be hard up for news if you can’t think of a better question than that”), and whether his burst of executive activity since returning from Geneva has been his idea or Bob Leffingwell’s, the fact remains that he has given Bob Munson a busy summer. The Majority Leader has been held to his duties as rigorously as he ever was during the tenure of the President’s predecessor. He has not complained about this, for, after all, it is his job, and it has also given his wife Dolly a chance to hold at least four extra garden parties at “Vagaries,” that great white house in Rock Creek Park, that she wouldn’t have held if they had returned to Michigan earlier in the summer. But the instinct of twenty-three years in the Senate, the last twelve of them as Majority Leader, tells him that the time has come to get the Congress out of Washington and give its members a chance to rest up from one another.
There comes a point, as Bob Munson is well aware, when Senators and Representatives have been together long enough and it is much better for the country if they can just go away, return home or travel or whatever, and forget the problems of legislating for a while. In a system resting so subtly but inescapably upon the delicate balances of human likes and dislikes, familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt but it does breed an eventual irascibility which, toward session’s end, makes the functionings of American democracy rather more subject to personal pitfalls that they should ideally be.
A fast windup to the aid debate—about two more days, Bob Munson estimates—an opportunity for a few last-minute speeches and dramatics by those Senators and Representatives who always have to have the last word for the sake of the political record and whatever headlines it may bring them, and then—home.
So thinks Robert M. Munson as Senator Tom August of Minnesota rises in the Senate to make his concluding speech on the aid bill and at the United Nations the M’Bulu of Mbuele begins to set in train the series of events that will add another ten days to the session and bring to the UN and to both houses of Congress one of the most violent and embittered controversies of recent years.
Unaware of these thoughts of adjournment passing through the mind of the Majority Leader, but fully in accord with their general import, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is also anxious to get away. Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina is just turned seventy-six—his colleagues spent all day yesterday trying to outdo one another in paying him tribute, except for Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who deliberately stayed away with the sour comment to the press that he “wasn’t interested in soft-soaping senility”—and he fully apprehends that he had best get on home to South Carolina and do some visiting around the state if he wishes to retain his gradually slipping hold upon it. The basic sources of his political power are as ancient as himself, and many of them, indeed, are gone. A great name and a great reputation, great battles in the cause of Carolina and the South, have carried him through election after election; but he is conscious now that new generations, new interests, new industries, and new money in the state are threatening his position as never before.
“Seab won’t leave the Senate until they carry him out on a stretcher,” Senator John DeWilton of Vermont remarked the other day. The old man knows with a lively awareness that he can be carried out just as effectively on a ballot box. New leaders walk the streets of Barnwell and new voices exchange the softly accented passwords of power in the moss-hung gardens of Charleston. Seab Cooley still commands great respect in his native state, but his instinct is not playing him false: there are whispers everywhere, an urge for someone new, a feeling, sometimes vague but increasingly articulate, that South Carolina should have a younger and more vigorous spokesman in the
There comes a point, as Bob Munson is well aware, when Senators and Representatives have been together long enough and it is much better for the country if they can just go away, return home or travel or whatever, and forget the problems of legislating for a while. In a system resting so subtly but inescapably upon the delicate balances of human likes and dislikes, familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt but it does breed an eventual irascibility which, toward session’s end, makes the functionings of American democracy rather more subject to personal pitfalls that they should ideally be.
A fast windup to the aid debate—about two more days, Bob Munson estimates—an opportunity for a few last-minute speeches and dramatics by those Senators and Representatives who always have to have the last word for the sake of the political record and whatever headlines it may bring them, and then—home.
So thinks Robert M. Munson as Senator Tom August of Minnesota rises in the Senate to make his concluding speech on the aid bill and at the United Nations the M’Bulu of Mbuele begins to set in train the series of events that will add another ten days to the session and bring to the UN and to both houses of Congress one of the most violent and embittered controversies of recent years.
Unaware of these thoughts of adjournment passing through the mind of the Majority Leader, but fully in accord with their general import, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is also anxious to get away. Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina is just turned seventy-six—his colleagues spent all day yesterday trying to outdo one another in paying him tribute, except for Fred Van Ackerman of Wyoming, who deliberately stayed away with the sour comment to the press that he “wasn’t interested in soft-soaping senility”—and he fully apprehends that he had best get on home to South Carolina and do some visiting around the state if he wishes to retain his gradually slipping hold upon it. The basic sources of his political power are as ancient as himself, and many of them, indeed, are gone. A great name and a great reputation, great battles in the cause of Carolina and the South, have carried him through election after election; but he is conscious now that new generations, new interests, new industries, and new money in the state are threatening his position as never before.
“Seab won’t leave the Senate until they carry him out on a stretcher,” Senator John DeWilton of Vermont remarked the other day. The old man knows with a lively awareness that he can be carried out just as effectively on a ballot box. New leaders walk the streets of Barnwell and new voices exchange the softly accented passwords of power in the moss-hung gardens of Charleston. Seab Cooley still commands great respect in his native state, but his instinct is not playing him false: there are whispers everywhere, an urge for someone new, a feeling, sometimes vague but increasingly articulate, that South Carolina should have a younger and more vigorous spokesman in the
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