Mr. Brooke of Massachusetts
BARNES, PETER
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. Mr. Brooke of Massachusetts By Peter Barnes Washington Working out of a sparsely furnished, still rather disorganized office in the Old Senate Office Building is a new Senator...
...Should every Jew who comes before a Jewish judge be acquitted...
...He has joined an informal discussion group of six young Republican Senators (Percy, Baker, Mark Hatfield, Robert Griffin and Clifford Hansen are the others I that corresponds in many respects to the Wednesday Club of young liberal Republicans in the House...
...Until he can determine whether Percy's plan is satisfactory from the viewpoint of fair housing, he does not want to tie himself to it...
...a man should get a job on his qualifications, he felt, and Negroes should not meekly accept only those positions allocated to them by whites...
...Brooke did not get his preferred committee assignments: He asked (a bit presumptuously) for Foreign Relations or Appropriations, and was given Banking and Currency, with Aeronautics and Space thrown in as a consolation prize...
...More precisely, his speech and attitudes are middle class, which is often considered synonymous with white...
...Brooke of Massachusetts By Peter Barnes Washington Working out of a sparsely furnished, still rather disorganized office in the Old Senate Office Building is a new Senator who has already made his mark on history...
...He has told his staff to give him ideas without regard to political consequences...
...This might be pure poppycock coming from another politician, but Brooke means it...
...He is his own man as a Negro, just as he will be his own man as a Senator...
...it reflects his desire to carefully evaluate the feasibility of Percy's plan, as well as Senator Abraham Ribi-coff's housing proposals and any other urban plans that may be offered...
...a potential Presidential nominee, Percy needs Dirksen's support...
...and it will be listening to him a long time after that, too...
...I am not a civil rights leader...
...When he was Attorney General, Brooke was mildly ambitious for the 1968 Republican Vice Presidential nomination...
...Brooke comes to Washington with a charisma in many ways similar to John Kennedy's: He has good looks, charm, a winning smile...
...But I am not a marcher...
...Brooke thus intends to chart his own course...
...he died three years ago...
...Banks, utilities and other groups who offered him inordinately large contributions were turned down...
...Already Brooke has received over 1.400 speaking invitations from nearly every state in the nation, but he has turned almost all of them down...
...Most of his $400,000 campaign costs was picked up in small contributions??about three quarters from within Massachusetts and one quarter from out-of-state...
...but he believes that one way to make it colorblind is to behave as if it were...
...One could hardly expect him to become chums with Richard Russell, James Eastland and the other Senate patriarchs...
...Nor does Brooke seem particularly interested in pleasing the Republican leadership for the sake of securing future favors...
...He knows America is not colorblind...
...Big name Republicans like Richard Nixon and George Romney were carefully kept out of Massachusetts during the campaign...
...When I was being sworn in, it was a moment of great satisfaction to me that I was a United States Senator...
...I am a lawyer and politician by profession...
...In fact...
...Always his own man in politics, Brooke pre-empted the Republican nomination from Governor John Volpe and is beholden to no one for his election to the Senate...
...That spot went instead to Charles Percy, Dirksen's fellow Illinoisan, so Brooke is indebted to the Minority Leader for precious little...
...For another, Brooke unhedgingly supports the consular treaty with the Soviet Union and greater trade with the Communist bloc...
...Brooke is running for nothing, and voted against the filibuster...
...Brooke could easily take the Robert Kennedy approach, exploiting his race the way Kennedy profits from his kinship...
...For the present, he is learning the folkways of the Senate and cautiously keeping out of political debt...
...Brooke's support was invited, but alone among the new crop of gop liberals he declined...
...His staff, which is almost entirely white, reflects his self-image as Massachusetts' Senator, not "the Negro Senator...
...That is not my profession...
...Nothing I might say about the civil rights movement," Brooke observed, "would give it the recognition and praise it deserves...
...He did not believe there were such things as Negro jobs and white jobs...
...I was thinking that I would have wished very much for my father to be there to see me...
...Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, 47, polished and articulate, is the first Negro to be popularly elected as a U.S...
...Also like Kennedy, he combines ambition and political savvy with a certain humility, even naivete, which is tremendously appealing to the man in the street...
...Brooke is neither a Black Man's Negro, like, say, Adam Clayton Powell, nor a White Man's Negro, like - (perhaps the space had better be left blank...
...On the Rule 22 fight, Percy voted with Dirksen to keep the filibuster...
...As Attorney General, he once ruled that a Negro school boycott was illegal...
...That just did not cross my mind...
...He did not even get the Republican vacancy on the only exciting Banking and Currency subcommittee, Housing and Urban Affairs...
...It is a magnificent crusade...
...Both times Brooke turned it down...
...The flow of events, he says, will determine that...
...But I wasn't thinking that this was any particularly historic moment??that I was the first Negro Senator in so many years...
...Now he appears determined to pick his way carefully...
...And from the layout of things in the Senate, it looks like he will be able to pull off his independent approach...
...Immodestly, Brooke challenged a respected white Anglo-Saxon Protestant for the gop nomination for Attorney General in 1962??and narrowly won...
...Yet Brooke's attitude toward his race is representative of his independent frame of mind in other matters...
...When Percy presented his much-heralded "New Dawn" plan for promoting home ownership in the ghettos, 23 Republicans??from Jacob Javits on the left to Karl Mundt on the right??associated themselves with the plan...
...What is certain is that when he makes his first Senate speech, the nation will listen...
...For one, he dissents from Dirksen's hard-nosed attitude toward Vietnam...
...Brooke's political base in Massachusetts is quite secure...
...He plans to take part in the fight for a strong truth-in-lending bill, and he has ideas on the draft: He is considering introducing a proposal providing for a wholly professional army in peacetime...
...In 1964, while running for Attorney General, he refused to endorse Goldwater and piled up a 797,000-vote plurality, the biggest victory of any Republican that year...
...Mississippi sent two Negro Senators to Washington during Reconstruction, but they were chosen by the Legislature...
...There are two ways??or at least two extremes??to go about being a new Senator: the Edward Kennedy way of quiet ingratiation with the Establishment, and the Robert Kennedy way of flamboyant appeal to the nation over the heads of the Senate powcrs-that-be...
...His features, his speech and his attitudes are, in appearance, white...
...Brooke is not the string-along type...
...This attitude has often befuddled and annoyed Negro militants and white liberals, who mutter that Brooke is an Uncle Tom...
...Now he seems to cherish his freedom more than his ambition...
...In this he will be aided by his negritude, which gives him a decided celebrity advantage over other freshmen on the Hill...
...But why not, if it was illegal...
...Brooke has yet to make his maiden speech in the Senate, and he does not know when he will make it or what it will be about...
...Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen put in a plug for Brooke at a small fund raiser in Washington, but that was a joint affair involving Dirk-sen's son-in-law, Howard Baker Jr., now Senator from Tennessee...
...On the other hand, Brooke is too reserved and too much of a loner to follow the Edward Kennedy path...
...I've got complete freedom, complete independence," Brooke told me recently, "and I intend to make the most of it...
...There is a second reason??socio-psychological rather than personal??for Brooke's desire to blend in with the white marble exterior and white political interior of the Senate...
...almost to the day of the swearing in...
...Even among liberals, though...
...The Republican National Committee chipped in only $2,000 for his campaign...
...Each vote, each speech I make will be based on my best judgment??not on party line or on the desires of some special interest group...
...As a speaker he can spellbind audiences with an eloquence that is never emotional or demagogic, but quiet, stern, persuasive...
...His margin over Endicott Peabody in the Senate race last year was not quite as great (about 438,000), but it is more than enough to make him reasonably sure of re-election six years hence...
...Peter Barnes, former Washington correspondent for the Lowell Sun, will soon join Newsweek's staff...
...Brooke favors a pause in the bombing to bring about negotiations...
...His abstention was not due to any personal rivalry with Percy...
...He has quietly let it be known, too, that he disagrees with many of the views put forward by the Minority Leader in the Republican State of the Union speech...
...But Brooke is no Uncle Tom...
...When he was getting started in Massachusetts politics, Governor Christian Herter and then Governor Volpe both offered him the job of secretary of the Governor's Council, a post traditionally reserved for Negroes...
...Though it is impossible, he would like to avoid being known as "the Negro Senator," primarily because he does not see himself that way...
Vol. 50 • February 1967 • No. 5
