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The frown begins with a line biting deep into the bridge of the broad nose. Thin, pale lips turn thinner, paler. Behind black-rimmed glasses, eyes glow with a suggestion of banked—and therefore controlled —inner fires. The voice takes over from the frown. Deep and strong ("I have always had a commanding voice"), it needs no microphone to help it carry. Questions come slowly, in careful Southern cadence. In the voice, as if measured carefully by the tapping of a finger on a mahogany table, are righteousness and rebuke, sarcasm and sadness, incredulity and indignation. Never is there unrestrained anger.
Both the frown and the voice have been made famous on radio and television by
Arkansas' Democratic Senator John L. McClellan, who at 61, and in his igth year in Congress, has come to direct evenhandedly, effectively and often brilliantly an investigation that ranks among the most important in recent U.S. history.
Into the Rackets. The McClellan committee investigation reaches far beyond the skulduggery of any individual, even a Dave Beck. It goes to a fundamental U.S. proposition: that labor and management, through their mutually honest efforts at collective bargaining, shall both thrive in a free economy. It was to correct a management-weighted imbalance that the Wagner Labor Relations act (John McClellan voted for it) was passed in 1935. But that, in turn, created an equally oppressive, labor-weighted imbalance that even the Taft-Hartley law (McClellan voted for it, too) failed to remedy. Unchecked by restraining laws, some labor leaders became racketeers and some racketeers became labor leaders, using their vast economic powers against management, unionism, and society itself.
To expose such wrongdoing is one aim of the McClellan committee. But much more important is the committee's responsibility for finding legislative methods of punishment and prevention. Indeed, the health of the whole U.S. economy may depend on the work of the committee, for, as McClellan says, "if left alone, unchecked and unrestrained, with the momentum it has already gained, we could be heading for a gangsterism economy in America. This must not occur."
Special Justice. It will not occur if John McClellan can prevent it. To the job of preventing it he brings much more than his scowl and his voice; they are merely the sight and the sound of the controlled strength that makes McClellan one of the most respected members of the U.S. Senate and its top investigator. Into the arena of congressional investigation, where many a congressional head has been turned by headlines and TV time, McClellan brings a special kind of justice. It is the personal code of a man who has had to learn the hard way to control his strength, who has had to beat down wild winds of temper, and learn that the law—in whose cold virtue he once sought escape from a world that used him cruelly—must be tempered by understanding.
Since boyhood, McClellan has carried with him the admonitions of an Arkansas preacher: "Know thyself, control thyself, deny thyself." For long, grim years John McClellan struggled to shape his life by that code—and success came late.