Somebody once asked me, what does it take to be a good Senator? Now, I think I can talk about this at my stage in life. I have been here quite a while.

I said, there is just one way to be a good Senator, and that is to be there, just be there.

You do not necessarily have to be brilliant, just be on the job, just taking care of the things that need to be done, day in and day out, and I doubt that the average person of the American public knows the hours that are put into these offices by Members of the Congress. Some Members may not. It is a human institution. There may be certain people that do not believe in giving too much, in working too much, but I would say that if you average it out, in having been a professor, having been in private business, having had a chance in my 62 years of life to see a little of what goes on in this country, that there is a tremendous dedication on the part of the Members of Congress to do their work in the Congress.

Or when we get a day off, they say, "Well, you are going to get a day off." A day off. I tell you, I long for the days on, because the days off is when they kill you with work.

People come by the hundreds, and the letters keep pouring in.

I am going home to Minnesota this weekend. Now, somebody will say, "I see Humphrey is going to take this weekend off and go to Minnesota."

Chairman METCALF. And they ask you to enjoy your vacation.

Senator HUMPHREY. I have enough meetings out there to take care of a month's calendar this coming weekend. This way, we learn about our constituents.

When we have the time off, when we had the month of August this last summer, I got in my car and drove several thousand miles in the State of Minnesota.

I went from farms to barns, to small towns, grain elevators, up to the iron mines, all over that State, not making speeches, just stopping off at a store or a bank or some place and listening to what people had to say, and getting a feel of what the concerns were of my constituents. Now, that is part of our job. I think a man in Congress has got to know, he has got to know his State, his people.

He has got to know this country, the feeling of it.

Senator, we have got to be able to project to the American people that congressional government can be responsible government, that it is not just the Executive, that Congress is the people's body, and might I say, there are two offices that I have seen that are the subject of great buffoonery, and what we call the political cartoon.

I served in both Congress and the Vice Presidency, and, you know, whenever you want to get a laugh out of somebody, you talk about Congress.

Generally, Members of Congress are portrayed as being portly characters with a waistline of about 52 inches, and talking out of both sides of their mouths, and so on, and so on.

We have to vote aye or nay, we cannot vote maybe. When the chips. are down, on an issue at the Senate, I have to vote yes or no. I cannot say that I would like, that is, to talk to you about that next week.

There is no way you can talk out of both sides of your mouth. You can have a period of conversation in which you are talking with peo

ple, and I met some folks in the hallway as I came to work, they handed me a petition, I said I frankly happen to disagree with that position, of their petition, but I said I am willing to take a look at it, I want to see what you have to say.

Somebody can say, there he is. He was willing to talk to them. It was about busing. I have made my position pretty clear about where I stand on civil rights, and the necessity of equal opportunity in education, and the role that busing plays in it.

I do not think I have to reply to that, but there is an effort made to somehow or another make it appear that when you are a Member of Congress, and you are seeking information, and you are visiting with your constituents, and you are in these hearings, that you lack definitive qualities. But we have got to vote in every one of these committees, and we take a rollcall, and we have to vote on amendments, when the markup of a bill comes, our words are taken down, as they are being taken down here today, by a stenotypist, we are recorded, and we have to vote finally upon every amendment that is brought up on the floor of the House, of the Senate, and we are held accountable for those votes.

We do not talk out of both sides of our mouth. I have not met a saint or any genius since I have been down here, 26 years in Congress.

There are very few saints elected to Congress. A couple of them came close to it: my dear old friend Frank Graham from North Carolina, and Paul Douglas. They may not qualify for sainthood, but there are people I know, the movers and the shakers in the Congress of the United States, that stay with their jobs, sacrifice, give of themselves, and work hard.

Now, they do it because they like it. It is just exactly as I do it. I like it. I ran for this job.

They did not come to me and say, "Come and save us." I said, "Let me save you." I ran for the job. I have been seeking these positions, but I want to again emphasize to you, Mr. Chairman, how much it means. to some of us, that you and other members of this committee are trying to modernize our Congress, to bring it up to date, without destroying its real function, namely the function of accommodating many different points of view, and arriving at a consensus.

It is easy to govern by edict. It is difficult to govern by the consent of the governed, and the social contract between the government and the people requires a great deal of trust and confidence and faith and requires respect for the majority as well as for the minority, as well as a willingness to accept the decision of the majority.

It is a hard system, you know, difficult.

Churchill, I only paraphrase it, said, democracy is the worst possible form of government, except all others that have ever been tried. When I was on the enforced absence back in 1968, I went back to the classroom with a couple of things I wanted my students to remember. I happened to believe that government ought to be as efficient as we can make it.

I believe in reform. I believe in modernization as you do, but I pointed out that we are not a corporation, we are not a business. This is not the purpose of it.

The purpose of business is to make a profit, provide service, or a commodity to make a profit.

The purpose of government was expressed in the first few words of the preamble of the Constitution, domestic tranquility, to establish justice, to provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare, secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. You can read the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Magna Carta, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, and that is a pretty good sampling of political literature, and you will never find the word "efficiency."

You will find the words, "justice," "love," "sharing," "brotherhood,” "service."

You will find all of those. Efficiency is but a tool to accomplish the greater things that we seek to do.

What I want to make sure is that when we reform, that whatever reforms we make, help us to do a better job for our people, to assure more justice, to see that people get a better deal.

That is what it is all about. That is why we are here. That is what these hearings are about.

Communication helps to do that.

When the public becomes disenchanted with congressional government-and, by the way, the recent poll was an indication of how the Congress as an institution is held low in public esteem-but when the public becomes disenchanted with the congressional institution as such, that is a serious danger to what we call free government, representative government. Individual Congressmen and Senators are popular and strong at home in their constituencies. But we as an institution, or Congress as an institution, are held in very little respect today. And we who are the Members of this Congress have a duty and an obligation to try to do everything we can to lift it, to lift it by our own personal conduct, by our work as Members of Congress, by the structural organizations, and by being willing to give us the tools to do the job, which, by the way, Mr. Chairman, you have been in the forefront of doing.

Chairman METCALF. Senator Humphrey, I think that one of the rewards of serving in Congress is to hear an eloquent statement about Government such as you have just made. I am delighted that these hearings are being broadcast over the radio to listeners throughout the United States.

Senator HUMPHREY. What radio is broadcasting these?

Chairman METCALF. National Public Radio, and the microphone in front of you is a live microphone.

Senator HUMPHREY. I was wondering whether it is CBS, or ABC, or NBC.

Chairman METCALF. No, we will have witnesses testifying for the networks. Maybe when their representatives are here, they will be broadcasting those sessions.

Senator HUMPHREY. I want to say, with all due respect to those great networks, that they operate under a public license. They go to great efforts to cover public activities of the Congress of the United States, and we are indebted to them. But I think they too could be helpful to us in projecting better knowledge.

Chairman METCALF. We are looking for ways to help the media to be more helpful to us so that they can convey a greater understanding of Congress as an institution. Congress is one part of the Government that belongs essentially to the people, and we must find some way to restore their faith in their elected representatives and, thus, in constitutional government. I think your very eloquent statement is most important and most helpful in this regard.

Thank you very much for taking the time to assist in our inquiry. We have run a little late this morning, so we will recess until 2 p.m. [Whereupon, the committee was recessed at 1:15 p.m.]

AFTER RECESS

Chairman METCALF. The Joint Committee will be in order. This is a continuation of the hearing on Congress and Mass Communications, and we are pleased to have with us one of the most distinguished Members of the House of Representatives, John B. Anderson, who has exercised a good deal of leadership in this area.

It is a real privilege to have you here, Congressman Anderson. You may proceed with your statement.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN B. ANDERSON, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

Representative ANDERSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that most generous introduction.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee:

I am grateful for this opportunity to testify on the subject of Congress and Mass Communications. I especially wish to commend the Joint Committee on opening this most useful and informative dialog on the role and image of Congress as perceived by the public through the mass media, and what might be done to improve public perception of our role and activities.

I must confess that when I originally received notice of your hearings in late January, I gave the matter very little thought. But when the Harris survey published on February 12 revealed that only 21 percent of the American people gave Congress a positive performance approval rating, I entertained second thoughts on the subject and decided to accept your invitation to testify. It's little consolation that Congress has only dropped 17 percentage points over the last year while the President has dropped 40. On the contrary, this is all the more distressing when you realize that the American people have practically lost all faith in all levels and branches of Government.

On a more personal level, we should be particularly pained by the fact that the public apparently holds garbage collectors and used car salesmen in higher esteem than Members of Congress; and that 41 percent of the American people cannot name one U.S. Senator from their State and 54 percent cannot name the House Member from their district. All of this gives us ample cause for reflection and introspection.

The central questions posed by this inquiry, as I understand them, are: How can the role of Congress be more fully and accurately cov

ered by the news media? How can spokesmen for Congress gain direct access more readily to the broadcast media to present congressional viewpoints on major questions? And what additional facilities, staff and other supporting services, if any, are required to provide Congress with a more adequate institutional capability in the area of mass

communications?

The central premises advanced in the study prepared for these hearings are that there is a direct correlation between power and media coverage, that the executive branch controls a disproportionate share of both vis-a-vis Congress, and therefore, if Congress is to truly funetion as a coequal branch of Government, as intended by the Constitution, it has a right to coequal coverage by the media. Based on these premises, the study proceeds to explore ways in which the Congress. as an institution, can increase its coverage by the media.

In my testimony today, I would like to take some qualified exceptions to these premises. Let me qualify my remarks by stating that, in my opinion, media coverage of Congress has been inadequate and superficial and must be improved; and that Congress can and should pave the way for greater media access to the entire legislative process. To this extent, the various alternatives explored by the Joint Committee study are most useful.

Having thus qualified my testimony, allow me to proceed to elaborate on the exceptions I take to these basic premises. It seems to me that we are engaged here in something of a chicken-egg-type debate. The central question seems to be, does the executive branch enjoy more power than the legislative branch because it is more adept at commandeering media coverage; or, does it command greater media attention because it is more powerful than the Congress?

I would like to suggest that this question is not so difficult to resolve as the chicken-egg controversy since in the present instance we can turn to the historical record of the past 40 years or so. And that record documents the growth of executive powers and the relative decline of legislative powers, and attributes this mainly to the new economic and world roles of our Government in the New Deal and World War II era, and the new realities of our complex urban, scientific and technological age in the postwar period. And it should be noted that this trend has resulted as much from congressional acquiescence as from executive usurpation.

To the extent that the mass communications media have chronicled this trend, I suppose they could stand acccused of being accomplices after the fact-even of aiding and abetting the growth of Presidential power. But I would submit that the role of the media in actually contributing to the increased growth of Presidential powers has been minimal at best. That is not to say that the media, in reporting Presidential activities, have not reinforced and legitimatized the exercise of these powers in the public mind. It must be conceded that the media have played a role in this respect. But we must be careful, Mr. Chairman, not to attribute disproportionate weight to the media factor in the present imbalance-of crediting the messenger for the imbalance, as it were. It is my contention that the indirect role of the media in reinforcing and legitimatizing Presidential powers has been a very limited factor in the actual enlargement of those powers over the years,

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