In September of 1975 I was appointed minority counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. I was thirty-four years old and had previously served as a legislative assistant to Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott. Our committee consisted of five Democrats and three Republicans. The Republican members were Mark Hatfield from Oregon, Bob Griffin from Michigan, and Hugh Scott from Pennsylvania. The committee was chaired by the senior Democrat, Howard Cannon of Nevada.
Rules and Administration was a catchall committee having jurisdiction over such disparate areas as Senate office space, the Botanic Gardens, the Library of Congress, and, oddly enough, the federal election law. It was the proposed 1976 amendment to this law that almost cost me my job.
The committee was holding hearings on this amendment in our hearing room in the Russell Office Building, then known simply as the Old Senate Office Building. An ornate, beautiful, and high-ceilinged room, once home to the Senate Commerce Committee, it could accommodate fifty to sixty people if the subject matter before the committee aroused any great interest.
That was not the case on the day of my near undoing. In addition to the five or six sitting committee members, there were approximately twenty staff members, a few journalists, and several curious tourists in attendance. Most of the staff members sat in front of the raised and curved committee table. Others sat immediately behind their senators, waiting patiently for a whispered directive, request, or instruction. I sat behind our ranking member, Mark Hatfield.
The only witness to testify that day was Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, a cosponsor of the bill. Since most, if not all, of the committee members supported the amendment, Senator Kennedy’s remarks would be no more than icing on an alreadybaked cake. Midway through his prepared text the bell on the legislative clock in the room rang, indicating that a vote was about to take place on the floor of the Senate. The Russell Office Building was located a long stone’s throw from the Capitol. Senator Cannon apologetically interrupted Senator Kennedy and announced a twenty-minute recess, which would allow the committee members enough time to proceed to the Capitol to vote.
The room emptied quickly of all senators, including Kennedy. Moving from my assigned seat and lowering myself into Senator Cannon’s chair, I gaveled, regained the staffers’ attention, and launched into my Western Pennsylvanian imitation of Kennedy’s Boston accent. After an initial confused silence my audience jumped right in, firing questions and insults as fast as I could drop my r’s and widen my a’s. I was enjoying myself immensely when suddenly my audience fell quiet. I continued chirping away. Finally I noticed our chief of staff making the international sign of impending doom: a finger drawn across the throat. A few seconds elapsed before I realized that the throat to which he alluded was my own.
Apparently Senator Kennedy had not voted but had been caught up in conversation outside in the corridor and then had drifted back to the staff offices behind the committee room. He was at that moment standing behind me, observing my performance. Visions of my wife and two infant daughters, soon to be destitute, flashed through my mind. In those days the mere allegation that a staffer was “personally obnoxious” was sufficient grounds for dismissal, and I had no doubt that a “sincerely regret” letter from Mark Hatfield was only a day away.
As I rose, turned, and started to mumble a feeble and terror-inspired apology, the senator raised his hand, grinned, and said in a much better Kennedy accent ,than my own, “Actually, you sounded more like Bobby than me.”
—Andrew Davis Gleason is an attorney in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
MYSTERY SHIP
Over a period of several months late in World War II, a ship’s bow of welded steel plate slowly began to take shape at Washington’s Naval Gun Factory. About fifteen feet high overall, it was perhaps twenty feet long fore and aft. Its purpose was not obvious; word around the slip was that it was to be an icebreaking prow for emergency mounting on small vessels assigned to the Navy yard. The slow progress likely reflected both the low probability that the Potomac would soon freeze over and the higher priority of other work at the docks, including the maintenance of a variety of Navy river craft and the presidential yacht Sequoia.
Suddenly in midsummer 1944 all attention shifted to the neglected bow. Painters arrived to cover the rusted shape with a coat of Navy gray. Oddly, they painted a column of numbers much like the draft marks on most Navy ships, except that the range of this block of numbers was appropriate for a huge carrier—wholly out of scale with the modest little bow sitting in the dock.
And this burst of activity was not confined to the steel shape alone. Soon carpenters and riggers had built a platform, complete with a railing and a short stairway, to face the bow at about mid-height. Big enough for a dozen people, it, too, was painted, pure white.
The sporadic construction followed by the almost overnight appearance of the handsome platform was watched with puzzled but growing interest by me and several fellow engineers from the vantage point of a third-story loft over a small wind tunnel adjacent to the slip. (Employees of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, we designed parachutes for air-launched naval mines and torpedoes.) Within days we had seen the often ignored and still incomplete shape fast-forward to become what appeared to be the bow of a very small and spanking new ship—but a very big ship if you focused on the curious block of keel depth numbers.
Clearly a stage was being set for some event. That became even more obvious when workers appeared as soon as the platform paint was dry to decorate it with flags and bunting. The following day we arrived at work to find the slip sealed off by security guards, but our third-floor windows gave us front-row seats to the little pageant that next took place. Mid-morning, several cars arrived to unload passengers; most were flag-rank naval officers. Another curiosity: Although it was summertime and sizzling hot in Washington, the officers wore winter blue dress uniforms instead of whites. Then, as we watched, Eleanor Roosevelt left her car to join the others and climb the few steps to the platform deck.
Things proceeded quickly: One of her aides assisted Mrs. Roosevelt into a dark, full-length coat while the officers donned winter-uniform overcoats; someone handed the president’s wife a ribbon-decorated bottle; with a full swing she struck the bottle against the bow; it shattered and she and others nearby were showered. End of scene, all recorded by a crew of cameramen.
In a few minutes the visitors left in their caravan of cars, and in a few hours the platform, bunting and all, was gone. Later the numbers on the little bow were painted over and the bow resumed its slow progress to completion that fall.
Within a day or two of this puzzling performance we learned why it had taken place. It seems that, months before, Mrs. Roosevelt had been guest of honor at the launching of the Yorktown and had christened it with the traditional bottle. However, the camera crew responsible for recording the event had somehow missed the brief but critical moment when the bottle shattered on the huge ship’s bow. So, to fill the gap in the ship’s film library, the little bow in the little slip in Washington was dressed up to look like a big one.
Although it was sizzling in Washington, the officers wore winter uniforms, and Mrs. Roosevelt put on a full-length coat.
—Leon J. Lofthus, a retired engineer, lives in Rockville, Maryland.
THE LOOKOUT
When the name John Dillinger is mentioned, most people think of a notorious bank robher. My memory is of an unshaven shadowy man who stood behind a dirty screen door and motioned to my father.
Daddy was a feature writer for an Indianapolis newspaper in 1933. His articles were almost always controversial. When you read a Robert A. Butler by-line, you knew the story would contain the unexpected, and a bias toward the underdog.
While other papers were running headlines about the many banks being robbed, all supposedly by Dillinger, Daddy was writing different stories. He tried to point out that the criminal couldn’t be in two places at once, that the distance between two banks was too great for Dillinger to have robbed them both on the same day.
Apparently Dillinger took note of what my father had written, for he asked to meet with him. Dillinger’s father lived in a farmhouse in Mooresville, Indiana, just seven miles from our home, and he invited my father to visit there. Most of Our neighbors knew when Dillinger was in town, and I can remember Daddy shaking his head and saying, “I saw John just last night, and here he is, supposed to have robbed a bank clear up north. He must have a look-alike.” We went to the farmhouse, my father and I, a nine-year-old left in his care for the day. We drove into the lane, which was empty except for a nondescript dog. We walked up the steps, and Daddy motioned to a porch swing. I sat down, making sure my skirt was where it belonged, and started the creaky chains in motion. After a moment, an old man, Dillinger’s father, joined me. I can recall little about him except that he smelled much like the barns I loved to visit.
We were lookouts, Daddy told me. We were to alert the shadowy figure I saw behind the screen if anyone drove close by. I could think of little to say to the old man, and my eyes continually strayed from the road to a swaybacked horse in the pasture. I was hoping to be invited to ride, and I know I must have hinted about it several times. That black horse was much more interesting to me than anything going on in the room behind me. But Dillinger’s father didn’t respond to my hints as we sat and watched the lane.
I don’t remember how long we waited while Daddy talked to Dillinger. Once, when a car came up the road, driving slowly, I hopped down ready to do my job. The old man shook his head and said that they were neighbors, not out to get John, and that we’d best not interrupt what was going on inside.
When my father came out, he tipped his gray felt hat to old Mr. Dillinger and motioned for me to go to the car. I remember that he was very quiet on the way home, smoking his usual tipped cigarette in its amber-colored holder. I asked him why he would talk to a bad man instead of calling the police. Wasn’t he scared?
“If I thought Dillinger was as dangerous as the police make him out to be, I would not have taken you with me,” he replied. “The young man wants to surrender.”
Dillinger was bad, but not nearly as bad as the police made him out to be, my father explained. Then he gave me one of those moral lessons that parents of the day were wont to offer. “When you are older, you’ll realize that no one is all good or all bad. Sometimes people are accused of things they haven’t done. It’s up to newspapermen like me to try to point that out.”
I could certainly understand what he was saying. My brother was always getting in trouble for things I did.
“If the police catch Dillinger,” he said, “he’ll probably be gunned down. John knows that. It’s a simple way to close the files on many crimes.”
Daddy was to meet Dillinger at a Chicago drugstore in a week’s time and take him to the police. The outlaw had told him it was the only way he could be arrested without incident, that they wouldn’t dare kill him as long as a wellknown reporter was by his side.
The day arrived, and my father stood and waited outside the drugstore. He had left the motor running in his black La Salle coupe. When Dillinger arrived, they were to jump in the car and head straight for a police station where my father had friends.
Unfortunately, at the same time Dillinger showed up so did a police car. The officers just wanted some ice cream from the drugstore fountain, but Dillinger, thinking that he had been set up, ran away unseen.
One week later what he feared most happened. He was set up, this time by a woman, and he was gunned down just as he had anticipated he would be.
My father was sad about his failure to accomplish the surrender. He went to see John’s father and came home a bit poorer after financing a new shirt and haircut for the old man. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if the police had come by the Mooresville farmhouse that day. Would it have mattered that a little girl, her legs too short to touch the floor, was sitting on a porch swing outside the outlaw’s hiding place? Would it make a difference today if there were more old-time writers dedicated to reporting truths even if they are less sensational?
—Elizabeth Klungness, the editor and publisher of Writer’s News, lives in Vista, California.
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