Cramming for Capitol Hill

At the end of the movie The Candidate, after Robert Redford has scored an unexpected victory in his campaign for the U.S. Senate, he breaks away from his cheering supporters to ask his Svengali-like manager plaintively: "What do we do now?" Similar uncertainty will plague most of the 69 men and women elected for the first time on Nov. 7 to the U.S. House of Representatives. To judge by past experience, their initial months in Washington will be taken up by the minute, time-consuming details of opening an office, learning the complex rules of parliamentary procedure and even finding the bathrooms, rather than in grappling with the real issues of lawmaking.

Four of the freshmen legislators will be luckier than their colleagues. At Harvard's Institute of Politics, Democratic Congresswomen Barbara Jordan of Texas and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke of California and Republican Congressmen William S. Cohen of Maine and Alan Steelman of Texas are completing an experimental four-week cram course on how Congress operates. The informal instructors range from such old pros as Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper and former House Speaker John McCormack to such Washington-wise Harvard academicians as Economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Professor James Q. Wilson. The experts are offering the quartet not only vital inside tips on how to run their offices but also the details of some of the major legislative issues they will face. The course's founder, Mark Talisman, 32, for ten years an assistant to Ohio Congressman Charles A. Vanik, spent one nonstop 4 1/2-hr. class session on such not-so-trivial basics as where to turn in a proposed bill (in the "hopper" at the side of the Speaker's platform), who will assign it to a committee (the parliamentarian), who controls the parliamentarian (the Speaker) and what to do if both the parliamentarian and the Speaker refuse to help get it to the committee where it will have the best chance of passage (rewrite it so it can be sent to a more favorable committee). The congressional fledglings were advised to be careful in selecting their office space, since the wrong choice can add up to five miles a day in their walking routine. "If you end up in the far corner of the Longworth Office Building, you're dead," warned Talisman. He also helped Congresswoman Jordan go over the resumes of some 200 applicants for jobs on her staff; like many other first-term Representatives, she did not know most of the applicants or the people they cited as references.

Other sessions of the course dealt with such practicalities as how many round trips to their home districts legislators are allowed on their expense accounts (36), the most helpful source of information on about-to-be-voted-on bills (the weekly "whip package," which includes the next week's scheduled action, committee reports and copies of the bills, including short summaries of their contents), and how bills are numbered (consecutively, except for one each session introduced by Iowa Congressman H.R. Gross, which carries the number 144 since that number equals a gross).

Patsies. The fascinated freshmen were told how to find out what business is taking place on the floor (call the Democratic or Republican cloakroom, where a recording reports the latest developments) and what six bells and six flashing lights mean (an air raid). Talisman warned the group to beware of letters from other Congressmen that begin "Dear Colleague" and contain a request to co-sponsor a bill. "Some members become patsies for this," he advised. "Don't co-sponsor anything you aren't sure about." The class learned not to try to influence the military status of constituents (after such a request, the serviceman's file at the Pentagon is likely to be stamped with a big red "Cl," signifying "congressional influence," which usually leads to the least desirable assignment, rather than to preferential treatment).

The policy topics included tax reform, congressional reform, defense spending and welfare proposals. Harvard Economist Otto Eckstein predicted that the toughest economic decisions ahead of the congressional freshmen will be when and how quickly to end wage and price controls and whether there must be a tax increase. Edward Lashman Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of HUD, explained how lobbyists operate. Most lobbyists, he said, know that "any Congressman whose vote can be bought with lunch isn't worth dealing with because he'll sell it to someone else for dinner."

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