THE SENATE: Death of the Tiger

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His wiry frame tensed for combat, his glance imperiously stern, his mustache visibly bristling, his arms formidably laden with books, the lean, dapper man strode briskly to his Senate seat. "Mr. President," his utterly confident baritone voice rang out, and then for two hours, three, four, and once for a marathon 22 hours and 26 minutes, Wayne Morse lectured, harangued, infuriated and often educated his fellow Senators. Sometimes they fled the lesson, and Morse addressed an empty floor and gallery. But it scarcely fazed him. For he was sure that he was speaking for the ages and not just for the benefit of his all-too-fallible colleagues.

"The Tiger," he was called, and it is true that only death could tame him. When he died at 73 last week in Oregon, he was in the middle of a comeback try for the Senate, where he had served for 24 tumultuous, useful years. Morse's battles had been a tonic to him; the harsher the better. Mostly he raged at conservatives, who, as he saw it, threatened civil liberties, or at special interests that wanted to encroach on the public domain. But he also feuded with friends. Some of his meanest gibes were directed at people who thought that they were close to him. After breaking with Richard Neuberger, whom he had helped win a Senate seat in Oregon, Morse simply would not let up the attack. When Neuberger returned to the Senate after a bout with cancer, Morse blithely remarked that the disease was obviously responsible for his erstwhile friend's lack of judgment. Neuberger once observed of Morse: "It's a tragedy, in view of his brilliance, to see him so unstable, obstreperous and irascible."

In Morse's defense, it can only be said that his invective was impartial and bipartisan. He accused Harry Truman of putting on "one of the cheapest exhibitions of ham acting I have ever seen." He said that Lyndon Johnson was "drunk with power." The corpulent G.O.P. Senator Homer Capehart was a "tub of rancid ignorance."

Morse could get away with being the perpetually angry man because he was always clean. He was nobody's man; he pursued a career that other politicians can only fantasize. He would not make a deal, he would not trade votes, he would not join a cabal. He switched from a Republican to a Democrat, but he was at home in neither party. While his col leagues rebuked him for being a gadfly, he taunted them for being "phony lib-g erals." "A true liberal can't limit himself to a few areas," he declared. "He I must be on guard everywhere, ready to I pounce on evil wherever it raises its ugly head."

Morse was one of the most ornery of the "sons of the wild jackasses," the progressive Republicans out of the Mid west who waged epic battles with the banks and trusts. Born on a Wisconsin farm, Morse learned his politics from Senator Robert La Follette, the fiercely independent Republican who championed the small farmer and workingman.

A prodigious talker, La Follette also in spired Morse with his lifelong love of or atory — the longer the better.

Labor Mediator. After earning a law degree from the University of Min nesota, Morse took a teaching job at the University of Oregon law school.