NOTES IN THE NEWS
notes in the news Congressional Hypocrisy When Senator William Proxmire, Wisconsin's maverick Democrat, rose on the Senate floor recently to ask if the Senate really needed five $6,714 Lincoln...
...Democrats running in marginal districts or states . . . know their opponents are holding their fire until after the primary and intend to go all-out once Teddy is the official nominee...
...The Campaign Trail Now that Labor Day is at hand, the curtain is about to rise on one of the most significant political campaigns in recent history...
...The Medicare Issue Democratic Party strategists who have high hopes that the medicare issue will provide them with considerable political mileage this fall— Senate Republicans voted almost solidly against the Administration's program—are convinced the outcome of the Tennessee primaries confirms their expectations...
...Meanwhile, the American Medical Association has decided to play politics on an unprecedented scale: Borrowing from the techniques of organized labor, the AMA set up the American Medical Political Action Committee (AMPAC) and gave it $50,000 as a starter...
...One of the results is that a Congressman's campaign for reelection is literally subsidized by the taxpayer...
...In the Democratic primary of that state, Wilkes T. Thrasher, a militant supporter of the Kennedy plan to establish hospital insurance under Social Security, defeated veteran Representative James B. Frazier, Jr., for the nomination, which is tantamount to election...
...At stake are not only control of Congress and the fate of the New Frontier but, quite possibly, the Republican choice for President in 1964...
...The odds on a Hughes victory are admittedly slim, but Newsweek describes his chances as "not impossible...
...End quote...
...The one thing you can't call the Communists is Pharisees...
...Research machinery was set up to provide material for the campaigns, and the group agreed to meet again in January, 1963, to evaluate the result of the elections and plan for 1964...
...The conference voted to raise a sizeable campaign chest between now and November, to be allocated to peace candidates on the basis of need...
...The four House masseurs, for example, are, inexplicably, on the payroll of the Capitol architect...
...The outcome of the Democratic contest may well ride on how the two candidates perform in the two television debates that have now been arranged...
...candidates for governor, running in three of our most populous states, will turn, in great measure, on how they fare this fall...
...A Gentleman's Conspiracy There is evidence that Congress is well aware of its financial inconsistencies and legalized trickery...
...However, while Governor Rockefeller's timing in hastily associating himself with the Dirksen-Halleck rigidity on foreign policy in general and test ban negotiations in particular was doubtless a calculated political maneuver, it represented no break with his past position...
...His goal this year is an even more massive margin than he rolled up four years ago because he is convinced this would dispose of any lingering doubt that he should be the Republican Presidential nominee in 1964...
...His continuing insistence on a massive program of fallout shelters has won him considerable headline treatment...
...They receive allowances for long-distance telephone calls, telegrams, stationery, travel, stamps, and rent for an office back home...
...Foreign travel—free—is available on the slightest pretext of official business...
...In the planning stages are still more buildings—including a new, functional Capitol...
...Backed by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Political Action for Peace (PAX), and other peace organizations, Hughes, surprisingly, is getting substantial backing in a race featuring the President's brother, a nephew of the Speaker of the House, the son of a former Senator and ambassador to the United Nations, and an incumbent Congressman...
...Senator Paul Douglas, Illinois' expense-conscious Democrat, has pointed out that Chicago's 2,359-car Grant Park garage cost only $8 million, or $3,349 per car...
...The Congressional Record is used freely as a campaign tool: Members of Congress insert into the Record any remarks, speeches, editorials, or articles they desire...
...Chotiner who directed the recent unsuccessful drive of a far Right-wing Republican to unseat incumbent Senator Thomas Kuchel because the latter was thought to be too liberal to be a Republican...
...Ted and Ed The struggle for the Senate seat in Massachusetts is generating increase ing bitterness as the primary election approaches—September 18...
...Our lament is concerned with the abuse of these allowances for political campaigning, for subsidized luxuries, for the widespread practice of writing letters of congratulations to constituents when they marry, have babies, get jobs or promotions, and all the other costly perquisites of membership in the club...
...The extension of the East Front of the Capitol has been described by Douglas as "the most expensive building in the history of America in terms of cost per cubic foot...
...we swear to the flag in the name of Him who said, "Swear not at all...
...Nixon Comes Home In the dramatic contest for California's governorship, Mr...
...The same Senators who defeated the medicare bill on the ground that it was socialism are entitled to receive free medical care and drugs either on Capitol Hill, or at government hospitals, where they pay only for their room and board...
...Nixon's repudiation of the John Birch Society as "a great political mistake" and contended that the Birchers "are the hard core of the Republican Party...
...Kastenmeier, probably the most controversial of the group because of his deep involvement in the Liberal Project, was not only reelected but led his party, including Mr...
...But the signs may well have been misleading...
...And the Court's decision is, in fact, constitutionally indefensible as long as the name of God continues to be profaned (or even used) in other public places: If the prayer must go, so must the motto of the U.S...
...An old Senate custom," said Senator John O. Pastore in defense of the limousine appropriation before his subcommittee...
...All the participants were united on the need to make reversal of the arms race a central issue in present-day politics...
...In an informal chat with newsmen, Mr...
...Outmoded buildings must sometime be replaced...
...Mint, "In God We Trust...
...In what the distinguished Washington correspondent Marquis Childs terms "a striking phenomenon of the time," twenty candidates in twelve states are running on peace platforms—disarmament and an end to nuclear testing...
...It was Mr...
...Limousines are assigned to the majority and minority leaders and whips, and the president pro-tem...
...Nixon in all his winning campaigns before 1956...
...But nothing, it seems, is too good for the legislators who control their own as well as the nation's pursestrings...
...Supreme Court's recent decision, Baker v. Can, in the Tennessee case...
...More recently, however, he has been veering Rightward, both in his speeches on the stump and in his choice of campaign aides...
...It is still given in some of them...
...It was Mr...
...The occupancy list is kept secret, even from other members of Congress...
...Thus: ¶ A member of Congress can use his office staff and equipment to turn out anything short of an outright appeal for votes, and mail it postage free...
...Down the devouring firel Of course the Court does not care whether the pupils profane the name of the Lord, as long as they do it on their own time and not on the taxpayers...
...The most recent move away from Center came with his appointment of Murray Chotiner as a principal campaign lieutenant...
...intellectual community, which is not numerically great but is articulate and influential, is cold to Edward Kennedy, although ninety-five per cent of them support the President...
...It is our feeling that the nation can get along fine with the present Capitol, but, with some honorable exceptions, there is considerable room for improvement in the choice of tenants to occupy the building...
...They are concerned wth maintaining the mummery of God in a Godless country which is engaged in a war for the world with another Godless country which has the forthrightness to call itself Godless...
...Of those defeated, several of whom were from marginal districts heavily influenced by the religious phase of the Presidential contest, every one ran ahead of fellow-candidate John F. Kennedy...
...At first, his opponent, Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy, brother of the President, refused, but later agreed to two on television...
...Theophrastus Such peace programs met in Chicago recently in what may turn out to be an historic meeting...
...Aid to education, health and welfare measures, foreign aid, public works to ease unemployment —all these are carefully scrutinized and often ruthlessly slashed or killed outright, in the virtuous name of economy...
...Far more emphatic was the judgment of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, an independent organization with pronounced liberal views...
...It was Mr...
...The only question, as he sees it, is whether the President "will be hurt more by the blow to his prestige if his brother is defeated or by resentment across the country if he wins...
...Such a people is headed for the flame of devouring fire...
...The fact that Teddy's candidacy involves exploitation of the reputation of the President is arousing widespread resentment," the Committee noted...
...In the last ten years, the legislators have spent $200 million for their own buildings—$372,-000 per member...
...McCormack does say is that "the President is going to be hurt in this election...
...The present Rockefeller strategy is to wear his conservative uniform as much as possible to allay the fears and entice the support of the Gold-water-Dirksen-Tower school of Republicanism...
...Edward J. McCormack, the state's Attorney General and nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack, took the initiative in demanding the debates...
...Frazier, who has served seven terms, had voted with the majority of the House Ways and Means Committee to keep medicare bottled up in the Committee...
...Washington columnist Doris Flee-son, writing from Boston, reported recently that while most Democrats believe Mr...
...The AMPAC hopes to mobilize most of the medical profession for political action...
...In Tennessee, for example, doctors sent pleas to support anti-medicare candidates along with their bills...
...Medical treatment, therapy, tests, and surgery come with the compliments of the taxpayers...
...They profaned my name," the Lord explained to his prophet Ezekiel...
...in segregated churches...
...A statement prepared by one of the three working committees pointed out that militarism not only threatens the nation with war but handicaps the development of true liberalism as well, creating a hostile climate for the achievement of civil liberties and reforms such as national health insurance, aid to education, low-cost housing, and the like...
...But the deplorers are not concerned with constitutionality...
...McCormack has been cautious in exploiting the "too many Kennedys" issue, and had made no charge by late August that either President Kennedy or Attorney General Robert Kennedy was exerting pressure to help their younger brother...
...The Governor is an old hand at milking the cold war...
...They may create an abomination of desolation, but they don't go around saying, "Lord, Lord," while they do it...
...But the overriding fact is that Scripture forbids us to say it— in or out of school—if we don't mean it...
...The Progressive plans to provide comprehensive coverage of significant campaign developments in its October and November issues...
...Congress' own television studios charge $20 for a five minute film that would cost $400 commercially...
...For this was a measure designed for the convenience and comfort of Congress itself, and in this area the generosity of Congress is boundless...
...Louis Post-Dispatch put it, his is a "dedication to the arms race as a way of life...
...Meyer was defeated in his bid for reelection in the complex 1960 campaign, but the evidence is not at all conclusive that defeat represented repudiation of his policies...
...The Court's decision is deplored by all true believers, including Herbert Hoover (and, I dare say, John Edgar), General Eisenhower, Cardinal Spellman, the John Birchers, and all Congressmen up for reelection...
...Breaking the Silence Last month, in an editorial on our sterile China policy, The Progressive urged again, as it has so often on this and other issues, open discussion and debate of affirmative alternatives to present frozen attitudes on American foreign policy...
...Their comments take such form as: "You can't beat a Kennedy here but of course I'm not going to vote for him...
...The evidence is impressive that these new-style candidates are no wild-eyed dreamers high in ivory towers...
...Rockefeller on the Right New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller seems to be a leadpipe cinch for reelection...
...His most recent appearance in that garb, the press reported, occurred when he lashed out at President Kennedy's new proposals for a ban on nuclear testing...
...and we perpetuate an economic system which leaves men saying, with the Lord, "I hungered, and ye fed me not...
...The record appears even more dismal in the light of its overweaning concern for its own comfort and the status of its individual members...
...It houses additional suites for selected Senators—"hideaway" offices with unmarked doors, roped off from the public...
...One of these "printing" bills provided for a $5,000 entertainment fund for the House Foreign Affairs Committee— plus $14,000 for employes to administer the fund...
...Now comes a hopeful possibility that the current Congressional campaign will break the silence—or at least dent it...
...The rate of increase in Congressional housekeeping expense in the past ten years has been six times the rate of increase in the Federal budget generally...
...It is said of one Senator, "He keeps no files, just puts everything in the Record...
...The largest single type of spending in which Congress indulges itself is for office space...
...The Court orders that there shall be no conversion by the ferule...
...And the penalty is thunder, earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire...
...But look at us: We praise the Lord (who said, "Love thine enemy") while we pass the ammunition...
...Of major significance in the current movement to make peace a vibrant political issue is the determination of SANE to participate actively and on a national scale in the campaigns of individual candidates...
...Chotiner who characterized Mr...
...Nixon's "soft-on-Commu-nism" strategy against Adlai Stevenson in 1952...
...Chotiner had become too "hot" as a result of his involvement in a Senate investigation of influence-peddling in Washington...
...No one knows how much it will cost, but the total will run well over the $83 million it cost to build the Pentagon, the largest building on earth...
...As a consequence of the fear of being misunderstood and branded pro-Communist," we said, "there has been an oppressive silence on this critical issue, for much too long...
...It is profanation...
...What Mr...
...Kennedy will win, "a surprising number give him the back of their hand at the same time...
...notes in the news Congressional Hypocrisy When Senator William Proxmire, Wisconsin's maverick Democrat, rose on the Senate floor recently to ask if the Senate really needed five $6,714 Lincoln Continentals and a $4,173 Mercury Monterey to transport its mail, the response of most of his fellow-Senators ranged from apathy to annoyance...
...A number of the peace candidates— Democrats, Republicans, and independents—several of their campaign managers, and representatives of sup porting organizations involved itt The Mummery of God The wicked children of Israel were shamed and confounded for having advertised themselves among the heathen as the people of the Lord...
...Last year, twenty-five printing bills came to the floor together and were passed at the rate of one a minute...
...Kennedy, in every county in his district—which, incidentally, is the district in which The Progressive is published...
...He is now seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S...
...Chotiner who was the architect of Mr...
...The Presidential ambitions of three G.O.P...
...Meanwhile, we report below on some of the more interesting sidelights of the tune-up phase of the political struggle...
...The bright flame of idealism may inspire them, but there is also a hard shell of realism, too, not only in their recognition of the urgency of debating the issues of foreign policy and charting a more creative course, but in their sensing that a good many millions of Americans are, in the politicians' term, running scared...
...They are New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, California's former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and Michigan's automobile magnate George Romney...
...McCormack complained that the Kennedy forces will have spent a half million dollars by primary election day while he will have to make do with $100,000...
...In short, as the St...
...They believe there is a better way out, and they are willing to explore it...
...These are then reprinted, and as excerpts from The Congressional Record are automatically eligible for mailing free under the franking privilege...
...Fulton had refused to concede the outcome in late August as his supporters cried "fraud" in the counting of absentee ballots...
...Candidates who feel threatened by this are a bit sardonic at Presidential expressions of concern for their elections...
...we worship God (who said, "He who does not love his brother, how can he love me...
...Last year almost ninety million pieces of mail were sent out under the franking privilege, some of which was genuinely official business, but most of this tremendous volume was thinly-veiled campaign material...
...The current Congress has a shabby record in discharging its responsibility to the people and to the nation...
...It was Chotiner who served as manager and hatchet-man for Mr...
...Under this proposal the present building would be retained as a ceremonial structure, museum, and tourist attraction...
...There can be no serious objection to reasonable allowances to Congress for staff, telephone, printing, postage, and all the other appropriations necessary to conduct government business efficiently and promptly...
...The lawmakers enjoy subsidized haircuts (free to Senators and seventy-five cents for Representatives), subsidized meals, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and masseurs...
...The taxpayer picks up the tab for the difference...
...Authorized but not begun is a 1,900-car underground garage at an estimated cost of $42 million, or $22,000 per car...
...Senators can get most of their printing at taxpayers' expense through the Senate Service Department...
...Confounding the 'Pros' Probably the best-known of the candidates is Harvard history professor H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of the late Chief Justice of the United States Charles Evans Hughes, who is running in the name-studded race for the Senate in Massachusetts...
...Except for the rare occasions when some upstart like Senator Proxmire comes along, a gentleman's conspiracy operates to pass legislative appropriations quietly and frequently concealed in camouflage...
...And now the Supreme Court forbids the State of New York to profane the name of the Lord by allowing its public schools to subject the pupils to a daily prayer which they no more mean than their parents mean it on Sunday...
...Mr...
...In a recent report, the Committee warned that the Democratic Party is being weakened nationally and the President's leadership gravely damaged by the presence of the totally inexperienced Ted Kennedy on the Bay State ballot...
...Often, these bills bear no numbers or titles, and frequently copies are not available...
...Louis Post-Dispatch editorial observed, "intelligent young people who refuse to accept the inevitability of the arms race...
...And it strikes down the myth that the'child who insists on being excused from the mumbo-jumbo is uninjured: The child is branded, exactly and precisely like the child in the Communist countries who, at his parents' insistence, continues to receive religious instruction in the public schools...
...After months of wooing liberals and independents, he is now sporting the spangles of the Right on critical issues...
...In that war we are advertising ourselves among the heathen as the people of the Lord...
...Nixon against Helen Gahagan Douglas...
...In a second Tennessee Congressional race, Representative J. Carlton Loser, another conservative who opposed hospital insurance under Social Security, had the fight of his life and may have barely won a disputed contest by only seventy-two votes against State Senator Richard H. Fulton, an ardent advocate of medicare...
...Up the Supreme Court...
...Chotiner master-minded all the Nixon campaigns until mid-1956 when the then Vice President dropped him...
...They are for the most part," a St...
...It is in the area of allowances and services that Congress has been most kind to itself—and most lax in observance of its own rules...
...The goal is a $400,000 war chest to seek the election of Congressional candidates who oppose passage of the King-Anderson bill which embodies the Social Security concept in hospital insurance...
...Probably the most deplorable aspect of the whole sorry business is the sneaky techniques Congress uses to practice its expensive chiseling...
...Down the wall of separation between East and West Berlin (but not between North and South Korea...
...true believers, all...
...Chotiner who conceived and executed the widely criticized "pink sheet" campaign for Mr...
...Miss Fleeson learned that the Harvard-M.I.T...
...In one Boston suburb, a sixth of the voters signed his petition...
...He also stood against President Eisenhower's proposed exchange of visits with Premier Khrushchev and any relaxation of trade barriers between East and West...
...We find intolerable the piling on of special privileges—as if our Senators and Congressmen were oriental satraps, rather than representatives of the people, accountable to the people...
...In other words, if you don't mean it, don't say it...
...All the other elections for governor and for the state legislatures also carry unusual importance this year because most states will be confronted with the need for reapportionment next year as a consequence of the U.S...
...Up the wall of separation (between Church and State...
...Several years ago he advocated ending the nuclear test moratorium —long before the Soviets broke it...
...Nixon first presented himself to the electorate as a middle-of-the-road man of moderation who repudiated the support of the extreme Right John Birch Society...
...They also fear that this will be an effective issue, capping the picture of the President's other relatives and friends swarming around official Washington...
...Rising now is a third House Office Building...
...Hughes achieved with relative ease what the "pros" derided as impossible: He not only collected the 72,514 valid signatures necessary to earn a place on the ballot as an independent, but his 1,500 enthusiastic canvassers gathered more than twice that number...
...All this, and more, has driven the cost of keeping a Member of Congress in Washington to $275,000 a year, and the bill keeps rising steadily...
...A people who put "In God We Trust" on their pennies, and who put their trust in the pennies, is a people who "with their lips do honor me, but have removed their heart far from me...
...In many cases they won more votes in defeat than they had won in victory two years before...
...The six limousines Proxmire questioned under an appropriation for "Mail Transportation" are not used for carrying the mail at all— they are assigned to the Secretary of the Senate, the financial clerk, the sergeant-at-arms, the deputy sergeant-at-arms, and the secretaries of the majority and minority—all political appointees...
...When some of these fresh voices were silenced by defeat in 1960, many liberals ran for cover, convinced that peace was still too shaky a platform on which to base a political career...
...Out-and-out campaign literature is available at cut rates from two private printing shops housed free, through the ruse of carrying the owners on the House payroll, in the old House Office Building...
...Measures appropriating funds for Congress are frequently brought to the floor at odd moments by unanimous consent, usually when few members are present...
...Some advocate recognition of Communist China and her admission to the United Nations, the mere mention of which strikes terror in the hearts of professional politicians...
...It was Mr...
...False Echoes of the Past Four years ago, a similar hopeful note was sounded in the election to the House of a number of peace-oriented candidates, including Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, Byron Johnson of Colorado, Meyer of Vermont, and several others, all Democrats...
...Another standout candidate is William Meyer, Vermont Democrat, who astounded the nation in 1958 by walking off with Vermont's single House seat—the first Democrat to achieve this near-miracle in a hundred years—on an all-out peace platforrq...
Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9
