THE CONGRESS: Voice of the 84th

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Parakeet's Perch. His day begins at 5 a.m. in his three-room suite in the Mayflower hotel, where he has lived since 1926, the year after it was built (recalls Mrs. George: "I'd been watching the building go up, and one day I said, 'Mr. George, I don't know where you're going to live, but I'm going to live right there' "). He reads the morning papers, shaves (sometimes with a parakeet named Bobbie perched atop his head eying the lather hungrily), breakfasts on grapefruit and coffee with his wife, who is known throughout Washington as "Miz Lucy" (says Miz Lucy: "I always call him Mr. George, no matter how sweet I feel, or how mean"). Once a week, usually on Thursday mornings, Secretary of State Dulles comes by to join the Senator at breakfast and brief him on the latest foreign-policy developments. At 8:30, except on the Dulles mornings, George is driven to Capitol Hill in the limousine he rates as the Senate's president pro tempore.

He lets himself into his third-floor office and, since he is the first one there, opens the mail himself, carefully putting each letter back in its envelope to be answered by his five-woman staff. Surprisingly little of his mail conies from Georgia—George's constituents seem to be reluctant to take up his time. While the Senate was in recess one summer, a Vienna lumber dealer drove 200 miles to complain to George's colleague, Richard Russell, about trouble with war orders. Russell asked why the man had come all that way, since he lived just a few blocks from George in Vienna. The reply: "Oh, we wouldn't think of bothering the Senator with things like this."

After morning committee meetings, George gets to the Democrats' Senate cloakroom by 11:45 and holds informal court in a brown leather chair, smoking filter-tipped cigarettes (doctor's orders) and strewing ashes all over his coat front. Younger Democrats know that they can find him there, often drop by for aid or advice, e.g., when a junior Senator, heading his first subcommittee, recently asked George how he could get a reluctant Cabinet member to testify at hearings, George said he would look into the matter. The Cabinet officer dutifully appeared before the subcommittee early the next week.

"Huuuuuuh, Huuuuuuh." When the Senate convenes, George enters the chamber and sits alongside Lyndon Johnson for a 20-minute briefing session on the day's agenda. Because of his heavy work load on his own committees, George does not overburden himself with details in other legislative fields. One recent afternoon George walked over to Armed Services Committee Chairman Russell and said: "Dick, they tell me you've got a little bill coming up this afternoon. Now tell me about it." Russell spent two minutes outlining the main features; George nodded his agreement, later supported the measure. The "little bill": a $750 million pay raise for servicemen.