THE CONGRESS The Elephant Hunt Drawing a bead on Virginia's apple-cheeked Harry Byrd, the Senate's economizer extraordinary, is almost as adventurous an undertaking as stalking a bull elephant with an arquebus. But Minnesota's bumptious Freshman Hubert Humphrey was never one to heed the admonitions of his elders. He sighted on Harry Byrd's jaw-cracking Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures. Far from serving as a useful check on government spending, blared Humphrey, the Byrd committee might better be described as "the nonessential committee on nonessential expenditures."
Harry Byrd was not on the Senate floor when Freshman Humphrey first discharged his matchlock. But last week Byrd planted himself firmly behind his desk, flipped open a manuscript on the lectern before him and fixed the upstart with a cold, stern eye. After glancing through the Congressional Record, he began, he had found at least nine major misstatements in Humphrey's 2,000-word accusation. He would proceed forthwith to set the Senate straight on the facts.
Atomic Superlatives. From both sides of the aisle, Senators crowded in to watch the fun as Byrd took off after his accuser, item by item. Humphrey had called his committee "the No. i example of waste and extravagance," snorted Byrd. That was not only a misstatement; "even in this atomic era of superlatives, it must go down as a super-exaggeration." In the past nine years the committee had spent only $127,000. In return, it had pushed through savings of more than $2.4 billion.
Humphrey, continued Byrd, had misquoted and misused committee figures to prove his case. He had overlooked some elementary facts and twisted others out of shape. Then Byrd hit his peroration. Humphrey had tried to dismiss the committee as just a "publicity medium," he snapped. "As the Senator from Minnesota is a publicity expert himself, his statement could be regarded as a compliment.
"I know of no Senator who has more generously used the Congressional Record and other governmental facilities to promote his publicity. If he has ever hidden his light under a bushel, I am not aware of it. I have not observed that he is of the shrinking-violet type . . ."
A Political Zombie. Sitting in his back row seat, scribbling notes furiously, hapless Hubert Humphrey tried vainly to get the floor. But Byrd's old friends of both parties jumped in to help cut the freshman down to size. "I know of no more valuable committee that has functioned in this body since I have been a member," declared Georgia's veteran Walter George. "Amazing and reckless charges," said Mississippi's John Stennis. Michigan's Republican Homer Ferguson pointed out that Byrd's committee was so respected by the G.O.P. that Byrd had been allowed to stay on as chairman even in the Republican-controlled 80th Congress. Half a dozen others rose to add their voices in praise of Byrd: Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry (". . . a great chairman ... a great work . . ."); Tennessee's ancient, irascible Kenneth Mc-Kellar; South Dakota's Republican Karl Mundt, who couldn't think of anyone in public life who "has contributed more to the general welfare"; even such an evenhanded Republican moderate as New Hampshire's Charles Tobey.