Word: dirksen
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...lines are intact," intoned Sen ate Minor ity Leader Everett Dirksen, "the boys are prepared. The captains are on duty at the appointed hour in the ap pointed place. The speakers are ready...
...more battle-ready than Generalissimo Dirksen, 69. After months of threatening what he calls "extended debate" to block repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act's celebrated section 14(b), Ev's hour had come. Dirksen, who on most days is about as soigné as Margaret Rutherford, even subjugated his mutinous curls, donned a neatly pressed blue suit, and had a shoeshine in honor of the occasion. An occasion it certainly was, presaging as it did one of the few defeats dealt Lyndon Johnson by the prodigiously productive 89th Congress...
...Administration, determined to honor a campaign debt to organized labor, was unconditionally committed to repeal of the Taft-Hartley "right to work" clause, anathema to labor because it allows individual states to outlaw the union shop. Nevertheless, Dirksen's filibuster, powered by a hard-core coalition of some 38 Republicans and southern Democrats, seemed insurmountable, for the Administration could not possibly muster the two-thirds majority (67 votes) to invoke cloture. So, unable to stop the show and concerned that it might prove too arduous for elderly Senators, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield ruled out the seriocomic...
Featherbedding. Then, with only five Senators on the floor, a radiant Ev Dirksen led off the extendalong with a three-hour-20-minute oration. It was a mere trumpet flourish compared to some buncombe spectaculars of the past.* Under Mansfield's gentlemanly ground rules, of course, this was more like featherbedding than filibustering. Dirksen read newspaper editorials, won permission to have sacks of anti-repeal mail brought into the chamber, told Dirksenesque jokes to his colleagues. "I am sure the Senator has heard about the schoolteacher who said, 'Johnny, how do you spell straight?' Johnny replied...
There was even some overdue debate on the pros and cons of 14(b). Union membership as a condition of employment, argued Dirksen, limits a man's right to earn a living. Said he: "After all the noise and detonations in this chamber about the right to vote, that right cannot compare with the right to work, because inherent in it is the right of survival." Nonsense, replied Tennessee Democrat Ross Bass: "The American worker is never led into a box or into a factory where he has to work. He has the free right of working there...