The Man from T'ang

He is the esteemed author of Scott on Bailments (1931), How to Go into Politics (1949) and The Golden Age of Chinese Art (1967). The Oriental Ceramic Society (U. K.) values his membership, as do the advisory committee on Oriental art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the board of regents of the Smithsonian Institution. The National Art Gallery of Taiwan has a standing offer of an assistant curatorship; and last week Oxford University's Balliol College--the politicians' prep that produced Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Tory Leader Ted Heath, Defense Minister Denis Healey, and such other luminaries as Arnold Toynbee, Julian Huxley, Graham Greene and King Olaf of Norway--invited the Virginia-born Brahmin to lecture on American politics during the fall Michaelmas term. He is, in short, the alter ego of Pennsylvania's Hugh Scott, a former Republican national committee chairman (1948-49) and one of the canniest, guttiest infighters on either side of the Senate aisle.

Not that Scott has made much of a secret of his intellectual and esthetic bents. His Senate office is dominated by chinoiserie, and his house on N Street in Georgetown is a treasure house of the Oriental art he started collecting more than 30 years ago. Bored with the long train ride from Chestnut Hill to his office in Philadelphia, Scott, then a lawyer, started teaching himself Japanese grammar. As often happens with students of that subtle tongue, Scott found that a taste for Japanese art quickly followed. "Mrs. Scott was slightly appalled at first at all the junk I was bringing home," he recalls, "but she came to like it too."

Devotion to Mother. As a Navy commander in 1945, Scott was among the first Americans to enter Tokyo, later made several more trips to the Orient, finally realized that his real love was not Japanese art but its Chinese "mother." His devotion has never wav ered. "The Chinese art," he says tenderly, "is more sophisticated, more subtle." And in all of China's history, he adds, no period can equal "the lively T'ang Dynasty" (618 to 906), the "golden age" that he chronicles in his latest book.

All of the volume's 124 plates are reproductions of treasures from the Senator's own collection. Begun in 1963 as a catalogue for an exhibit of his pieces at the Kress Museum in Allentown, Pa., the book might be counted as one of the unexpected bonuses from the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Scott, a moderate who knew that Goldwater's candidacy might well cost him his seat, found jades and porcelains a welcome tranquilizer after a hard day on the stump. Even today he has not forgotten that harrowing year (he won re-election by a margin of only seven-tenths of 1%), and has given his newest acquisition, a cringing, scrawny ivory elephant, the telling title 1964. Says Scott: "He's just waiting for the next blow to rain down on him." The Senator himself does not wait for blows; he delivers them.

A ferocious politician with an abrasive wit, Scott scores Democrats and Republicans almost equally, but takes special delight in punching holes in deep-hued conservatives of his own party who, he says, "regard it as a personal affront that I get re-elected." Probably no one on Capitol Hill is better prepared to acquaint British students with the ins and outs of U.S. politics. After all, he has only to read to them from another tome he is now writing: Come to the Party, a history of the G.O.P. since 1940.

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