Partly Young, Partly Angry

By Edward Magnusan

O CONGRESS

by DONALD RIEGLE with TREVOR ARMBRISTER

297 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Michigan Republican Donald Riegle was elected to Congress at 28, boyishly glamorous and unabashedly candid about his ambitions to fetch up in the White House. Now, at 34, he is a disenchanted public servant who likes to link himself with those "beautiful kids" whose "day is coming." O Congress is Congressman Riegle's yearlong diary (beginning in April of last year), kept while Congress was in session and printed, he says, to "prompt a few young people to enter politics." Yet Riegle's account of his frustrations in one of America's most intractable institutions seems far more likely to turn young idealists away from Congress --at least as an instrument for change.

It did not take the new Congressman long to learn that he had only three unhappy choices in the House of Representatives: 1) "play the game and be one of the boys," hoping to accumulate power gradually; 2) quit and try to influence policy through administrative jobs at federal, state or city levels back home; 3) stay and fight outside "established traditional paths." Riegle chose the third, even though, as he concedes, he became "an outsider" as a result, with his long-term political career and immediate re-election in doubt. "If the country is in jeopardy," he says, "and you're not prepared to force a change, then your political future doesn't mean anything on moral or practical grounds."

Much of Republican Riegle's rage and despair reflect his feelings about his party chief and President, Richard M. Nixon. The President, he says, urged him to run in 1966. In 1968 Nixon told him, "Well, you know, Don, if we're elected, we'll end this war in six months." But the war went on. Largely for that reason, Riegle became one of a small band of liberal anti-Nixon Republicans. He soon found himself dropped from the White House invitation list. He could not even get Nixon to pose with the little Michigan girl who had been chosen for the annual cystic fibrosis poster.

Riegle's judgments may be questionable, but his irascibility is uninhibited by any concern for political expedience. He describes the men around Nixon as "unprincipled sons of bitches." He is instinctively antiEstablishment. Riegle was doing well as a promising junior computer executive for IBM until he was sent home from work one day for wearing a blue shirt instead of a white one. He quit.

In Congress, Riegle found the work load for a conscientious Representative almost intolerable, and he admits that his accomplishments have been negligible. A typical day's mail brought him 88 letters from his district, seven invitations to appear or speak, eight letters from colleagues seeking legislative support. Overworked on the House Appropriations Committee, where he felt he could easily use five staff assistants, and constantly required to fly home to serve constituents and attend meetings, Riegle felt "like a piece of meat being hauled here and there."

His hands broke out with tiny red blisters, he often slept fitfully, and he developed chest pains. Before long he considered himself "used up, consumed --the job is draining my life away." There were times, he writes, when he "wanted to vomit" at the futile debate in the House about the war. Angry, he once took the floor to expose the fact that many of his colleagues were absent from the discussion because they were playing paddle ball in the House gymnasium.

Riegle's diary is sporadically an expose. He suggests that some women are as sexually available to Congressmen as others are to athletes and musicians. There are also small, personal vignettes; he observes that Louisiana's Otto Pass man is so fidgety that "he wears out a suit from the inside." Yet the congressional attitude that this book most strongly attacks, and that Don Riegle cannot abide, is the worldly advice once given him by Michigan's Elford Cederberg: "Remember, Riegle, you'll never be defeated by the speech you didn't give."

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