17

CRAIG  RAUPE--PIGS,  POLITICS AND PRESIDENTS

            Craig Raupe had a dream.  He wanted to go back to the little Texas town of Granbury, buy a farm and raise hundreds and hundreds of pigs.  “I’m not talking about just a few pigs,” he used to say.  “I’m talking about pork production.”

            Despite a fascinating and useful life, Craig never quite managed to realize his dream.  He got sidetracked into politics which, next to pigs, he loved better than anything.  After working thirty years in a multitude of jobs in Washington, he wound up with thousands of friends but only two pigs.  They were given to him as a spoof by several members of Congress, and he kept them for a time under his desk in the House of Representatives.

            One day a grizzled old tourist, shuffling along the ornate marble hallway outside the Majority Leader’s office, suddenly froze in his tracks, looking puzzled.  “I hear a pig,” he said.

            “Shush, papa!” ordered his wife.  “Don’t be silly.  We’re in the Capitol of the United States.”

            Before the health department could discover his secret, Craig crated up the pigs, intending to send them to Texas by air freight.  But the airline refused to accept them, saying the Agriculture Department prohibited interstate shipment of livestock by air.  Undaunted, Craig appealed to a friend in the airline business.  Listing the rancid little creatures on the shipping invoice as “rare dogs,” the friend smuggled them aboard a plane bound for Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.  That was close as Craig ever came to becoming a big-time pork producer in Texas.   

            Even in the face of this professional disappointment, the life of this amiable country boy with stooped shoulders and  level head could never have been called dull.  Once he sat at the right hand of the Majority Leader, helping orchestrate the schedule and legislation of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Another time he managed a large chunk of Eastern Airlines.  He helped fight the Cold War in Indochina and Indonesia, achieved two bizarre meetings with Harry S Truman, saved Lyndon B. Johnson from a major embarrassment, and set his subcommittee chairman’s hair on fire.  Through all these incarnations there remained only one unchanging  component--the abiding respect and loyalty that he and Jim Wright felt toward each other.  No two brothers were ever closer.  

            Like the man he would serve for 35 years, Craig was a child of the Depression.  He grew up in the tiny farming community of Granbury, a village which slid off Norman Rockwell ’s easel and wound up 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth.  Even today the town retains much of the charm and neighborliness of a bygone era.  Nestled alongside a magnificent lake spawned by the Brazos River, the town has a square dominated by its historic courthouse.  Around the square are buildings dating back to days when we prefer to believe life was simpler. 

            “After the second World War other Texas towns started modernizing their buildings,” Craig told me.  “But Granbury had no industry and was too damn poor to fix up anything.  So things look today pretty much the way they did about a hundred years ago.”

            In the 1960’s Granbury’s quiet seductiveness began to attract wealthy retirees from Fort Worth and Dallas, along with an assortment of musicians, actors, writers and poets--“the artsy-fartsy set,” Craig snorted.  Even with these newcomers threatening to infiltrate, if not to overwhelm, the local citizenry, and even with the town getting a new Wal-Mart big enough to hold an airport, Craig would never have forsaken the little community. Hardly would a day go by that he did not mention his plan eventually to return to his childhood home on the shady banks of the Brazos, only a few blocks from the courthouse square.  “If I have a paramour,” he said, “it’s Granbury.”

            Uprooted by World War II from this idyllic little community, Craig wound up as a teenage sailor aboard a battleship in the Pacific.  Whenever the ship went to general quarters, he once recalled, he would scurry to his battle station in the powder magazine deep in the bowels of the ship.  There he worked feverishly amid tons of explosives, knowing that even the tiniest spark could spell disaster for the ship and everybody in it.  It would have taken nothing more than a couple of matches rubbing together in the pocket of a careless shipmate, or maybe even a spark from a carelessly-dropped wrench striking the steel deck.  The ship would have gone up like an 800-foot-long firecracker.    

            Thus, while he was busily sending up powder bags so the gun crews could shoot at the bad guys, it was also crucial for Craig to keep the good guys from blowing themselves up by acting without thinking. Curiously enough, this was  pretty close to the jobs he was later destined to do in Washington.      

            Craig Raupe and Jim Wright met in Weatherford in 1953.  Craig had come to town to accept a job teaching history at Weatherford Junior College, and Jim Wright was the town’s youthful Mayor.  When Craig received one of the letters the Mayor routinely sent out to welcome new citizens, Craig responded by asking him for a job to tide him over the summer, until he began his teaching job. 

            From the very beginning the Mayor liked this gangly young newcomer who somehow radiated an impossible but delightful combination of earthiness and intellectuality.  He cursed like a longshoreman, as if a swearword were as essential as a period to a properly structured sentence.  Regardless of whether he picked up his purple prose as a boy, as teenager in the Navy, or as a conscious safeguard against pomposity, his language always hit the mark.

            For he was, in fact, an intellectual.  Interspersed with his profanity were occasional observations on subjects as obscure as the political theories of Thomas Hobbes.  It didn’t take Jim Wright long to perceive that here was a man who loved the kindred arts of politics and government as much as he himself did.  Better still, this new citizen of Weatherford had an abiding sense of right and wrong--a quality Jim Wright would see demonstrated shortly after hiring him to supervise the  city swimming pool.   

            In 1953 Weatherford’s pool, like those of virtually every other city in Texas which even had a pool, was closed to African-Americans.  It was simply the way things were.  True,  Ku Kluxers and diehard segregationists could be found in almost every town in our state, but most white people were not mean-spirited or cruel.  My mother would almost cry whenever anybody recalled the lynching of a black man in our little town a quarter century before. 

            Our main sin, I suppose, was in accepting the world the way we found it.  In grammar school, I knew that white kids went to one school, Negro kids to another, and Mexican kids to a third.  Today I can see now how wrong that was, but I didn’t then.  In those Depression days, the desperate poverty of Negro and Mexican families used to sadden me far more than the fact that their world was isolated from ours.  Even when our family was evicted from our home and had little more than pinto beans and cornbread for supper, I knew we were far better off than the families living in shacks with dirt floors and eating flour tortillas on the other side of the Missouri-Pacific tracks.  On the scale of human priorities,  poverty and hunger outweighs social equality every time.  And in those days, the connection between the two had not yet dawned on many of us.

            It was only later, after my generation came home from World War II, that the fundamental unfairness of segregation began to gnaw at our consciences.  It  happened to a lot of us, including Craig Raupe and Jim Wright. 

            After the Mayor hired him to run Weatherford’s swimming pool, Craig used to stand at the gate day after day, fretting at the sight of little black kids sweltering outside the chain link fence as white youngsters frolicked and shrieked with joy in the pool.  Finally Craig could stand it no longer.

            “Dammit to hell, Jim--this just ain’t fair,” Craig said.  “But what am I going to do?  I don’t know how long I can live with this.  Before long some of those litttle colored kids are going to come up and ask me to get in the pool.”

            Today it seems unthinkable that any such subject would even need to be discussed.  Yet in small town Texas, a full year before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, only a local city official of extreme naivity would have summarily wiped out a social norm, however misguided, that had been observed in his community for more than a century.  As Mayor, Jim Wright knew that in the past, incidents less consequential than this had triggered racial upheavals in other Texas towns.  There could be no doubt that opening the pool was the right thing to do.  Yet it could trigger grave political consequences, perhaps even violence.  Of course, he realized, a decision of this magnitude did not necessarily have to be announced to the blare of trumpets.  As a matter of fact, it did not have to be announced at all.  

            “If it happens,” he said quietly to Craig, “let it happen.”

            Eventually it did happen.  When the first few little black kids showed up, apparently nobody in Weatherford even blinked.  So quietly and gradually was the pool opened that only a handful of people were even aware of it.  Except, of course, for a small number of black kids who found the searing Texas summers much more enjoyable than before.   In retrospect, the subdued opening of the pool may have been Craig’s first hint that in politics, as in the Navy, a fellow could help the good guys without blowing up the ship.

            This, incidentally, was not the only racially-charged controversy defused by Craig’s new friend the Mayor.  In the days before the historic verdict in Brown vs. the Board of Education, black students in Weatherford had no high school of their own, yet they were barred from the high school white kids attended.  Thus, for African-American students, public education ended with grade school.  Appalled by this unfairness, Jim Wright quietly persuaded the City Council to provide bus service to take black youngsters to high school in Fort Worth.

             In achieving these two quiet victories without triggering a major upheaval in a small, tightly-segregated Texas town in 1953, Jim Wright and Craig Raupe had displayed masterful political skills.  Jim Wright did not know it at the time, but his ingenuity soon would be tested again.  As unlikely it might seem, Craig was about to be engulfed in a controversy involving, of all things, a municipal water shortage.

            In 1954 Weatherford was in the grip of a devastating seven-year drouth.  So severe did the water shortage eventually become that the City Council was forced to put a complete ban on lawn and shrub watering.  A few conscientious homeowners observed the ordinance, but many ignored the no-watering edict and continued to irrigate the grass and plants around their homes.  

            By then Craig had left his job at the swimming pool and was working at the city-owned water and electric plant.  His boss there was Conrad Russell.  A former Mayor and widely-known civic leader, Conrad at this time was superintendent of the city’s utility plant, and he was deeply worried about Weatherford’s dwindling water supply. 

            “People don’t realize just how serious this is,” Conrad told Craig.  “Nobody’s paying any attention to this new city ordinance.  If people keep watering their lawns, one day they may try to get a glass of water and find their kitchen faucet as dry as the Sahara Desert.”

            “What can we do?” Craig asked.

            “We’ve got to find somebody watering their lawn in violation of the law and make an example of them.  Prove to the public that we mean business.”      

            “Have you talked to the police about trying to catch somebody?”

            “Humph!” snorted Conrad.  “We can’t depend on the police to do this.  We have got to do it.”      

            “We?” asked Craig.

            “You,” said Conrad.

            Craig Raupe, an unlikely enforcer, dutifully accepted the summons book that was thrust into his hands the next morning.  He reluctantly set out on patrol, hoping against hope he found no lawn waterers.  This was not to be.  On Oyster Hill, an unlikely name for a bone-dry residential area 300 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, he happened to walk up on an unlikely suspect--a pretty housewife, blissfully watering the plants around her expensive home. 

            Hating himself, Craig said,  “Ma’m, I’m awfully sorry, but I’m going to have to give you a ticket for watering your shrubs.”

            “A ticket for watering my shrubs?” she asked, obviously mystified.

            “Yes, ma’m.  Because of the water shortage.  There’s a city ordinance against watering lawns and shrubs.”

            “Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t know.  We’ve been out of town on vacation.”

            Guiltily, Craig handed her the summons filled out in the name she gave him, Mrs. Dotti Doss.

            “This is going to be very embarrassing to my husband,” she said.

            “Why is that, ma’m?” said Craig, sounding to himself like Joe Friday.

            “He is President of the Water Board,” she said.

            Petrified, Craig wondered what to do.  Obviously he couldn’t backtrack now.  Yet what were Conrad and Jim Wright going to say?  Thank you, Craig, for ticketing the wife of one of Weatherford’s leading citizens who just happens to be in charge of the city water works.  Craig entertained grave doubts that this was exactly the kind of person Conrad wanted to hold up as an example of selfish, irresponsible citizenship.  Then, to make matters worse, Craig learned something else. 

            The husband, James Doss, was also President of the Farmers & Merchants State Bank as well as one of Mayor Jim Wright’s best friends.   

            James Doss was not pleased when his wife told him about the ticket.  Furious that she would be singled out when she hadn’t even heard there was a ban on watering, Doss summoned City Councilman Byron Patrick for a talk.  Patrick invited a colleague, Councilman Burette Hobson, to join them.  The three met at Weatherford’s  traditional hotbed of political intrigue, the Texas Cafe.  As the two Councilmen tried to placate the angry Water Board President,  Mayor Jim Wright walked in.

            “Please don’t come over here, Jim.  There’s no need for you to get mixed up in this,” said Patrick.

             Ignoring this advice, Jim Wright joined the crisis group over coffee as they hunted for a way out of the dilemma.  On the one hand, nobody wanted to embarrass Mrs. Doss or her husband, the prominent banker.  Yet, if she were let off scot free, citizens of lesser prominence surely would continue to ignore the city’s urgent water-saving law.  Meanwhile, the shortage would grow steadily worse until one day there might be no water at all.  Then, in a moment of inspired political insight, Jim Wright demonstrated the political acumen that was later to serve him well for 35 years in Congress. 

            “Look, James,” he told the banker.  “Why don’t you make this a matter of pride?  Go public with an announcement.  Say, ‘I insist on paying this fine.  True, my wife wasn’t aware of the watering ban.  But I insist on paying the penalty as a good citizen because our city is facing a desperate water shortage.  Every one of us must stand together in this crisis.  As Water Board President, I want to set an example of responsible citizenship.’” 

            However bizarre episodes like this may seem today, these were the shared experiences which welded together the lifelong friendship between Jim Wright and Craig Raupe.  Their fateful meeting in Weatherford in 1953 would be a high point in both their lives.  And while neither realized it, this was just the beginning.

            Politically savvy and intensely loyal, Craig was destined to help Jim Wright either as a staffer or a tireless friend for the rest of his life.  Early in their acquaintance, Craig bestowed on his new friend a tribute he reserved for selected people.

            “Jim Wright,” he would say, “you’re a great man.”

            One sweltering afternoon later that summer, Craig was sitting at home in his undershirt, trying to keep cool, when there was a knock on the door.  It was Jim Wright, and he had come to tell Craig he was thinking about running for Congress.  Under no illusion, he knew it would be an uphill fight against the basic power structure of the Fort Worth area.  He would be challenging Wingate Lucas, an entrenched incumbent, as well as his powerful patron, Amon G. Carter, publisher of the Star-Telegram.

            Excited by the prospect of a race even against such staggering odds, Craig’s political juices began flow.  Damn right you ought to run, he told Jim Wright.  Together they began a series of meetings with potential supporters and political leaders.          

            “Jim Wright said he wanted to ask their advice, but that was just bull,” Craig told Star-Telegram reporter Larry Neal years afterward.  “He already had his mind made up.  I was the only one there who told him unreservedly to go.”

            In defiance of all political logic, Jim Wright won the election.  The new Congressman packed up and headed for Washington, along with his one-time swimming pool superintendent.  Craig was now Administrative Assistant, or chief of staff, to the new Congressman for the 12th District of Texas, which at that time covered all of Tarrant and four neighboring counties. 

            Having driven to Washington in his elderly green Chrysler, Craig began setting up Jim Wright’s office in the Longworth Building, just across busy Independence Avenue from the gleaming white dome of the Capitol.  It was in this office, during those first few weeks, that he met two people destined to play significant roles in his life. 

            The first was Larry L. King, a brash, talented former newspaper reporter from the far reaches of West Texas.  Like Craig, Larry privately considered himself an unabashed, free-thinking liberal, if not a closet socialist.  Larry, too, had just arrived in Washington.  He was Administrative Assistant to another new Texas Congressman, J.T. Rutherford of Odessa. In later years Larry would achieve fame as an author and playwright, but in those first heady but bewildering days at the Capitol, he and Craig were content to share advice, political gossip and an occasional beer or two at a now-defunct Congressional watering hole called Mike Palm’s.

            One day, while Larry was huddled with Craig on either pressing matters of state or some ribald new joke, another person walked through the office door--a person who, even as much as Craig himself, would affect Jim Wright’s life for decades to come.  Kathy Mitchell had heard that the new Congressman was looking for a secretary to work temporarily in his district office in Fort Worth, and she had decided to apply.  She had never been to Texas and, up to now, had never entertained any idea of going.  But she was young, single, attractive and adventuresome, and she was here to check on the job possibility. 

            In an interview, Craig was impressed with her quiet charm, her credentials and her alert brown eyes that appeared to sweep in far more information than she felt it necessary to share.  It took Craig only a few minutes to decide to hire her, and it was one of the finest things he ever did for Jim Wright.  For a few weeks she worked in the new Washington office with Craig and two other staff members, Helen Lee Fletcher and Opal Beland.  Then, with sublime self-confidence,  Kathy climbed into her convertible and struck out alone for Texas.  It was the beginning of a career in which she would serve Jim Wright with keen intelligence, sound judgment and unswerving loyalty for the rest of her working life.

            Getting a Congressional office set up and running smoothly is like wrestling an octopus.  Every time you think you’ve got one tentacle of responsibility under control, two more reach out and grab you.  Craig and the other staffers worked with Jim Wright on endless details of hiring, payrolls, supplies, schedules, appointments, legislation, committees, reports, hearings, visits, trips, telephones and, of course, constituent cases--cases, cases, cases.  

            A “case” is a letter or phone call from a constituent asking his Congressman for help with a problem involving a government agency.  It may be a foulup over Aunt Martha’s Social Security check.  Or maybe a businessman making an urgent trip to Europe needs help in getting a passport processed in time.  It can be any one of a thousand things, and Craig soon found himself neck deep in helping resolve such problems.

            By habit an early riser, he would arrive in the office about 6 a.m.  If the morning mail contained a favorable case decision, Craig would pick up the phone and call the constituent back home to pass along the good news.  In those days, Texas was not on daylight savings time and Washington was two hours ahead of Fort Worth.

            Often, after asking Craig to thank Congressman Wright for his help, the sleepy constituent would ask, “By the way, what time do you fellows start to work up there?”  Years later, Craig told me he was so busy in those days that he once met himself coming back.

            Today newly-elected members of Congress can easily make themselves heard on major issues.  But in 1955, freshmen legislators were expected to be seen but not heard, especially on major issues.  It would have been unthinkable for a new Congressman to be given a role in shaping crucial House decisions such as those on taxes and defense.  These were the exclusive domain of the old bulls--mostly elderly Southerners who, with decades of seniority, chaired the key committees.  The crucial House Rules Committee, for example, was headed by crusty old Howard Smith of Virginia, who had been in Congress since 1931.  Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was elected in 1914.

            Bowing to reality, the freshman Congressman from Fort Worth decided to zero in on a relatively less prominent issue and try to make it his own.  Looking around, he found a perfect niche--soil conservation.  The need to preserve this precious resource had been one of his genuine interests for many years, and it was a subject in which the old curmudgeons of the House had shown little interest.  Moreover, an ideal opportunity had just popped up.

            Because of the work he had done in this field before coming to Congress, Jim Wright had been invited to deliver the keynote speech at a major national soil conservation meeting in New Orleans.  It would be the first important national forum for the new Congressman from Fort Worth, and he was determined to make his speech a real bell-ringer.  For several days he worked diligently, crafting and honing a dramatic call for America to wake up to the dangers of soil erosion.  Finally he finished the speech--except for one important point.  On his way out of the office one day, he handed the text to Craig, using his customary nickname.

            “Judge, in this speech I point out that we’re losing our top soil at the rate of one inch every sixteen years,” he said.  “But I also want to say how long it takes nature to make an inch of top soil.  I’d like for you to get the Library of Congress to research this, please.  Then just insert the correct figure in the speech, OK?”

            Craig nodded, intending to do so right away.  But he was fighting a whole battalion of octopuses that day, and he forgot about the speech.

            Several days later, as Jim Wright was preparing to leave for New Orleans, he stuck his head out the door of his private office and asked Craig if the speech was ready.

            Caught entirely off guard, Craig thought fast.  “Yes, sir,” he lied.  “I’ll bring it right in.”  Then, rummaging through the piles of papers on his desk, he found the forgotten speech.  With only minutes to act, he seized the first figure that popped into his head and frantically typed “one million years” in the blank space Jim Wright had thoughtfully provided.

            At the New Orleans meeting the speech was a resounding success.  Elated by the applause and favorable comments he received, Jim Wright returned to Washington and promptly arranged for time on the House floor to repeat his urgent call for an all-out war against soil erosion.

            “It took nature a million years to build a single inch of topsoil,” he declared in words preserved today in yellowing copies of the Congressional Record.  “We are depleting it at the rate of one-sixteenth inch each year.  Thus in a meager sixteen years, we are denuding the earth of a million years of nature’s labor.”

            While Craig didn’t tell Jim Wright that he had made up the figure, he began having pangs of conscience.  As a professional educator, he felt guilty for having put an inaccurate figure out into the public domain.  Worse still, he knew he had done so for no reason except to protect himself.  For many months, he wondered what the figure should have been.  Finally, for his own peace of mind, he telephoned the Library of Congress.  In a few days, he got a call back. 

            “I found the figure you wanted,” the researcher said, “It takes approximately a million years for nature to make an inch of topsoil.”

            “A million years!” Craig whooped.  “That’s wonderful--just wonderful.”

            Puzzled at this reaction, the researcher said, “I’m glad you are pleased.”       

            “Can you give me the documentation on this?  Did it come from an authoritative source?” 

            “Oh, yes,” replied the researcher.  “This figure came from the keynote speech at last year’s national soil conservation meeting in New Orleans.”

            Unlike many Americans, Craig did not consider politics a dirty word.  On the contrary, he regarded politics as the essential ingredient to self-government.  Nobody did he admire more than politicians who had the guts to make decisions which, however unpopular at the time, they believed to be in the best interests of the nation.  One of his special heroes was Harry S Truman.

            Once disparaged as nothing  more than a stooge for the Pendergast political machine, this once obscure county judge from Kansas City came to exemplify Craig’s vision of all that is right and noble in American politics.  He marveled at the courage of this plain-spoken, everyday American who stood alone and unflinching in the face of some of the most torturous judgments a President has ever had to make--the decision to drop the atomic bomb, to send American troops to defend South Korea, to fight the demagogic and remorseless Senator Joseph McCarthy, and to demonstrate to the vainglorious Douglas MacArthur that the Constitution put elected civilian officials, not five-star generals, in charge of making U.S. foreign policy.  

            But to Craig, even such acts of Presidential heroism paled in comparison with the courage Truman displayed in the Presidential election of 1948.  The Republican candidate  was Thomas E. Dewey of New York, a dapper, mustachioed former district attorney whom some people said reminded them of the little man on top of a wedding cake.  Political pollsters and pundits had led the nation to believe Dewey’s election was a foregone conclusion.  Poor little Harry Truman, the Kansas City haberdasher who somehow got himself elected Vice President and then inherited the White House when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, was given virtually no chance at all of winning his own term in the White House.

            One of the few persons who refused to believe the pundits and the polls was Truman himself.  Even though he had to scrounge even for enough money to pay for his campaign train, he set off on a rousing whistlestop tour that stirred the nation and soon had thunderous crowds shouting, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”  Ignoring this upsurge in support for the scrappy little fellow speaking from the rear of the train, the know-it-all columnists and pollsters persisted in their smug predictions of a decisive Dewey victory.  On election night, Truman, beaming and confident, didn’t even bother to stay up to watch the returns.  He went to bed, slept soundly and woke up having achieved probably the most astonishing come-from-behind election victory in American history, beating Dewey by more than 2 million popular votes and an electoral vote of 303 to 189.  

            Everyday people from coast to coast were thrilled by this spectacular victory, but none more than Craig, who at the time was a student under the GI Bill at North Texas State College in Denton, Texas.  Here he was engaged in twin pursuits.  One was courting Joyce Adkins, the brilliant and beautiful campus queen he was destined to marry.  Craig’s other pursuit was steeping himself in the subjects he loved--American history and government.  Recognizing that Truman’s election would stand as a significant watermark in U.S. political lore, Craig undertook an exhaustive research project that led him to write his master’s thesis on how he believed his Democratic hero had managed to pull it off.  He worked hard on this paper and was inordinately proud of it.  His fondest hope was that somewhere, someday, he might be able to present it personally to Harry Truman.  Now, in 1956, in Washington as a faceless young Congressional staffer for a freshman Congressman from Texas, he saw his chance.

            Bursting with the news, Craig called his pal Larry L. King to say he had learned Harry Truman was coming to Washington for the first time since leaving the White House.  He was to speak to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, and would be staying at the Mayflower Hotel.  If Craig could somehow wangle his way in to give Truman his study on the 1948 election,  would Larry come along and take their picture?  Perhaps realizing Craig would never accept no for an answer, Larry agreed to go along with the scheme.          

            “Larry King,” Craig said, “you’re a great man.”

            Borrowing the office camera he used to take pictures of constituents who visited his boss, Larry set out with Craig early in the morning for the Mayflower.

With sublime confidence, Craig strode up to a house phone and rang upstairs.  “Let me speak to Harry Truman,” he said.

            “This is Harry Truman,” bounced back a flat Missouri twang.

            Only in the innocent America of yesteryear could such a thing have happened, but the former President invited Craig and Larry up for coffee.  With Midwestern graciousness, Truman made the two young Texans feel welcome.  He smiled and accepted the thesis and shook hands and smiled some more as Larry energetically manipulated the camera for what he thought was about a dozen pictures.  But shortly afterward, at a quick-service photo shop, all the film turned out to be blank. 

            “Raupe cursed and abused me at great length,” Larry said in recounting the incident in The Washington Post many years later.  But  Craig was nothing if not resourceful.   

            Knowing that Truman, in a habit dating from his days as a World War I artillery captain, still enjoyed starting each day with a vigorous early-morning walk, Craig called Larry at home that night.  Get your expletive deleted camera and meet me in the morning so we can try to catch him on the street outside the hotel, Craig ordered.  Today, dear friends, any two strangers attempting to intercept a President on the street would be set upon by large numbers of muscular young men in trench coats and tiny trademark earphones.  But believe it or not, in that tranquil and far more civilized year of 1956, they caught the energetic Mr. Truman.  Larry demonstrated his mastery over the cantankerous camera, and Craig got the picture he wanted.  He got it for the same reason Harry Truman got his own term in the White House.  He was too damn stubborn to give up.

            After his first six years with Jim Wright in Washington, Craig began to get restless.  The United States was being drawn ever more deeply into the war in Indochina, and Craig yearned for a piece of the action.  Signing up as a State Department foreign service officer, he took his wife Joyce on assignments to Vietnam and Indonesia.  On their return to Washington the following year, Craig signed up with Agency for International Development for duty far more hazardous--the job of convincing Congress what a grand idea it was to keep appropriating tax money year after year for foreign aid.  This was one of the toughest, most thankless jobs in town.

            On the Hill, foreign aid is unsurpassed as an arena for shameless political demagoguery.  The idea of sending American dollars overseas enrages millions of hard-working American taxpayers, especially when they have been led to believe the  money goes into projects that look ridiculous.  Nearly any Congressional office can count on a steady drumbeat of angry mail demanding to know why we are pouring our money down a rathole in Afghanistan or Cambodia.  Regrettably those wretched little African kids with matchstick arms and legs and swollen bellies have foolishly neglected to hire fat-cat Washington lobbyists to fight for the cups of gruel they occasionally get with U.S. foreign aid money. 

            Then too, foreign aid, however beneficial it may be to U.S. foreign policy, has seldom failed to get a bad rap in the press.  Newspapers down through the years have specialized in exposing harebrained projects in which our foreign aid money has been foolishly frittered away.  While lawmakers could have dug into these abuses and corrected a large number of them, it was far easier just to go along with a large segment of the American people in condemning the whole shebang as a senseless waste of our money.  Yet in the 1960’s it was Craig’s job to convince Congress that U.S. foreign aid served worthwhile diplomatic as well as moral purposes.  This was not easy.

            One day, for example, Craig found himself in a high-level policy meeting where AID officials were discussing plans to use U.S. foreign aid money to build a brewery in Turkey.  A brewery in Turkey?  At first he could not believe what he was hearing. 

            AID officials, brimming with enthusiasm for the project, were convinced that the brewery would bring significant benefits to the sluggish Turkish economy.

            “That’s just dumb!” Craig protested.  “When we take our appropriations bill to the Senate next week, can’t you imagine them asking why we are using tax dollars to build breweries?”

            Despite his arguments, the policy-makers gave formal approval to the brewery project.  As a creature of the Hill, Craig realized the decision represented sheer idiocy in the agency’s relations with Congress.  Already he could visualize the scene:      

            “A brewery?  Did you say a... a brewery, suh?” the chairman demanded, almost choking on the word.

            A hush fell over the crowded Congressional hearing room.  From his seat high on the rostrum the chairman peered down at the witness in thunderstruck disbelief.

            “Ah cannot bring mahself to believe what you are tellin’ me, suh,” he cried. “You are sayin’ that those striped-pants do-gooders down at the State Department have... are pouring mill-yones of ouh hard-earned Amurrican tax dollars into building a... a (choke) brewery, suh, in Turkey?”   

            The AID official in the witness chair squirmed and wished he were dead.  “Yes, sir,” he croaked.

            Reporters at the press table overturned several chairs as they scrambled out to their telephones.  “If you want to hear about a screwup, listen to this!” one newsman whooped to his bureau in the National Press Building.  “Guess what those oddballs at State have done now!” shouted a radio reporter.  “Boyoboy--the White House is going to love explaining this one!” laughed a wire service man.

            Within an hour the story was in the hands of every right-wing radio talk show host in the nation.  Their lines were jammed as thousands of Americans called to protest to this latest example of Washington stupidity.  For three days the story and its fallout were splashed across page one of every newspaper in America. 

            But none of this happened.  It didn’t happen because a one-time sailor who learned his trade in the powder magazine of battleship still recognized how easily the good guys could blow themselves up. 

            Back in his office, Craig did a lot of soul-searching.  To whom did he owe his loyalty--the Agency for International Development or the best interests of the United States Government?  It didn’t take long for the answer to become clear.  He picked up the phone and called his friend Walter Jenkins, right-hand man to President Lyndon B. Johnson.        

            On Jenkins’s orders, he reported to the White House and was immediately whisked into the Oval Office.  He told his story to the President.

            Johnson listened quietly, without comment.  Then he picked up the phone and called Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

            “Dean, I don’t know what’s going on over there,” he said.  “I’ve heard some tales.  But I want you to know one thing--I don’t want any breweries built anywhere  with federal money.”

            Having left unquenched the thirst of uncounted Turkish citizens, Craig left his post at AID for an entirely new and unfamiliar professional challenge--a job as chief lobbyist for Eastern Airlines.  Now defunct, Eastern in those days was one of the premier trunk airlines, especially dominant on East Coast routes.  So pleased was Eastern’s management with Craig’s performance in Washington that he soon was promoted to Vice President in charge of the airline’s Southeast region, based in Miami.

            Although few people were as wise as Craig in the ways of Washington, it took him a while to get acclimated to the rarefied heights of airline management.  He discovered, for example, that straight-line logic was not always practicable.  Once at a high-level Eastern management meeting in New York, he listened to an exhaustive report from the Vice President in charge of baggage. 

            “It’s a privilege to report that this year we have managed to reduce our baggage losses by nearly three percentage points,” the executive said proudly.

“Moreover, we plan in the coming year to reduce our baggage losses even more.”

            At this point, Craig characteristically went to the heart of the matter.  “Why don’t we try not to lose any baggage?” he asked.

            While other Eastern executives laughed uproariously at the idea of trying to run an airline without losing any bags, Craig told me later they were far less amused at the airline’s occasional loss of a coffin being flown as cargo.  Many well-to-do New Yorkers who moved to Florida in retirement would leave instructions with their families to return them home for burial.  After making arrangements, the grieving widow often would ask for assurance, “Now my husband will be going back on the same plane I am on, won’t he?”  In those cases where the coffin somehow was placed on the wrong flight and taken to another destination, the airline would be turned upside down until it was located and returned.

            Despite small dramas like this, Craig turned out to be an exceptional airline man.  He won repeated raises, citations and awards from Eastern, but the airline at that time was being wracked by a desperate fight for corporate control.  As Craig related the story to me, one day he got an abrupt call:  “You’re a hell of a good man, Craig, and we’re sure sorry to have to let you go.  But we’ve been running two airlines here, and you’ve been working for the wrong one.”

            This was the most devastating professional insult of Craig’s life.  It shook him to the marrow of his bones.  Never before had he failed at anything.  Even though he was blameless and was fired as part of the corporate upheaval, he was haunted by the illusion that he somehow had fallen short.  To him, being fired even under these circumstances represented a humiliating personal defeat.  He began drinking heavily.  Finally, jobless, despondent and leaning ever more heavily on the bottle, he turned to his best friend for help.

            At that time, Jim Wright had just become chairman of the House Public Works Subcommittee on Investigations, a panel that had earned enormous prestige by rooting out corruption in the Interstate Highway Program.  Without hesitation he hired Craig as one of his staff investigators.  Here, after a desperate personal battle against booze, he regained control of his life.  Never a person for half-way measures, Craig underwent an astounding change.  At the height of his addiction, he seemed to guzzle enough whiskey to put a Kentucky distillery on overtime.  And then, virtually overnight, he threw himself with the same zeal into the battle against alcoholism.  He would attend three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a day--one at noon, two in the evening.  In between he went to hospitals or homes to help others in their battle against booze.  In later years, after Jim Wright became Majority Leader, Craig quietly extended his AA work even to the floor of the House.

            “If he saw a Congressman chronically nipping, he would write him a private note or get together with him for a talk,” recalled his friend Gary Hymel, chief staffer to Speaker Tip O’Neill.

            Never once after Craig’s astonishing transformation did he fall off the wagon.  Especially do I want to assure you he was cold sober the day he set Jim Wright’s hair on fire.

            It happened while the Investigations Subcommittee was examining various means of improving airline passenger safety.  One company had come up with an intriguing idea--a simple transparent hood, made of fireproof material.  In the event of a crash, the company believed such a hood would give a passenger a few more precious seconds to escape from a fiery, smoke-filled cabin. 

            Parade magazine heard about this, and expressed interest in getting a cover picture of the subcommittee chairman, Jim Wright,  demonstrating this new safety hood in the face of an honest-to-goodness burst of flame inside an honest-to-goodness airplane.  There was, fortunately, no suggestion of first arranging for the airplane to crash. 

            Suspecting that hardly any airline would enthusiastically welcome a blazing torch inside one of its aeronautical machines even to make a picture for Parade, Craig came up with an alternative.  He figured that a railroad passenger car interior might bear some resemblance to an aircraft cabin, at least to a camera.  Moreover, railroad people were known to be far less finicky than airline people about igniting fires inside their public conveyances.

            After arranging to use an idle railroad car at Washington’s Union Station, Craig stopped by a neighborhood hardware store and picked up a butane blowtorch.  While he had never used one of these, he knew that sometimes plumbers did, although he wasn’t sure exactly for what, or how. 

            As the intrepid crew gathered for the camera shoot, Jim Wright fiddled with the mask and Craig fiddled with the blowtorch.  Even though neither had ever used a particular device of this kind,  Jim Wright seemed to know more about the hood than Craig did about the blowtorch.  Eventually, however, this dutiful friend and employee of the Congressman managed to evoke large billows of flame from the torch with at least some measure of control.

            With confidence born of having survived both World War II air combat in Pacific and one term in the Texas Legislature, Jim Wright gamely pulled the hood over his head.  From inside came muffled words that sounded as if he were saying he was ready.  Or maybe, in retrospect, he was saying, please pull down the hood a little further in the back.  Anyhow, with gradually diminishing enthusiasm for this entire enterprise, Craig orchestrated a fearsome tongue of flame into what he hoped was Jim Wright’s securely protected head.  It was hard to tell exactly what went wrong.

            Maybe Craig’s aim was faulty.  Or maybe Jim Wright didn’t have the hood pulled down far enough in the back.  Or perhaps the company never anticipated its product would be tested by a Congressional aide making his solo flight with a butane blowtorch.  Anyhow, Jim Wright’s hair caught fire.  For a minute there was so much excitement it was hard to tell who was trying to do what.  The Congressman removed the hood with somewhat greater dexterity than he had put it on.  The cameraman and Craig frantically started beating the flames, an operation which, of course, marginally involved pounding the top of Jim Wright’s head.

            Fortunately, however,  he wasn’t hurt, and suffered only a negligible loss hair.  Courageously he volunteered for a second picture, and this one wound up on the cover of Parade.  Somehow, though, the idea of fireproof protective hoods never seemed to catch on, either with the airlines or with the blowtorch companies. 

            While I had known Craig for many years, it was not until Jim Wright decided to run for Majority Leader in 1976 that I got a chance to work closely with him.  First we were thrown together during the campaign and then, after Jim Wright succeeded in winning this No. 2 position in the House, Craig became his Executive Assistant to work the House floor.  I soon learned what I had suspected from Craig’s work in AA--namely that he was utterly incapable of half-way measures.  His credo could be summed up in only six words--go wide open, never give up.  Once his brother Hugh bought a bicycle shop, and Craig kept telling me how healthy it was to ride a bicycle.  Then I found that this skinny, almost gaunt fellow would go out and ride a bicycle for a hundred miles.  On one jaunt he fell and cut a big gash in his head.  He climbed back on and kept riding, waving aside motorists offering a ride to this crazy fellow pedaling down the highway with blood streaming down his face and soaking his shirt. 

            He never flaunted his values, but they were as solid as the Hood County Courthouse.             He devoutly believed in the sanctity of democratic government, and that there was no greater honor or responsibility than to have been elected by the people to serve in public office.  He was infuriated by staff members who became intoxicated with personal power.

            “There are two kinds of people around here--members of Congress and clerks.  You just need to remember which one you are,” he used to say. 

            His day-to-day work reflected his deep concern for poor, the sick, the elderly and the homeless, but he would have cursed anybody who called him soft-hearted.  Probably his closest approach to sentimentality was once when he gave an autographed picture to Jim Wright.  Its handwritten inscription:  “To the best sonuvabitch there ever was.”

            While Craig never gave me that much gooey affection, once he came pretty close.  He and I had been trying to reason with an cantankerous committee chairman, purple with anger, who was about to fire a staffer he mistakenly believed had changed the language in a bill.  It would have been a foolish action and I came right out and told him why.  Furious at me, the chairman stalked off--but he didn’t fire the guy.  Afterward Craig looked at me and smiled.           

            “Marshall Lynam,” he said, “you’re a great man.”

            For three years Craig worked the floor and helped orchestrate the flow of legislation to the House floor.  While he handled it with unsurpassed skill and diligence, the pressure began to tell on him.  In 1979, at the age of 54, he decided to hang it up and perhaps realize his lifelong dream of raising pigs--er, that is, producing pork--in Granbury.  With Joyce he went back and they built a beautiful home a stone’s throw from  the spot where he grew up.  But then, in 1983, Joyce developed cancer and died in a matter of months.  After that, Craig was never quite the same.             

            For a time he taught some college courses in Texas and then, perhaps drawn by Washington, a geographic paramour second only to Granbury, he returned to the capital and founded a lobbying firm with Jeanne Campbell, herself a longtime Congressional staffer.           

             In January of 1987, at the convening of the 100th Congress of the United States, Craig realized one of his most cherished dreams.  He sat and watched as his best friend, Jim Wright, was sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives--the most powerful legislative office on earth.  Then, almost as if he realized his life was complete because his best friend had achieved the ultimate success for an American lawmaker, Craig died suddenly of an aneurysm on October 14, 1988.  He was buried beside his beloved wife Joyce in the soil of his beloved paramour, Granbury, Texas. 

            We human beings are not supposed to sit in judgment of such matters.  But I like to think that when Craig reached the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter may have looked in his ledger, smiled and said:

            “Craig Raupe, you’re a great man.”