The Empire Builders

On the floor of the U.S. Senate last week, two aged, reactionary spoilsmen, both vindictive, determined and ruthless, were waging a joint fight for power. Both, chip by chip, were being whittled down to size. One was 80-year-old Kenneth Douglas McKellar, the choleric Tennessee feudist who heads the all-powerful Appropriations Committee; the other was Nevada's silver-maned, silver-minded Patrick A. McCarran, 73, chairman of the scarcely less powerful Judiciary Committee.

They were dangerous men to tangle with. There was no Senator who did not have federal projects in mind--rivers, harbors, post offices, federal buildings--which needed the approval of vitriolic old Kenneth McKellar, a man who never forgives and never forgets. There was hardly a Senator who was not also thinking about some patronage jobs--a federal judgeship, a spot as U.S. attorney--or some legal claim in his own state. All such matters have to be approved by Pat McCarran's Judiciary Committee. And McCarran was also McKellar's right bower on the Appropriations Committee.

Working hand-in-glove, the two old demagogues had used the legislative weapons given them by seniority to crowd into the whole field of foreign and domestic policy. Other members were threatened and badgered if they failed to go along with the McKellar-McCarran axis. Administration officials were called away from their jobs and up to Capitol Hill to be bullied and harassed. Under McCarran's chairmanship, the EGA watchdog committee (which wanted $344,000 expense money next year) had become a dirt-digging machine to supply Kenneth McKellar's rancorous attacks on EGA.

Sheepherders, Yes. Last week the first cracks in the McKellar-McCarran empire began to appear. With considerable courage, Majority Leader Scott Lucas had led the successful bipartisan drive to pass an EGA bill without the crippling amendments written into it by McKellar's Appropriations Committee. Example: McCarran's proposal to give $50 million to Franco's Spain. Victorious in that fight, Lucas then turned on Pat McCarran.

All session long, McCarran had bottled up in his Judiciary Committee the liberalized D.P. bill which the Administration was determined to push through before adjournment. Under the pretense of looking into subversive aliens in the U.S., McCarran had run a one-man filibuster, playing back the undocumented allegations of such old Un-American Activities Committee favorites as Spy Queen Elizabeth Bentley, baying off onto the subject of spies in the U.N. secretariat. McCarran was in a hurry to admit only one set of immigrants: 250 sheepherders to solve a labor shortage in his own state of Nevada.

Visiting Democrat. Majority Leader Lucas offered McCarran one last chance to report out some kind of D.P. bill--even if it was the shabby bill which McCarran himself had proposed." When would he be ready? Replied Pat: "Probably not before next May." Well, what if the committee reported out the McCarran bill anyhow? Pat hit the ceiling. "I would be forced to oppose my own bill," he roared. "I have been gathering a lot of material on this question for weeks. I have enough to fill the Congressional Record from now to next Christmas."

Last week Democrat Lucas took an unprecedented step. At the invitation of New York's Republican Irving Ives, he appeared before the Republican Policy Committee to ask for help. "This matter," he told the G.O.P., "doesn't involve politics. It involves human beings, their lives and their futures. And it involves the prestige of this nation. Both parties are pledged to a more liberal law."

Republican Policy Chairman Robert Taft agreed. Six Republicans and six Democrats agreed to file a motion to order a D.P. bill out of the Judiciary Committee. If successful, it would be the first time a bill had been pried out of a Senate committee since 1932. It would also be the first real setback McCarran and McKellar had met since they set out to crack the whip over the Senate.

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