DARK MULE FROM MISSOURI
Riggs, Robert L.
Dark Mule from Missouri By ROBERT L. RIGGS THERE IS NOT in all Washington a political figure more difficult to bring into focus than W. Stuart Symington, the junior Senator from Missouri. It is...
...Having taken a $200,000 loss in order to enter government service, he had no sympathy with the members of the Eisenhower Cabinet who, in 1953, objected to selling some of their holdings...
...James P. Kem had slipped into the Senate during the Democratic disaster of 1946...
...The way it worked out, of course, nobody involved in that brawl came out looking better than he did before it started...
...Emerson was a plant gone to pot...
...Every blow he lands upon the Party's titular leader increases not his own chances but the prospect that Symington will get the prize...
...He assailed the Republican Party itself as a party that put property before people...
...The theory broke down...
...It was Symington's dream to couple the disposal agency with the RFC, thus creating both a lending and a selling unit, but he never was able to market the idea...
...His boyhood was spent in genteel poverty...
...Symington has, I believe, unlimited resources of grim, stubborn, bull-headed determination...
...Instead, the other Charles E. Wilson, "General Electric Charlie," was imported to be head of the Office of Defense Mobilization...
...It was Symington who asked the leading question of Robert T. Stevens, when the nominee for Secretary of the Army was wrestling before the Senate Armed Services committee with the question of what to do about his textile company stock...
...He was tolerated at first by politicians as a fat cat who could spread his wealth among campaign workers...
...For a time, he consoled himself with administering the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but, in 1952, he entered the race for the Democratic nomination for Senator from Missouri...
...In his crusade on behalf of plenty of planes and H-bombs and guided missiles, Symington feels he is a voice crying in a wilderness of smugness and complacency...
...He went after the Republican's voting record, called him a "do-nothing isolationist and reactionary...
...It was Symington's dream that he would get the top job of bossing the industrial effort needed to fight the North Koreans, the Chinese, and possibly the Russians...
...The first Symington had arrived in Maryland in 1790, and the family had prospered in the quarry and fertilizer business until the death blows struck against the Confederacy took the starch out of George Pickett's man...
...That is his quiet, shy, diffident manner...
...The first of these is that, because of his one-track interest in military defense against Russian attack, many party leaders have assumed he has no other deep-seated convictions...
...Nonetheless, Kem, buttressed by a McCarthy visit to the state, carried on the same sort of campaign that proved effective for Republicans in other areas...
...Stevens," Symington asked, "if we assured you you have no chance to be confirmed unless you do dispose of your holdings...
...But in 1938, along came an opportunity to take over the Emerson Electric Manufacturing Company in St...
...In a world in which all things are relative, the New York Governor and the Tennessee Senator have converted many Southerners who previously had looked upon Adlai Stevenson as a wild man into reluctant supporters of the 1952 Presidential nominee...
...He learned early one very important thing about business men who enter government service...
...It was as Secretary of the Air Force during the economy-minded regime of Defense Secretary Louis Johnson that Symington first developed his obsession...
...That career goes back beyond the 1952 election which made him a U.S...
...He had never been elected to any office anywhere...
...He was on the faculty at Amherst College when the Senator was born...
...Massachusetts-born of Maryland and Virginia ancestry, Symington had lived in Missouri less than a dozen years...
...So strongly did he feel about Johnson's economy cuts that he gave up a job he dearly loved, that of Secretary for Air...
...Rather, it is because of the contradictions between what Symington is—a fundamentally uncomplicated man—and what politicians have decided he should be...
...When children continued to arrive, Professor Symington decided he would have to abandon the cloistered halls to support them...
...Although he is a wealthy man, the belief that Symington was born with a silver spoon in his mouth is erroneous...
...degree and embarked on a distinguished, if unlucra-tive, career teaching Romance languages...
...They range from civil rights to additional arms for Israel and economic assistance to India and other Asian areas where we are contesting with the Communists for the possession of men's minds...
...The second is that Symington failed to emerge with any laurels from the one great test he has had, the outstanding opportunity to make himself a national figure of great stature...
...The harshest thing they said was that he lacked the intestinal fortitude to slug it out before the television cameras with so rough an in-fighter...
...Do they think he is malleable enough, amenable enough, pliable enough to let them mold him...
...While still in his thirties, he had made enough money to consider giving up business and making a career out of enjoying life...
...Symington married Miss Wadsworth while he was working in his uncle's foundry in Rochester, N. Y. It was his wife's talent as a singer that made him liable to the charge that he was a "cafe society playboy...
...His devotion to that idea led him to quit as Air Secretary so that he could be free to cry out against the Defense Department economies of ROBERT L RIGGS is Washington cor-respondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal...
...New Hampshire and Minnesota made them forget many harsh things they had said about Stevenson's leftish views...
...They thought Symington would come out of the contest with Senator McCarthy as the white knight who met every wicked thrust of the Wisconsin Senator and helped truth and right triumph over fraud and evil...
...He made a pilgrimage to London to talk with his hero several years ago...
...But from that office he moved into one which he and his friends thought would give him a chance to rouse the country and its public servants to the need for adequate defense...
...The people of that state were not too impressed when he offered himself...
...He tried to make capital of the fact Symington had been a Missourian for only a brief time...
...A wealthy father-in-law, a talented wife, prosperous uncles, and his own consuming ambition to amount to something soon put Symington on the road to prosperity...
...Although he is a wealthy industrialist, he denounces both publicly and privately the "trickle down" theory of prosperity and "big business Republicans" with all the ardor of a prairie state populist...
...Not long after the North Koreans attacked, it was apparent we had to return to the "czar" system of World War II...
...But every time Kefauver knocks Stevenson to his knees, he increases the antagonism Southerners feel toward the Tennes-sean...
...It was chairmanship of the National Security Resources Board...
...There is not a member of Congress who talks more like a New Dealer or who has, for his brief three and a half years in office, a better New Deal voting record than Symington...
...It did, of course, help Stevens make up his mind...
...By the end of the war, his company had turned out $100,000,000 worth of turrets and had won praise from Senator Harry Truman's War Investigating Committee...
...One of the first things Symington did was to sign a contract with William Sentner, the union's leader, even though Sentner at the time was a professing Communist...
...If they do have that low opinion of him, it is the price Symington has had to pay for being a man with an obsession throughout his public life...
...They remembered what television had done for Estes Kefauver...
...His only roots there were in the top layer of business and social life in St...
...The period of his law studies and a following period when he was starting as an attorney gave the family a double taste of hard times...
...Louis businessmen with whom Symington had become acquainted was Banker John W. Snyder, who became Truman's Secretary of the Treasury...
...The mildest thing they said about him was that he fumbled a golden opportunity, that he seemed to be always one jump behind McCarthy, that the Wisconsin Senator had him constantly on the defensive...
...Yet, Southerners, in flight from what they regard as the social and economic radicalism of Estes Kefauver and W. Averell Harriman, look to him as their dark horse hope for the Democratic Presidential nomination...
...Billed as a "society singer," she appeared in the St...
...At the same time, he made no secret of the fact that he voted for Republican nominee Wendell Willkie in 1940 because he was against a third term...
...Symington hid his disappointment well, but the turn-down, in which the then Secretary of Defense, General George C. Marshall, was reported to have had a voice, seemed to increase Symington's activity as a prophet of the early destruction of Western civilization...
...Despite the major's lack of ambition, his son, who was father of the Senator, got a Ph.D...
...Harry Truman put the influence of the White House behind his primary opponent...
...While visiting a Yale roommate, Symington met Evelyn Wadsworth, daughter of James W. Wadsworth, who served both as a Republican Senator and House member from New York, granddaughter of an earlier Senator Wadsworth, and also granddaughter of John Hay, who was secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later Secretary of State...
...That was in early 1950, before fighting started in Korea...
...His position is that the Supreme Court has said the last word on the subject...
...Louis—a move which eventually launched him into a public affairs career...
...Symington mixed it up roughly with Kem...
...My own view is that his failure to rise to the occasion in those hearings was not caused by a lack of courage so much as by an unwillingness to wallow needlessly in the many gutters selected by McCarthy...
...He hit Kem especially hard for his failure to support farm legislation...
...The Southerners, especially the Rayburn-John-son Texas leadership, must have no illusions about his views and his voting record...
...Among the St...
...By the time young Symington was ready for college—after a few months as a 17-year-old soldier in World War I— his father was doing well enough to send him to Yale...
...Senator into the period when he held high appointive office under Harry S. Truman...
...He is the gentlest Senator in the entire chamber...
...But, for whatever reason, Harry Truman decided not to give Symington the prize...
...He feels it was from her that he inherited an instinct to support the efforts to gain better political, social, and economic status for Negroes...
...Although he can, when aroused, express himself in Anglo-Saxon words of one syllable, it is difficult to picture him holding such frightening views as many Party leaders south of the border attribute to Kefauver and Harriman...
...They lived in a poor section of Baltimore until the father achieved recognition and eventually became a judge...
...He envisions himself playing much the same role as Winston Churchill played in the late 1930's...
...In fact, some of it went beyond the boundaries of gentility and was strictly of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks variety...
...If he feels that integration in Mississippi is going to be a bigger headache than it is in Missouri, he is not unique in that belief...
...Would it help you, Mr...
...His family had been living a hand-to-mouth existence ever since his grandfather, Major William Stuart Symington, came home from the Appomattox surrender, after serving on General Pickett's staff in the Army of Northern Virginia, and pretty much gave up the struggle against a troubled world...
...Early in 1941, Symington put the Emerson Company into the business of making bomber turrets...
...Louis...
...His views on the nat-tural gas bill, which Democratic Leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson rammed through Congress to an Eisenhower veto, make him eligible to be the darling of Americans for Democratic Action...
...The sad fact is that although it was McCarthy who got the Senate's vote of disapproval, after still another set of hearings, it was Symington who got a private vote of censure from those who wished him well...
...Against the advice of intimate friends, Symington allowed Snyder to persuade him to take over what seemed a hopeless task of heading the War Surplus Administration...
...Among its many tribulations, it had endured a 53-day sit-down strike rather than do business with the CIO Electrical Workers Union...
...Regis, Waldorf-Astoria, and other spots and was paid $2,000 a week...
...They would be eager now to clasp Stevenson to their bosom if they thought he could ward off either Harriman or Kefauver...
...Beyond the reasons already mentioned, there may be one other factor which causes Southerners to overlook Symington's liberal voting record and utterances...
...On one occasion, she sang at a charity bazaar and a professional agent persuaded her to sing in night clubs...
...The current expression of his obsession leads him to denounce the fiscal policies of the Eisenhower Administration, which, he contends, are crippling the defense of this country in order to achieve tax reduction and a balanced budget...
...But Symington got the nomination after what amounted almost to a house-to-house canvass through the county seat towns of Missouri...
...But in a way Symington suffered more loss than any of the others because his friends had hoped for great things from it...
...While the father was getting a doctorate and then a law degree, the young man's uncles were re-establishing the family fortune by setting up a railway equipment firm...
...Symington's single-minded pursuit of more and more planes and more and more guided missiles has made him almost mute on every other subject which comes before a member of Congress, despite the fact that he has strong views on a long list of matters...
...The Senator's mother was a devoted Episcopalian who gave much of her energy to social-welfare work, particularly among Baltimore Negroes...
...He entered law school at New York University...
...For that reason, he has adopted Churchill as his patron saint, his idol, his model...
...If the Tennessean deals Stevenson a final wound in California, the rush toward Symington, as a way to avoid Kefauver, could turn into a stampede...
...The Southerners' apparent hope they can make him over seems to arise from two related matters...
...It is not because he is complex either as a public person or as an individual that the picture persists in remaining fuzzy...
...Do they pay him the poor compliment of believing that, in return for the nomination, he would change into the kind of candidate and President they would insist that he be...
...On the advice of the late O. Max Gardner, he disposed of his market holdings when he became head of the surplus disposal agency, although there was no law requiring him to do so...
...He was raising his voice just as loudly against Democrats when they were in power as he now is raising it against Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson and other Pentagon lieutenants of the five-star general in the White House...
...He carried it with him into the era of the Korean war when he was, at the start of that conflict, head of the National Security Resources Board...
...The Symington obsession was and is that he is a voice crying in the wilderness, trying to warn his countrymen that, unless they heed his call for ever greater military power, they will be wiped off the earth by Russian atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs...
...When she gave it up, she was offered $3,500 as an inducement to continue...
...But every instinct in him forbade him to get sufficiently close to McCarthy intellectually to put a thumb in his eye at the proper time, to bash him on the shins, to apply a knee to the groin...
...His Republican opponent was not one of the more impressive members of that party...
...Kem rode the Eisenhower train through Missouri, his hands firmly gripping the coattails of the Presidential nominee...
...That muffed opportunity was the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954...
...Why then is 54-year-old Symington labeled the Southern choice for a convention compromise...
...McCarthy promptly sensed the disdain, contempt, and repugnance Symington felt toward him and recognized the Missouri Senator's disinclination to dirty his hands on him...
...How any Dixie politician can find comfort in Symington's views on Segregation is something none of them has yet explained...
...One of the assumptions then was that we had finally got the government organized so that, when a military crisis arose, we could carry on a national effort without bringing a lot of "czars" to Washington...
...Louis Johnson...
...He called him "a Broadway play-boy," "the idol of New York cafe society," "our friend newly-arrived from the East...
...He knows by heart much of what the former Prime Minister has written about military problems...
...In the November election, Symington won by a margin of 150,000 despite the fact that Eisenhower, carried the state by 29,000...
...Hence, McCarthy was able always to carry the fight to Symington, calling him "Sanctimonious Stu...
...The grim stubbornness Symington has displayed in pursuit of his obsession ought to be evidence he cannot be seduced from any views he holds strongly...
...He used all the Republican arsenal—the Korean War, the Truman-Acheson foreign policy, Alger Hiss, mink coats, and corruption...
...The best Symington was able to do with McCarthy in that sort of fray was to shout at him, "Why don't you see a psychiatrist...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
