On the sunny winter day (Feb. 7, 1937) that President Roosevelt delightedly stunned the country with his Supreme Court Plan, one Senator withdrew from the ranks of his huffing & puffing colleagues, sought out a secluded leather chair, thoughtfully drank a Scotch-&-soda which he later described as "a foot high."
Charles Linza McNary of Salem, Ore., the Republican minority's Senate leader, was the one legislator who refused to treat the Court Bill as an earthquake. His eyes narrowing with the twinkle that always precedes the dehorsing of an adversary, pink-cheeked Senator McNary brooded long and carefully.
A scheme that then seemed grandiose and daring beyond any dim 1937 Republican dreams gradually took shape under the still-sandy thatch that belies McNary's age (65). When all but a few bumbling die-hards believed the President would have his way about the Court, McNary coolly visioned not only the bill's strangulation but the wide-open splitting of the Democratic Party and the eventual use of the conservative Democratic wing by Republican strategists in a practical coalition which could not merely harass Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal but stop it cold. The conception was a brilliant, deadly parallel to the late T. E. Lawrence's masterly guerilla tactics in the Arabian revolt in the desert.
Imposing silence on his own colleagues, especially upon Idaho's sonorous constitutionalist, Wild Bill Borah, was Leader McNary's hardest job. Every morning he summoned them all to the green-baize table of his caucus room and made them vow tongue-holding again. "Let the boys across the aisle do the talking," he would say, smiling dreamily as he shot his cuffs. So it was not Borah or California's Johnson or Michigan's expletive Vandenberg who took the headlines in the Court debates. It was Virginia's red-hot Glass, Montana's Wheeler, Nebraska's Burke, North Carolina's Josiah Bailey—Democrats all.
In the background was another Democrat—Peter Goelet Gerry of Rhode Island, no orator but a great conniver. At his home the President's opponents met secretly, unsuspected. And another Democrat headed the Judiciary Committee which had the bill in charge: Ashurst of Arizona. That elegant obfuscator contributed nobly the second essential of McNary's stratagem: delay.
To his mounting anger, the President learned in April that there were 75 "sure votes" for a compromise plan. No compromise, the President cried to his tiring wheelhorse, Joe Robinson. McNary chuckled, and the anti-Roosevelt votes only increased.
Then overworked Joe Robinson died, and Franklin Roosevelt played straight into McNary's hands by his choice of bumbling "Dear Alben" Barkley over Pat Harrison for his new Leader. Next came the attempted Purge, another stroke of political amateurishness. McNary grew almost profane when restless men like Vandenberg talked openly of an open coalition with the conservative Democrats whom Roosevelt was trying to read out. He encouraged his followers to go to ball games with Jack Garner, Pat Harrison and other time-biders, but kept them from doing anything that might revive loyalty to the Democratic label.