A Long Time Ago In D.C.

On Monday morning, May 13, 1957, I entered the Washington bureau of the Associated Press in the old Evening Star building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a 26-year-old reporter transferred from Indianapolis, where I had reported on the Indiana legislature. I was immediately sent to Capitol Hill and soon was helping cover the Kennedy brothers' investigation of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who was defended by Edward Bennett Williams. What a start to 50 years in Washington that continue today.

My $125 weekly paycheck was hardly enough to get by, but drinks were cheap in the Members Bar of the National Press Club (restricted to men, as was the club itself), and the small steak there sold for $1.25. I resorted to group living, in a large Georgetown house owned by a Foreign Service officer who was in Costa Rica serving as ambassador. I paid $100-a-month rent. My housemates included two United Press reporters and two CIA employees (one overt, one covert).

It would be highly unlikely to find journalists and intelligence operatives cohabiting today; the nation's capital was a kinder, gentler place a half-century ago. Then, as now, a Congress controlled by Democrats with a one-vote margin in the Senate confronted a Republican president. But in 1957 they opposed each other courteously. I had arrived in Washington during a pause that preceded party polarization, the civil rights revolution, racial rioting, student unrest, assassinations, two impeachment proceedings, Vietnam, Watergate and Iraq.

Washington then was still the town of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, shabby and unlike today's sleek metropolis. The government was much smaller and far less intrusive. The federal budget was $76.7 billion ($585 billion in current dollars), compared to the 2007 figure of $2.7 trillion. But even that relatively modest number spawned an assault on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's spending by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.

The biggest news of my first week was LBJ leading the Senate on Wednesday to cut $102 million in foreign propaganda funds from the Eisenhower budget. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland and others in the GOP leadership supported the president in principle but voted for the Appropriations Committee cuts in the interest of Senate solidarity.

On Tuesday night, on national television, Eisenhower had called the cuts a "needless gamble" with national security. But in his weekly news conference on Wednesday, the president rejected the idea of going around Knowland to 14 liberal Republican senators who supported Eisenhower, asserting that he would work only through the GOP's "elected leadership." After the news conference, it was announced that Ike went golfing at the all-male Burning Tree club with his son John and press secretary James C. Hagerty.

While government outlays were limited, the top marginal income tax rate in 1957 remained at the Korean War level of 91 percent (compared with today's 35 percent). That helped produce a surplus in 1957, one of three surpluses during the Eisenhower years. They were matched by three Eisenhower recessions.

Nobody talked then about tax rate reduction until John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, and nobody in 1957 anticipated the massive 1958 recession that produced big Democratic congressional majorities for a generation.

Nor did anybody foresee that Lyndon Johnson would later that year engineer passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. At his May 15 news conference, Eisenhower said he would go "no faster and no further" than the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. That promised doing nothing about voting rights, open occupancy or fair employment.

But Time magazine's cover story that week on Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. reported him pressing for desegregation in interstate transportation, for abolishing segregation in Washington restaurants and, especially, for voting rights. Time depicted Brownell, who had been Eisenhower's campaign manager, as running the Justice Department on a nonpartisan basis. A U.S. attorney was quoted: "I think the Attorney General should get a Medal of Honor. He got us all feeling a certain pride in what we do."

That was the tone of Washington when I arrived. Today the city is slicker, the nation is richer and minorities are protected. But I cannot help feeling nostalgia for the civility and even innocence I encountered 50 years ago.

© 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.