The Other Long

THE SENATE

Some months ago, Bobby Kennedy put in a call to Louisiana's Senator Russell Long and got Missouri's Senator Edward Long on the phone by mistake. "Oh," said Bobby, realizing what had happened, "you're the good Long." "Yes," Ed Long joked back, "and which Kennedy are you?"

Good Senator Long had few jokes to tell last week. After elaborate but independent investigations of his political and financial interests, LIFE and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch simultaneously published accounts of Long's association with St. Louis Attorney Morris A. Shenker, chief of a brigade of lawyers representing jailed Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa. Both publications charged that in the years 1963-64 Shenker had paid Ed Long some $48,000 in fees--though the Post-Dispatch was gingerly about saying why.

According to LIFE, which worked on its story for three months, the fees were for questionable services rendered. The article claimed that Long's Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure has been toiling for the past three years at its marathon probe of wiretapping and bugging mainly for the purpose of collecting evidence to absolve Hoffa of his 1964 conviction for jury tampering.

"Smear." "Senator Long has misused his investigating subcommittee--first, as an instrument for trying to keep Jimmy Hoffa out of prison; subsequently, after Hoffa went in, to get him out," wrote LIFE'S William Lambert. He catalogued Long's friendships with Missouri Teamsters, his excessively fervent praise for Hoffa at a Miami Beach Teamster convention last year, his subcommittee's apparent fascination with whether federal agents had illegally bugged telephone conversations between Hoffa and one of his lawyers--a charge that, if proven by the committee, might possibly have freed Hoffa.

The suspicions thus raised about Ed Long deepened the gloom of a Senate already embarrassed by the case of Connecticut's Tom Dodd, by the vulgar performance of the other Long, Russell, who stalled legislative proceedings for five weeks over the tax-endowed campaign-fund act, and by the scandal of Adam Clayton Powell on the other side of the Hill.

For his part, Missouri's Long denounced the expose as a "smear," explained that the $48,000 he collected from Shenker--in installments of $2,000 a month--had nothing to do with Hoffa, but was earned by referring estate and damage cases from his own law firm, one of the six Missouri and Illinois businesses that have made the junior Senator a millionaire. "I have been scrupulous to see that no conflicts of interest arise," he told the Senate. Long claimed that the Internal Revenue Service, a primary target of his probe, was out to "get me" and had leaked the information about the $48,000 payment from Shenker. IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen denied the charge, declaring that LIFE had dug up the facts on its own and had come to his agency for confirmation of the payments.

Finally, the best defense being a good offense, Long asked the Senate to raise his subcommittee's budget to $200,000, an increase of $35,000, so that it might continue its wiretapping investigation.

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