Last Words

As the 78th Congress flickered to a finish, lame-duck Congressmen seized their last chance. One by one, they took to the floor with prepared valedictories. Most of their colleagues had already gone home, but the Congressional Record was still there, duty-bound to print every last quack. Each swan-songster was convinced that his constituents had been misguided, but magnanimously agreed to abide by the voters' decision. Each also wanted to take a few fast, final pokes at the Soviet Union and the British Empire.

Gerald Nye, 52, giving up the Senate seat in which North Dakota voters had kept him for 19 years, admitted: "I would be lacking completely in frankness were I to say that leaving . . . is painless. . . . Knowing that this might be the last time I will speak on this floor, there has been some temptation to make this . . . an 'I told you so' speech. . . . You see the gravity of the peril in which our foreign entanglements have involved us. . . . I am sure, knowing the power of British propaganda, that within 20 years--perhaps within ten years--we shall be told that we must go into another European war to keep Russia from seizing control of the world. . . ."

Hamilton Fish, Congressman from New York for almost a quarter-century, wriggled his beetling black brows and thundered: "I had hoped to be Chairman Of the Rules Committee. . . . I am opposed to Naziism . . . but there is one thing worse--and that is the bloody hand of Communism. . . . It took most of the New Deal Administration, half of Moscow, $400,000, and Governor Dewey to defeat me. . . ."

Robert ("Buncombe Bob") Reynolds, 60, delivered his swan song looking jaunty and well-preserved in a loud-checked shirt and playboy bow tie. North Carolina's junior Senator, now the son-in-law of Washington's wealthy Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, had decided last spring not to seek a fourth term. Said Buncombe Bob: "I have often referred to myself as an isolationist. . . . I merely employed the term because those who attempted to smear us for trying to keep this country out of the war used that word. . . . We are winning this war. . . . Russia could not have won it. Great Britain could not have won it. . . ."

Stephen A. Day, Illinois' billiard-bald congressional spokesman for the Chicago Tribune for four years, explained: "We are wasting time when we expect Stalin to accept a plan of collective security. . . . Whoever heard of a dictator sharing his sovereignty?. . . Now [for] the real reason why I have been an object of attack by the President and his entire battery of New Dealers, character assassins and Communists. For many years, I have been an outspoken foe of Communism. . . ."

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