The Grand Exit

In the tobacco country around Lowe's Crossroads, Ky., where Alben Barkley lived as a boy, going to church on Sunday was the most important event of the week. It was from the country preachers of Kentucky that young Alben acquired first impressions of oratorical technique, and the style he learned from them stayed with him to his last word. From the Sunday-meeting atmosphere he also drew many of his famed stories. He often told the one about the two deacons, one a Republican and one a Democrat, who were conducting a service together. "Oh Lord," prayed the Republican deacon, "let us Republicans hang together whether in accord or discord." Countered the

Democratic deacon: "Oh Lord, be not particular--any cord will do."

Over the years Barkley's vigorous oratory and his rich, kindly humor won him ever-widening political success. In 1905, only four years after he started practicing law, he was elected prosecuting attorney for McCracken County, in 1909 county judge; in 1913 he went to the U.S. House of Representatives as a party-line Wilsonian, and then in 1926 to the Senate, where he became such a faithful cam paigner and stumper that Franklin Roosevelt threw him the majority leadership (through the medium of a ''Dear Alben" letter) in 1937.

Cricket v. Stallion. When he was Ma jority Leader, Barkley's opponents called him a mere puppet of the man in the White House. Then, one day in 1944, Roosevelt vetoed the best tax-increase bill that faithful Alben could tug through a hostile Senate. Barkley resigned as Majority Leader, led the Senate in overriding the veto, was re-elected by acclamation. and won an apology from the President. In the process, Barkley dared to ridicule Franklin Roosevelt. Attacking the President's criticism of the tax on timber, Barkley roared on the Senate floor: "The President cites his own experience as a timber man. I do know that he sells Christmas trees at Christmas time. But to compare these little pine bushes with a sturdy oak, gum, poplar or spruce is like to comparing a cricket to a stallion."

That attack may well have locked Alben Barkley out of the White House. At the Democratic Convention in 1944, Roosevelt passed up Barkley and picked Harry Truman as the second man on the ticket. Bitterly disappointed, Barkley nevertheless made a passionate nominating speech for F.D.R. In. 1948 it looked as if Harry Truman, too, might pass up Barkley, but Barkley's keynote speech aroused a defeatist convention and made him the logical nominee for Vice President.

The Big Chance. He became the respected "Veep," a title created by his grandchildren and adopted by all of the U.S. He was the only Vice President of the U.S. to be married while in office. His wife of 44 years had died in 1947, after a long and expensive illness that Barkley paid for by tireless work as an orator at $300 to $1,000 a speech. While the public cheered him on, he courted and won, in 1949, Mrs. Jane Hadley, a handsome widow from St. Louis. "I have no way of knowing whether I'll make the grade or not." said the Vice President shortly before their engagement was announced, "but it's wonderful to have so many people pulling for me."

Barkley's big chance for the presidential nomination came in Chicago in 1952, but he was 74, and there was great concern about his health. He tried to overcome that handicap. "If I felt any better," he said, "I'd send for a psychiatrist, because I'd know it was mental." When union-labor leaders turned him down in a dramatic hotel room conference, Barkley withdrew, deeply hurt. Two days later he went before the convention to make one of his best speeches and receive a hero's farewell. Harry Truman still believes, according to his memoirs, that Barkley could have been nominated if he had not given up.

In the Back Row. In 1954, Alben Barkley came out of retirement and went back to Washington as the junior Senator from Kentucky. But he was an aging man: his sight was failing; he was tired. Last week he went to Lexington, Va., to keynote the traditional mock Democratic National Convention at Washington & Lee University. Before a capacity crowd in the university gymnasium, he again stood up to give a scathing, ultra-partisan Democratic speech that, largely because of the humor in it, would not offend even the most partisan Republicans. Looking back through history, he credited all the good in the U.S. to Democrats, all the bad to the G.O.P.

Pointing out that he had no further personal ambition, he raised his right hand high, and cried in an echo of the flowing Barkley style: "I'm glad to sit in the back row. I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty-"* Then, with the roar of applause and cheers from the 1,200 students ringing through the hall, Alben William Barkley, 78, slumped to the stage, dead of a heart attack.

-A typical and skillful Barkley rewrite of a reference to fit his particular point. The actual phrase (Psalms 84:10): "I had rather be a doorkeeper in the House of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness."

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