The Barkley Incident

To Alben Barkley the scene was familiar: the high-ceilinged room, and the big man propped up in the plain mahogany bed, his tremendous shoulders bulging his pa jama coat. In seven years as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Kentucky's Barkley had talked with President Roosevelt literally hundreds of times, at all hours and in many places, including the President's bedroom.

The President's regular Monday conference with the Democratic leaders of Congress is usually held in his big oval office in the Executive wing of the White

House. But last week Mr. Roosevelt held the conference in his bedroom. The other leaders--Vice President Wallace, Speaker Rayburn, House Majority Leader John McCormack--were already there when Alben Barkley walked in.

In the Bedroom. The President was jovial. He announced cheerfully he had decided to veto the new tax bill. He proceeded to read excerpts from his veto message. A three-against-one argument promptly boiled up. While Wallace sat silent, Barkley, Rayburn and McCormack vigorously tried to persuade the President to change his mind. A veto, they argued, would simply mean throwing away more than two billion dollars in revenue. Why not let this bill become law without his signature? A veto would stir up fresh bitterness in an already restless and resentful Congress.

The debate grew detailed. Leader Barkley nailed the President's false classification of social-security taxes as general revenue. Bringing up his point against the timber tax, Mr. Roosevelt reminded the leaders that he is a treegrower himself. Politely but firmly, Barkley declared that the President's annual crop of quick-growing Christmas "bushes" cannot be compared with the once-a-generation harvest of slow-growing commercial timber.

The argument remained polite. The President remained adamant. Leader Barkley summed up. On the Senate Finance Committee he had worked on the bill. He had fought against some of its provisions; he knew the bill was far from perfect. But this bill was the work and the will of Congress. He could not assent to throwing away 2.3 billion dollars for the reasons raised by the President. If the President persisted in his veto, he, Barkley, would have to stand up on the floor of the Senate and defend his position. Mr. Roosevelt remarked that this was understandable. The conference broke up in strained good humor.

"For the Greedy." Next day the President sent the veto message to the Capitol. It was the first time in history that a U.S. President had vetoed a general revenue bill. It was addressed to the House, as the tax-originating branch of Congress, and was read only there. But some Senators got copies at their offices.

Leader Barkley read his copy three times, incredulous, shocked, then angry. The temperate words which the President had read aloud the day before were still there. But peppered among them now were other words, phrases, sentences, bitter, taunting, contemptuous words which stung the majority leader like slaps in the face: "unwise," "inept," "indefensible special privileges to favored groups," "dangerous precedents for the future," "disappoint and fail the American taxpayers." Taxpayers' confusion, asserted the President, was not the Treasury's fault but "squarely the fault of the Congress of the United States. . . ."

"Having asked the Congress for a loaf of bread to take care of this war," he went on, he might have been content with "this small piece of crust" if it had not contained "so many extraneous and inedible materials."

Meanest slap of all was a neat turn of phrase of the kind in which Franklin Roosevelt delights: "It is not a tax bill, but a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy."

Shaken to the soles of his solid brogues, Leader Barkley quickly checked a dozen other Democratic Senators, found ever)' one livid with rage. The House postponed debate on the message, but off the floor 80-year-old Chairman Robert L. ("Muley") Doughton of the Ways & Means Committee was already spluttering his indignation at the message which "questioned our integrity or intelligence, or both." Alben Barkley kept a tight grip on himself and held his peace. After adjournment at 2:15 p.m., he went to his office and began to think. At his modest apartment on Connecticut Avenue he had a light dinner (he has not been feeling well of late), and kept on thinking.

Limits of Loyalty. Alben Barkley had a lot to think about. For seven years, as titular leader of the Senate, he had been Franklin Roosevelt's most faithful follower. Opponents had taunted him with being a Roosevelt stooge, a White House errand boy, reminding him constantly that he owed his election as leader to the President's famed "Dear Alben" letter (see p. 20). Critics had called him inept, plodding, bumbling--as often he seemed. But despite both the taunts and his faults, he had kept the faith. Time & again he had yielded his own judgment to the President's, time & again he had marched up Capitol Hill carrying water on both shoulders to fight the President's battles. Time & again, trying to keep peace between President and Senate, he had carried individual Senators' complaints to the White House, seen the President nod and make notes, found later that the matter had ended then & there. But he had gone on gladly, because Party loyalty was ingrained in his soul, and because he believed sincerely in Franklin Roosevelt as a great leader.

To the depths of his loyal soul, Alben Barkley shuddered at doing what he felt he must do now. He knew what capital the Party's and the President's enemies would make of it, what capital the nation's enemies might make of it. But every man has his limits: some things no man can do and keep his self-respect. And beyond the deception and the insult to him personally, there was the fact that the President had, not for the first time, deliberately impugned the integrity and motives of Congress as a whole. Surely the nation needed to have confidence in its elected representatives, too, as well as in the President.

By 11 p.m. Alben Barkley knew what he had to do. In his bedroom he scratched out a few notes, then sat down at his typewriter to compose the speech. Back in Paducah just after the turn of the century he had been a court reporter for five years; usually the words flow fast through his fingers. But now he needed an audience; the typewriter was cold. After four pages he gave up and went to bed.

For the Senate. But next morning, when he sat down to dictate in his office, the words came rumbling out so fast that his pretty red-haired secretary, Loraine Winfrey, could hardly get them down.

After a half-hour he had to dash off to a committee meeting. When he strode up the center aisle of the Senate to his frontrow seat at noon, there were only seven freshly typewritten sheets in his hand. Back in his office, Miss Winfrey was typing frantically at the rest.

Word of Leader Barkley's intention had wildfired through Washington. As the opening formalities droned along, Senators came solemnly to their seats. Half a dozen stopped by to give Alben Barkley an encouraging shoulder-pat. Barkley chatted calmly with Tennessee's truculent spoilsman, Kenneth McKellar, at the desk on his left. Since Barkley had him arrested last year in order to force his attendance during a filibuster against the anti-poll-tax bill, McKellar had nursed a feudist's grudge for the majority leader. Now he thawed perceptibly. When a Barkley secretary appeared at the rear door of the chamber with a few more sheets of the speech, McKellar shuffled back to fetch them. Thereafter, throughout the speech, he continued to act as copy boy as each new sheet appeared.

Every eye on the floor and in the packed galleries was fixed on Leader Barkley as, his greying hair freshly cut and wetted down, his portly frame neatly draped in brown, he rose to deliver his historic speech. Adjusting his incomplete manuscript on a little reading stand, he took a deep breath, hitched at his belt, put on his heavy-rimmed spectacles, fixed his eyes firmly on Vice President Wallace for a moment and began to speak. His heavy voice was clear, his tone deadly earnest.

"Deliberate Assault." After a formal opening, Leader Barkley let fly an orthodox crack at a Republican. The "prominent person" whom President Roosevelt had cited as stating his tax demands were too low, he said, was obviously Wendell Willkie, "the up-to-date Halley's comet, darting across the firmament hither and yon to illuminate the heavens with an array of fantastic figures. . . ." But the real target of Barkley's speech became apparent at once. "I cannot help but wonder, Mr. President," he continued, "whether this spectacular celestial nomad has frightened the President into the use of figures quite as fantastic. . . ."

Thereupon long-suffering Alben Barkley proceeded to rip Franklin Roosevelt's veto message to shreds & tatters. Sweeping aside the patently specious social-security point, as he had in the White House bedroom, he now declared that the President had "resorted to one of the most unjustifiable methods of calculation it is possible to conjure up, which obviously was handed to him by a mind more clever than honest." The President's "needy-greedy" crack, he cried, "is a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every member of the Congress of the United States. The members of Congress may do as they please. But as for me, I do not intend to take this unjustifiable assault lying down."

Leader Barkley's voice was low and several times-near breaking as he recalled his 31 years in Congress. "For twelve years," he said, "I have carried to the best of my ability the flag of Franklin D. Roosevelt. ... I dare say that for the last seven years of tenure as majority leader, I have carried that flag over rougher territory than was ever traversed by any previous majority leader. Sometimes I have carried it with little help here on the Senate floor and more frequently with little help from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue [the White House]. . . . But, Mr. President, there is something more precious to me than any honor that can be conferred upon me . . . and that is the approval of my own conscience and my own self-respect. ...I have called a conference of the Democratic majority for 10:30 o'clock tomorrow morning ... at which time my resignation will be tendered."

Alben Barkley had dropped his political blockbuster. He added a final blast: "If the Congress of the United States has any self-respect yet left, it will override the veto of the President and enact this tax bill into law, his objections to the contrary notwithstanding."

As the majority leader finished and sat down, there was a moment of unbroken hush. Then a round of clapping on the floor, led off by Wisconsin's Bob La Follette, was quickly drowned by a thunder of applause from the galleries. Henry Wallace slipped quietly out of the chamber. Pennsylvania's Joe Guffey vanished. A couple of other irreconcilable New Dealers, Rhode Island's Green and Delaware's Tunnell, kept their seats. But all other Senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, swarmed to pound the Barkley back and shake the Barkley hand. It was the greatest ovation in the memory of living Senators. Leader Barkley declared: "Now I am content. My cup runneth over. I have never felt calmer in my life."

"Make Way for Liberty!" Perhaps only three people in the world--Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Eleanor Roosevelt--could have denounced Franklin Roosevelt with more sensational effect. The President, "away from Washington" at some military-secret resting place (see p. 17), had already heard by telephone from Steve Early of the avalanche which had struck him perhaps the hardest political blow of his career. He had also heard that Senate Democrats were resolved to accept Barkley's resignation and immediately re-elect him. With lightning speed, the master politician acted. He wrote a telegram to "Dear Alben." When Barkley got back to his apartment that evening. Secretary Early was waiting personally with the telegram. Dozens of copies had already been handed the press. It was a beautiful letter. The President protested that he had never intended to attack "the integrity of yourself and other members of Congress." He declared that at the Monday conference "I did not realize how very strongly you felt about that basic decision." Key paragraph, a political master stroke brilliantly designed to turn prospective rebuff into apparent triumph, was one urging Barkley not to persist in his intention to resign, hoping that if he did his colleagues would not accept, "but if they do, I sincerely hope they will immediately and unanimously re-elect you."

Since the U.S. at large did not know that this procedure was already all set, the President regained some prestige next day, for the Democratic conference did precisely that. Barkley had talked to his colleagues in caucus, emerged misty-eyed and alone to announce his resignation to reporters. Then he strode to his office to await his colleagues' decision.

Twenty minutes later a notification committee headed by Texas' Tom Connally burst from the conference room. Cried Connally, pushing through the crowd: "Make way for liberty!" For some ten minutes Leader-Elect Barkley hung back. He wanted a few days to "think it over" lest the public should interpret his prompt acceptance as knuckling under.

But no one was fooled. Alben Barkley, no longer beholden to President Roosevelt for his leadership, was now the chosen leader of Democratic Senators themselves, and no longer the President's errand boy. When he went to the White House he would present the Senate's views--that, at least, would be his opportunity.

That afternoon the House made the rebellion flat and final, overriding the tax veto with a sweeping 299 votes to 95. Next day the Senate set the seal to the historic week by an even more crushing vote, 72-to-14. Long ago distrust between the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. Government had become a breach; now the breach reached crisis.

"How Can the People Trust Us?" Why had the President sent so offensive a message to Congress? Two explanations were popular:

1) That Franklin Roosevelt had become so immersed in the conduct of the war and foreign relations that he had lost touch with opinion, Congressional and public. This was easily negated: the President was not too immersed in the war to shake up his Term IV staff, and insert a fresh young leader, Robert Hannegan, as Democratic National Chairman. 2) That the President had deliberately set out to discredit Congress as a campaign technique, aimed mainly at soldiers, who are supposedly angry with Congress over the soldiers' vote bill.

Some Congressmen think the President has been needled into baiting them by the White House Inner Circle: Harry Hopkins, Sam Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter et al. Last week they were privately blaming the ideas in the tax veto message on Treasury Counsel Randolph Paul, the words on Judge Rosenman. The facts: the message was no hastily okayed product of a Presidential ghost, no result of a sudden fit of Presidential temper. Mr. Roosevelt had been poring over the document for more than a week, weighing its ideas, sifting its language, arguing it with many an adviser. Economic Stabilizer Fred Vinson had strongly favored the veto. But many a White House adviser had argued even more strongly against it. When one of them pointed out that Congressional tempers were already nearly tantrum-taut, the President expressed doubt that there was any use trying to get along with Congress any longer.

Significance. In the midst of its greatest war was the U.S. in for a siege of bitter feuding between President and Congress? It might be. Much depended on what was going on in the mind of Franklin Roosevelt as, day after day, he remained secluded from press and public in his military-secret hideaway.

Congress is now clearly in control of Republicans and of Democrats unfriendly to the President. But Republicans who gloated might be celebrating prematurely.

Rare is the Democratic professional who prefers a Republican victory in 1944 to 16 years of Roosevelt. And almost no Democrat believes that any other Democrat but Franklin Roosevelt could win the 1944 election. The prospect was that Congressional Democrats will close ranks behind the President as the elections draw nearer--but more & more on their own terms, not his.

It was up to the President to treat Congress with respect and confidence. Leader Barkley, though protesting his continued personal devotion, made that plain in his reply to Mr. Roosevelt's letter. He wrote:

"It seems to me there is something broader and more fundamental than any personal acquiescence as between you and me over matters of public policy and fundamental principles. In this great crisis of our nation's history we must all seek some common ground upon which we can meet and have confidence. ... If we cannot trust one another in this tragic period . . . how can the people trust us?"

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