Nation: The Senate: An Individual Who Happens To Be a Negro

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Less than Bashful. "I'm cautious by nature," Brooke explains. He has spent long hours on the Senate floor since his arrival, on occasion sitting as the only spectator while some colleague spun a solo speech. Unlike his freshmen classmates Percy and Hansen, he has not yet introduced any legislation. Nor does he expect to assault Senate tradition by making a floor speech soon. "I won't establish a record for speaking early," he says, "but I will not be bound by custom either. If I feel I must speak out, I will have no hesitation."

Off the floor, he has been less than bashful about making his views known. During a briefing for new Senators by the Secretary of State, Brooke quizzed Dean Rusk insistently about continued U.S. bombing raids in North Viet Nam. As he said on a Meet the Press panel recently, Brooke feels the bombing strategy should be "reassessed" because he does not believe the raids have "served the purpose for which they were intended," to stop enemy infiltration.

He said pretty much the same thing two weeks ago during a 90-minute private meeting with Lyndon Johnson. Nor did he hesitate to criticize House Minority Leader Gerald Ford's handling of the Powell controversy. Arguing that Ford had made a political "blunder" by marshaling G.O.P. members behind last month's resolution to deny the Harlem Democrat his seat, Brooke charged: "Now the Powell matter has become a Republican problem. It was the Democrats' mess, and we should have let them stew in it."

Brooke intends to be his own man—and that goes for liberals, Negroes and the G.O.P. alike. "I will not have my vote taken for granted," he says. "I can be a team man, with the reservation that I can leave the team when I want to." He favors open housing, job-training programs, seating Red China in the U.N.—all of which puts him out of step with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. More often than not, he will be voting with the Republican liberals, notably California's Tom Kuchel, New York's Jacob Javits, New Jersey's Clifford Case and his fellow freshmen Hatfield and Percy.

Allies, Not Adversaries. When pressed to define his political outlook, Brooke offers such portmanteau labels as "creative moderate" or "a liberal with a conservative bent." While accepting the humanitarian goals of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, he faults the Administration's approach to helping the poor as "aspirin—it relieves the pain, but it doesn't cure." Both domestic-welfare and foreign-aid policies, he reasons, should be oriented more toward self-help and less toward the dole approach. "If you give a man a handout," he maintains, "you establish a chain of dependence and lack of self-respect that won't be broken easily. If that is the situation of the grandfather, then the son, the grandson, the great-grandson will probably be in the same desperate, dreary situation. But when a man wins self-respect, then everything else falls into place."