3

REVENGE  OF  THE  GREEN  HORNET

                                            A few years ago, browsing in a book store, I picked up a bestseller entitled simply, Chaos.  Its author, James Gleick, introduced “chaos theory” as a new science which might show, as I understand it, that when you accidentally drop your car key, there is a solid scientific reason why the key bounces straight down the nearest storm sewer.  In short, the book seeks to demonstrate--pay attention, now--that apparent disorder is meaningful.  When I read this, I was delighted.  What a blessed relief this will be, I thought, to Paul Willis.

            Dr. Paul Willis was the first person I met when I landed, alone and somewhat intimidated, in Washington to join Jim Wright’s staff.  On his own, without anybody having asked, Paul met me at the airport, welcomed me to the city and drove me to the Capitol.  From that time until now, I see him as the genuine article--the embodiment of both a gentleman and an intellectual.  He even sounded like a scholar, using the phrase “in terms of” and stuff like that.  He held a doctorate in political science and, in what I imagine was a less stressful time in his life, was a professor at Drake University.  Exactly how he came to be in a town as frenzied as Washington I don’t know.  For a true disciple of orderliness, quiet reflection and deep thought, Paul struck me as being somewhat out of his element in the pandemonium of Capitol Hill.

             When I went to work for Jim Wright, Paul was the Congressman’s top staff person--Administrative Assistant or AA, in Hill jargon.  His desk, with a banker’s lamp glowing discreetly over whatever Congressional document he was perusing,  sat in one of the less hazardous spots in our jam-packed little room on the third floor of the Longworth House Office Building.  Day after day Paul must have struggled to keep coherent thought from being washed away by the swirl of chaos and tumult of our Congressional office.

            “You tell the Congressman we’re sick and tired of being insulted by that jerk Fidel Castro--you hear?” says a visitor, looming over Wanda, the receptionist. 

            “Good morning,” breaks in another fellow, interrupting the first.  “My son wants an appointment to West Point.  Is it too late to get him in for the September term?”

            Two phones are ringing.  On one, a woman calling from Fort Worth demands, “Have you heard anything yet about Henry’s Social Security?”  On the other line, a little girl working on her school lessons wants Congressman Wright to tell her the names of the nine justices of the Supreme Court.

            Through the swarm of visitors weaves a breathless Congressional page.  “The Majority Leader wants Mr. Wright to come right away to a press conference in the Rayburn Room,” he gasps.

            Two desks away, Julie hisses to a fellow staffer who is furiously pounding the keys on her typewriter.  “Dammit, Marie, don’t you have that speech draft finished yet?  Twice already the boss has asked for it.” 

            “Is this where I pick up tickets for the White House tour?” asks a harried fellow whose wife and six kids cluster in the doorway.  “How should I know?   I’m from Western Union, trying to pick up a telegram,” the other guy replies.  

            “What happened to those Medicare letters?  The boss needs them--now,” cries Anne, bursting out of the Congressman’s private office.

            “Excuse me, please,” says a kid from the House Post Office, elbowing his way through the office to dump off yet another armload of letters.  It is the fifth mail delivery of  the day.

            “How much longer is Congress going to keep doling out foreign aid to those deadbeats in Europe?” demands a fat man methodically placing colored pamphlets on everybody’s desk.

            Amid piles of newspapers back in one corner, a legislative staffer shouts into the phone, arguing with a reporter.  “I can’t help what you’re hearing, Joe--I’m telling you that TFX research appropriation is in good shape.”

            A distraught TCU student is calling from Texas.  “How long before we hear something from the Philippines about my brother’s emergency furlough?  Dad’s still in intensive care.”  

            A well-dressed woman politely approaches a typist.  “Excuse me, but I understand you can get me one of the flags they fly over the Capitol.”

            “Where’s your boss?” cries a frenzied clerk from the Public Works Committee.

“The chairman needs him for a quorum.”

            “Don’t ask me.  If I don’t get corrections over to the Capitol in the next five minutes, Jim’s remarks will be all screwed up in tomorrow’s Record,” exclaims a legislative staffer.   

            “Hey, Kathy,” I call across the room.  “Pick up line 4.  It’s that guy calling again about Jim Wright talking Friday at the Rotary Club.”

            An office intern bursts in.  “The copy machine broke down.  What am I supposed to do with these letters the boss wants to go out this afternoon?”

            Whew. 

            As a newspaper reporter I hadn’t realized what an bewildering range of requests were routinely handled in those days by the more active Congressional offices.  If House and Senate members of that era had done nothing but make laws, serving in Congress would have been a snap.  The real problem lay in the dozens of Congressional fringe services that many offices rendered to enhance their popularity with the voters. 

            The tempo of work in any given office, I found, usually reflected the character and temperament of the member it served.  If Congressman Dulltool were a ho-hum fellow, content only to vote and vegetate,  he wasn’t bothered by a deluge of letters, phone calls or visits from constituents.  If, on the other hand, you served on the staff of an irredeemable workaholic like Jim Wright, the pace ranged between the frantic and the impossible.  It soon dawned on me that my boss was a guy born in a hurry with flaming red hair and an ambition to match.  Over the years the red hair  thinned but the ambition did not. 

            He devoutly believed that his Constitutional title--Representative of the 12th District of Texas--meant exactly what it said.  One day I made the mistake of telling him that I suspected a Fort Worth war veteran was not, in fact, entitled to the pension he was requesting.  “All right, Marshall,” he said.  “All the poor guy wants is a chance to present his arguments to those bureaucrats in the Veterans Administration.  If I don’t help him get that chance, who will?”

            With this clear charter, our office staff responded not only to the thousands of  inquiries we received each month on legislative matters, but also to the countless plain, everyday citizens pleading for help in their dealings with government agencies.  Back home people knew  Jim Wright and his staff were their voice in Washington--taking their side in problems with the federal bureaucracy, selecting good kids for nominations to the military academies, sending out flags that had flown over the Capitol, arranging White House tours and straightening out Mrs. Murphy’s problems with the Social Security Administration.        

            Even in those days, of course, only a few Congressional offices were as busy as ours, and today there are fewer still.  As quaint as it may sound in the me-first 1990’s, Jim Wri[ML1] ght really felt it was not merely an option but a duty to go to bat for people who ran into problems with government agencies.  Once I saw him get the Secretary of the Navy personally on the phone to demand an immediate flight home for a sailor on Guam who had been refused Navy transportation when his father died in Fort Worth.                

            Coming aboard in 1962 as a writer and press secretary, I became the eighth member of Jim Wright’s  Washington staff.  Having grown up in the newspaper business, where bedlam and deadline pressure were part of the job, I was used  to a frantic level of activity.  So was Kathy Mitchell, a pretty, absolutely unflappable woman who joined Jim Wright when she was 19 and worked with competence and unswerving loyalty as his personal secretary and Executive Assistant until she retired. But the person who suffered most from chaotic environment and the monumental work load in our office, I believe, was Paul Willis.  As an academic, he was accustomed to a job where one had time to think.

            What worried Paul most, I suspect, was the unbelievable volume of mail we received, mostly from constituents in the Fort Worth area.  It wasn’t unusual, even then, to receive two hundred letters a day.  And Jim Wright demanded that every letter receive a prompt, responsive answer.

            Legislative mail was the hardest to handle, because it covered such an incredible array of subjects--taxes, foreign affairs, defense, civil rights, transportation, criminal justice, and on and on.  In the 87th Congress, 20,316 pieces of legislation were introduced.  During that period (1961-62), the House was in session for a total of 304 days.  Thus any member silly enough to try to read all these proposals would have found an average of 66 new bills or resolutions on his desk or bedside table every day the House met. 

            When a constituent wrote about a bill, sometimes it took considerable detective work just to find what piece of legislation the writer was talking about, not to mention drafting a responsive reply based on the Congressman’s feelings about it. Word-processing computers were still just a dream, and sometimes even diligent staff members simply found themselves swamped by the mail.  Take what happened to our friend Grayson Chase, a likable, free-spirited Congressman from the Midwest who occupied the office next door.   

            One day I needed a new ribbon for my manual typewriter, and there was none in our storeroom.  Knowing that Congressman Chase occasionally pecked out his own letters on a typewriter like mine,  I popped over to ask Marie, his receptionist, if I could borrow a ribbon.

            “The Congressman’s back in the district today, but let’s take a look,” she said.  When she opened the door to his private office,  I blinked.

            There, squarely in the middle of the floor, was the biggest pile of mail I had ever seen, except once when I visited a post office during the Christmas rush.  Thousands of letters, packages, newspapers and mailing tubes were stacked in a waist-high jumble.  Obviously untouched since its delivery, the mountain of mail would have filled  a small truck. 

            “Looks like you have a few letters,” I mumbled in the type of embarrassment one might feel at finding a friend had a crazy aunt locked in the attic.

            ”Yes,” Marie said, casually skirting the stack of mail to get to the cabinet where she believed might be a typewriter ribbon.  “The Congressman won’t let us open any of this until we finish the mail we already have.”

            “I see,” I said, deciding not to pursue the matter.  I thanked Marie for the ribbon and returned to our office, quietly thankful that our staff, at least, that had no such horrendous backlog.  I would have been even more thankful if I had not discovered two drawers of unanswered mail squirreled away in the desk of Joanna, a legislative assistant who resigned unexpectedly a week or so later.              

            Personally I never hid any mail.  I’m not devious enough for that.  If  letters were too silly to answer or I simply didn’t have time, I felt it was far more conscientious to stack them in plain sight on the corner of my desk.  Then, if anybody complained about a missing letter, I could usually find it.  If not, I eventually would get so sick of looking at them I could muster the courage to throw them away.  But I considered that only a minor sin, at least compared to what I did with one of Jim Wright’s newsletters.

            Every couple of weeks, the Congressman prepared a one-page report called The Wright Slant, giving his assessment of issues before Congress.  Several thousand copies were printed on the Gestetner, an ancient duplicating machine known more familiarly to the staff as the Green Hornet.  It acquired this nickname because, for a reason still not completely clear to me, Jim Wright wanted all his newsletters printed in a garish green ink.  However distinctive its color, this ink was a bilious goo that the Gestetner roundly resented having thrust into its innards and which it regularly regurgitated over walls, chairs, file cabinets and any humanoid silly enough to try to operate it, which in this case was me.  If my experience with this machine had a silver lining, it probably was the fact that on St. Patrick’s Day, I didn’t need to wear a green tie.

            Despite all the stories you hear about the perversity of machines, I don’t believe they can really take reprisals against humans.  But if scientists someday discover that machines do indeed have this power,  I can tell them the exact day the Green Hornet extracted its revenge from me.

            Soon after I joined the staff, Jim Wright signed off on a newsletter I had helped him prepare.  He instructed me to go ahead and send it out to constituents who had asked to be placed on our mailing list. 

            “You don’t have to run off any envelopes,” said a fellow staffer, genuinely trying to be helpful.  “We printed an extra set last week, and they’re in those boxes stacked out in the hall.”  So when I finished running off the newsletter on this accursed machine,  I notified the House Folding Room, which in those days folded and stuffed such mailings and got them to the post office. 

            In an hour or so, a workman wheeled up a cart and loaded the newly-printed green newsletters.  Then, at my direction, he picked up the boxes in the hall--about a dozen big boxes, all filled with envelopes addressed to people in Jim Wright’s district.  At least I thought  that’s who they were addressed to.  

            The first call, as I remember, came only a day or so later from the editor of a newspaper in Temple, Texas.

            “Why did Congressman Wright send me thirteen copies of his newsletter?” he asked in a reasonably civil voice.

            “You got thirteen copies of it?” I said.  “The post office must have gone bananas.”

            “It’s not a post office mixup.  They’re all addressed to me,” he said.

            “Oh,” I said.

            As it turned out, the boxes I sent to the folding room did not contain one envelope addressed to each constituent on our newsletter list.  Instead the boxes contained envelopes carefully prepared for an entirely different purpose--the mailing of progress reports on Texas’s Trinity River canal project.  In the boxes were thirteen complete sets of envelopes for every newspaper, radio and television station in Texas.

            Jim Wright should have fired me, but he didn’t—possibly because he needed me to help write apologetic letters responding to dozens of angry editorials condemning our little old newsletter.  Texas newspapers and broadcasting stations, quivering with elation at having caught us red-handed, inveighed loudly about this clear-cut abuse of the Congressional frank.  But would you believe it?  Not a single one of those ingrate editorial writers had the courtesy to thank me for providing such a splendid example of government waste.  But actually, the joke was on them.  They never found out about my world-class blunder involving a letter to a Korean war veteran in Fort Worth.

            Today, with the larger staffs and gee-whiz computers in most Congressional offices, it may be easier to keep track of correspondence.  Maybe it also was easy in my days, but somehow I never mastered the technique.  To me, the most nettlesome problem was what we called “case mail.”   

            Say, for example, that Mrs. Flossie Schwartz wrote to the Congressman complaining about a mixup in her Social Security.  This would be a “case,” and we promptly responded over the Congressman’s signature, assuring Mrs. Schwartz  he would investigate her problem immediately.  Then we bucked Mrs. Schwartz’s incoming letter to Social Security headquarters, which usually straightened out the trouble promptly and sent a letter to the Congressman saying so.  This reply from Social Security we sent to Mrs. Schwartz, along with a warm and fuzzy cover letter from the Congressman saying  how delighted he was to have been able to resolve this problem for her.

            Those of us on the staff never tried to leave a false impression, but it simply couldn’t be helped if Mrs. Schwartz imagined that the moment the Congressman received  her complaint, he dropped everything else, personally summoned to his office the head cheese of the whole blamed Social Security Administration, angrily chewed him out and ordered him to solve Mrs. Schwartz’s problem by nightfall.  But whatever the method, Mrs. Schwartz’s problem really did get solved and, chances are, she would remember, on election day, how the Congressman helped her.

            One case like this sounds simple enough, but our office often was working on hundreds of them at the same time.  As the press person, I wasn’t called on to handle many, and it’s a good thing.  Try as I might to keep them all straight, I occasionally misplaced a file.  Then, when the response arrived from the federal agency, sometimes I couldn’t figure out what prompted the constituent to write in the first place.  One day, for instance, a letter arrived from the Army responding to one of my inquiries. The letter read like this:

Dear Congressman:

            Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding Mr. Jerome K. Dinglehoofer of 1624 Perrywinkle Street in Fort Worth, Texas.  After a search of Army records we have found that Mr. Dinglehoofer, at that time a  Staff Sergeant, received a medical discharge from the U.S. Army on July 18, 1951, as a result of advanced syphilis.

                                                                                                                                    Sincerely,

                                                                                                                                    Troy G. Buttondown, Maj., USA                                                                                                                                                                  Office of Legislative Liaison

                                                                                                                                    Department of the Army

            For days I tried to find a copy of the original incoming letter, but to no avail.  I wanted to get off the Army’s response to the constituent as soon as possible.  But even more I was personally curious.  What type of inquiry, for Pete’s sake, would prompt a response like this?  After rummaging through desk drawers, file cabinets and even waste baskets in a vain attempt to find a copy of the original incoming letter, I appealed for help from Kathy, the Congressman’s personal secretary.

            “What should I do?” I asked.

            “Keep looking for the incoming letter.  It’s probably here somewhere.”

            “I’ve already looked everywhere, Kathy.  The damn thing is just not here.”

            “Maybe somebody else on the staff has it.”

            “I’ve asked everybody.  Nobody will admit having a case file on a guy named Dinglehoofer.  I think I’ll just throw away the Army letter and forget about the whole thing.”

            “No, you ought not to do that.”

            “Well, the Army letter has Mr. Dinglehoofer’s name and address.  I suppose I could just mail it to him with cover letter apologizing for having lost the file.”         

            Kathy looked up, startled.  “Oh, no--I really wouldn’t do that,” she said.

            But I did.  Against Kathy’s advice, I sent it directly to Mr. Dinglehoofer.

            Then, a few days later, I found the original incoming letter.  It had been put in the file of another case, and it read like this:

Dear Congressman:

            I wonder if you can help a group of ladies at our church with our Christmas project.  Each year at Christmas time we pick out a deserving family to whom we can bring gifts and good cheer during the holiday season.  This year we are thinking about helping a Mr. Jerome K. Dinglehoofer and his family, who live in Fort Worth at 1624 Perrywinkle.  We believe he is a disabled veteran.  Could you please check on this for us?

                                                                                                                                    Sincerely,

                                                                                                                                    Mrs. Clara Sophengopher

                                                                                                                                    Chairwoman, Ladies Society

            “Oh, no!” cried Kathy, when I finally told her what I had done.  “I told you we shouldn’t send that Army letter to that poor man,” she said.

            “Well, do you think it would have been better to send it instead to the church ladies?” I growled.

            “No, of course not.”

            “And don’t you suppose Mr. Dinglehoofer knew the reason he was being discharged?”  I demanded. 

            “Yes, I suppose he did,” Kathy said softly.  “But he probably never expected to be reminded of it in a nice Christmas letter from his Congressman.”         

            In retrospect, I can understand why life was so difficult for my friend Paul Willis.  I am sure my office endeavors added to Paul’s burden, even though I really didn’t mean for them to.  At any rate, not long after this episode, he told Jim Wright he had decided to return to teaching.  As his words were recounted to me, Paul said to the Congressman: 

            “Jim, in each of us there are two persons--the activist and the contemplative.  Working in this office, there is simply no time for the contemplative.”

            In room 1327 of the Longworth House Office Building in the year 1962, he was damn sure right.