New Chapter in Pike's Progress

"It's time Congress faced up to its responsibilities," New York's Democratic Representative Otis Pike declared last week, adding with typical Pikean acerbity, "I'm not so sure Congress wants to face up to its responsibilities." Pike, however, was fully ready.

At issue: the CIA documents on its failure to predict the Communists' surprise Tet offensive in Viet Nam in 1968. On President Ford's orders, the CIA had refused to produce the documents for Pike's committee investigating U.S. intelligence, so the committee subpoenaed them. The CIA then ignored the subpoena, so Pike's committee voted 10-3 to ask the support of the full House in forcing the CIA to obey. Implicit in that vote was the threat of a contempt citation against CIA Director William Colby.

Weighing those warnings and threats, President Ford decided to compromise. He ordered Colby to turn over the seven-in.-high pile of documents on three conditions: 1) no public disclosure of the material before a consultation with the CIA; 2) any dispute over a document's release to be refereed by the White House; and 3) a presidential decision not to release a document for security reasons would be binding, unless the committee chose to go to court. Pike thought that compromise reasonable enough, and his committee voted to accept it.

Critical Memo. The Congressman then took aim at his next target: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In questioning State Department Official Thomas D. Boyatt, about Boyatt's criticism of intelligence failures during the Cyprus invasion, Pike found that the witness had been forbidden to answer key questions. Reason: Kissinger was insisting that no State Department officials below the rank of Assistant Secretary should ever testify on the formation of policy, only on the "facts" of such policies. The State Department justified that ban as a defense against McCarthyite harassment of policymakers, but Pike called it "preposterous." His committee thereupon voted 9-2 to subpoena Boyatt's critical memo on Cyprus.

As the week's developments indicate, Otis Grey Pike, a silver-haired 54, is the model of a properly pugnacious public servant--sharp-tongued and not easily intimidated. He has fought hard against such expensive Pentagon projects as the C-5 transport and the B70 bomber. During Robert McNamara's supposedly cost-conscious tenure as Defense Secretary, Pike took to the House floor each day for weeks and spoke for one minute on one Pentagon budget item. The most outlandish: little metal rods worth 50-c- were costing the Pentagon $25.55 under a catalogue listing describing them as "precision shafting."

Said Pike: "For once the American taxpayer got precisely what he paid for."

Secret Yen. But the military is only one of Pike's many interests. Says an official biographical memo he wrote about himself: "He can fly a plane, navigate a boat, play a piano (or a ukulele) . . . swing an ax, sing a song . . ." The son of a Republican Long Island banker, Pike grew to admire Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal and joined the Democratic Party at 21. A Princeton graduate who finished Columbia Law School in 1948, Pike was first elected to Congress from his conservative Long Island district in 1960 ("I've always been surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth side by Republicans"). Pike harbors a secret yen to be a "charter captain half the time and a political writer the other half," but he settles for cruises off Long Island in the 30-year-old Navy launch he bought for $8,250. Pike and his wife Doris still live in the two-story Victorian frame house where he was born; in Washington, he occupies a modest three-room apartment above a delicatessen near the Capitol.

Pike is believed to be thinking of running for James L. Buckley's U.S. Senate seat next year, a tough fight he would relish. But for now he is determined to nettle the members of the Administration who would conceal activities Pike thinks they ought to disclose. "Congress might have to revise its own rules to safeguard genuine secrets," says Pike, "but that is Congress's decision to make. The foreign affairs of the nation belong to the nation, not just to the Executive."

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