Nation: Third Time Unlucky

"I am no johnny-come-lately," intoned Everett Dirksen. "When I start, I play for keeps." What he was playing for last week, the third time around, was a characteristically Dirksenian lost cause: a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's "one-man, one-vote" ruling.

In a rambling Senate speech larded with Familiar Quotations from Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Douglas MacArthur, Abraham Lincoln and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Republican leader reiterated his fear that the reapportionment of state legislatures entirely on the basis of population would lead to their domination by "the bosses of the big-city political machines." Instead, Dirksen proposed, the voters...

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