HE had the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound, the jowls of a St. Bernard and a baldachin of white hair like that of an extraordinarily unkempt poodle. His face, reporters joked, looked as if it had been slept in. When he spoke, there issued forth a sesquipedalian vocabulary, diapasonal sounds like a Hammond organ in dense fog. His performances had a consciously archaic quality about them. He satirized fustian while indulging in it. His senatorial solemnity was a species of burlesque. He belonged in a Chautauqua rather than a McLuhan age, although he became a master of television performing. His manner, leavened by an exquisite sense of self-parody, conjured up Americana, suggestions of snake-oil peddlers, backwoods Shakespeareans, the gentle rapscallionry of Penrod Schofield's or Pudd'nhead Wilson's world. Before he died of a pulmonary embolism at 73, Everett McKinley Dirksen had himself become a unique object of Americana.
Not everyone, of course, was charmed. As Republican leader of the U.S. Senate for the past ten years. Dirksen commanded the power to alter the directions of the nation, and sometimes he almost gave the impression of whimsicality in the causes he embraced. At times, he was a man of stupefying inconsistency. But then Dirksen always was fond of quoting Emerson on the hobgoblin of little minds. It was Dirksen, an old supporter of Joe McCarthy. who almost singlehanded kept the utterly superfluous Subversive Activities Control Board in business two years ago. It was Ev, too, who had been seeking a constitutional convention to overturn the Supreme Court's one-man one-vote decision. Yet the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965, and last year's open housing bill, perhaps would not have passed without Dirksen's aid. Similarly, the 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty might not have cleared the Senate had not the minority leader, long a vocal opponent of the treaty, searched his mind and concluded that "my earlier opinions did not stand up."
The Mighty Oilcan. Dirksen was apparently serene about such political transmogrifications, which struck others as a trifle manic. "Change," he once observed, "is inherent to life. The only persons who don't change are dead, or involuntarily confined in mental hospitals." More than an ideologue, Dirksen was a total and masterly politician. His 35 years on Capitol Hill equipped him with intricate parliamentary skills, and his basic instincts were conciliatory. "The oilcan is mightier than the sword," he believed. Moreover, from his first days in Washington until his death, his primary concern went to the heart of public policy.
He was personally kind and shamelessly sentimental. In his garden at Sterling, Va., he tended prize roses, poinsettias and camellias. Each year, in his most floriated prose, he beseeched the Senate to designate the marigold as the nation's official flower: "It is as sprightly as the daffodil, as delicate as the carnation, as aggressive as the petunia, as ubiquitous as the violet and as stately as the snapdragon." He was one of the last national politicians who dared allow his eyes to mist when he spoke of the "fa-lag" and "coun-tray," and, in a way, the emotion was genuine.