[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 20 (Wednesday, February 1, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1963-S1964]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


            EVERETT McKINLEY DIRKSEN: PRAGMATIC CONSERVATIVE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Pekin, 
IL, who served this body so well as the Republican leader of the U.S. 
Senate, was one of the most capable political figures of his time and 
of the modern era.
  Historians generally acknowledge, for instance, that without Everett 
Dirksen's backing, such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights 
Act almost certainly would not have passed.
  Thomas McArdle, offers an insightful profile of Everett Dirksen in a 
recent article published by Investor's Business Daily.
  Mr. President, I call the attention of my colleagues to this article 
and ask that it be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

     Sen. Everett Dirksen: He Epitomized the Notion of ``Pragmatic 
                             Conservatism''

                          (By Thomas McArdle)

       Today, the country's most influential Republican leader, 
     Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., proclaims that he 
     will cooperate with President Clinton, but is unwilling to 
     compromise.
       What a contrast to the late Senate Republican Leader 
     Everett McKinley Dirksen, who was fond of replying to 
     detractors who accused him of not standing for very much, 
     ``If there were no compromise, there might not have been a 
     Constitution of the United States.''
       Dirksen is remembered as a honeytoned orator who could 
     endear himself even to a hostile audience. His baggyclothes 
     and unkept hair were legendary, but it was a rumpled, folksy 
     image he deliberately cultivated.
       Moreover, he was far from being just the colorful, lovable 
     clown political cartoonists loved to peg him as. He may have 
     been the senator who delivered an annual speech in praise of 
     the marigold, but there was substance underneath of 
     idiosyncracies.
       Dirksen was both in 1896 in Pekin, Ill., part of Rep. 
     Abraham Lincoln's congressional district in the 1840s. As a 
     boy, Dirksen knew some old-timers in the town who actually 
     knew Lincoln personally. His sentimentality towards Lincoln 
     would pervade his speeches and statements all of Dirksen's 
     career.
       His parents were immigrants from Ostfriesland in northern 
     Germany. His father, like many of his fellow German-immigrant 
     and native-born neighbors in Pekin, had an unquestioning 
     loyalty to the Republican Party unheard of today. Dirksen's 
     middle name came from then-Ohio Governor William McKinley, 
     soon to become the next Republican president. His twin 
     brother was named after the sitting GOP speaker of the House 
     and his older brother after the last Republic president, 
     Benjamin Harrison.
       When he was five, Dirksen's father suffered a debilitating 
     stroke and the young sons were forced to work hard on the 
     family's small farm. Rising before dawn each workday was a 
     habit Dirksen would maintain all his life.
       He displayed extraordinary political acumen early on, 
     gaining his first term in the House of Representatives by 
     beating a multimillionaire, five-term GOP incumbent in the 
     party primary. He then handily defeated the Democratic 
     challenger--in 1932, the year voters were so mad at 
     Republicans for the Great Depression that Franklin Roosevelt 
     won the presidency in a landslide and a national realignment 
     in favor of the Democratic Party began. Dirksen won the 
     district by almost as great a margin as Roosevelt.
       [[Page S1964]] Republican leaders were wary of him even 
     this early. He had run a campaign aimed at garnering the 
     votes of those who would be supporting FDR, and even praised 
     Democratic candidates for other offices.
       It was a pragmatism that would characterize Dirksen 
     throughout his career. On his death in 1969, conservative 
     columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., then much more a firebrand 
     than today, would assess the senator in an otherwise glowing 
     obituary as ``so much the pragmatist that you couldn't really 
     count on him in a pinch.''
       The Chicago Sun-Times once estimated that in his 17 years 
     in the House of Representatives, Dirksen changed his mind 62 
     times on foreign policy, 31 times on military affairs, and 70 
     times on agriculture issues. Then, in the Senate he outdid 
     that record.
       His most famous about-faces were on the nuclear test-ban 
     treaty and the Civil Rights Act. In the summer of 1963 he 
     opposed the enactment of federal guarantees of the right of 
     blacks to use any hotel, restaurant or other public 
     accommodation on property rights grounds, the core of the 
     proposal by President Kennedy, though he supported its other 
     provisions.
       The next year, with Johnson having replaced the 
     assassinated JFK, some savvy maneuvering by Democrats for 
     Republican support in the House forced Dirksen in the Senate 
     to soften. He ended up becoming instrumental in passage of 
     the Civil Rights Act, using his party to provide the margin 
     of victory.
       Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., ``says the Attorney General 
     (Bobby Kennedy) has nailed my skin to the barn door to dry,'' 
     Dirksen told a reporter in typical Dirksenesque language. 
     ``Well, nobody has hung up my conscience and my sense of 
     history to dry. Pardon me for the sermon.''
       Dirksen also immediately opposed upon hearing about it the 
     administration's treaty with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear 
     tests in the atmosphere. But by September Dirksen realized 
     that public support for the treaty was very strong. He ended 
     up turning 180 degrees, supporting the test ban entirely, but 
     only after he persuaded Kennedy to write a letter assuring 
     that the U.S. nuclear weapons program would not be slowed 
     down.
       ``They called him the Wizard of Ooze,'' recalled former 
     National Review Publisher William A. Rusher, author of ``The 
     Rise of the Right,'' a chronicle of conservatism's struggle 
     to power in the GOP. But Dirksen's smoothness never seemed to 
     leave him alienated from conservatives the way many of 
     today's Republican ``pragmatists'' are. Much of that 
     undoubtedly stemmed from his support of isolationist Sen. 
     Robert Taft's R-Ohio, failed run for the party presidential 
     nomination in 1952 and Dirksen's opposition to the Senate's 
     censuring of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., in 1954 (though he 
     severed relations with McCarthy very soon after that).
       ``Certainly, speaking as a conservative, I regarded Everett 
     Dirksen as a friend and I think he would be delighted to see 
     all that's happened,'' Rusher added.
       Lee Edwards, president of the Center for International 
     Relations and author of a soon-to-be-released biography of 
     Barry Goldwater, noted that Dirksen had a strong role early 
     on the Goldwater's rise to power.
       On a trip to speak to the Arizona GOP, Dirksen personally 
     took Goldwater aside and advised him to run for the U.S. 
     Senate when the Arizonan was only a city councilman.
       ``Goldwater has admitted on more than one occasion that it 
     did make a difference in his decision to run,'' according to 
     Edwards.
       His heavy smoking and drinking eventually caught up with 
     Dirksen and he died of complications from lung cancer surgery 
     in 1969. One of the three Senate office buildings across the 
     street from the U.S. Capitol bears his name, the two others 
     named after Democratic senators. He lay in state under the 
     dome of the Capitol on the same black catafalque as Lincoln, 
     then only the third senator so honored.
     

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