UPHEAVAL ON THE HILL

CONGRESS is a creature of custom whose membership, unlike that of the executive branch, alters only gradually over the decades. Abrupt reaction is as alien to Capitol Hill as to a three-toed sloth. Yet the divisions and defeats of the Democrats in 1968 were bound to make a heavy mark on the 91st Congress, which assembled last week as a Republican prepared to take over the White House. The Democratic Party, which has ruled Capitol Hill for most of the past 40 years, seemed not only to have lost its old suzerainty over labor, the South and the minority groups, but also to have estranged the young, educated and relatively well-to-do urban voters. The legacy of an unhappy year for the Democrats was a bruising awareness of the necessity--more tantalizingly, of the possibility--for change at the top.

Last week, as Senate Republicans chose a moderate new leader by electing Pennsylvania's Hugh Scott as minority whip, the young Turks of the Democratic Party joined in open revolt against their hierarchical chieftains. Rejecting the Eisenhower-Johnson concept of consensus, they demanded younger, more aggressive leadership and distinctively Democratic programs to revivify the party's claim to national leadership in the years to come. At stake were many political fortunes, young and old, and the relationship that the predominantly Democratic 91st Congress will have with the Nixon Administration.

Crustacean Tradition. A figure whose very name embodies dissatisfaction with the old established order stood at the center of the party's upheaval. Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, the fourth and last of a legendary band of brothers, emerged from the quiescence of private grief to do what very few of his colleagues have ever dared to do. In defiance of all the crustacean traditions of the U.S. Senate, Massachusetts' Kennedy, with but six years' tenure, challenged and defeated Assistant Majority Leader Russell Long, who is 50 and has 20 years of service in the upper chamber. Ted Kennedy easily won the job of whip, the No. 2 party role in the Senate--next to Majority Leader Mike Mansfield--and a post whose power, limited as it is, he will probably use to the hilt.

In the House of Representatives, a similar but unsuccessful revolt took place. There, Morris Udall, 46, a brilliant legal scholar and brother of outgoing Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, took on Boston's venerable John McCormack, 77, in a contest for the post of Speaker. Udall, who was entering first grade when McCormack took his seat in the House, also defied precedent: few Speakers in modern times have been threatened by a member of their own party, and none has ever been ousted. It was Udall's challenge to McCormack that inspired Kennedy's campaign against Long.

Udall lost; Kennedy won. But both challengers established beyond dispute that the lessons of 1968 have not been lost on substantial numbers of younger, activist members of the Democratic Party. Udall declared: "The House, if properly organized and led, can restore its influence and can again become the independent, constructive force it once was." Ted Kennedy agreed: "The Democratic majority of the Senate has an obligation to the country to present the best possible programs in keeping with our historic role as the party of progress and change in the U.S."

Though Udall was overwhelmingly defeated by McCormack's supporters, his move helped wrest from the incumbent Democratic leadership in the House an agreement to allow all party members to sit in on monthly policy meetings, thus assuring that the voice of the activists will continue to be heard. Another concession to Udall's rebellion: committee appointments will henceforth be subject to approval by a caucus of all House Democrats instead of being dictated by a tight coterie of congressional elders. Udall and his hardy backers--only 58 of 435 House members--did their careers no damage, and may well have assured a more responsive leadership for the future.

Another Beacon. There were no shadings of this sort to Ted Kennedy's victory. He won a clear mandate from his colleagues to lead his party's moderates in the task of preserving and expanding the urban-oriented programs of the Great Society. As a longtime critic of Viet Nam, he showed that a majority of the Senate Democrats may now very well be antiwar. As a member of the Democratic hierarchy, he will have considerable influence on the legislation that Richard Nixon offers to Congress, and on the countervailing programs that the Democrats can now only propose from Capitol Hill. He also marked out a unique redoubt from which to pursue any presidential ambitions that he may entertain in 1972 or 1976--or thereafter.

There was also a kind of poetic symbolism in Ted Kennedy's first real foray into national politics. It was Jack Kennedy's assassination that brought Lyndon Johnson to power. Bobby Kennedy's energetic campaign helped persuade many restive Americans that the old order might, after all, be redeemable. In the dying days of a Democratic Administration, the last of the clan rekindled a beacon of courage and change--one that should certainly brighten his party and the Senate and may yet achieve the full promise of a haunted dynasty.

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