The Congress: Mister Sam

In Dallas’ Baylor University Medical Center last week, two elderly ladies emerged from a hushed, darkened room. Their eyes told the story: in the quiet room lay their brother, Sam Rayburn, 79, in a drugged sleep, beyond the help of medicine or surgery. A biopsy had disclosed that the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was ravaged with cancer and had little time left to live.

Persuasion & Reason. Samuel Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver) Rayburn has served in the House longer than any other man—nearly 49 years, more than a quarter of the history of that body. He was Speaker for 17 years, more than twice as long as his nearest competitor, Henry Clay. He served with—Rayburn rejected the word under—eight Presidents, through three wars and countless world crises. In nearly half a century on Capitol Hill, Rayburn watched and guided more than 3,500 Congressmen, including Jack Kennedy. Rayburn was a careful leader and a firm believer in the art of the possible. “My experience with the speakership,” he once said, “has been that you cannot lead people by driving them. Persuasion and reason are the only ways. In that way, the Speaker has power and influence in the House.”

As the Speaker, Rayburn reached the pinnacle of his ambition. He might have become President—Franklin Roosevelt offered him the vice-presidential nomination in 1944, and gave it to Harry Truman when Rayburn rejected it. “I’d rather be Speaker than any ten Senators,” he sometimes said. “I love the House.” It was a love that stretched back to early boyhood. As a suntanned youngster in Bonham, Texas, he peeped under the flap of a fairground tent and, with thumping heart, listened to the thunderations of Joe Bailey, a hell-for-leather Congressman. That did it. Later, Sam confided his ambitions to a brother: “I’m going to make a lawyer and go to Congress.”

It was not easy. The Rayburns were a poor farm family, and Father W. M. Rayburn—a Civil War cavalryman who had ridden to Appomattox with Robert E. Lee—was barely able to feed his eleven children. “Character is all I have to give you,” he told his sons. “Be a man.” Sam went off to East Texas College, paid his own way by sweeping floors and ringing the school bell. Before he left home, his father pressed $25—the family savings—into his hand.

After college, Sam pursued his dream and won election to the Texas legislature. At night he studied law, passed his bar examinations at 26. At 29 he was Speaker of the Texas house of representatives, the youngest in history. Two years later, when he was 31, Sam Rayburn went off to Congress, as the newly elected Representative of Texas’ Fourth District. He was home at last.

“Sam Stays Hitched.” Rayburn rose rapidly, established a reputation as a dependable party man of absolute integrity. Said John Nance Garner, a onetime Speaker himself who became F.D.R.’s first Vice President: “Sam stays hitched.” His speeches were never eloquent or theatrical, but when Mister Sam spoke, the House listened attentively. To the generations of young Democratic Congressmen who came to him, he gave the same advice: “Don’t try to go too fast. Don’t ever talk until you know what you’re talking about. You don’t have to explain something that you didn’t say.”

Rayburn was a son of the South (Robert E. Lee was his apotheosis of an American hero), and he drew his strength from the South. In 1948, campaigning through nine Southern states, Rayburn helped keep the South from defecting altogether to the Dixiecrats; he was awarded a large share of the credit in saving the presidency for Harry Truman. In the Congress, Rayburn served effectively as a middleman between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals.

But Rayburn was a Democratic Party regular before he was a Southerner. He worked faithfully for the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the New Frontier. Even when he disagreed with specific programs, Mister Sam went along—for the good of the party. He also had Republican friends. He liked Dwight Eisenhower—even though he always professed bewilderment that a native Texan, from Rayburn’s own district, could ever become a Republican. Once, when he was asked to go to Massachusetts to stump against longtime

Republican House Leader Joe Martin, Rayburn was shocked: “Speak against Martin? Hell, if I lived up that way I’d vote for him.”

“You’ve Got To.” In his long years on the Hill, Rayburn never saw his name printed on a major item of legislation. His talents were managerial and strategic. When a big bill hit the House, Rayburn usually took an opinion poll and reported his findings to the White House. If a President insisted on ramming through a bill that Rayburn thought had no chance of passage, Rayburn would go back to the Congress and do his persuasive best to win the needed votes. But if Mister Sam said a bill was going to be beaten, it usually was.

Rayburn’s most effective work was not on the House floor but in its cloakrooms and corridors. In 1941, the Roosevelt Administration had carelessly worked itself into a cul-de-sac by not writing in provisions for emergency extension in the original Draft Act. There was considerable public agitation for killing the bill—and thereby releasing more than 1,000,000 men from the Army. Rayburn worked feverishly with his undecided colleagues. “I want you to vote for this bill,” he pleaded, “even if it means your defeat. You’ve got to, if this country is to live.” His efforts swayed at least a dozen votes, and on the roll call the bill passed by a heart-stopping 203-202. Four months later, the U.S. was at war.

Although he presented a cool exterior to the public, and rejected intimacy, Sam Rayburn was a warmhearted humanitarian. The day after his close friend, former Vice President Alben Barkley, died, Rayburn let his emotions show. Stepping into the well of the House, he delivered a moving eulogy in a choked voice. “God bless his memory,” he said. “God comfort his loved ones. God comfort me.”

That was pretty much the way the House felt about Mister Sam.