Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress

10. The Moral Architect

10 The Moral Architect Thin, medium height, almost totally bald; his skin has a ‘‘translucent quality accentuated by the unrelieved black of his clerical garb.’’ His eyes, very deep-set, punctuate his conversation, as they roll around, close as he pauses to reflect, then ‘‘dart skyward in mock alarm or dismay.’’ He is controlled in his intensity, yet playful, as he presses his long, thin fingers together in front of him, massages his face, and then jabs them into the air for emphasis. In the fall of 1973 Drinan sat down—when he wasn’t jumping up to stalk around his office, or slumping into his chair to swing his feet around and up onto his desk—for a long interview with editor Alan Westin for the Civil Liberties Review. ‘‘This is a restless man,’’ wrote Westin. ‘‘He twists around to add body English to his staccato laugh.’’ CLR illustrated its interview with a caricature of Drinan by Isadore Seitzer in which Drinan appeared as a mounted medieval knight in armor, with the Constitution on his flag, the Capitol dome as his helmet , and the Bill of Rights in his saddlebags. It was a friendly interview that focused on the work of the Judiciary Committee, and particularly on Subcommittee Three, which concerned itself with prison reform, capital punishment, the newsman’s privilege, and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, also known as preventive detention, whereby the executive branch had the power to round up and detain people without due process of law. Echoing his retreat notebook of 1968, in which he exclaimed that he had gone ‘‘13 years Without a Voice!’’ Drinan complained that he had come to Congress in 1970 not only for a ‘‘voice’’—which he had had as a dean, speaker, and writer—but for a ‘‘vote.’’ He discovered, 214 | the moral architect though, that the seniority system, controlled by conservative committee chairmen, prevented him from voting on issues that really mattered to him. Westin worked Drinan through a host of issues, asking frequently what Congress had actually accomplished in the time during which Drinan had had the opportunity to effect change. The answer was often ‘‘Not that much,’’ because of the ‘‘structural obstacles Congress throws up against reform’’—for example seniority and the narrow Democratic majority with many Democrats from the conservative South. A small caucus of reform Democrats made committee meetings more open, but they changed little. On civil rights, ‘‘King Richard’’ Nixon had begun the year by removing Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh from the chairmanship of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission . And the administration was re-segregating schools by cutting funds for busing. To guide future legislation, the committee toured the country investigating prisons and their rehabilitation techniques. In 1972 the Supreme Court had held that capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against ‘‘cruel and unusual punishment .’’ The following year Nixon responded with legislation asking that capital punishment be restored for certain crimes. Drinan’s response to that was a bill to abolish the death penalty for federal crimes. He knew that the majority of Americans supported the death penalty, but because they were not well informed, the majority, said Drinan, was not to be trusted in certain ‘‘basic justice and morality’’ issues, like busing and prison reform. The question of the ‘‘newsman’s privilege’’—whether a journalist can be compelled by law enforcement to disclose information he or she has gained in confidence from a source—is a difficult one that would concern Drinan and remain unresolved for years. Drinan in 1973 conceded that someone actually on trial for murder, for example, should be able to call upon a journalist to reveal confidential information that may exonerate him or her; but this was his only exception to what he saw as the journalist’s broad right under the First Amendment to serve the public’s need for information. In early 1973 Drinan had written to the New York Times (February 1) arguing that the same law recognizing the confidential relationships of husband and wife, lawyer the moral architect | 215 and client, and physician and patient should apply to journalists—not as a personal right ‘‘but because of the public’s right to know, of which the newsman is a trustee.’’ No federal statute should interfere with that public right, Drinan maintained. Five years later he returned to the topic, in...