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Everett McKinley Dirksen was born in Pekin, Illinois, in 1896. He fought in World War I, participated in a series of business ventures upon his return from Europe, and won a place on the Pekin City Council in 1926. After losing his first bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1930, Dirksen won the first of eight consecutive elections to Congress as a Republican in 1932. Forced by illness to retire from the House in 1948, Dirksen successfully challenged the incumbent Democratic senator from Illinois in 1950 to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Dirksen's Republican colleagues elected him minority leader of the Senate in 1959, a post he held until his death on September 7, 1969.

Dirksen achieved prominence and influence as leader of the Senate Republicans during the presidential administrations of the Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Although the Republicans were outnumbered two to one in the Senate during the 1960s, Senate rules in those years gave Dirksen and his colleagues in the minority great influence over legislation. Dirksen used his leadership position, his reputation for mastery of the legislative process, and his powers of persuasion to help Kennedy and Johnson pass such landmark acts as the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The remarks he delivered on June 10, 1964, as Senate debate on the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended, were widely credited with swinging enough Republican votes to ensure the passage of the bill. Dirksen was equally proud of his skill at keeping undesirable legislation off the books. He once explained, when asked in an interview what his most important accomplishment was, "Well, if I had to put it in the large, probably it would be my endeavors to stop legislation that was not in the public interest. Because I have followed the old precept of Gibbon, the great historian, who said 'Progress is made not so much by what goes on the statute book but rather by what is kept off and what is not put on'" (ABC's Issues and Answers).

Even outside the capitol, Dirksen's eloquence earned him celebrity status; in 1967 his patriotic recording Gallant Men: Stories of American Adventure won a Grammy Award. His practice of announcing the arrival of spring every year became a Washington tradition. Of his speaking style, Dirksen once explained to a reporter, "I always extemporize. I love the diversions, the detours. Without notes you may digress. You may dart. After you've taken on an interrupter, you don't have to flounder around the piece of paper, trying to find out where the hell you were" (qtd. in Shalit, p. 27). As such, full texts of Dirksen's remarks are relatively rare. But it is possible to identify the broad themes--freedom, the importance of the individual, the role of government, the primacy of the Constitution, and the role of Congress from the notes and drafts he composed.

References:

1. Dirksen, Louella, with Norma Lee Browning. The Honorable Mr. Marigold: My Life with Everett Dirksen. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

2. Hulsey, Byron C. Everett Dirksen and His Presidents: How a Senate Giant Shaped American Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

3. Loomis, Burdett. "Everett M. Dirksen: The Consummate Minority Leader." In First among Equals: Outstanding Senate Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard A. Baker and Roger H. Davidson, Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991.

4. Johnson, Lyndon B. "Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union." Public Papers of the President: Lyndon B. Johnson Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965.

5. MacNeil, Neil. Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man. New York: World Publishing Company, 1970.

6. Nixon, Richard. "Statement on the Death of Senator Everett Mc- Kinley Dirksen of Illinois" In Public Papers of the President: Richard Nixon. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971.

7. Schapsmeier, Edward L., and Frederick H. Schapsmeier. Dirksen of Illinois: Senatorial Statesman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

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