Formation of a Fossil

In any classification of Republican politicians, Indiana's U.S. Senator William Ezra Jenner has been for years the prototype of the reactionary. A belly-punching precinct politician, he washed up through his state's G.O.P. organization and into the U.S. Senate on a wave of wild generalizations and crustacean thinking. He gained a national reputation for his unrestrained and often undocumented charges against people and programs he did not like (it was Jenner who called General of the Army George Marshall a "front man for traitors"). In 1952 he was re-elected in the Eisenhower landslide, but neither the man with the coattails nor the man with the cling liked it very much. Since then Jenner has been utterly unable to adopt the stance of a responsible, constructive member of the party in power.

Destroy & Rebuild. Constantly becoming more frustrated, Lawyer Jenner let it be known last fall that he would like to leave the Senate and take a U.S. Court of Appeals bench in Chicago. The Department of Justice pointed out to him that the Constitution prohibits a man from stepping directly from the U.S. Senate to the federal bench. From then on Jenner sulked, and refused even to talk to his fellow Indiana Senator, Republican Homer Capehart, about any other nominee for the post. "Believe it or not," Capehart told a friend, "the senior Senator from Indiana can't get an appointment with the junior Senator."

Capehart finally got his appointment only to have Jenner berate him violently for supporting the Eisenhower program. "I've never taken so much abuse in my life," Capehart later confessed. "I'm afraid one of the 96 Senators is nuts." By that time Jenner was calling Capehart, who himself has Grade A credentials in the right-of-center division of the G.O.P., a "New Deal sonofabitch."

Back home in Indiana, there were other developments to add to Jenner's irritation. President Eisenhower was obviously friendly with Indiana's forward-looking Governor George North Craig, who had seized control of the state Republican organization from the Jenner forces (TIME, March 7). At the beginning of 1956, Jenner was not even showing much interest in leading his own faction of the Indiana G.O.P. organization. He predicted the ignominious defeat of Capehart and other Republicans in Indiana next November. While his lieutenants sour-graped that control of the Indiana G.O.P. would be worthless in the great defeat, Jenner was saying that the Republican Party, ruined by the Eisenhower leadership, must be destroyed and rebuilt on the Jenner pattern.

A Symbol & a Symbol. Last week Indiana was just catching up with a classic Jenner tirade delivered in Chicago at a meeting of the bitter-right Abraham Lincoln National Republican Club. In a rabble-rousing outburst against the Eisenhower Administration, Jenner cried that patriotism and courage and the Constitution are going "out of style" in Washington. He called the conduct of U.S. foreign policy "nauseating," and roared that the State Department under John Foster Dulles "talks anti-Communism but silently, secretly carries on a planned retreat before the Communist advance." His question: "Could our fifth column have planned it that way?"

"The [presidential] office," he went on, "is being changed from the American constitutional office of the first citizen of the Republic, into a European office much more like the early Roman emperors . . . This glamorizing of the presidency is the work of that bureaucratic elite which wants to rule the United States in the protecting shadow of a loved and trusted symbol. Kings, emperors, and Fuehrers are built up by ambitious power-seekers who could not be elected to office themselves. Our power-seekers try to make our chief executive into a monarch, and our sober constitutional executive branch into a glamorous imperial household, in which they will wield the hidden powers."

Musing about his colleague's tirades, Homer Capehart last week said, of the state where Bill Jenner once was a political monarch: "I don't think the people of Indiana are taking it seriously." In 1956, Senator Jenner is the symbol of a brand of Republicanism that has quietly, gradually, relentlessly been made obsolete by the Eisenhower Administration. He has been transformed from a reactionary into a fossil.

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