National Affairs: Two for the Show

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In squads of eight, the Senators and Senators-elect marched solemnly down the center aisle into the well of the Senate—each newcomer escorted by an incumbent. Four at a time, the new Senators faced the rostrum and repeated the oath after Vice President Nixon. Then they signed the roster on the clerk’s desk and went to their desks.

In the seventh group was a tall, solemn-faced freshman who bears a strong physical resemblance to James Roosevelt. He was chaperoned by the Senate’s runner-up (after Joe McCarthy) for the title of most controversial member: Oregon’s vociferously independent Wayne Morse. When Oregon’s Richard Lewis Neuberger signed the roster, he was greeted with a friendly burst of applause. Then he formally took his seat in the rear row of the chamber. For the first time in 40 years (since Neuberger was two years old), the voters of Oregon had sent a Democrat to the Senate.*

Caucus in Bed. It was a dignified, simple ceremony, as the 84th Congress convened last week, and one that pleased Neuberger, who, unlike his senior colleague from Oregon, has resolved to be humbly uncontroversial for a while and to make a good impression on his fellow Senators. Since his election he had prudently declined nearly all of the 168 invitations to speak and appear on radio and television, in the tradition that Senate freshmen should be seen and not heard.

Unfortunately for his shrinking-violet role, Dick Neuberger accepted one speaking invitation. On the night Congress convened, he made a brash speech before the Women’s National Press Club’s Congressional Dinner and told some thuddingly tasteless anecdotes about his wife, Oregon State Representative Maurine Neuberger. He recalled that the Republicans had published a picture of Maurine in a bathing suit during the 1952 campaign, when she was running for the state legislature. Noting that she had gotten more votes than Dwight Eisenhower in her district, Neuberger added a quotation that he attributed to Mark Twain: “It just goes to prove that the voters would rather see Lillian Russell naked than General Grant in full dress uniform.”

Then Neuberger quoted his old friend, Publisher Palmer Hoyt (Denver Post), on the fact that the Neubergers had comprised 15% of the tiny Democratic delegation in Republican Salem. “I’ve heard of politicians caucusing in a telephone booth,” Hoyt had said, “but it’s the first time I’ve known you could caucus in bed.” Having run through his quips, the new Senator proceeded to batter those politicians who had resorted to “character assassination” in 1954—to the acute annoyance of Republicans in his audience. Washington’s fleeting mood of bipartisan sweetness and light was jarred.

In the midst of Neuberger’s speech, Mrs. George Malone, peppery wife of the Republican Senator from Nevada, rose from her chair, uttered a distinct boo, and flounced from the banquet hall. Afterward, she was scolded in the lobby by Perle Mesta, elder daughter of the Democratic regiment. Next day both ladies denied everything (she was only going to the ladies’ room, explained Katie Malone), and Dick Neuberger, the man who wanted to be dignified, was the subject of caterwauling headlines across the nation.

First Capital Debate. When the man who is now Neuberger’s senior colleague, Wayne Morse, first visited Washington in 1925, his arrival was less publicized, but in a way, even noisier. One jungle-hot afternoon a weathered Model T lurched down the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue with a rattle and a clatter that Calvin Coolidge, 50 yards away in the White House, might easily have heard. Its hood was propped open to keep the motor cool, its rear end listed to one side under an uneven burden of piled-up duffle in the back seat, and its muffler was all too obviously missing. A sweating cop whistled the flivver to a stop, and out popped Wayne Morse. Characteristically, Mrs. Morse stayed in the car and said nothing.

As the cop started to make out a ticket, Tourist Morse started to talk. He had lost the muffler in suburban Bethesda, he explained. If the cop would just have a heart, he could fix it himself at the Hains Point tourist camp and save a few dollars. Under the torrent of Morse’s argument the policeman relented, tore up the ticket and wearily directed Morse to the camp. Last week Morse was still noisily disturbing the peace of Washington, still arguing endlessly and effectively.

Washington finds the two Senators from Oregon fascinating, but doesn’t know quite what to make of them. Neither is likely to have much real effect on the 84th Congress, yet each is almost certain to make headlines. The two share a peculiar position in midcentury political history: if Morse had taken his own advice of a few years ago and remained loyal to his party, the Republicans would control the Senate; if 1,500 fewer Oregonians had voted for Neuberger, the G.O.P. could have organized the Senate in spite of Wayne Morse.

The significance of the team of Morse and Neuberger—if it remains a team—is threefold:

1) They add to the growing ranks of self-proclaimed liberals in the Senate, a bloc that has made significant gains in the last two Congresses.

2) Neuberger’s victory by a 2,462-vote eyelash over Republican Guy Cordon (with an able assist from Morse) marks a major political upset in the Northwest: the Republicans’ ancient and iron grip on Oregon (once as overwhelming as the Democratic thralldom of the South) has been broken.

3) Morse and Neuberger, in or out of tandem, give Oregon the most fascinating pair of Senators currently on Capitol Hill. For sheer showmanship, Oregon’s delegation to the upper house will be a No. 1 attraction in the new Congress.

A Lot in Common. For the past 20 years the careers and personalities of Wayne Morse and Richard Neuberger have crossed and recrossed, separated and intertwined like grapevines in the wildwood. The two men have befriended and belabored each other alternately, since Neuberger was a callow student of law at the University of Oregon in 1934, and Wayne Morse his autocratic professor. The two have a great deal in common. Each has an active mind and a fluent tongue. Each is a dedicated and unswerving egotist. Neither man drinks or smokes (Neuberger will toy with an occasional ceremonial glass of champagne), and both have notable physical and moral courage. Each man admittedly relishes the role of martyr. Both are happiest when the battle is hottest, bored and irritable in time of peace, and although Neuberger is a chronic hypochondriac, both he and Morse have excellent health and prodigious reserves of energy. Both are chips from that almost formless, sprawling tree of native American nonradical, anticonservative discontent that goes by the name of liberalism. The political similarity of the two men is bracketed if not defined by three heroes they share: Woodrow Wilson, William Borah and George Norris.

There are also some strikingly dramatic differences.

Morse has no mental superior in the Senate; his mind is keen and penetrating; his mental standards are professorially rigid and thorough. Neuberger, on the other hand, is bright rather than brilliant, often hasty and superficial in his judgments. Morse, a good lawyer, calls himself a “constitutional liberal,” distrusts the New Dealish tendency to disregard checks and balances. Neuberger, while no flaming left-winger, is less likely to be troubled by such constitutional scruples.

Neuberger has seldom deviated in his political convictions. Morse, on the other hand, has probably contradicted himself more often than any other Senator. Items:

¶In 1951 Harry Truman asked him to be Attorney General and clean up the scandal-pocked Justice Department. Morse rejected the offer on the ground that the problem was the responsibility of the Democratic Party. Since then, he has changed his mind: “What do they mean, ‘party responsibility’? Watch out for it. It’s a cliché. It’s an alibi for doing what a close-knit group of machine politicians think ought to be substituted for representative government.”

¶In 1948 and 1950 he campaigned for Douglas McKay when McKay ran for governor of Oregon. After 1952, Morse changed his mind about McKay.

¶An avowed opponent of filibustering, as a matter of principle, Morse nevertheless holds the Senate record (22 hrs. 26 min.) for a filibuster in 1953 against the Holland tidelands bill.

Morse’s most notable about-face, of course, was his disavowal of Dwight Eisenhower in the middle of the 1952 campaign, and his subsequent flight from the Republican Party to his own one-man “Independent Party.” Although he was the first Senator to propose Eisenhower as a G.O.P. candidate, his cooling-off was rapid and complete, and he campaigned lustily for Adlai Stevenson. He now calls the President “the most dangerous man ever to have been in the White House.”

Boy Orator. Wayne Lyman Morse has always been a fierce independent. He was born on a 320-acre farm in Verona, Wis., eleven miles from Madison, where his father, Wilbur Morse, raised Devon cattle, Percheron horses and five young Morses. Wayne learned the facts of life early: when he was eight, his father gave him custody of four Shetland pony brood mares. At ten he got a stud pony, and by the time he was twelve he sold a two-year-old pony to some tourists from Columbus, Ohio, for $60. Says Morse: “I was made.”

Father Morse was a foot-dragging Wisconsin Progressive, but young Wayne exercised his independence early and became an extravagant admirer of the late, near-great “Fighting Bob” La Follette years before he was old enough to vote. Around county fairs, Wayne often competed with young Bob and Phil La Follette, who were pony breeders, too (Morse never lost in the stud-pony class, though the La Follette brothers generally beat him in other classes).

By the time he was in high school, Morse was actively politicking for La Follette and his Progressives with a troupe of classmates. (Wayne especially admired Fighting Bob’s ability to talk interminably). The troupe traveled from courthouse to courthouse through southern Wisconsin with a Model T and a big bass drum. And, as usual, Wayne did most of the talking.

The Morses were always poor and lived under the constant threat of a foreclosure. Wayne had to borrow money from his high-school biology teacher to get through high school and into the University of Wisconsin. One summer, between his sophomore and junior years at the university, Wayne grew a mustache to make himself look older, and hopped a freight train for the Dakotas, where he worked as a harvester for his tuition. He can and does discourse on this rich experience (“When I worked alongside the Wobblies . . . “) for hours on end.

In high school Morse cast an adolescent eye at pretty Mildred (“Midge”) Downie, the daughter of a railroad conductor, and made one of the few unrevoked decisions of his life. Midge was a talented girl who played Snow White in the senior-class play and was valedictorian of the class of 1919 (Morse was president of the student forum). Together, Wayne and Midge went on to the university, where Wayne was a facile debater and an honor student. In 1924, after he had picked up his bachelor’s degree (in philosophy) and his master’s (in speech), Morse married Midge and left the same day for Minneapolis, where he took a teaching job at the University of Minnesota. His subject: argumentation.

The Twelve-Cent Honeymoon. They arrived in Minneapolis with exactly 12¢ between them, and wound up their honeymoon at a 5¢ moving-picture theater, each chewing a penny stick of gum. The living was slim, indeed, and the family crises frequent (once, when Morse invited his immediate superior on the faculty to dinner, he discovered that Midge had no food and only 27¢; the evening was saved when the grocer extended credit). One of Morse’s pet students was a promising young man named Harold Stassen. Later, Morse changed his mind about Stassen.

In his spare time in Minneapolis, Morse got his law degree; then he went on to New York to work on his doctorate (in jurisprudence) at Columbia, under Professor Raymond Moley. His thesis, a study of the grand-jury system, is a definitive work on the subject. Moley was enormously attracted to his bright young student. Later Moley changed his mind about Morse—and, of course, vice versa.

After Columbia, Morse took up an offer from the University of Oregon. In two years he was the dean of the law school. One of his students was Dick Neuberger, and the professor had profound and lasting influence on the young man. It was Morse who saved Neuberger in the now famous cribbing incident. Neuberger made lavish use of his unlimited cuts in a class in law bibliography, was absent when the instructor announced that the usual consultation among students would not be allowed at the next assignment. Unaware of the injunction, Neuberger consulted freely with a fellow student, was promptly found guilty of violating the university’s honor system.

He appealed to a faculty committee and was found guilty again, by a vote of 4 to I. The one exception was Dean Morse, who argued that no dishonorable intent was involved. On Neuberger’s final appeal, the faculty discipline committee upheld Morse, cleared Neuberger. The case was forgotten until last fall, when Circuit Judge Carl Wimberly, Senator Cordon’s former law partner, charged that Neuberger had been expelled for cheating. Republicans and Democrats alike denounced the story, Neuberger got a lot of publicity, and Republican State Chairman Ed Boehnke announced that “That fool judge has just cost Guy the election.”

At the end of his first term, Neuberger failed his course in criminal law, which was taught by Dean Morse. Neuberger asked Morse to reread and re-evaluate his paper. Morse agreed. Together Morse and Neuberger read the examination paper again, and when they had finished Morse decided he had been much too kind, docked Neuberger an additional ten points. Then, in a long conference, Morse urged Neuberger to drop the law and take up journalism. When the young man hesitated, Morse telephoned his father. “This boy’s a fine journalist,” he said, “but he’s no lawyer and I doubt whether he ever can be. At any rate I haven’t got time to try to make him one.” Dick Neuberger switched to journalism.*

The professor, meanwhile, was branching out into other fields too. In 1933 he led a faculty rebellion against the university’s autocratic old chancellor, W. Jasper Kerr, ultimately forcing him to resign and splashing the name of Morse in every newspaper in Oregon. In 1936 Morse went to Washington as a special assistant to Attorney General Homer Cummings (on the recommendation of Raymond Moley) to direct a nationwide study of the administration of criminal law. In 1938 Frances Perkins appointed him West Coast maritime arbitrator, where he made a brilliant reputation as a fair and meticulous judge.

On to Washington. By 1941 Morse had caught the eye of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him chairman of the Railway Emergency Board, when 19 railway brotherhoods were threatening a nationwide strike. Morse met with both sides in a Washington hotel, brought in a settlement after 34 continuous hours of hearings. Six weeks later, Morse began a glittering career on the War Labor Board, highlighted by 100 crisp and clear decisions, a big hand in the concoction of the Little Steel formula, and one ferocious encounter with Harold L. Ickes. When Ickes, of all people, berated him for grandstanding, Morse wrote him a notably short (for Morse) letter: “Dear Mr. Secretary: Your most recent communication serves only to strengthen and confirm my low opinion of you.”

In Washington Morse clearly heard the call of big-time politics, and in 1944 he decided to try to unseat Oregon’s crusty old isolationist Senator Rufus (“Black Rufe”) Holman. A tenuous Republican, Morse first considered and then rejected a Democratic offer to run, because, he said, the Democrats were short of campaign money. In a violent primary, Morse won the nomination by 10,000 votes, went on to trounce his Democratic opponent, Edgar Smith,* by 95,000 votes. In mid-campaign, President Roosevelt made a trip to Puget Sound, gave Smith a verbal message to relay to Morse: “The President noted you’d been giving him hell in the campaign. He said if you kept on doing it, you’d be elected.” After the election, Roosevelt saw Morse in Washington, asked him if he had got the message. Morse assured him that he had. Said Roosevelt: “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

Wayne Morse’s arrival in Washington as a Senator-elect was better publicized and less noisy than his first visit as a tourist. He had crossed the country with two riding horses in a trailer; their disembarkation made it certain that Morse would be a spectacular Senator. He quickly brushed off the tradition of freshman silence, became one of the loudest actors on the Senate stage. He was utterly ruthless in debate, utterly independent in his votes. Morse’s voting record of conformity with the majority of G.O.P. Senators: 79th Congress 30%, 80th Congress 43%, 81st Congress 35%, 82nd Congress 33%.

By May 1952, Morse was in such ill repute among Republicans that Oregon’s Republican Convention delegates voted 13 to 5 against making him a member of the platform committee at the Republican Convention. Morse was embittered by the insult, and the beginning of his final break with the party stems from that date. In Chicago, he fought hard to get Eisenhower the nomination, but a week before the election he announced in a recorded statement that he had left the Republican Party. A reporter who accompanied him to the recording studio described the scene: “His mustache quivered, and his hands shook, but when the recording was done, Morse turned around and said, ‘Golly, I feel like I’ve just taken a bath. It may be the beginning of the end of my political career!'”

On the other hand, it may have been the beginning of a new career. Wayne Morse today is liked and admired in Oregon, where he will face the voters next year. His brilliance has not ripened into political wisdom; the spirit of compromise which responsibility brings has not brushed him. He plays to the gallery, in which he is his most appreciative spectator. But he plays without chicanery­ and there are few Senators who can match him in drive and analytical power.

“I’m Lonesome.” Morse, who follows no leader, attracts no senatorial followers. Will the new Junior Senator from Oregon sit as apprentice at the knee of the master? It is not likely. Dick Neuberger is not the apprentice type.

Unlike Morse, Neuberger comes from a prosperous family. His mother, Ruth Neuberger, always dominated the family circle, ran three family-owned Portland restaurants (at 61, she still does). As a kid Dick was resolutely dressed in Lord Fauntleroy suits, packed off to dancing schools and summer camps, and sheltered like an only child (he was 8½ years old when his only sister, Jane, was born).

By the time he was in high school, Dick already had a healthy interest in writing. He got a summer job as a copy boy on the Portland Oregonian, progressed quickly to cub reporter. He was an able writer, says Arden S. Pangborn, a former associate (now editor of the Oregon Journal}, but he “made a lot of enemies. He always appeared to be after the next man’s job.” He was always anxious to promote Dick Neuberger; once the Oregonian received a news release from Neuberger, written from a resort hotel in Gearhart and reporting, quite seriously, that Richard Neuberger had been runner-up in a pingpong tournament.

At the University of Oregon, Dick quickly became a big man on campus. As a cocksure sophomore he became editor of the Emerald—a post traditionally reserved for upperclassmen—and made it into a whirling journal of controversy. His fiery editorials against fraternities, restrictions on smoking and compulsory fees nettled Neuberger’s schoolmates. Before long, little coin boxes designed to receive contributions for “sending Dickie home” appeared on campus telephone poles and tree trunks. Neuberger was unabashed.

In 1933, when Dick was a junior, his Uncle Julius Neuberger, a Navy doctor, took him to Europe for a Grand Tour. Not much interested in girls or frivolous entertainment, Dick stayed close to Uncle Julius, spent his time interviewing diplomats, citizens and local officials. At one point Uncle Julius persuaded Dick to goto London on his own, for a good time, but 48 hours later Dick telephoned him in Paris. “Uncle Julius,” he said, “I’m lonesome.”

Niagara of Nonfiction. When he returned to the U.S., Neuberger wrote his first article for a national magazine, “The New Germany,” in the Nation, a chilling report on the early Nazi regime. The article was a sensation, and Neuberger decided to become a fulltime, free-lance writer. He set up shop in his mother’s house, where, between reveries over phonograph records (his favorites : marches and Gaité Parisienne), he turned out a Niagara of nonfiction. By last week, after 20 years and some 750 articles and six books (including two highly successful children’s books), Dick Neuberger was earning around $30,000 a year from his typewriter.

His beat was the Northwest, a region he loves with a sincere passion. He covered 2,200,000 sq. mi. from the Aleutians to upper California and west to Montana and Wyoming. A frugal craftsman, he was disinclined to write one story on one subject for one magazine; instead he broke up each piece of research into three or four fragments, built them into separate stories, and squeezed the maximum possible return out of his reporting.

In 1940 when he was 27, Neuberger decided to get into active politics; he ran successfully for the state legislature as Democrat. About the same time he met Maurine Brown, a schoolteacher and fellow Democrat. Gradually the romance flowered and after the war (which Neuberger spent as a captain in the Yukon and the Pentagon) Dick and Maurine were married in Missoula, Mont. Dick developed a bad cold, then flu, and the honeymoon had to be postponed for months.

The Neubergers settled in a spacious, eleven-room old house in Portland with a half-Manx, hermaphrodite cat named Muffet, and lived pleasantly in a world of welterweight music, gardens, politics, and a tidal wave of Neuberger articles. In 1950 after Dick had graduated to the state senate, Maurine filed for a seat in the lower house. Both, of course, ran as Democrats. Dick has said that people wonder why they insist on sticking to a party label that was such a liability in Oregon. He explains: “Evidently martyrdom suits our personalities. Maurine and I enjoy being caribou in timberwolf terrain. It gives us a sense of high adventure and derring-do.” During legislative sessions in Salem, the Neubergers lived in a motel and built up a commendable liberal record (and a basic research for magazine articles) as an aggressive, incorruptible legislative team.

By 1954 the Neubergers were the best known Democrats in Oregon and Dick, impressed with his voter-strength and in flamed against the Administration’s public-private power policy (TIME, Nov. 15, 1954), decided to run against Guy Cordon in the political arena of a state which had been almost continuously Republican since 1878.

One-Man Show. Neuberger’s shrewd and professional campaign was almost entirely a one-man (and a woman) show: Neuberger made all the decisions, wrote most of the press releases, planned all the attacks. In the first phase of his campaign he told Oregonians, in shocked, evangelistic tones and in endless reiteration, that Cordon was a sinister reactionary who took tidelands oil away from their children’s mouths, gave away dams and power lines to private utilities, tried to wreck Eisenhower’s foreign policy and opposed everything from cancer research to free school lunches. The voters were impressed.

Neuberger spent his campaign funds wisely. Instead of using up a lot of money on a few half-hour TV shows, as Cordon did, Neuberger bought hundreds of one-minute radio spots, which poured from the Oregon airwaves. Journalist Neuberger knew just how to deal with the press. Although all but three of Oregon’s 21 dailies were committed to Cordon, Dick managed to get a remarkable amount of space. Every night his nimble fingers typed out releases on his twelve-year-old Royal portable for delivery just in time for deadlines to city rooms around the state.

Having established Cordon as a villain, Neuberger moved into the second phase, in mid-September, with his own campaign promises. With Maurine driving a rented blue Ford, the Neubergers traveled to every nook and corner of the state, to Philomath, Gold Beach, Madras, Looking glass, Yachats, Yoncalla, Bonanza, Cornucopia, Garibaldi, Grande Ronde, Depot Bay, and even to Sisters and Fossil. Wherever possible they stayed with local citizens, and Dick invariably managed to establish a personal identification with his audiences (“As my close friend Amos Buck of the Butchers’ Union knows . . .”). With his sloppy green corduroy jacket and his pleasantly casual manner, Dick Neuberger wowed the home folks. Maurine took care of the women’s clubs and the radio chats. And Wayne Morse, who contributed $500 and 61 incendiary speeches to the Neuberger campaign, was a fire-breathing advance man. Neuberger, who in 1950 had written that Morse “has reduced to an exact science the technique of leading a double life in politics,” was surprised and gratified by Morse’s support, promised to stump for him in return in 1956.

Cordon, a behind-the-scenes politician who hates to make speeches and loathes publicity, was a feeble amateur by comparison. He spent just one 1954 day in Oregon before September, and never succeeded in getting his campaign off the ground.

As Richard L. Neuberger went off to Washington last week with a brand-new tuxedo and Muffet (to keep him company until Maurine resigns from the legislature in May), he had the grudging admiration and good wishes of Oregon’s Republicans. Said former National Committeeman Ralph Cake: “While I believe he’s a fellow who doesn’t want to go too deeply into things at times, I think it’s a certainty he will try to do everything he can for the state and the region.”

The Morseberger combination is an odd product of staid, cautious, conservative Oregon, the Vermont of the West. Morse and Neuberger may not be men to match Oregon’s mountains but, like mountains, they fill the eye.

* In 1938 Alfred E. Reames was appointed to a nine-month Senate term by Democratic Governor Charles H. Martin.

*In the 20th century, journalism is increasingly the path to politics, as the law was in the 19th. The century’s most famous journalist-politicians are Clemenceau, Churchill, Lenin and Mussolini. Some others: Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, Texas’ Oveta Gulp Hobby, Ohio’s Warren Harding, Brazil’s President Café Filho, Britain’s Richard Grossman, Illinois’ Frank Knox, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg and Blair Moody, Washington state’s Warren Magnuson, South Dakota’s Francis Case, Oklahoma’s Mike Monroney, Idaho’s Henry Dworshak, Louisiana’s Edward Hebert, and Tennessee’s Brazilla Carroll Reece.

*Both Smith and Howard Latourette, whom Morse beat in 1950, have become Republicans.