PROUD BODY

HUITT, RALPH K.

Proud Body Citadel: the story of the u. s. senate, by William S. White. Harper. 274 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt AFEW years ago William S. White, the chief Congressional correspondent...

...He is profoundly aware that "the real authority of the Senate is at bottom a moral-constitutional authority and this authority itself rests at last upon a great, single ideal, the ideal of fair play...
...What this small and proud body has to contribute to the life of the great society is, in the main, very good indeed...
...The conservatism that is slow to change is also slow to panic...
...In this body, as in other human groups sufficiently small and continuous for intimate group life, there are unwritten but powerful norms for the behavior of members...
...Those who are not sensitive to the requirements of the parliamentary way of life, or who deliberately flout them, may be widely-known in the country but will be without influence in the Institution...
...That book was a political, not a conventional, biography...
...in a sense it faces the past...
...It preserves the Constitution's concern for a separation of powers and the integrity of the states...
...Those who know them intuitively and conform to them gain status in the group...
...Coming as it did soon after Taft's death, it succeeded admirably in striking a balance and giving a perspective on a life often filled with acrimonious controversy...
...That authority is threatened, he believes, by irresponsibility and lawlessness in the conduct of investigations, and by abuse of Senatorial immunity from action for libel or slander for what is said in committees or on the floor...
...Tolerance and good manners are virtues that are valued...
...It is the integrity of the Senate that most impresses William S. White...
...The life it describes is not finished but may, indeed, be coterminous with that of the Republic...
...Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt AFEW years ago William S. White, the chief Congressional correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a Pulitzer prize biography called The Taft Story...
...Its chamber is small, so that debate can proceed at a conversational level...
...It was Richard Russell and his committee who restored reason and reaffirmed the principle of civilian control over the military when MacArthur was recalled...
...We have needed such a book on the Senate...
...They are the work of a man who has observed his subjects at close range for a long time, with respect and sympathy wholly untinged with sentiment...
...That is why it is the chosen political instrument of the Southern virtuosos, who exact through it "the South's unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg," and the despair of those whose desire for rapid social change requires positive action by the government...
...They have the same intellectual comprehension of the basic values, the same almost tactile sense of the moods and predilections of what is described...
...they are the "Senate types," the members of the "Inner Club," who set the tone and decide the great questions...
...White likes to refer to the Senate as "the Institution...
...Nevertheless the two books are much alike in style and spirit...
...The Senate of the United States, as its members love to call it, is not universally loved, and it is not necessary that it should be...
...What is important is that it be generally understood...
...Both books are fair—an achievement of considerable magnitude in dealing with political actors whose roles affect so immediately and heavily the lives and aspirations of us all...
...And that is why the President (whose institutional compulsion is innovation) and the Senate never can really understand each other...
...The Senate is rooted in the past...
...it underscores the stability and timelessness of the pattern of behavior there...
...The capitalization is deliberate...
...It is the Senate itself which provides the forum where reasoned argument gets its most respectful hearing, and a climate where a great individual still can flower in his own unique way...
...The Senate, as White properly emphasizes, is a small body...
...It did not try to tell all the details of Taft's life but to tell what kind of man he was and how he got that way...
...On most great questions, the author reminds us, the Senate comes down on the side of the constitutional principle...
...He warns the Senate, in words that members of that august body would do well to read and heed, that these two evils "can erode the moral base on which the Senate in the end must stand and which once crumbled could not in many lifetimes be rebuilt in strength and durability...
...A member may be disciplined finally for grievous and repeated offenses, not against the great society, but against the good order of the club...
...It gives force to the Constitution's safeguards of the rights of minorities—not just any minority, but the sectional minority Calhoun meant when he talked about the Concurrent Majority...
...It is conservative in the true meaning of the term...
...It was the oddly-paired Taft and Claude Pepper who stood resolutely against the drafting of striking railroadmen...
...The Senate, in a word, is the kind of body the Constitution-makers meant it to be...
...This book is not about a man but an institution...
...But he does not excuse the cruel lapse in the moral sense of the Senate when for several years the motives and loyalty of honorable men, including many who had served their country in high office, were impugned almost without challenge...

Vol. 21 • July 1957 • No. 7


 
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