You Can't Go Home Again

"I joyously accept the verdict of my party ... I shall possibly be enjoying the ecstasy of the starry stillness of an Arizona desert night," said Henry Fountain Ashurst, "or the scarlet glories of her blooming cactus, the petrified forest which leafed through its green millenniums, and put on immortality 7,000 years ago." That was in 1940 when Orator Ashurst, defeated for reelection, was delivering his swan song in the Senate. Last week, 14 years later, Ashurst, lively and loquacious as ever at 79, was still living in Washington. Widower Ashurst is a perennially popular extra man at the parties of Washington's wealthy widows, but he still longs for the starry stillness and the scarlet glories (and, perhaps, for his old aisle seat in the Senate). And one of these days he is going home: "Just say that I'll be living in Arizona in my 90th year."

Loafers & Lobbyists. Last week there were more than 100 former Senators and Representatives, who, like Ashurst, were still around Washington. Some were in other branches of the Government; a few were making a lot more money than they ever made as Senators; some were just loafing and dreaming.

A few ex-members of Congress, such as former Senators Richard Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and Sinclair Weeks, and onetime Representative Sherman Adams, are at the top level of the Eisenhower Administration. Others have lesser jobs in the Government and the Republican Party; Washington's Harry Cain is a member of the Subversive Activities Control Board; New York's Len Hall is chairman of the G.O.P. National Committee; New York's James Mead is on the Federal Trade Commission. Still others hold important Government jobs outside Washington; Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (his, predecessor, ex-Senator Warren Austin, is living in retirement at his Vermont home); Clare Boothe Luce is Ambassador to Italy.

Some erstwhile Congressmen have registered as lobbyists or established legal practices in the city. Ernest McFarland of Arizona lobbies for Western Union and RCA, and Missouri's Albert Reeves looks after the interests of the Dominican Republic. Former Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a brilliant lawyer, represents Robert R. Young and a group of railroads. Other lobbyists are James P. Kem of Missouri, Fred Hartley Jr. of the Taft-Hartley Act, Scott Lucas of Illinois. Gerald P. Nye is now the president of a records-management and microfilm company, hasn't been in North Dakota in years. Joe Ball has left Minnesota for greener pastures in Manhattan, where he is an official of a steamship agency.

Memoirs & Habits. Of some 1,000 living ex-Congressmen, a quorum is engaged, in Washington and in their home states, in the practice of law. Former Senator Joseph O'Mahoney represents Owen Lattimore, among other clients. Millard Tydings has a partnership with his father-in-law, onetime Ambassador Joseph Davies. Bennett Champ Clark and John Danaher, both former Senators, are judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals. One-third of the Supreme Court--Justices Hugo Black, Harold Burton and Sherman Minton--are former Senators.

In a class by themselves are the retired Senators who feel more at home in Washington than at home, and are living in retirement in the capital. William J. Bulow, 85, left the Senate in 1942, and drove home to Beresford, S. Dak. Within one month he was back in Washington, "where I knew somebody." Owen Brewster of Maine lives at the Mayflower Hotel, "just taking it easy," and fretting about the future of the G.O.P. Texas' Tom Connolly, after 24 years in the Senate, still finds it hard to shake off capital habits. He still regularly uses as an office the chambers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he presided for years as committee chairman.

There he keeps appointments and dictates letters and touches up his memoirs. "Some people think I'm still a Senator," snorts Old Tawm, who still acts and looks like one.

Encyclopaedias & Chickens. The most famous ex-Senator of all, Harry Truman, went home to Independence to write his memoirs. Another memoirist, Kenneth McKellar, 85, is back in Memphis, after 41 years in Washington, and feeling "sort of poorly." Former Senator Alben Barkley is back in Kentucky this year. After a fling at television, he is diligently running for the Senate again.

The reputed dean of the shadow Congress, former Senator Joseph E. Ransdell, 95 (he served his freshman term in the 56th Congress of 1899), is bedridden at his Louisiana home. Rush Dew Holt, now 48, the onetime (1935) "boy wonder" of the Senate, switched his political allegiance in 1950, and is running this year as a Republican, for a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates. Eight former Congressmen (South Carolina's Byrnes, Illinois' Stratton, Massachusetts' Herter, Virginia's Stanley, Connecticut's John Lodge, North Carolina's Umstead, Nevada's Russell and Delaware's Boggs) are now governors of their home states.

A number of erstwhile Congressmen have gone in for odd jobs. California's (once Broadway's) Helen Gahagan Douglas has gone back on the stage. Connecticut's William Benton is publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Mon Wallgren of Washington raises grapefruit in California, and John Townsend raises chickens in Delaware. John Rankin operates a tiny real-estate development in Tupelo, Miss., and former Congressman John M. Boer of North Dakota (1917-21) is a cartoonist for the paper Labor.

At least three living ex-Congressmen have served sentences in penal institutions. After serving his time, Andrew May is content to practice law in Prestonsburg, Ky. New Jersey's J. Parnell Thomas tried in vain to get back to Washington as a Representative. And Massachusetts' ex-Representative (and ex-Governor) James Michael Curley, 79, is again seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.

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