Word: cannoneer
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Senate Sins. The tragedy of Clarence Cannon's life is that the U.S. Senate so often restores the budget cuts he has made. "The Senate piles everything on earth on these bills." he grumps, "and they always wait until the last minute to do it." Cannon always wants the House to insist on its cuts in conference committee. "Sam Rayburn says, 'Hell, we've got to get out of here.' I always say we can't accept this change. But Sam always says we've got to get the hell out of here...
...volume that contains the U.S. budget went from the White House to Capitol Hill. Wrapped up in that budget were all the plans and programs of the U.S. for the next fiscal year. Speaker Sam Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith, Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence Cannon and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills would all help bring those programs to life. The dew of innocence was still in the eye of the 86th Congress, the fires of hope in its breast. New "approaches" hung high like pie in the sky, and Lyndon Johnson was gone clean...
Generals on Horseback. In the strange person of Chairman Clarence Cannon the House's polarization of power reaches its extremes in the Appropriations Committee, which can send its bills to the floor without going through Rules. Speaker Rayburn cordially dislikes Cannon, a sentiment which is more than reciprocated. Yet somehow the two old men, each playing by the House rules, seem to balance each other. In 1950, when Appropriations Committee Chairman Cannon pushed his pet "one-package" appropriations bill (all main appropriations in one lump sum so the world could see the awful enormity of it all) through the House...
Chairman of a 50-member committee, largest in congressional history, Clarence Cannon works almost around the clock at the job -as he sees it -of saving the U.S. from bankruptcy. He darts back and forth among his 14 subcommittees, bent forward, as one Capitol staffer puts it. at a 45° angle; if he tilts to 50°, the whole Hill knows that Clarence Cannon is on a rampage. He judges his subcommittee chairmen by the amount by which they can cut budget requests. Last year his star pupil was Louisiana's Otto Passman, who applied a $872 million meat...
...Cannon's power is immeasurable. One year, on a Saturday afternoon, he decided that defense requests were too big, jumped up from his desk, ordered his staff to knock out $6 billion by Monday morning. In the final congressional result $4.8 billion of that cut survived. Military men displease Clarence Cannon anyway. "They always want to fight the next war with old weapons," he says. "We had the deuce of a time getting them to give up the cavalry. They liked to ride those horses." By the simple expedient of packing his Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he lopped the Navy...