Very Personal

Like Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar considers Columnist Drew Pearson a liar. Last week on the Senate floor the feuding, 75-year-old Tennessean said so, 23 times, in a speech covering three and a half pages of the Congressional Record.

In one of his columns, Washington Merry-Go-Rounder Pearson rehashed some old stories about McKellar's choleric temper and his insatiable hunger for patronage. That afternoon the bulb-nosed Senator took advantage of a large audience, proceeded to bellow for over an hour what he chose to title "Personal Statement about a Lying Human Skunk." Excerpts: "Pearson is just an ignorant liar, a pusillanimous liar, a peewee liar, even if he is a paid liar. . . . When a man is a natural-born liar, a liar during his manhood and all the time, a congenital liar, a liar by profession, a liar for a living, a liar in the attempt to amuse, or to be as he thinks smart, a liar in the daytime, and a liar in the nighttime, it is remarkable how he can lie. . . . That would make no difference to this 'revolving,' constitutional, unmitigated, infamous liar, this low-lived, double-crossing, dishonest, corrupt scoundrel who claims to be a columnist."

At tirade's end the puffing Senator had admitted that three of his immediate family are on the Federal payroll, that he is still sponsoring an amendment which would give Senate spoilsmen control of all Federal jobs paying more than $4,500 a year, and proved that he has a terrible temper. He had specifically denied only one Pearson charge: "I never pulled a knife on any Senator."

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