Chairman Skinflint

congressman wayne hays has found the true path to power in washington: he hires and fires the capitol barbers

In one sense, he is a lived anomaly among the gentlemanly company on the Hill. Members of Congress, for all their respective private furies of hubris and avidity, have always maintained a protocol of deference and almost excruciating civility--a kind of chaste genteelness in which any personal affront virtually amounts to a pornographic incident. But in this atmosphere of clubroom decorum, Ohio Congressman Wayne Levere Hays has persevered for 24 years as an exuberant klaxon horn of spectacular unpleasantness.

On this count alone--his perverse zest for the choleric--Hays would be notable enough. During floor debates in the House, he is sometimes given to dismissing an antagonist as a "potato-head," and recently, after one colleague's earnest and elaborately crafted appeal for a measure Hays disliked, Hays lustily hooted, "That was a great speech. I'd be interested in knowing who wrote it for you." Never especially deft in those courtesies the House membership has traditionally shown to new arrivals, Hays for a time went about introducing Father Robert Drinan, freshman Democrat from Massachusetts, as "This is the guy who wants to destroy the Catholic Church, but you notice he still wears its uniform." As if particularly obsessed with the eccentricity of this liberal Jesuit in the House chamber, Hays finally sought out Drinan during McGovern's travail over finding a replacement for Eagleton and gravely informed the priest, "I guess you heard McGovern's considering you--I got a call from him myself about you." Pausing just long enough for this possibility to fully clang in the deepest vaults of Drinan's ego, Hays then added, "But don't worry, he wants a Catholic."

One Congressman surmises, "I suppose Wayne's managed, at some time or another, to give personal umbrage to everybody who's passed through this chamber." Hays is, at 62, a middlingsized and somewhat baggy figure out of the haggard and scantily inhabited Appalachian hills of southeastern Ohio, where years ago he was a high school teacher of forensics, who still has about him the stale, heatless look of a smalltown lessonmaster: a pale-tan blur of hair dimming away from a high pallid forehead, vaguely beaked nose and thin scrupulous eyes the color of sleet, and a face as empty of expression as if left permanently nerveless by Novocain. Off the floor, he converses in a tone of voice that most resembles the static of a far radio station. He would strike one, altogether, as one of the mustier presences in the House.

"But Wayne is a very extraordinary guy around here," says one member. "His motto is, If you can't say anything abusive about somebody, don't say anything at all. And he doesn't discriminate, I'll say that for him--hell, no. He'll revile anybody."

Indeed, his appetite for opprobrium is omnivorous. He inveighs with equal eagerness against notables such as former HEW Secretary John Gardner ("I don't know what the hell you're doing here telling us how to discharge our business," he snapped to Gardner during a committee hearing. "You were the worst Secretary of HEW the country ever had.") and against his own office secretaries ("If you can't put me through on a call, it's time you just got the hell outta here"). In one committee hearing, after the widow of a Foreign Service official had urged the formulation of some grievance procedure in the Service, her husband having committed suicide after his summary dismissal, Hays stirred himself to proclaim, "I'm sick and tired of being told about this man's suicide. All of us had it bad during the Depression, but we didn't go out and shoot ourselves." Last year, he purchased a $100 membership in the Democratic Study Group--bizarrely alien company for him, made up of activist Congressional reformers--simply to provide himself with an occasion for accosting Senator McGovern, after an address to that body, about young McGovern partisans who had committed certain inhospitalities against Hays's own primary campaign in his home district: "What I want to know," he cawed to McGovern, "is if you can't control these rumheads of yours when you're their candidate, how the hell do you expect to control 'em if you become President?"

Over breakfast recently in a House cafeteria, Hays was still savoring an incident on the House floor the day before, when he had wagged his finger in the sober, bespectacled face of Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and proposed in a loud flat twang that Mills's conversion to revenue sharing had perhaps been prompted by a vertigo lingering from Mills's brief Presidential fancies and, in any event, should be commemorated by erecting a $5,000,000 monument to folly in his honor. From anyone else, such remarks would have constituted a scandalous affront to a formidable presiding bishop of that chamber. But in the cafeteria the next morning, Hays was celebrating the episode in a tinny blare that turned the heads of other members over a range of at least six tables around him. "Yeah, Wilbur didn't seem to like that very much; he's never had anybody talk to him that way before. His face turned red as a radish, in fact. The trouble with Wilbur, see, he goes down to the White House for all these conferences with the President and it's begun to give him delusions of grandeur."

Leaving his spare breakfast only lightly tasted and affecting imperviousness to the audience hearkening now all around him, he went on with similar full-lung observations about other figures on the Hill: "And this Fulbright, you know, he's supposed to have a reputation for craftiness, for always having something up his sleeve. All I got to say is, if he doesn't have any more up his sleeve than he's got in his head, he's a goddamn paraplegic...."

Before rising to go on to his office, Hays delivered a last poker-faced announcement--this one on the House Speaker himself, Carl Albert: "One sure thing a Speaker's got to have, and that's backbone. But a lot of folks lately have begun to wonder exactly where Carl's is. Hell, everybody thought McCormack was the weakest Speaker in memory, but Albert's beginning to make him look like Superman."

There are those on the Hill who suggest that Hays improbably has come to nurture a secret aspiration for the Speaker-ship himself. The likelihood of that ever happening could hardly seem more ethereal. He has never been regarded by his colleagues as exactly wearing the glamor of inevitability, but more as an ill-humored and odious curiosity. But then last year--simply through the inexorable, brute machinations of the seniority system--Hays was delivered into the chairmanship of the House Administration Committee.

Up to then, the HAC had served as little more than an obscure clerical operation, something like the House orderly, tending to such perfunctory and mundane chores as passing on members' travel expenses and signing the payroll vouchers for committee aides and House employees in the barbershops and restaurants. But operating exclusively within this microscopic jurisdiction, Hays managed in barely a year's time--enjoying the wide latitude his fractiousness had earned him from other members--to negotiate his petty duties into a position of ponderous power in the House. Before long, he had even come to pose a challenge to the sovereignty of the Speaker himself--a development, altogether, roughly equivalent to a maintenance supervisor's taking over city hall by seizing the plumbing facilities.

However unnerving to the House's inner community, this happenstance could seem merely a curious incident in an ongoing intramural skirmishing that is finally of little real import to the larger world beyond Capitol Hill. But, in fact, Hays's feat is yet another weary instance--only more baroque than most--of that institutional infirmity of Congress whereby the true dynamics and processes of power are invested far less in national exigencies than in, as one young member ruefully notes, "this endless inside game of ego absolutely detached from what is actually happening to the people out there." No doubt, this is an inversion that is endemic to all institutions, from I. T. T. to religious agencies and charitable foundations all the way down to Jaycee chapters and local school boards. Certainly in Congress, the medium of power has mutated into a property and measure of men in itself, abstracted away from its appointed ends into a kind of apolitical, amoral currency negotiated primarily for its own increase. And it is this insular obsession with cloakroom politics that, as much as anything else, accounts for the lingering enervation of Congress before an over-hulking White House--that deepening Constitutional disorder that has become of late so advertised a matter of unease.

To a real degree, the gathering confrontation between the Congressional and the Executive estates is simply a warring of institutions, impersonalized finally beyond the protagonists caught up in it like some indifferent battle of the elements. The Presidency itself is an establishment that has proliferated beyond any single mortal reach and has, in fact, assumed a distinct life, a personality, sensibility and vision of its own--an independent will and nature that, at least since Franklin Roosevelt, has quickly overwhelmed and assimilated the particular individualities of its successive occupants. That's why they have all wound up acting more or less alike, indistinguishable from their predecessors. As most recently and curiously evident with Nixon, they cease behaving like themselves, mystifying their previous ideological constituencies and probably at times even themselves, simply because they become the establishment itself behaving through them. No less consuming is the institution of Congress. "Anybody who stays on the Hill for any length of time," reports one House insider, "goes through countless hours of the most incredible and deadening crap and gamesmanship and attritions. It has extinguished far braver and brighter men than Hays. After a while, if you have any hopes at all of counting around here, you just atrophy into the system."

In Government as much as elsewhere, then, institutions are never so much the lengthened shadows of singular men as are men merely the foreshortened shadows of institutions. And if definition often lurks most authentically in the absurdities of caricature, Wayne Hays presents, at the least, an animated caricature of the quest for consequence in the institution of Congress.

• • •

When Hays gained his chairmanship, his first extensions seemed innocuous enough. With the assent of the rest of the committee, he invested himself with direct and personal responsibility for the daily operations of the House cafeterias, restaurants and barbershops. In the process, he dematerialized a special subcommittee chaired by Illinois Congressman John Kluczynski, and one Hill observer now recalls, "All Kluczynski had to do around this place was run that little restaurant committee of his. Needless to say, he's now the guy who hates Hays more than anybody else on the Hill, which is no slight distinction, considering the vigor of the competition."

Before long, Hays also quietly annexed direct control over the House barbershops, personally raising haircut prices and eliminating tips. In this, he was plundering the traditional province of doorkeeper William "Fish Bait" Miller, one of the unofficial inner potentates of the House. When word of Miller's profound disgruntlement over this expropriation reached Hays, he serenely proposed, "Hell, that goddamn Fish Bait's been trying to take over everything around here. It's time we did something about him, he's gotten way outta line." But even as he was saying this, Hays was further engaged in confiscating, from the House clerk, responsibility over the allocation of telephones to members' offices and--more portentously--dominion over the House's embryonic computer facilities, which are already conjuring in members' heads giddy visions of well-nigh Olympian access to constituency statistics and intelligence, a purview that will incalculably enhance re-election prospects. In time, Hays also ingested into his committee authority over the determination of members' fringe privileges, such as office expenses and allowances for trips back home. Now, declares one Representative, "about the only thing left in the way of these small essential services that Hays hasn't collected to himself yet is supervision over the parking lot. And he's begun angling his eye toward that one lately."

Throughout his steady, discreet, patient accumulation of these petty jurisdictions, Hays has proceeded, admits one colleague, "at least with the implicit consent of the rest of the membership. Anybody else would have despised the drudgery of taking on that committee and having to tend to all those little administrative routines. But not Hays. His genius was to perceive in all those tedious and piddling tasks a fantastic possibility for empire--due largely to the lack of desire on the part of everybody else to bother with them."

Indeed, Hays is capable of an almost Churchillian gusto for the menial. Strolling with a visitor through the rotunda of the Capitol recently, he paused amid the ranked effigies of various titans out of the struggles and sagas of the republic's past to recount in a hushed undertone a triumph of his own against the Capitol architect over the cleaning of the colonnades: "Now, look here a minute," he husked, "see the top of that column up there? See how nice and clean it is? You can't tell me that doesn't look a hundred percent better." Accordingly, when he seized supervision of the restaurants and barbershops, it was with all the ferocity and implacability of a Torquemada. He stalked balefully through the kitchens, firing a hamburger cook in one of them ("They told me he was stealing"), and retracted his edict against breakfast table service in the members' inner dining (continued on page 86) Chairman Skinflint (continued from page 80) room only when one exasperated Representative pitched his loaded self-service tray against the wall one morning. "One thing in particular that had bugged me for years," Hays reports, "was the haircut situation around here." Summoning House barbers to his committee's hearing room to inform them they were "con artists," he then advised them that if they engaged in any unauthorized conversations about his stewardship, he would promptly pull all the shops out of the Capitol. "Now, any of you fellows think you're being put upon, just go on downtown and find another place to work," he added, " 'cause I got a lot of barbers back in my district I can bring in here if you don't want your job." (Since this session, as it turns out, Hays has been getting his own hair trimmed elsewhere.)

The truth is, Hays has achieved a few not altogether negligible economies, most notably in the operation of the restaurants. "He's accomplished just enough to keep most of the fellows around here from calling his hand on how he's gone about it," concedes one of his most devout critics. "No question there was a certain amount of flab in the daily expenses of running this place, and a lot of guys feel that maybe we needed one mean, enthusiastic son of a bitch to straighten it all out."

But after consolidating this private duchy, Hays began venturing into somewhat more swashbuckling presumptions. When a staff aide to Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser invited several witnesses to testify at a hearing being conducted by Hays's State Department subcommittee, Hays proclaimed the invitations a violation of his territorial imperative and therewith refused to sign the aide's monthly pay voucher--in effect, firing him. Astonished, Fraser finally had to stall the proceedings of the whole House with quorum calls before Hays consented to restore the aide to the payroll. Even so, Hays snorted, "We're going to have a showdown with this guy when he gets back here from a European junket. After that, I'll decide if he keeps on getting paid." As if to amplify that, Hays chose to depart town for a period last summer and leave suspended in his office the unsigned payroll vouchers for a whole throng of House employees, from pages to doormen, some of whom finally had to take out loans until he elected to return.

Then last August, the House's press and television corps recommended several appointments to vacancies in the custodial personnel of their respective galleries--appointments that were actually House staff positions, the final domain of Speaker Albert, and which Albert duly approved and confirmed. But shortly thereafter, Hays notified two of the appointees that he would process their pay checks only through midmonth, after which they would have to look for new careers elsewhere. Only after the most strenuous entreaties by a Capitol press delegation--and finally by Albert himself--did Hays relent. But again, he did so only tentatively, announcing he had struck upon the notion of devising a special subcommittee to start trimming "nonessential employees." At the same time, though, he had expanded his own Administration Committee staff from 28 to 71, making it the bulkiest on the Hill.

By now, it was clear that what Hays's quiet extensions constituted, ultimately, was an unprecedented advance on the traditional prerogatives and legitimacies of the Speakership itself. Hays's multiplying incursions provided Albert no small measure of private distress. A tiny, tidy, leprechaunish man, scrupulously decent and amenable, Albert began imploring intimates, "What is wrong with Hays? I've got to do something about that man, I just can't allow this business to go on any longer." But, to the despair of many members, Albert still lingers in a curious lassitude of incredulity.

"The truth is," asserts one member, "Carl's just afraid of him, like most of the other guys here."

Indeed, Albert's apparent faltering of spirit is a circumstance that seems to captivate no one more thoroughly than Hays himself, and almost by way of celebration, Hays clangored to colleagues in a House cafeteria during the protracted days of the last session, "Hell, since Rayburn died, hasn't anybody been able to figure out how to get this goddamn place closed up. The thing about Carl, he's just too nice a guy."

In all of his most audacious challenges to Albert and other members, one Congressman points out, "Hays has yet to really follow through--to deliver on his bluffs." But power in Congress is peculiarly transacted in a more indirect and oblique script; it has always been largely a dialog of the tacit, a flourishing and flexing of feints, like heavyweights sparring in the dainty French manner.

"Just take his approval power over committee budgets," notes one member. "For some of these committees, getting funded is literally a matter of life and death, and it's not lost on anybody anymore that they're dealing with the kind of guy who'll take your desk away if you piss him off. Hays has demonstrated to everybody's satisfaction, believe me, that he's in possession of an absolutely enormous potential for clout, and the way things work around here, that's enough for him to be able to enjoy its consequences without ever having to actually apply it. And now, when you look around here, all of a sudden you discover Wayne Hays has about become the invisible czar of this place."

But about the only gratification his laboriously collected influence would seem to provide to Hays now is the static voluptuousness of miserdom: He has never, in the past, seemed given to any special ideological urges to which he could now apply his heft. He is commonly regarded as one of the more crustacean conservatives abiding in Congress and once ridiculed antipoverty legislation on the basis that it placed community reforms in the hands of the poor, who "have been a failure all their lives." Yet he also voted for most of the civil rights legislation of the Sixties and has lately presented modestly adventurous proposals for campaignfinancing reforms (though later, disconcertingly, undertaking to modulate that) and for strip-mining restrictions, albeit belatedly, considering the ravaged condition of his own district. Though he served as an unflagging apologist for the Vietnam imbroglio, he also entertains the notion that "If the Russians decide to attack us, I just pray to God they drop their first bomb right on top of the Pentagon, because then maybe we'll have a chance to go on and win the war." Serving on the Reese Committee during the McCarthy delirium in Washington, Hays asked one particularly officious witness, who had advertised himself as a specialist in Communist thinking, to speculate about the likely source of a statement that Hays then carefully read off; when the witness promptly pronounced it the unmistakable tissue of a Communist mentality, Hays said, "Well, that's funny, 'cause those words were written by Pope Pius the Twelfth." On the whole, then, he has appeared more or less a haphazard collage of sourceless whims, a kind of political platypus, hybrid and neuter.

About all Hays himself offers by way of political self-definition is, "A man is known, I guess, by the enemies he makes." Hays cites his, at the moment, as "John Gardner, Ralph Nader, The Wall Street Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer." Any ideological rhymes in that motley assortment of adversaries would seem hopelessly elusive, aside from the fact that they have all recently, in various criticism, given Hays offense. That, Hays explains, is precisely the point: They define what apparently constitutes his sole historical passion--"They can't control me. They can't tell me what to do."

• • •

Hays arrived in Congress more or less devoid, then, of any basic political persuasion but, speculates a House veteran, "as a very smart and very able fellow who suddenly found himself in the midst of a lot of other equally able and ambitious guys. So it's like he just decided, at some point, that he was going to have to find some gambit that was totally outside the conventional patterns, something not easily available to anybody else."

He was conspicuously uncomfortable (continued on page 210) Chairman Skinflint (continued from page 86) with the House's own elegant instrumentalities of courtesy. "I've always found it sort of difficult," he admits in a mumble, "to ask favors." Until he came into his chairmanship, his only excursion beyond his routine Congressional functions--aside from a brief, surpassingly anonymous announcement for the Presidency in 1968--was a lunge at the House Majority Leadership in 1970. He was pricked into that venture when, as he explains it, "Hale Boggs asked me if I would go around and help talk up support for his candidacy. But what I found, everybody I talked to, not a one was all that damn crazy about having Boggs. So I figured, what the hell, I might as well have a go at it myself." But he prosecuted his campaign with the novel blandishment, "What would you rather have--a happy Wayne Hays as Majority Leader or an unhappy Wayne Hays as chairman of the Administration Committee?" Despite that dour proposition, he finished fourth in a field of five--though he did make good on his bluster at a prevote gathering of the other contenders, "Listen, you bastards, I'll bet any one of you in this room a hundred bucks that I don't finish last."

So, rather than likability, it's as if Hays determined he would specialize in the unique properties of offensiveness. "I do like to stick the shaft to 'em," he allows. "To me, it's a lot of fun. It's kind of like a game of chess, you might say, a battle of wits. If you can, you win 'em." Whatever, it's been a ruse by which he has finally prospered. Indeed, his employ of abuse has only been lent extra punch by the House's own vast aversion to personal altercation.

"I could not possibly exaggerate the reluctance around here," declares one member, "to get into any unpleasantness with a guy who not only does not mind unpleasantness one bit but who actually delights in it."

• • •

Arrived as an eminence of the House now, Hays has reincarnated the quarters of the Administration Committee into one of the more imperial settings under the dome. "Until Hays moved in, those rooms up there used to look like the rear offices of a spare-parts warehouse," recalls one committee member. "Then, all of a sudden, rugs grew on the floor, paintings bloomed on the walls."

In an inner office that has acquired the tassels and blush of a pasha's bower, Hays reposes behind a Napoleonic desk below an epic crystal chandelier, amid a profusion of antiques, including a silver serving tray that once belonged to Queen Victoria's first prime minister. Actually, for someone who issued out of Bannock, Ohio, Hays has long had an improbably nimble eye for art. One of the most precipitous and exuberant junketeers in Congress, he has managed to amass an imposing booty of artifacts to adorn his various habitations in Washington and Ohio--Persian prayer rugs, mahogany English Regency chairs, myriad oils, including an original Dufy and Utrillo. Conducting visitors among his galleries of acquisitions, he is prone at times to remark, "This is a hell of a long way from Bannock, wouldn't you say?"

The truth is, his aesthetic enthusiasms--which he acknowledges are "rather catholic"--range beyond the inanimate. Chatting with a visitor recently, he suddenly lowered his voice to a conspiratorial croak, "I want you to come with me for a second, I'm gonna show you something that'll knock your eyes out." Tilting his head into the doorway of one of his committee's rear offices, he summoned forth, with a fragile wheeze and a single languid wave of one long age-freckled hand, an extravagantly opulent young female. Dismissing her back to her desk after a short exchange of pleasantries, he then inquired, "Now, what do you think of that? Any of the other fellows around here got anything you've seen that can beat that?"

In his exercise of this particular connoisseurship on the Hill, his frequent overture is, "Hi. I'm Wayne Hays, D. D.--Doctor of Divan," and if greeted with anything less than enchantment, he tends to take it not amicably. To a colleague puzzled by his inordinate biliousness toward one female Congressional aide, Hays clipped, "Well, she had her chance with me and she muffed it." After taking in the musical 1776 not long ago, Hays seemed for weeks obsessed with those scenes unfolding the more lickerish propensities of the patriarchs and would report with a certain reedy exhilaration in his voice, "Hell, Franklin was an 80-year-old man, but he was still going full blast after those skirts." For his part, Hays readily announces, "My greatest ambition now is to be ninety-one years old and shot at by a jealous husband."

Back in his home district, at his office over an abandoned tire store in Flushing, he frequently passes his morning in the company of a huge puffy ink-chocolate Persian cat named Lucifer, which oddly seems to belong both to Hays and to one of his secretaries there--an indefinite common ownership made up of a kind of mutual fondness. While Hays is going about his dictation to this secretary ("A real sweet person, and the goddamnedest longest-legged gal, you oughtta see her sometime in, uh, a bathing suit"), their flamboyant pompon of a cat--a moving penumbra of implausible fluffiness resembling, more than anything alive, something won by a teenage girl at a state fair to decorate her pillow--is left to daintily prowl, with an exquisite luxuriousness, over the chairs and window sills and filing cabinets, now and then even floating across the length of Hays's own desk.

On many counts, then, there seemed a certain drollness, at the least, about Hays's being selected in 1967 to chair the special subcommittee charged with investigating the improprieties of Adam Clayton Powell. In fact, Hays suspended the Powell proceedings to make a 20-day sojourn to Paris with a 26-year-old secretary for a NATO conference, this following an excursion to Bermuda with the same secretary to consult with "British parliamentarians." Hays answered all waggish commentaries about these jaunts by insisting, "I am broadening my international education." Even so, Hays seemed to sense that, with his explorations into Powell's prodigalities, he might himself be embarking into a latitude of treacherous winds. "The chairman thought I was the only one who could handle it," Hays now says, "but I didn't want the damn thing. It was a very unpleasant assignment. If Powell had just come in and cooperated with us, it wouldn't have turned out like it did, anyway. The whole thing was highly unnecessary. But he was just too goddamn arrogant and contemptuous with us."

In the Congressional firmament--where, as one of its denizens puts it, "You've got to be somebody significant, or else you just aren't real yet, you simply don't exist"--Hays's only hold on self-validation remains his forbidding surliness; for him, survival lies in maintaining the vitality of his ill-humor.

For a period of days recently, Hays seemed sunk in some vague catatonic torpor, moving with the creaky deliberation of approaching decrepitude, greeting visitors wanly and distractedly with a chill, furtive handshake, then absently rubbing his forehead with tapering fingers glazed at the nailtips as if with the first frost of old age, speaking in a voice that seemed to be issuing through the polyethylene gauzes of an oxygen tent. Then one afternoon, a visitor happened to stroll into his office only a few minutes after Hays had finished reading his profile in the Nader Congressional report--and found him suddenly, startlingly alive, full of an eager and hectic animation. "That son of a bitch!" he bugled. "He put in there that I sleep with five different girls every week. I called over to that place and told those jerks that if they didn't take that out, I'd be getting every cent of Mr. Nader's G.M.-suit money. They got no evidence, I sure as hell know that." It was as if he had been instantly revived out of his invalidlike drowsiness, reinvigorated merely by a random whiff of sulphur promising new possibilities for acrimony and vilification. Buoyant now on the updrafts of distemper, he brayed jubilantly, almost festively, "They release that item, by God, I'll just go around town saying Nader sleeps with five different boys every week. That son of a bitch--if you want to know the sorriest gang in the world, it's a bunch of Jew boys led by an A-rab."

However astonishingly squalid Hays's style of invective may strike others, it has sensationally facilitated what Hays describes as his chief amusement over his Congressional career: "The enemies I've been able to accumulate." At times, he is fond of musing over his collection of past scandalizations, like someone sentimentally leafing through an album of nostalgic snapshots. He recalls a conversation with Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg in the Mayflower Hotel early during the Korean War, in which Vandenberg assured him that the whole business would be resolved in six weeks. "I told him. 'General, you'd give me a lot more confidence about that if you were over there in Korea leading the troops, instead of in here leaning on the edge of this bar telling me about it.' I thought he was gonna have a stroke."

Similarly, in his frequent forays abroad, he has with regularity left the composure of Foreign Service officials memorably disheveled. On his maiden outing, on landing in Poland, he was notified that local regulations required him to leave his newly purchased camera on the plane, whereupon he honked, "You tell those Commie bureaucrats that if I get off this plane, my new camera is coming with me. If they want to keep a member of the U. S. House of Representatives sitting inside this plane the whole time it's parked on their airfield, tell 'em to go ahead." Granted a special dispensation a few minutes later, he descended the ramp to stand for several minutes theatrically snicking his camera at the Polish photographers gathered there. During another processional, through South America, Hays encountered, at dinner in Colombia, a U. S. foreign-aid official who, Hays recalls, "got a little bit in his cups, to the extent he started telling me what a bunch of bums Congressmen were. The next morning, I got on the phone to the Ambassador and instructed him to get that jerk shipped out of there or we'd have a new Ambassador to Colombia. If I'm not mistaken, the guy was gone even before we'd left."

At a diplomatic reception in Yugoslavia attended by President Tito, Hays was taken aside by the U. S. Ambassador and breathlessly informed that Tito, told there was a large population of Serbians in Hays's district, was interested in chatting with him about them. "Fine," said Hays, and, introduced to Tito, proceeded, "If you'd like to know how the Serbs in my district feel about everything, Mr. President, I can tell you there's not a one of them who wouldn't hang you from the nearest lamppost if they had a chance." Hays now gloats, "I threw our whole embassy into an uproar. The Ambassador himself personally told me it was the single most horrible thing that had happened to him in his entire career."

By his own account, at least, he has been given to no more awe for his own Presidents. Once invited to the White House for a briefing by Nixon, Hays was halted at the gate by a guard "wearing that goddamn silly Student Prince costume the President had just invented for them" and told that his name did not seem to be on the list of those attending. "He asked me to wait there, it wouldn't take him but ten minutes to get me cleared. I told him, 'Ten minutes, hell--I didn't want to come down here in the first place.' So I just spun a little rubber, you know, and took on off back for my office. The White House was already on the phone when I walked in, and they tried apologizing and said they sure hoped I would be at the reception that evening for this head of state who was in town, but I just told them to stuff it, I had a few important things I had to do that evening." Purportedly, he monumentally and more or less permanently miffed President Johnson when, phoning Hays once to cultivate support for a bill about to be submitted to Congress, Johnson intoned, "You are the first Ohioan I want to talk to about this measure," to which Hays twanged that he had just run into Mike Kirwan, another Ohio Democrat, "and he said you told him the samething."

"Unlike Johnson," Hays sometimes reflects for audiences, "Eisenhower had been around generals enough to know how unbelievably dumb the lot of them are. Instead of generals, Ike's mesmerization was millionaires." During a luncheon once at the Eisenhower White House for descendants of former Presidents, Hays--"through the stupidity of some bureaucrat who thought I had something to do with Rutherford B. Hayes, without noticing our names weren't even spelled the same"--found himself seated next to Eisenhower. "I kept feeling I ought to engage him in conversation, but I couldn't seem to get more than one or two syllables out of him. I tried everything--foreign affairs, domestic politics, the legislation pending in Congress. At last I said, 'Well, Mr. President, and how's everything down on the farm at Gettysburg?' Obviously, I'd finally hit on something that he was interested in. He looked at me very seriously, like he was noticing for the first time there was this guy sitting beside him, and then he shook his head and said, 'Not good. Not good. It looks like I'm going to have to get rid of all my cattle.' Of course, I was in the cattle business myself, and I immediately assumed he was talking about some disease that meant he was going to have to shoot 'em all, some real disaster, but he said, 'The Attorney General has advised me they might at some time involve the appearance of a conflict of interest and I ought to sell them.' I couldn't believe it. I said, 'Well, Mr. President, if it were me, I can tell you I certainly wouldn't do anything like that.' He said, 'Oh, yeah? What would you do?' and I said, 'The first thing I'd do is get me another Attorney General.' Hell, you know what? He actually got mad. Later on, I told him I wasn't really a descendant of President Hayes or any of the others so far as I knew, and he rared back and said, 'But you aren't even supposed to be here!' I said, 'Well, Mr. President, nevertheless, it appears I am, and I've already gone through most of the courses here and several glasses of fine wine, but if you'd like me to get up and leave before they bring in the dessert, I'll be happy to.' That didn't seem to make him any happier, either. The man had absolutely no sense of humor."

• • •

Over such a career, it might be supposed that Hays, on occasion, would have met with certain knuckled retorts. But few, if any, have ever countered him that bluntly. When Hays once ambushed a bill of California's Ron Dellums by quoting a speech Dellums had made the day before referring to "the mediocre prima donnas in Congress who don't understand the level of human misery," Dellums later phoned Hays, ashen with rage. "If you'd been dealing with the politics of my amendment, that'd be a different question," he hissed, "but you chose to take it on for personal and gratuitous reasons. I heard you were out to get me, and I just want to know if that's the case."

After a pause, Hays mustered a wintry chuckle. "Don't worry. If I were out to get you, you'd know about it."

But there are not many who have confronted Hays even that directly. Whenever someone begins making sounds about dealing with him in a bluffer fashion, Hays himself reports, he simply barks, "Just try it and see what happens to you." But in this doughtiness, he is not without discretion. After being referred to less than luminously in a magazine article a few years ago, Hays phoned a Congressman he knew to be a friend of the writer and proclaimed, "I'm gonna punch that son of a bitch right in the mouth."

The Congressman told Hays, "Well, you might like to know that the party you're talking about is about six feet, seven, weighs about two seventy-five and is a right mean feller."

There was a silence. "Oh, yeah?" Hays blared. "Well, hell----" After that, to all appearances, the matter slipped Hays's mind.

But many on the Hill propose that Hays--who is even fond of sometimes tweaking members about hints of peccadilloes he has discerned in the travel vouchers that pass before him--is negotiating a perilously combustible game. "Intimation, however it's exercised, has never worked in the long run around here," says one Hill observer. "One of these days, ole Wayne's going to violate one amenity too many and find he's run out of grace all of a sudden. Then they'll converge on him, and when they're done, all he'll have left of his empire is the handle stub of his gavel."

In the meantime, he is accorded a deference by the rest of the membership that approaches the uncanny. At one committee meeting not long ago, New York Congressman Ben Rosenthal had to be restrained from heaving a water pitcher at Hays, purportedly for an anti-Semitic comment; but, later asked by a newsman what had provoked him, Rosenthal merely averred in a dull murmur that he couldn't precisely remember. On a recent afternoon while Hays was entertaining two journalists in his inner office, one of the House's more robust liberal activists stepped in to ask for a small dispensation involving office facilities--a labored entreaty that Hays, after a few minutes, interrupted with a mutter, "Well, hell, don't oversell it"--and then quickly, casually granted the consideration. Taking a deep breath, the member swiftly stood and was surging for the door when Hays lightly called, "Uh--just a second," introduced him to his guests and then suggested, in an idle and toneless voice, "You might want to tell 'em what you think about me."

The member descended somewhat hastily and clumsily back to the couch, his rumpled hulk heaped precariously on the very edge, and gazing for only an instant with a helpless blankness, he then commenced in a hearty boom, "Well, sure, that's very easy. Ah"--his mouth hung soundlessly open for a moment--"I do think Wayne's style intimidates some members, but that's their problem, not Wayne's This place is a jungle, see, and if the others smell you're weak, they'll chew you up and spit you out." His huge face flushed, he stared fixedly at the two journalists with something like a secret appeal in his eyes. "What I mean is, I don't think I have to prove my own liberal credentials, and of course, as I'm sure you understand, we've had our differences in the past, but Wayne reflects great credit on, uh, our Congress and our country. What you have to realize about the way Wayne operates, he doesn't play games, he means what he says."

With Hays himself slumped comfortably in a leather chair beside him leisurely and abstractly picking under his thumbnail with a paper clip, the liberal Congressman barged on, rummaging forth observations about Hays with an earnest and interminable elaboration that suggested that, without further cue, he would still be cumbersomely perched on the edge of that couch vibrantly effusing on into the next morning. At last, Hays interposed with a dim flicker of a smile, "Goddamn. I think I'm gonna make you my campaign manager."

With that, the Congressman ceased, quickly computed that he was now released and blurted, "Well, anyway, Wayne, thanks again," and lurched out of the office.

After a moment, Hays offered, "Well, you heard him. And he's one of the more liberal guys around here--fact, he surprised me, some of the things he had to say there. But you see? I'm not quite the son of a bitch the press has me cracked up to be."

• • •

In that dingy and overcast childhood as the son of a small grocer and feed-store proprietor in a little mountain junction, the great illumination came to Hays, when he was in the fourth grade, that he would ultimately be a United States Senator, and then President. This bright epiphany--principally induced by his great-uncle, a state senator who, Hays remembers, "always looked very distinguished, and people were always consulting him about things"--constituted the single vision of Hays's life from then on. Elected mayor of Flushing, Ohio, then a state senator and county commissioner, his only deflection from this goal came when he volunteered for active duty the day after Pearl Harbor. Shortly there-after, though, he received a medical discharge--owing to a suspicion by military doctors, Hays soberly explains, that "I had cancer of the mouth."

Now, after 24 years in the House, Hays seems to recognize that his ambition is permanently stalled. At times he will remark wistfully of former House colleagues who eventually made the crossing over into the Senate--that exalted political empyrean that now appears irrevocably denied to him--"It's funny, but suddenly you just never hear from them again. Happens every time, with, every one of them. They just disappear when they get over there."

He is nourished only by the notion that from the House, where he is immutably stranded, he has at least managed occasional impingements on that lost larger world. He cites, for example, "the time Kennedy called me to ask about Bill Fulbright being Secretary of State." According to Hays. "I told Kennedy, 'You've got to be kidding. Here's a guy who's opposed every single piece of civil rights legislation put before Congress, a full-blown segregationist, and you want to have him dealing with all these emerging nations in Africa and the Third World?' Kennedy told me, 'My God, Wayne. I never thought about that. You're absolutely right.' Fulbright doesn't know this, but I'm the guy who put the lid on his great dream of becoming Secretary of State. That he didn't get it, you know, is what's been the matter with the son of a bitch ever since."

If his own greater expectations somehow miscarried, Hays alleges he has struck a détente of sorts with his disappointment. "When you're chairman of a committee in the House, you have to be held accountable for how that committee functions, and that's a lot of responsibility, brother." Beyond that, Hays once confided in a flat and rapid murmur, "You probably wouldn't ever guess it--I've always hidden it real well--but I have a considerable inferiority complex. Yeah. I used to be so bashful, I'd walk over to the other side of the street just to keep from talking to some important or older person, which is one of the reasons I got into public debate in high school, to try and overcome that. Now, I have no doubt I could have been elected governor of Ohio at one time or another--but my whole experience, see, has been in legislating, not in administering, and I never was sure if I could do it. In fact, this was the first time--this year, when I became chairman of the committee--that I'd ever administered anything. And there's no way around it, you just have to have a bit of the bastard in you to keep things under control and to get things done. I don't think there's many who'd say I haven't done a pretty fair job so far."

Neither is Hays without certain other consolations. Back in his home district one evening recently, he indulged himself with dinner at a country club nestled on a mountaintop only a few miles away, as it turned out, from the grim little hill-shank town of his boyhood. Taking a table in a far corner by the window, his back to the other diners in powder-blue golf sweaters and Popsicle-hued slacks, who were mostly collected on the other side of the room, Hays noted with a faint lift of a smile, "I'm probably the only Democrat in here." For a while, after receiving his cocktail, he gazed out through the room's expansive plate-glass picture window, down over a far sweep and lilt of sleekly barbered fairways in the smoky bluing tints of a chill autumn sundown. With the supper-hour organist intoning placid sentimentalities in the background, Hays mused cozily, "You know, I caddied once on that golf course--earned money to go to college carrying bags right down there on those fairways."

At that point, a tall 40ish woman in a brilliant pants suit paused at his table. Bangled, her rangy marelike plenitude only vaguely sagged, her face cosmeticized to a slightly savage vividness, she breathed, "Well. Wayne Hays. Whaddaya know?"

He gave her a quick upward flick of a glance--"Oh. Uh, yeah, hello, how've you been, good to see you"--and returned, with a certain bland alacrity, to contemplating the fairway. Later, when he had finished his meal, a squat man came over and greeted him with a gusty cordiality, and when this party had withdrawn, Hays idly surmised, one arm slung over the back of his chair, "Well, that was the manager of the place. I guess."

Also, through some obscure process over his years in Congress, Hays has come into possession of a 169-acre farm in the candygreen rippling hills a few miles outside Flushing. There, black Angus cattle and Tennessee walking horses browse in white-fenced pastures around a tall, narrow, red-brick Victorian farmhouse that looms gauntly beside the highway on a lawn empty of trees. Inside that house one afternoon not long ago, Hays--arrayed in the garb of a gentleman rancher, English tweed jacket and sheeny twill trousers with tapered-toe boots--entertained some guests by putting a Herb Alpert album on the stereo ("He's my favorite") and showing them around. But the stereo's blare of festive brass clangored over the hard polished wooden floors of rooms that seemed, despite the lavish amphitheater of a bed upstairs, irredeemably chill and unlifed, containing only an expensively ornamented emptiness. Upstairs, Hays lingered just inside the doorway of a sitting room with bare yellow-pine floors and blank white walls, scanty of furniture and rectangled in a cold bright afternoon sunlight. "I've got this one room," he explained, "in case, you know, sometime in the future it becomes hard for me to move around. I mean, you never know what's going to happen to you in your old age." He ruminated on that a moment, while the Tijuana Brass clamored on bravely and obliviously through the bleak rooms around him. "You know, the only thing I have a horror of is staying around the Hill until I'm senile. I just hope I have enough sense to know when it happens. I don't want to be remembered as that doddering old man who was always wandering around, never quite knowing where he was."

He passes much of his time alone. His 19-year-old daughter, Geeta, and his wife. Martha--a quiet, thin, blonde, somewhat harried-looking lady--remain behind in Ohio when he is in Washington; and when he is back in his home district, he often leaves them at their home in Flushing to stay the night out at his farmhouse. His days in his district are largely spent driving himself over thinly raveling highways to whose edges tenuously cling countless and indistinguishably drab mountainside villages, making brief stops--a sooty brick church in a sullen little river town, where grizzled and sturdy Knights of Columbus stand ranked in their ambassadorial finery in a dungeonglum basement with linoleum flooring the color of stale chewing gum, all of them gravely holding transparent plastic cups of whiskey--and then driving on, humped and comfortably spread-kneed behind the wheel of his spacious Gran Torino, resembling nothing so much as a prosperous middle-aged traveling salesman for fancy plumbing fixtures, driving on into the fading lonesome burn of sunset, while he tunes into the car's silence the crackling fume of irate radio evangelists.

One journalist who flew out to spend some time with Hays during his last reelection campaign pulled up at the motel where he was scheduled to meet Hays a half hour later and discovered the Congressman already sitting in the small cramped lobby just inside the entrance, where--watching a television set for a while, then ruffling through the Sunday funnies, impassive to the curious uncertain glances of the desk clerks and strangers milling around him--he had been waiting for over an hour. Such patience would be attributed, by most in Washington, simply to the heroic diligence of Hays's ego. But a few days later, as Hays and the journalist were about to part, it seemed more some small plaintive rasp from far voids of loneliness when Hays, his tepid handshake lingering shyly, suddenly essayed in a flat and toneless mutter, "By the way, if we're still speaking to each other after your piece comes out, I'll come down with my architect and help you redecorate that old country house you've bought, and maybe you'd like to go over with us for that NATO meeting in Bonn, just to look it over, if you've never seen one before; just let me know enough ahead of time so I can arrange it...."

Two evenings before, during a round of campaigning in church basements and high school gyms festooned with welcome, congressman hays banners in Halloween black-and-orange crepe paper, Hays had grumped on the road between calls. "I just can't seem to get in the spirit of this campaign for some reason. It's just no fun yet. It's too nice." At a rally a few hours earlier, as if casting about for some rancor to restore his pulse, the best he could invoke was a slightly askance and inordinate irascibility over Dr. Benjamin Spock ("That damn kook, that damn nut, if there's anything wrong with this present generation, it's that damn book of his"). But it was like a blustery short-winded blowing at stubbornly sodden ashes. Now, driving himself through the starless night over that mean and bitten landscape of hills flayed by strip mines. Hays comforted himself for a while with reminiscences about past acrimonies. "Opponent of mine once kept trying to press it as a point in the campaign that he had eleven children. It began to get tiresome, him bragging about those eleven children of his. Finally, one night, the two of us appeared together to talk to a gathering of Polish miners, a right rough bunch of fellows, and he brought the damn thing up again. So when he was finished, I stood up and said, 'Well, you know, I got a champion bull sired fifty calves, but it's never occurred to me to run him for Congress.' Those Poles started whooping and banging on the tables--they all had about three beers in them by that time--and hollered, 'Go get 'him, Hays! Go after 'im!' Yessir, that gentleman found out a little bit what politics is all about that evening, believe me." Hays emitted a Meeting and papery chortle. "Heh-heh. What I did to that guy shouldn't happen to a dog. Heh."

Then, after a pause, he sighed. "But, hell, I just can't seem to catch life this time. I just haven't been able to get goddamn good and mad at anybody. I don't know what's the matter. God--maybe it's already happening: What if I'm beginning to get old?"