Booknotes

Mr. GILBERT C. FITE, AUTHOR, "RICHARD B. RUSSELL, JR.": Well, Senator Russell was a very, I think, distinguished politician for his day. And later, we may talk about some of his problems. But I think, generally, he was in the mainstream of American history from the time he was in the Senate in 1933, when he came to Washington in January of '33, and stayed there until he died in 1971. So he was here for 38 years and in a very important period of American history. And he had much to do with many of the issues that were involved--or that the country was involved in during those years.

Mr. FITE: I never knew him personally, but I went through all of his personal papers and I think I got a pretty good understanding of the kind of man he was. In the first place, he was a very intelligent person. He didn't show this in his early years in school because he liked to play rather than study. But once he got through law school and--with a little better than average grades--and started practicing law, and went into politics in 1921 when he went to the Georgia Legislature, from that time on, I think his intelligence showed in about everything that he was involved with.

In addition to that, he was a man that was greatly concerned about having information on the issues that he dealt with. He had no respect for some of his colleagues who he thought really weren't prepared for the issues that they were dealing with in the United States Senate. He studied a great deal. The story is that when he first came to Washington that he read the congressional record in its entirety every day. So he wanted to be informed. He was a man who believed that knowledge was power, and that if you knew more than the people you were, perhaps, arguing against or working against on a, say, a particular political issue, then you're--you were more likely to win the battle if you had more information.

He was a humble individual, although he held high office and was chairman of the Appropriations Committee during his last years, and was on the Appropriation Committee all the 38 years that he was in the Senate. He was the kind of person who would always be prepared on an issue when he went to--whatever that issue might be. So he was informed on issues and he worked hard to know more than other people on it.

Mr. FITE: No, he was--he never married. As a young man, he did a lot of courting, as they called it in those days. In the--when he was a teen-ager, he was literally pursued by young ladies. And they thought that he was a catch, so to speak, if they could get a date with Richard Russell. And I found in his files many of the letters that these girls wrote to him when he was 16, 17 and 18 years old. But whenever any one of them would get serious, then he would drop them. But he almost got married in 1938.

He met a young lady here in Washington, who was a professional person, and they came just within an ace of getting married, but they didn't get married because of religious differences. It seems--well, not very important today, perhaps, but in the 1930s, a mixed marriage, which was, at that time a Protestant and a Catholic, didn't go over. And the young lady was a Catholic and she wanted to have a Catholic wedding, the Catholic rites, and he didn't. He wanted his brother, who was a Presbyterian minister, to marry them.

Mr. FITE: Well, he came from a family of 13 children. He was the fourth --the first son and the fourth child of a family of 13.

Mr. FITE: His father was a very ambitious man--a lawyer and a judge--and a man who pushed his son very hard. And Judge Richard Russell, his father, was very concerned about his son’s succeeding.

Mr. FITE: His father had run for...

Mr. FITE: Yeah, that's a picture of the judge. He swore his son in as governor of Georgia. He was then chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. And he was very happy because he had run for governor on at least two occasions earlier and had not made it, and was now sort of leaving it up to his son to carry on the family record, so to speak.

Mr. FITE: Richard Russell was born in Winder, Georgia, which is not far from Atlanta, a small town; probably had about 1,000 people at that time, and it was an area where they raised cotton--it was a rural town. And he went to a private school, Gordon Military Institute, for his secondary education, and then he went to the University of Georgia for his law degree, which, at that time, was a two-year degree. And so he was from a big family with an ambitious father, who pushed him and he lived in this rural community, which--although I should say that he did travel a good deal as a youth. He came to Washington. He was here, in fact, for Woodrow Wilson's inauguration with his father in 1913. And so--but he was raised in a rural community and he never got over that feeling that--of agrarianism. He was a great agrarian.

Now when he came to Washington in 1933, he lived alone, either in a hotel room or in a small apartment. He also had a sister in Washington at that time and he visited her frequently. But generally, he lived alone; spent his evenings reading, getting ready for the Senate business the next day or reading history. He had a great love of history and he probably knew more about the Civil War than most professional historians.

Mr. FITE: Well, his pattern at the end of the day was stay until about 7:00. And the staff--some of the staff used to say they wish he would get married so he'd have to go home for dinner. But he would stay until about 7, finish his correspondence and then he'd at--in the early years before television, he'd listen to the news on the radio while he was having a couple of drinks of Jack Daniels, which he kept in his drawer--his desk drawer--and then he would go out to the local--to a local restaurant to have dinner. And he kept up that pattern during most of his years in Washington.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Yeah.

Mr. FITE: Sometimes that would be what he would do, right.

Mr. FITE: Yes. He started smoking very early in life as a teen-ager, and his mother used to chastise him for it and yet he never stopped. And he smoked unfiltered cigarettes, of course, at that time, and he began to get emphysema in the 1950s. He went to Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment and to find out for sure what he had in about 1955. And the doctors there tried to get him to stop smoking, but it was about three years later before he did. And he said on one occasion he coughed just as much when he wasn't smoking as when he was, so he said, `Why don't I continue to smoke?' But he did quit about 1958, but by that time, the emphysema had become so serious that he went downhill rather steadily after that.

Mr. FITE: Not too often, according to what the staff members have told me. They might be with him, but they might--he would frequently not offer them a drink.

Mr. FITE: Well, he was a very private person and his senior staff--he saw them frequently, and, of course, the secretary who took his correspondence, he saw her frequently. But the people who worked out in the front offices, who took care of the daily routine, he didn't see them very often. He always went in his private door, or almost always. He was not a person that was--we might say hale and hardy and well met. He was a very reserved Southern gentleman. He called the ladies in his office `Miss So-and-So'--whatever their name was. Call them...

Mr. FITE: Used their first name.

Mr. FITE: Yeah, Miss Margaret, or whoever it might be, right.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Well, Richard Russell, I think, had as much or more respect by his colleagues than most any senator during that period, at least on the Democratic side. And he got along well with his colleagues on the Republican side as well. And that was partly true because he was a master at doing favors for people in a behind-the-scenes way. Richard Russell worked behind the scenes. And people came to ad--that is, his colleagues came to admire him for a variety of reasons.

One was that they could absolutely depend upon his integrity. I mean, if Richard Russell gave you his word, you didn't have to worry about it. You didn't have to have it written down. Not only did he have great integrity, but he was fair, and people--his colleagues recognized that. And so he built up a series of friendships and a high level of respect that I think very few senators had to that degree. And I think that's the reason that finally it was named. And, of course, Senator Byrd was and is a great admirer of Richard Russell.

Mr. FITE: Robert Byrd, right.

Mr. FITE: Right. Mm-hmm.

Mr. FITE: I think that's Burnet Maybank.

Mr. FITE: Well, they were people that were supporting Richard Russell and the Southern cause in regard to civil rights. They were part of the Southern caucus, and since a good deal of the book deals with the struggle and the conflicts over civil rights, the publisher thought that was an appropriate cover.

Mr. FITE: You know, the authors don't have anything to do with that.

Mr. FITE: We live in northwest Arkansas, not far from Senator Fulbright's former home at Fayetteville.

Mr. FITE: Yes, now.

Mr. FITE: I don't do anything. I'm retired.

Mr. FITE: I started working on that about 1980 when I was at the University of Georgia in Athens. And then I had it almost completed when I retired in 1986 and then I was having so much fun in retirement I had a little problem getting back to it. And then I finished it and it was published last year.

Mr. FITE: That is a series of books that the University of North Carolina Press has published. I think many of them are biographies of Southerners and they've gotten special support from this foundation or this group.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Well, I think--the first book I ever wrote back in the late 1940s was a biography of Senator Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, a liberal Republican. But I think--well, my philosophy of history is that we ought to be as objective in writing our history as we possibly can and we ought to keep--when we're writing biography--keep the person in the time and place in which he lived. And that's what I did, especially on the question of civil rights.

Now Richard Russell and I would not agree on the question of civil rights. But I think I have presented his position fairly. I've been critical, but I don't think unduly so. I've tried to place him in the time that he lived in, the environment that he came out of, the influence of history on him and his family, and so forth.

But other than the civil rights issue, I think Richard Russell was very much in the mainstream of Democratic politics in the period from 1933 to 1971, except, possibly, right at the end--he and Lyndon Johnson had a falling out over a good bit of the Great Society program. But other than that, he was a New Dealer in the early years, supported Franklin Roosevelt all the way through, and supported such things in the early years as federal aid to education. I mean, he was not out of tune, except on this one issue, with the main thrust of the Democratic Party.

Mr. FITE: He did. I expect after Johnson became president, he spent more time with Johnson than I would guess any other senator--a lot of time over there.

Mr. FITE: No. He could have been majority leader in 1953--I mean, minority leader in 1953 or he could have been majority leader in 1955. He did not want the--or he could have had it earlier--he did not want the majority leadership because by the time he could have had it, he and Harry--Harry Truman, who had become president, had a sharp difference over the civil rights question. And Russell said, `I do not want the responsibility of handling the administration program, as I would need to do if I were majority leader, with this civil rights issue in it as a main part of Truman's program.'

Mr. FITE: Well, I think he had a lot to do with making Lyndon Johnson first minority leader and then majority leader. Russell liked Johnson from the beginning and Johnson courted Russell as he did other people. And when Russell--I mean, when Johnson came to Washington, the Johnsons almost immediately began to entertain Russell--inviting him for dinner and that kind of thing and courted him unmercifully, really. And so Johnson and Russell had or did develop a fairly close personal relationship early on.

But what Russell liked about Johnson was his ability to get things done and his ability to work with different elements in the Democratic Party. And that, I think, is one of the main reasons that he supported Johnson for majority leader. He could see--Russell could see the Democratic Party dividing over the question of civil rights by the late 1940s and he felt Johnson would be the best person in the party, that he knew of anyway, to kind of keep the two groups, the two elements in the Democratic Party, together. And he worked hard toward that end. But he admired Johnson. He liked Johnson. They were just the very opposite. If the old saw is right that opposites draw one another, here's a good example of it, because Russell was private, he was reserved, he was polite, while Johnson was often boisterous and demanding and so forth. But they got along very well together...

Mr. FITE: ...until...

Mr. FITE: ...the judge, right.

Mr. FITE: Well, in 1968, Russell made a nomination for a federal judge in south Georgia. And if I can go back just a minute. Some people thought that Johnson and Russell really came from parting of the ways over the Great Society program. And it's true that Russell opposed most of that program, but they still had very close social relations all during the '60s up to 1968. And so Russell nominated an old friend and political supporter, and a rather distinguished lawyer, for a judgeship in south Georgia. And the man had earlier made some anti-civil rights statements and took some anti-civil rights positions. This had been almost a decade before. And some of the civil rights people and the attorney general's office said we'd better look into this a lot more carefully.

And so groups began to oppose judge--the nominee. And Russell thought that the president ought to put it right through. And so when he didn't--although he told Russell that, you know, `I'm finally going to appoint the--your nominee, but I've got to solve some political problems that I've got here with the appointment beforehand.' And Russell thought he was too slow and embarrassing his nominee and so forth, and so he wrote the president a red-hot letter. In fact, it was so hot that Johnson told one of his aides that he didn't want to even keep it in the file, although he did.

And they never recon--the appointment was made, but Russell never forgave him. And Johnson tried to--after he decided he wasn't going to run for president and went back to Texas, he tried to mend the split, but he was never successful. And Russell--in fact, when they were doing a book on Johnson and wanting some of his former colleagues to say some kind things about him, Russell didn't even answer the request until, finally, one of his assistants or one of his aides said, `We've got to write something,' and so they did. But Russell was unforgiving, I'd say, in that situation.

Mr. FITE: Well, I got--I found it both in the Russell Papers and in the Johnson Papers.

Mr. FITE: The Johnson--the Russell Papers are in the Russell Library at the University of Georgia, and the Johnson Papers are in the Johnson Library at Austin, Texas.

Mr. FITE: And I interviewed most of the senior staff people, yes. Charles E. Campbell was his last administrative assistant and I interviewed him at some length.

Mr. FITE: I believe he's still alive.

Mr. FITE: Yes, I talked to him. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mr. FITE: Fulbright. Let's see--well, I interviewed a number of Others -- and, of course, Senator Talmadge, the other senator from Georgia.

Mr. FITE: Well, Eugene Talmadge had run against Russell for the Senate in 1936.

Mr. FITE: Eugene Talmadge was a governor--he'd been secretary of Agriculture in Georgia and was--and then became governor.

Mr. FITE: Was his father, right. And so Tom--Eugene Talmadge was a--well, had a lot of support from the--from rural Georgia, and that was his--that was his base. And a lot of people thought that he would give Russell a real battle in 1936. Russell--his first election was for four years to fill out a term of a deceased senator. And so then he came up in '36 again and a lot of folks in Georgia thought that Talmadge could beat him because Georgia was predominantly rural at that time and he had a farm, and in his past political history, he had appealed to the rural element.

But the surprising thing was for many people, including me when I began to study it, was how much support Russell had from farmers. And he never acted like a farmer. He never, you know, hardly ever campaigned without his shirt and tie in those rural areas. And yet he got the farm vote. I think because they felt, `He's giving it to us straight. We can depend on what he says.' And Russell didn't make many promises to farmers, but he still got their vote.

Mr. FITE: That would have been in 1930.

Mr. FITE: No, he was running for governor.

Mr. FITE: Yes, he was elected. He was never defeated in an election. In any--from the House--when he was 23 years old, he ran for the House in his district, that is the state House of Representatives, he won that against an older man in the county who was well-established--beat him, I think, better than 2:1, as I remember it. And then when he ran for governor, a lot of people thought--this was in 1930--that he was just testing the water, so to speak. That used to be characteristic in Georgia and probably other states--run and get known. And he said, `No, I'm going to run to win.' And he beat some of the best old-line politicians that the state had.

Mr. FITE: Oh, not much. One year, he spent $3,000 when--I think when he ran the first time for governor. I expect when he ran for the Senate--it seems to me--I'm not sure of these details, but I think it was about $12,000 for...

Mr. FITE: Well, he had a car and a driver, and he'd go from town to town and talk to people at the courthouse square, or he might stop along the road and talk to a farmer. And he didn't use much radio, but he did use radio some in 1932, and at least he made maybe three or four talks on radio. So that's about all the costs he had.

Mr. FITE: From January 1933 until he died in January 1971.

Mr. FITE: He was a senator when he died, and was chairman pro tem of the Senate.

Mr. FITE: Well, that's, I think, the most distinguished title that the colleagues can give to somebody that they deeply respect and--it does carry some--or it did at that time, anyway--carried some perks with it. You know, he had a car after that and that sort of thing.

Mr. FITE: I think, in the first place, he was chairman of the Subcommittee on Agriculture Appropriations in the 19--late 1930s. And the United States was very rural in the late 1930s, and he did a lot of favors for people--for senators all over rural America, which was a good share of America at that time. And so that was--he--as I said a while ago, he did a lot of favors for people. Also, he had established this reputation of being fair, of being--having great integrity. And there was another thing about Richard Russell: He--if you told him something in confidence, you could be sure it was never going to be repeated.

And so, over the years, his stature just increased year after year with more and more of his colleagues respecting him, and then, of course, seniority played a big part here because seniority was a lot more important in those days than it is now, because when you got to be chairman of the--let's say of the Armed Services Committee, which he was for 16 years, or chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which he was after 1969, why, you know, you had a lot of power.

Mr. FITE: Yes.

Mr. FITE: That idea had floated around. A number of people had that idea, of relocating blacks from the South to the North. Russell, on the racial issue, did not believe in integration in any form whatever. He believed that both races would be better off if they were separate--physically separated. And so as the civil rights movement developed, Russell and people who held those views said--and many of the views were coming from the Northeast and the North and, to a lesser extent, from the West, in Congr--that is, representatives in Congress from those areas, Russell said, `Well, if we're going to have integration, why don't we have it in the North as well as in the South?'

And so he favored this relocation bill. If--any black family that wanted to move on, at least one of the bills said that they'd be paid $1,500 to move to some other community. Of course, that got nowhere in Congress, any more than the idea that had been around during quite a little of the 20th century of moving blacks to Africa or some idea of that kind.

So none of--these were mostly ideas to deter or to turn aside the main drive for civil rights. And Russell and the Southern caucus, which started out with about 20 senators and finally declined until it only had about 12 or 13 left that they could really depend on to oppose civil rights legislation, those--well, by that time they were just trying to slow the process up. As Russell said on many occasions, you know, `If I could just stop this for 20 years,' or something like this.

Mr. FITE: Well, I think he would have said separate and equal, but my view is that you--they can't be separate and equal. They're separate and unequal. And so Dick Russell would have argued with me on that point--or with anybody. He did. The Congressional Record is full of the arguments. But--now unlike Senator Talmadge, let's say, who came in in the '50s, who had a--who came in as a strong segregationist, but who gradually changed some of his views. But Russell never did.

And I think part of this was due to his understanding of history. He--as I mentioned a while ago, he was a great reader of history. And some of the history he read was on Reconstruction after the Civil War. And he read the history in that period, which tried to show that blacks were totally irresponsible when they got in positions of influence, as they did in some of the Southern states there during Reconstruction.

And so with that understanding and with the stories that the older men in his community used to tell him about the Civil War and about Reconstruction, he was--he just believed that blacks could not handle the kinds of responsibility, let's say, that he could do. And so he was--as I say there someplace, he was sort of bound by his understanding of history and how blacks had functioned in American society at a particular time, particularly during Reconstruction.

And he just never changed his mind and there was no reasoning with him on that point, although he was a most reasonable man on almost every other issue. But not that one.

Mr. FITE: Mm-hmm.

Mr. FITE: Well, he just, for some reason--and I can't explain it--and his correspondence, which--practically all of which I've read, don't explain why he never changed his view on this one issue.

He changed views on many other issues--very important issues, and--for instance, in his early years he was a strong isolationist. Well, he got away from that in his later years. But on this issue of race, he lived in a time, was raised in a community that was strictly segregated, and just could not, for some reason or other, bring himself to see that this was wrong.

Mr. FITE: Well, he kept the filibuster rule in force, and even tightened it up in some cases, so that a minority had more power than it had had earlier. And it wasn't until 19--when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed that the rest of the Senate was strong enough to override that small minority. And if the Senate, at that time--or, that is, if the caucus--Russell and the Southern caucus--could have gotten the thing in committee--the Civil Rights Act--they might have blocked it even longer. But in 1964 there were enough votes to put it directly on the calendar, and so there was no way for a committee to block it. And, of course, that was done in a purposeful way by the people who wanted civil rights legislation passed.

Mr. FITE: They would not have. Now he did--he finally voted against the--he knew the '57 law was going to pass, but the most effective parts of that law he and Lyndon Johnson arranged to cut out because Johnson could see--Johnson became a strong supporter of civil rights because he wanted to become president, and he saw that no person in American history, from this time onward, would probably--could be elected president without supporting civil rights.

And so he and Russell made a deal and they got the law passed, but it wasn't a very effective law. Neither was the 1960 law. And it wasn't until 1964 that Johnson had built up enough support that they were able to put it past this minority that would have talked forever to keep it from passing if they'd had a chance.

Mr. FITE: I have seen nothing in the record where his colleagues challenged him on this contradiction, as you imply. I believe it was Hubert Humphrey that once said that Richard Russell was in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, except on this issue of civil rights.

And I never saw Humphrey--any record of Senator Humphrey or any of the other strong pro-civil rights people, you know, criticizing Russell in the broad sense because of this one issue. And I think that's just because they did have deep respect for him, but on this one issue, you know, `Dick, you don't know what you're talking about, and we're going to change it.' And they did.

Mr. FITE: I think--in the case of women, I think Richard Russell would have supported that move. I don't think we can really guess whether--if he had lived long enough--that he would have changed his mind, but certainly there was no indication by 1971 that he was changing his mind. Now he had given up on the fight over civil rights. For instance, he had been a strong opponent of some of the housing legislation and that sort of thing, but he quit, really, opposing that in a vigorous way--might vote against it, but he wasn't taking the lead in it.

Mr. FITE: Well...

Mr. FITE: Not very often. Russell was very critical, in fact, of his colleagues, who he said instead of tending to day-to-day business, were running to the television station to get on TV so they could send their message home and that sort of thing. He thought we'd have better government if everybody did their work and paid attention to the day-to-day operations more than trying to get publicity for themselves.

And the way we spend money nowadays on elections would have simply been abhorrent to Richard Russell. Now, of course, he did have the good luck of not having any opposition after 1936, so all he had to do was to raise enough money to file his candidacy. But he never spent much money and the idea that we have--or have had recently, of where candidates--or I mean members of Congress can keep a certain amount of campaign money, that--Richard Russell--he would have thought that was the worst thing in the world. Because he always--if he had any extra campaign money left over at the end of a campaign, he always sent it back if he could find the people to send it to. And when he couldn't find the people to send it to, he gave that money to the University of Georgia in his will.

Mr. FITE: Yeah.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Well, his Southern colleagues put a lot of pressure on him to run for president in 1952. He had been nominated in 1948, but he never joined the Dixiecrats; he went ahead and supported Truman, although he had been nominated, and it was on the--on a civil rights issue--on the civil rights issue.

And so then he said he would--wouldn't run anymore, but he had a lot of pressure from Southerners to run for president in 194--in 1952, and so he finally decided that he'd take a swing at it, and he did.

Mr. FITE: Well, newspaper talk of that, yes.

Mr. FITE: Yeah. Right.

Mr. FITE: There were some Democrats that would have been--would have loved to have had Eisenhower as their candidate.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Well, he was listed as Richard B. Russell, Democrat, Winder, Georgia, and that's all that they had in the Congressional Record after about the mid-'50s.

And this--he was going to change this, but his colleagues came around when this issue of the directory came out and they saw that his one line of identification--when the rest of them had a half a page or a page or a page and a half, telling all of the great things they had ever done--his colleagues came up to him and said, `Dick, that's great. We think this is wonderful.' So he got so many compliments from people that he never changed it, and after the mid-'50s, for about the last 15 or 16 years he was in Congress, that was the only identification in the Congressional Directory: Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Winder, Georgia.

Mr. FITE: Right. He opp--Russell was a very conservative man on an issue such as this. He didn't want the sound system and he said, `The reason I don't want the sound system is because in the gallery, if people--if they have trouble hearing, they'll be quiet and kind of pay strict attention to what we're saying. If we have a sound system, why, there'll be whispering up there and all this and they won't any pay attention--or not as much attention to us.' So that was his reason. But, of course, they put in the sound system.

Mr. FITE: Oh, there's a very big Russell family, right--nephews, nieces. Some of the senator's family--some members of it are still alive.

Mr. FITE: The family were all--members of the family were all very cooperative. His sister gave me access to files that she had--Mrs. Hugh Peterson. And other members of the family were generous in giving time for interviews. And one of them told me--one of the sisters who was a friend of the lady that he came--well, that he almost married--she told me something about that situation and so the family--all the members were very cooperative.

Mr. FITE: No, I don't think so.

Mr. FITE: Oh, yes. Yeah. Nobody edited out anything.

Mr. FITE: Well, I think they can learn how the Senate operated, to a considerable degree, during that period. I think they can learn something more about some of the main issues that confronted the country during those years. And I think you get something of a flavor of what society was like at that time, how it moved from sort of the simpler, at least, rural society to a more urban society with different kinds of problems.

For example, in the early part of the book I had to deal a lot with agricultural policy because Russell was greatly interested in the condition of farmers in rural America. But relative to the rest of the economy, by the time he left the Senate there had been a great change. You know, the farm population had declined from about 30 percent to 32 percent down to about 3 percent so he had--he took up other issues. And so you see that change throughout the book. And I think you see how one senator--and we do this in all--in the biographies of all the senators--how one operated and how they operate differently.

Mr. FITE: I think it's $29.95.

Mr. FITE: No, they don't put it on--maybe--I don't know about why they didn't, but it's published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill.

Mr. FITE: This was a committee that made a trip around the world, to all--or not to all, but to many American military bases in 1943. And the committee went out to kind of see how American troops were doing and how the whole operation was organized, and to try to answer questions of that kind. And they were in--they went to London and North Africa and to India and then down to the South Pacific, where MacArthur was. And they were gone about 30 days or such a matter.

Mr. FITE: When he got back he had some points to make that we're still making. And one of them is that the countries they visited were anticipating, as he put it, `a lot more help than we're going to be able to give them after the war is over.'

And Russell later became a very strong opponent of foreign aid--in fact, he never voted for a foreign aid bill after 1952. And as he--as he saw the demands that were going to come to the American taxpayer, he said, `Our taxpayers have been burdened enough by the war. It's time that we look at things at home.'

Mr. FITE: Yes. There was an understanding that Russell, as chairman of that committee, would make a report on that worldwide trip, and Senator Lodge did reveal most of what he was going to say ahead of time, much to Senator Russell's consternation. He didn't appreciate that at all.

Mr. FITE: Well, General Douglas MacArthur was in command in the Far East during the Korean War and he was fired by President Truman, which caused a great hullabaloo, not only in the country, but in Congress. And MacArthur came home, addressed Congress, made comments that caused many people to say, `We ought to fire Truman and hire MacArthur.' It was a very emotional issue. And the question was--in the Far East, the--well, the recommendation of MacArthur to take some actions--bombing actions and so forth against China.

And President Truman said, `This is a police action and we're not going to do that.' And so he recalled General MacArthur. Something needed to be done to quiet this issue, and Senator Russell headed the committee that examined the official name of the hearings is Hearings on Far Eastern Policy, but they were all known--always known as the MacArthur hearings.

And Russell called in all kinds of people to testify, including General MacArthur, who Russell greatly admired. Russell had known MacArthur--oh, back in the early '30s. And--but he developed these hearings on a very even-handed--in a very even-handed way. And he just defused the whole question, for which Truman was very grateful and the country was grateful. It just kind of died and went away. And it had been a very emotional question because of MacArthur's popularity from World War II and also during the Korean War.

Mr. FITE: Right.

Mr. FITE: Yes. Well, the school lunch program first got its support from those who were trying to do something for farmers and get rid of the farm surpluses. And so we were buying all these commodities, so why don't we distribute them to the schools? Which they began to do in the late 1930s. And finally, in 1946, Russell was mainly responsible for getting a school lunch law--a separate law--passed in Congress. Originally it had come out of the Department of Agriculture, mainly.

Mr. FITE: He got along pretty well with Richard Nixon, and Nixon greatly admired Russell. And I think that it was a sort of a mutual admiration society. We have a tape interview with President Nixon in regard to Russell, and there's no question but he greatly admired him. In fact, he was the president who called him a--called Russell a president's senator. And so they had a good working relationship during that short time that they were both--well, Russell was still in the Senate and Nixon was president.

But Nixon had one criticism of Russell, and that is he wasn't a very--very effective in the electronic age. That is, he didn't come across very well, Nixon didn't think. As a person, Nixon thought--well, he thought that public officials needed to do this, to communicate with the public in the electronic age in which we live and Russell just shied away from that. And he did it on purpose.

Mr. FITE: I think if we determine it by century, let's say, I think he'll be a--in the first five or 10. I'd say in the first five in--in the 20th century or up to now in the 20th century.