Word: rayburn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Speaker Sam Rayburn called him the best-informed man in town, and Franklin D. Roosevelt said he had never heard a better toastmaster. He knew all the big and middle-sized people by their first names. Yet gaunt George William Stimpson had never amounted to much as a Washington correspondent. At 49, he was barely making a living by grubbing regional news for his little string of Texas papers...
...another objection came to the President from Speaker Sam Rayburn. If some 60 Congressmen went off to the Pacific as observers, the Administration's legislative program might be blown to bits...
Next day only 13 of the House's 435 members were on the floor when Speaker Sam Rayburn banged his gavel, adjourned the House until Monday, Oct. 8. The recess was the longest any wartime House had planned. Members can be called back into session on three days' notice in an emergency (but at least 100 were already off, or soon would be, on extended overseas trips...
...President's request promptly threw the spotlight on 63-year-old Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, and on 76-year-old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, the Senate's presiding officer. To U.S. citizens, middle-of -the -roader Sam Rayburn, 31 years in Congress, seemed reasonable enough as a presidential possibility. But they quailed at the thought of crotchety, patronage-grabbing Kenneth McKellar, whose striped trousers seemed almost his sole presidential qualification...
...vote, party lines dissolved: 138 Republicans joined with 205 Democrats (and two minor party members) to pass, the bill, 345-to-18. (The dissenters were all G.O.P. bitter-enders.) The overwhelming vote was due to: 1) educational spadework by the Treasury Department; 2) sure-footed maneuvering by Speaker Sam Rayburn; 3) sober second thoughts by Republican House leaders. The nonpartisan character of the vote prompted a happy comment from President Truman: Congress would really be ready for the peace treaty...