Hierophant on the Hill

By Lance Marrow

DIRKSEN : PORTRAIT OF A PUBLIC MAN by Neil MacNeil. 402 pages. World. $12.50.

He was essentially a legislative man, not so much an ideologue as a hierophant of parliamentary procedure. He embodied much that is best and some that is worst--or perhaps silliest--in the American congressional tradition. His talent for the political about-face was acrobatic. Everett McKinley Dirksen, said his Illinois colleague Paul Douglas, "is a man of no principles." Dirksen preferred to call it "flexibility," and that kindlier word, which suggests growth rather than knavery, often proved accurate enough to describe his shifts in policy. During his 35 years in the House and Senate, Dirksen was isolationist, internationalist, champion of Joe McCarthy, internationalist again, antiwar critic (Korea), apologist for war (Viet Nam), Goldwaterite, and finally, an improbable shepherd of nearly all the major civil rights legislation of the '60s. Toward the end of his life--he died in 1969--it began to seem that Dirksen's most interesting achievement was himself: a rumpled travesty of Throttlebottom, Pekin, Ill., Polonius wreathed in consciously self-mocking fustian, a man at once shamelessly sentimental and uncommonly shrewd.

Neil MacNeil observed Dirksen's career for 19 years--the last twelve as chief congressional correspondent for TIME. He is best when narrating the intricate workings of Congress, fondly chronicling the stratagems of cloture and bombast. His portrait is judicious and frequently admiring. Only occasionally, though, does he step back and render judgment: "Using a rhetorical ready-mix of melancholy and country humor, Dirksen mouthed the platitudes of an earlier America as though they were beatitudes, and he sensed himself as the appointed guardian of those values."

Lance Morrow

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