Word: barkley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...argument remained polite. The President remained adamant. Leader Barkley summed up. On the Senate Finance Committee he had worked on the bill. He had fought against some of its provisions; he knew the bill was far from perfect. But this bill was the work and the will of Congress. He could not assent to throwing away 2.3 billion dollars for the reasons raised by the President. If the President persisted in his veto, he, Barkley, would have to stand up on the floor of the Senate and defend his position. Mr. Roosevelt remarked that this was understandable. The conference broke...
...Leader Barkley read his copy three times, incredulous, shocked, then angry. The temperate words which the President had read aloud the day before were still there. But peppered among them now were other words, phrases, sentences, bitter, taunting, contemptuous words which stung the majority leader like slaps in the face: "unwise," "inept," "indefensible special privileges to favored groups," "dangerous precedents for the future," "disappoint and fail the American taxpayers." Taxpayers' confusion, asserted the President, was not the Treasury's fault but "squarely the fault of the Congress of the United States...
Shaken to the soles of his solid brogues, Leader Barkley quickly checked a dozen other Democratic Senators, found ever)' one livid with rage. The House postponed debate on the message, but off the floor 80-year-old Chairman Robert L. ("Muley") Doughton of the Ways & Means Committee was already spluttering his indignation at the message which "questioned our integrity or intelligence, or both." Alben Barkley kept a tight grip on himself and held his peace. After adjournment at 2:15 p.m., he went to his office and began to think. At his modest apartment on Connecticut Avenue...
Limits of Loyalty. Alben Barkley had a lot to think about. For seven years, as titular leader of the Senate, he had been Franklin Roosevelt's most faithful follower. Opponents had taunted him with being a Roosevelt stooge, a White House errand boy, reminding him constantly that he owed his election as leader to the President's famed "Dear Alben" letter (see p. 20). Critics had called him inept, plodding, bumbling-as often he seemed. But despite both the taunts and his faults, he had kept the faith. Time & again he had yielded his own judgment...
...President to treat Congress with respect and confidence. Leader Barkley, though protesting his continued personal devotion, made that plain in his reply to Mr. Roosevelt's letter. He wrote...