Books: Corruption Within

THE CASE AGAINST CONGRESS by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. 473 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

THE SENATOR by Drew Pearson. 447 pages. Doub/eday. $6.95.

Privately, Drew Pearson can be a charming fellow, and even mildly self-depreciatory. He proposes, for instance, to package and sell manure from his large farm outside Washington under the label "Drew Pearson's Best." But professionally, he is an angry man. He makes it his business to doubt the probity of anyone in public life until he has checked him out. He has often been irresponsible, a journalistic guerrilla. Still, on balance, Pearson has dug out more ugly facts than any rival muckraker. In The Case Against Congress, written in collaboration with his associate Jack Anderson, Pearson compiles a forceful indictment of venality in Congress after 35 years of watching it in action and writing about it in his daily column.

Glass, Right or Wrong. For the most part, The Case Against Congress reports conflict-of-interest cases, many of them unblushingly straightforward. Congressman Sam Gibbons, a Democrat from Florida, sponsored a special bill for construction of a veterans' hospital on land to be purchased from a corporation represented by his own law firm. Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a millionaire cotton farmer, fights strenuously for higher price supports for cotton. Though he vociferously opposes "big Government spending," Eastland received $129,997 last year in farm subsidies. Representative Arch Moore Jr., a Republican from West Virginia, belongs to a law firm that has Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. for a client. In the House, Moore "champions" restrictions on imports of competing glass.

Pearson and Anderson concentrate much of their fire on L. Mendel Rivers, the crustaceous South Carolina Congressman, and on Connecticut's Senator Thomas J. Dodd. They cite Rivers as a classic example of the seniority system gone awry. A man of limited talent, Rivers rose to his exalted position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee only through the process of aging and the political savvy to be rhythmically re-elected by his constituents. Thanks to his influence, charge Pearson-Anderson, his home town of Charleston had military installations lavished upon it. "His district has prospered from his service on the military committees like a tick on a fat dog." But the authors wander astray when they maintain that he is "America's top security risk" because of his drinking problem. He has gone on the wagon since he became committee chairman.