THE CONGRESS: Acid & Acrimony

In a huge, semicircular conference room in the U.S. Capitol, seven Senators and seven Representatives last week sat down to what may be the most important job of their legislative lives: hammering out a labor reform bill. Between the hard-fisted Landrum-Griffin bill passed by the House (TIME, Aug. 24) and the milder Kennedy-Ervin bill approved by the Senate, there was ample room for compromise, though the rigid—and almost equally divided—positions of the conferees typified a general bitterness rarely before equaled on Capitol Hill.

Labor itself, by its incredibly crude tactics, seemed determined...