Books: Longer and Greater

A SENATE JOURNAL, 1943-1945 by Allen Drury. 503 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

Among his fellow Senate correspondents, the United Press’s Allen Drury was not considered much shakes. He had a preoccupied air about him, spent much of his time in the periodicals lounge just off the Senate gallery, always seemed anxious to get away as early as possible in the afternoons.

What he did then, no one knew. But now they do: Drury went back to his bachelor apartment and typed out the voluminous entries for A Senate Jour nal, 1943-1945. Published as his third book, it is unlikely to achieve the success of Advise and Consent. But for those interested in how the Senate worked and worried in that chaotic, midwar period, Drury’s moonlighting was well worth while.

The Bitterness. Few men are giants to their contemporaries, and while Drury was generally fond of his Senators, he also saw their political wens and warts. Yet it is also true that the Senators of that not-so-long-ago era seemed to walk with a longer stride, to orate with a greater flourish, and to politick with greater passion than their well-barbered successors of today.

What comes through the book, more than anything else, is the extreme bitterness between the nation’s wartime Senate and the U.S. Commander in Chief. On the soldier-vote bill, Senate critics were convinced that F.D.R. was merely trying another trick to gain votes for his fourth-term reelection. Drury quotes a dissident Senator: “Roosevelt says we’re letting the soldiers down. Why, God damn him. The rest of us have boys who go into the Army and Navy as privates and ordinary seamen and dig latrines and swab decks, and his scamps go in as lieutenant colonels and majors and spend their time off getting medals in Hollywood … I took my oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and that’s what I’m going to do. And then we’re ‘letting the soldiers down’ when we refuse, are we? Why those bastards! Just a bunch of thimble-riggers, that’s what they are, them and that—that—that—man in the White House.”

Way for Liberty. The war between Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue came to a climax with F.D.R.’s veto, over the desperate pleas of Democratic Senate Leader Alben W. Barkley, of a 1944 tax bill. Barkley’s one-vote election as majority leader over Mississippi’s Pat Harrison had come only with the all-out help of the Administration, and he had felt obligated ever since. But this was too much. Barkley resigned from his leadership post in a highly emotional Senate moment. Senate Democrats promptly caucused and unanimously re-elected Barkley—now, they thought, a free man. Drury recalls the end of that caucus: “Suddenly the conference room 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!’ ”

Top Man. Who was the most powerful man in the Senate of that day? It wasn’t Alben Barkley, and it certainly vas not Republican Leader Wallace White. Neither was it Bob Taft or Harry Truman or Tom Connally or Arthur Vandenberg. It was Tennessee’s Kenneth McKellar, partly because of his position as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, partly because of his unmatched tactical shrewdness, and partly because of his histrionic talent for vituperation. Drury gives an account of Old Mack in characteristic action on the Senate floor, taking out after his longtime enemy, then TVA Director David Lilienthal. “The air was empurpled with denunciations and derogations. From time to time some particularly apt phrase would occur to the Senator, and he would repeat it with loving emphasis. ‘His eely, oily, ingratiating, insinuating ways,’ he cried once; and struck with it, paused for a moment and went back over it with tender care: ‘His eely—oily—ingratiating—insinuating—ways!’ ”

Both Truman and Taft—the Democrat who didn’t want to become President but did, and the Republican who aspired all his life to become President but didn’t—are major characters in A Senate Journal. Drury greatly admired them both. Indeed, during his relatively brief tenure on the Hill, Drury discovered one fact that many never learn: Senators, being politicians, are generally good guys—after all, that is their business.

Dangerous & Rude. In his lengthy book, Drury displays real distaste for only four Senators. One was North Dakota Republican William Langer, who presented his ideas “at the top of his lungs like a roaring bull in the empty chamber, while such of his colleagues as remain watch him in half-amused, half-fearful silence, as though in the presence of an irresponsible force they can neither control nor understand.”

Another, more surprisingly, was Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg. After Republicans helped kill the anti-poll-tax bill, Drury recorded: “To Vandenberg, who as usual would not talk and said so with a smug bluntness verging on the downright rude, it was a matter that should not be boasted about.

‘I never believe in boasting,’ he said in his pompous voice, as though he had done it all singlehanded, an impression he may quite possibly be victim of.”

Other characters people his pages. There was Hattie Caraway, the U.S.’s first woman Senator. There was the legendary Hiram W. Johnson of California. There were “Young Bob” LaFollette and Bennett Champ Clark, both sons of famous political fathers. There were “Cotton Ed” Smith and “Buncombe Bob” Reynolds, “Curly” Brooks and “Glad” Tydings. Today’s Senators, alas, don’t even have nicknames.