The topic of this episode is, “Who was the meanest man in Congress?”
My guest is Timothy J. McNulty, who taught journalism at Northwestern University and spent more than thirty years at the Chicago Tribune. During his years as a journalist, Tim was a national and foreign correspondent, and also an editor. He logged untold hours paying attention to Congress and its many characters. And importantly for the purposes of this episode of the podcast, he is the coauthor of a terrific book, The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century (NewSouth Books, 2019).
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.
I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Welcome to the podcast.
Timothy McNulty:
Thanks very much for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for being here.
Jack Brooks served in Congress from 1952 to 1994. He was called a number of names: the snake killer, the executioner, and the meanest man in Congress. Why?
Timothy McNulty:
Well, each one had a very set reason in Congress. “The snake killer” was him using an old Texas term when he went after President Ford’s early budget. He said to reporters then, “Well, the best time to kill a snake is when it’s young.” So that’s what Ford did. “The executioner” is what Nixon told some of his aides, because Brooks had been really a driving force in the Judiciary Committee. Peter Rodino was the head of it, but he was taking it very slow, and Brooks wanted to speed things up. So that’s what bothered Nixon. And then “the meanest man” was something that Brooks had a great deal of pride in, because his questioning on the Government Affairs Subcommittee struck fear into a lot of bureaucrats and corporate leaders who were called to testify, because he didn’t blanch at any kind of power or anything else, whether it was Marine Corps generals or heads of General Motors or government department heads. He just went after them. So he got that “meanest man” title and wore it proudly.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, yes. Brooks himself, as you detail in your book, was a Marine, and he was in World War II. He saw many intense things and he endured a lot, both in his upbringing and before he got to Congress. But the listener might be wondering: if Brooks was so mean, how come voters reelected him every two years for four decades?
Timothy McNulty:
Well, of course, he looked after his district. No matter what other public pronouncements or other publicity he got, he was never that interested in being anything other than a congressman. And people recognized that. He of course brought home a lot of government money, especially for infrastructure down in Southeast Texas. But he also had his staff be very aware of constituent concerns, whether it was someone who’s a mother who wanted her son to be able to come home because of an operation that she was having— He took care of things and made sure that his staff answered every letter, every message. And that’s why I think— He also was a populist. This is in a very different era that you alluded to: a populist, a Democrat, in Texas! That was something that was seen as a great achievement: to be that strong and to have both conservative ideas and also very advanced or progressive ideas. He also was able to kind of meld his constituency. It was business leaders, but it was also union leaders. That was important in Southeast Texas, there on the border with Louisiana. So [he had a] fairly unique ability to get together members of the community, no matter what their title or station.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes. You mentioned his knowledge of his district. One of the particularly interesting aspects of his district is that it was in Texas, but it had a significant number of Black citizens in it.
Timothy McNulty:
Yeah.
Kevin Kosar:
And Brooks, unlike so many other Southern representatives, was progressive on racial issues and had a big role in pushing forward civil rights acts. Is that right?
Timothy McNulty:
That’s the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and others. He was very definite about that. He made sure that the Black citizens in his district were equally represented, and he refused to sign on to any pronouncements from other Southern Democrats who were for segregation. He was one of the few that refused to sign those kind of pronouncements. His district was one that encompassed everything from a town where Blacks were not welcome after dark to union leaders in Louisiana and in Southeast Texas and Beaumont, where they were in charge of a lot of the companies and the unions. So he was able to kind of meld all these different groups together by their self-interest.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, yes. It’s a remarkable thing, considering how intense the backlash towards desegregation was, to be able to keep that balance and fend off any primary challengers who might go after him. That was quite something.
Timothy McNulty:
He learned a lot in the Marines. He learned a lot in his first decade as a congressman. He was also in the Texas state legislature. Sam Rayburn was a mentor, and Rayburn talked about [how] the first ten years in Congress, you’re kind of learning how things work. Then after that you become effective. And Brooks paid attention to his mentor. He also was a friend on the Senate side of Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson also as president. They were very close. So he kind of put together things from his life, both in the Marines and the state legislature, and then in his early days in Congress, to become very effective. And it was also, by the way, across the aisle. It wasn’t as if they were saying, “I’m only going to work on Democratic issues.” He had strong friends on both sides. For instance, Bob Dole one time was meeting with the Democratic leaders in the Senate and the House. And they made an agreement—which is the art of compromise that Congress is lacking now—but they made an agreement, and Dole had told the Democratic leaders that he wanted it in writing. And they asked, “Well, you want a letter from Brooks?” And Dole said, “No, I don’t need it from Brooks. His word is good.” So that’s the way he was considered on the Hill.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. That gets to an interesting insight that your book offers on how to be an effective politician. One thing, certainly, that Brooks had was doggedness. The book relates the story of how he wanted, back when he was a state legislator, a community college to become a full-blown university. He had to fight and fight and bargain, and the bill died at least one time, if not more. And he kept at it until he got it done.
Another thing that he seemed to really get was that, yes, politics is about principles, but it is about people, trust, and wants. In his career in the military, you describe how Brooks positioned himself as a guy who was able to procure things that were wanted—like boots or whiskey or socks—and was able to build support amongst those he served with. Is that right?
Timothy McNulty:
Absolutely. He learned that you appeal to people on what they need. So whether it was—as you said, one time, he traded things that another unit might have needed for fifty pairs of boots that his company needed. Or, a shipment of whiskey came in on a ship, not identified as whiskey, but he was able to figure out how to get that on land and on the islands in the South Pacific, and made good use of it. And it wasn’t for himself. He was doing it and learning how to manage things for people’s own self-interests. Part of his appeal was that it wasn’t like he was eager to make money or to get higher office. He was able to just say, “Here’s what we need,” and figure out how to negotiate it. And the idea of compromise, he recognized—I think what Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson also realized—that in order to be effective, you have to be willing to compromise.
Kevin Kosar:
That’s right. Speaking of Rayburn, who was speaker of the House for a very long time, and Lyndon Johnson, who became majority leader in the Senate before vice president and president: Brooks spent time with them, which had the advantage of not only conferring some of their power upon him—the fact that these two fellow Texans would listen to Brooks about certain things—but also he learned process. That’s another key aspect of being an effective legislator: figuring out how the wheels turn on Capitol Hill. Is that right?
Timothy McNulty:
Absolutely. He realized that when he was— For instance, there was a sign, as simple a thing as a sign on a reservoir in Texas, and he wanted it named after Rayburn with Rayburn’s full name. And they just said, “No, we can’t do that. It’s different than the rest of them.” And Brooks was able to say, “Here’s what I’m going to do.” He detailed who he was going to talk to, what was going to happen, when they were going to send that bill to President Kennedy, when Kennedy was going to sign it and come back to Brooks. So he recognized that, and so did a lot of the other people who were bureaucrats or others that wanted to do things only one way. He recognized that the more you understood how Congress worked, the more effective you would be.
Some of his accomplishments were not flashy. They weren’t Newt Gingrich trying to get up and get a name for himself, speaking to an empty House of Representatives just so that he could have some TV time. But Brooks was able to look at things and say, “What do people need?” So he went after things as mundane as lightbulbs. Lightbulbs are something that’s so commonplace. Yet he realized at some point that the way they were made was to absolutely burn out quickly. So he went to the GE and said, “Here’s what you could do. The technology is available.” He also did other infrastructure products like IBM and said, “Why are we leasing computers at this enormous cost? Why don’t we buy them?” And so he did. The same thing with Westinghouse or with the Boeing and the FAA. Those kind of changes—whether it was airline safety or other products—he said, “Why don’t we do it? It makes more sense for the government to be paying.”
That’s why he was also feared: when people went up to his committee, then he would ask very blunt questions. One of the— Afterwards he told some of his staff, because they heard these heads of businesses saying, “Brooks, that S.O.B.,” and Brooks to his staff just smiled and he says, “Well, what they mean is Sweet Old Brooks.”
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, yes. The lightbulb incident was a good one. I’ll give listeners a preview. Essentially, you had three or four firms that were making lightbulbs in the country at that time, and they created a planned obsolescence. Bulbs would only burn for 750 hours and then would go kaput. There was no reason that it had to be that way; it just encouraged more people to spend more money on lightbulbs. Brooks called them out on it, and they didn’t have a defensible answer. By training that attention upon them—it was an element of just shaming them into improving their behavior.
My next question: Brooks had a long career, and he did an enormous amount during that time on Capitol Hill. In your estimate, what were his greatest legislative achievements, if you could just pick a couple?
Timothy McNulty:
Well, I think his involvement with the Civil Rights Act, as I mentioned before, that certainly was something that he would be very proud of. Not signing the Southern Manifesto that would encourage segregation—that took courage, and he had that. Like I said, [he was involved with] large-scale infrastructure projects in Beaumont and elsewhere in Southeastern Texas. He also was the one vote that allowed the International Space Station to continue. It came down to one single vote, and Brooks casted to continue the space station.
He also had some controversy when he was on the Judiciary Committee and ultimately became chairman of it. During the Nixon hearings, he told his fellow legislators that the only decision that they really had to make with Nixon was whether to shoot him or hang him. There was another time when he was talking to people in his district. In the Marine Corps, his last station was in China, because they were going to invade Japan, and they knew there were going to be enormous casualties. So he was very much for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During this one press conference, he said, “Truman should have dropped three bombs.” It was controversial. There was a TV crew, but they had just turned off the camera, to his aides’ great relief. But he was insistent: he said it saved tens of thousands of American lives and he was for it.
So he didn’t shy from controversy. When Oliver North testified— Now, Oliver North had become symbolic of rectitude, and he was being questioned and all that by other members of the committee. Then, when it came time for Brooks’s question, he laid into him. He also had been a Marine colonel, and he wasn’t going to take any guff or false modesty. So he laid into North. It was not until then that it turned—that a lot of the other members of Congress began to question whether North was actually as patriotic as he wanted to paint himself.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes. Brooks was remarkable in so many ways. As we noted earlier, he was a guy who very much believed in delivering tangible benefits to his voters and to the American public generally. But that doesn’t mean he was a big-spending liberal. In fact, much of his career he spent acting as a watchdog over government spending. That is unusual today. We too often hear conversations where a member is described as a liberal, and they just don’t care about waste, fraud, and abuse, or they’re a tightwad legislator who doesn’t want to spend anything on the war or anything. Brooks showed that you could do both, and you could do them well.
I want to circle back for my last question on the issue of Brooks’s meanness within Congress. Clearly, he was well liked, both by voters and many other members. He was also feared, particularly by people in the executive branch who ended up in his crosshairs. Was his meanness different from the type of meanness that we see in Congress today?
Timothy McNulty:
Yeah. When we were trying to decide on the title and subtitle of the book, it was a question that we had to address. When we think of meanness today, it’s very personal—again, Newt Gingrich kind of attacks on people. Another word that we questioned whether we should use: the toughest man in Congress, because that was really his reputation. Even though they called him the meanest man, the intention was to say, he is not going to take guff from anybody, and he will question people. He will make sure that other legislators are held to account. So it’s a different kind of context that people use the word now.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, his meanness seemed to be closely related to the issue of government accountability, not as a gratuitous vehicle for raising one’s own brand. Interestingly enough, and I shall close with this, as a legislator, he frequently did not try to draw media attention. Rather, he kept stuff that he was working on low-salience until he felt that he needed some outside attention that would perhaps help him get something over the line.
Timothy McNulty:
Yep. You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly a good way of describing it.
Kevin Kosar:
Timothy J. McNulty, thank you for telling us about the meanest man in Congress, who is also one of the most consequential legislators in our republic’s history.
Timothy McNulty:
Thank you very much.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Mikael Good and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others, and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging @AEI. We hope you have a great day.
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