The Congress: Mr. Speaker

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Doing What Comes Natural. In Boston young Lawyer McCormack seemed headed for quick success. He prepared his cases with exhaustive research—in the House, he has always been known as a Congressman who studied bills down to the last comma—and he was a slashing courtroom examiner (a style that has always been his chief characteristic as a House debater). His firm came to gross some $30,000 a year, but McCormack's ambitions were never really satisfied in the courtroom. Politics, McCormack says, "was the natural thing for anyone born in South Boston." And in South Boston terms, John McCormack was a natural politician.

He was wise enough to bide his time, learning the rules of the game while making himself known to Boston's rough-and-tumble political kingmakers. He worked for other candidates, made himself useful to the party, and shrewdly stored up political lOUs as provender for his own political future. "I was getting experience and making friends."

When he was 25, John McCormack ran as a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, the fourth in the state's history. McCormack was an odd looking candidate—a pallid beanpole of a man with a mop of black hair and windmill arms, he looked like a Dublin agitator from an O'Casey play. He won his race, and at the convention he mingled with the stars of Massachusetts' political firmament. That same year—1917—McCormack enlisted in the Army, serving in Stateside garrisons for the duration of the war, emerging as a sergeant major.

After Armistice Day, McCormack ran for the state House of Representatives. He won, and won, and won again. In fact, the only time John McCormack ever lost an election was a calculated step toward a career on Capitol Hill. By 1926, McCormack was a state senator, and he considered himself ready for the big time. That year South Boston's James A. Gallivan was running for his ninth consecutive term in Congress, and McCormack challenged him in the Democratic primary—the only election that matters in South Boston. Gallivan, an enormously popular man, was also awesomely bibulous. His drinking didn't bother the tolerant constituents of the Twelfth District, but it opened a door for John McCormack. One day McCormack and a friend. Contractor James Fitzgerald, found Representative Gallivan in a drunken stupor on the floor of the Boston Athletic Club.

Gallivan's pulse was so feeble that Fitzgerald could not detect it at first. Said Fitzgerald to McCormack: "You better run against him. This fellow isn't going to live long. He's going to drop dead."