THE PENCIL AND SILENCE BOTH BROKE

by H. N. Burdett

Senator Mike Mansfield, D-Montana, who served for 16 years as the U.S. Senate Majority Leader, once characterized Senator Charles McC. Mathias, R-Maryland, as "the conscience of the Senate."

Mathias earned that reputation by his consistent refusal to knuckle under to the leaders of his party on his strong support for civil rights and campaign finance reform, both generally conceded to be Democratic rather than Republican issues.

But the majority leader's compliment doubtless owes much more to the Maryland senator's s entrenched opposition to the Vietnam war.

What really rankled Mathias' GOP colleagues was that his anti-war stance ran counter to the considerable pains the Republican party had taken to brand Democrats as the party of cut and run, too pitifully weak and frightened to defend the nation, whereas only Republicans possessed the strength, the reliability and the will to protect the American people and the free world from ruthless Communist aggression. All of this political capital was now threatened by arguably the strongest, most articulate arguments against the war being offered not by a Democrat but by one of their own.

For his part, Mac Mathias was equally concerned that the continuing United States presence in Vietnam bespoke of a great nation compounding an already colossal mistake and in so doing relinquishing the essence of its soul.

During those dark, turbulent days when the United States was more divided than at any time since the Civil War, the late Bob Spaeth, then a popular dean of men at St. John's College in Annapolis, would occasionally bring progressive members of the U.S. Senate to the campus to speak both formally and informally.

I suspect his purpose was to provide balance to St. John's Dean Bob Goldwin's more conservative views. Goldwin, who also passed away last month, was responsible for bringing Leo Strauss, purportedly the godfather of neoconservatism (an allegation vigorously denied by one of Strauss' brighter former students, William Kristol, now editor of the Weekly Standard and ubiquitous neocon talking head on network television) on to the St. John's faculty.

As an aside, when Spaeth departed Annapolis it was to reconstitute the liberal arts program of his alma mater, St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, which has no connection or relationship to the school of the same name in Annapolis, but rather is a Roman Catholic institution of higher learning with a Benedictine tradition. Former U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, the acknowledged foremost opponent of the Vietnam war, was a graduate of St. John's University in Minnesota. When Bob Goldwin left Annapolis, he became the authority on the United States Constitution at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank.

During those dark and troubled days, Spaeth invited Mathias to the St. John's campus in Annapolis. The Maryland senator told him that as a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a lonely voice against the war he found himself incredibly frustrated whenever Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the architect of the war, appeared before his committee.

Mathias said he was determined never again to ask McNamara even a single question because not only did he not always believe him, but the Secretary was such a master at obfuscation that just as certain magicians excel at sleight of hand, he had an impressive array of sleight of mind tricks that he used to tie members of the committee into virtual knots. But Mathias' silence did little to lower his surging blood pressure as he listened intently one afternoon to McNamara's diabolically cunning ripostes to committee members earnestly seeking information from the one cabinet member who had it.

The Maryland senator busied himself by taking notes on a legal pad with a No. 2 yellow Ticonderoga pencil when one of the senators asked the Secretary how many tanks the United States had in Laos, where Mathias feared the U.S. incursion would be the tipping point assuring that the misadventure in Southeast Asia would metastisize throughout the Asian continent and beyond.

McNamara responded to the question with a number followed by the observation that "this is the equivalent to the number of tanks the Soviet Union now has in Bulgaria." At which point, under pressure from Mathias' tightening thumb and fingers, the Ticonderoga snapped in half and the Maryland senator broke his vow of silence: "Mr. Secretary, why did you say that? Is there some sort of Bulgarian absolute regarding tanks of which this committee is unaware?"

Under his familiar crown of dark heavily laquered hair, McNamara peered through his frameless eyeglasses into Mathias' widened blue eyes and assumed the demeanor of a righteous clergyman getting on with the salvation of perhaps less than worthy souls, and responded, "I said it, Senator, because it is true."