Word: dirksen
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...Under Dirksen, Senate Republicans have worked and voted in a unity unseen in recent years. On issues of national security, Dirksen and his Republicans have gone down the line with President Kennedy. Thus, when Democratic liberals recently filibustered against the Administration's satellite communication bill - on the ground that it was a Government giveaway to private enterprise - Dirksen rounded up the Republican votes necessary to invoke cloture. "There were," he says, "questions of national security as well as the progress being made by the Soviet Union. Quite aside from the basic problem of space communication, other appeals could...
...this poses a problem to President Kennedy. He well knows how much help he has received from Dirksen. But Dirksen is running for re-election this year against Chicago's Democratic Representative Sidney Yates, a devoted Kennedy follower. Kennedy has promised to campaign in Illinois for Yates. Yet his heart can hardly be in it. Says one top Administration Democrat: "I like Sid Yates. But my party would be in a hell of a mess -Kennedy would be in a hell of a mess-if Dirksen got defeated...
Plainly, despite all the gibes that have been thrown his way, there is something special about Dirksen. Says a White House staffer: "Who could dislike Dirksen? He gets his arm around your shoulder and, well, he's a total pro, able, cute and clever." He is also-as a result of his midlands upbringing in a plain, small town-trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And when he traces his beginnings, as did Lincoln, in "the short and simple annals of the poor," those homely virtues take on a fresh meaning...
...Dirksen's father, like most folks in those parts, was a Republican through and through. He proved it by naming his first-born son Benjamin Harrison; when his wife gave him twins, he seconded the motion by naming them Everett McKinley and Thomas Reed (after the then Speaker of the House). Father Dirksen died when Everett was nine. He had made a good living painting fancywork on carriages and buggies. But he left little. The family lived in the section called "Beantown," where thrifty immigrants grew beans instead of flowers. Dirksen's mother, a hardy woman...
...Barn. Pekin, the home of Bird Farm Sausage, Bourbon Supreme and Olt's Duck Calls, was a pleasant place for boys. They played "stink base," "run, sheep, run," football and marbles, fished for crappies and perch in the river. The block on which the Dirksen house stood was rimmed with bushy maple trees, and Tom Dirksen recalls that "you could climb up in one tree and go all the way around the block without touching the ground, climbing from tree to tree." But Everett didn't go in too much for that sort of amusement. Says...