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60 5 H H H H H Moakley versus Hicks Speaker of the U.S. House John William McCormack was a formidable poker player, known for holding his cards close to his vest and maintaining an inscrutable demeanor. Although he was seventyeight years old and completing his twenty-first term, only his wife, Harriet , and his closest aides knew that he would announce his retirement on May 20, 1970. His colleagues in the Massachusetts delegation were informed of the fact two hours before the news conference. McCormack had been Speaker of the U.S. House since the death of Sam Rayburn, taking over in January 1962. When he rose to the top leadership , Time magazine described him, accurately, as a “tall, gaunt man, with a shock of white hair, rimless glasses and a thin lipped smile.” In truth, he looked like a figure from the distant past even in 1962—a man born in 1891, a World War I veteran in a landscape shaped by World War II, the space race, and rock and roll. The first time the Speaker flew on an airplane was in late 1961 to attend Rayburn’s funeral. By 1970, to a generation that was protesting the war in Vietnam, smoking marijuana, and dancing to the Rolling Stones, McCormack looked like a figure from nineteenth-century literature—Ichabod Crane or Mr. Micawber. There was some truth to that image. The cultural revolt of the 1960s and 1970s located the sources of militarism and imperialism in an uptight culture of emotional repression that frustrated humanity’s inner longing for pleasure and joy. McCormack didn’t drink, dance, or even socialize much with his colleagues—a seemingly humorless Puritan in a den of congressional bourbon-swillers. He dined quietly with his wife every evening in their apartment at the Hotel Washington. “Old John” exemplified routine. He arrived at the House at the same time every morning, and ordered the same cheese sandwich and chocolate ice cream for lunch every moakley versus hicks H 61 day. John McCormack rarely appeared in the headlines, and probably few Americans in the 1960s could identify him. In Congress, Majority Leader John W. McCormack rounded up the votes to pass Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Its fruits included the Old Harbor housing project, today named for McCormack’s mother, inwhichJoeMoakleyhadlivedasaboy.McCormackhelpedpushthrough parts of Truman’s Fair Deal, such as the gi Bill, from which Moakley had also benefited. McCormack’s rise to the office of Speaker continued a tradition of House leadership based in Texas and Massachusetts that went back to John Nance Garner and would end with Tip O’Neill, the “Austin/ Boston Connection,” as political scientists dubbed it. McCormack fashioned the majorities, which included substantial numbers of Republicans and no Southern Democrats, that passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The story of the legislative “Second Reconstruction ” has gone down in American history as the work of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but few remember that “Old John,” Speaker McCormack, had led those bills through the House. And when McCormack announced his retirement, the one unfinished item of business that he regretted had not been completed was a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right of eighteen-year-olds to vote.1 Then why did he look like an out-of-touch old man? The reason was that McCormack supported the war in Vietnam. The House took its first vote on Vietnam in August 1964 after a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast. The resolution cited the centrality of Southeast Asia to American interests and empowered the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces” to defend the region. In his masterful biography of the future House Speaker, Tip O’Neill and the American Century, John A. Farrell describes an exchange between the representatives of the 8th and 9th districts of Massachusetts. The two men, mentor and protege, were seated at a table among others in the House dining room before the vote, and O’Neill remarked that “there was something screwy about the whole thing.” Later, O’Neill remembered that “everybody kind of looked at me aghast,” and McCormack summoned him to his office, warning him not to vote against the resolution. “Tom, it will be determining that you’re a traitor if you were to do a thing like that,” McCormack admonished, and O’Neill joined the 416–0...

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