Paging History When the House comes back into session this week, there will be no teenagers in blue blazers running around and filling up lawmakers’ water glasses and fetching documents.
Members of Congress may actually have to open doors for themselves. The venerable House page program, which traces its roots back to the Continental Congress, is no more. The Senate, which cleaves more to tradition, is keeping its pages. But House leaders justified cutting the storied program, saying it cost about $5 million a year — a pittance given the $14 trillion national debt — and argued that in an e-world, many of the page duties had become obsolete. (Did Bill Gates, a former page himself, hasten the End of an Era?) There also may have been a reason as old as the Garden of Eden. Noting that Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner had rejected offers by wealthy former pages to cover the costs of the program, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington law professor and ex-page, told NPR that “some members of Congress view the pages as a temptation and a liability for members of Congress, that every 10 or 20 years, we have some member who tries to molest or proposition a page.” When I ran the temptation theory past my brother Martin, an artist who worked as a Senate and House page in the ’50s, he was shocked. “In 1954, it is likely that the entire page corps were virgins,” he said. “If someone had experience, he certainly would have bragged about it.” I asked Martin to reminisce about his most interesting high school brushes with history. “I met three men who would later become president of the United States,” he said. “Richard Nixon was extremely polite and easy to work for. John Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts, yelled at me for a good five minutes in December of 1954 for opening the door of the Senate for him while he was on crutches after back surgery. He kept asking, ‘Who asked you to open the door for me?’ Apparently, he didn’t realize that was my job.” In retrospect, Martin understood that J.F.K., in chronic pain, was probably sensitive about looking like an invalid. A few weeks before the censure vote of Joe McCarthy in 1954, Martin had seen J.F.K. walking with his best friend in the Senate, George Smathers of Florida. “I read in The New York Times that you’re not going to be here for the censure vote,” Smathers teased Kennedy, alluding to the fact that McCarthy was a friend of Joe Kennedy’s and Bobby Kennedy worked for him. “Don’t believe everything you read in The Times,” Kennedy shot back. But then, Martin said, “When the vote actually came up, he was in the hospital having back surgery, so at least in this case, The Times was right.” Martin’s best friend on the Hill was Gary Helgason, a McCarthy page. “Gary was clearly not the blue-blood, high-brow type,” Martin said. “He would threaten anyone who would say anything negative about Senator McCarthy to take them to the page room and give them a good whipping.” Martin happily recalled walking Jackie Kennedy to the family gallery: “There were two seats particularly that the pages wanted her to be seated in because she had the most attractive legs of any senators’ wives. We wouldn’t have done that for Mrs. Truman.” He worked for L.B.J. when he was the Senate minority leader. “Most pages were frightened of Johnson, and I remember one page saying he would vote him to be president just to move him down Pennsylvania Avenue and away from him! Johnson sent me once to help Lady Bird set up a party and asked me if I knew who she was. I did. She was the complete opposite of Johnson — very lovely lady to work for!” There were plenty of temptations that had nothing to do with the pages. Martin watched Barry Goldwater tell Senator Herman Welker, a Republican from Idaho who was loudly humming and singing as he presided over the Senate, that he was “in no condition” to “be in that seat.” Welker, a tough guy, told Goldwater to “come up and do something about it,” but Goldwater, a gentleman, walked away. As the only senator who tipped the pages a dime, William Fulbright of Arkansas was popular. So when an angry Mrs. Fulbright called the cloakroom looking for her husband and accusing him of being with another woman, the pages did their best to protect their favorite senator. As a page in 1952, Martin watched on the Capitol steps as my dad, a police detective in charge of Senate security, greeted Harry Truman as “Mr. President.” “Mike,” Truman chided him, “call me Harry like you always did.” Martin concluded: “After being a page, Dad got me a job at the Botanical Gardens shoveling and spreading manure. Many people thought the two jobs were similar.” By MAUREEN DOWD Published: September 6, 2011 WASHINGTON D.C.
