Word: albens
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Whenever he walked outside, Democrats crowded around him. All of them -including his five leading rivals-were glad to see him, and couldn't help showing it. They felt that he was somehow on their side. Alben Barkley was really on everybody's side: he was Mr. Democrat, the personification of a kind of comradeship that binds together the dissident bundles in the Democratic Party. There was a half-truth, but a deep half-truth, in the campaign placard: "North, South, East, West, all agree Barkley best." All would have agreed, at that point, that Barkley was second...
...personal honesty, loyalty and principles with a belief that U.S. politics is a process of compromise rather than an instrument of doctrinaire philosophy or a weapon of personal ambition. And he discovered early in the game that a sense of humor could ease the process for everybody, including Alben Barkley...
...Alben gets his way," said a fellow Kentuckian, "but he does it so you never feel it hurt." In 1949, while Barkley was presiding over the Senate, he ruled against his Southern friends in an attempt to cut off a Southern filibuster. But he lost not a friend thereby. He set the tone by reaching for one of his ageless stories. "I feel," he said, "somewhat like the man who was being ridden out of town on a rail. Someone asked him how he liked it, and he said that if it were not for the honor of the thing...
...Alben's lasting political credit, he was born poor (Nov. 24, 1877), in a two-story log house in the one-crop tobacco country near Lowes, Ky. He was the eldest of eight children, and his father's favorite. When Alben had outgrown the little Lowes school, his father loaded the family and their possessions into a single wagon and, with the cow trailing behind, moved to Clinton, Ky. so Alben could go to Marvin College. Alben worked his way through Marvin as janitor (years later a wag posted a sign on the lawn: "Barkley Swept Here...
...Senate, two years later was in such good graces that he was allowed to second the nomination of Al Smith at the convention. He stumped for Smith, stumped again in 1932 for Franklin Roosevelt. In 1937 Roosevelt threw Barkley the majority leadership of the Senate by the famous "Dear Alben" letter,* and "Dear Alben"-sometimes known as "Bumbling Barkley"-amiably suffered the charges of sharp-tongued critics who said that he was nothing but a Roosevelt errand...