After Adam

Being a collection of mortals, some Congressmen are lazy or incompetent, others drink too much, some have a trained eye for a trim ankle, and a few-are not overly honest. The House is generally tolerant of all such failings, which makes it all the more unusual that the House is actually trying to do something about Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Powell, 54, a ten-term Congressman, has long offended the more tender sensibilities in Congress. What really got Powell's colleagues aroused was the junket he took to Europe last August. He went ostensibly to study the labor situation, or the Common Market, or something. As it turned out, the trip involved considerable research in French nightclubs and sunbathing in Greece in company with two young female aides. Powell's headline-making, who-cares manner of junketing called into criticism the whole system of congressional travels--and it was this that was not forgiven.

Since then the House has adopted rules tightening up on foreign travel, taking particular care to include Powell's Education and Labor Committee, whose members can go abroad only under special conditions, and then only at Government per diem expense rates. Now a group in the House Administration Committee is planning to cut deeply into Powell's request for $697,000 to support his committee this year; this would be almost unprecedented, since a committee chairman's fund requests are generally routinely approved.

House members are forbidden to attack one another personally, but Delaware's Republican Senator John J. Williams recently spoke for many of Powell's colleagues in a scorching denunciation of Powell on the Senate floor. Citing a federal grant of $250,000 to a Powell-sponsored project to fight juvenile delinquency in Harlem. Williams declared that Powell "could well be recognized as an authority on 'adult delinquency.' but most certainly he is not the caliber of man whom the American people would want to set an example for the youth of our country."

"Demagogue & Playboy." Powell's record is a many-splendored thing. There is. for example, his Puerto Rican-born third wife. Yvette. 31, whom he married in 1960 when she was a $3,000-a-year clerk on his staff. She is now on his payroll as a $12,974 secretary, and still draws the salary though she spends almost all her time in their $45,000 beach home in Puerto Rico. The Internal Revenue Service claims that Powell still owes $41,015 in income tax and penalties for 1949-55. And Powell is one of the House's most notorious absentees: he has responded on the average to less than half the roll-call votes over the last decade. All this has contributed to the feeling expressed last week by one disgusted colleague: "He is a demagogue, a high liver, a playboy and a charlatan.'' Said another: "I don't know exactly how you decide who's the worst Congressman, but Adam's certainly in the finals."

Yet even those who criticize Powell most severely admit that he has great talents which, properly used, could make him an outstanding legislator. Says one of his fellow committee members: "He's a charming man, enormously talented and able. He wanted to be a good committee chairman. I think he still does, but he has a low level of frustration. When things aren't going well, he'll just beat it."

Years of Persecution. Many trace Powell's unpredictable legislative behavior to his years of personal trial as No. 2 man on the Education and Labor Committee under North Carolina's Graham Barden.

A chairman whose greatest pride came in the number of bills he could kill, Barden never concealed his racial antagonism, mercilessly cut Powell short in discussion, ignored him on every committee matter. Says a committee member who served under both Barden and Powell: "I wonder if a lot of the rest of us might not have reacted the same way if we'd been persecuted like that by the chairman."

Powell put up with such treatment for six years, until Barden retired in 1961. At last finding responsibility in his own hands, Powell for some six months was a model committee chairman, always present, always prodding subcommittees and pushing legislation. But, typically, when a key Administration school aid bill died in the Rules Committee in the summer of 1961, the disgusted Powell disappeared for most of the remaining session.

Whatever the pressures building up against him in Congress. Powell is secure as both political and spiritual shepherd for the 10,000 members of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church for as long as he desires. He has been pastor there since 1937. Last year he announced that he would retire at the end of this year, but offered to linger indefinitely as "pastor emeritus." He still flies in about every other Sunday to address his flock.

Misuse of Power. Off pulpit and out of Washington, he cuts a dashing figure in Bermuda shorts and lavender shirts, loves to surfcast or seek deep-sea kingfish off his new home at Puerto Rico's Cerro Gordo. There he is intensely disliked by the Munoz Marin government because of speeches plugging Puerto Rican statehood --a stand designed to please his Puerto Rican constituents in Harlem.

Powell says that he will retire from Congress in 1964. But few believe him. Says Jim Booker, political editor of Harlem's Amsterdam News: "No Negro who gets as much power as Adam is apt to let it go too easily." The Amsterdam News aptly expressed Harlem's sentiments about Powell in a single headline: HO HUM, THEY'RE 'AFTER ADAM' AGAIN.

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