National Affairs: The Style of Bridges

• Share

In a skillful display of his cloakroom style, New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, 60, last week bolstered his position, held since Ohio's Robert Taft died in 1953, as the behind-the-scenes leader of Senate Republicans. As usual he refused (for health reasons, he again explained) to consider a move from his powerful position on the Appropriations Committee to take on the minority leader title. He preferred instead to back Illinois' Everett Dirksen for the job. To crown Dirksen, Bridges had first to put down a stubborn revolt of Vermont's George Aiken and six other Senate liberals (TIME. Jan. 12) lined up behind Kentucky's courtly John Sherman Cooper.

He had to hustle a little. Promising a juicy committee assignment here, collecting an IOU there. Bridges knew just what Dirksen's margin would be (20-14) well before caucus time. By then he had another problem: such G.O.P. conservatives as Iowa's Bourke Hickenlooper, Kansas' Andy Schoeppel and Nebraska's Roman Hruska. angry over Cooper's refusal to surrender, plotted a surprise scheme to elect South Dakota's Karl Mundt to be party whip instead of California's Tommy Kuchel—thus take back the one top party post (out of four) that Bridges had offered the liberals as a compromise. But even as Kansas' Schoeppel stood to spring the Mundt nomination. Bridges genially drifted around the caucus table, switched just enough probable Mundt votes to elect Kuchel by exactly the same margin he had given Dirksen.

When it was over the Old Guard snorted that the liberals, for all their headline making, had gained nothing that they could not have got in a quiet, back-room talk. The liberals retorted that all they really wanted—besides Kuchel's victory —was headline recognition that they, too, speak for the Republican Party. And Styles Bridges disappeared back behind the scenes, pleased that he had prevented a bitter split yet protected his own brand of pre-Eisenhower Republicanism in its last important redoubt.