on the floor to confess that he “felt like a skunk at a lawn party.” He had gotten a call from Mansfield, and “it made me feel like a peanut.” Mansfield, said Dodd, is a “gentle, decent, honest man, a great soul . . . We do have wonderful men leading us.”