THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 27, 1995 TAG: 9501270601
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
For just a tick of history's clock, the late Virginia Rep. Howard W. Smith, was back in the news again.
Republicans put his portrait in the hearing room of the House Rules Committee, which conservative Smith of Alexandria ruled 12 of his 36 years in Congress until he was defeated at 82 in 1966.
His picture replaced one of Rep. Claude Pepper of Florida. But 11 black members of Congress protested the display of Smith's likeness because of his role in blocking civil rights bills.
Republicans took it down.
Most Southern congressmen opposed integration to some degree; but Smith, saying little, bottled up bills in committee - as he did a multitude of spending bills.
Smith and Harry F. Byrd Sr., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, slowed spending. Often Smith's soft-spoken ``no'' killed a bill. When the vote in committee bid to be close, Smith would disappear, a silent filibuster. Nobody was left to call a meeting.
He never told his staff where he might be. He didn't want them to have to lie. Once it was a week at Nags Head with his grandchildren.
Pressured by reporters, an aide said the Judge was at his Fauquier County farm painting a barn. Thereafter, in his absence, reporters noted the judge was painting that barn. But it remained the same weathered gray as the man.
A slim, wavery figure, he sometimes seemed about to disappear in front of you. Towering erect, bushy brambles over his eyes, he was a praying mantis moving slowly in the House until he pounced.
His power stemmed in part from others' using him as an alibi. A member would introduce a fool bill at a constituent's insistence, then say to Smith: ``For Pete's sake, go paint that barn again!''
He grew to like Bobby Kennedy. The first year he let President John Kennedy's Peace Corps out of committee; and the next year he praised it. Kennedy's aides begged him to bless it on the floor. So he did.
Next day he arose to question Iowa Rep. Gross, and Gross said: ``I'll be delighted to yield to the gentleman from Virginia who took the sawdust trail yesterday on the Peace Corps.''
He grew up on a farm where whites and blacks labored to raise what they ate. Smith played with the black children. One, Moses Cameron, was his best friend, he told a reporter.
``He called me `Howard' and I called him `Cameron.' One day my mother told him to call me `Mr. Howard.' Mose said he wasn't going to do it, that he had always called me Howard and was going to keep right on.
``The next morning I met Mose, and I said, `Mr. Cameron.' He said to me, `Mr. Howard.' We both laughed and that was the end of that. From then on, he called me `Mr. Howard' and I called him `Mose.' ''
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson bulled to passage a bill assuring blacks the right to vote. That changed things.
It freed whites as well as blacks. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The late Virginia Rep. Howard W. Smith
by CNB