The Road from Slippery Rock

A year ago, he voted with Minnesotan Fritz Mondale to expand the Congressional Budget Committee's federal budget recommendations by $9 billion. Today, he is beginning to talk about "bureaucracies" and the "frustration" of dealing with them. His desk is littered with old speeches, dug out by his staff, with the conservative passages underlined. Pennsylvania's Senator Richard Schultz Schweiker, 50, has a talent for flexibility.

Since he came to Congress in 1960 from suburban Philadelphia's Main Line 13th District, Schweiker has steered a left-of-center course that has helped make him one of the state's biggest Republican votegetters. So attentive has he been to his labor constituents that the AFL-CIO'S political action group, COPE, awards Schweiker a 100% rating and made him the first Pennsylvania Republican Senator to win its endorsement for re-election (in 1974). Among other things, he voted to repeal Section 14-B of the Taft-Hartley Act, the right-to-work provision that allows states to outlaw the closed shop. He was a co-sponsor of the original Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, which would have committed the Government to take potentially inflationary budgetary steps to achieve full employment. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him an 89% rating, the same as ADA President George McGovern, who wryly offered last week to take Schweiker aboard as his vice president.

Schweiker, a founding member of the Senate's Wednesday Club of liberal and moderate Republicans, supported Medicare and federal rent subsidies. He was one of the earliest Republican doves. He voted against the Nixon Administration on the ABM and on the Supreme Court nominations of G. Harrold Carswell and Clement Haynsworth. Schweiker also voted to override every one of Nixon's 14 vetoes. For such behavior, he earned a place on Nixon's enemies list. Only on the issues of abortion, gun control and busing--all of which he opposes--has Schweiker deviated from the liberal canon. A student of the John Kennedy assassination, Schweiker embarrassed himself last October by impetuously calling previous investigations of the murder "a coverup" and predicting that the Warren Commission Report would collapse "like a house of cards."

Son of a tile manufacturer, Schweiker grew up in the tiny southeastern Pennsylvania town of Worcester. His family is Pennsylvania Dutch and belongs to the small (2,600 members) Central Schwenkfelder Church, a Protestant sect with origins in Silesia. At 17, he enlisted in the Navy and served on the carrier Tarawa in World War II, then returned to Pennsylvania. After two years at Slippery Rock State College, he transferred to Penn State, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He joined his father's business, eventually becoming vice president for sales.

Working in the Community Chest, Boy Scouts and the Jaycees, Schweiker built a foundation for a political career. In 1960, he defeated conservative Republican John Lafore in a congressional primary, then won the seat in November. After four terms in the House, Schweiker went after the office of liberal Democratic Senator Joseph Clark and came from far behind to upset him by 282,000 votes, even while Hubert Humphrey was carrying Pennsylvania in the national election.

In Washington, Schweiker enjoys a reputation as a diligent and amiable Senator with clever political instincts. He and his wife Claire--who was the original "Miss Claire" on TV's Romper Room--have two sons and three daughters, aged six to 18. Daughter Kristi, 6, might make engaging Republican competition for Amy Carter. Schweiker does not smoke, and drinks an occasional Bloody Mary. He is given to wearing double-knit suits and combs his graying curly hair forward over his balding head.

Schweiker is aware that his alliance with Reagan seems politically peculiar and opportunistic--an arranged marriage uniting the Hatfield and McCoy wings of the party. Last week he pledged that he would abandon his labor policies if they ran counter to the Republican platform. He has always tried to make a virtue of his flexibility. Says he: "I feel I'm changing my job from being a representative of a northern industrial constituency to a more moderate, national constituency. I happen to feel that the Ford campaign is headed for oblivion. I could see 16 years of Carter and Mondale. The Ford people are like lemmings into the sea."

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