Giving Them Fits

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It is 7 a.m. in Washington, D.C. Through the deserted lobby of the Shoreham Hotel moves an elderly man with a brown cane. He sets out at a brisk pace into the morning mist that still mantles Rock Creek Park. His shoes are scuffed, his trousers baggy, his shirt frayed. He is alone, and he is happy.

Not many people know this side of the man. He is perhaps most content while walking through a park-or climbing to the top of Old Rag, his favorite mountain in the Blue Ridge chain. Up there he may be alone-as he often is-but in a political and philosophical sense, he will be master of all he surveys. "I love these mountains," says Virginia's Senator Harry Flood Byrd. "I like to look out over the ridges and valleys and watch the changing shadows."

Symbol of Rebellion. The shadows are changing for Harry Byrd. He is 75. His Senate career spans the New Deal and the New Frontier. "I am," he says in wry pride, "the only man left in the Senate who voted against the Wagner Act and the TVA." Throughout his career, he has been fighting against burgeoning bureaucracy and bloating budgets. It galls him that during his three decades in the Senate the public debt has swelled from $23 billion to $298 billion, and the number of federal employees has grown from 580,000 to 2,500,000. This is an issue about which Byrd, far from being resigned with the passing of the years, is still expertly indignant. Last week he jabbed a finger at a sheet of statistics on his cluttered desk and complained: "The civilian employment in Government went up 35,000 in just the last month." Jab, jab, jab went the finger. "Just think of that--35,000 in the last month!"

It is an irony that, as he nears the end of his political life (Byrd says nothing about the subject, but friends give odds that he will not run for re-election in 1964), Harry Byrd has arrived at a crest of effective power and influence. He has, in fact, become a symbol of the Capitol Hill rebellion against the young activist who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Old Harry Byrd is rather fond of young Jack Kennedy. "He's a very attractive person," says the Senator from Virginia. "He's got ability, no doubt about that." The President of the U.S. returns the compliment--in a way. "You know," he has said, "Harry Byrd is the most gracious person you'd want to meet. But does he give us fits!"

Fits is the word for what Byrd is giving the New Frontier. Items: > The President's medicare bill theoretically had to go through the Senate Finance Committee--and Chairman Byrd was characteristically against the measure. Byrd does not like to simply pigeonhole a bill, no matter how much he may dislike it. That would be politically crude. But first things come first, and Byrd scheduled lengthy hearings on tax revision before medicare. Desperate to get medicare through the Senate and thus pressure the House (where the measure faced a savage fight), the Administration decreed that medicare be tacked onto a less important bill and be brought to a Senate vote without ever being considered by Byrd's committee. But in the gentleman's club that is the U.S. Senate, it is very risky for anyone to try an end run around such senior members as Byrd. By a Senate vote of 52 to 48, medicare died a premature death and the Administration suffered a sobering defeat. >In the controversial area of tax policy, Byrd is playing a key role. Before going to the Senate floor, the New Frontier's tax-revision program was butchered by Byrd's Finance Committee. Sliced away was the Administration's scheme to require financial and business firms to withhold taxes due on interest and dividends. Says Byrd: "I'm firmly opposed to the idea of the Government using the businesses of the country as collection agencies for taxes."

>As for a quick 1962 tax cut, Byrd is stubbornly negative. His opposition is one of the reasons why President Kennedy, except at the cost of gallons of political blood, could not hope to get such a tax slash through. Byrd's position: he would like a tax cut as much as anyone--but not if it means running the U.S. deeper and deeper into debt. His implacable stand won support in a recent Gallup poll which reported that 72% of the people opposed a tax cut if it meant increasing the national deficit.

> The Administration's foreign trade bill -the boldest and best program the New Frontier has yet put forth--is still up for consideration by Byrd's committee. Scores of protectionist witnesses have testified or are still waiting in line. On the basis of Byrd's record, the White House supposes that he favors the bill. But there is still a gnawing at Administration innards about what Byrd may finally decide to do. It should come as considerable comfort to New Frontiersmen to know that Byrd privately says: "I'm going to support the President on the trade bill."

The congressional record for 1962 is proof enough of Byrd's present influence. But how and why, in the twilight of his political life, has Byrd come into his most effective political period?

The answer," of course, lies in the political climate of the day. President Kennedy has so far shown himself to be much more adept at activity than at achievement, to think in terms of politics rather than principles. Despite his personal popularity, the President has yet to win popular support for his programs. As no one else can, the veterans of the House and Senate sense this gap between promise and performance.

Wanderers & Wanderers. Thus, there has clearly been a failure in leadership at the White House level. On the floors of the Senate and the House, the Democratic leadership has been equally ineffectual. Many members of the lopsided Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House have therefore felt free to vote according to their own, local political interests.

In such an atmosphere, leadership must inevitably be taken over by the few legislators who really know what they stand for. Byrd knows what he stands for. So does everyone else. Byrd believes that a dollar should be worth a dollar. This is still a popular notion in the U.S. And so, in one of the most crucial of all areas, Byrd has become a kind of unwavering banner around which the wanderers and the wonderers of Capitol Hill can rally.

One of the Last. In many ways, Byrd seems a complex of contradictions. To his critics, he is the symbol of public stinginess; to his friends, he is the soul of private generosity. In Washington he walks alone; but at the entrance to his magnificent Rosemont estate in Berryville, Va., is a sign saying "Visitors Welcome"--and the Senator has been known to spend entire afternoons escorting unknown callers around the vast premises. In the Senate club, Byrd stands in the center of the innermost circle, but he is far from being one of the boys. He dislikes and avoids cloakroom politics; but many of the cloakroom politicians are nowadays holding his coat.

Democrat Byrd has declined to actively support the Democratic nominees in the last six presidential elections; yet he is the active leader and patron saint of the most enduring state Democratic organization in the U.S. He was one of the several Democrats that Franklin Roosevelt would have liked to purge from the Congress. But Byrd considers himself a sort of charter member of the Roosevelt club. "I'm one of the last of the old New Dealers," he says, with only the tiniest twinkle of humor. "I campaigned for the New Deal platform in 1932--and I'm still standing on it." It takes a moment or so for a listener to recall that Roosevelt's 1932 campaign program promised federal frugality--including a cut of 25% in the cost of Federal Government.

While these political positions may seem inconsistent, Byrd's complete consistency is the secret of his increasing political strength. Democrat Harry Byrd is stronger if only because Democrat John F. Kennedy's Administration, for all its brave words, seems weaker.

A Bunch of Bills. The most famous family name in the U.S. today is Kennedy. But the Byrds can overwhelm the Kennedys with escutcheons. Harry Byrd is an authentic--as opposed to a working--aristocrat. He is of the eighth generation of the Byrds of Virginia. William Byrd I sailed up the James River in 1670 from his native England at the age of 18. He acquired 26,000 acres, grew wealthy as a tobacco planter, slave dealer, importer and exporter. He also fused the Byrd blood with another famed line: that of Mary Horsemanden, a 21-year-old widow who traced her ancestry clear back to Charlemagne.

The Byrd lands grew to 179,000 acres under William Byrd II, who. like his father, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Bill II built Westover, an elegant Georgian mansion with a fine library. He also founded the city of Richmond--but he remains best remembered for his spicy diaries. Sample entries: "I went to the capitol where I sent for the wench to clean my room and I kissed her, for which God forgive me." "I had wicked inclinations to Mistress Sarah Taylor." "When I returned I had a great quarrel with my wife, in which she was to blame altogether; however. I made the first step to a reconciliation."

The next Byrd. William III, committed sins far graver, in the family's view, than the mere stealing of kisses. He blew the family fortune through gambling and wild spending, lost Westover, committed suicide on New Year's Day, 1777. As a French and Indian War colonel, however, he had fought so gallantly that his portrait hangs today in the restored Colonial Capitol in Williamsburg. Most tourists are happily unaware that in the Revolutionary War his sympathies were with George III.

By 1887, when Harry Flood Byrd was born in Martinsburg, W. Va., the intervening Byrds had made money, mainly as talented lawyers, built some fine mansions in Winchester, Va. Harry's father, Richard, was perhaps the most brilliant of the lot, a spectacular courtroom figure with black hair that seemed electrified, steel-rimmed glasses and a flair for oratory. Richard was a colorful politician--he was elected speaker of the Virginia House after just one term. With offbeat humor, he named his three sons Tom, Dick and Harry (they arrived in reverse order), was to take great pleasure in their later success: Tom in business, Dick as the world-famed polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who died in 1957; Harry in politics. But old Dick was also a most convivial fellow, who loved a sociable sip and was so totally lacking in financial sense that he rapidly took his family toward bankruptcy.

Saving the Star. That was where young Harry came into his own. He had been bored by his lessons at Winchester's Shenandoah Valley Academy. His father had purchased a small daily newspaper, the Winchester Star, for use as a personal political vehicle. When the paper seemed about to go under, 15-year-old Harry saw a chance to quit school. He persuaded his father to let him try to save the Star. Save it he did--by scrimping on expenses and contributing a remarkable amount of journalistic ingenuity. Today, the Winchester Star and the Harrisonburg News-Record are prosperous papers operated by the Senator's oldest son, Harry F. Byrd Jr.

But running a paper was not enough for Teen-Ager Byrd. He bought a patch of land at the edge of the city, planted a few apple trees with his own hands. Then he began leasing orchards. "I had a kind of a big house on wheels from which we sprayed the trees," he recalls. "The people who did the spraying lived in it. I'd get the spraying done, and the picking and the selling, and then the owner of the orchard and I would divide the profits." Harry Byrd has since become the world's largest individual apple orchard owner, with some 4,000 acres and 200,000 trees in rows up to two miles long. Harry Jr. is the general supervisor of the multimillion-dollar business; another son, Dick, runs the cannery; and another son, Beverley, is in charge of planting and picking.

Road to Richmond. After marrying Anne Douglas Beverley, a lovely girl whose family name was every bit as important in Virginia as Byrd's, Harry turned seriously toward politics. At that time, he had about as many kinsmen as there were voters in Virginia; Harry, at 28, easily won election to the state senate. His service there was lackluster-until in 1923 he found an issue that outraged his hard-earned sense of economic propriety and jolted him into angry action. He was chairman of the senate roads committee when a $50 million bond issue was proposed to improve the state's roads.

There was no question about the condition of those Virginia roads. "There was even a bunch of farmers who'd stay by the road with their mules down there around Fredericksburg," Byrd recalls. "Everybody would get stuck and they'd charge $10 a car to pull 'em out. Ten dollars was plenty in those days. Used to make 'em mad as hell." But Byrd was also dead certain that bonds were not the way to fix things up. It had taken Virginia taxpayers some 30 years after the Civil War to pay off more than $45 million worth of bonded debt incurred before the war. The memory was painful.

Says Byrd: "That's the big reason I have always been so opposed to bond issues."

Byrd slogged across those awful roads by horse and buggy and model T to stump the state for a pay-as-you-go gasoline tax instead of the bond plan. The bonds were rejected by 46,000 votes, and Harry Byrd was a statewide hero who rode the road issue straight to the Governor's chair in Richmond.

As Governor, he was quite a Byrd. Besides streamlining the state constitution with 80 amendments, he pulled the state from a $1.3 million budget deficit into a $4.2 million surplus, drove through a tough anti-lynching law, lured new industry, supervised the state's takeover of every road, even farm-to-market, in Virginia. He also became the chieftain of the longest-lasting Democratic state machine in America; its members call it The Organization; political scholars have described it as a true oligarchy. In any event, it has dominated the statehouse since the turn of the century.

Fading Glow. In March 1933, three years after he left the statehouse. Byrd was appointed to the Senate in place of Claude Swanson, who had been named

Navy Secretary by F.D.R. Byrd had campaigned for Roosevelt, was all aglow at the money-saving promises of the New Deal platform. The glow quickly faded. Byrd recalls the disenchantment: "The first bill I voted for was to preserve the federal solvency, to cut federal expenses 15% across the board. That was the way to do things, and I was all for Roosevelt on things like that. But then this fellow Keynes got hold of him." Soon Byrd was leading the Senate opposition to the AAA, TVA, NRA-and when Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, Byrd knew that his dissent was total.

Their feud became so fierce that Roosevelt tried to funnel patronage through Byrd enemies in Virginia. Says Byrd: "Not controlling patronage turned out to be a damn good thing for me, because the Depression was still on and everybody was wanting a job. There weren't enough to hand out."

Byrd has been at odds with every subsequent President. He considered Harry Truman just another big spender. Irritated by Byrd's opposition, Truman made his famed offhand remark: There were, he told a White House visitor, "too many Byrds in Congress." Predictably, Byrd liked Ike--but the pair came to a parting of the political ways when Eisenhower ran up that whopping $12.4 billion budget deficit in 1959. "I didn't like that thing about sending those troops down to Arkansas either," recalls Byrd. Byrd has inflamed the segregation issue in Virginia with his demand for massive resistance to school integration. He has denounced the N.A.A.C.P. and "the Warren Supreme Court," and pleaded in 1958: "Let the laws be enforced by the white people of this country."

Nothing attests to Byrd's influence on the voters of Virginia more convincingly than the fact that in the past three presidential elections Harry has been too busy "picking apples" to speak out for the Democratic ticket--and the state has gone Republican each time. Byrd did not endorse Ike in 1952, but he did tell Virginians by radio that "I will not, and cannot, in good conscience endorse the national Democratic platform or the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket." In 1956 he said nothing at all. In 1960 he announced only that "I have found at times that silence is golden." Republican Nixon carried Democratic Virginia by more than 42,000 votes.

Tart Replies. In the Senate, Byrd's power is seldom exhibited before the galleries. Ordinarily, he is a poor speaker. But when his dander is up, his oratory can be blistering. His reply to criticism from Florida's Claude Pepper in 1946 is a Senate legend: "When I became a member of the Senate, a distinguished colleague said to me that it never paid to get into a contest with a skunk." When Hubert Humphrey, as a freshman Senator, had the temerity to call Byrd's Joint Committee on the Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures an example of "waste and extravagance," Byrd's floor reply covered five pages of acidic language in the Congressional Record. Humphrey has since told Byrd that this was "the worst mistake I ever made."

When aroused, Byrd is also apt to dash off a letter. U.S. Chamber of Commerce President H. Ladd Plumley received one recently when the chamber endorsed a tax cut--something which, to Byrd, smacked of conservative heresy. The chamber's statement, wrote Byrd, was "fiscally irresponsible in the highest degree." Byrd dismisses the notion of getting more revenue by a pump-priming tax cut as "a damned absurdity." The only big outlays of which Byrd approves are those for defense, conservation and highway--as long as the last is pay-as-you-go.

Byrd is as conservative personally as he is politically. For years he would buy a Chevrolet and drive it until it was falling apart; he switched to his present habit of getting a new Chevrolet each year only when persuaded that it would save him money (he has a dealer who gives him a new car for $600 and his old one). His wife has been an invalid for several years; but Harry and "Sittie" Byrd were never much for Washington's social merry-go-round. His only social extravagances are a picnic in his orchards each August, which attracts some 3,000 Virginians, and a series of three spring parties at Rosemont for Washington's elite and some of his Virginia cronies. Although he neither smokes nor drinks, he serves a man-sized drink, follows it with a billowing buffet of fried chicken, Smithfield ham and strawberry shortcake.

Ranger 777. Byrd's only fiscal soft spot is in his love for national parks. He has visited nearly every one in the U.S. The National Park Service, he says, is one agency that "returns $1.20 value for every $1 spent." The service in turn clearly appreciates Byrd: he is the service's only honorary ranger, proudly wears his silver badge No. 777 at park ceremonies. He has been climbing in the Blue Ridge--such peaks as Hawks Bill, Naked Top, Roundhead Ridge and his favored Old Rag--for 60 years. He spent his honeymoon in those mountains, got Roosevelt to start the 500-mile-long Blue Ridge Parkway, is mainly responsible for Shenandoah National Park. On each of his past two birthdays he has donated a camping shelter near Skyland; they have been dubbed "Byrd's Nest No. 1" and "Byrd's Nest No. 2." Byrd gallantly danced at the dedication of Byrd's Nest No. 2 this year.

When his Senate duties keep him away from the Blue Ridge, Byrd takes that early morning walk through Rock Creek Park-and his musings are a seminar in political history and practice, well salted with great issues and names of the past. "I've lived here ever since I came to Washington," he says as he sets out from the Shoreham. "It's nearly 30 years ago now. You know, the Shoreham was in bankruptcy when I first came here. I told 'em I didn't have any money, but they said I might as well stay until I could pay, because nobody else had any either."

He swings his cane nonchalantly at a bush, looks back to see if his aging cocker spaniel is still with him. "You know," he says, "they were telling me not too long ago that I couldn't walk any more. One winter they had some ice on those steps back there and it was covered with snow and I didn't see it, so I fell and hurt my knee and it gave me arthritis." He flexes his left knee. "They wanted to take my kneecap off, said it wouldn't cripple me and it would stop the arthritis. But I didn't like that idea much, so I did just the opposite. I went out and climbed Old Rag the next weekend. It hurt like hell, but I got up there. Now I've got it built up so I can get around all right. It's built up muscles all around that knee. Look here." He hauls up his left pant-leg. "Look at the difference from the other one." He tugs up that pant-leg.

On His Belly. He comes to a high wire fence sealing off the Dumbarton Oaks estate, a public haven filled with dogwood, rhododendron and massive trees. Since it is not open so early in the morning, Byrd for years used to crawl on his belly through a hole in the fence. Then the hole was patched. Byrd hesitantly asked if he might have his own key to the gate-something the Park Service would have granted long ago at the slightest hint. "I got 'em to put in the Shenandoah Park when I was Governor. It was the Depression then, but I got a million dollars out of Congress, and we raised another million. Ickes wouldn't let the mountain people stay in there. He made them all move out. I begged him not to do that. I said just let the old ones stay there and live out their lives. But this Tugwell fellow had just come back from Russia, and he and Ickes got the idea of moving them all in together. "You know mountain people won't live close to anybody else. But they made 'em get out and burned their houses down and built two settlements for them outside the park--that cost nearly as much as the whole park did. And it didn't last very long either. They were making them all work and put everything they raised in together. One night after they'd been there about a year, one man got in and robbed the smokehouse where all the meat was, and the others got mad and they killed him. That was the end of that Russian business." Byrd heads back down a bridle path, the Shoreham's sandy-colored brick looming above the trees. "When I was Gover nor they asked me if Winston Churchill could come down and visit. He wanted to see the battlefields. The only trouble was that when he got there, they told me he drank a quart of brandy a day. It was strict Prohibition, and I never had al lowed any in the mansion. I called up a fellow who I thought might be able to get it and said, 'John, I'm in a hell of a fix. I need you to deliver a quart of brandy to the kitchen of the Governor's mansion every day this week.' "Churchill had some fellow with him named Lord so-and-so, and the Lord had a girl in San Francisco and was always calling her up the whole time they were there. After they left, I got a bill for those calls for $250." Harry Byrd walks back into the Shoreham to change his clothes and cook his own breakfast. He is ready to do a day's work on the Hill in defense of his idea that a dollar is a dollar and that economics is really a simple, common-sense subject. To a man with reminiscences like his, it does not seem illogical that he should think that he may yet teach quite a few lessons to that attractive young fellow in the White House.

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