Oratory in the Modern Senate
Heard, Alex
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 22, NO. 5 / MAY 1989 Alex Heard ORATORY IN THE MODERN SENATE A dutiful reporter braves the tedium of the Tower debate to gather up specimens of senatorial...
...Still, the argument had enough inherent flaws— Grant, after all, was a crummy executive, and the yoking of Churchill and Tower in the listener's mind was, at best, unfortunate for the diminutive Texan—that once should have been enough...
...Alcohol Abuser...
...Reading Lamar's speeches, Lott came across a reference to Prometheus...
...Look at the big picture...
...Ain't no marginal case of this kind...
...DOLE: Well, I want to quote the exact thing...
...Steve Symms violated Speech Rule 2 when he quoted Lonesome Dove...
...Sorry, make that: NOO...
...You know that is not the record...
...How do you swear in as Secretary of Defense, an individual who must deal with thousands of alcohol abuse cases, when he is a known alcoholic abuser himself...
...This old cowboy would never walk away from that"), most rhetoric-minded senators used the high-school orator's technique of letting literature speak for them...
...Again, most didn't try for eloquence, and with the exception of folksy westerners such as Alan K. Simpson ("If 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989 people are telling lies about you, [you should] scrap...
...At the end, Gus McCrae is carried back to the Rio Grande to be buried by his lifelong friend, Woodrow Call...
...Jumpin' on all the senators and everythin' else...
...Very few senators come to the floor to listen to such speeches...
...Still, Stevens dramatically read the rest of a long passage from William Manchester's The Last Lion, then sighed and said, "You know who it is: Winston Churchill...
...You probably heard that several GOP speakers noted the fact that Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill were big boozers...
...Senator Steve Symms, the night before the Tower debate "If we've offended anyone, we apologize to everyone all at once...
...How can I put in a Secretary of Defense that on an average of—really dealing with 400 and some-odd alcohol abuse cases, and put in Mr...
...Now if you gettin' 400 and some a year, that's my test...
...Most of the debate exactly matched the description by New York Timesman Warren Weaver in his 1972 book on Congress, Both Your Houses: " 'Debate' . . . almost always consists of a series of end-to-end speeches by senators . . . [many] overlapping those that have come before and those yet to come...
...Finally, ignoring Rule 3, there was the Senate's resident poet, William Cohen, who in one brief speech quoted at length from Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral...
...Oops...
...Suppose," Ted Stevens brayed on Day Tivo, "that a witness [at the Tower hearings] had come in and said something like this: 'Remaining within reach are the jam and a weak scotch-and-soda—always Johnny Walker Red—which the prostrate . . . [here Stevens paused to verbally "edit out" the secret name] will occasionally sip over the next four hours in the tradition of Palmerston, Pitt and Baldwin...
...Senator Phil Gramm was first and most dramatic: "Winston Churchill, who was a voice of the free world, who stood alone against Nazi aggression, consumed more liquor on an average basis than anyone has ever accused John Tower of consuming...
...telegrams sent by Midwestern cub scouts...
...This was supposed to feature verbal eyegouging and hoarse stands by Jimmy Stewartish senators who would collapse as they waved SAVE TOWER...
...HOLLINGS: No, the record is he is an alcohol abuser...
...It was Senator Symms, not I, who compared this Alfonse and Gaston Nerf-Mitt boxing match to the truly rancorous old days, so it's fair to look at Then versus Now...
...And all of these other things . . . Providing the best indicator of how much Senate clubbiness did not break down during the Tower debate, Rent Lott, who followed Hollings, said, "I proceed here with some trepidation this afternoon, following the great orator, the Senator from South Carolina...
...Was he unfit...
...DOLE: That is not the record...
...Future historians who study the allegedly furious Tower debate in the Congressional Record will be puzzled by breathless contemporary newspaper accounts of "shock waves reverberating through the Senate," because the Reconi does not use exclamation points, all-capital-letter sentences, italics, or other guides to volume and tone...
...And it reminds me of what is happening here...
...DOLE: Is that not a vicious personal attack on a former colleague...
...Did you see him on the floor...
...This is an open-andshut case...
...The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator...
...HOLLINGS: I repeat my challenge to point to any instance in the record where I have been vicious or have attacked the gentleman [Tower], when in truth, I have come down as best I can in a deliberate and cautious fashion...
...The man has a problem, let him handle the problem...
...MR...
...But such arguments, which were about procedural details, soon vanished from memory...
...I reacted too quickly, of course— arguments did get saucy at times—but the little-known truth about the Tower debate is that 95 percent of it was tedious...
...The fella's got a problem, let him handle the problem...
...In a passage regarding the number of servicemen dismissed for alcohol abuse, the Record has Hollings saying: In 1987, there were 415 of them...
...Jumpin' on all the senators and everythin' else...
...Don't use the Congressional Record, which, with the advice and consent of staff aides, routinely tidies up remarks so that they make sense, even if they didn't when spoken...
...Ask Hitler's Ghost...
...Bush had been kind enough to take him on a tour of the second floor of the White House...
...Alcoholic Abuser as Secretary of Defense...
...Perhaps," Cohen gamely admitted, "I indulge too much in reading of literature...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989 15...
...All in all, as I learned the hard way during three days in the press gallery, it's best that our senators restrict themselves to nasal, Nunnian argument, because these guys just can't make high-flying (or low-punching) oratory "work" in the theatrical sense...
...Alex Heard is a writer living in Washington, D.0 For the better part of six days it was thus...
...5 / MAY 1989 Alex Heard ORATORY IN THE MODERN SENATE A dutiful reporter braves the tedium of the Tower debate to gather up specimens of senatorial magniloquence— before they could be edited by the senators' translators...
...Even during these flashpoints, the rancor was expressed more by loudness than by rhetoric...
...Ernest Hollings[This pro-Tower] editorial poses as an attack dog for fairness, but in truth it is a partisan poodle echoing the most hackneyed lines of Senator Tower's defenders"), and on to the bitter, uninspired end, every senator who tried to scale oratorical peaks stepped on his tongue and (as the senators might phrase it themselves) crash-landed his trial balloon on the Ashheap of Eloquence...
...What are we debating...
...Man, what are we talking about in this body...
...The entire discipline thing depends upon this...
...Tip-off...
...0 "Man, what you talking about in this body...
...Charles Dickens aptly put it, 'The best of times, and the worst of times.' " (2) Your literary allusion should make sense...
...But senators kept doing it, each time with a pathetic air of having just thought up something very new and profound...
...Since hardly anyone is on the floor, the instances are limited when one senator interrupts . . . with a challenging question that could qualify as debate...
...rr he partisan reader will have noted 1 that I haven't quoted many Democrats...
...It is almost the way I feel here today...
...Without these, the hottest moment in the debate—the nasty shouting match between Ernest Hollings and Bob Dole over whether Hollings had or had not called Tower an alcoholic—rings flat: MR...
...In a decade of occasional Senate watching, all the debates I'd seen had been dull, and this was supposed to be different...
...Lamar, who (uh oh) "used to quote mythology...
...When John McCain interrupted John Glenn on opening day, for example, because Glenn had quoted words from the forbidden FBI report, he started a rousing free-for-all that brought seventeen senators to the floor...
...Or, like the vulture did to Prometheus, will we bury our beak in the vitals of our victim who has been one of our own...
...I taped Hollings, and what he actually said (pardon me, yelled) was: And just in the alcohol, in the year 1987, was 414 military...
...It is as though our colleagues in the majority party seem to be under some kind of an illusion that they are going to be able to take Senator Tower down to the Rio Grande and bury him along the orchards of the Lonesome Dove and not have a wh00000le bunch of senators accompanying that burial scene...
...This will probably be as bloody as any debates held on this floor since the Civil War...
...It probably has something to do with TV, legal education, and a congenital lack of wit...
...HOLLINGS: Yes, I said only that he abuses alcohol...
...Senator Robert Dole, on the next to last day O n March 2, when Sam Nunn opened the Tower debate with a lawyerly summation, I squirmed and groaned in my gallery seat...
...Note how the image he refers to—a journey of oblige by a faithful friend—has nothing to do with the point he shoehorns into it...
...where Ronnie Reagan did his weight lifting"), to a bellowed demand that President Bush release the FBI report NOW, to indiscriminate charges about Tower's drinking, to an observation that he (Hollings) should get larger contributions from defense contractors, and on to much, much more...
...And all of these other things...
...Man, what you talking about in this body...
...If you want to review this oratorical spasm, though, try to get C-SPAN tapes...
...In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts damned South Carolina's Andrew Butler and Illinois's Stephen Douglas with tart words that prompted Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina to enter the Senate chamber two days later and beat Sumner on the head with a cane, nearly killing him...
...Senators came in, read arguments that had already been delivered many times, and hung around briefly before clocking out...
...The entire discipline of our armed services depends upon this...
...It was not supposed to be Senator Technocrat droning through a legal brief...
...3) You shouldn't overdo it, otherwise you'll come off like a snotty little show-off...
...This is because they were playing the soft-spoken, grave, we're-onlydoingour-advise-and-consent-duty number...
...I don't know why...
...All I know is that, starting with John Warner's early, feeble attempt at a flourish ("[When John Tower left the Senate] I remember so well, thinking at that time, that at long last he could devote more time to his family, and to those many interests that all of us have but which Senate duties have precluded the pursuit thereof"), through many fumbled metaphors (Rent Lott— "Do not be weighted down by the trees...
...Today's senators like to yell, but they don't like to call each other malfeasant snake-in-the-grass or Mofo...
...And here we dare to quibble, "Was he on duty...
...And here we come and we say, Was he on duty...
...In short, this was supposed to be fun...
...I read the book," Symms said, "and the movie was very well done...
...In acting upon this nomination, is this body, great institution that I feel so honored to serve in, going to soar like an eagle as it has in the past and do what is right in its relation with the President and the defense of this country, our country...
...This was supposed to be the most "rancorous clash" in twenty-five years...
...Now them's what I call fightin' words...
...Trent Lott topped this by quoting nineteenth-century Mississippi Senator L.Q.C...
...These dustups accounted for most of the "debate...
...About Douglas, who had written the bill that would allow slavery in the proposed Kansas territory, Sumner ranted: "No person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality...
...The senators smashed these rules...
...So this is my test...
...This can work, but as any high school speech coach will tell you, there are rules to bear in mind: (1) You should be sure that the kid who spoke immediately before you didn't already say, "The sixties...
...What you saw on the evening news were rare stretches of rancor-footage culled from hours and hours of Nunntalk...
...Did you see him on the floor...
...Still, the single strangest ramble of the debate passed the lips of—who else?—Senator Hollings, who in a bravura, ping-pong-logic speech lurched from a refutation of Symms's Lonesome Dove metaphor, to Ronald Reagan's dislike of big government, to how Mr...
...Usually, as a senator read, only two or three others were on the floor listening, including a couple from the opposition who had ears cocked for a factual error they could bitch about...
...And Ted Kennedy, who delivered a memorable anti-Bork tirade, was for obvious reasons kept on a short leash...
...Granted, they seemed dramatic at the time, especially when one was suffering leadbutt from sitting through hours of uncombative verbiage...
...Ain't no marginal case of this kind...
...It was a case where Prometheus was bound to the rock, but it was not an eagle, but a vulture that buried his beak in the tortured vitals of the victim...
...In many ways they were, as Mr...
...o, am I suggesting that modern senators talk like that...
Vol. 22 • May 1989 • No. 5
