The Congress: Mr. Speaker

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Ways & Means, McCormack was a House wheel. The help he had received from Rayburn made them allies—and their alliance endured for 30 years. Although McCormack had learned abstinence at his mother's knee (and has never touched hard liquor), he was welcome at Garner's after-hours hideaway, the famed "Board of Education," where the Speaker and Rayburn held forth with other congressional leaders, mixing Bourbon and Scotch with political gossip and plans. In 1936, after the death of Speaker Joseph W. Byrnes, Alabama's William ("Mister Will") Bankhead was the uncontested candidate to become the new Speaker. But a large grey thunderhead of controversy gathered over the succession to Bankhead as majority floor leader. The contenders were New York's John O'Connor and Sam Rayburn. By every rule of geopolitical logic, O'Connor should have been McCormack's man: he was a Northerner, a big-city Democrat, an Irishman and a Catholic. But Rayburn was a treasured friend, and McCormack promptly endorsed Mister Sam, bringing ten of New England's eleven Democratic Representatives into camp with him. That helped win the day for Rayburn. "I don't go back on my friends," McCormack says today. "I would be an ingrate."

Pristine Record. In 1940, when Rayburn succeeded to the speakership, McCormack became majority leader, smothering his opponent, Virginia's courtly Clifton Woodrum, with the aid of some muscular Rayburn politicking among the Southern delegations. At the 1960 Democratic Convention, it was again McCormack's turn to help Rayburn. As the chairman of John Kennedy's home-state delegation, he came to the rescue of Rayburn, the campaign manager of Lyndon Johnson, with a timely motion that suspended the rules and put Johnson on the ticket with Kennedy as vice-presidential nominee by acclamation. The move effectively choked off the testy liberal opposition to Johnson, and wrapped the Democratic ticket in the cloak of unanimity. "Massachusetts and Texas," mused McCormack. "It's a good combination." In his years as a citizen of the House, John McCormack has compiled a pristine record of party loyalty. He was a fervent New Dealer ("I was Franklin Roosevelt's good right arm," he says), and he has worked hard for the New Frontier. His name has never been signed to any famous bill and he has never been notably associated with any specific area of legislation. A passionate antiCommunist, Mc Cormack chaired the first House commit tee investigating Nazi and Communist subversion (later the House Un-American Activities Committee). Through the years, he was a prime mover in the fight for TVA, SEC, the Federal Housing Act.