The Senate: A Duel of Chairmen

With the advent of TV, most Senators have found the cameraless Senate chamber a poor place to make headlines. Most days, as a consequence, the Senate floor is about as exciting as a daytime soap opera. All the more dramatic, then, was the scene last week when two of the upper chamber's most celebrated dignitaries — both chairmen of highly important committees —squared off for a direct and bruising battle.

The overt issue was the attempt by William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee to gain representation on the Senate's special CIA watchdog committee (TIME, May 27). The real question, however, was whether Fulbright would succeed in flouting Richard Russell, chairman both of the watchdog group and the powerful Armed Services Committee, and uncrowned king of the Senate's inner Establishment.

Fulbright began the debate by downplaying his committee's move, arguing that since the CIA "plays a major role in the foreign policy decision-making process," it was only reasonable that the Foreign Relations Committee should be interested in it. A broadened—and by implication more alert—watchdog group, he claimed, would be but a "small step in the Senate's formal recognition of its duty to exercise a more comprehensive oversight of U.S. intelligence activities."

Muscling In. Sitting impassively across the way, Russell would have none of Fulbright's "self-serving, self-seeking" power play. The Foreign Relations Committee, he complained with reason, had "rewritten, rewritten and rewritten" its solution so that it would not be sent through normal parliamentary channels to the Armed Services Committee—where, he neglected to add, it would have been quietly killed. Knowingly touching the Senate's most sensitive nerve, Russell further objected that the resolution would "change the procedures of the Senate as they have existed since its creation." Said he: "I'm not trying to muscle in on the Senator's committee. I'm trying to keep him from muscling in on mine."

With that, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield decided that the Senate's interest in keeping its private business private—as well as protecting the CIA—was more important than its long-held pride in open debate. He asked for an extraordinary secret session, only the second held since the middle of World War II.* "Things might be said that aren't particularly true and could be harmful," reasoned Mansfield. "Rumor and hearsay can be damaging."

The doors might just as well have stayed open. The outcome was foreordained as the Senate, 61 to 28, sent the Foreign Relations' resolution to certain death in Russell's Armed Services Committee. It was another demonstration of Fulbright's lack of influence in Washington.