An eloquent, stirring voice of principle rattled through the empty chamber of the United States Senate one day last week. Earlier in the week, word had got around that Senator Thomas Dodd (D.Conn.), who had leapt to national fame six months before on the strength of a brilliant exposition of the need for firmness on Berlin, was preparing a major address on the Khrushchev visit. By Wednesday afternoon advance copies of the speech were on his colleagues’ desks. Lyndon Johnson set aside time for delivery—the next morning at ten o’clock when senators could say, some of them truthfully, they had to be at committee meetings. The party leaders and a few others were on the floor when the session opened, but as soon as the routine morning business was out of the way, they cleared out. A solitary Republican remained, in deference to the custom of having both parties represented. Two Democrats came in for part of the speech and interjected brief comments of support. That was all.
I sat in the press gallery with Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune and Forrest Davis of the Cincinnati Inquirer (we didn’t have much company either). We agreed we were listening to one of the great Senate speeches of the modern era. We remarked on the attendance, and on the extraordinary fact that in the face of a pre-announced attack on Dwight Eisenhower, not a single member of the President’s party rose to his defense. We knew the President’s position had its defenders in the Senate—as did Dodd’s—but this seemed to be moment in the nation’s history when most of its leaders saw advantages to keeping counsel.
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