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Oral History Interview with
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| Preface | |
| Interview #l: Reporting for the United Press | |
| Interview #2: Regional Reporter on Capitol Hill | |
| Interview #3: Politics, Conventions, and Campaigns | |
| Interview #4: The Senate Periodical Press Gallery | |
| Interview #5: The Standing Committee of Correspondents | |
| Interview #6: Addendum | |
| List of Subjects Discussed (Index) |
Preface
The United States Senate established its first "reporters gallery" on July 8, 1841, in response to the demand from the increasing number of newspaper correspondents who wanted to cover the annual sessions of Congress. At first the Vice President, and later the Senate Rules Committee supervised admission of journalists into the press gallery. But during the years following the Civil War a number of Washington correspondents lobbied for private business interests, and lobbyists posed as journalists to gain access to the galleries and the committee rooms of the Capitol. When some journalists became involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal and other sensations of the Gilded Age, other Washington correspondents feared that the deteriorating ethics of the press would disrupt their regular channels of congressional information. These reporters approached the Speaker of the House and the Senate Rules Committee with a proposal to allow journalists to assume control of accreditation to the press galleries. In 1879 the House, and in 1884 the Senate ceded such rights to a Standing Committee of Correspondents, elected by the correspondents themselves. Rules of accreditation were published in the Congressional Directories, along with lists of the journalists who had access to the press galleries.
At first Senate doorkeepers loosely supervised the press galleries, until the 1890s, when James D. Preston began to expand the post to that of superintendent of the press gallery. To assist reporters, Preston took notes on Senate proceedings, arranged interviews with senators, and otherwise facilitated the daily reporting from the press galleries.
The rules that the Standing Committee of Correspondents adopted initially required that those seeking admission must earn their principal income from news correspondence, that they must not engage in lobbying, and they must file telegraphic dispatches to daily newspapers. When adopted in the 1880s, the last requirement automatically excluded all women and black reporters. At that time, women journalists were hired to write society news which they mailed to their papers, rather than pay the higher telegraph tolls. Black reporters were
limited to reporting for black-owned and operated newspapers, which were weekly rather than daily papers. Not until the Second World War did women reporters return to the press galleries in any appreciable numbers. The Standing Committee of Correspondents did not admit a black reporter until 1947, and then only after being ordered to do so by the Senate Rules Committee.
Newspaper correspondents similarly excluded radio and magazine reporters from their gallery. In 1939, radio reporters finally convinced Congress to create a separate Radio Gallery (later the Radio and Television Gallery). The House and Senate also established Periodical Press Galleries for magazine and newsletter writers, and a Press Photographer's gallery. Standing Committees of journalists elected from each gallery continue to grant accreditation.
For eighteen years, Roy McGhee served as Superintendent of the Senate Periodical Press Gallery. After serving as a reporter in Missouri, and as United Press International bureau chief in Denver, he came to Capitol Hill in 1959 as a regional reporter for UPI. He covered the Southwestern members of Congress, who at that time include Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn. He remained a Washington reporter until 1973, when he took charge of the Periodical Press Gallery, a post that he held until his retirement in 1991. "Roy McGhee has burned the midnight oil as the Superintendent of the Senate Periodical Press Gallery," commented Senate Republican leader Bob Dole. "That is more than a political lifetime for many over those eighteen years, Roy has seen 218 Senators come and go .... And while periodicals, by definition, are often published only once a week or once a month, Roy's gallery is open every day. So make no mistake, there is nothing periodic about the running the Periodical Press Gallery."
About the Interviewer: Donald A. Ritchie is associate historian of the Senate Historical Office. A graduate of C.C.N.Y., he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. He has published articles on American political history and oral history, including "Oral History in the Federal Government," which appeared in the Journal of American History. His books include James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Harvard Press, 1980), The U.S. Constitution
(Chelsea House, 1989), History of a Free Nation (Glencoe, 1991), and Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Harvard, 1991). He also edits the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series) (Government Printing Office). A former president of both the Oral History Association and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he received OHMAR's Forrest C. Pogue Award for distinguished contributions
to the field of oral history.
REPORTING FOR THE UNITED PRESS
Interview #1
Thursday, January 16, 1992
RITCHIE: I understand that you call Jefferson City, Missouri home. Was your family from there originally?
McGHEE: No, they were originally from Centralia. My paternal grandparents migrated west in the early days of the last century from Virginia. I have a great great some kind of grandfather of whom I have a Brady tintype. He was born in Virginia around 1780. My own grandfather was born in 1840 in Missouri, but in between that time the family had migrated west through Tennessee into Missouri. I still have furniture in my house to this day that the family says was carried down the Ohio River from Louisville or someplace in the migration, three or four tables and antiques that are in my house. My grandfather then was born in Boone County, Missouri, in 1840, and he was in the Civil War, and he died at 86 or 88, close to 90 years old in the 1920s when I was a very small child, but I remember him very well.
RITCHIE: Which side did he fight on?
McGHEE: He was a Confederate, and I remember that one of his closest friends in Missouri was a former Union solider. It used to irk my grandfather that his friend received a pension and he did not.
RITCHIE: Missouri is one of those states where you could have fought on either side.
McGHEE: Well, I can remember stories he told me. He was at some battle in Arkansas. I can recall him telling about his unit, I don't remember whether it was a regiment or a division, or what it was, but they were bivouacked on either side of a stream. Food was in short supply, and a deer ran
down the middle of this little creek, and both sides started shooting at it, and there were some casualties--the same people, but from both sides so friendly fire is not something that first started in Vietnam, it was going on in the Civil War.
RITCHIE: What did your family do in Missouri?
McGHEE: My father left Centralia early in life, that's in northern Boone County, and went to Jefferson City in 1913 to work on the new capitol. That's when the present capitol building was built. The old one burned and they replaced it. It was a mammoth project. He worked on that capitol building for several years and joined the Missouri National Guard in Jefferson City, and when [Woodrow] Wilson became president and federalized the Guard to send them with [General John J.] Perching to the Mexican border to chase Pancho Villa, my father was along. That was his first military adventure, under fire and in actual pursuit. I can remember as a boy, my father had relics of that campaign. He was lying once on the ground in a shelter half and a rattlesnake wriggled into his place and he and his tent mate somehow or other wrestled the snake to death, and for years we carried around this huge rattlesnake skin. I have pictures at home of my dad at the Mexican border.
Then when World War I came along he went to France and was a machine-gunner of Company M--I'm not going to be able to remember the regimental numbers. But he was gassed at the Meuse-Argonne battles, I think. It didn't impair his health a hell of a lot. Ten years later or so he was awarded a pension, when I was ten years old. I was born in 1920. I can remember in the midst of the Depression my father was out of a job. He had applied for a pension years and years before. Through the bureaucratic process, I'll be damned if they didn't award him one with back pay for several years. I can remember very well, I was about ten or eleven years old then, the elation. It was 1931 or 1932, and boy that was a windfall!
RITCHIE: Did your father come in contact with Captain Harry Truman in France?
McGHEE: Well, they were in Europe at the same time. Truman was from the western part of the state and my dad was from a Guard company in the middle of the state, and I don't think they ever came in contact. However, I came in contact with Harry Truman when he was a senator. In my final year in high school I was a page at the Missouri supreme court. Some of my duties were running the elevator. I recall one time that Truman came down for some court case when he was a U.S. Senator, and I was operating the elevator. There were some lawyers with him, and he got on the elevator and we started for the second floor where the hearing rooms were and the elevator got stuck, right in the middle of the floors! There was quite a little hubbub about it. There was a little door in the ceiling of the elevator, and they got that opened. There were no phones in the elevators then.
They boosted me up through that opening and I got out on the second floor and got help, and they got the elevator fixed. But--this gets a little raunchy what I'll never forget is one of the lawyers saying, "We should have walked up the stairs. It's only one flight up." And I can remember Truman saying, "No, there's two things a man shouldn't do when he's past thirty five" this is raunchy as hell, but Truman said it within my hearing. "One of them is walk upstairs if he can ride an elevator." And one of the lawyer's said, "What's the other one, senator?" He said, "It's make love dog fashion." [laughs] I'll never forget that!
My relationship with Truman continued--of course, I lost all track of him, I went in World War II in January, 1942, I quit school and enlisted, but when the war was over and I finished my education and became a reporter on my hometown newspaper for a while, it was then that Truman brought [Winston] Churchill to Missouri, and he made the famous speech at Fulton, which was just twenty miles north of Jefferson City. There was a huge parade, and I was a reporter at the time, my first job out of college, so I covered that parade for my hometown newspaper, and I remember Churchill and Truman. Then sometime later I worked for the A.P. [Associated Press] for a while and then went to work for the United Press. Three or four years after that, Truman came back to deliver the commemorative speech on the occasion of an anniversary of Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech.
That was my first conflict, I guess you might say, with television reporters. I was working for United Press then and they were going in the television business by supplying news film. So they asked me to go over there and cover Truman's speech, which I did. But the network television people were in opposition to the independents--the United Press then was filming everything and selling it to small, non network affiliated stations. They didn't have an electrician along, somebody to plug in the camera and lights. So the union was not going to cover Truman's speech if the United Press television people covered it. And I was the only U.P. representative there, so everything fell on me to try to straighten that out. I didn't get to Truman, but I got to one of his aides, and explained the situation. They said, "There's nothing we can do about that." Truman wasn't about to get involved in some labor dispute. That was my first real contact with Truman.
Later, when I was a reporter in Kansas City, when Truman would come out there. The senior White House correspondent then was a famous reporter named Merriman Smith, you may have heard of him, although fame is fleeting in our business.
RITCHIE: I've got a couple of his books here.
McGHEE: Anyway, he was quite a character, and a boozer. When he would come out there he would hole up with three or four other boozers and the coverage of Truman when he was in Kansas City was really left to the local bureau, and I did a lot of that with Truman and got to know him pretty well.
I guess the best story I have about Truman was that I used to be heavy, I'm no longer heavy but in those days I was fat, and young, and drinking, like a young reporter would do, thinking this was important to show you're a man. I was quite heavy and I got heavier. Truman made a trip to Hawaii after he was president. The first thing he did was go to Hawaii. When he came home, he
came to Union Station, and I was sent down there to cover his arrival back and see if he had anything to say. I was the only reporter there. Truman got off the train and walked along that big esplanade of the station. I said, "Hi, Mr. Truman." He said, "Hello." And I said, "Are you going to continue your walks
now that you're home to Independence for good." He said, "Yes, McGhee, and from the looks of your belly you'd better come join me." [laughs] Great guy, I liked him very much.
The final story about Truman: Truman was given an office in the federal building in Kansas City to write his memoirs. One day a message came from Washington to the Kansas City bureau, signed by Merriman Smith, that Truman had been in New Orleans, making a speech, and while he was there he had fallen down some steps and had broken some ribs, and the supposition was that he had had a drink or two. So the office sent me over to Truman's office, which was on one of the upper floors of this skyscraper building in the city. I went in and talked to his secretary and asked if I could see Mr. Truman. She said, "What about?" I told her. She said, "Well, sure, Merriman Smith was a friend of his." So I went into his office and I told him what I wanted. I said, "We got a message from Washington that said that Merriman Smith has heard that you broke a couple of ribs and he wanted me to check up on it." Truman said, "No, nothing to it. I didn't fall down, I'm fine." I said, "Fine, thank you very much."
I went back to the office and sent Washington a message: Truman says there's nothing to it, and he personally told me that. So Smith was a big man in the U.P. then, and a big man in American journalism, influential. He sent another message back and said, "That's not right. My source is absolutely impeccable. I know Truman fell down, and I know a doctor saw him, and I know he broke some ribs. Get back over there and verify this so we can write it." So the office told me to go back to see Truman again. I went back, and I was embarrassed to have to go back, didn't want to, but I did. I explained again, and Truman again saw me, and again for the second time he said there's nothing to it. I did not fall down. I am not bound up, nothing's wrong with me at all." So I went back and wrote that message out to Washington.
Then I got a message from New York: Merriman Smith says the Kansas City bureau is not following up on his requests, and not doing it properly, and he knows that this is true because of his source--whom I have no idea who it was--and he's absolutely confident that this is correct. So for the third time I had to go back over there. This time I resisted. I said, "No, you can't make me
go back over there. Hell, he's the ex president of the United States." That didn't matter to them at all. I had to go back. Again I talked to the secretary and told her that I really had to see the president again. On my own I made a promise that I wouldn't bother him on this subject any more, I'd quit before I'd do it again.
So I went in again and I showed Truman the message traffic from Washington to Kansas City. I said, "I know this is a burden on you, and I hate like hell to keep bothering you, but I've got to have another comment from you on this." And I showed him this stuff. He said, "I wonder what would please them?" And with that, Truman took off his shirt and stood there bare-chested, and there were no bandages. I went back to the office and I told the bureau chief what had happened. He couldn't believe it. He took over then and wrote a message to Merriman saying "Don't bother us anymore. Our man's been over there three times now and there's absolutely nothing to this. Get it from some other sources and print it on your own from your source if you want. We're not verifying a damn word of this. Truman denies it." Well, that was the end of that!
RITCHIE: When you're president you have to go a long way to satisfy the press!
McGHEE: You sure do, and Truman went the extra mile on that one. He was a great guy, I liked him very much.
RITCHIE: I'd like to go back and talk a little more about your Missouri years. You started in college in 1939 at Jefferson City Junior College, and then you went into the service. Were you drafted or did you decide to enlist?
McGHEE: I enlisted after Pearl Harbor. I was ready to be drafted, but I enlisted instead. I quit college and enlisted. That was rather funny. Missouri was playing Fordham in the Sugar Bowl that year and I had tickets, and I wanted to go to the game, but I wasn't supposed to leave town, because that was within the month after Pearl Harbor was bombed. There was a great uproar in the country then, and everybody was full of patriotic fervor, oh it was really
something. But I had these tickets, and I was just a kid, so I said, "The hell with this, I'm going to go to the football game." I sat around there for a month and they hadn't called me. Incidentally, I had learned to fly when I was in high school, in a civilian pilot training program. It was one of these preparatory things that the military was sneaking through to have at least a cadre of pilots in the event of war. They could see war was coming and we were going to have to get in. They paid for my flying lessons, so I had a license to fly. I couldn't afford to do it, and I didn't after I got my license. But before I went down to the football game I had gone down to the Jefferson barracks in St. Louis to see if I could become an army air force pilot. They took all my papers, gave me a physical examination, and said: "Go home and we'll call you."
In the meantime I went to New Orleans to the football game. And the night before the football game, on New Years' eve, I was walking through the grand arcade of the Roosevelt hotel and I ran into somebody from Jefferson City. He said, "The draft board is looking for you! You're down here and they've called you!" It scared the bejesus out of me! I didn't know what to do about it. There wasn't anything I could do about it New Year's eve. So the next day I went to the football game, and then the following day I went down to enlist.
There were lines, marine corps, army, navy, and the coast guard, and the coast guard had the smallest line. So I got in it. I must be the only person in the history of the U.S. military that as a condition of enlisting--there was competition among the services for anybody. I had already signed with the army air force that they would call me, but I hadn't taken the oath or been sworn in. And here the draft board was after me, or so I thought. I was real confused about it. Anyway, I got on that line and I said to the recruiting man: "I will sign up right now, can you give me a leave? I've got to go home and straighten up my affairs there." So they did. I enlisted, and my first duty was a two week leave! I went home and came back to New Orleans and took my training there.
RITCHIE: Where did you spend the war then in the coast guard?
McGHEE: Most of the war I spent in the Caribbean on a sub-chaser. Let's see that was January 14, 1942, when my duty actually began. I had had that two-week leave in the meantime. I took my training and then was sent over to Mobile Bay. A German submarine had penetrated the bay and gotten into Mobile Bay actually. There were lots of ships being sunk then by German subs. And there was an old lighthouse service, which was a paramilitary organization like the public health service, but really not in the military. So they sent a half a dozen or so recruits down to this lighthouse, after the submarine had penetrated, and what we were supposed to do was just keep sentry duty, constantly, and radio if we saw anything suspicious at all. This must have been February or March, 1942--miserable weather, cold and lonely and far out. The island wasn't a square block. It was just a rock pile with this huge lighthouse on it. So that was my really first assignment in the military. I got out of there as soon as I could. They sent me to a bosun's school in New York. So in April I went to New York and was there until October in school.
RITCHIE: On Staten Island, I'll bet.
McGHEE: Well, no, I was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but we took our real ship's training at Manhattan Beach, right next to Coney Island. That had been a summer resort. Coming from the midwest I had never seen anything like it. Oh, there were a thousand little small houses no bigger than this room, right next to each other. They turned these into barracks and quarters for training purposes, and the owners had given them to the military for the war. Anyway, I had one hell of a time that summer. I had never been to New York before and just went wild there. When I got out of that training school I was sent back to New Orleans, and I was just there a very small time and I was sent to Key West, and got on a ship to Cuba, and then I got on a bigger ship. I spent the next couple of years, maybe not that long, until September of '43 I was in the Caribbean. Sometimes I was ashore in Curacao and Trinidad and other places. But most of the time I was shuttling back and forth between Guantanamo Bay and Trinidad, with occasional forays south of there, in convoy duty. And we would lose ships on almost every trip. We couldn't stop to pick up any survivors or anything, we had to stay on station. That was my war, really. I was safe.
They would never waste a torpedo on an escort vessel, you know, when they could get a big transport ship.
RITCHIE: My dad was in the coast guard, and he was stationed at Staten Island. He went up and down the coast all the way to Rio de Janeiro. It was the best time of his life, I think, the war years.
McGHEE: Yeah [laughs], well I certainly had a grand time during that period. Looking back on it, it was a magnificent experience. Of course, I hated it. I wanted to be in a more active war setting, and kept trying. I came home in 1943 and was sent to radio school, electronics school, at Atlantic City. I was there until the spring of '45, and then assigned to the U.S.S. Sabago, which was a state-of-the-art communications ship that was supposed to lead the American forces after the minesweepers in the second wave of the invasion of Japan, ahead of the landing craft carrying troops. It was a new ship, we put it in commission in San Francisco. I was at Treasure Island there for several weeks, and then shipped to San Pedro. The ship was floated down there, really, to be refitted down there, but when it got there we lived on the thing for a while.
To back up a moment, in San Francisco, I was there in August when the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945. I can recall when we got the news we were undergoing a gas mask drill with tear gas, live gas. We had done it without any gas and then they put this real tear gas in there, so you had to get your mask on in a matter of seconds or else you'd get sick if you breathed this stuff, not fatally, but it wasn't pleasant, I'm sure. It didn't happen to me, I got my mask on on time. But when we were out there, I can remember the site very clearly, and the atom bomb was dropped. I had been to college and I had almost flunked physics, but I was among the very few that had any college education at that time, with us. When they said an atomic bomb, I vaguely had an idea of what the hell was going on, that somehow or other they had exploded the atom and released energy from matter. I knew it was a tremendous thing, and I can remember telling my shipmates about what the hell was going on there.
Later we went down to San Pedro, and within a couple of weeks the war was over. Everybody wanted to get out and go home. I had enough points since
I had been in that Caribbean stuff for a couple of years to get out right away. But I had a ranking then of a radio man, and they froze all communications rating because all of a sudden there was open traffic. Before they had to be encoded and there were restrictions on the use of military communications equipment for personal messages and things like that. When the war was over, all this was over, so they had a great need for everybody who knew Morse code, who could send stuff, and who knew the radio business, so they froze us.
Well, this is the funniest story of my military career. We were supposed to be on the ship at a certain time. The ship was getting ready to go to the Far East. We had leave everyday, but you had to be back aboard at midnight, and I didn't make it back one time until one or two o'clock in the morning, and I was broken. They took away my rating. This was before they froze the ratings. And I was eligible to get out of the service, the coast guard. This ship was run by the navy, incidentally, and I was assigned to the navy. I'll never forget it, the captain took away my rating, and then he called me back up when they froze it and said, "We're going to give you your rating back." I said, "No, I won't take it, I want out." [laughs] He Was furious! I hated the military. I hated the discipline. I hated the bureaucratic nonsense that went with it. I never adjusted to it, really. So I was enlisted as a second-class seaman and I got out as a first-class seaman after four years. But I had one hell of a good time.
I can recall when I got off of that ship I was carrying that huge seabag. The ship was moored right at a dock in San Pedro. The officers were all lined up, and the crew, when we got off of the ship to go to the train. I was going back to St. Louis to be discharged. I had this seabag which was as big as that desk, almost, on my shoulder, and I was a small man too. I got down and I said, "I don't need anything that's in this." Looking back on it, it was a terrible thing to do, but I was contemptuous of the whole goddamn navy, and I just threw the seabag in the water and walked off. And some people came after me and said, 'You can't do that, you're destroying government property. It's yours' but you can't do that." I said, "What are you going to do about it?" And they let me go. [laughs] The first thing I did was go into Los Angeles and buy some civilian clothes!
RITCHIE: It's a funny thing about the military, on one hand it gives you the world, it gives you a chance to travel and see things you would never have seen or done, and on the other hand it puts you into this restrictive discipline situation.
McGHEE: I hated it. When I was on one of these ships, I was a reader, and I joined the Book of the Month Club. We'd be three months at sea and then we'd come into a port, and here would be a bushel of books. And of course, my berth where I slept was about that high [gestures], and there were forty men in a room this small. I had a lower bunk, next to the bulkhead, and there was a little place there where you could keep books. And we had a locker about this big [gestures] to keep our clothes in. That was the only private space you had on this ship, and I got all these books.. I just took them and put them down there by my bunk. Well, there was a fire inspection and they found these books. Oh, there was holy hell to pay! "Where did you get all these books? What are you doing with these things?" Well, I got these books all during the war. I could never cancel. I'd write them a letter but they kept sending these books. When the war ended and I got out of the coast guard I had a bill with those people that was astronomical. And I couldn't keep the books. I gave them to the navy, and they made a ship's library out of them! [laughs] But the military was not a good time in my life.
RITCHIE: When you came out, did you use the GI Bill to go back to college?
McGHEE: Yeah, I did. I got out in 1945, in October or November, and I was too late to get into the University of Missouri. I had quit college after a year and a half, but I took courses in the military during the war, I took correspondence courses, and with those I had enough for two years, so I could enter as a junior. Well, I was too late to get into the University of Missouri, the term had started in September and this was November. I did not want to waste time. I was anxious to get back into school and then get out and go to work. So I went up to the University of Minnesota, which was on the quarter system, and they started right after Christmas, on the first of the year. I went up there, froze to death, and lived in a boardinghouse in St. Paul and rode the streetcar--
had to walk about nine or ten blocks to the streetcar line--over to Minneapolis across the river, where the campus was. I can recall how cold that was. I'd say, "Well, the military wasn't bad, there I was floating around the Caribbean most of the time!" [laughs] But I went to school up there in 1946, and then I went back to the University of Missouri in the fall and graduated from there in 1948.
RITCHIE: When did you decide that you were interested in journalism as a career?
McGHEE: When I was about ten years old. Jefferson City was a political town, and I was always interested in reading the newspapers. I watched the reporters from Kansas City, and St. Louis, and Joplin, and Springfield, all the big towns that had press representatives at the state house. It just seemed to me that they never worked! [laughs] I think I learned the essence of journalism when I was about ten, eleven, or twelve years old, and as far as I could see somebody would tell them something, and they would write it out and send it away, and they'd get paid for it, and had a hell of a life. So I always knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter.
At Minnesota, I was in the j-school. I took the normal editing and reporting courses. When I got back to the University of Missouri, it was not a graduate school there but it was a professional school, and you couldn't enter until you had two years of specific undergraduate work, which I had had okay by then, but they would not accept transfer credits from any place else. At Minnesota I didn't take anything except journalism courses. I got down there and I was going to have to stay in school another year if I stayed in journalism. So I talked to some friends who were newspapermen in Jefferson City. They said, "The hell with that. Take some economics and some American history, it will serve you a hell of a lot better than what they're going to teach you in that j-school." So I did. I got a degree in liberal arts and went to work immediately as a reporter. I never regretted not having a journalism degree.
RITCHIE: What was your first job as a journalist?
McGHEE: When I was in school, remember I told you I was a page at the supreme court? Well, one of the supreme court justices had a friend who was the editor of the Missouri bar journal, which was the official magazine of the Missouri bar. He hired me when I was in school to do editorial work for him, which I did, which really helped me too. It gave me extra income to live on. The GI Bill gave us fifty or sixty dollars a month, and my folks would help me a little but not a lot, so this was a big boon for me, but I didn't keep the job. I wanted to be a daily reporter, so I went to work for my hometown paper. They hired me right away.
My career was short circuited there, though, quite a bit. I really liked the job there. It wasn't long before I was promoted, and I was the city hall and county offices reporter. I did everything, but that was my beat, and the city council. The Jefferson City Post-Tribune and the Capital News--the Capital News was an a.m.--you worked on both, but you were assigned really to one paper or the other. I got real well acquainted with everybody in the city hall. One day--this was the way I lost my job--I was messing around looking at the old archives in the street commissioner's office, and I found that Daniel Boone had laid out the city of Jefferson City. He was hired by the first state legislature to find a site, well, they had found the site overlooking the bluffs of the south side of the Missouri River, in the middle of the state, and they hired Daniel Boone as the city architect, like Latrobe or whoever it was ....
RITCHIE: L'Enfant.
McGHEE: L'Enfant did it here. They hired Daniel Boone to do that, and they paid him a gallon of whiskey and five dollars a day for his services; and I think two dollars a day for the men that he had, who were essentially slaves. Very interesting. I wrote a whole series on those archives, and I made good friends with the street commissioner. I put his name in the story every time, and he thought the world of me.
One day the society department needed somebody to go out and interview some rich woman whose daughter was getting married. I had to go out with a photographer and write a story about this, which was out of my milieu but
anyway I did it. I drove my car, and there was a blizzard in town. Coming back, the front wheel of my car, which was an old rattletrap--I had only been out of school for less than a year--hit a hole. There were all these snowbanks, and here was my car down in this hole. I had to get it pulled out and fixed.
I remonstrated with the street commissioner about it. I said, "Goddamn, how come you let these holes be in the street like this, particularly in a snow storm? People can't see them, can't avoid them." He said, "Well, we didn't know anything about it, it's probably a water company hole, the water company dug it." I said, "Don't you monitor them? Don't you make them fix them?" He said, "Yes, the statutes are here, they're supposed to pay a dollar, and the dollar is supposed to go to pay for the inspector to go over when they dig a hole in the street to make sure they fix it. This dollar is to pay a man to go out and do this." I said, "Well, why wasn't that done?" He said, "It hasn't been done since 1922." I said, "The water company hasn't paid you that dollar since then?" No, they quit paying in the early 1920s. I said, "How many holes a year do they dig in the streets here." He gave me the figure, and I multiplied it out and it came to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of twenty years or more. So I went back and wrote a story about it.
Now, small town journalism is different from bigtime journalism, I can really assure you. Those were still the days of itinerant editors. We had had a new editor come in. So I went back to the office and I wrote this story that the water company owed Jefferson City hundreds of thousands of dollars, and explained the situation. It was a private water company, too. The owner of the paper was an absentee owner. He was in Florida for the winter. His name was Goshorn. He was a golf-playing friend of the president of the water company, very close, high, rich people. So the story appeared in the Capital News, the morning paper. In about twenty minutes this guy was on the phone to the publisher in Florida, the publisher was on the phone to the managing editor, who called in me and the new itinerant editor and said, "A story like this should never appear in our paper without us knowing about it." It was absolutely the truth, every line of it. But there was quite a furor about that, and they forced the water company finally to fork over some payment and start fixing the streets after they dug holes in them.
But spring came, and Mr. Goshorn returned from Florida and he called me in. He said, "Look, we don't think you're going to work out here on this paper." He said, "I'll help you get a job." He called a friend on the Kansas City Star, and he said, "I think you'll be much better off and happier working someplace else. I said, "Well, fine." Well, as it turned out, I got an offer from the United Press also at the same time. The Star offered me seventy five bucks a week to be their Olathe, Kansas correspondent, which was a suburb of Kansas City. In addition to my pay, they would give me ten cents an inch for everything I got printed. The United Press offered me seventy five dollars a week too, and in the interim time before I did this, I was working for the A.P., and they were only paying me sixty bucks a week. So I took the U.P. job. I said, "Hell, I don't want to be living in Olathe, Kansas. I'll be in the same kind of thing I was in Jefferson City. So I went to work for U.P., and I worked for them until I took this job here.
RITCHIE: Where did you work for U.P?
McGHEE: Well, in Kansas City, and then I covered the Missouri and Kansas legislatures. I actually covered in the midwest the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson. Then I was sent to Denver as chief of the bureau there; and I was there during the latter Eisenhower years, and then sent to Washington in '59.
RITCFIIE: What did you do in Denver?
McGHEE: In Denver I was the manager of the bureau, I ran the place. I was half businessman and half editor and half everything else. I didn't like the job at all.
RITCHIE: So you came back as a working reporter?
McGHEE: Yeah. I got out of the management end of it. I was on the track to get into U.P.I. management, but I never regretted getting out of it at all. I really loved working for United Press as a reporter.
RITCHIE: Did you cover Congress when you came here?
McGHEE: Yes, I was assigned up here.
RITCHIE: Could you tell me, what's the difference between covering a state legislature and covering Congress?
McGHEE: State legislatures are much more venal. It was a revelation to me. I guess it's because of the national diversity in the national Congress. Everybody is watching everybody else. The criticism of Congress, you're well aware, is that they're a bunch of loafers, they're in the public till all the time, they take junkets and rape the taxpayers every chance they get. But to me that's all representative of our society, of our democratic institutions and the way we work. I'm not condoning dishonesty or saying that that's okay, I'm just saying that I don't believe there's near as much of that minor corruption in the national Congress as there is at the state level, at least in my experience at the Kansas and Missouri state legislatures. Those legislatures, when I was covering them from 1950 to 1955 or so, both of them, were absolutely owned by the utilities and the railroads and the interests. Absolutely owned, no doubt about it. It was common knowledge. And that's not true in the national Congress. Nobody is big enough to own the whole Congress. They may be big enough to own a chunk of it, but there's always watchdogs around here. And frequently you don't have those on the state level. In my experiences they weren't there in the state governments.
Another thing journalistically that hit me, that I think is completely different is that Washington works on reaction. If an event occurs, the very first thing that a reporter does is get comment on that from somebody else, from the opposing side or from anyone. And a synthesis is eventually arrived at. That process fascinated me when I came here. Frequently, a journalist is the messenger, unappointed, without portfolio, but when he gets a reaction from one side he will go back to the original source and say: "Well this guy says this about this." "Oh, he does?" And through the workings of that process, sometimes the process is affected, and the result is affected. I saw it many times. I don't think I can recall an example at the moment, but that fascinated me. I think that's
another big difference. That's just not true in state legislatures. That process does not occur. The journalist is usually bought, to begin with, or frequently bought--not usually, frequently bought. Politics is at a much different level, if not better or worse.
RITCHIE: Was a state legislature more open and accessible and available than the national legislature?
McGHEE: I think so. If you're a state house reporter you know everybody. You can't know everybody in the national government. You can't even know everybody in the Congress. But you can know almost everything that's going on in a state house. At least in Kansas and Missouri, I don't know about New York and California, maybe they're more similar to here. And everybody knows everything else, too. For instance, the Santa Fe Railroad owned Kansas. No doubt about it! Anything they wanted they got. It was common knowledge, and it was not thought venal at all. That was the natural order of things. Well, that isn't the way it is here. If someone gets an advantage, however slight, there is another side that wants a similar advantage or they're going to raise hell about the competitor getting one.
RITCHIE: Was there a lot more socializing in a state legislature? I get the sense of people living in hotels and hanging out at the bar together.
McGHEE: That's exactly right. I lived in Kansas City and I worked in Jefferson City, my hometown, and Topeka, and I lived in a hotel during those legislative sessions. You consorted much more with the representatives and state senators than you do here, socially I mean. You were part of the local scene. Here, a reporter doesn't feel in awe of a committee chairman, but he recognizes that this chairman has almost absolute control and that the position is different from a committee chairman in a state legislature. Change is slow in the national Congress, and it's not in state legislatures. A committee chairman is seldom deposed. In my thirty years around here, not until recently over in the House was any chairman ever kicked out. I mean, he could stay there forever. That's not the case in many state legislatures. The people there hold consensual power, not because of seniority or anything else. The politics is freer, it's different.
RITCHIE: How would you rate the job that the press does in general of covering state legislatures?
McGHEE: Well, I'd have to speak from the 1950s, which was the last time I covered one. I think the wire services, which were big in the states that I covered, were very good. They had high standards. There was no bias at all in the writing for any of them. But that's just not true of the newspapers. The Kansas City Star was obviously Republican and they gave no house room to Democrats. Now, the reporters for the Star did. Conversely, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was a liberal, and a great one in my opinion, and also more prestigious than the Star, but again richer, in those days it was, not now.
RZTCHIE: That was Irving Brant's paper then.
McGHEE: Yeah. The one thing that the Post Dispatch did that goes against my grain is that they would have investigative reporters working with the prosecutors. They would testify in trials and go before grand juries and give testimony. I could never quite understand that, but they did it. And it was the only newspaper in the state that did do it, so far as I know.
RITCHIE: When you came to Washington, what was your initial beat?
McGHEE: Well, I was assigned up here at the Capitol, but as a regional reporter. The A.P. for years had had a regional staff. They had a man assigned frequently to one state, and sometimes to four or five, and sometimes to a region. Well, the U.P. was always behind the A.P. in money and everything except journalistic ability and peer prestige, but they were always behind in resources to cover. You had to do twice as much work as the A.P. guy did. They established a regional service in 1959 here.
I had threatened to quit in Denver. I liked Denver very much, I enjoyed the mountains and everything, but I did not like the work. It was about a twenty man bureau, and we relayed all of the Asian and Eastern, Oriental news. It would come through San Francisco, and Denver was a relay point. We would break everything and rehandle everything from the Orient in Denver to the east
and eventually to Europe, although there were also break lines in the Orient. Conversely, everything that happened in the eastern United States did not go straight through to California. It was broken in Denver and we would re-edit, boil down--time zones were different, markets were different--and we would rehandle everything and rewrite. Consequently, it was a traffic job. I was a personnel manager. Even though it doesn't sound like a lot of people, when you are dealing with them they've all got personal problems, you've got schedules. We actually had more desk tricks to man by the table of organization than we ever had people to man them. And you were on a budget that you could pay only so much amount of overtime, which meant that I was working a lot of desks, because I was the boss and the work had to be done. And then I had to hold hands with publishers and call on them. They were bitching about rates or why we didn't have this story or that story. I didn't like it, so I wanted out of there. Of course, they had a man who was doing a creditable job, and the money was okay.
Eventually I said, "Look, if you don't get me out of here by such and such a time, I'm going to quit." So the president of the company came through one day and he said, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "I don't care." I'd like to go abroad, or I'll go to Washington." He said, "Well, we can send you abroad." Actually, in 1956, when the British and the Egyptians had that set to and Egypt broke away, they were going to send me to Paris then, but I couldn't speak French and it fell through. But the president came out and said, "We're going to open a bureau in Delhi and we'll give you the bureau there." I said, "Fine." So I was all arranged to go to India, and then they said, "Well, you're going to have to take a pay cut." I said, "What do you mean." They said I was in management and I was going back into reporting, and my salary was higher than the salary for correspondents in Asia and if they sent me out there at my salary it would become known overnight almost and there would be a hullabaloo. They said, "You have to take a pay cut, that's all." I said, "Bullshit, I'm not going to do it. I won't go then." That was along in August or September of 1959. I said, "I'm going to quit, soon as I find a job." They didn't want me to quit at all.
The North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs, which was responsible for tracking missiles that might come in and operating the DEW
Line up in Alaska, they were one of my jobs, and the Air Force Academy was just getting started out there then, and I did all that stuff, and I got acquainted with the military. Castro had come into power the first of that year in Cuba, and by August or September things were terrible. The Air Force was having an Air Force Association meeting in Miami, so their chief press agent called me up and said, "How would you like to spend the weekend in Miami?" I said, "What's the story?" He said, "We're going to take a contingent from here to the Air Force Association meeting down there. And we'll be happy to put you on the airplane and give you a hotel room and let you loaf for a weekend." Well, fine, it didn't bother my moral scruples a bit. I got down there, and I left word of the hotel where I would be, but I no sooner got there that I said, "Well, the hell with this, I'm not interested in this military bullshit."
So I got on an airplane and I went to Havana. I went to the [U.P.] bureau there, and I'll never forget it. The bureau in Havana was in the arcade of the Seville Hotel. It was an old, old hotel, prestigious, and the arcade ran from one street on the street level clear through the building for a whole block. There were shops and things on either side, prestigious kinds of stores. And the U.P. bureau was there. At that time, Castro really hadn't consolidated his revolution yet. There had been some gunfire a couple of weeks before, and bullets had actually come into the U.P.I. offices off that arcade. Havana at that time was the main relay point for all of North American news to a vast client network in South America. I'll never forget this huge radio transmitter that was in the bureau. It was as tall as the ceiling and about this wide [gestures], and a formidable looking machine. And they had shot it! Bullets had gone through the glass windows and had disrupted the hell out of the whole service. So the bureau was then in the process of moving from that ground floor office to an office on the eighth floor of that building, the theory being that if somebody shot at you from the street they wouldn't hit the machinery, because they would set it back in. Well, I remember that very well. That was just a side light on my other story.
But I stayed there that weekend and went back to Miami on Sunday night, and there was a message there for me at the hotel. It said: "Call New York immediately." I decided, "well, I won't call New York immediately." I
called the office in Denver and I said, "What's this all about?" They said "We don't know. A message came in and we told them you were in Miami at this hotel, and they want you to call as soon as you get the message." And the message had come in on Friday and here I was in Havana for the whole weekend. Nobody knew where I was, really. When I got back to Denver I called New York and I told them I had been out of touch for the weekend. I didn't tell them where I was. They said, "Are you still going to quit?" I said, "Yep, I'm going to quit unless you transfer me someplace." They said, "Well, how would you like to Washington?" "Fine." So that's how I got here!
RITCHIE: But they started you as a regional reporter when you got here.
McGHEE: Yeah, and I covered nine states in the southwest: Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming. The U.P. at that time had four or five divisions, and that was the southwestern division. They sent a man here for each division, to handle regional news, and gave us a special wire and everything.
RITCHIE: Did you cover both the Senate and the House for that region?
McGHEE: Both the Senate and the House and the whole government, everything. It was a difficult job. Except I was on my own. My bosses were not here, they were back in Missouri and Texas. I was isolated from the bureau here considerably for four or five years and then they put me on the general staff covering the Senate.
RITCHIE: Well, that was a pretty good assignment to get, considering that in 1959 the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate were from Texas.
McGHEE: That's right. I remember covering [Sam] Rayburn and [Lyndon] Johnson very, very much in 1959 and '60, and '61.
RITCHIE: I understand that Johnson in particular was very concerned about how he was covered and which reporters covered him.
McGHEE: He was. He was a contemptuous son of a bitch, so far as I'm concerned.
RITCHIE: He gave you a lot of trouble?
McGHEE: Well, he gave me a lot of trouble not when he was Majority Leader but after he became Vice President. I had a very difficult time with him. Johnson had an office in what is now the LBJ Room, we in the press called it his "nooky room." He had several [laughs], but this one was very ornate, and right off of the Senate Reception Room, which is in my opinion the prettiest room in the U.S. Capitol Building. Johnson was bigger than life and he could never, never stand to be in second place or beneath anybody else. He just was chomping all the time. He needed adoration. He needed people to think that he was a big shot. And generally reporters would say, "Well, he's a big shot, so what? We've got a town full of them." But I was a regional reporter and knew him fairly well. He lived up here on the Hill much more than any vice president well, I won't say before, because I understand that [Alben] Barkley never used an office downtown, nor did Truman. But Johnson didn't either. He stayed around the Senate quite a bit.
He would frequently call up to the Senate press gallery at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, five thirty, and he'd tell the superintendent, "You can tell any reporters that want to come down that I'm available, send them down." So, when a vice president calls he might have something to say. Generally, he didn't, except blowing his own horn. Very little hard news ever came out of those things, but a lot of regional news did. So me and a fellow named [L.T.] Tex Easley [Jr.] were really regulars in those. I had to go to every one of them, in case he said something about Texas, which I would make a story out of. Nobody else gave a damn about it, but the Texans ate it up. Tex Easley was the A.P. man, and he'd been here since the mid thirties. Johnson had tried to hire him, and Tex had sense enough not to go to work for him. So he and I would always go down there and we'd sit and drink with him and then come back. and
write some innocuous story for Texas. Frequently it was difficult to do. Sometimes we wouldn't write anything.
Well, this afternoon he had quite a contingent of people down there. Sarah McClendon was one of them, she covered Texas stuff, and people from the Texas newspapers were down there. There were a dozen of us, maybe, and Johnson was passing out the whiskey, he was drinking it by the glass himself, and he was just yakking. But he would always say, "This is off the record," or "This is for background." "Now, this is really deep background." "This is not for attribution, now." Tex and I understood this method, and we discounted about ninety percent of what he was saying anyway. But Tex was off that day. There was some kid, some other reporter who didn't know Johnson, he was new around here. Jack Bell, who was then head of the Senate A.P. staff, said, "Go down to Lyndon's office and see if he's got anything to say." So we were down there for an hour or two.
Among the things that Johnson said and I remember him very well saying, "this is deep, deep background, don't allude to this, don't say anything about this, but you know the United States is in negotiations with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." Now, this was 1961, not long after the inauguration. Well, I didn't even make notes on it. We had had three or four drinks down there, and I came back up and wrote some little story for Texas and then went down to the National Press Club. I was at the bar at the National Press Club about eight o'clock. Our bureau was in the Press Club Building at that time, and they tracked me down at the bar there, and they said, "You were at that Johnson press conference, right?" I said, "Yeah, I was there, I wrote a story about it." They said, "Didn't you hear him say something about negotiating with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." I said, "Yeah, I heard it, but it was completely off the record, deep background, no allusions, nothing, we couldn't use it." He said, "Well, you've got to come down and write a story about what he said, because the A.P. wrote it, and we've got to match it." I said, "I can't do that. I don't believe a damn word he was saying. I'm not going to do that." They said, "You've got to do it." I said, "Well, I'll see if I can get ahold of the vice president and see if he will permit me, when I tell him what happened, to write it." They said okay, so I called George Reedy, who was his
press secretary--an old U.P. hand, incidentally, from the bureau here. Reedy hit the ceiling, he said, "God Almighty, you know there's not a damn word of truth to that, don'tcha?" I said, "Yeah, I know it."
What had happened was, the A.P. kid went back up to his booth there, and Bell said to him, "What did the vice president have to say, anything?" The kid was thumbing through his notebooks, and he said, "I didn't understand much of it, but I think it may be news, he said we were negotiating with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines." Bell said, "What?" The kid said, "Yeah." So Bell grabbed the notebook out of the kid's hand and looked at it, and his notes were very clear, but there was no mention in his notes that this was deep background and off the record, not for attribution, don't use it in any sense. Bell wrote a bulletin that said that Vice President Johnson told Capitol Hill reporters today that the United States was in negotiation with West Germany to sell them atomic submarines. A bulletin! And he added an "urgent: this is a break through in international negotiations and atomic politics," and all this. Of course, any reporter worth his salt has background at immediate recall almost and he can take the smallest fragment of information, blow it up, and, make it look like it's really important, when it may or may not be. Well, Bell did this with the story. It went to England, it went to France, it went all over the world. And it just upset the hell out of embassies, everybody: what in the hell is this? And there was not a word of truth to it.
So the office said, "You've got to match this story." I said, "I cannot match the story that way. If you give me some time--and I can't get a clearance to write it from Reedy and Johnson--I'll do my best to back off of it so we will be in print with something, but I cannot write that the United States is doing this because Lyndon Johnson said it. He said it, but he said it off the record. I can't write that he said it off the record when it's on the record here." But the office was adamant. They had to match that story or knock it down. I called Reedy and he was just beside himself. He said he knew something like that was going to happen one of these days, and now it did. So he called Johnson, who at that time was living in Pearl Mesta's old house in northwest Washington, where I had been several times as a guest of Johnson's. He was drunk by then, full of booze and at home and not thinking clearly. Reedy always swears that he told
him that it was the A.P. that did it and not the U.P., but he mentioned my name, that I had called him and reported this, and Johnson got it in his head that it was me that wrote this. For six months he didn't speak to me. Six months! Well, here's the vice president from one of your regional states--I tried to get to him I don't know how many times to tell him that it wasn't my fault, that I didn't do it at all.
The White House knocked the story down the next day. They said, "Absolutely nothing to this." Johnson denied ever having said it. It was a one-day wonder. But to me it wasn't a one day wonder because Johnson was pissed at me, really pissed. I did not really get back into his good graces until he became president.
RITCHIE: I guess he wanted to be in complete control of the news that was reported on him at all times. He in a sense courted reporters ....
McGHEE: Oh, he did, he did. He courted us. He'd call you in, give you whiskey, and joke with you. But he was a mean son of a bitch, too.
RITCHIE: Which was somewhat self defeating. If he didn't speak to you for six months, that interrupted your coverage of him for that six month period.
McGHEE: But he really didn't care. He was moving on to higher things. He'd been cheated out of the presidency he thought by a whippersnapper. He was a funny, funny fellow.
RITCHIE: What was he like as majority leader of the Senate?
McGHEE: Well, I was covering regional items then, but you know they have what they call "dugout chatter" before the daily sessions and Johnson would show up and he'd banter with the reporters. Very seldom did any information come out of it. I remember one time--he was a crude, crude man. I think Sarah McClendon had asked him some question that nettled him a little bit. He was sitting down instead of standing up, and he reached down and pulled his crotch
and said, 'Well, Sarah, I don't know." [laughs] And he was scratching himself, it was terrible.
RITCHIE: On the Senate floor?
McGHEE: Right on the Senate floor [laughs].
RITCHIE: His counterpart in the House, Sam Rayburn, had a very different personality. How was he to cover, as a reporter?
McGHEE: Well, everybody feared Rayburn, nobody feared Johnson reporters, I'm talking about. Rayburn was a presence, an austere man. You just didn't fiddle with him at all. You seldom got to see him or talk to him. Now, he did talk to Tex Easley all the time. He was a friend of Tex's. He was, I think, a very good man, at heart, too; but he was stern. He had this visage of strength and no nonsense about him. He was, I guess, in his eighties when I came here. I remember--the type of stories you do regionally--up from the Rio Grande Valley every year the onion growers down there would send a boxcar full of onions to Washington, to Rayburn, and he would distribute hundred pound sacks of onions to everybody in the Capitol Building, all the congressmen and anybody else who wanted them. That was always a picture, Rayburn would pose with these onions. It was in the Speaker's office, and Rayburn then was an old, old man, and a hundred pounds of onions was not something that you easily picked up. But some reporter asked, "Can we get you to hold an onion." And Rayburn thought they wanted him to hold the whole sack, so he reached down and finally hoists this bag up. I'm standing there amazed. I thought, "That old bastard's going to die right here!" He's lifting up this hundred pound sack of onions and holds it there. It never got into print, but it's just a recollection I have. When I think of Rayburn right now, I think of him holding that hundred-pound sack of onions in the Speaker's office.
RITCHIE: George Smathers said that Rayburn used to eat raw onions, and would pass them out to other people: "Have an onion." Was Rayburn concerned about how the press covered him?
McGHEE: I don't think so. The press more or less idolized him, too. The press doesn't idolize people, but they had a genuine respect for him. He was a powerful, powerful man. But his power arose from his willingness to really go by seniority. He would never interfere with the system. He believed in the regular order.
RITCHIE: He used to say, "You've got to go along to get along."
McGHEE: Yeah, that's what he used to say.
RITCHIE: You covered Louisiana too, so you must have followed Russell Long's career in those days.
McGHEE: I knew this subject would probably come up. I have a couple of pretty good stories about Russell Long. Russell Long was on the Finance Committee and on the Foreign Relations Committee, and he gave up Foreign Relations to go on Commerce because his theory was that Finance and Commerce would go together and he didn't really give a damn about foreign relations anyway. He traded with Gale McGee, who wanted on Foreign Relations, and I think he was on Commerce. That's the way it worked. So he traded and went on Commerce. It wasn't long after that that [Harry] Byrd died, and then Long became chairman of the Finance Committee.
RITCHIE: That's right, [Robert] Kerr died, and then [Harry] Byrd died, and then Long took it over about '65 or so.
McGHEE: Kerr, I remember him very, very well, got a lot of stories about him too [laughs]. Russell Long, after he became chairman of the Finance Committee--I've forgotten what year it was, but I had been a regional reporter and drank with Russell Long a great deal in his hideaway there in the Capitol Building, particularly. I remember it was one of those adjournment nights when something was holding up the sine die adjournment, some bill was in conference and they couldn't quite get it straightened out and everybody was just sitting around waiting for the papers to get here or over there and the adjournment resolution to pass. [portion of interview closed]
But he was the whip. "You know," he said, "I'm going to be chairman of the Finance Committee, and that's a fulltime job, and I don't want to mess with this whip job. It ain't worth a damn anyway." He said, "If I could find a real good conservative, if I could get Bob Byrd, for instance, or somebody like that, elected to my job, I'd quit." I wasn't taking notes, but I recalled this conversation. [portion of interview closed]. Long gave me that spiel and I made a mental note of it, but I didn't write anything down. I wasn't taking notes in there at all.
So Congress adjourned, in October or November, whenever it was; and when the Congress is out of session, there's not a lot to do around here. You search for stories. So I remembered that conversation, and I wondered if he'd told anybody else that and I could verify it, get another source or two. So I called up his drinking buddy. I called him up and I said, "Say, I've heard something. I want to run it past you and see if there's anything to it or not." .I told him what Long had told me, but I didn't say Long had told me that. He said, "Hell, yes, it's true. He's going to be chairman of the Finance Committee. He doesn't want to mess around with that piddling job there as whip." I said, "Well, fine, has he told anyone else that?" This guy said, "In certain circles it's well known that he would give up that job if he could get somebody of his political persuasion to succeed him." So I wrote a story that said that Russell Long had confided to associates that he would give up the whip's job if he thought that he could be succeeded by a conservative Democrat. Then I said: "Among those that he has reported to have mentioned were Senator Robert Byrd". I wrote this story in December, and fleshed it out--like I told you Bell does, and any reporter can do, tell them what the hell the whip does, and make a story out of that little bit of information.
The story moved on the "A" wire and went to the Washington Post's Senate correspondent, who was then an old man, Bob Albright. So the Post gets this story that says that Long is going to be chairman of the Finance Committee and it's a fulltime job and very prestigious and he doesn't want to do that and
be whip too. He couldn't take both, so he was going to take Finance and give up the whip's job if he could find the proper successor. Ted Kennedy at that time was skiing at Sun Valley, when he saw the story or heard about the development that Long might step down. Kennedy immediately got on the telephone and started lining up support for the job if it became vacant. When the story got to the Washington Post, without any of the Kennedy stuff in it, the Post called their Senate man, who was a supernumerary at that time and asked him if there was anything to the story, and could he match it. Long was in Louisiana, nobody was around Washington, it was late December, close to Christmas, and Albright said, "Go ahead and run the wire copy, that'll be okay." Well, the Post didn't do that. Somehow or other somebody knocked the U.P.I. logo off of the story and put Albright's name on it.
So the story appeared all over the country under U.P.I, but it appeared in the Washington Post under the Post's Senate reporter's name. When the story hit the Washington scene the next day, everybody in Washington was looking at the Post, and they thought that this guy had gotten the story himself. They were on the phone to Long: "What the hell is going on?" The Senate leadership, the White House, everybody was wanting to know what in the hell is going on here. He said, "Goddamn, I never talked to that man! I never talked to Albright." To this day, I don't know whether Long remembered that he talked to me about that. He said, "What's the source of that story?" Somebody told Long that it was United Press International, and all Long got was International, and that had only been two or three years after U:P. had merged with I.N.S., and he got it mixed up in his head that it was International News Service, which was out of service even. In any event, he never connected me with that story the rest of the time he was here, and didn't until the time that he left, and hasn't to this day [laughs], that I was the one responsible for causing him all that trouble. Well, as it turned out, Kennedy beat all comers and was elected whip, and then screwed up in the job and a couple of years later Byrd beat him.
Long was an expansive, wonderful, hale-fellow-well-met kind of guy. I used to go up to the National Press Club with him. I'll never forget one night we were up there at two or three o'clock in the morning. Long was driving his
car--he wasn't capable of driving, really--and I lived, still live in same place, in Northwest Washington, in an apartment. Long had a girlfriend who lived there, he later married her. She was a secretary to Senator [Sam] Ervin of North Carolina. Anyway, Long knew that I lived there, and he said, "C'mon, I'll take you home." I didn't know whether to ride home with him or not, but I couldn't abandon a U.S. senator in the Press Club at that hour, so I said okay. We get on Foxhall Road, and Gwen Cafritz lived out there in a big mansion, huge English manor type house on a vast estate there off Foxhall Road. So we were driving up there, going to take me home, and Russell turns into her driveway at three o'clock in the morning, drunk out of his mind, and I'm well on my way too.
We go up this gravel driveway and park in front of the place, and a big dog starts barking like hell. Russell gets out of the car and says, "C'mon, c'mon, she'll love to see us." I said, "Goddamn, senator, we can't do that, it's three o'clock in the morning and you're waking these people up!" He said, "No, no, we'll get in." So he goes and bangs on the door and yells: "Gwen, Gwen, let us in, this is Russell." I am cringing there, wondering what in the hell I'm doing there with this guy." And the door opens and the dog bounds out, and we think he's going to eat us both up, and then the door slams. The butler or somebody said: "I'll get rid of these guys," and he let that dog out. Well, Russell Long and I are falling down on that gravel, we finally get back in the car before that dog got us, and got home. But that was only by way of illustration of what a great guy he was. He really liked newspaper people and he fiddled around with them all the time. He wouldn't trust them [laughs].
RITCHIE: What did you do in the situation where you were there, and he told you that [portion of interview closed]?
McGHEE: I didn't write a line about it.
RITCHIE: Exactly, but what do you do with stories that you can't write?
McGHEE: I've got notebooks full of stuff like that at home. You know, you always have illusions of writing a book about it some day, putting all the
remnants together and writing it, but really they're too specialized. I'm not a stylist, and it would be very difficult.
RITCHIE: But how do you know at the time, as a newspaper reporter, what you can write and what you can't write? How did you determine that you couldn't publish that story?
McGHEE: I could not publish that story because it occurred between me and Russell. There were no witnesses. All he'd have to do is deny it and I'm out on a limb, I've got no proof at all. [portion of interview closed] I had no interest, really, in exposing Russell Long's machinations; but if I had, I would have had to have been secure myself that the story would stick. I couldn't prove it at all, and he wouldn't have said it, had he been sober. I would have been taking advantage of him. It was the same way in writing that story. I confirmed it. I could have written the story that Russell Long told me, and he did, but he could have denied it. I went to his friends and got absolute proof that he had been thinking along these lines, and I had no compunction about writing the story then.
RITCHIE: One old time newspaper reporter, back in the 1920s, described himself as a "graveyard of secrets." That people told him these things that he could never publish, and that was one of the problems of being a Capitol Hill reporter.
McGHEE: Well, it is. I don't know where you draw the line on that. Without reporters being friends--there's a lot of criticism about journalism today, where you draw the line between what's private and what's public, and what you can prove and what you can't prove, and what's within fair game and what isn't, to write. That all changed in the '60s, when reporters became belligerent with their sources. I attribute that to the advent of television and the oversimplification of complicated stories. If I had carte blanche, if I had felt secure myself, if I had wanted to do Russell Long in, and somehow or other contrived to write that story, and been able to write it, I think I would have been doing him a disservice. [portion of interview closed] A lot of people, I think, attribute venality that really isn't there to many of our elected officials. God
knows there's enough venality, but it isn't endemic, or even in the government pandemic. It just isn't that way. Most people are honest.
In my time here, I have seen the Congress go from everybody hating them--well, everybody's always hated them, not hated them but held them in contempt--but the viciousness of attacks on Congress. You know, this business about their pay raises, Jesus! It is too bad that they don't have some mechanism that their pay can keep apace with their needs; but that's the way our system is. But then to blame the people personally is wrong. Then some of them of course are craven and they make a big pretense of giving it to charity. I mean, there are all kinds of ins and outs about it, but if you apply the general morality of the nation, you're not going to find it any different. Everybody wants a raise. And as far as I'm concerned they earn it. I don't know, my attitudes have changed over the years about that.
RITCHIE: I wanted to ask you about some of the other colorful characters in your region.
McGHEE: Bob Kerr was there.
RITCHIE: Yes, in Oklahoma you had Bob Kerr, in New Mexico you had Dennis Chavez, in Arizona you had Carl Hayden.
McGHEE: Well, I didn't cover Arizona.
RITCHIE: But you had Arkansas, which was a powerhouse.
McGHEE: [J. William] Fulbright was there, and [John] McClellan.
RITCHIE: And you had [Allan] Ellender in Louisiana.
McGHEE: Ellender was a funny old man, too.
RITCHIE: Could you tell me about some of these people?
McGHEE: Well, I guess among the people that I personally disliked, and I generally don't dislike people, I get along with almost everyone, but I did not like Bob Kerr. I always felt in my heart that he was really a crook and a no good. I could not find any redeeming qualities about the man to balance those suspicions off. I just never liked him.
RITCHIE: How was he as a news source?
McGHEE: He was great for Oklahoma news: "I called up the Bureau of Public Roads and we're not going to put that road through." He was on the Finance Committee, too. But he was mean spirited. He was like Lyndon Johnson, tough. I'm probably talking in bromides, everybody knows that. I've forgotten what the story was about, but I remember the context, I said to Senator Kerr, "Isn't that a rather parochial view that you're expressing here, senator?" It was something about the nation versus Oklahoma. And in a room full of people--and I used the word "parochial" in the sense that it was limited to this region, and he knew what I meant, it was before a bunch of Oklahomans, I guess and he said, "Now what in the hell are you bringing religion into this for?" I mean, he knew what I meant! [laughs] But that was his response.
Clint Anderson was a wonderful old man. In his later years of course he had palsy and he could hardly move, he shook all the time. But Anderson almost got through a health insurance bill once. I guess it was Medicare.
RITCHIE: Yes, in 1962.
McGHEE: And Kerr defeated him on it by one vote, somehow or other, bullied somebody into defeating him. I interviewed Anderson afterward. It was a great story at the time. Generally, even when one senator hates another one, they won't tell you, they won't say so, but Anderson was really hurt. He was deeply hurt by what Kerr had done to him. He thought he had had Kerr's promise on this compromise, and he didn't. Kerr double-crossed him.
RITCHIE: And he expressed it to you in the interview?
McGHEE: Yeah, he did. And I tried to get that across in what I wrote. I don't know if I made it or not. Desks don't want you to get anything in a story particularly in a wire story. "If he said it, quote him outright, don't embellish it, let the reader make up his mind," which I guess is a good way to do things.
I think one of the most colorful characters in my time here was John Pastore, but he also was a man with compassion and a great heart, and it came home to me personally. The head of the House U.P.I. bureau and I were walking through the Rayburn garage one time and we saw all these cars, Fords, Lincolns, big stretch Mercurys, that these congressmen were driving. There was a congressman here named [Paul] Rogers from Florida, and he had a press secretary who later quit him and went to work for the Ford Motor Company. This other newspaperman and I noticed all these damn cars, so we decided to look into this to see where in the hell they were getting all these cars. Why are there so many Lincolns? So I called up this friend, who had worked for Congressman Rogers and now worked for Ford. I said, "Have you all got some
plan or some program with the Congress that you let them use cars, or lease them to them, or something?" He said, "Yeah, we got a real cut rate for committee chairmen and ranking members." I said, "Both House and Senate?" "Yeah, both House and Senate." I said, "All they have to be is the chairman or a ranking member and they get this?"
The deal was you could lease a Lincoln for a hundred dollars a month, you'd keep it for a year and you could turn it back and they'd give you a new one, a nominal fee, which is essentially a bribe by the Ford Motor Company to these senators and congressmen. I said, "Who else gets them?" He said at that time (Everett] Dirksen had one of them because he was no, Dirksen did not have one at that time, that's another story I'll tell you in a minute, which is funny. I was going to say that there was some leadership in it, it might have been that the lower ranking people in the leadership got them too, those who weren't supplied by the Senate. In any event, [Frank] Eleazer--he was the House bureau chief, and he and I were the ones whose suspicions were aroused by all these Lincolns in the Rayburn building--he said, "You take the Senate and I'll take the House and let's just see how many of these cars are out here."
I called up every chairman and every ranking member of a committee in the Senate, and I found twenty five people that admitted that they were taking these cars, admitted it. Alan Bible, all the chairmen, practically all of them. A quarter of the Senate was on the take from the Ford Motor Company. And Eleazer found essentially the same thing over on the House side. We put all this together, and I had everybody except Margaret Chase Smith--God, this was funny. We didn't want to go with the story until we could name the people that had them. We didn't want to leave anybody out since that would tarnish the others--why didn't you get him? So we insisted, one of the things about our story this was a big story, a very big scandal story, and we knew we had one, and the office wanted to make damn sure that there was no fuck-ups in it.
But I could not get to Margaret Chase Smith. She never talked to reporters. She only talked to the Maine reporter, and we didn't want to give our story to him or to anybody else. So I kept going to Mrs. Smith's office and running into her in the hall. She would ignore me. I would try to talk to her and she wouldn't talk to me. So finally I went over and I wrote a note into a guy named Bill Lewis, who was her paramour and her A.A., a colonel or something in the army. I was camped out in her anteroom, I think she was in the Russell Building, and I wrote a note into Lewis and I said: "We are writing a story about automobiles that the Ford Motor Company is supplying, practically gratis, to chairmen and ranking members. I'm wondering if Mrs. Smith is taking advantage of this offer or not?" I wrote that out on a note, something to that order, and sent it into Bill Lewis. And I got a written note back from him and he handled all of her affairs, she didn't handle anything, really. She was window dressing up here, really. Anyway, he wrote the note back out to me, I never saw him, I never went in and talked to him, but the note came back. It said: "No, we were unaware of this program, but now that we know about it, we'll look into it and get one." [laughs] It just fit in with our story beautifully! [laughs]
So then we had them all, we had everybody in the House and Senate and we had the names, twenty-five of them in the Senate. We wrote the story late one afternoon for the a.m.'s, and we held it off deliberately until late in the afternoon so the A.P. couldn't match it, because if they got it early enough they
could get to these people. They could get to them anyway, and they tried, but everybody didn't know what in the hell the story was. But we had it all set up. [John] Stennis was chairman of the Ethics Committee then, so we went to him and the Senate Ethics Committee and laid this stuff out to them before we wrote a line, and we got assurances that they would look into it to see if there were any rules being violated or anything. In our copy, we also wrote that this situation had been brought to the attention of the Senate Ethics Committee and the House Committee on Standards and Conduct, or whatever they call it over there--they didn't do anything about it, they didn't give a damn. But Stennis was straight laced, and he did.
But then we didn't write the story, we held off on it, and we kept after the guy to give us a break when the committee did anything about it. The committee did something about it, they roasted these people, you wouldn't believe, it was really something. Stennis went on the Senate floor with a resolution out of the committee saying that these people had to give these cars back, they could no longer have them, roasting the hell out of the Ford Motor Company for trying to subvert the legislative process. These people were appearing before all kinds of committees up here for corporate purposes, and here these guys who were acting on it were on the take from them. Stennis was pissed about it. And among the people that he singled out, and why he singled out Gordon Allott, I don't know. He was ranking Republican on the Interior Committee, anyway he had one of the cars too, and Gordon Allott was a very good friend of mine and a good source too. But we wrote his name in there.
I started this anecdote out by telling you what a great guy John Pastore was. Pastore was not one of the people that had one of these cars. I don't know whether you know how wires work or not, but I was the reporter on this story, and my name appeared on it along with Eleazer's, but actually the Senate chief up here when we finally got the thing we put out bulletins. When Stennis went on the floor with this, we had it, and nobody else did. It took them hours even to get copies from the Ethics Committee. But we had the story. I did not have a list written out of the senators, so I grabbed a Congressional Directory, and here the guy is writing the story and I'm dictating, essentially, to him, and we get to the point where we want to name the names in the copy. So I had the
Directory with the list of names and I said, "These are the senators who have these cars," and I made checkmarks in the Congressional Directory. Somehow or other the checkmark went through Pastore's name instead of the name above or below, and Pastore did not have one of those cars. He was ranking, on something or other, I guess it was Commerce maybe. But he did not have one of those cars.
The story appeared in the Providence Journal the next morning. They had rewritten it: "Senator Pastore has a free car from the Ford Motor Company." And of course, Pastore didn't have one. So the next afternoon he took to the Senate floor, and he was furious. He was always accused--any Italian you know is supposed to have Mafia connections and all that--and he said, "I have lived my life apart from this kind of stuff." He said, "I do not have any such car. I don't know anybody who has such a car. I don't know anything about anybody else's business." But he was furious that he had been tarred with this. Immediately I knew what had happened. It kind of dampened our enthusiasm for this story when we had made this grievous error. So we got a correction out right away. The story went on for two or three cycles, and we explained in one of the cycles the story that Pastore's name was included through error and that he did not have one of these automobiles.
I went down and I called Pastore off the floor. We were in the President's Room down there, and I told him that I was the one responsible for that story in the Providence Journal. I said, "I have absolutely no excuse, and no alibi, and I'm not trying to get out of this, but I do have an explanation of what occurred, if you'd like to hear it. He said, "Well, I sure as hell do." So I had the Directory with me that I had used, and I explained to him what had happened. People don't understand how newspapers work, or how wire services work particularly. I had to get it through to him that although I was responsible for the story, I actually didn't write it myself. He couldn't understand that. "Who did write it then?" I had to explain this business to him, so I showed it how it happened, and before we left that afternoon he said, "I'm sorry that this happened to you. I don't believe in this kind of stuff in the Senate." He said, "I understand what happened. Thank you very much for coming and telling me." He was the perfect gentleman about it. I told him that I would write personally to the editors of the
Journal, if he wanted me to. No, he didn't want to do anything more about it, forget about it. We had written that he was listed in error.
Pastore was wonderful about it, absolutely wonderful. I have a big framed picture of John Pasture at home in my house now, signed. I got to know Pasture after that pretty well. He was a New Englander, I had nothing to do with him as a regional reporter for the southwest. He and I became pretty good friends in the Senate.
RITCHIE: Tell me, why did you wait to run this story until after the Ethics Committee had made some comment on it? Why not blow the story first?
McGHEE: Well, the Ethics Committee was very interested; and they said, "We will do this. We will look into this, and we will give you a progress report." We put them a time frame on it: "When are you going to do it?" They said, "right away." They didn't have anything to do, the Ethics Committee. I've forgotten the name of the man who was the staff guy who really did the work on it. But it got a hell of a lot more impact when we came out saying that the Ethics Committee had ruled--I've forgotten the official term, it wasn't censure, it wasn't any big deal, like a big trial in the Senate. Stennis just said: "Get rid of these cars." And they did.
RITCHIE: But didn't you run the risk that the story would get out?
McGHEE: Well, nobody knew we were doing it, except the guy from Ford who was my source, who told me this. Then he was scared to death that somehow or other he was going to lose his job because of it. He didn't. But nobody knew it except for our office and me and Eleazer. We were in much better shape if we could get the official stuff on it. Then we had them, and a big break on it. We were put in for prizes for that story. We never got one. I think there was some other big scandal occurred that year, and we were washed out.
RITCHIE: Is there a danger of getting too far out ahead of a story sometimes? Of not knowing how to verify information that's in it. Do you hold off until you can be absolutely certain?
McGHEE: We didn't hold off because we weren't sure of the information at that time. Because we had it from the senators themselves, and even had this wonderful line from Bill Lewis. We had the information, but we were looking at impact then, and the impact of course was great when the Senate Ethics Committee condemned this action. That's something for the Senate to tell a quarter of its members: You're doing wrong here, cut it out.
RITCHIE: And its most powerful members.
McGHEE: Yeah! It really was a big story and a big thing, but the only thing that marred it was listing Pastore in our haste to get the thing out when we finally had the Ethics Committee report, and we had that exclusive for several hours. There really wasn't all that necessity to move that fast, I could have just as easily copied out a list of names and given them to him. Then I would have had it right, but I was going through the directory and he was writing at the same time, and Pastore's name got in there. It was Godawful.
REGIONAL REPORTER ON CAPITOL HILL
Interview #2
Friday, January 17, 1992
RITCHIE: We were talking yesterday about the region that you covered for U.P.I. You mentioned the states and some of the senators you covered. One of the states was Arkansas, and one of the senators I've always been interested in is J. William Fulbright. Could you tell me about your dealings with Senator Fulbright back at that time?
McGHEE: Well, I was a regional reporter and of course Fulbright's interests were worldwide. The regional information about Fulbright I didn't write a hell of a lot of stories about him in my early years. But through that association I became friendly with Senator Fulbright, and he became one of my intellectual heroes in the Senate. I have a couple of stories about Fulbright. I guess I should tell you, to lead into this one story that I want to tell you, is that I had an interest in Latin America. In my war years I was in and out of several countries in Latin America quite a bit. One time when I was in Puerto Rico, I was coming back to the United States to go to Officers' School, and I had to wait a long time for transportation. This was in 1943. I didn't have anything to do, except sit at the Naval Air Station there waiting for transportation, which was very difficult because I was very low on the priority list for getting back to the United States. I was itching to do something, so I enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico. I went to the commanding officer and he said, "Sure, you don't have anything else to do, go ahead and do it." So I did. I lived, believe it or not they let me live in a hotel downtown. It was the old Palacio Hotel in downtown San Juan, and the rent was only a dollar a day. Every morning I would get up and take the bus out to Rio Piedras, where the university was. It was about an hour's ride on the bus, but I went out there every day and I took a couple of courses. Nothing ever came of it, but I got interested in speaking Spanish. I never had any formal education in it, but through street Spanish more or less
I picked up enough. I like to fancy myself as being able to talk it, I really can't. But in any event, I had an interest in Latin America.
Then one year, I guess it was '62 or '63, it was before Kennedy was killed, I was down in Latin America when Kennedy was there as part of the Alliance for Progress; and he dedicated a new airport in San Jose. Again, one of these years previous to that, when the Senate was not in session, I was over in the House press gallery playing gin rummy one afternoon, and the phone rang. It was the office, and they wanted to know--I'm way ahead of myself, let me back up. There was nothing to do one year, and we were always searching for things to do when Congress wasn't in session; and I wrote a story about the Inter-American highway, which was going to be dedicated shortly. I wrote a great long series of stories about it, and what the Americans had done to facilitate its construction and building. So when they got ready to open the highway, the automobile manufacturers' association and the Commerce Department sent an invitation to the A.P. and the U.P. and the big newspapers to accompany a caravan of three buses. One for the press, one for the public works people and dignitaries from the country we were going through--they would ride on the Pan American segment through their country--and then a bus for the public roads people that accompanied the whole trip from someplace in Argentina to Detroit. Well, I picked it up in Panama. Anyway, I wrote this story, so this trip came along to the office and they said, "Why don't you go on this, but you can't file very much," because tolls then were thirty nine cents a word from that part of the world. So they limited me to two hundred words a day. it was a kind of feature thing anyway, but I had a good time. It was a three-week trip and I went through all of those countries, and we spent two or three days in each one. I ran into a revolution in Honduras and did some actual reporting because of that. But it was a fun trip. That's part of the background of my having an interest in Latin America--the war experience and then that.
Then again when I was playing gin rummy, the phone rang and it was the office. The bureau chief wanted to speak to any United Press man, and I was the only one in the gallery. He said, "What are you doing at this very moment?" This was 1965, late March or April. I didn't want to tell him I was playing cards, so I said, "Well, I've got some phone calls out arid I'm just waiting for
returns. He said, "Is it anything earthshaking that you have to do?" I said, "Not particularly, why?" He said, "I want you down here in the bureau as soon as you can get here. You're going to Santo Domingo." You know, it was a real shock and a surprise to me, because I was a regional reporter, I hadn't even gone on the general staff yet. But anyway, I went down there and said, "Well, can I go home and pack some clothes?" He said, "No, we've got your ticket. I want you to go to New York right away and you'll get briefed there about what to do and where to go." So I did, I went down to the bureau and called my wife and I said, "Look, I'm being sent to Santo Domingo," the revolution was brewing. I didn't know when I'd be back or anything. I left without even a toothbrush. I bought everything in San Juan--they gave me a ticket to San Juan and then the military transported me to Santo Domingo. Anyway, by way of background of my relationships with Fulbright, I had a distinct interest in Latin America.
I liked Costa Rica very much, and Costa Rica as you may or may not know has a reputation of having more school teachers, no army, and a higher literacy rate than the United States. Primary education is compulsory, everybody has to go to school, and they learn, it's not like here. Those kids when they get out of school, they're literate. I loved the country and I still go back there, I'm going back there next month again for the rest of the winter. But one time I was traveling around in the countryside--no army now--and I saw a jeep with a machinegun mounted on it. I couldn't figure out what was happening here, why the rural civil guard would need weapons of that sort. They were obviously not weapons that were for general riot control or civil disturbance that the constabulary would need. So I came back and I went to Fulbright. I didn't report any of this, it was beyond my ken, but I told Fulbright I was traveling in the back country down in Costa Rica--I've forgotten what year it was, whether it was before the Dominican thing or after, after probably. He was very interested and he called up the Pentagon people and said, "What in the hell are you doing? Are you supplying those people with war weapons, when all you should be supplying them with if anything is maybe sidearms, perhaps rifles?" Fulbright really got onto them about that, and I think he stopped them from arming those people to the teeth, because they're really volatile people, they're like everybody else, but they do have a democratic basis, grounding, and respect for democratic institutions.
Then of course when Fulbright split with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam war, that was a big, big story. By that time, I think, I was on the general staff and I wrote about that considerably. I always had a soft spot in my heart for Fulbright. Johnson would call him "Halfbright," and he was ridiculed considerably by the right wing in the Congress, and the hawks; but he was a real gentleman, one of my favorite people in the Senate. He had an intellectual side to him that's really rare in the Senate. I remember a colleague of mine who covered the Foreign Relations Committee, a woman. She wrote about the difficulties of diplomatic communication between the Arabs and Western people. It was something that struck Fulbright as good information, a good
interpretation of things. She had in her story about how Arabs frequently will shout and give an appearance of violence when that's cultural with them and really does not mean that they hate you. It's their way. Fulbright made a speech on the Senate floor about it. That's just by way of illustration. In my opinion, Fulbright was a cut above the normal senator.
RITCHIE: You mentioned the other day about Russell Long and Gale McGee trading committee assignments, from Foreign Relations to Commerce. Long wanted to get on Commerce, and McGee wanted to get on Foreign Relations. I understand that Fulbright didn't want McGee on Foreign Relations, as a matter of fact he even bumped him off of the committee at one point.
McGHEE: I was unaware of that. I remember when he got bumped, though, because I covered Wyoming, I covered Senator McGee too.
RITCHIE: I wondered whether you had any insights into that.
McGHEE: No, I don't recall it. I don't believe that Fulbright would have bumped anybody if he could not have done it in the regular order. I don't remember the details of it, although I do remember when he went off of it briefly, but he got back on, in my recollection. It must have been because the ratios changed. Maybe Fulbright engineered with the fellow from Kentucky who was the ranking member then.
RITCHIE: John Sherman Cooper.
McGHEE: They may have arranged to change the ratio to get rid of McGee. I don't know what happened inside there. But I don't ever recall seeing Fulbright rambunctious on the Senate floor. A great guy, I liked him very much. I liked him better than I liked McClellan [laughs].
RITCHIE: Why, what was the matter with McClellan?
McGHEE: Oh, he was just gruff. Real conservative. My only disappointment with Fulbright was that he signed the Southern Manifesto, but so did McClellan. Matter of fact he probably wrote it! But that was for his own political base. He couldn't do anything else at the time. He never really felt that way, anyway.
RITCHIE: You mentioned that you were in the Dominican Republic, were you there when the revolution took place?
McGHEE: Yes, that's what I was sent down there for, to cover their revolution.
RITCHIE: There was a lot of question about whether or not Lyndon Johnson had exaggerated the situation down there.
McGHEE: Oh, he certainly did. He certainly did. It was obvious to reporters on the scene that we were favoring--we were there to keep the peace and to protect American lives, and not to take sides in the revolution but we really did take sides. We were in bed with the fascists that took over the country. I remember the general, his name was Palmer, and I saw one day when they were distributing food--they divided, they put a line in the city, and on one side were the forces loyal to the elected government, Caamano, and on the other side were the forces that were loyal to those who had seized official state power, a general named Imbert and his chief guy, a fellow named Wessin y Wessin. I'll never forget those names. The American forces were aiding them all the time. Food was hard to come by, and the military was distributing food to one side and not the other. Palmer denied that, and I got in a hell of a brawl with him on the embassy grounds, which was one of the few safe places in the city, real safe.
It was an outdoor news conference.
I had seen that morning that the American forces were distributing food to the ones who were trying to overthrow the government, rather than sustaining the government. Palmer denied it. He said it wasn't occurring, and I had seen it personally, and so had other reporters, absolutely seen it, and had written it. We were furious, the reporters down there, because the military lied to us all the time about the state of things. You really had to get behind what their story was. You couldn't take anything they said as truth. You wrote everything very qualified, what you did, that they told you. I got in this brawl with Palmer, argument with him, about this mere fact that I had personally seen the food being distributed to these people. I was unaware of it, but the television cameras were filming this press conference. I was as close to Palmer as I am to you, and he lied right in my face. I said, "That's not true, general," or something like that. "I personally saw your forces doing it this morning." And the cameras caught it. I was down there several weeks, and phone communications were terrible, but my family, wife saw that on the television! [laughs]
RITCHIE: She must have worried about your coming back!
McGHEE: Well, not really. It was quite an experience. But that has very little to do with the Senate or the Congress.
RITCHIE: Although the Dominican Republic was really the beginning of the break between Fulbright and Johnson. Fulbright stood up and publicly questioned whether or not Johnson was telling the truth about the Dominican Republic.
McGHEE: And of course he wasn't. He said people had their heads chopped off. That wasn't true. Actually, I remember writing at that time that the show of American force down there was uncalled for. We had more than thirty thousand troops in that little island in a matter of a couple of weeks. What it really was was a rehearsal for our about to become build up in Vietnam. That was more troops than we had in Vietnam at that time. More troops than we had in Vietnam we had in the Dominican Republic, and the Vietnam thing
had been going on for three or four years, or longer. '65this was. I remember writing that intervention had really changed the course of Latin revolutions. Generally you get one bunch of thieves overthrowing another, and it's their turn to steal for a couple of years until somebody else comes in. And they're generally bloodless. They'd let the old bunch go to some other country that will take them, and they'll live off what they've stolen. I mean, it's a way of life. But this was different, absolutely different. The United States was afraid that there would be another Cuba, and they could not stomach that. They could not let democracy take its course there. I interviewed Juan Bosch, who was the first democratically elected leader of that country after Truijillo was overthrown. He was a Spanish poet and a visionary. Our military didn't like him a bit. It was an interesting assignment, I enjoyed it very much.
RITCHIE: I get the sense that Johnson was obsessed with not making the same mistakes he thought that Kennedy had made, that Kennedy had let the Bay of Pigs fail, and he wasn't going to let the Dominican Republic go the same way.
McGHEE: My God, we had forces down there! We had battleships off of the coast of Santo Domingo, guns trained on the city. It was, I think, a black mark on our diplomatic history, in this hemisphere.
RITCHIE: It's an interesting point in time in terms of the press and the military. The military had gotten a pretty good press in the '40s and '50s for the most part, but in the '60s the press became very suspicious and critical of military tactics and the line that the military was giving. I don't think the military had any experience with that kind of a critical press.
McGHEE: You know, that was only fifteen years after World War II. America really isn't militaristic, really it isn't, despite the fact that we've got all this blowhard phony patriotism extant all the time, but it really isn't militaristic. People are very suspicious about turning things over to the military. I am not that way, really. I think that when the military goes in to do something, particularly in the humanitarian field, they are tremendous. That came home to me right before I came to Washington, when I was in Denver. There was an
earthquake in West Yellowstone Park. It was in a remote area in the Montana part of Yellowstone Park. There was a lake out there called Hebron Lake, and it was an artificial lake where they dammed the Madison River, which incidentally was the favorite fishing stream of Herbert Hoover, he used to go fishing out there all the time. It's beautiful country. The Madison River below that dam ran between two real precipitous mountains, through a mountain valley, very narrow, and where the stream was there were campgrounds on either side. Well, the earthquake came, and there were campers in there, and this earthquake took that lake and just did it like a saucer, and emptied all the water over that dam and it just flooded the valley. It killed lots of people. The army went in there with helicopters and was rescuing people. I went up there from Denver, me and a guy from the Scripps-Howard newspaper there rented an airplane and flew up. We were among the first to be in there and watch it and report on the disaster. The military there was fantastic. They did a job that only they are equipped to do. But of course that was peacetime, relative peacetime.
RITCHIE: Well, while we're still talking about the regional part of your reporting, I wanted to ask you about some of the other senators in your region. We just briefly the other day mentioned the senators from New Mexico, Chavez and Anderson, interesting old-time Senate types. I wondered if you could give me any insights into those two senators?
McGHEE: Well, Chavez as you may or may not have heard was a notorious drinker. When I first came to Washington in September of 1959, somebody took me to lunch at the old Carroll Arms. I remember going to lunch there, it was the first time I had ever been in the place. I don't know whether you remember the restaurant. You kind of descended a few stairs there into the waiting room before you'd go into the restaurant itself. Well, I went in there and when we emerged a couple of hours later there was a man, whom I didn't know, I had never seen him before, lying on the floor between the door to the restaurant proper and the door to the street. The door to the street was up a couple of steps. I've forgotten who I was having lunch with, but it was somebody from the U.P., from our bureau, who had been an old hand here, I think it was Warren Duffy. When we got out of there, no one was helping this man. He was
just lying there, and Duffy, or whoever it was, said, "Watch out, you're new here, don't step on that United States senator." I couldn't believe it! [laughs] Here was Chavez passed out at one thirty in the afternoon in the lobby of the Carroll Arms!
I liked the old man, though, very much. He had a daughter named Ymelda, and she was married to a columnist.
RITCHIE: George Dixon.
McGHEE: George Dixon, correct. George and I became pretty good friends. Of course, Chavez was his father-in-law. I've forgotten when Chavez died, but he died of cancer. He was taken out to the NIH [National Institutes of Health] out in Bethesda. This fellow I spoke to you earlier about, my counterpart in the Associated Press, Tex Easley, he also covered New Mexico. He and I went out there to see Chavez one day. We knew he had cancer, but nobody ever wrote it. It was before the days you didn't mention it. If someone had cancer you'd fuzz it up. The reader was aware of what was happening, but you never overtly said this man has cancer. So Tex and I arranged to go out to NIH and have an interview in the hospital with Senator Chavez. I inquired, to make small talk, "How are you getting along, senator?" "Oh, I'm fine," he said, "you know I've got cancer very bad." And he kept talking about it. He knew who we were, he was alert and aware, apparently they didn't let him have any whiskey.
So when we finished the interview and got out of there, I got to thinking: my God, here's this man in command of his faculties and he tells a newspaper reporter that he's got cancer. So I wrote that he was dying of cancer, and wrote about what we were talking about in the interview. What we talked about was that he had built a record. He was on the Appropriations Committee, headed the military subcommittee. I got out the old records and added them up and discovered that he had presided over the largest appropriations in American history. He had been here for years and years and years, and I believe during World War II was on that same committee when we spent billions on the military. Anyway, he had set a record of sorts, and I wrote that in there. I
practically wrote an obituary of the man and said that he was dying of cancer. And Ymelda was furious. She called me up and said, "That's really low life." And here everybody in the state knew what was wrong with him. I guess I'm trying to defend myself for doing it, but I did it, anyway. George Dixon, why he understood. He kept saying, "Don't pay any attention to Ymelda." I felt real badly about it. Chavez had a son who was a renegade, just one step ahead of the sheriff all the time [laughs]. I never had much to do with him, but he was on the payroll. Chavez was a nice old man, though, I liked him.
RITCHIE: It seems as if there was a different standard. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but the press just allowed public figures to have private lives and private indiscretions that they knew about but they didn't write about, including their health, and their drinking
McGHEE: And womanizing, and gambling, and everything, certainly.
RITCHIE: What was the prevailing thought about that?
McGHEE: The prevailing thought was that unless it somehow or other was detrimental to their public function and public duties and responsibilities that it was their own business. I'm still of that persuasion. I don't believe that you can set a moral standard for anybody else. It's the root of democracy. It's why I like representative government, really. People that bash the Congress, of
Course, I just maintain that they don't like it, they want some other system. When they blame the institution for the peccadilloes of the members, we've always had that. It just hasn't been published and widely disseminated, or that it made a difference.
RITCHIE: I remember reading an article by a young woman reporter who had just come to cover the Capitol and she was sitting in the gallery watching Harrison Williams manage a bill, and he was clearly drunk on the floor. She wrote a story back to her newspaper in New Jersey about this, and the editor responded: "We don't want to know about this, we want to know whether he passed the bill or not."
McGHEE: [Laughs] I remember Harrison Williams and Russell Long on an adjournment night when Russell was whip and he was standing in for Mansfield on the floor, and both of them had been drinking too heavily. Williams came on the floor when Russell was calling up little innocuous bills, the final things they were doing that night, and one of them was a resolution commending some movie star for something he'd done, or some entertainment figure. Williams walked on the floor and he said, "I'd like to amend that." And he named somebody else. And then some other senator who had had a few got up to add his movie star to it, and the first thing you know this list of people that the Senate was memorializing included Rin Tin Tin, for Christ's sake. It was a funny, funny scene; and finally Long realized that it was out of hand and he called the bill back. It never passed. [laughs]
RITCHIE: From talking to a lot of people here, I get the sense that alcohol really was a problem for many senators in the 1950s.
McGHEE: It was, and it was tragic in some instances. One of the most brilliant men in my time covering the Senate was a senator from my state of Missouri, named Tom Hennings. He was an absolutely brilliant man, great lawyer, great jurist, thinker, and alcohol really did him in.
RITCHIE: I've read Drew Pearson's diary, and he talks about Hennings disappearing for days and they would find him in a hotel room or somewhere, and that was when Pearson was hoping that Hennings would be the champion against Joe McCarthy.
McGHEE: Hennings was on the Judiciary Committee, and when he'd go off on one of these binges, there was a staff member, he was a good friend of mine, his name was Stan Chapman from Kansas City, and they used to let him sit in the committee proceedings in the mark ups, which were then closed to the press, and he could vote. This staff guy, Chapman, a character himself, would vote Tom Hennings' vote. And sometimes he'd piss off Eastland [Senator James O. Eastland, (D MS), chairman of the Judiciary Committee] so much, of course they were on different sides of the liberal conservative spectrum. But Hennings was a great senator. Liquor really got him though.
I can recall reporters that were drunks. Willard Edwards was a great Chicago Tribune reporter, until he sobered up and didn't drink anymore at all, he had whiskey in his desk all the time. Lots of reporters had bottles in their desks in the gallery. They'd nip from time to time.
RITCHIE: I guess there was a sense that everybody did it, and it was available. There didn't seem to be much of a stigma against it.
McGHEE: No, there wasn't. Johnson was a drunk. Jesus, he'd just get blotto [laughs]
RITCHIE: Well, one other state in your region I wanted to ask you about was Wyoming. The two senators were McGee and O'Mahoney.
McGHEE: Well, when I came to Washington O'Mahoney was an ill man. I can recall Johnson having him wheeled in on a stretcher to vote. I also remember Johnson on a critical vote, I've forgotten the s