WASHINGTON — The very first thing you notice about the senior senator from West Virginia is that voice.
There is no doubt about it: Robert C. Byrd has the best voice in Washington.
It’s a deep yet tremulous 74-year-old voice that seems to descend upon the listener from on high, as if Byrd is somewhere above you, uttering eternal truths that are immediately being hammered into granite.
As he talks, Byrd dances through the octaves, carefully playing with his articulation of each vowel and consonant, surrounding his audience in the sweet darkness of sound.
Long, crafted pauses break his sentences, and during those silent moments time seems suspended; Byrd is then like nothing so much as a Shakespearean actor warming to the task.
The thought occurs that America is a safer place because Robert Byrd went into politics rather than into door-to-door sales.
Or is it?
“My voice, a political tool? I have never used my voice as a political tool,” insists Byrd in the sliding baritone that he has so often utilized as a political tool.
As he speaks, Byrd’s ornate Victorian-Era office in the Capitol Building is transformed into a personal stage. Beneath murals glorifying the Republic, Byrd paces the room, moves toward a shaft of sunlight and strikes a heroic pose beside a tall window.
He is a short, compact man, but his size belies the power of his presence. With his carefully coiffed silver hair, his high forehead and piercing eyes, and impeccably dressed in a vested dark suit, Byrd has the look of an important person not to be messed with, a fundamentalist preacher or a hanging judge.
Slowly, Byrd gets down to business. He moves to his desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a large black book. It is the Bible. Byrd turns to a coffee table in front of his audience, lifts the Bible and with sudden force slams the book down.
He slaps his hand onto the Bible. “Has Robert Byrd ever twisted arms to get the CIA to move jobs to West Virginia?”
His question to himself thunders through the room.
“Has Robert Byrd twisted arms at the FBI to move jobs to West Virginia?
“I swear on the Holy Bible that I have not!”
It is a bravura performance by the Senate’s premier dramatist.
Byrd, a Democrat, is here for some serious damage control. The former Senate majority leader and current chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee is under attack as Congress returns later this month, and he wants to get his side told.
The charge that Byrd is answering: that he has used his sway over the appropriations process, the flow of money, in the Senate to move–no, his real foes would say steal–thousands upon thousands of government jobs and take them to his depressed Mountain State.
Byrd’s pork-barrel deals have prompted the kind of shock and outrage from his colleagues that has rarely been seen here since Jimmy Stewart filibustered Claude Rains’ crooked dam project in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
“Everyone in this body knows what’s going on,” Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) warned darkly in a recent emotional rebuke to Byrd on the floor of the House. “We all know what’s taken place. I believe that actions like this . . . are disgraceful.”
Byrd’s efforts to move FBI and CIA facilities and thousands of jobs to West Virginia–immediately transforming rural hamlets there into international centers of law enforcement and intelligence gathering–have drawn special fire.
The attacks have come from such diverse sources as right-wing House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (“It makes no sense at all except as a pure abuse of power,” Gingrich blasted) to Tom Clancy, best-selling novelist and friend of the CIA (“The Duke of West Virginia,” Clancy wrote in The Washington Post, “. . . is taking serfs from one fiefdom and moving them to another–his–in return for which he will deign to grant favors to those willing to support his legislative kidnaping”).
To be sure, pork has never gone out of style in Washington. There is a good reason, after all, why Congress seems so reluctant to cut the bloated defense budget, even after the collapse of the Soviet Evil Empire; it’s because the Pentagon and the nation’s military contractors have been so efficient at spreading their largess (factories and jobs) throughout almost every congressional district in the country.
So when others in Congress say they are shocked–shocked!–to find pork-barrel politics going on, their protestations may be just a wee bit disingenuous.
Still, Byrd has been catching flak because he seems to have gone beyond the pale, the accepted norms of pork. At least by the standards of modern Washington, that is, where special interests usually bring home the bacon through less showy practices–and without leaving so many tracks.
Indeed, perhaps Byrd’s biggest mistake was that he failed to follow convention and work through a bunch of shadowy lobbyists; he has instead done pork the old-fashioned way–by dint of his brute power over the legislative process.
Byrd denies that he has abused his power or exerted undue pressure to persuade federal agencies to locate jobs and facilities in West Virginia, yet he remains quite open in his desire to do more for his state.
He has, in fact, publicly devoted himself and the remainder of his Senate career to the cause of stimulating the moribund West Virginia economy through a massive injection of government money and jobs. He even set a goal: to bring $1 billion home with him in the space of five years.
He has already exceeded that objective in just three years, and the way he has gone about it is a lesson in congressional power.
In 1989, Byrd surprised official Washington by stepping down as Senate majority leader to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. To most political pundits, it was a puzzling move; after all, as majority leader Byrd was a national figure. He was trading in the status of statesman for the grubby world of an obscure committee post, and few outside the Senate saw the logic in it.
Yet Byrd, a senator since 1959 (and a congressman even before that, dating to 1953) understood where real power lay in Congress.
At least the kind of power that was useful to West Virginia.
A master of parliamentary procedure and a self-taught expert on the history of the Senate, Byrd knew that while the highly visible majority leader could control the scheduling and the legislative pace in the Senate, the real substance of the Senate’s business was conducted at the committee level. Arguably the most powerful committee of all was Appropriations; while other panels could create new programs, Appropriations controlled all the money to run those programs.
“I had been in the leadership for 22 years, and that’s a long time,” Byrd says. “I had been spending all my time on the floor and on matters affecting the nation. I felt it was time to move on. I’m glad I walked away from it.”
And so, after a career in the Senate leadership, what better way to help West Virginia than to take the helm of Appropriations, where Byrd would be in a position to pick and choose which government spending programs to ship back home?
Today, Byrd doesn’t deny the obvious benefits his committee post offers West Virginia. What is good for West Virginia, Byrd explains, is good for America.
“Naturally, my state is part of this union. A highway in West Virginia versus another state . . . one shouldn’t look at it as if it is a highway in Mexico. All of these states are part of the same country.” Byrd adds that others shouldn’t begrudge West Virginia. Quoting Daniel Webster, he notes: “We don’t put lines of latitude on what public works do or don’t benefit us.”
The result: By last fall, more than $500 million in proposed federal spending for West Virginia for fiscal 1992 alone was moving through the Appropriations process in the Senate, according to Congressional Quarterly, a Washington journal that tracks Congress. A list of Byrd’s West Virginia-bound pork, compiled by Congressional Quarterly in the middle of the fall’s congressional session, was impressive; it ranged from $165 million in highway improvements to $600,000 in research grants for the study of a replacement for lime fertilizer.
More visible projects included the transfer of a 90-worker data processing division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; an Internal Revenue Service center employing 300, and a 700-worker office of the Bureau of Public Debt.
But his greatest coup was the FBI’s national fingerprinting laboratory, bringing as many as 2,600 workers to Clarksburg, W.Va.
Byrd didn’t win so much for his depressed home state by relying on friendships with his fellow senators; on the contrary, he has been successful almost exclusively because of the power of his position and his unrivaled grasp of the legislative process in the Senate–and in spite of the fact that many of his colleagues view him as cold and aloof.
“I don’t have close friends in the Senate,” Byrd quietly acknowledges. He adds, with a measure of pride: “I don’t socialize with anybody. I haven’t played a round of golf in my life.”
But with few allies to rely on, Byrd’s West Virginia-first campaign finally ran aground late in 1991 in the face of mounting congressional opposition. Thus, when Byrd tried to take the CIA, or at least a big chunk of it, to West Virginia, the rest of Congress put its foot down.
The CIA and Byrd had earlier agreed to transfer 3,000 workers to a new CIA office center to be built in West Virginia, consolidating a series of smaller offices scattered throughout the Washington area.
But this time, Byrd’s critics had seen enough.
Quickly, the House Intelligence Committee labeled the plan a “covert action.” Condemnation spilled out of Congress: “If this wasn’t so pathetic, it would be funny,” complained Rep. David O’B. Martin (R-N.Y.).
Wolf, a Republican from the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington whose district includes CIA headquarters, noted that Byrd’s actions would mean the agency would have to change its name to the “Decentralized Intelligence Agency.”
Eventually, the full House defied Byrd and has at least temporarily blocked the move.
In the face of so much criticism, Byrd repeatedly has insisted that the CIA followed a legitimate site selection process in choosing West Virginia; he also stresses that he believes his honor was impugned in the House debate over the CIA project.
How has he responded to such personal attacks?
He insists–dramatically, of course–that he remains above the fray.
“Those are innuendoes, willful misrepresentations of the facts,” Byrd says.
The lawyerly words flow slowly but steadily, as if he is pulling warm licorice from his mouth.
“I have turned my cheek to all of the innuendoes,” Byrd says.
He says again, more emphatically: “I have turned my cheek.”
