THE SENATE: Death of the Tiger

His wiry frame tensed for combat, his glance imperiously stern, his mustache visibly bristling, his arms formidably laden with books, the lean, dapper man strode briskly to his Senate seat. “Mr. President,” his utterly confident baritone voice rang out, and then for two hours, three, four, and once for a marathon 22 hours and 26 minutes, Wayne Morse lectured, harangued, infuriated and often educated his fellow Senators. Sometimes they fled the lesson, and Morse addressed an empty floor and gallery. But it scarcely fazed him. For he was sure that he was speaking for the ages and not just for the benefit of his all-too-fallible colleagues.

“The Tiger,” he was called, and it is true that only death could tame him. When he died at 73 last week in Oregon, he was in the middle of a comeback try for the Senate, where he had served for 24 tumultuous, useful years. Morse’s battles had been a tonic to him; the harsher the better. Mostly he raged at conservatives, who, as he saw it, threatened civil liberties, or at special interests that wanted to encroach on the public domain. But he also feuded with friends. Some of his meanest gibes were directed at people who thought that they were close to him. After breaking with Richard Neuberger, whom he had helped win a Senate seat in Oregon, Morse simply would not let up the attack. When Neuberger returned to the Senate after a bout with cancer, Morse blithely remarked that the disease was obviously responsible for his erstwhile friend’s lack of judgment. Neuberger once observed of Morse: “It’s a tragedy, in view of his brilliance, to see him so unstable, obstreperous and irascible.”

In Morse’s defense, it can only be said that his invective was impartial and bipartisan. He accused Harry Truman of putting on “one of the cheapest exhibitions of ham acting I have ever seen.” He said that Lyndon Johnson was “drunk with power.” The corpulent G.O.P. Senator Homer Capehart was a “tub of rancid ignorance.”

Morse could get away with being the perpetually angry man because he was always clean. He was nobody’s man; he pursued a career that other politicians can only fantasize. He would not make a deal, he would not trade votes, he would not join a cabal. He switched from a Republican to a Democrat, but he was at home in neither party. While his col leagues rebuked him for being a gadfly, he taunted them for being “phony lib-g erals.” “A true liberal can’t limit himself to a few areas,” he declared. “He I must be on guard everywhere, ready to I pounce on evil wherever it raises its ugly head.”

Morse was one of the most ornery of the “sons of the wild jackasses,” the progressive Republicans out of the Mid west who waged epic battles with the banks and trusts. Born on a Wisconsin farm, Morse learned his politics from Senator Robert La Follette, the fiercely independent Republican who championed the small farmer and workingman.

A prodigious talker, La Follette also in spired Morse with his lifelong love of or atory — the longer the better.

Labor Mediator. After earning a law degree from the University of Min nesota, Morse took a teaching job at the University of Oregon law school.

At 30 he became dean and plunged into controversy. But he also demonstrated that he could end fights as well as start them. He often mediated labor conflicts on the West Coast. Appointed the Pacific Coast arbitrator of maritime disputes in 1938, he became the tough man on the docks, forcing even the doughty longshoremen to back down.

In 1941, President Roosevelt asked him to chair an emergency board set up to arbitrate a threatened national railway strike. After being locked in negotiations for 36 hours with Tiger Morse, both sides gave in.

Appointed to the National War Labor Board, Morse broke with the Administration when the striking mine workers were granted a larger wage boost than other workers had been granted. After an angry blast, Morse resigned. Then he ran for the Senate in Oregon as a Republican. Franklin Roosevelt sent him a message urging him to give the President “hell” if he wanted to.

With relish, Morse did as he was instructed, and won. F.D.R. later reminded him: “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

In his first six months in the Senate, Morse made more speeches than all the other freshmen combined. He started to take stands without regard I to party position or leadership preference. He backed President Truman when he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act, when he seized the nation’s steel mills in an effort to forestall a strike and when he fired General Douglas MacArthur. Though Morse fervently supported Dwight Eisenhower for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1952, he became disillusioned by Ike’s cautious civil rights stand and by his choice of Richard Nixon as a running mate. Switching to the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, Morse bolted the Republican Party.

When he returned to the Senate after the election, he carried a folding chair. Where, he mischievously asked, should he sit? He was finally placed on the Republican side of the aisle, but he was stripped of his important committee assignments and relegated to the District of Columbia Committee. Resisting this “garbage-can disposal,” as he called it, he became one of the Senate’s most formidable fighters for home rule and desegregation in the District. Relishing his independence, he delivered his record filibuster against a bill giving away offshore oil lands to the coastal states. Mindful that his hero La Follette had almost been poisoned by some tainted eggnog he had sipped during a talkathon, Morse had an aide scrutinize the preparation of his tea, orange juice and bouillon. Only poisoned words flowed that memorable night in the Senate.

Re-elected in 1956 as a Democrat, Morse engaged in perhaps the most celebrated duel of his career. When Republican Clare Boothe Luce was named Ambassador to Brazil in 1959, Morse went to oratorical extremes to block her confirmation. Rather inconsistently for a civil libertarian, he phoned her doctor to find out if she had ever been under psychiatric care. After Mrs. Luce was confirmed, she struck back at her tormentor. The reason that he had been so venomous, she explained, was that he had once been “kicked in the head by a horse.” (Morse, in fact, had been hospitalized for a blow in 1951, though he was no more irascible after the event than before.) Rising in anger on the Senate floor, he somehow managed to persuade his colleagues that the insult to him was also an affront to the entire body. While some aggrieved Senators muttered that they should not have voted for confirmation, Mrs. Luce resigned her appointment.

Morse waged his last great battle against the Viet Nam War. Only he and Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allowed President Johnson to intervene on a massive scale. Morse considered this his finest hour in the Senate. But if he took satisfaction in helping to drive Johnson from office, he could not save himself. In 1968 he was defeated for re-election by Republican Bob Packwood. Four years later he ran against Republican Senator Mark Hatfield and was soundly trounced.

Senate Primary. Spending more time on his 29-acre Oregon farm with his wife Midge, Morse finally seemed to have retired from political wars. He enjoyed periodic visits from his three daughters; he tended to his prizewinning saddle horses and cattle. But he could not be kept down on the farm. This spring he announced once again for the Senate. He won a rather mild primary and prepared to face Packwood in the general election. In the year of Watergate, when clean politicians are much in demand, he was given a chance of winning. But in the middle of campaigning, he developed a urinary infection. Blood poisoning followed and his kidneys began to fail. He slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness. Earlier he had rejected the use of a kidney dialysis machine to prolong his life. He had been beholden to no man in the course of his remarkable career, and he decided that he was not going to end his life in thrall to a machine.