January 2011

“All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society; but the want of it must be supplied by the rod in school, the penal laws of the state, and the terrors of divine wrath from the pulpit.”

“Many human beings, like dogs, are mere followers. They lack the disposition to lead. They imitate. Such men are Christians, pagans, or devils according to their surroundings. Step by step, they go one way or the other.”

“We are thousands of miles from home, and comfort ourselves by thinking that a knowledge of our indulgence in vice will never reach them. Here, there is no parents [ sic ] eye to guide, no wife to warn, no sister to entreat, no church, no sabbath ... in short, all the animal and vicious passions are let loose, and free to indulgence [ sic ] without any legal or social restraint.”

One of the perks of power, wealth, and fame is that those so favored never have to carry anything. Their luggage, briefcases, purses, wallets, umbrellas, and groceries are carried for them.

In the early 1970s I was on the staff of one of these noncarriers, Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. He had just finished his four terms as governor and was in the interregnum between that office and the Vice Presidency, which he was to assume under Gerald Ford in 1974. During this time of relative inactivity he was acting as the chairman of a politically power-packed commission named by Congress to study the ramifications of the recently enacted Pure Waters Act. Soon after he was named to chair this prestigious body, I was assigned to it as one of his two personal staff members.

Convened in January of 1961, the Eighty-seventh Congress was a gathering of contrasts. Less than a quarter of the people serving in the House of Representatives had been there during World War II, and 153 members had served fewer than five years. On the other hand, old lions still prowled the corridors. They included Wright Patman (seventeen terms), Clarence Cannon and Emanuel Celler (twenty terms), and Carl Vinson, then in his twenty-fifth term.

Over in the Senate only 19 members had been serving when World War II ended. Remarkably, 40 were in their first terms. Yet one senator, Carl Hayden, had first come to Congress in February of 1912, two months before the Titanic sank. The fathers of George Bush and Chris Dodd were there representing Connecticut, while Al Gore’s father represented Tennessee. All the subsequent namesakes of Senate office buildings—Russell, Dirksen, and Hart—were members of the Eighty-seventh Congress.

The elegant World War I-era Westin William Penn Hotel (412281-7100) is located in the heart of downtown’s Golden Triangle. The Pittsburgh Hilton and Towers (412-391-4600), fronted by Point State Park, offers fine views of all three rivers. The Sheraton Hotel Station Square (412-261-2000) is across the Monongahela in a mallsand-stalls development where you will also find restaurants, horse-drawn carriages, huge pieces of old industrial equipment displayed as sculpture, and a disused railroad terminal with boutiques inside the cars. Tour ships that cruise the three rivers leave hourly from Station Square.

The best views of Pittsburgh can be had by riding the Monongahela and Duquesne inclines on Carson Street. These cable railways are the two survivors of fifteen that were built in the late 180Os to bring workers to jobs along the river from their homes high above. They climb four hundred feet up Mount Washington at nerve-racking angles of more than thirty degrees by means that may not be immediately apparent to a first-time rider.

Most cities have some activity that’s mandatory for out-of-towners. Every tourist in San Francisco has to ride a cable car; everyone who vacations in New York has to complain about the prices. And every visitor to Pittsburgh has to remark with wonder that the place is no longer a smoky mess.

This has been going on for quite some time. As early as 1949,  Newsweek said Pittsburgh was “no longer the smoky city or the tired milltown, but an industrial metropolis . . . with clear skies above.” A decade later, Stephen Potter, author of the Gamesmanship series of books, marveled that “in fact there is very little smoke and quite a lot of green.” Even today, writers feel compelled to explain: “Gone are all those huge steel mills gushing black smoke into polluted air.” Or: “Some people still envision a grimy steel town. But that was the old Pittsburgh.” This article, of course, is no different.

It is surely fortunate that only very seldom these days does the fate of a great nation lie in the hands of a single individual. Winston Churchill, in his history of the First World War, described Admiral Jellicoe, who had commanded the British Grand Fleet in the Battle of Jutland, as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” Two and a half decades later, of course, the fate of Britain, and thus the world, lay in the hands of Churchill himself.

The closest the United States has come to such a situation, at least in this century, was probably in the “hundred days” of the New Deal, when the country and Congress alike looked to Franklin Roosevelt to prevent the complete collapse of the American economy. During that period Roosevelt was, in effect, a dictator, although let me hasten to add that I mean the word only in its best sense, that of the office of the Roman Republic once filled by Cincinnatus. Earlier, of course, Abraham Lincoln certainly held the fate of this nation in his hands as well.

If you write a column called “In the News” long enough, some of your subjects eventually begin to catch up with one another. This space recently (November 1995) was occupied with the past history of the struggle for the item veto, and behold, in April 1996, it ended in victory for the veto’s advocates. If the law giving presidents the right to selectively kill individual appropriations is sustained against any Court challenge, it will mark an important constitutional change that shifts an allotment of budgetary power from Congress to the Executive. Yet it will not demand the complex process of formal amendment.