Man Behind the Frown

(See Cover)

The frown begins with a line biting deep into the bridge of the broad nose. Thin, pale lips turn thinner, paler. Behind black-rimmed glasses, eyes glow with a suggestion of banked--and therefore controlled --inner fires. The voice takes over from the frown. Deep and strong ("I have always had a commanding voice"), it needs no microphone to help it carry. Questions come slowly, in careful Southern cadence. In the voice, as if measured carefully by the tapping of a finger on a mahogany table, are righteousness and rebuke, sarcasm and sadness, incredulity and indignation. Never is there unrestrained anger.

Both the frown and the voice have been made famous on radio and television by

Arkansas' Democratic Senator John L. McClellan, who at 61, and in his igth year in Congress, has come to direct evenhandedly, effectively and often brilliantly an investigation that ranks among the most important in recent U.S. history.

Into the Rackets. The McClellan committee investigation reaches far beyond the skulduggery of any individual, even a Dave Beck. It goes to a fundamental U.S. proposition: that labor and management, through their mutually honest efforts at collective bargaining, shall both thrive in a free economy. It was to correct a management-weighted imbalance that the Wagner Labor Relations act (John McClellan voted for it) was passed in 1935. But that, in turn, created an equally oppressive, labor-weighted imbalance that even the Taft-Hartley law (McClellan voted for it, too) failed to remedy. Unchecked by restraining laws, some labor leaders became racketeers and some racketeers became labor leaders, using their vast economic powers against management, unionism, and society itself.

To expose such wrongdoing is one aim of the McClellan committee. But much more important is the committee's responsibility for finding legislative methods of punishment and prevention. Indeed, the health of the whole U.S. economy may depend on the work of the committee, for, as McClellan says, "if left alone, unchecked and unrestrained, with the momentum it has already gained, we could be heading for a gangsterism economy in America. This must not occur."

Special Justice. It will not occur if John McClellan can prevent it. To the job of preventing it he brings much more than his scowl and his voice; they are merely the sight and the sound of the controlled strength that makes McClellan one of the most respected members of the U.S. Senate and its top investigator. Into the arena of congressional investigation, where many a congressional head has been turned by headlines and TV time, McClellan brings a special kind of justice. It is the personal code of a man who has had to learn the hard way to control his strength, who has had to beat down wild winds of temper, and learn that the law--in whose cold virtue he once sought escape from a world that used him cruelly--must be tempered by understanding.

Since boyhood, McClellan has carried with him the admonitions of an Arkansas preacher: "Know thyself, control thyself, deny thyself." For long, grim years John McClellan struggled to shape his life by that code--and success came late.

Poor Little Fellow. In 1896 a letter from Sheridan, Ark. plopped into the Washington mailbox of Arkansas' Democratic Representative John Little. It bore the news that Constituents Isaac and Belle McClellan intended to name their newborn son John Little McClellan in honor of the Congressman.* To his namesake John Little promptly sent $5. Belle McClellan, a lovely woman with a fine singing voice, died three weeks after John's birth. On her deathbed she made only one request: she asked that Congressman Little's $5 be used to buy her newborn baby a Bible. So John was left to grow up with the Bible and his father Ike--who still thinks sadly of John's earliest days and calls him "that poor little fellow."

The son of Farmer James McClellan, Isaac McClellan, sometime farmer himself, schoolteacher and country editor, longtime lawyer and dabbler in Democratic politics, was quite a man. He remarried in three years, started tutoring John when the boy was four. He pushed hard and John gritted himself ahead, within two years was doing fine in the fourth grade of Ike's school. When Ike turned from teaching to politics, he took John along on the political trail.

Foot-Washing Convert. Not even the uproarious Arkansas political meetings of the day were larks for John McClellan. His political favorite was Governor Jeff Davis,/- an imposing figure in a Prince Albert coat of Confederate grey, whose platform was simple: "I am a hard-shell Baptist in religion. I believe in foot-washing, saving your seed potatoes and paying your honest debts." Invective .ran high in Arkansas politics, and little John McClellan had no way of telling the campaign flourish from the mortal insult. He took everything with deadly seriousness, spent sleepless nights after his heroes were attacked, blazingly denounced Jeff's enemies to audiences of two or three farmboys. Even Ike McClellan says: "I should have held off until John was a little older and could understand that our opponents didn't really mean what they said."

Ike, after years of studying nights, became a lawyer in 1907, and John traveled the circuit with him. John's Henty was Blackstone. He learned that preparation for a case is 90% of success. (One of the things that makes his current Senate investigation stand out is its painstaking preparation.) As his father got busier, teen-age John was virtually in sole charge of a 75-acre farm, but he still found time to study his lawbooks. In the law he seemed to find something otherwise missing from most of his life. Says one observer: "His father was a lawyer--and his only mother was the law."

The minimum age for admission to the Arkansas bar was 21, but Ike wangled special legislative permission for John to take the required oral test at 17. John scored a 90, 15 points above passing, and became the youngest lawyer in Arkansas.

The Death Curse. All work and no play made John a dour boy. What happened next was to make him a dour man. The same year he passed his law examination he married Eula Hicks, the prettiest girl in Sheridan, a tiny thing with a profusion of auburn ringlets. When John went away to World War I (he was discharged as a first lieutenant), something happened to the marriage. Exactly what is locked behind the tight lips of John McClellan himself. Court records show only that

Eula was granted a 1921 divorce on the ground of desertion and that McClellan "neither answers, demurs or otherwise pleads, but wholly makes default." Despite the cold legal words, the breakup was passionate and enduring. Years later, weakened by blood poisoning after a minor operation, Eula Hicks McClellan called to her bedside Doris and Max, the children of the marriage. "Don't ever," she said. "as long as you live, have anything to do with the McClellans." Then she died.

The curse worked in reverse. Doris and Max adored their father--but he held himself aloof from the children of his broken home. After he left Eula, McClellan moved to nearby Malvern, paid $125 down for the law library of a recently deceased judge, and set to work as few men can work. It paid off. At 30, McClellan was elected prosecuting attorney for a district covering three counties, including the one in which Ike McClellan was a leading defense lawyer.

Glint for Slint. John McClellan was a born prosecutor. His temper rarely showed in the courtroom. "He was cool," says a friend. "That was his business--law--and he knew it." His cases were perfectly prepared (although old Ike, who knew people and juries, still chortles about his victories over John); he feared nothing and favored no one. Once a boyhood pal who had turned moonshiner was prosecuted by McClellan, convicted and fined. He came to McClellan afterward with a chill glint in his eye. "John," he said, "this time's all right. But don't you ever prosecute me again." McClellan returned glint for glint. "Albert," he said, "I don't care how much whisky you make or sell--but don't get caught. If you do, I'm going to send you to the penitentiary."

McClellan's record as prosecutor put him on the path to Washington; in 1934 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas' Sixth District. Coming from a state ravaged by the Great Depression, McClellan voted for many of the early New Deal measures, e.g., social security, and the so-called "share-the-wealth" revenue bill of 1935. But the Administration's House leaders learned right off that Ike McClellan had not raised a yes man. A few days after John McClellan took his seat, a Democratic whip bustled up with curt instructions to vote for a certain bill. McClellan bristled. "Look," he said, "you don't know me and I don't know you, but we're going to get to know each other pretty darn quick. I vote as I please." He did, too. and as his essential cotton-country conservatism took over, he often voted against the New Deal.

Such razorback independence could never be to the liking of a squire from Hyde Park. In 1938, when McClellan decided to run for the U.S. Senate against Incumbent Hattie Caraway, Franklin Roosevelt threw the weight of the whole New Deal machine against him. McClellan says that most of Arkansas' 50,000 WPA workers voted for Hattie--on orders from Washington. He also claims that two Internal Revenue agents came into the state, called on McClellan's supporters, examined their income-tax returns, then pointedly announced that Mrs. Caraway was the candidate to back. McClellan fought savagely, lost his voice to a sore throat ("I went through that campaign living on ice-cream cones"), and, by 10,000 votes, lost the election.

Safe in the Club. But John McClellan had decided to go to the Senate, and, however deliberate he may be about making up his mind, he is stubborn once it is done. In 1942 he tried again, bucked F.D.R. and the state Democratic organization, won by nearly 50,000 votes.

In the Senate McClellan has generally voted with other Southern conservatives. He is an authentic member of the Senate's clublike inner circle. Because he could be trusted not to embarrass the Senate, he was named chairman of one of the touchiest political investigations of the 84th Congress: the probe of lobbying activities which grew out of charges made by South Dakota's Francis Case that a lobbyist had tried to influence his vote on the natural-gas bill. Midway in his Senate career McClellan fastened onto the Appropriations Committee as the place where true Senate power accrues. Equally important, he takes care of the folks back home. Says an admiring Arkansan: "John McClellan is a patronage-minded fellow and a boondoggle-minded fellow, but only in the most honest sense. The people are convinced that John has sluiced more federal money into this state than any other single person--and they're probably right."

With the help of the federal bankroll, John McClellan's first two Senate terms made him an unqualified political success in Arkansas. He was a valued--by club standards--member of the Senate. But it is also true that he was little-known outside his state and his club. Except for the Army-McCarthy hearings, when Joe splintered himself against John's flint, McClellan gave little promise of real national prominence.

Perhaps the 17-year-old lawyer had matured slowly. But more likely the answer lay in McClellan's personal life; far from being conducive to greatness, its classic tragedy would have left most men in the gutter.

Death, Death, Death. In John McClellan's second marriage, to a Malvern girl named Lucille Smith, he had found rare comfort. "My goodness," says Ike McClellan, "how devoted they were to each other." During McClellan's first term in the House, Lucille decided to drive her three young children (John L. Jr., Jimmy and Mary Alice) home to Arkansas for a visit. She fell ill in Tennessee, barely made it to the home of relatives in Jackson, died a few days later of spinal meningitis. Her death, recalls Ike, had "a terrible effect on John. He had a notion to resign from the House, but I told him not to do that, stay with it."

McClellan stayed with it--to the exclusion of all else. He fell back on the cure he had taken after his divorce from Eula: work, more work, still more work. Finally a worried colleague talked McClellan into going along to a friend's Washington home, where "a very attractive lady" was visiting. McClellan went, reluctantly--and then he saw the lady. "I'll never forget," says McClellan. "She came down the steps of the house wearing a picture blue hat and a blue dress, a beautiful lady in blue." The lady in blue was a widow from North Carolina, Norma Myers Cheatham. She is now Norma Myers McClellan.

John McClellan's mother had died bearing him. His first wife had died hating him. His second wife died loving him. After his third marriage, McClellan reached again for family happiness and stability. They were beyond him. In North Africa, during World War II, Corporal Max McClellan--Eula's son--came down with a back ailment. Doctors neglected him, his Army superiors accused him of goldbricking--until he. like Lucille McClellan, died of spinal meningitis. John and Max had never been close, which made the boy's death all the more painful. Says a close family friend: "Max was raised in a broken home, and John felt bad about that. He felt he had let Max down."

Almost six years later the body of Max McClellan was returned to the U.S. for burial. Two nights before the funeral, John McClellan received word that his favorite son John Jr., who was preparing to follow his father in the law, had been injured in an automobile accident near Fayetteville. But Johnny was reported not badly hurt, so the family attended Max's funeral, then flew to Fayetteville. Recalls Jimmy, the only remaining son: "When we arrived at the airport, there was a little delegation waiting to see us. Dad looked out of the window at their faces and he knew."

Johnny McClellan had died that morning of a brain injury. The family had buried Max on a Friday. On Monday Johnny was buried in Malvern, next to his mother's grave.

"Master of My Soul." That nearly did it. "There's not a man in the world," says an intimate friend, "with more excuse to throw up his hands and turn all his problems over to alcohol than John McClellan." McClellan did just that, and it nearly broke up his marriage to Norma. Finally he turned in despair to a trusted adviser. "What will I do?" he asked. The stark, unqualified reply: "Lay off that bottle." John McClellan thought for a moment, then his face turned hard. Said he: "I'm going to show you that I am the master of my own soul." He went into the bathroom, and when he emerged, there were two shattered bottles of bourbon on the floor. Drinking has not since been a problem with John McClellan.

That may have been a turning point in other ways. McClellan had always drawn within himself to answer problems. As if to spare himself future pain, he turned away from his children. They used to say of him that he never seemed to care about them until they were dead. Now there is a drawing-together. Eula's daughter Doris, whose whole life has been a fight to win her father's affection ("There's no one in the world I'd rather see walk in the door than my dad, because I just love him to death"), feels at last that she has. Lucille's son Jimmy, who had always felt left out, turned to the law after Johnny's death ("I really didn't know what I wanted to be, but I wanted to be close to my father"), now finds in John McClellan the "warmest, kindest man alive."

"You're Mad Already." Moreover, John McClellan has finally brought his temper under control. In 1954 he returned to Arkansas to run for re-election against Fair Dealing ex-Governor Sid McMath, his bitterest political enemy. McMath knew just how to get McClellan's goat: accuse him of being a pawn of the powerful Arkansas Power & Light Co. McClellan's conservatism has often paralleled that of A.P. & L., but McMath was among the few people in Arkansas who professed to believe that John McClellan was, or could be, anybody's pawn.

McClellan Adviser Q. L. Porter recalls an early strategy conference: "John said, 'If McMath wants a fight, he can sure get one with me.' I said, 'John, if you go in there with that attitude, he's gonna whip the pants off you. That's the only way people can ever beat you--by making you mad. And here you sit in my office, and you're mad already, and the campaign hasn't even started yet.'

"Well, do you know John McClellan went through that whole campaign without ever saying the name Sid McMath? That changed him. He saw what he could gain by keeping calm. Not that he became a calm person, but he practiced calmness because he could see its virtue."

McClellan beat McMath by 37,000 votes and returned to Washington. It had taken him years, but he was finally able to live up to the code set forth by the preacher of his boyhood days: to know himself, control himself, and deny himself. John McClellan would be a lesser man if he had never had problems. He is the stronger for overcoming them. His conduct at the labor-investigating committee shows it.

A Two-Word Message. In his $300-a-month Fairfax Hotel suite, John McClellan awakens daily at 7, breakfasts on bacon and eggs, glances at the morning papers, and by 8 o'clock is on his way to the Senate Office Building in a taxi. (He has rarely driven since the time he started through a red light while his mind was preoccupied with work.) A mass of business is already waiting: more than 300 letters a day, many of them with valuable tips about the investigation; conferences with Committee Counsel Robert Kennedy, who keeps McClellan thoroughly briefed on latest developments; executive sessions with fellow committee members; preparations for the day's hearings.

Kennedy and McClellan have a close but strictly professional relationship. Kennedy is in direct charge of the investigation, assigns the staffers (about 60 lawyers, accountants and legmen, plus clerical help), keeps detailed track of the probes already under way in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis. McClellan makes the broader policy decisions (and his policies have won the full cooperation of A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders). At hearings he calls on his legal talents to get at the nub of complex situations so that both the press and the public can understand what has happened.

McClellan gives his committee colleagues almost free rein (although he sometimes buries his face wearily in his hands when another Senator wanders in questioning a witness), keeps them fully informed of all developments. Exception: only McClellan and Kennedy knew that Midwestern Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa was about to be arrested for trying to bribe a committee staffer (TIME, March 25). Recalls Norma McClellan: "John was extremely preoccupied that night. I kept asking, 'John, what is troubling you?' He kept saying, 'Nothing, nothing.' About 11 o'clock, John Edgar Hoover called up with a two-word message: 'Mission accomplished.' Then John told me what it was all about. Jimmy Hoffa had been arrested."

"I Have No Problems." Despite his imposing work load, John McClellan, once driven to a man-killing pace by his personal problems, now operates well within himself. He often takes a half-hour nap after lunch, generally gets away from Capitol Hill by 7. Norma is waiting in the apartment with dinner ("He eats anything I put before him") on TV trays. Together they watch the news or Kinescopes of the day's hearings on a 27-in. set, and John relaxes with his favorite programs, e.g., Dragnet, Highway Patrol, before reaching for his work folder. With John busy in his committee work, many constituents have begun to take up their problems with Norma, who deals with them tactfully, efficiently and with charm ("She has all the graces that I lack," says McClellan). The McClellans are in bed by midnight, and John drops right off to sleep. "I have no problems," says he. "I don't brood over things, or worry, or lose sleep--that doesn't happen any more."

Thus mellowed, John McClellan has bought a 150-by-600-ft. plot of land back in Little Rock, dreams fondly of retiring from politics in 1960 and becoming son Jimmy's law partner. One thing that could keep him in politics is Enemy Sid McMath. Says McMath: "McClellan swears he'll run again in 1960 just to oppose me, and by God, I'll be there to oppose."

In any event, Senate Investigator John McCellan has plenty of work left before 1960. On the McClellan committee agenda are four separate investigations in the New York area: rackets in garbage collections, coin-operated machines and the building trades, and Teamsters' "paper locals" (i.e., locals which in some instances have no members, but are used to rig union elections and to extort money from businessmen). During the summer months the committee may take to the road, holding hearings wherever strong evidence of labor racketeering has shown up. It is in these hearings and the legislation which grows out of them that the man with the frown, and the tempered steel that lies behind it, will make his lasting mark.

*Devoted Democrat Isaac McClellan named later sons by his second marriage for Democrats William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson and Arkansas' Senator Joseph T. Robinson.

/-No kin.

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