Word: barkleys
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Another Kentuckian describes Barkley as "an extreme extrovert-but one with a feeling for what the other fellow is thinking." Translated into political terms, this means that he has an uninhibited affection for people, even strangers, and shows it when they put personal demands on his life. Right after his wedding in 1949, he overheard his bride say: "Will someone fix my jacket before I go out and face that mob?" Said the bridegroom: "Why, that's no mob out there, my dear, that's the American people." When the American people began to make sightseeing detours through...
Next to Harry Truman (who has the presidential prestige), Barkley is the most-sought-after speaker in the Democratic Party. His political oratory booms and pulses with echoes of the old-fashioned tub thump (even though he has consciously tried to tone it down for the microphone). Most of his stories are as whiskery and old as Abe Lincoln. But from Atlanta to Manhattan they love them, because they can't help loving the man who tells the stories. Somehow he stirs an impulse that every splintered Democrat feels more deeply than the jagged hatred of the other splinters...
...Lowes school, his father loaded the family and their possessions into a single wagon and, with the cow trailing behind, moved to Clinton, Ky. so Alben could go to Marvin College. Alben worked his way through Marvin as janitor (years later a wag posted a sign on the lawn: "Barkley Swept Here"), won high grades and a medal for oratory...
Roads to Congress. Barkley picked up law in the informal and highly efficacious way of the times: a few courses at the University of Virginia law school, home reading, and a term of clerking in the office of Paducah's famous old Judge William Bishop (fictionalized as Judge Priest by Paducah's other famous citizen, Irvin S. Cobb). Law led to politics, and in 1905 Barkley rambled through McCracken County on a one-eyed horse, stopping at every farmhouse to swap stories and get himself elected county prosecuting attorney. The next jump (in 1909) was to county judge...
...arrived at the onset of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, set his course with the party leadership, and became identified as a progressive. In 1926 Barkley moved over to the Senate, two years later was in such good graces that he was allowed to second the nomination of Al Smith at the convention. He stumped for Smith, stumped again in 1932 for Franklin Roosevelt. In 1937 Roosevelt threw Barkley the majority leadership of the Senate by the famous "Dear Alben" letter,* and "Dear Alben"-sometimes known as "Bumbling Barkley"-amiably suffered the charges of sharp-tongued critics who said...