EVERETT DIRKSEN: AMERICAN ORIGINAL

HE had the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound, the jowls of a St. Bernard and a baldachin of white hair like that of an extraordinarily unkempt poodle. His face, reporters joked, looked as if it had been slept in. When he spoke, there issued forth a sesquipedalian vocabulary, diapasonal sounds like a Hammond organ in dense fog. His performances had a consciously archaic quality about them. He satirized fustian while indulging in it. His senatorial solemnity was a species of burlesque. He belonged in a Chautauqua rather than a McLuhan age, although he became a master of television performing. His manner, leavened by an exquisite sense of self-parody, conjured up Americana, suggestions of snake-oil peddlers, backwoods Shakespeareans, the gentle rapscallionry of Penrod Schofield's or Pudd'nhead Wilson's world. Before he died of a pulmonary embolism at 73, Everett McKinley Dirksen had himself become a unique object of Americana.

Not everyone, of course, was charmed. As Republican leader of the U.S. Senate for the past ten years. Dirksen commanded the power to alter the directions of the nation, and sometimes he almost gave the impression of whimsicality in the causes he embraced. At times, he was a man of stupefying inconsistency. But then Dirksen always was fond of quoting Emerson on the hobgoblin of little minds. It was Dirksen, an old supporter of Joe McCarthy. who almost singlehanded kept the utterly superfluous Subversive Activities Control Board in business two years ago. It was Ev, too, who had been seeking a constitutional convention to overturn the Supreme Court's one-man one-vote decision. Yet the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, and last year's open housing bill, perhaps would not have passed without Dirksen's aid. Similarly, the 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty might not have cleared the Senate had not the minority leader, long a vocal opponent of the treaty, searched his mind and concluded that "my earlier opinions did not stand up."

The Mighty Oilcan. Dirksen was apparently serene about such political transmogrifications, which struck others as a trifle manic. "Change," he once observed, "is inherent to life. The only persons who don't change are dead, or involuntarily confined in mental hospitals." More than an ideologue, Dirksen was a total and masterly politician. His 35 years on Capitol Hill equipped him with intricate parliamentary skills, and his basic instincts were conciliatory. "The oilcan is mightier than the sword," he believed. Moreover, from his first days in Washington until his death, his primary concern went to the heart of public policy.

He was personally kind and shamelessly sentimental. In his garden at Sterling, Va., he tended prize roses, poinsettias and camellias. Each year, in his most floriated prose, he beseeched the Senate to designate the marigold as the nation's official flower: "It is as sprightly as the daffodil, as delicate as the carnation, as aggressive as the petunia, as ubiquitous as the violet and as stately as the snapdragon." He was one of the last national politicians who dared allow his eyes to mist when he spoke of the "fa-lag" and "coun-tray," and, in a way, the emotion was genuine.

In the Gas Bag. What ideological baggage he did carry was a fairly conventional Midwestern conservatism based upon business and old American virtues of religion and family. Dirksen's parents were German immigrants who settled in Pekin, Ill., still speaking their Ostfriesean dialect at home. He was prophetically named for the 19th century orator Edward Everett and for William McKinley, who was elected President the year that Ev and his twin brother Tom were born. The boys went to work early, tending the vegetable gardens on the family's 1 1/2 acres, milking the cows and slopping the hogs.

At 18, Dirksen enrolled at the University of Minnesota, working nights as an ad taker for the Minneapolis Tribune. In 1917, he quit school, joined the Army and shipped off to France, where, as a 2nd lieutenant, he was assigned to man a tethered balloon 3,500 ft. above the lines, spotting artillery targets and sweating out German fighters. He sometimes joked that his duty in the "gas bag" must have had something to do with his later grandiloquence.

Actually, the poet and speechifier had been in him from boyhood: he liked to erect a platform in the barn and electrify himself with his own sermons. After the war, he went back to Pekin, failed in a washing-machine enterprise, then joined Tom and their older brother Benjamin Harrison Dirksen in a bakery. But all the while, Ev was writing short stories and plays. With a friend, he produced three theatrical triumphs in Pekin. In one, Percy MacKaye's A Thousand Years Ago, Dirksen played a fevered lover in pursuit of the Princess of Pekin. He won her, naturally, and kept her. The "princess" was a girl named Louella Carver, who became Mrs. Dirksen in 1927.

Dirksen's political career began in 1927, when he was elected Pekin's city finance commissioner. He ran for Congress three years later and lost to the incumbent. In 1932, however, he made it. Throughout his congressional career, Dirksen displayed a prodigious capacity for hard work, arising at 5:30 every morning and carrying home a bulging briefcase each evening. During the New Deal, he did not support all of F.D.R.'s programs, but did vote for many, including social security and the minimum wage and hour bill. He was an isolationist until September 1941, when he switched to support Roosevelt's international policies, including aid to Britain. Dirksen remained an internationalist throughout the war, later backed the Marshall Plan and creation of the United Nations.

Fearing that he was going blind, Dirksen quit the House in early 1949. He was on his way to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for surgery for degeneration of the retina when he "consulted with the Big Doctor Upstairs" and decided against the operation. With ten months of rest, he recovered his vision. In 1951, Dirksen returned to Washington as a Senator..

The Succession. It is the memory of Dirksen in the early Eisenhower years that has always troubled his liberal critics. He reverted to isolationism and became a domestic reactionary, defending Joe McCarthy's depredations and fighting doggedly to prevent McCarthy's Senate censure in 1954. But after the censure, with his own re-election in 1956 and some courting from Eisenhower, Dirksen gradually moderated his views.

For a time, Dirksen, who was always ambitious, had hoped to run for the vice-presidency with Robert Taft in 1952. But when he ascended to the Senate G.O.P. leadership in 1959, he was mellower, and his ambitions were satisfied. Under Kennedy and Johnson, he became a uniquely loyal opposition to the White House. In hindsight, his largest failure during the '60s arose from his devotion to Lyndon Johnson. Dirksen refused to criticize the President for the conduct of the Viet Nam war and kept most Republican Senators silent as well--although it is doubtful that many would have been highly critical in any case.

It was Dirksen's fate to spend almost all of his years in Congress as a member of the minority party. Characteristically, he made the best of it, and no member of the Republican Party had greater impact on the legislation of those Democratic years.

Among Senate Republicans, Dirksen exercised an unchallenged leadership that will probably be impossible for his successor to achieve. With a Republican President, for one thing, the influence of all G.O.P. Senators is somewhat diminished as they defer to the White House's lead. As Republicans have increased their strength in the Senate (there are now 43, compared with 35 in 1961), their factionalism has also increased. Last week, even as Dirksen lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, the maneuvering to claim his mantle began. Pennsylvania's Hugh Scott, the Minority Whip, was the choice of party liberals, while the conservatives leaned toward either Nebraska's Roman Hruska, Colorado's Gordon Allott or Tennessee's Howard Baker, who is Dirksen's son-in-law. Since both Hruska, 65, and Allott, 62, are comparatively colorless, the Senate G.O.P.'s conservative majority may well settle on Baker, 43, a Nixon moderate who would provide the party with a more youthful image. A day after the funeral in Pekin, both Baker and Scott declared their candidacies for Dirksen's chair, and Hruska added his bid two days later.

There was Senate gossip about working out a deal in which Scott, who is 68 and faces a difficult re-election race next year, might be named leader, with Baker as his whip. Baker, who has been in the Senate for just three years, could thus gain parliamentary experience and inherit the leadership before long. In any case, the position will inevitably count for less now that Dirksen is gone.

The reason is not merely the scope of the job; it is the stature and the enormous range of the man who has vacated it. Dirksen's act would be impossible for anyone to follow. Who else, after all, could have won a Grammy and outsold Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan with a record on which he read the Declaration of Independence, backed by full orchestra and chorus?

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