Rhode Island: The Colonel & the Senator

“Senator Pell is a real smoothie, all right,” said a Newport matron, “but this colonel is really dragging him up and down over the coals.” The colonel in question is Lieut. Colonel Briggs, U.S.A. (ret.), a brisk-mannered, parade-ground-voiced old campaigner who is gunning for the Rhode Island Senate seat of Democrat Claiborne Pell.

Colonel Briggs—who was known to the troops as “Old Poker Face” during the war—is the choice of Republican Governor John Chafee and the G.O.P. state central committee, and is thus the strong favorite to win the Republican primary next month. Confident of this, the colonel last week officially opened the campaign with all sights trained on Claiborne Pell and November.

Steady Blue Eyes. Senator Pell will need every bit of his suavity to answer the challenge—for the colonel is a lady. She is, in fact, Lieut. Colonel Ruth Briggs, 55, a much-bemedaled, widely experienced veteran of 20 years in the WACs, who was enticed out of retirement by Governor Chafee to take a crack at Socialite Pell, 47. Colonel Briggs, her hair swept back from the forehead and braided on top as it has been for the past 20 years, has been lambasting Pell for weeks, touring factories and stores with a firm handshake, steady blue eyes and a brisk “I’m Colonel Briggs running for the U.S. Senate and I hope you will help me in November.” A Barrington fisherman summarized the surprise of many who are approached by the colonel: “I heard about this colonel, but I didn’t know she was no dame.”

Partially because she is not yet widely known, no one gives Colonel Briggs much of a chance to unseat Claiborne Pell. Still, some pretty unusual things have happened to Ruth Briggs in her career—and could happen again. Among the first WACs to be sent overseas, she quickly found herself in charge of a packed lifeboat after her ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean—and the senior British officer in the lifeboat became seasick. “Being a Rhode Islander,” she explains, “I’ve been around small boats all my life.”

As a member of General Bedell Smith’s staff in North Africa, Colonel Briggs helped arrange the Casablanca conference. She was lent to the State Department for a London assignment after the war, went on to Moscow as part of Ambassador Bedell Smith’s staff, and in 1948 was appointed vice consul in Belgrade. After sending her to school for four years to become a Russian specialist, the Army put her in the Pentagon as chief of its Eastern European branch of intelligence; in 1961 she was sent to France as chief of the Armed Forces Soviet intelligence section. She has a chestful of medals and citations, and she insists on being called colonel—the highest rank a woman can reach. Says she: “I’ve earned it.”

Barrage of Barbs. The colonel is a charming and good-humored woman who insists that the campaign poses two major issues for Rhode Islanders: “What’s happening to their sons and what’s happening to their dollars.” She feels that the U.S. should put more effort into winning the Viet Nam war more quickly (“I’m not as scared of China as some people are”), calls for more steps to stop inflation. Moreover, she seems able to throw a continuous barrage of barbs at Claiborne Pell, whom she calls a “curlyheaded croquet player from Newport.” Referring to Pell’s good looks, she says: “I concede that if the election were on the basis of looks, I would lose. My campaign managers wanted me to do something with my hair, lose 20 lbs. and put some sex appeal into the campaign; but my reaction is it’s too darn late.” She also twits the New York-born Pell for his money (“It’s axiomatic that if you want to take good care of your money, you should not elect a man who has inherited money or married it”), and criticizes him for what she calls a vacillating stand on Viet Nam (“The only way you can win a war is to be willing to fight it”).

Though she plans to wage a man-to-man battle with Claiborne Pell, who so far has kept a discreet silence, Colonel Briggs also has the little extras of her sex going for her. When a woman in a store, mistaking the colonel for a supervisor, asked, “Do you have a lemon squeezer?” Colonel Briggs quickly introduced herself, said: “I have two, and if you can’t find one I’ll be glad to send you one of mine.” And, though the colonel has promised to stick to the issues, she is woman enough to admit that she cannot promise not to be “snide from time to time.”