Neil MacNeil
Special Features

The September 14, 1962, issue of Time: The Weekly Magazine featured Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen on the cover. The accompanying 3,500-word story, “The Leader,” was based on reporting by Neil MacNeil, congressional correspondent for the magazine. He, along with Time writer Jeffrey Birnbaum, interviewed the Republican senator from Illinois for 10 hours.

The Dirksen Congressional Center houses MacNeil’s collection. Although the interview notes do not survive, MacNeil filed more than 40 pages of reporting with his editors. They are reproduced at macneil_reports_emd.pdf.

Among other topics, MacNeil explores Dirksen’s transformation from “the fierce and brutal partisan” who joined the Senate in 1950 to the widely-respected Senate leader of the early 1960s. The reporter delves into Dirksen’s leadership philosophy and practice, citing examples from then-current legislation. He also reports on Dirksen’s relationship with President John Kennedy’s administration.

Some of the background information was not for attribution, including the following statement given to MacNeil by Bobby Baker, secretary of the Senate Democrats:

I’ve seen a lot of Republican leaders in the Senate in the past 20 years—the most dynamic period in the history of the world. Most of the Republican leaders were inflexible—[Charles] McNary, [Wallace] White, Ken Wherry, [Robert] Taft and [William] Knowland. Taking all things into consideration, Dirksen is by far the ablest leader they’ve had. He’s been a fantastic help to the Kennedy administration—and Kennedy knows it. If he was mean, he could be a spoiler, like Charlie Halleck [R-IN and House Minority Leader]. I’ve never dealt with a more honorable and fair man, a fellow who will go further than you yourself. He’s changed, and he’s developed into a real Senate man, he’s close to being the head of the club. When he came here, he was a sort of demagogue. But now, he’s totally unselfish. The Republicans had a crisis a few years back, a real crisis, over a fellow who thought he was entitled to go on the Appropriations Committee. Dirksen got off the committee. He got off the committee, one of the most powerful in Congress, to help a colleague out and solve the crisis. I like Sid Yates [Dirksen’s Democratic opponent in the 1962 Senate campaign in Illinois], but my party would be in a hell of a mess—Kennedy would be in a hell of a mess—if Dirksen gets defeated. Dirksen’s not an obstructionist. Charlie Halleck is a gut fighter, and if Dirksen acted like Halleck, Kennedy would be in real deep trouble.

Read MacNeil’s Reporting: macneil_reports_emd.pdf

Frank H. Mackaman, Compiler and Editor 2016

Neil MacNeil (1923-2008)

The Bronx-born MacNeil arrived in Washington in 1949 to report on Congress for the United Press. He worked for Time from 1958 until his retirement in 1987. In 1964, MacNeil became one of the first congressional correspondents on television. He began delivering weekly news and commentary about Congress on WETA, a public television station in Washington. His program, “Neil MacNeil Reports,” continued until 1967, when the station originated “Washington Week in Review,” on which Mr. MacNeil frequently appeared as a commentator. The program was broad cast nationally by the Public Broadcasting Service. He wrote three books: Forge of Democracy: The House of Representatives, 1963; Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man, 1970; and The President’s Medal 1789-1977, 1977, a study of presidential inaugural medals. At the time of his death, MacNeil was completing a fourth book, tentatively titled Call The Roll: A Candid History of the United States Senate. For many years he served on the executive committee of the Congressional Periodical Press Galleries. In 1980 he won the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting on Congress.

On August 24, 1961, in response to a request from his editors, Neil MacNeil filed the following report on himself [MacNeil to Clurman for pub letter]:

As you requested, here’s a self-serving report on me.

Schools: Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Columbia School of Graduate Faculties. Major: American political history.

Father: Neil MacNeil, former assistant managing editor, New York Time. Mother, Elizabeth Quin, originally from County Galway, Ireland. Wife: Laureen, and daughters: Dierdre and Catherine Elizabeth, both under 16 months.

It’s true I kept a falcon for almost a year—actually had it flying around the house, and I claim I taught it to fly—but I’m not a qualified falconer, just a long-time observer of the great falcon migration down the Long Island shore each fall. Southampton is home away from home, but I’m pretty well rooted in Washington now, having been here [the] last 12 years.

I have a small reputation as a chef—filet of sole, bonne femme, coq au vin, and the best hollandaise in town—and a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a wine connoisseur. The only secret is to know how to read the bottle’s label, to own taste buds adequate to tell a chateau bottling from rotgut, and to have on tap the patios of the wine-lover. I keep a modest cellar in the Victorian house we restored on Capitol Hill, a half dozen blocks from the big dome, and, like any man who likes the good things in life—i.e., old books, Rembrandt etching—I prefer claret.

I broke in as a reporter for the New York Times, covering Brooklyn police headquarters, got the rudiments there and on New York’s east side with the usual collection of fires, murders, suicides. I punched cattle briefly in Cotulla, Texas, a state which didn’t appreciate me. I left after I had been charged by a loco white-faced cow, been endangered by tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and been shot at by the foreman. My first job was selling librettos at the Metropolitan Opera. I’m a trout fisherman who doesn’t tie his own dry flies, but I keep and don’t use enough a handsome collection of custom-made fly rods, including two very early (1870) split bamboo rods. I had an abortive music career with the bagpipe, being forced to give that up because of the neighbors.

I came to Washington in late 1949 with the UP [United Press International], and for them covered the U.S. Senate first for a few years, then the night rewrite for a few more, then a brief stint at the White House, before the House of Representatives. I joined Time in April 1958. I’ve been covering the Capitol ever since for Time. Covers include: Rayburn, House leaders, Halleck, and Lodge.

Professionally, my main interest on the Hill is not so much what happened as how it happened, for the true drama of a legislative fight normally takes place before the formal vote, in the private offices, the closed committee rooms, the cloakrooms, and the lobbies. These are the places where the decision is made, where the blood is shed.

I first met Larry O’Brien [President John Kennedy’s congressional liaison chief about whom MacNeil was preparing a Time cover story in August 1961] in the early days of the West Virginia primary, saw his operation in Los Angeles, ran into him a few times during the fall campaign. I began to bump into him this year around the Senate and House, but didn’t really get interested in his operations until a dramatic change took place around April. My count of the House told me that the Kennedy program couldn’t get through, and this count was confirmed by friends on both sides in the House and lobbyist friends as well, but the Kennedy bills were moving through the House. The Senate had some rough spots for the Kennedy program, but not the challenge of the House. The obvious question came up: how was this being done? And an examination of the power centers quickly turned up O’Brien’s footprints and those of his aides and allies. Thus the cover.

For the past several years, I have been making an intensive study of Congress, particularly the House, a chamber normally neglected by Washington correspondents largely because of its complexity. This study has included in depth examination of the power centers, the lobbies, and so one, and a near exhaustion of the published sources on Congress. I’m proudest of one private remarks by Speaker Rayburn to a friend about me. He said: “He knows the House.”

END

Neil MacNeil’s Collection

The Center houses the MacNeil Collection. The reporter’s daughter, Deirdre, donated the collection in August 2012 following its use by Richard A. Baker, Historian Emeritus of the U.S. Senate, who consulted the collection in order to complete a manuscript on the history of the Senate begun by MacNeil.

The collection is divided into the following series: Clippings, Notes, Reports, Subjects, and Miscellaneous. This publication draws on the Reports series.

MacNeil’s reports, filed with his senior editors, comprise the heart of his collection. They are typed and detailed and cover a vast array of topics. These reports document the interplay between MacNeil, the reporter, and his editors. Further, they include off-the-record information as context for published stories. Together the reports portray the time period in a personal, colorful, and informed way.

Although the first report authored by MacNeil was dated April 3, 1958, his collection includes earlier reports from other Time reporters, likely retrieved from the magazine’s archives as background research for MacNeil’s own reports.

“Neil MacNeil Reporting on Everett McKinley Dirksen” transcribes every report in his collection that mentioned Everett Dirksen by name.

Explanatory Notes

MacNeil’s reports took two forms. Many were prepared in draft form using a typewriter often with handwritten corrections and annotations. Others appeared in final form with the text in ALL CAPS. In relatively few cases, both versions exist for a single report.

To improve readability, and yet preserve MacNeil’s style, the editor adopted the following conventions:

1. Although MacNeil’s final reports were filed in ALL CAPs, this transcript employs standard rules of capitalization.
2. Minor errors of spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Major errors are noted by [sic].
3. The reporter varied his spelling of certain terms. For example, he spelled Vietnam as both a single and as two words, i.e., Viet Nam. The transcript adopted a consistent approach—in this case converting all references to “Vietnam.”

As rich and thorough as the Reports series is, there are gaps, indicating that MacNeil did not save all his filings. There are relatively few documents between 1962 and 1964, and there are no reports on the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Neil MacNeil Reporting on Everett McKinley Dirksen” is organized chronologically.

The header for each entry lists the date, the author’s name (usually MacNeil), the person to whom the report was sent, and the title notation. In the vast majority of cases, several reports or drafts on a single topic apparently were prepared—a Roman numeral designated the version. There are many omissions in those cases where MacNeil prepared multiple drafts.

On mid-afternoon, Tuesday, August 5, 1964, rumors began to fly around Washington DC that there had been a new, provocative attack on U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese patrol boats. This incident followed Sunday’s attack on the USS Maddox, a destroyer patrolling the waters off the coast of South Vietnam Wire stories forced President Lyndon Johnson to summon congressional leaders to the White House for a briefing.

The next day, Time Magazine reporter Neil MacNeil filed a 19-page account of the meeting with his editors. Following the president’s opening comments, the Congress members heard from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, then Secretary of State Dean Rusk followed by the CIA’s John McCone and the new chairman of the Joints Chiefs of staff, General Earle Wheeler. The president read to the congressmen the statement re read later that night to the American people. The briefing lasted from 6:45 to 8:15 p.m.

Johnson did not seek the advice of the congressional leaders, according to MacNeil—“he was merely informing them.” But the president pressed for passage of a congressional resolution endorsing the administration’s stand, eyeing each member seated around the table. “He got it—in effect at least—from all. No dissent.”

Following the meeting, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen gave an off-the-record assessment of the president to MacNeil. “Unless all signs fail, I think he’s shown a rather steady nerve. He hasn’t panicked at all. But pressure does get to him,” Dirksen said.

MacNeil closed with a brief appraisal of the politics of the episode: “The trouble is that, for him [Johnson] politically, this may lead to other unforeseeable incidents, even war, and it’s not possible to evaluate the response politically of the voters to those unknown events to come.”

On October 9, 1974, Congressman Wilbur Mills (D-AR), powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was involved in a traffic accident in Washington DC. Mills was intoxicated and accompanied by Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanny Foxe, an Argentine stripper.

The ensuring publicity prompted Time Magazine editors to sound out their reporter on Capitol Hill, Neil MacNeil, about his approach to covering the story. MacNeil responded with a 10-page memo entitled “peccadillos of the famous.”

According to MacNeil, Time’s policy “is that a prominant [sic] person’s private-life peccadillos, such as womanizing and booze, normally should be passed over by the press until and unless those actions somehow compromise his public actions and responsibilities.”

He wrote at length about the challenges of reporting on Congress members’ “private” lives and cited many examples of unreported indiscretions, including some involving John Kennedy. One example involving a senator from a southern state:

This reporter has seen—some years ago—Senator [name and state] staggeringly drunk on the Senate floor, incapable of managing a bill before the Senate under his care, wildly shouting to the presiding officer, and finally dragged from the chamber by two fellow senators. We reported that incident in full—but TIME did not print it.

As the historic 88th Congress drew to a close in the fall of 1964, Time Magazine’s Capitol Hill reporter, Neil MacNeil, offered his appraisal. “Much of the time, the Congress looked clumsy and awkward. The Senate staggered through two debilitating and seemingly senseless filibusters,” he wrote. “The House seemed constantly in need of someone to wipe its nose.” (Much the same could be said about our current Congress.)

“The members of both parties in both chambers were constantly complaining and caterwauling at their frustrated, bewildered, confused, and pitiful condition. No one appreciated them. They were led by inept leaders—so they protested,” MacNeil reported.

But appearances deceived: “If this congress [sic] frequently looked inept and bamboozled, it was moving all the same at the very same time implacably toward its impressive record.” As MacNeil concluded, “Beyond cavil, the record already in hand is one of the most extraordinary in the nation’s legislative history.”

MacNeil’s 13-page report macneil_reports_88th.pdf describes the 88th Congress’s achievements and analyzes the roles President John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson played.

At 11:30 a.m., Tuesday, April 29, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford summoned the leaders of Congress to the White House for an historic, hour-long meeting. “The president entered the room, his face deeply anxious, his manner tense,” wrote Time Magazine correspondent Neil MacNeil. Ford told them that he had convened a session of the National Security Council at 7:30 p.m., Monday evening, and there gave the order to evacuate all Americans from Vietnam.

MacNeil filed his report of the meeting on April 30. He ended by quoting Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield:

“It’s the end of an era, the end of the post-World War II era. We have to bind up the wounds, as Ford said, and start anew. We have to recognize that we are limited in our resources; we can’t police the globe. … I hope we’ve learned from what we’ve gone through and that we never get involved in any civil wars again. The president set the proper tone: Put it behind us. Bind up the wounds.”

Read MacNeil’s five-page report at: macneil_reports_saigon.pdf

“The growing danger in Vietnam, the obvious escalation, and the increased commitment of U.S. troops have brought a new wave of anxiety to Congress,” Neil MacNeil reported on June 16, 1965. “Most fascinating,” he continued, “was the splitting away of the House Republicans from straight down-the-line support of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy—which put them at odds also with the Senate Republicans.”

MacNeil went on to describe how Melvin Laird, chairman of the House Republican Conference, had hinted at the possibility of “ending any Republican support of our present Vietnam policy.” He, along with House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, preferred to use U.S. air strikes rather than committing more ground troops to the war. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, however, did not share the criticism of his House colleagues against President Lyndon Johnson’s strategy. “Lyndon Johnson is no damn fool,” Dirksen said privately. “It is unimaginable that he would take a step … that flew in the face of the best military brains.”

The dynamics of congressional reaction to the administration’s policies with respect to the war in Vietnam occupied much of MacNeil’s reporting in 1965. His collection contains many related stories.

Read MacNeil’s 11-page report

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield on the Challenges of Senate Leadership

On February 24, 1964, Time Magazine Capitol Hill correspondent Neil MacNeil profiled Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) for a cover story. In his report, MacNeil focused on Mansfield’s approach to leading the Senate. What follows are excerpts—see the full text.

Mansfield’s definition of “leader”: “In the Senate, the word ‘leader’ is a misnomer. You don’t lead. You try to see what the Senators want and then you follow. I am a follower.”

“The job of senator is serious,” he said, “but we’re pretty expendable. We’re the employees, the servants of the Senate. We represent the Senate temporarily. We people the institution of the Senate.”

“When it comes to parliamentary tricks,” Mansfield said of his floor leadership, “I have none. And if I had any, I wouldn’t use them. An open door policy is the only way I can operate. It’s the only way I can hold the trust of my colleagues.”

“I make no deals of any kind. There’s a lot of talk on how we operate up here. The only way is to let all the senators know all the time what we’re doing, and trust in their maturity, their intelligence and their love of country.”

On the contrast between his leadership style and that of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson: “He was an extrovert—I am an introvert. He was outgoing—I was a loner and still am. He was enthusiastic in his pursuits, about everything—and I’m kind of reserved. He had a great parliamentary talent for welding his colleagues together that I do not possess. He is a proud man. He always thinks of victory—but he never forgets the policy of compromise. I always seek victory, but I recognize that there are so many divergent avenues that I take half a foot rather than none. He would too but I do so less grudgingly. He always used to say ‘Come, let us reason together.’ He did that in his own way, and I try to do it in my way. We are not similar men. Although basically we are similar in what we seek, what we want, what we hope for our country. He was extraordinary—magnificent.”

“I operate on the theory, and I believe in this wholeheartedly, that every senator regardless of what stands he takes is an equal, he is on an equal basis with every other senator and I treat them all alike. I expect to be treated as courteously in return, and I am. I do not believe in arm-twisting. I do not ask a Senator to vote one way or the other. I hope by logic and persuasion that he can be brought to see the light as need be, but each senator is there to vote as he sees fit, as he thinks best. And each senator has as much right as the next senator to vote one way of the other.”

“We get an extraordinary reading from an extraordinary man on Barry Goldwater and the American press,” reporter Neil MacNeil told his editors. “The reading is from Everettt [sic] Dirksen, the man who placed Goldwater in nomination and cinched that nomination by ending any doubt of the political course of delegate-rich Illinois.”

Dirksen, it seemed, was “gravely concerned” by Goldwater’s tendency to speak recklessly. “We’ve got to stop this hip-shooting,” said Dirksen. “It is simply too dangerous in the world as it is, with Latin American and Viet-Nam.”

The Senate Minority Leader offered an impractical solution. He would force Goldwater to insist that all press questions be submitted to him in writing in advance to permit him and his staff to work out rational, responsive, and responsible answers.

Read MacNeil’s full report: macneil_reports_goldwater.pdf

Some observations on the president-elect’s Cabinet nominees:

State Department: “He took a calculated risk there. That’s not all bad. He showed some backbone.”

Defense Department: “He’s going to be on a defense spending tear, but the fact is he has selected someone who’ll look at waste. That’s good.”

These two quotes are not about Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, Donald Trump’s nominees for State and Defense. Instead, they come from Neil MacNeil’s reporting on Ronald Reagan’s nominees, Alexander Haig and Casper Weinberger. In covering the transition from Jimmy Carter’s administration to Reagan’s, MacNeil filed four other stories related to Cabinet appointments in December 1980: David Stockman to the Office of Management and Budget; Richard Schweiker to Health and Human Services; Alexander Haig to State; and John Block to Agriculture.

MacNeil’s December 24 story, reproduced at the link below, noted that “one of the problems is that the Washingtonians only know a few of the Reagan Cabinet—and they are awaiting the coming of the outsiders, whom they have yet to meet.” The Time Magazine Capitol Hill correspondent also quoted one veteran lobbyist: “It looks like a businessman’s Cabinet. It looks like it reflects Reagan’s complex soul. He’s got all the contradictions in Reagan wrapped up in that Cabinet.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Read MacNeil’s full report: macneil_reports_presidentialtransitions.pdf

In September 1986, MacNeil interviewed five senators who would retire following the end of the session: Charles Mathias of Maryland, Tom Eagleton of Missouri, Gary Hart of Colorado, Paul Laxalt of Nevada, and Russell Long of Louisiana.

Here are excerpts from his first report of the interviews:

Eagleton: “The Senate as an institution has worsened. We don’t know how to run our business. We are beset with incessant filibustering.”

Hart: “What I have seen is a decline in what I would call the moderate consensus and the rise of ideology and faction, and I think that also plays itself out in the fractionalization of our society and the greater emphasis on special interests and special interest money.”

Mathias: “I think one of the most important things you can do to be an effective senator is to make sure that you earn your living some other way. You have got to have the ability to deal with a certain degree of independence, and if you are dependent on the job, you will never be able to rise above the need for trim and cower.”

To read the complete account, visit: macneil_reports_senateevaluated1986.pdf