ustxtxb_obs_1965_12_10_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

thoritarian limitations within his union, Congress, at the urging of the business community, adopted in 1959 the LaborManagement Reform Law. This law guarantees “every member of any labor organization shall have a right to meet and assemble freely with other members; and to express any views, arguments, or opinions ” This language has been construed to immunize a union member from union discipline even for untruthful criticism of union officials. It would be equally simple for Congress to insure all corporate employees with these same constitutional guarantees of free speech; they have none now, unless they are afforded by union contract, and such contracts seldom, if ever, Washington, D.C. It will simply be Hell on the Republic, but I am transporting my awesome personal presence away from the nation’s capital until such time as Jack Frost completes the official mischief of his season. This is my last hurrah from Washington until God wills it warm. These ole Texas-bred bones wither and the flesh on them cringes at the prospect of another Washington winter. I have sufered all or part of eleven Washington frostbit seasons in the service of my country, more or less. You mix up sleet, snow, slush, heavy traffic, $70 heating bills, and the tragicomic buffoonery of the Texas delegation in Congress, and it will make you turn blue. Well, I have blued myself on the Potomac’s shores for the last time. With the dawn my bride and I join the wild goose in Southward flight. Florida will have custody of such talents as repose in our family until the ice age passeth. Before honoring Florida, though, we plan to afford Texans a rare thrill. For most of December my plans are to sashay around Texas. No doubt many an old friend will be greeted; perhaps a cork or two will pop; there may even be a few hymn-singing sessions with my Baptist and Methodist kinfolk. But let confession be made that I harbor plots running to boggier muck. One involves my craft \(which, though many have never suspected it, is the writing tics. I am as enamored of the writing racket as most politicians are of themselves, and I love Texas politics the same way Austin’s gamier lobbyists go for their money belts when a State Senator bellies up to the bar. You put the two together, back-to-back, and I break out in squeals and goosebumps the same as H. L. Hunt must do when he thinks on the oil depletion allowance and Strom Thurmond in the same wonderful morning. If you will bear with me through a few sage observations dealing with the arts, we shall then get to the political name, calling and I promise blood-letting enough for all. apply to managerial and professional employees. The business corporation is even more the creature of the state than the trade union, and there are ample grounds for Congress to impose upon the corporate community, as it has upon the trade union, the duty of insuring freedom of speech and assembly to its employees. Such legislation would insure that those corporate citizens who maintain their individuality, independence, and integrity could speak out in dissent if they wished without reprisal from their employers. Although legal immunity from reprisal would be insufficient to guarantee individuality, it would at least be a beginning. THE FASHIONABLE THING for wordsmiths to do these days is to inspect Texas. Not only inspect it but prod it, interpret it, explain it, and generally worry it like a dog at bone. No self-respecting writer dares go to his agent with less than a claim of being pure expert on LBJ, LBJ Country, and all else remotely smelling of the rich, simmering stew that is modern-day Texas. Sometimes this causes some pretty funny stuff to get into print, though the authors didn’t really have their minds locked on comedy. I am thinking particularly of the type of writer who leaves the National Press Club in Washington, or the showy editorial rooms of New York, for such limited periods of time that they rush back from Texas under the grand delusion that Governor Connally is a Democrat. Though when good citizens gather to enumerate my virtues they generally rate modesty high on the list, it is against my natural style to deny a certain amount of expertise on an astounding variety of subjectsincluding Texas. Thus have a few magazine editors, absolutely bewitched by my professed knowledge of Lone Star attitudes, seen fit to see me through the winter with assignments on this fashionable subject. FROM LONG DISTANCE it appears that we shall be offered one of three serious choices: incumbent Senator John Tower, Attorney General Waggoner Carr, and Congressman Jim Wright. I am not going to waste time arguing with you purists that the menu could offer better fare; you either eat from what we got, or you go hungry. Look at it this way : if you had to judge a swim suit contest involving Miss Candy Barr, Hon. Joe Pool, and lawyer Melvin Belli, there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of agony before you picked Miss Barr, providing you have got all your hormones and just the tiniest bit of your eyesight. I feel the same way about our senatorial contest. Jim Wright is as clear-cut a choice for good as is Miss Barr in our hypothetical swimsuit competition. There are those who claim that I have hacked around on Congressman Wright’s political carcass with a sharp blade, and on more than one occasion Wright himself has bawled Mighty Caesar’s tortured “Et tu, Brute?” into my face. I do not dispute that Congressman Wright has sometimes disappointed me \(as has everybody save my sweet mother, Santa Claus, and the ed him a clout or two to the body politic when in my view he had a blow coming. But I do not find Jim Wright without honor, nor view him without hope. He is at least as good as most Texas politicos, and better than many including the sitting junior Senator and our erstwhile Attorney General. This I have tried to make clear. Thus I was chagrined when Scripps-Howard reporter Seth Kantor, who has yet to dazzle me with his political acumen, kept his record consistent by grossly misinterpreting my recent article in Progressive to the extent that he took it as evidence L.B.J. is not “for” Wright’s senatorial ambitions. I have read the piece several times and wrote it once, and now wonder how much Dr. Kantor comprehends of what passes before his eyes. Though I am not in the moment authorized to speak for the President of the United States, it seems obvious that on the best evidence of L.B.J.’s sent to the recent Wright “Appreciation Dinner,” he at the very least wishes Jim Wright no There are more reasons why this is logically so than there are reasons why the sun may be expected to appear tomorrow morning from the east. LET US PURSUE my theory through first accentuating the negative. Historically, most political Poobahs in Texas have had all the attraction of terminal cancer cross-bred with scarlet fever. Just call the roll: Shivers, Ramsey, Shepperd, Smith, Barnes, Tunnell, Connally, ad ?museum. To that motley collection of DoNothings add in letters writ large the name of WAGGONER CARR. His election as U.S. Senator, presuming Texans could sink to so low an estate, would trigger the loudest cheers among Lone Star state “gluttons of privilege” since last week’s production of Life Line; his brain-wattage wouldn’t light up Fibber McGee’s cluttered closet with the door closed. The most puerile, obsequious, cliche ridden, yessah Massah, hello white folks, I’m your boy speech these jaded ole ears have heard from the mouths of overly-ambitious men was given by Hon. Carr at a collection of wealthy greedy Guses in Odessa a few years ago. I am waiting yet to heard of one damn thing Waggoner Carr has done for the plain people of Texas, and I promise exotic ribbons to the first person who can prove to me that the Attorney General has hatched a single thought that might remotely be in the best interests of John Q. Public, Texan. I am so confident that I promise duplicate prizes in case of a tie. The wavy-haired December 10, 1965 5 THE LAST HURRAH Larry L. King