"I Love This House"

(See Cover)

The dew of innocence in its eye, the fires of youth in its breast, the 86th Congress this week was still in the beginning of its beginning. It was the most heavily Democratic Congress since the glad, gone days of the New Deal. New plans, new programs, most of all what columnists have long called "new approaches," hung high like pie in the sky. Any bright young Senator could make headlines by calling a press conference to tell how the U.S. could become the Man in the Moon. Even hard-bitten Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had become a space specialist, gone clean out of this world.

But as certain as Congress is Congress (and Article I of the Constitution still says that it is), before too many months some of the dew will have dried and some of the fires banked. The U.S., in the wonderful sum total of its governmental parts, will be operating on a reasonably down-to-earth basis. And one of the big reasons will be that improbable stabilizer called the House of Representatives.

Men v. Pinwheels. As a steadying influence, the House is improbable because, by its very nature, it is divisive. From the 64 members of the original 13 states (who thought they had troubles enough), the House has grown to 435 (plus one vacancy). It is divided into 282 Democrats and 153 Republicans.* Or, depending on who is doing the counting, it is divided into 129 Easterners, 120 Southerners, 128 Midwesterners, 58 Westerners. Or it can be divided into 16 women and 419 men. Or 228 lawyers and 207 nonlawyers. Or 261 veterans (including Spanish-American War Corporal Barratt O'Hara, Chicago Democrat) and 174 nonveterans.

In such divisions is the raw material for chaos, and under the pressures of Year 1959 the House might even be forgiven for flying off like pin wheels in 435 different directions. Small chance. In the 170 years of its existence the House, through trial and error (with plenty of both), has developed a remarkable system of self-government, comprised of hard rules and of a hard breed of men who, however else they may differ, live by their rules. The five top leaders of the House have only one thing in common. They can all say with Speaker Sam Rayburn: "I love this House. It is my life." Through the Big Five, both in their personalities and their positions, the House can best be understood:

TEXAS' SAM RAYBURN, 77, the 44th Speaker of the House, has held his office 14 years, far longer than any other man (Henry Clay, elected Speaker his first day, served ten years). Eighth of eleven children of a Confederate cavalryman, Rayburn comes from tough, Bible-reading ("Every bit of wisdom is written somewhere in that book") people, who scratched a living from 40 sun-baked acres of cotton at Bonham, Texas. Folks such as his family, he thinks, are the "real people," and his feeling for them forms the basis of his political liberalism. Since 1913 Rayburn has represented Texas' agricultural (cattle, corn, cotton) Fourth

Congressional District, whose seven counties cover 4,827 sq. mi. from the Red River to Dallas County. Publicly grumpy, egg-bald Sam Rayburn in private is gentle and old-school courteous, presides over the House, at $45,000 per year, with a strange and astute mixture of paternalism and institutionalism. Sam Rayburn has made the House his home, its members his family.

MASSACHUSETTS' JOHN MCCORMACK, 67, was elected Democratic floor leader the same month -September, 1940 -that Mister Sam became Speaker (during the two Republican Congresses since then, Rayburn became floor leader, McCormack Democratic whip). Boston-born John McCormack, a cigar-munching teetotaler, was left fatherless at 13, shined shoes, ran errands, earned his way through night law school, was elected to the House in 1928. He is a hard-knuckled politician from one of the hardest knuckled of all political schools: Massachusetts' Twelfth Congressional District. More than half Irish, the Twelfth takes in ten dingy, crowded

South Boston wards and is, says a local politico, a "district that demands service." It gets service from Roman Catholic John McCormack: the Twelfth probably has more public housing than any other U.S. congressional district. Childless, devoted to his wife Harriet (he can boast that in 39 years of marriage they have never missed dinner together, whether at public banquet or in fireside privacy), McCormack too is, in effect, wedded to the House. Heir apparent to Rayburn, leader of the New England Democratic bloc, grey, sharp-featured John McCormack is, in his own words, his party's "field general." His battlefield is the House floor, his weapon one of the House's toughest and most partisan tongues. "I'm a great believer in the two-party system." he says. "But I think the Democrats should be the majority party."

VIRGINIA'S HOWARD WORTH SMITH. 75, is the chairman of the House Rules Committee, which must pass on all legislation except appropriations bills. Rules can bottle up a bill or define the terms of its floor consideration, e.g., by setting the time limits on debate, by deciding whether amendments may be made from the floor. Such a power position is made to order for lanky (6 ft. 160 lbs.), courtly Howard Smith, possessor of the bushiest eyebrows south of John L. Lewis. A Byrd organization Democrat, he is the recognized leader of House Southern conservatives, uses his committee to fight off civil rights legislation. ("I use every weapon I've got," he says. "That's why I'm here.") Since 1931 Judge Smith (he was a state circuit judge) has represented Virginia's Eighth Congressional District, stretching from the Blue Ridge to the Northern Neck and including Charlottesville and Fredericksburg. Judge Smith owns three farms, lives on his family lands near Broad Run, where he has nearly 300 head of dairy cattle, and an old red sow whose ears he likes to scratch. A hard fighter but a fair one. Smith knows the House rules and lives by them. "These rules have been developed over 170 years." he says. "There is reason behind them."

MISSOURI'S CLARENCE CANNON, 79, has presided over the spending of more than a trillion dollars -exactly $1,040,597,183,594.75 -in his 18 years as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Homely (to an opponent who accused him of being two-faced, Cannon once replied: "My God, if I had another face don't you think I'd use it?"), hunched (5 ft. 7 in., 142 Ibs.) Clarence Cannon is perhaps the House's most unpopular member, has had fist fights with at least three colleagues; Tennessee's equally terrible-tempered Senator, the late Kenneth McKellar, once threatened to gavel Cannon's head during a conference committee hearing. But he is also the House's hardest-working member (roughly, from 10 a.m. to midnight seven days a week) and one of its ablest. Brought to Washington in 1911 as aide to Speaker Champ Clark, Lawyer Cannon became parliamentarian, began compiling his monumental Procedure and Precedents, by which the House still does business. In 1922 Cannon was elected to the House from Speaker Clark's old district, Missouri's Ninth ("The Bloody Ninth"), which sprawls across 24 northeastern counties and includes Mark Twain's Hannibal. As the dour guardian of the House's power of the purse. Cannon fights an unending battle. "We've got to keep people from taking more and more money out of the U.S. Treasury," he cries. "Every day they devise a thousand new ways to do it."

ARKANSAS' WILBUR DAIGH MILLS, 49, is the youngest chairman in the history of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee, co-protector with Appropriations of the House's constitutional power to originate all money bills. Son of a small-town banker. Mills lives in Kensett, which by legend got its name when natives told Missouri Pacific surveyors, trying to decide where to build a station: "You ken set it hyar or you ken set it thar." Since 1939 he has represented the hill-and-dale Second District, which also boasts such place names as Morning Sun, Evening Shade and Oil Trough. Stocky (5 ft. 8 in., 180 Ibs.), gracious Wilbur Mills has a first-rate fiscal mind, is a Rayburn protege, ranks high on the list of possible future Speakers. But he is in a dangerous political situation: with Arkansas due to lose two Representatives after the 1960 census. Mills cannot risk being gerrymandered out of Congress by a legislature under the segregationist thumb of Governor Orval Faubus. Mills therefore has recently taken a strong segregationist position, this year masterminded the disputed House seating of Little Rock Segregationist Dale Alford, won respect for his political footwork, lost points for the speakership.

Two to Five. Historically speaking, the practical balance of powers among the five House rulers is explained by the fact that their jobs were once held by two men. For many years the Speaker was also chairman of the Rules Committee, and the chairman of Ways & Means (which handled appropriations along with tax bills). The majority leader was the other major figure -and he was generally the creature of the Speaker. This meant in effect that one man held all the reins of power.

Under that system, with some variations, presided canny Speaker James G. Elaine, elephantine (250 lbs.) Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed, and autocratic, scraggly bearded Speaker Joseph Cannon. Far from the House representing the combined or compromised will of all the districts of the U.S. -as the authors of the Constitution had intended -it represented mostly the will of the Congressman from the Third District of Maine (Blame's) or the First District of Maine (Reed's) or the 18th District of Illinois (Cannon's).

In 1910 the House finally arose in its wrath against "Uncle Joe" Cannon, amended its rules so as to break forevermore the near-absolute power of the Speaker. One of the key changes was to split the power center into the positions now held by Speaker Rayburn, Majority Leader McCormack, Rules Chairman Smith, Appropriations Chairman Cannon, and Ways & Means Chairman Mills.

Chairman of the Board. Speaker Rayburn still has plenty of rules to reign by. He can, for example, declare that a floor motion is "dilatory" and rule it out of order. But he never has. Instead, such has been the development of the House that Rayburn can exercise greater control by ignoring the formal trappings of power. After the revolt against Uncle Joe Cannon, the Democratic caucus became the forum for making party policy. But so canny is Mister Sam's sense of the House, and so complete the Democratic trust in Rayburn's integrity that the caucus has long since given way to the "Board of Education"* -actually the foregathering of Mister Sam and select Democrats in the Speaker's Capitol hideaway to talk politics between sips of good whisky.

The meetings generally start at about 5:30 p.m., generally end two bottles later at about 7. A typical session may start with a few jokes (Mister Sam is a fine storyteller, and he likes them clean, has been known to dress down members who offend). Missouri's strappingly handsome Dick Boiling, 42, one of the fastest rising Congressmen in many a year, is on hand to report on the doings of Judge Smith's Rules Committee, where he serves as Rayburn's top personal representative. Floor Leader McCormack is on hand, sitting at Rayburn's right, listening carefully while Texas' Frank Ikard, another trusted Rayburn aide, propounds Ways & Means problems.

For years Indiana's Charles Halleck, newly elected G.O.P. leader, has been dropping by, the only Republican to do so with any frequency. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson steps in about once a week. But he and Rayburn are in almost constant contact, by telephone or otherwise, since it is vital that each know what the other is doing. Rayburn simply will not schedule a bill, for example, that Johnson has told him the Senate will not accept; the House has too much to do to be wasting its time that way.

Strong Right Hand. The House has become far too complex a place for Sam Rayburn or any other one man to keep in mind. Rayburn therefore must depend heavily on others for help. In return for that help, Rayburn freely delegates responsibility, and to no one more than Ways & Means Chairman Mills.

As he does with all young Democratic Congressmen, Rayburn took Mills in hand early, gave fatherly advice and counsel. "Don't try to go too fast," he says. "Learn your job." Or: "Don't ever talk until you know what you're talking about." Or still again: "If you want to get along, go along." By that he does not mean blindly sticking to the party line. He does mean living by the manners and morals of the

House as an institution. "The House is the greatest jury on earth," says Sam Rayburn. In his capacity as chief juror, he soon decided that Wilbur Mills was a real comer. He brought Mills along, got him elected to Ways & Means in 1942, saw him become chairman last year.

In a strong sense, Mills is Rayburn's right hand. As chairman of Ways & Means, Mills is responsible not only for tax writing, but for the program that Rayburn himself deems important above all others: reciprocal trade. This requires the most sensitive sort of judgment. Last year, for instance. Mills knew that a majority of his committee was willing to vote for reciprocal trade, then about to expire, as a permanent program. But he also knew that the House as a whole would not go that far and that if he tried for too much he might get nothing at all. So Mills settled for a five-year extension, steered through the House the strongest reciprocal trade bill ever. (Ultimate Senate-House compromise: four years.)

As chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, Arkansas' Mills automatically becomes the chairman of the Democratic Committee on Committees, which makes the party's House committee assignments. These are as vital to the career of every Congressman as they are to the efficient operation of House machinery. Through Mills, Rayburn can see to it that a promising youngster gets a good committee. If he kicks loose from the party traces too often, a Gentleman from Iowa, say, may find himself a member of the Merchant Marine & Fisheries Committee ("I don't mind them voting against the party sometimes," says Rayburn, "but I don't like it to be chronic").

Indeed, the whole direction of the Congress can be changed by the committee assignments. The House has long behaved much more responsibly than the Senate on reciprocal trade -mostly because Mister Sam has a flat rule against electing anyone to Ways & Means who is not "safe" on the subject. This year, as the result of a deliberate Rayburn-Mills effort, the Education & Labor Committee, for many years controlled by a mossback conservative coalition, has a moderate-liberal majority, may soon become more than a society for discussing the iniquities of Walter Reuther.

Minimum High Regard. As a committee and cloakroom negotiator, Wilbur Mills has few House peers. But when all the behind-the-scenes work has been done, it remains the basic job of the House to make laws -and that can only be done on the floor, where Majority Leader John McCormack holds forth, directing the tides of legislative battle.

A willing, two-fisted debater, McCormack once spoke on 200 different subjects in a single year, had a memorable moment when he demolished Michigan's acidulous Republican Representative Clare Hoffman in the House's own florid parliamentary language: "I'm one of the few men in the House who still has a minimum high regard for the Gentleman from Michigan."

The floor leader must always know how the House is leaning on the issues that come before it. To help him, McCormack can always call on the Democratic whip, Oklahoma's Carl Albert, who, with his 15 assistants, can come up with a quick nose count in 24 hours, a firm figure within a week. (In 1955 the whip count indicated reciprocal trade would win by a single vote on the key roll call; the actual count was 193-192.)

Perhaps more than anyone else, McCormack will be guided this year by the 1958 election results. In the 85th Congress he knew that every time he scheduled a New Dealish labor or welfare bill for floor action, he could expect about 40 Southern conservatives to join with a big majority of the 200 House Republicans in blocking the legislation. But there are far fewer Republicans, far more liberal Democrats in the 86th Congress. "We have a good working majority," says McCormack. "The coalition will be ineffective." Another McCormack rule of thumb: the later in the session that a piece of really controversial legislation gets to the House floor, the less chance it has of being approved. His hope for this year: get labor and welfare bills to the floor early.

Up on the Count. But it is not all that easy. Under the House system as it has evolved over the decades, the floor leader, the Speaker or anyone else must nearly always go through the Rules Committee to get legislation to the floor. The Rules Committee serves as an absolutely necessary check on the flood of bills introduced each session by the members of the House (by last weekend they had introduced 3,443 so far this session). But beyond that, notions differ. "Some think we are just a traffic cop," says Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith. "Others feel that we have to be selective and exercise our own judgment on what should go to the floor. I subscribe to the latter."

Virginia's Smith especially subscribes to the latter when civil rights bills are before his committee. In 1956 he delayed Rules consideration of a civil rights bill for more than a month, was finally forced, by a signed petition from his own committee, to hold hearings. For days Southern Congressmen paraded their objections before Rules -and all the while Judge Smith kept counting committee noses. Finally one afternoon he found that no quorum was present -and down went his gavel. Missouri's Dick Boiling, leading the civil rights fight within Rules, realized he had been caught.

"You've got us," he said, smiling almost despite himself. "What rule do I look at?" Twinkling his delight, Judge Smith cited the rule by which he could -and did -put off civil rights hearings for a precious while. Recalls Smith, puffing on his old curved pipe: "I felt like a well-fed missionary at a cannibals' convention. They were really mad at me. I don't blame them a bit. I would have been mad had I been in their shoes."

Down on the Farm. Last year, in the final hectic days of the 85th Congress, Rules Chairman Smith took no chances on being forced by a committee petition to call hearings. As a dozen major bills -relief for depressed areas, housing, mineral subsidies, etc. -piled up before Rules, Howard Smith simply disappeared from Washington. He returned a week later, smilingly explained that he had had some hay down on his farm that needed tending. Says he today: "There were about a dozen things thrown at the Rules Committee, and they would have cost the taxpayers about $10 billion. There was no way on God's earth to prevent them from coming out if the committee met. That's why I went away."

But Judge Smith is not always so obstructive, and even his methods pall before those of some previous Rules chairmen, e.g., Illinois' Adolph Sabath, who used to feign fainting fits to get hearings adjourned. On the vast majority of bills Smith works closely with Rayburn or McCormack in speeding the legislative process.

"The newspapers raise a lot of hell about how arbitrary we are," says Smith. "But we grant thousands of rules while denying one." Moreover, the Rules Committee can be -and is -used by the leadership to bottle up irresponsible legislation for which Congressmen may be politically committed to vote if it reaches the floor. "Many, many times." says Howard Smith, "members have told me that they were going to speak publicly for a bill, and if it got out on the floor they would have to vote for it, but they were against the bill and wanted it killed by the Rules Committee."

Generals on Horseback. In the strange person of Chairman Clarence Cannon the House's polarization of power reaches its extremes in the Appropriations Committee, which can send its bills to the floor without going through Rules. Speaker Rayburn cordially dislikes Cannon, a sentiment which is more than reciprocated. Yet somehow the two old men, each playing by the House rules, seem to balance each other. In 1950, when Appropriations Committee Chairman Cannon pushed his pet "one-package" appropriations bill (all main appropriations in one lump sum so the world could see the awful enormity of it all) through the House, an irate member complained bitterly to Rayburn. Mister Sam only shook his head. "I can't do a thing with Cannon," he said. "He's the most powerful man in the House." Yet the very next year, Chairman Cannon could not even get his one-package bill reported out of his own committee. Muttered he gloomily: "Sam packed the committee against me."

Chairman of a 50-member committee, largest in congressional history, Clarence Cannon works almost around the clock at the job -as he sees it -of saving the U.S. from bankruptcy. He darts back and forth among his 14 subcommittees, bent forward, as one Capitol staffer puts it. at a 45DEG angle; if he tilts to 50DEG, the whole Hill knows that Clarence Cannon is on a rampage. He judges his subcommittee chairmen by the amount by which they can cut budget requests. Last year his star pupil was Louisiana's Otto Passman, who applied a $872 million meat ax to the foreign aid bill (the Senate restored some of the cut). He held Passman up to the full committee as a shining example of the positive statesman. Says Cannon: "Of course they all laughed."

Cannon's power is immeasurable. One year, on a Saturday afternoon, he decided that defense requests were too big, jumped up from his desk, ordered his staff to knock out $6 billion by Monday morning. In the final congressional result $4.8 billion of that cut survived. Military men displease Clarence Cannon anyway. "They always want to fight the next war with old weapons," he says. "We had the deuce of a time getting them to give up the cavalry. They liked to ride those horses." By the simple expedient of packing his Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he lopped the Navy's atomic-powered supercarrier out of the defense budget last year. Yet at the same time he was one of the earliest and strongest advocates of the atomic submarine.

Senate Sins. The tragedy of Clarence Cannon's life is that the U.S. Senate so often restores the budget cuts he has made. "The Senate piles everything on earth on these bills." he grumps, "and they always wait until the last minute to do it." Cannon always wants the House to insist on its cuts in conference committee. "Sam Rayburn says, 'Hell, we've got to get out of here.' I always say we can't accept this change. But Sam always says we've got to get the hell out of here."

Last week the buckram-bound volume that contains the U.S. budget went from the White House to Capitol Hill. Wrapped up in that budget were all the plans and programs of the U.S. for the next fiscal year. Speaker Sam Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith, Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence Cannon and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills would all help bring those programs to life. The dew of innocence was still in the eye of the 86th Congress, the fires of hope in its breast. New "approaches" hung high like pie in the sky, and Lyndon Johnson was gone clean out of this world. But the U.S. will probably keep on at a straight, steady pace -in large part because of the five powerful men who love the U.S. House of Representatives and, loving it, live it.

* Biggest House Democratic majority in the 20th century: 331 Democrats, 89 Republicans, in the New Deal 75th Congress, 1937-38.

* Rayburn dislikes the name, which was given to the sessions by Texas' John Nance Garner, who, as a House member, used to signal Speaker Nicholas Longworth each afternoon that it was time to "strike a blow for liberty." Explained Garner: "You know, you get a couple of drinks in a young Congressman, and then you know what he can do. We pay the tuition by supplying the liquor."

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