Back to the Fold

Debonair as ever, trading jokes with old acquaintances, the familiar figure hovered at the edge of the floor when the House convened last week. Despite his jaunty air, Adam Clayton Powell betrayed some of the nervousness of a dispossessed relative at a family reunion as his sometime colleagues took the oath of office from venerable House Speaker John McCormack.

A veteran of 22 years in Congress, Powell was banished in 1967 on charges that he misused some $40,000 of public funds. Now he had returned from exile. Re-elected by his faithful Harlem constituency six weeks after his expulsion, and re-elected again in November, the wayward sheep was back from his retreat on the Caribbean isle of Bimini, ready and anxious to rejoin the fold. For five hours, the House debated the issue of reseating Powell, airing in the process nearly all his public and private transgressions. Then its members voted 251 to 160 to let Powell take his seat. From the rear of the chamber, where he had been waiting during the debate, Powell strode forward to take the oath from John McCormack.

His chief champion in the debate was his erstwhile inquisitor, Brooklyn Democrat Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and head of the special investigatory body that aired Powell's linen two years ago. "Any additional punishment would be vindictive," cried Celler. "It would be Draconian." He challenged the House: "He who is without sin in this chamber, let him cast the first stone. Judge not lest you be judged--particularly with reference to dear ones on the payroll." That capacious euphemism stirred many of Celler's colleagues to private ire but public charity.

More bluntly, Arizona's Morris Udall, the lopsided loser the day before in his fight to win the speakership from McCormack, declared: "Adam Clayton Powell isn't my idea of a Congressman.

But we've seated all kinds in the 180-year history of this chamber. Don't close the door again on the 500,000 people of the 18th District of New York. Don't further divide this country." For 22 months, Powell's largely black constituency--actually, 431,330 people in the 1960 census--had been without representation in the House, and refusal to seat him could have heightened racial tensions.

Fine for Sins. When the House unseated Powell in 1967, it deposed him as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, stripping him of all the perquisites that the post confers. In restoring him to Congress last week, the House deprived him of his seniority and meted out a $25,000 fine for his past sins as the price of forgiveness.* (He has already forfeited $55,000 in congressional pay.) The resolution gave him until Jan. 15 to decide whether to accept the terms.

Powell accepted the conditions instantly but threatened to challenge the fine in court. He was not unprepared for the result. Claiming quarters in the marbled Rayburn House Office Building five days before the vote, he ordered them redecorated. Sounding quite like the old Adam, he said happily of his new office: "It's identical to the one I had before. Only this is bigger, and I have a garbage disposal."

*To be paid in $1,150 monthly installments during his two-year term, leaving Powell $1,350 a month before taxes from his $30,000-a-year congressional salary.

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