Mr. Speaker

(See Cover)

The great walnut doors of the U.S. House of Representatives swung wide, and Doorkeeper William ("Fishbait") Miller announced in his drawlingest Mississippi delivery the arrival of a distinguished member. Through the door came a tall, gaunt man with a shock of white hair, rimless glasses and a thin-lipped smile. The House rose in welcome, and Massachusetts' Representative John William McCormack made his way slowly down the center aisle. His peers had just elected him the 45th Speaker of the House.

When McCormack mounted the rostrum to voice his thanks and to take the oath of office (administered by Georgia's Carl Vinson, the dean of the House), his smile flickered. It was a supreme moment for John McCormack--one he had dreamed of for half his life. Yet McCormack could sense a melancholy and a reserve in the House mood.

The House was haunted. McCormack evoked the spirit in the opening words of his acceptance speech: "Speaker Rayburn was not only a great man. He was a good man." For all of McCormack's days as Speaker, he will be pursued by the memory of his predecessor and dear friend, the little Texan who had presided over the House more than twice as long as any other man. The House had rarely given a Speaker such wholehearted trust and respect.

There was no Democratic challenge to Majority Leader McCormack's more or less automatic succession to Rayburn's chair--nor was there any marked enthusiasm about it. Some liberal columnists and editorial writers grumbled, but the young liberals of the House, much closer in "style" to their President than to their new Speaker, were too prudent to voice their misgivings publicly.

Beyond these liberals, there was general House concern about the capacity of John McCormack to achieve real stature in the Speaker's chair. All could agree that McCormack, after 33 years in the House, has a keen and crafty mind, that he is a diligent worker and a dangerous debater, with a knifelike sarcasm that can cut an opponent to tatters. McCormack delights in being described as "The Fighting Irishman from Boston," and he is all of that. But some Congressmen wonder if that is enough.

Power & Trappings. McCormack is the first Roman Catholic to attain the speakership; one of the futile arguments mentioned by the anti-McCormack press was that with one Catholic in the White House and another, Mike Mansfield, leading the Senate Democrats, it would be asking too much of non-Catholics to elevate a third to the speakership. At 70, McCormack is the second-oldest man to win election (the oldest: Illinois' Henry Rainey, who was 72 when elected Speaker in 1933). He is the third Northern Democrat to become Speaker in this century. The seventh Bay Stater to lead the House, he puts Massachusetts far in the lead as the mother of Speakers (following are Virginia and Kentucky, each with four).

The Speaker of the House of Representatives ranks right behind Lyndon Johnson in the presidential succession. In power potential he stands second only to the President. "The Speaker," said Speaker Thomas B. Reed, "has one Superior and no peer." When he and the President are of the same party, the Speaker is expected to be the chief White House ally on Capitol Hill. The Speaker must be a skilled and cool parliamentarian, in complete control of the 437 men and women of the House, able to interpret, to arbitrate, and to act swiftly and certainly. Through his various powers, controls and discretions, he can exercise enormous influence on the flow of legislation. No law may be enacted without the Speaker's signature. His right to refuse recognition to members rising to speak on the floor is a legislative tool of immense power; his discretionary privilege of entertaining or refusing to entertain a motion is another.

In his prestigious new job, Speaker McCormack is paid $35,000 a year, plus $10,000 for expenses (an ordinary Representative gets $22,500). He also inherits two elaborate suites of offices and a cozy nook, a Cadillac with chauffeur, a private dining room. The power and the trappings of the Speaker are a big step up for any man--and a long way from the drab South Boston streets where John McCormack got his start.

John Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller have won full political rights for the very rich--their sons may aspire to any office. John McCormack's rise to the Speakership is a forceful reminder of an older American theme.

The Deserving Poor. The South Boston of McCormack's boyhood was a neighborhood of shabby respectability. South Boston's citizens, almost all Irish American, were poor but industrious (the "deserving poor"). Drawn together by their church (at one time, South Boston claimed to produce more nuns and priests per capita than any other U.S. community) and by the bitter prejudice of Boston's entrenched Yankees, the Irish were fanatically loyal to one another. A local saying has it that "if God came down to South Boston and ran for office against a fellow who was born in the district, he'd be licked." When he was asked about his friendship with John McCormack, Richard Cardinal Gushing put it succinctly: "Of course we're friends. I'm from South Boston, he's from South Boston."

John McCormack was just 13 when his bricklayer father died. Besides his mother, there were two younger brothers, Edward ("Knocko") and Daniel, to support. (Nine other brothers and sisters died in infancy or youth.) Mary Ellen O'Brien McCormack was a strapping woman with a great heart, who cheer fully took on the burdens of her friends and neighbors. "She was the Mary Worth of the district," says her grandson, Edward McCormack Jr. "The one whom everybody came to with their troubles, arbiter of disputes, nurse of the sick, comforter of the oppressed." But Mary Ellen could not manage alone after her husband's death, so John quit school and went to work. "It was him that kept us together," recalls Knocko McCormack. "The main support was that he had a pretty good paper route, there in Andrews Square. He never went to high school, never went to college. He did nothin' but work. He had to work, to keep his mother together and to keep the two of us--my brother and me--from goin' to the Home."

"Then You Moved On." Rent for a two-room tenement was only $1.25 a week, but there were many times when John and his mother were unable to raise that much. "You never had no regular address," says Knocko. "You just stayed in one place as long as the landlord would let you, and then you moved on. We were poor, we were poor. We're not proud of it, but we don't shun the fact that we were the poorest family in South Boston." The family stove was fueled with stray lumps of coal that Knocko and Dannie picked up in the railroad yards, and John's meager earnings were supplemented by a "pauper's basket" from the welfare department. "I had to go down to the Chardon Street welfare home and chop wood so we could get the basket," says Knocko. "Those baskets didn't have any oranges or grapefruit or nuts in 'em. It was a yard of dried fish and a bag of potatoes and maybe a little bag of onions." Friends still recall seeing young John McCormack crouched on a curbstone, reading by the flickering light of a gas street lamp. He devoured dozens of Dick Merriwell* adventures, and he retains a reverence for the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger. "Parents," he says, "should make Horatio Alger stories must reading for their children. They build fine character."

Knocko's Horse. The McCormack brothers went different ways. Dan, the youngest, served in France in World War I, afterward became a drifter and an odd-job man, is now living in Texas. Knocko drove a team for a while, served overseas with the Yankee Division, returned to South Boston, where he ran a saloon that was the scene of many a celebrated Donnybrook. A huge (275 Ibs.), roaring Irishman with a blackthorn wit, Knocko and his antics have delighted Boston for decades. Once, on a dull afternoon, he persuaded two plumbers to install an overhead shower and a concrete drain in the middle of his living room. When his wife came home, she found Knocko seated under the shower, pulling the chain. He silenced her with a question. "And why should I hafta move when I want shower?" In 1940, when Knocko named grand marshal of the Evacuation Day* parade, there were newspaper stories wondering how anyone could find a horse that would not collapse under the marshal's weight. "It is the tradition that the chief marshal must ride a horse," roared Knocko. "Therefore I'll push my personal feelings out the window. I just want to say that I don't want to get into trouble with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." Knocko led the parade--on a spavined, swaybacked but steady old ash-cart horse --to the cheers and laughter of all South Boston.

John McCormack, as spare and serious as Knocko is broad and fun loving, chose the Alger road. From his paper route, he moved to a $3.50-a-week job as an errand boy in a brokerage firm. Then Lawyer William T. Way offered him $4 a week as an office boy. "He turned out to be my benefactor," McCormack wrote, years later, "for he encouraged me to read law. The day I left the broker's office and went to work for Mr. Way proved to be the turning point in my life, even though at the time I made the decision I was guided solely by the fact that my new job gave me 50-c- more a week."

At 21, McCormack had read enough law to pass his bar examinations (just before the Massachusetts legislature passed a law requiring two years of high school as a prerequisite to admission to the bar). Mary Ellen McCormack had died a few months earlier. There has been only one other woman in John McCormack's life: Harriet Joyce, a neighborhood girl, who became his bride in 1920. A talented contralto, Harriet had sung in St. Augustine's Church choir, gave up a budding career for a semi-cloistered life as Mrs. Mc Cormack. Their romance has been an un fading valentine. The McCormacks, who are childless, live quietly in a suite at the Washington Hotel, at the Treasury bend of the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route. Between congressional sessions, they dwell on the second floor of a grey-shingled, two-family house in Dorchester, an aging Boston neighborhood. It is one of McCormack's proudest boasts that he has never once missed having dinner with his wife in their 41 years of married life. Rarely seen in public, Harriet McCormack is her husband's closest confidante; every day he scribbles dozens of notes on matters he wants to tell her about that eve ning. When he is with her, says an associate, "you might as well forget everything else--he only has eyes for her."

Doing What Comes Natural. In Boston young Lawyer McCormack seemed headed for quick success. He prepared his cases with exhaustive research--in the House, he has always been known as a Congressman who studied bills down to the last comma--and he was a slashing courtroom examiner (a style that has always been his chief characteristic as a House debater). His firm came to gross some $30,000 a year, but McCormack's ambitions were never really satisfied in the courtroom. Politics, McCormack says, "was the natural thing for anyone born in South Boston." And in South Boston terms, John McCormack was a natural politician.

He was wise enough to bide his time, learning the rules of the game while making himself known to Boston's rough-and-tumble political kingmakers. He worked for other candidates, made himself useful to the party, and shrewdly stored up political lOUs as provender for his own political future. "I was getting experience and making friends."

When he was 25, John McCormack ran as a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, the fourth in the state's history. McCormack was an odd looking candidate--a pallid beanpole of a man with a mop of black hair and windmill arms, he looked like a Dublin agitator from an O'Casey play. He won his race, and at the convention he mingled with the stars of Massachusetts' political firmament. That same year--1917--McCormack enlisted in the Army, serving in Stateside garrisons for the duration of the war, emerging as a sergeant major.

After Armistice Day, McCormack ran for the state House of Representatives. He won, and won, and won again. In fact, the only time John McCormack ever lost an election was a calculated step toward a career on Capitol Hill. By 1926, McCormack was a state senator, and he considered himself ready for the big time. That year South Boston's James A. Gallivan was running for his ninth consecutive term in Congress, and McCormack challenged him in the Democratic primary--the only election that matters in South Boston. Gallivan, an enormously popular man, was also awesomely bibulous. His drinking didn't bother the tolerant constituents of the Twelfth District, but it opened a door for John McCormack. One day McCormack and a friend. Contractor James Fitzgerald, found Representative Gallivan in a drunken stupor on the floor of the Boston Athletic Club.

Gallivan's pulse was so feeble that Fitzgerald could not detect it at first. Said Fitzgerald to McCormack: "You better run against him. This fellow isn't going to live long. He's going to drop dead."

McCormack took his friend's advice, waged a gentlemanly campaign without any real expectation of winning--and lost gracefully. In a post-election letter, Gallivan expressed his thanks: "Let me congratulate you on the splendid and clean manner in which you conducted your campaign. It was a source of sincere regret that I had to have you as my opponent." Two years passed, and Jim Gallivan did indeed drop dead. Nine Democrats, including John McCormack, filed for the party's nomination to succeed Gallivan. The Irish masters of Boston--including Kingmaker James Michael Curley and Martin Lomasney, boss of the Eighth Ward--recalled McCormack favorably and spread the word that he was their man. "They figured McCormack was the type who, if he got to Congress, would stay there." recalls Lawyer James Sullivan, one of the eight disappointed also-rans. "They were right--he's never moved."

Member of the Board. The U.S. in 1928 was at the pinnacle of Republican prosperity, but Depression--and the Democrats--were soon to come. In Washington, John Nance Garner of Texas was floor leader of the Democratic House minority. Garner and his crony, Texas Representative Sam Rayburn, were ever on the lookout for promising newcomers, and they liked the look of the freshman from Boston. McCormack voted his party's line undeviatingly. He worked diligently at the menial committee assignments that are a new Congressman's lot, and he quickly learned the procedural rules of the House.

McCormack was an expert poker player, a talent that endeared him to Jack Garner, who was later called "a poker playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man" by John L. Lewis, and whose own political career had been given a hefty bipartisan push forward by a poker-playing Republican, "Uncle Joe" Cannon. McCormack became a Garner protege. At the beginning of McCormack's second full term, the Democrats took control of the House, and McCormack went to Speaker Garner with a timid request for an assignment to the Judiciary Committee. "Hell," growled Garner, "we want you on Ways & Means." McCormack was dumfounded, for Ways & Means was and is one of the most powerful and sought-after committees in the House. McCormack followed Garner's instructions and persuaded the Massachusetts delegation to nominate him for the post; then Sam Rayburn called to tell him that the entire Texas delegation would vote for him. McCormack was the first Democratic Representative to win the cherished assignment after less than two terms in office.

From the moment of his elevation to

Ways & Means, McCormack was a House wheel. The help he had received from Rayburn made them allies--and their alliance endured for 30 years. Although McCormack had learned abstinence at his mother's knee (and has never touched hard liquor), he was welcome at Garner's after-hours hideaway, the famed "Board of Education," where the Speaker and Rayburn held forth with other congressional leaders, mixing Bourbon and Scotch with political gossip and plans. In 1936, after the death of Speaker Joseph W. Byrnes, Alabama's William ("Mister Will") Bankhead was the uncontested candidate to become the new Speaker. But a large grey thunderhead of controversy gathered over the succession to Bankhead as majority floor leader. The contenders were New York's John O'Connor and Sam Rayburn. By every rule of geopolitical logic, O'Connor should have been McCormack's man: he was a Northerner, a big-city Democrat, an Irishman and a Catholic. But Rayburn was a treasured friend, and McCormack promptly endorsed Mister Sam, bringing ten of New England's eleven Democratic Representatives into camp with him. That helped win the day for Rayburn. "I don't go back on my friends," McCormack says today. "I would be an ingrate."

Pristine Record. In 1940, when Rayburn succeeded to the speakership, McCormack became majority leader, smothering his opponent, Virginia's courtly Clifton Woodrum, with the aid of some muscular Rayburn politicking among the Southern delegations. At the 1960 Democratic Convention, it was again McCormack's turn to help Rayburn. As the chairman of John Kennedy's home-state delegation, he came to the rescue of Rayburn, the campaign manager of Lyndon Johnson, with a timely motion that suspended the rules and put Johnson on the ticket with Kennedy as vice-presidential nominee by acclamation. The move effectively choked off the testy liberal opposition to Johnson, and wrapped the Democratic ticket in the cloak of unanimity. "Massachusetts and Texas," mused McCormack. "It's a good combination." In his years as a citizen of the House, John McCormack has compiled a pristine record of party loyalty. He was a fervent New Dealer ("I was Franklin Roosevelt's good right arm," he says), and he has worked hard for the New Frontier. His name has never been signed to any famous bill and he has never been notably associated with any specific area of legislation. A passionate antiCommunist, Mc Cormack chaired the first House commit tee investigating Nazi and Communist subversion (later the House Un-American Activities Committee). Through the years, he was a prime mover in the fight for TVA, SEC, the Federal Housing Act.

He voted for Boulder Dam agricultural supports, and many another project that had no particular connection with the parochial interests of South Boston. Yet McCormack is an oldfashioned, frock-coat liberal, and a vastly different breed from the young, grey-flannel liberals who man the New Frontier. McCormack's liberalism is instinctive and emotional, culled from personal experience as a member of the "deserving poor." He has little use for the liberalism derived largely from books and faculty-club discussions. Such House liberals as Missouri's Richard Boi ling and New Jersey's Frank Thompson regard McCormack as a hack politician who is all too ready to compromise modern liberal principles. Replies John McCormack: "I'm a progressive who believes that the road to progress is, in moments of contest, reasonable compromise. You don't compromise principles, but you harmonize tactics to preserve unity." McCormack proved his point with consummate skill in three grueling turns as chairman of the Democratic Platform Committee (in 1944, 1952 and 1956). At each convention, he managed to control and placate, if not to elate, both the flaming Northern liberals and the truculent Southern conservatives on the explosive issue of civil rights.

Anathema to the Family. John McCormack and John Kennedy are not boon companions. In the past, the President and the new Speaker have had several well-publicized clashes, beginning with Kennedy's refusal, as a downy-cheeked Congressman, to sign McCormack's petition for the pardon of James M. Curley from his mail-fraud jail sentence (Curley had been the bitter foe of "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the President's grandfather, and therefore anathema to the unforgiving Kennedy family). That same year, Kennedy seized the Massachusetts Democratic organization from McCormack: the two men had agreed to a compromise, but the McCormack-endorsed candidate for state Democratic chairman, William Burke, refused to withdraw his candidacy; McCormack stuck by him, insisting that "my word is my bond." Another altercation threatens in this year's Massachusetts senatorial election: State Attorney General Eddie McCormack, the Speaker's 'nephew, is already a candidate; Ted Kennedy, the President's brother, would like to be. In this case, the probability is that the Kennedys and the McCormacks will reach an amiable accommodation, with either Ted or Eddie bowing out before the primary.

But if nothing else, Jack Kennedy and John McCormack both talk the language of practical politics. Both are determined to get along in the President-Speaker relationship, and McCormack's personal dealings with Kennedy are likely to be among the least of his problems during his first term as Speaker.

Cigar Smoke. McCormack's House critics accuse him of slippery ways, and McCormack himself admits to what he calls "diversionary" tactics. When pressed for a decision or a political commitment, he shrouds his plans and motives with a cloud of words as thick and nebulous as the cigar smoke that usually surrounds him. Says a frustrated White House staffer: "He takes half an hour just to say hello.'' Once, McCormack drove Curley to distraction by refusing to say whether or not he intended to run for mayor of Boston. After mushroom clouds of doubletalk, and in his own good time--when a candidate of his own choosing had built up support to the point of no contest--McCormack laconically announced that he would remain in the House.

McCormack is enraged by the persistent charge that he is under the thumb of the Catholic hierarchy. He resents his cloakroom nickname, "The Archbishop." as an insult to the Catholic Church. He is a deeply religious man who always wears the blue rosette of the Knights of Malta in his lapel. Of the eleven honorary degrees he has received, seven are from Catholic colleges.

He was dismayed and hurt when his Catholic constituents castigated him for his first appointment to the Naval Academy--of a Jewish boy. (In one ward of his Twelfth District, McCormack is still known as "Rabbi John.") He has consistently defended all minorities, and once, in a battle in the House with Mississippi's Racist John Rankin, he poured forth his feelings: "A man's racial origin means nothing to me, a person's name means nothing to me. A person's religion I respect. But what does mean everything to me is a person's mind. And when I meet a person with a bigoted mind, I am meeting a person I do not like, a person I have nothing but contempt for."

"Just Sit By Me." Although McCormack is extraordinarily thin-skinned himself, he can and does dish it out with one of the House's roughest tongues. Once, in the middle of a formal debate, he bluntly called Representative Earl Wilson of Indiana a "damned fool," and was required to retract his words. Again, in a 1953 argument with Michigan's acidulous Republican Representative Clare Hoffman, McCormack delivered an insult that is still recalled whenever Congressmen trade stories. "I would defend the Gentleman," he said, in a mockery of the politest parliamentary style, "because I have a minimum high regard for him." Once he called Republican Floor Leader Charles Halleck a "hijacker," and stuck his finger into Halleck's jowl for emphasis. But Indiana's Halleck comes from another hard political school, and he understands McCormack. "John McCormack," he says, "always was a worthy and formidable antagonist, who fought hard--and fair."

Off the floor, McCormack can be strangely thoughtful and gentle. His door has always been open to fellow members with problems, and he has been, through all his years in the House, among the most accessible of leaders. In the evenings, with his wife in their hotel suite, McCormack snips dozens of useful items from the newspapers and furiously pens helpful memoranda in an often undecipherable scribble, then dispatches them to his colleagues the next day. One of McCormack's first acts after Sam Rayburn's death was to offer to help get Rayburn's staff new jobs. For years, Congressmen of both parties, eager to deliver speeches but frustrated because they could not get recognition from the Chair, knew they could come to McCormack with their problem. His invariable answer: "You just sit by me for a minute, and I'll get the floor for you." The many favors he has done will stand Speaker McCormack in good stead.

Cast of Characters. The McCormack speakership will raise the curtain on a new cast of leading House characters. To get things done, the new Speaker will depend not on such White House favorites as Missouri's Dick Boiling and New Jersey's Frank Thompson, but on McCormack-style Congressmen like Massachusetts' Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill Jr. and New York's James J. Delaney, members of the key House Rules Committee, and Massachusetts' Edward P. Boland, who, as the only intimate shared by McCormack and Jack Kennedy's liaison man Larry O'Brien, can serve as a link between the House and the White House.

It is a tough House that Speaker McCormack faces across the well. McCormack must deal not only with the Republican opposition but with conservative Southern Democrats, the grey-flannel liberals and the entrenched committee chairmen. He has promised to go down the line in attempting to win passage of the Administration's legislative program. But in the 87th Congress' second session, the New Frontier legislative prospects look murky even to many New Frontiersmen. Not so to Speaker McCormack. His prediction: "I think we'll make as good a record as last year, and last year was an outstanding record." But, cocking an eye at the agenda and the problems of Housekeeping, McCormack characteristically hedges his bet: "By the end of the session, Congress will have enacted into law a majority of the President's program."

*Marking the departure of the British troops from Boston during the Revolution and celebrated, fittingly, on St. Patrick's Day.

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