New Style on the Center Aisle

In his home town of Pekin, Ill., Everett McKinley Dirksen once wrote and directed Chinese Love, a riceball melodrama about the unrequited passion of one Sing Loo for the beauteous Pan Toy. The Washington house of Hugh Doggett Scott Jr., who took over as leader of the Senate Republican minority after Dirksen's death, is chockablock with chinoiserle, mainly from the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906). That slight Oriental connection is one of the few similarities between the two men. Where Dirksen was a conciliator, expert in sub rosa dealings with Democrats, Scott is an acerbic infighter who means to do open partisan battle from his new front-row desk on the Senate aisle that divides the two parties. "I'm more of a militant," says Scott. "I've drawn a little white line down the middle aisle."

Unanswered Mail. In his September showdown over the Republican leader's chair with Howard Baker of Tennessee, Dirksen's son-in-law, most of Scott's strength came from a coalition of moderates and liberals; but, he says, his reputation as an aggressive activist "got me the two crucial votes I needed." Dirksen had antagonized some Republicans by his celebrated coziness with Lyndon Johnson and by the highly personalized manner of his leadership. Scott deliberately follows the reverse course. He is committed to making no under-the-table deals with the opposition, and --partly out of personal conviction, partly because of pressure from his party colleagues--the pipe-smoking Pennsylvanian has moved to spread the leadership role around.

"Dirksen was doing it all," complains one Senate Republican. Now Gordon Allott of Colorado runs the Republican policy committee, reports to the weekly luncheon of Republican Senators on White House sessions with G.O.P. legislative leaders, and holds the Tuesday afternoon Senate-press-gallery news conference that was once Dirksen's private preserve. Maine's Margaret Chase Smith heads the Senate Republican caucus and will speak for it when it meets. Assistant Leader Bob Griffin of Michigan steps in for Scott when the minority leader is off the floor, and also takes the party headcounts; that too was a Dirksen monopoly. Scott also hopes to give Griffin four or five head-counting lieutenants, a move that will further decentralize party leadership.

One of Scott's biggest problems is the parlous state of relations between Republican Senators and "downtown," an often pejorative Capitol Hill term for the executive branch. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky has been getting no answers to his letters to Postmaster General Winton Blount; when Blount invited Cooper to his office recently to talk over a Post Office problem, Cooper refused to come. Colorado's Peter Dominick is still seething over a contretemps with a second-echelon Treasury Department official, and even Karl Mundt of South Dakota--a staunch Nixon loyalist--complains of the "remoteness" of Administration staffers. The President himself angered many Republican Senators of every political hue. They could rarely get to see him.

One of the Mets. Some of that is changing, thanks largely to Scott's efforts. Nixon now regularly sees Senate Republicans at the White House for informal discussion of their problems and Administration programs. "That took care of some of the griping," Scott reports. He has given up one of the minority leader's Capitol hideaway offices for the use of White House Liaison Man Bryce Harlow and his newly enlarged staff, which now includes Gene Cowen, an able onetime aide to Scott.

One of Scott's aims is "to act as a channel to the White House." That channel flows both ways, and even where Scott feels he cannot support Administration policy, he will keep as quiet about it as he can. He backed the White House on the crucial ABM vote. "I'm most anxious to support the President," he insists. "I will in nine out of ten instances." He parts company with the Administration on civil rights especially. "I grew up in Virginia," he explains, "and I saw the casual hurts of the whites to the blacks." After losing a fight within the Nixon camp to get Administration backing for extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Scott served notice that he would oppose the proposals that the White House came up with because he thought they would dilute the existing law. Privately he also opposes Nixon's nomination of Clement Haynsworth to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The White House, Scott acknowledges, sees him as the President's leader in the Senate. That is vastly different from his own concept, which is to be the leader of the Senate's Republicans. He is also very much a Senator from Pennsylvania, where he is up for a third term next year. In that industrialized constituency, he narrowly kept his seat against the Johnson landslide in 1964, so it does him little harm to differ with Nixon from time to time. Scott's mail from home tells him that winning the Senate leadership has done him no harm either. "I became one of the Mets," he says. Scott is in his first --and last--World Series. At 68, he harbors no other political ambitions than to remain his party's Senate leader, playing that game to the full.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.