On Record

As the U.S. Senate passed the eleventh day of the civil rights filibuster last week, a team of recorders toiled round-the-clock to chronicle every syllable of the debate for official Washington breakfast table reading. Working ten-minute relays over two twelve-hour shifts, 14 Congressional Record reporters (six more than usual) took down verbatim the torrent of words, made it seem almost easy. "After all," explained one Record staffer, "the Southern Senators speak slowly."

In spite of such seeming offhandedness, the Congressional Record is in a sense a publishing wonder. It is a daily of more than 200 pages, with an average circulation of 42,000, no managing editor, and in the members of Congress, 537 contributors, all free to edit their own copy Printed overnight at a cost of about $16,000 per issue, it is delivered all over Washington earlier than the morning milk. Though the Record has never missed its midnight deadline, only a system as intricately interrelated as a Swiss watch keeps it functioning at all.

Turn & Folio. Under the general supervision of the Joint Committee on Printing, the Record's front-line troops are the official debate reporters, who catch the words uttered in the congressional chambers and get them down on paper. Reporters follow a debate like a mobile audience at a tennis match, use shorthand rather than stenographic machines so that they can more easily move from place to place in the chambers. Each reporter spends a five-minute "turn" (in the House) or a ten-minute "folio" (in the Senate) on the floor, then hustles down to the official reporters' office to read his notes into a dictating machine. An unwritten custom for both House and Senate reporters is to clean up little slips of grammar, fact or taste made by the solons. Once a Congressman leaped to his feet in a farm debate, said that the time had come to take the bull by the tail and look the situation squarely in the face. As discreetly as possible, the Record reporter straightened things out.

The reporters and typists work so fast that a Representative or a Senator can have a copy of his remarks within half an hour after he has stopped talking. Each member of both congressional branches has the opportunity to edit what he has said before it goes to the printers. This practice was scored by the late Senator Richard Neuberger (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), who introduced a resolution to prevent substantive changes in the recording of remarks made on the Senate floor. Senators, he said, are among the "few persons who can say 'I wish I'd said that,' and then actually say it."

Windy & Thick. Bundles of each day's congressional proceedings begin arriving at the Government Printing Office in the early evening in order to meet the deadline. A force of 100 proofreaders checks the Senate and House proceedings, as well as the reprinted articles, tables, etc., that go into the Record's appendix. Representatives are entitled to 60 free copies of the Record each day, Senators 100; other users pay $1.50 a month.

The present Record began in 1873, is a descendant of three previous congressional chronicles--the Annals of Congress, Register of Debates in Congress and the Congressional Globe. Whether or not the members of Congress have become windier, it is a fact that the Record has become thicker with the years--and 1960 is starting off with a bellow. Said Chief Senate Reporter John Rhodes, as he listened to the filibuster last week: "Anyone in this business has to be a little dippy."

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