Rayburn: a biography.

Rayburn:

A Biography, by D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon (Texas Monthly Press, 554 pp., $21.95)

YOU NEVER KNOW any more; the politician you cuss roundly today may tomorrow coax nostalgic tears from your eyes. The more water that flows beneath our political bridges, the better, in some respects, certain figures look--Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn, for instance.

Sam Rayburn, Democratic congressman from Texas for 48 years, and Speaker of the House for 21 of those years, is an unlikely folk hero in the Reagan age. If not exactly an architect of the New and Fair Deals, Rayburn laid on the legislative masonary with an expert and zealous hand. He labored hard, and apparently lovingly, for bigger and more costly government. As his final service to liberalism, he broke the power of the conservative-dominated House Rules Committee. Yet the liberal Sam Rayburn, as this new biography by D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon helps to remind us, was not the only Sam Rayburn.

Mr. Sam had a kind of bluff integrity that was easy to admire, from whatever philosophical vantage point. He stood by his friends and scourged his enemies. "There are no degrees of honesty,' he once said. "A man is either honest, or he isn't.' (Although, given this credo, it's hard to explain Mr. Sam's long, intimate partnership with Lyndon Johnson, a politician of, shall we say, limber ethics.)

Elected to run the House, Rayburn ran it with a high hand and a thunderous gavel. The House has never been so efficiently managed since. None of this participatory-democracy nonsense for Mr. Sam. "Consultation' was what took place at the by-invitation-only meetings of Rayburn's famous Board of Education, where congressional panjandrums bent elbows and planned the twisting of arms.

One very attractive Rayburn trait was his unquestioning support of the President--any President, Republican or Democrat--in foreign affairs. Whereas the House of the 1980s regards itself almost as a branch of the State Department, Rayburn maintained that "Foreign affairs are so definitely an Executive function, that we in the Legislative Branch are loath to make any moves without full consultation with the President and the State Department, as those moves, however well intentioned, may cause embarrassment to those responsible for the foreign policy and its execution.'

Having told President Eisenhower "that he should know more about what it took to defend this country than practically anyone,' Mr. Sam promised to deliver "95 per cent of the Democratic votes in the House' for whatever figure Ike arrived at. "I'd rather be alive with an empty pocket,' the Speaker said on another occasion, "than dead with a full one.' It is impossible to imagine Sam Rayburn trying to maneuver the Administration into an arms-control treaty or the abandonment of foreign allies.

Rayburn, to be sure, was a man from another time and place--born in 1882 in Tennessee, brought to Texas as a small child, and reared on a North Texas cotton farm by a foot-washing-Baptist father. Dirt-poor, young Sam put himself through college and determined on a career in politics. By age 25 he was in the Texas legislature; by age 31, he sat in Congress. He was never defeated for re-election, nor did he run for any other office. (He hoped Roosevelt would choose him for Vice President in 1944 and would have been glad for the presidential nomination in 1952, but he never announced his candidacy.)

Rayburn had in his being, personal as well as political, a streak of nineteenth-century populism. The common man was the man he liked best. During the New Deal he joined enthusiastically in attempts to punish stock manipulators and utility companies. At heart he was an agrarian. He thought people were better off when they lived on farms or in small towns. He defended fundamentally agrarian institutions like segregation, at least until segregation became constitutionally untenable. By the same token, he believed in states' rights. "I can see no reason,' he said early in his career, "for the Federal Government to force its hands into our local affairs.'

Rayburn favored--officially at least-- whatever the Democratic Party favored. In the 1920s that meant small government; in the 1930s, big government. Rayburn's most famous political maxim was, "In this House, the people who get along the best, go along the most.' Rayburn was the pre-eminent go-alonger. When Roosevelt, in 1940, asked Rayburn to second the nomination of Henry A. Wallace, a far-left liberal, for Vice President, Mr. Sam complied reluctantly, explaining to the Democratic Convention that "I cannot do other than follow the wishes of my leader.'

For all his love of the common man, Rayburn seems not to have been inspired by a vision of what the common man should be, or how he might live. The Speaker's job, as the Speaker saw it, was getting bills passed.

Rayburn was a lieutenant at heart, not a captain. He cared more for the hum of the legislative machinery than for the consequences of the finished product. A bachelor (if one discounts a brief, unsuccessful marriage in the 1920s), Mr. Sam had no personal life to speak of. He gets, in truth, a little tedious upon prolonged acquaintance.

But none of this lessens the values of the Hardeman-Bacon biography as a study in twentieth-century American politics. Hardeman, a Rayburn aide and sometime journalist, began researching the book in the late 1950s but died in 1981 with the manuscript barely begun. Bacon, assistant managing editor of U.S. News & World Report, took over and finally brought the project to fruition.

The research is impressive, the writing brisk and clear, the analysis, alas, more shallow than it should be. Hardeman and Bacon teach us astonishingly little about Mr. Sam's legislative techniques, even though technique, not philosophy, was the Speaker's forte. This being pretty much the official biography, the authors bend over backward to be sympathetic and nice to Mr. Sam.

Even so, the solidity of the man, his patriotism, his old-fashioned sense of honor--these things come through clearly, and are gratefully received. There's something to like about a powerful politician whose favorite TV show was The Lone Ranger because of how the masked man "always does the right thing and it comes out like it ought to.'