Master of the Senate (21 page)

As disgust with the Senate’s ineptitude intensified after the war, a hundred critics focused on the seniority system as a major culprit. Columnist Ernest K. Lindley wrote in 1949 that “it has been condemned in recent years by almost every authority or impartial observer of Congress.” Pointing out that under that system, ability counted for nothing, energy counted for nothing—intelligence, passion, will, principles, all counted for nothing—they noted that, in the words of Roland Young, secretary of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the seniority rule makes impossible “the utilization of the best material for the most important offices. Tenure and ability are not the same thing.” The
Washington Post
, referring to Congress as a “gerontocracy,” said that “to consider nothing but length of service in the choice of chairmen is to put Congress under a crippling handicap.” And there was another point. Since chairmen owed their places not to their party’s leader in the Senate or to their national political party but solely to what the political scientist George B. Galloway called “the accident of tenure,” they were therefore independent not only of the senatorial leader but indeed of their party, and of its platforms, promises, and philosophy—of party responsibility in the largest sense. The system “flaunts established political principles: that of party government; of a legislature responsible to the electoral mandate,” Young said. Furthermore, since, particularly in the Democratic Party, “the seniority line,” as the political scientist E. L. Oliver put it, “is also the line of cleavage between progressives and conservatives,” reliance on seniority put effective control of the Senate (and of the House) “into the hands of men wholly out of sympathy with the party platform, with the national administration, and with the clear majority of Congressmen elected upon the party ticket.” “Adherence to blind choice under the seniority rule … makes a farce out of the democratic principle,” the
Washington Post
said. Such arguments ignored the fact that it was not that principle but rather independence (including independence of the “electoral mandate”) that was the Founding Fathers’ most cherished
desideratum
for senators—that the seniority rule was, as one Senate historian did in fact note, “a protection against boss rule of the Senate.” But it was also true that parties had not been a major factor in government when the Fathers had been drafting the Constitution, and that independence of party, when parties had become so integral a part of the governmental process, had skewed the Senate’s relationship to that process. Seniority therefore added, in George Goodwin’s words, “a new non-constitutional dimension … to our constitutional system of separation of powers.” Feeling that the will of the people would be thwarted as long as the rule stood, the critics demanded that it be abolished. “If either of the two major parties is to serve as a vehicle for social action,” Oliver wrote, this “archaic procedure … will have to be scrapped…. Unless such a change is made, the expressed attitudes of the people will not be embodied in legislation.”

A
DVOCATES OF THE SENIORITY SYSTEM
, however, pointed out that its rigidity eliminated the bitter, time-consuming fights and political logrolling that would otherwise accompany the selection of committee chairmen at the beginning of each new session of Congress. “Nobody has ever produced a really workable alternative,” William White says. And harshly though that system might be assailed, it was protected by a very powerful force: itself. Junior senators might sneer at it, but senators are human, and as, with the passage of years, they accumulated the power and perquisites which were based on that system, the logic behind it, its fairness and justice, became increasingly clear to them. It was, in many cases, the rock on which they based their campaigns for re-election, since their more sophisticated constituents—the ones most deeply concerned about the outcome of that campaign—were well aware of the benefits the incumbent’s seniority gave to his state, gave, to a disproportionate extent, to them. “The longer I stay in Washington, the more sympathetic to [the seniority rule] I become,” Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said. The chairmanships that senior senators held because of that rule—had become, as one observer was to put it, a part of their identity, “a part of their being … almost of life itself.” There seemed no realistic possibility of persuading them that the rule should be changed. And since these were the senators who held the power—all the power—in the Senate, there was no realistic possibility that the rule would be changed. William White said flatly that “The Senate would no more abandon it than it would its name.”

N
OTHING
ABOUT THE
S
ENATE
would be changed, it seemed. The Senate’s world was made up not only of the Capitol’s north wing but of another building, which pointed at that wing from across broad Constitution Avenue. This
building was known simply as the “Senate Office Building” (there was only one Senate office building then; new senators were warned to spell out its name in full when giving a constituent their address; as one senator observed, “If you give him the abbreviation—S.O.B.—he will not know whether you are calling him one, or expect him to call you one”), and it indeed contained only offices and committee rooms, but these were the offices of
senators
and
Senate
committee rooms, and the building was the
Senate
office building; “Never in the history of the world was there such an office building,” the
New York Times
marveled when it opened in 1909.

In authorizing its construction, the Senate had made clear that it should embody senatorial philosophy—the same philosophy of restraint and dignity that had motivated the body to decree that its Chamber should be unadorned. The man directing the search for an architect said he was looking for one “of mature years … and it would not scare me off to hear his colleagues say that ’He is a little old-fashioned …! That is what we need now: a little of the old-fashioned but correct architecture.” And the architects selected—Carrère & Hastings of New York—had captured that philosophy perfectly.

It was a vast structure—low (only three stories high on the side facing the Capitol, five stories on the far side, so steeply did Capitol Hill fall away) but long, so long that from its majestic entrance pavilion, modeled on the pavilions of the Louvre, stretched away a colonnade of thirty-four thirty-foot-high columns, columns fluted for beauty and paired for strength, a towering colonnade that was in itself longer than a football field and that angled away from the Capitol in a diagonal that seemed to go on endlessly—except that there was, far down Constitution Avenue, an end: another, matching, if slightly smaller, entrance pavilion. In this building, the
Times
said, “a thousand men would feel lonesome”; it covered “what in New York would be a space of several city blocks.” The building’s exterior was a white Vermont marble selected for its unusual purity and hardness. The trees in front of that colonnade were still small enough in 1949 so that their leaves did not yet blur the facade or soften it, and from the Capitol’s Senate wing the long line of tall columns and the majestic pavilions that flanked them gleamed at you across the Capitol’s lawns, brilliant and dazzling in the late-afternoon sun, or loomed majestically through rain on a gray day.

But like the House Office Building on the other side of Capitol Hill, also by Carrère & Hastings, the Senate Building was designed so that it would not compete with but complement the Capitol, toward which both buildings were canted in such a way that they were in effect pointing at it.
*
The building’s roof
would be ornamented only by a simple balustrade, the architects said, not by prominent decorative elements which might “detract from the effect of the Capitol building.” And while the Capitol’s exterior was lavishly ornamented, it was decided that that would not be the case with the facade of the Senate and House Office Buildings.

The ground level of the Senate Building, the base of the long row of columns, was of the simplest design: Concord granite rusticated but otherwise unadorned so that except for small arched windows, the long lines of that hard stone stretch unbroken down Constitution Avenue. The capitals of those formidably paired columns are very simple, and the long entablature, a football-field-length entablature, that the columns support is very different from the Capitol’s entablatures, crammed as are the Capitol’s with reliefs of heroic figures. The entablature of the Senate Building is unbroken by a single decoration: on its entire length there is not a single carving of a leaf or an acorn or a bird—stretching down Constitution is nothing but a long, broad band of gleaming white marble, with, above it, only the simplest narrow classic egg and dart molding, and that simple balustrade. Architectural historians noted that the Senate Building was “more conservative” than other government buildings of the time. If the exterior was stately, even majestic, the stateliness and majesty were restrained, dignified, severe, uncompromisingly austere—testimony in granite and marble, that very hard marble, to the Senate’s grandeur and power, and to its philosophy.

T
HE BUILDING’S INTERIOR
was testimony to other aspects of that philosophy. Inside its main entrance across from the Capitol was a circular arcade of piers (modeled on the piers of the Royal Chapel at Versailles) out of which rose arches supporting a circle of eighteen columns that in turn supported a coffered dome that soared up to a circular skylight sixty-eight feet above the floor. But the grandeur of this spacious rotunda was a grandeur of utter simplicity, of what one critic described as an “elegance” that was “almost stoic” in its “exceptional restraint.” Suggestions had been made that colored marbles be used on the columns, but this was the home of the body that had kept its Chamber untainted by a single painting; “Color would take away from the dignity and monumental character of the design,” John Carrère replied. He allowed gray marble circles to be set into the rotunda’s shining white marble floor.
*
Otherwise, the white marble of the entire grand entrance to the Senate
Office Building—piers, arches, columns, dome—was unrelieved by any color except for the marble’s grayish veins. Opposite the doorway, beyond the circle of piers, was a palatial double stairway, in the same white marble and in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and at the top was the Senate’s “Conference Chamber,” a room (later known as the “Senate Caucus Room”) worthy of the Senate: spacious (it would seat three hundred spectators comfortably), high-ceilinged, its marble walls ranged by twelve massive Corinthian columns. And out from the rotunda stretched the corridors lined with other, smaller marble chambers for public investigations and hearings, and with the individual office suites of the senators themselves.

These were senatorial corridors.

They were long—four hundred feet long, some of them; there were more than three miles of corridors in the Senate Office Building—and their ceilings were so high that, broad though they were, they appeared narrow. And they were dim and somber. A row of old-fashioned lighting globes dotted the ceilings, and their lights were reflected down the center of the white marble floors in a line as rigid as if it were an element set into the marble. But the globes were too high and spaced too far apart to cast much light, and the corridors were so long that even on sunny days the light from the window at their far end penetrated only a little way down them, and some corridors had no windows at the end. And along each side of a corridor was a row of very tall, dark mahogany doors, towering over anyone walking past them and stretching down each side of the dim corridor like a long line of forbidding sentinels guarding the dignity of the men within.

The corridors were empty—empty not only of ornament (there were no flags, national or state, in the hallways of the Senate Office Building then, no state seals on the doors; “it was considered beneath the dignity of a senator to put out a flag or a seal,” one reporter who spent a lot of time in that building recalls; “the only thing you would see in the halls was umbrellas on rainy days”) but of people. There were relatively few visitors—the influx of constituents dropping by their senators’ offices in 1949 was only a trickle compared to what it would later become in the era of mass air travel—and so vast was the building that visitors were swallowed up by it. And so were the approximately eleven hundred people—ninety-six senators, their staff and Senate maintenance people—who worked in the building in 1949, particularly because there was very little visiting between offices then. The building’s mores were as rigidly formal as its architecture. In his thirty-fifth year in the Senate, John L. McClellan of Arkansas was to boast that during those thirty-five years he had never once been inside another senator’s office. Robert C. Albright, who covered the Senate for the
Washington Post
, wrote in 1949 that “You can tread marble miles of Senate Office Building corridors without ever seeing an open door.” When a door was opened, furthermore, the face of the receptionist inside was not always all that welcoming; “dropping in was not encouraged,” a secretary recalls. About ten in the morning, many staffers congregated in the “cafeteria”
(a cafeteria lined with fluted pilasters) on the second floor for coffee, and to socialize with their counterparts on other staffs; the rest of the time there was little socializing—and little traffic in the halls. Sometimes when you turned into one of those corridors, there would be a little knot of reporters waiting outside a closed door or questioning a senator who had just come out; a remarkably large proportion of committee sessions then were executive, or closed, sessions. Sometimes a figure—black against the light from the window behind him, his face all but unrecognizable in the gloom even if he was a senator—would be walking toward you. But quite often, it seemed, when you turned into a corridor there would be, in that long, long space, no one at all.

The corridors were silent. Voices seemed to be swallowed up by their length and their height. And of course so empty were they that often there was no voice to be heard, and you would be walking down a corridor in a silence broken only by the click of your heels on the marble floor and the distant pings of elevator bells, walking in silence between the rows of tightly closed doors that towered over you in the gloom.