Darkened Victory

(See Cover)

The crowd in the House galleries filled every seat, overflowed into the aisles. Over both the galleries and the floor of the House brooded a hush of expectancy, as if some history-making drama were about to unfold.

Promptly at high noon, as he has done many hundreds of times before. House Speaker Sam Rayburn swept through the door of the Speaker's lobby and onto the floor of the House. This time something new happened, a violation of custom for which old Capitol Hill newsmen could recall no precedent: in a grand gesture of affection and respect, both Congressmen and spectators stood up and applauded the old man as he started up the steps to the Speaker's rostrum.

Cursing & Conniving. The question facing the House was whether to adopt Rayburn's resolution calling for the addition of three new members (two Democrats and one Republican) to the Rules Committee, the channel through which most major legislation has to pass before it can get to the floor of the House to be debated and voted on. In that simple question, a mere housekeeping detail on the surface, much was at stake: Sam Rayburn's own prestige, the balance of power between liberals and conservatives in the House, and the congressional prospects of Kennedy Administration legislative programs in the 87th Congress.

During the 86th Congress, in 1959-60, Virginia's wily old Howard Worth Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee, had made up an unsplittable conservative bloc with the committee's four Republican members plus Mississippi's William Colmer. Because most major bills require positive action by the Rules Committee, the six conservatives were able to use a 6-to-6 deadlock to stall any legislation they disliked. By adding two new Democrats and only one Republican, Sam Rayburn expected to tilt the 6-to-6 standoff to an 8-to-7 majority. So much was at issue in the shift that the fortnight before the showdown saw the House's fiercest struggle for votes in many a year, a struggle that ultimately involved personal pressure from the new President of the U.S., broad threats of blacklisting by his Cabinet members, cursing and conniving on both sides.

As usual, the prevote battle behind the scenes was what decided the outcome, and the floor debate made no real difference. "Judge" Smith complained that the Rayburn forces had granted him only eight minutes to state his case. Said he in attacking the "committee packing": "I will cooperate with the Democratic leadership just as long and just as far as my conscience will permit me to go." When laughter rippled across the chamber. Smith retorted: "Some of these gentlemen who are laughing maybe do not understand what a conscience is." Mister Sam based his case on the nation's obligation and need to back up its new President. "He demonstrated on yesterday,'' said Rayburn. referring to Kennedy's State of the Union address, "that we are neither in good shape domestically or in the foreign field. He wants us to do something about that. Let us move this program. Let us be sure that we can move it. And the only way we can be sure that this program will move is to adopt this resolution." Most of the House rose to applaud Rayburn as he climbed back to the Speaker's rostrum, but Judge Smith stayed slumped in his chair.

A Wan Smile. Slowly, the clerk began reading off the roll. All but six members of the House voted--an extraordinary total. One of the few who did not vote was Rayburn himself; he would have voted to break a tie, but it never came to that.

The 25-minute roll call was almost cruelly suspenseful. Though both camps had counted the votes in advance with exquisite care. Congressmen hovered tensely over tally sheets. In the galleries, as the roll call seesawed toward an end. each new no drew a low, hissing gasp of disappointment. The galleries were clearly on Mister Sam's side.

The final tally was 217 for, 212 against: 64 Democrats, all from the South and border states, voted against Rayburn, but 22 Republicans, mostly from the urban Northeast, crossed over the party line to save him from a humiliating defeat. When Rayburn announced the totals. Howard Smith stood up and shuffled off the floor and into the cloakroom. "Well," he said with a wan smile, "we done our damnedest." Rayburn's smile was far from wan. "We won." he said, his eyes dancing, "and I am satisfied."

It was a victory that Mister Sam could rightly store in his treasure chest of memories, but it was a dark victory indeed. Essentially it was a fight of Democrats with Democrats, and it marked a decisive swing of power from the entrenched Southern Democratic conservatives to the urban liberal forces that have grown increasingly frustrated over Southern seniority. But the close vote reddened the sore of the split and emphasized the powerful resources of the conservatives even under intense pressure. The cold realists in John Kennedy's White House knew that the fight would have to be refought on every major bill, that their forces might never be as strong again--and they no longer had the Rules Committee blockade as an excuse for failure. They buckled down to prepare for a grim era of whipcracking, blandishment and push-pull patronage to work their will in Congress.

The Country Boys. The two wily old congressional giants who were pitted against each other in the fight have much in common. Sam Rayburn and Howard Smith both have the patina of age--Rayburn is 79, Smith 78--and the special dignity that accrues to old men who have long exercised power in causes greater than their own ambitions. Both are gruff on the surface, kind underneath. They were country boys, raised on farms, and they still, whenever they can get out of Washington, instinctively head for rustic serenity--the Rayburn cattle ranch near Bonham, Texas or the Smith dairy farm near Broad Run, Va. They grew up, pinched by poverty, in a South still seething with Civil War hatreds and sunk in economic misery.

The most striking difference, the Great Divide of personality, is a matter of the temperature of the heart. Smith is a bit frosty; displays of emotion make him visibly uncomfortable. Sam Rayburn, in contrast, is a sentimentalist, a man of strong and easily stirred feelings, who unashamedly weeps in public when moved. Men who were there still choke up when they recall Rayburn's anguished speech in the House on the death of his old friend Alben Barkley, the speech that ended, "God comfort his loved ones. God comfort me." The difference carries over into politics. Judge Smith (he was a state circuit judge before he got elected to Congress in 1930) is a stern-principled conservative. Sam Rayburn, for all his ingrained rural-Texas conservatism and his immunity to ideology, is a liberal of the heart.

Since 1932, the prevailing tendencies of the times have gone against Judge Smith. He has authored some important legislation--notably the anti-subversive Smith Act--but his essential role in Congress has been to delay defeat for his causes. Sam Rayburn has moved with the drift of things, and so helped to make history, not just slow it down.

Great Compromiser. Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn decided way back in boyhood that he was going to be Speaker of the House some day. and he early set about making his dream come true. He got elected to Congress in 1912, at 30, after serving six years in the Texas state legislature. He became House Speaker in 1940, has held that post ever since except for the two intervals. 1947-48 and 1953-54, when the Republicans had a majority in the House. By virtue of his early start, plus sheer longevity, Rayburn has established two records that, apart from his other achievements, entitle him to a niche in history: he has served in the House longer than anybody else in the annals of Capitol Hill, and he has held the office of Speaker far longer than anybody else, having long since broken the old record of eight years set by Henry Clay.

Some of Rayburn's predecessors as Speaker, notably Maine Republican Thomas Reed in the 1890s and Illinois Republican Joseph Cannon in the 1900s, were autocrats who ruled over the House like absolute monarchs. Sam Rayburn, though he exudes an authority that some times makes junior Congressmen quail when he speaks gruffly, has operated in the style of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, trying to get his way through persuasion and leadership. He has been called "the greatest compromiser since the Great Compromiser." To all new Democratic Congressmen he recites two rules: 1) "To get along, go along," and 2) "Be reasonable; be fair." Rayburn's Henry Clay approach helps explain why during all his years as Speaker he suffered a situation that the autocrats among his predecessors would have considered unthinkable: lack of a dependable working majority on the Rules Committee. Under earlier Speakers, Rules came to be called the "arm of the Speak er." Rayburn operated without that arm.

Saved from Chaos. Last week's battle chopped deep into the power of Rules Chairman Howard Smith, but it left the powers of the Rules Committee itself undented. Those powers have accumulated over the years and have survived many tirades from thwarted Congressmen and Presidents, because a powerful Rules Committee is necessary to the functioning of Congress. With its 437 members,* each armed with his own mandate from voters back home, the House is too unwieldy a body to get its work done without strict control over the flow of legislation. In the 86th Congress, the members introduced a total of 15,506 bills and resolutions, and the Senate passed an additional 957 measures that the House had to act on before they could become law. Under the "general rules" of the House, each member has a right to speak for one hour on every bill that comes to the floor.

It is the task of the Rules Committee to save the House from chaos by setting a "special rule" for each major item of legislation before it reaches the floor. The special rule imposes a limit on debate, and sometimes on amendments, even to the extent of forbidding any amendments at all. The committee has been known to revise bills to suit its pleasure before passing them along for a vote.

In session after session, the Rules Committee has taken the heat for blocking bills that the House leadership wanted to keep from an embarrassing vote; e.g., a bill for veterans' benefits that Congressmen would not dare vote against. In 1949 the House passed the 21-day rule, a "liberal" reform which provided that a bill could be called up by the chairman of any committee after the Rules Committee had blocked it for 21 days. In the next Congress, the 21-day rule was politely killed with Speaker Sam Rayburn looking on approvingly. Reason: too many embarrassing bills were coming to the floor.

Lumpy Roads. A bill can bypass the Rules Committee by coming to the floor under "suspension of the rules," which permits only 40 minutes of debate and no amendments. But an important item of legislation has little prospect of getting by in this way, because suspension of the rules requires a two-thirds majority. Three times since Judge Smith became Rules Committee chairman in 1955, Sam Rayburn has tried to get a blocked bill past the Rules Committee through suspension of the rules, and all three times he failed.

Even for bills that cannot command a two-thirds majority, there are two possible detours around the Rules Committee, but they are lumpy, uphill roads, rarely traveled. Any Congressman can drag a bill out of the Rules Committee if he can get a majority of the entire membership of the House to sign a "discharge petition," but many members disapprove of this approach, refuse to sign a petition even when they favor the stalled bill. During the half-century that the House has had some kind of discharge procedure, only two measures--the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and last year's pay raise for federal employees--have ever been enacted into law after being forced out of a balky Rules Committee by a discharge petition. Still another route is the "Calendar Wednesday" procedure. On Wednesdays, a committee chairman can call a bill to the floor without the consent of the Rules Committee, but under conditions that make it possible for opponents to stall the bill to death. Last year Sam Rayburn used the Calendar Wednesday method to rescue a depressed-areas bill from Judge Smith's clutches, but that was the first time the device had been used since 1950.

Revolt of the Southerners. For half a century beginning in 1858, the Speaker was himself a member of the Rules Committee. Even when the revolt of 1910 against tyrannical "Uncle Joe" Cannon deprived the Speaker of his place on the Rules Committee, it still remained pretty much under the control of the Speaker as the leader of the majority party.

In 1937 Southern members of the Rules Committee, including Howard Smith, rebelled against the New Deal because of Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court and his proposal to set a 40-c--an-hour minimum wage (strenuously opposed by owners of Southern textile and lumber mills). From 1937 on, all during Sam Rayburn's years as Speaker, the coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats successfully dominated the Rules Committee.

Though he did not control the committee, Rayburn usually managed, down to 1959, to find a way to bring to the floor any bill that he really wanted to see get there. Georgia's late Eugene Cox, longtime leader of the Southerners on the Rules Committee, had a deep affection for Rayburn, often at Rayburn's urging voted in committee for a bill that he would vote against on the floor. After Cox died in 1952 and Judge Smith succeeded him as captain of the Southern conservatives, Rayburn sometimes managed to get help from Republicans on the committee, with the quiet assistance of the House Republican leader, his old friend Massachusetts' Joe Martin.

Postscript Fiasco. Rayburn's serious troubles with the Rules Committee flared up in the 86th Congress--despite the fact that in the 1958 congressional elections the Democrats had widened their margin in the House to nearly 2 to 1, most lopsided majority since the 19303. What made the Rules Committee more troublesome than before was that Rayburn could no longer get any cooperation from the Republicans. Compromiser Joe Martin was deposed from the Republican leadership by Indiana's tough, uncompromising Charlie Halleck (and last week registered his vote against Halleck and for Rayburn). Halleck filled the Republican seats on Rules with hard-bitten party men and happy days were gone again.

Mister Sam encountered only moderate difficulties with Rules during 1959, because the Democratic liberals in Congress held back most of their planned legislation until 1960, so as to get the election-year benefits. When 1960 came around, the Democratic housing bill died in the Rules Committee, and so did a bill to ease restrictions on picketing of construction sites. Kennedy Democrats hoped to pass a politically profitable batch of welfare legislation at the post-convention session of Congress, but Judge Smith's Rules Committee helped Charlie Halleck's Republicans turn the postscript into a fiasco that spoiled the Democratic hopes and dented John F. Kennedy's image of leadership at the start of his tough campaign for the presidency.

To Break the Grip. The postscript session riled the frustrated young Kennedy "pragmatic liberals," and they prodded Sam Rayburn to do something about Judge Smith. By the time Congress convened again after the election, Speaker Rayburn had made up his mind that he had to break Smith's grip on the Rules Committee.

The Kennedy rebels wanted to purge Mississippi's William Colmer from the committee and replace him with a Rayburn man. Colmer seemed fair game since he had supported the independent presidential-elector slate in Mississippi rather than Kennedy-Johnson". Rayburn vacillated between the purge and his three-new-member plan, a less drastic break with House traditions and Southern feelings. His mind once made up on committee packing, he announced a "binding" Democratic caucus, a rare device by which a two-thirds vote can bind all members of the party to vote for a particular proposal. Again Mister Sam wavered, decided that a binding caucus would injure Southern feelings too deeply, and that he could win without it anyway.

Custom-Designed Pressure. Then gut-fighting Charlie Halleck swung into battle behind Judge Smith, made opposition to the Rayburn plan an official Republican stand--a position that made good tactical sense but grated on some Republicans because it aligned the G.O.P. with Southern Democrats. That confronted Rayburn with the possibility of a messy and painful defeat on the floor: he needed Republican votes to win, and Halleck's thrust forced several Republicans who would otherwise have voted for Rayburn into the Smith camp.

Behind the scenes raged a fierce struggle for power. White House News Secretary Pierre Salinger "backgrounded" reporters on the news that Judge Smith had been conferring with lobbyists of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the American Medical Association, all of which had launched barrages of letters and telegrams urging Congressmen to vote against the Rayburn plan. The labor and civil rights lobbies rolled up their persuasive artillery behind Sam Rayburn. As a compromise, Judge Smith promised "no obstacles" to clearance of five major Kennedy bills, but Rayburn retorted that "the President may have 40." President Kennedy threw his prestige into the fight by making it clear at a press conference that he wanted the Rayburn proposal adopted. Missouri's bright, strapping Richard Boiling, Rayburn's chief lieutenant on the Rules Committee, and New Jersey's Frank Thompson masterminded a ruthless campaign to bring to bear upon every wavering Congressman special pressures that were custom-designed--a promise, a thinly veiled threat, urgings from some organization back home.

TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil listened as two Rayburn lieutenants were running down the list of doubtful members. On one: "The General Services Administration ought to be able to get him." On another: "The Air Force can take care of him." A third? "If you can get the Post Office to issue that special stamp for him, you've got him." And a fourth?

"The United Mine Workers can get him." And a fifth? "Hell, if we can't get him. we might as well quit. Go talk to him." A sixth? "No, but I'll fix that bastard."

A Rayburn lieutenant in the House went to the bizarre extreme of sending a case of bourbon to a boozing pro-Smith Southerner in hopes that the man would be too drunk or too hung over to go to the Hill and vote. (The plot failed: Smith men saw to it that the man got to the Capitol to cast his no.) Cracking down on liberal Republicans who had promised to vote for the Rayburn plan, Charlie Halleck at one point grabbed a Congressman by the coat lapels and literally shook him. The man staggered away cursing Halleck, but he was scared enough to switch his vote from Rayburn to Smith. No Republican had any doubts that Charlie Halleck would retaliate against Republicans who voted for the Rayburn plan.

New Blood. As the hour grew late, Vice President Lyndon Johnson carried bad news down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. The Kennedy brothers decided that the Administration could not stand a defeat, decided to take over from Sam Rayburn and run the show the way they ran the Los Angeles convention. With Bobby Kennedy (who renounced politics when he became Attorney General) and Old Pro Larry O'Brien masterminding, they drew up a plan to contact anew every single member of the House. On the final day the President himself made three key phone calls. The most important was to North Carolina's Harold Cooley, influential chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. North Carolina had been well treated in appointments, and the White House expected reciprocation. (Cooley voted against the Rayburn plan anyway, and went to the top of Jack Kennedy's blacklist.) Larry O'Brien reported that Rayburn could count 217 votes--and that was exactly what he got.

After Smith's defeat, Rayburn tapped for the new Democratic seats on the Rules Committee two men who could be expected to go along with most Kennedy Administration legislative programs: Alabama's Carl Elliott, 47, who labels himself a "Southern liberal," and California's B. F. (for Bernice Frederic) Sisk, 50, who says that his political outlook is both "moderate" and "progressive." At long last, Sam Rayburn--and through him, John Kennedy--had a working majority on the Rules Committee.

The Facts. The power wrested from the Southerners would surely come in handy for a power-minded Administration. The Kennedy forces can now use the Rules Committee to block legislation, or use Rules to push Administration measures under the most favorable conditions--for example, restricting debate or amendments. But the victory over Judge Smith tolled plenty of troubles too. Even with a 261-to-174 Democratic majority to work with, even with the help of 22 Republicans, Rayburn won by a mere five votes, and he was able to win at all only because, as a Texan, he gathered 14 out of the 21 Texas votes in a battle on which he had staked his own prestige. For a clear-cut liberal v. conservative contest, the conservatives appeared to hold a narrow edge in the House. Congressional reporters recalled that last year the depressed-areas bill and the school construction bill passed the House by only 17 votes--yet in the 1960 elections the Republicans won back 21 seats.

At the start of his Administration, John F. Kennedy had to face two rather unpleasant facts: the election that carried him to the presidency also brought an increase in conservative strength in Congress, and the battle that cleared the way to the floor of the House may make it more difficult to get his proposals adopted once they get there.

* The "permanent" number, set by law back in 1913, is 435, but Congress temporarily added two extra seats for Alaska and Hawaii. The total is scheduled to go back to 435 for the next Congress, beginning in January 1963, but congressional leaders are talking of increasing the permanent number to 450.

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