Guarding the Assets

Behind a thicket of perquisites and protocol, the U.S. Senate has long guarded its majesty from the vulgar eye. It forbids cameras in the visitors' galleries, permits a member to edit gaucheries and gaffes out of his speeches before they appear in the Congressional Record, grants Senators a unique immunity from legal action for what they say in committee or on the floor. Thus last week when two Senators proposed that members lay their financial affairs naked before the world, the club's leading antiquary, Everett Dirksen, rose up in Dickensian outrage.

"I refuse to let you make me a class-B citizen," thundered the minority leader. Dirksen was fulminating against an amendment to the proposed ethics code by Pennsylvania's Joseph Clark and New Jersey's Clifford Case, who wished to stiffen the relatively flaccid measure.

It requires, among other things, that members and Senate employees file statements of their financial holdings with the U.S. Comptroller General (TIME, March 22). The lists could be opened only after a majority vote of the six-man committee on Standards and Conduct. But under the Clark-Case proviso, Senators would have to dis close publicly their income and assets, along with those of their families.

Why, protested Ev with horror, he would not dare ask his wife about her dabblings in the stock market. "She would say to me, 'It is not the Senate's business,' " he declared. "We have lived 40 happy years together. It just proves that love and harmony and sweetness of life still prevail in the Dirksen family. But she is her own boss." The public-disclosure amendment did have sizable support -- notably from Connecticut's Tom Dodd, whose transgressions in part prompted demand for the code. Yet the amendment failed, 44 to 40.

Dirksen's assault on the ethics package was all too successful. Clark and Case narrowly passed another amen ment restricting the use of Senate "slush funds," only to have it overturned next day by a substitute, sponsored by Tex as' Ralph Yarborough, giving sanction to the practice of accepting contributions to run Senators' offices -- the sort of practice that Illinois' Charles Percy abandoned last fall because of unfavor able publicity.

The adopted measure, passed 67-1 in the Senate's rush to finish its week's work, is a pale cautionary code unlikely to infringe on the rules of the club or invade any Senator's privacy.

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