Judgment of Daniel

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda-water the day after.

--Byron

Adam Clayton Powell has many proclivities in common with George Gordon Byron, but he has one clear occupational advantage over the poet. He composes his own sermons. Last week, addressing the faithful at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, Pastor-Congressman Powell recounted the saga of Daniel, with himself in the starring role. The lions, he implied, were those ravening "racists" on his House Education and Labor Committee who planned to make entrecote of their chairman.

Two hours after Powell entered his closed-door confrontation with the rebellious committee, the chamber was opened. The lions were licking their chops. Oddly enough, Daniel was also smacking his lips. Later, in his office, Powell sipped--appropriately--at a Jack Daniel, without soda, and allowed that "the noose slipped."

A Diligent Beauty Queen. If Powell escaped procedural hanging, he had certainly been drawn and congressionally quartered. By a vote of 27 to 1 the committee adopted stringent measures to control its wayward chairman. Among them were provisions 1) making the committee staff director responsible to the majority rather than Powell; 2) empowering the ranking majority member to report committee-approved bills to the full House, thus ending Powell's ability to pocket veto legislation at will; 3) requiring majority approval of the committee budget and a detailed review of all expense accounts.

For all his peccadilloes, few of his critics deny that Powell on the whole has been an effective if erratic committee chairman. Only last March President Johnson wrote him to commend a "brilliant record of accomplishment" that has included passage of 56 key bills for the New Frontier and the Great Society.

Powell's extracurricular record has been more consistently spectacular. For years he finagled luxurious European jaunts, in the company of pretty secretaries, at the taxpayer's expense. His third wife lives in Puerto Rico while drawing $20,000 annually as a staff member; estranged from her about two years ago, Powell has recently been depositing her pay in his own account. Another staff member was a former beauty queen whose diligence once earned her a raise from $10,144 to $15,583 a year. Even as rebellion flared in Powell's own committee last week, the House Administration Committee launched a separate investigation of his expense-account sleight of hand.

"All in a Jam." Over the years, Powell's flamboyant aberrations have become an embarrassment to Congress. With leisure to spare for fishing trips in the Bahamas, he has stalled the Administration's crucial $1.7 billion antipoverty bill for four months; though the committee has approved the bill, the

House was still waiting for it at week's end. In the House, Powell has shown up for only 54 of 135 roll calls this session.

In exasperation, seven committee Democrats have been plotting their revolt against the chairman since midsummer. When Powell got word of their plans, he denounced the uprising as a racist conspiracy, aiming his angrier invectives at Florida's Sam Gibbons, 46, a Democrat with an unimpaired liberal record who has had to assume responsibility for the antipoverty bill in Powell's absence.

Fearful of the chairman's black-power demagoguery, committee members from cities with large Negro populations were loath to humiliate him. "We were all in a jam," admitted one rebel. Nonetheless, the panel that prepared the rules changes made only one concession to Powell: they agreed to his amendment giving the chairman control over hiring, firing and paying the staff, but obtained the right of the majority to veto his decisions.

The only pro-Powell vote was cast by the ranking Republican committee member, Ohio's William Ayres, a Powell pal whose Akron district has a heavily Negro vote. Ayres, who may some day succeed Powell, was worried that the chairmanship itself would be weakened by clipping Powell's wings. But the rules changes adopted last week should strengthen the committee's hand by eliminating the wanton delays that have often kept important legislation in the pigeonhole.

Strong Plants. As for Powell's political future, ironically he can only gain from his foray into the lions' den. Elected to his eleventh term in the House in 1964 by a 9-to-l margin, he has always been, in the eyes of his constituents, an audacious Daniel in the white man's Congress.

In any case, Powell insisted that his prerogatives had not been severely curtailed but only slightly "pruned." And, the chairman observed hopefully, "You know what happens to plants when you prune them? They grow even stronger."

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