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Overshadowed. The G.O.P. assault on a subcommittee chairman, almost unprecedented in the ceremonious Senate sanctum, was especially ironic in Kennedy's case. The young Senator has always gone out of his way to be respectful of Senate customs. Since his emergence as a possible presidential candidate, however, Republicans have been treating him like an opposition candidate; the Alaska revolt was not an isolated incident. Senator Everett Dirksen recently attempted to turn Kennedy's hearings on discriminatory hiring into an assault on Government "harassment" of business, and Administration spokesmen criticized the Senate Select Committee on Hunger after Kennedy helped it reverse a fund cutoff. After the Alaskan revolt, an Administration official was quoted as praising the Republican Senators' decision to abandon the inspection tour. One Democrat, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, suggested that the Administration, strapped for funds, was trying to play down disclosures of urgent welfare needs.
Although it was hoped that Kennedy's presence on the tour would draw public attention to the miserable condition of Alaskan natives, the flap overshadowed the poverty. Lost in the accusations was the close-up look that the subcommittee got at the squalor in a far-off corner of America. Landing on frozen rivers, slogging through thigh-high snow in zero temperature, the Senators visited primitive villages where the unemployment rate is 60%. They had to bend low to get into crude Eskimo homes, rancid one-room shacks with no plumbing that house up to eleven people. They visited a village where residents have to walk two miles for water, and areas where only eight out of 100 native Alaskans graduate from high school.
Conditions in Alaska have been improving rapidly in the past few years, but they still have a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the U.S. Excursions like Kennedy's, whatever the publicity dividends for the tour guide, help remind the nation of those beyond affluence's pale—just as Bob Kennedy's visits to Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta did. In the meantime, Ted Kennedy, like Robert before him, is making good political mileage out of his rapport with America's downtrodden.
*While Ted was in Alaska, Wife Joan went to Brooklyn to visit a job-training center that Robert Kennedy helped establish two years ago.