Cougar in the Caucus Room

The going had been gummy. For seven grinding days, the Senate's three-man War Investigating Subcommittee had groped through a maze of epithets, gags, evasions and contradictory testimony to determine whether Mississippi's Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo had shaken down war contractors for campaign money and graft.

Vicksburg Contractor Michael T. Morrissey had testified that he happened to be passing Bilbo's "Dream House No. I" --a 27-room brick mansion near Poplarville, Miss.--one day. He found the Senator trying to build a lake with a mule, a one-armed Negro and two boys. Understandably touched, Morrissey fetched his earth-moving machinery, dug the lake, and by a "bookkeeper's error" charged the $3,672.91 cost to the Keesler Army Air Field, which he was then helping construct. He explained airily his loans of $6,000 and his gift of a Cadillac to Bilbo: "We always elect poor folks in Mississippi."

John R. Junkin, a sand & gravel dealer from Natchez, told the committee he had poured the concrete for the Dream House swimming pool, but had marked the $1,194.70 bill paid before he mailed it. Contractor M. T. Reed had contributed $3,500 to the Juniper Grove Baptist parsonage Bilbo was struggling to build, and had given the money to Bilbo. Contractor F. T. Newton had no idea what Bilbo had done with the $25,000 he had given him to back the unsuccessful 1942 senatorial campaign of handsome, languorous Mississippian Wall Doxey, now the Senate sergeant at arms.

The Terrible Eye. The committee's star witness was ailing Edward P. Terry, an erstwhile Bilbo secretary. Despite the terrible eye that Bilbo fixed on him from across the crowded Senate caucus room, Witness Terry began to squeal willingly.

In 1940, he said, New Orleans' notorious Abraham L. (Abe) Shushan, ex-convict and onetime Huey Long henchman, agreed to write off a $3,000 loan to Bilbo in return for an assist on an $80,000 income-tax suit. In 1941, Terry recalled, Bilbo had accepted $1,500 to get an aged Natchez drug addict a special morphine prescription from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The committee listened attentively, while Bilbo mangled a cigar. Then Michigan's Homer Ferguson, a relentless inquisitor, switched his approach. He asked Terry what he had done with the $15,000 given him by New York radical Simon Liberman for use against Bilbo in Mississippi's Democratic primary last July. Abruptly, Terry refused to answer and the committee cited him for contempt.

After that, it was Bilbo's turn. Before the hearing, a Mississippi doctor had told committee investigators that the Senator has cancer of the mouth. Wasted, and minus his lower plate. Bilbo sat in the wit ness chair from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. While his voice clogged and his shoulders sagged, he spat at his inquisitors like a treed cougar.

Any Questions? First off, he wanted the committee to know that "Ed Terry, who has been so free with his wild, hazy, vicious and traitorous hallucinations" was nothing but a "modern Benedict Arnold" and a "contemptible, pusillanimous, limicolous"* liar.

That off his chest, "The Man" began to answer specific committee charges in a 13,000-word statement. The Morrissey Cadillac had been a Christmas present ("It's just an old Southern custom").

Said Bilbo of the $3,000 he had borrowed from Abe Shushan to make a divorce settlement with his wife: "I still owe $2,250 on this alimony nightmare." The swmiming-pool bill and the Morrissey loan, he vowed he would pay.

But the charge that really outraged The Man was the one that he had deposited money collected for the Juniper Grove parsonage in a special fund from which he alone could draw. "Gentlemen of the committee," said he, bitterly, "that was a sacred fund and I want you and the world to know that if I ever forget the teachings of my sainted father and want to get money wrongfully I would never start by stealing from the church."

After he had denied or explained everything, Senator Bilbo asked the committee if it had any further questions. Icy-voiced Senator Ferguson had one: Did the witness know that it was against the law for political candidates to accept campaign contributions from Government contractors?

Bilbo, who up to that moment had -"Living in mud." maintained that the committee had no legal goods on him, wilted noticeably and croaked that nothing had come out of the Government's purse. "It all came out of the Government," roared Ferguson.

"I don't think it applies. I don't think I violated any law," muttered The Man as the committee prepared to adjourn.

Although the hearing was not officially closed, the subcommittee's lawyers were already at work on a strong anti-Bilbo report to the Senate. Its main point: that Bilbo had "acted improperly" in accepting gratuities from war contractors.

Since some Democratic Senators are almost certain to back Bilbo, right or wrong, the question of how to unseat The Man will devolve on the Senate's 51 Republicans. Their problem: whether to refuse Bilbo a seat on charges that his election was "irregular" (which would take only a majority vote), or seat and then attempt to oust him on charges of "moral turpitude" (which would require a two-thirds vote).

Republicans will try to find the answer at their Party caucus on Dec. 30.

* "Living in mud."

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