How Iowa's 'watchdog' in Congress took a snap at the White House during Vietnam
H.R. Gross' caustic lampooning of White House party during the war recalled.
“There are three parties in the House: Democrats, Republicans, and H.R. Gross.”
—Gerald Ford
WATERLOO — This week marks the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by the U.S. Congress. President Lyndon B. Johnson used it to commit America deep into the Vietnam War. And an Iowa congressman was just as stingy in his support of that as he was of everything else,
That congressman also delivered a caustic slap in the face when he found his hesitancy to be justified.
Iowa U.S. Third District Rep. H.R. Gross of Waterloo voted “present,” not “yes,” when the Tonkin resolution was moved out of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees for a vote by those full legislative bodies on Aug. 7, 1964. It passed 88-2 in the Senate and 416-0 in the House.
To say H.R. Gross was a spendthrift would be, well, a gross understatement. He voted against funding for Johnson’s Great Society-War on Poverty programs, the U.S. space program and even said the gas used to fuel the eternal flame on President John F. Kennedy’s grave should have been paid for by private foundations.
He was so stingy that the mayor of the largest city in his district, Waterloo Mayor Ed Jochumsen, supported his 1964 election opponent.
“There have been times when Gross could have helped us in Waterloo and didn’t,” Jochumsen said at a reception for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, as reported in the Sept. 24, 1964 Waterloo Courier.
But Gross, originally a newspaperman who became a radio newscaster on WHO in Des Moines and KXEL in Waterloo, served 26 years in the House.
President Johnson, a former Senate majority leader, was fresh off his victory in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and his war-on-poverty bill had just won approval in the House.
Flushed with that success, Johnson pushed for overwhelming bipartisan support for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a mandate for the actions he was about to take in Vietnam in response to alleged North Vietnamese attacks on two U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. He also wanted to quell criticism by his 1964 election opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, that he was soft on communism.
If Gross fell in line on Tonkin Gulf, he certainly dragged his feet when the marching orders came. The Associated Press reported that, after voting “present” on the measure in committee, he voted for it on the floor, with reservations.
Gross was quoted in an Aug, 7, 1964 Associated Press article that Johnson already had the power to do what the resolution ostensibly was authorizing him to do. It was muffled reservation. But he could see the tide he’d be swimming against. Sens. Wayne Morse of Oregon and Sen. Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against the measure and were not re-elected to office.
In early 1965, after Johnson’s landslide victory over Goldwater, the president began committing sizable numbers of American forces to Vietnam. Some of Johnson’s supporters, who thought he would limit U.S. response in proportion to the reported attacks on the two destroyers, felt betrayed.
In early 1966, Gross, the only Iowa U.S. House Republican to survive the 1964 Johnson landslide, came out of his cage. American troop strength in Vietnam stood at 184,000 by then and would swell to more than 380,000 by year’s end. Gross took the occasion of a lavish White House evening dinner-dance party that ran to 3 a.m. the next morning to lampoon the administration in a bit of his trademark biting Swiftian satire.
He took to the House floor and inserted into the Congressional Record the 1920 antiwar poem “Victory Ball, ” by British poet Alfred Noyes, which talked about a party the British aristocracy held at the end of World War I.
One stanza of the poem says, in part:
Shadows of dead men
Stand by the wall,
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.
They do not reproach,
Because they know,
If they’re forgotten,
It’s better so.
Gross said the poem “bears directly on the subject matter at hand.” His comments about that, and coverage of a similar ball at the Smithsonian Institution that generated a photo of White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers dancing the frug, genered hundreds of letters of outrage at the White House and support for Gross.
But it drew an angry reaction from a former fellow Iowa journalist — Hugh Sidey, the Greenfield native who wrote “The Presidency” column for Time and Life magazines.
”Egged on by Iowa’s cranky, 66-year-old Congressman H.R. Gross, the Pecksniffs have deluged the Congress and the White House with complaints about the revelry on the Potomac,“ Sidey wrote, referring to the sanctimonious character Seth Pecksniff from the Charles Dickens novel “Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“The upshot of all this has been to make the usually joyless White House an even more somber place,” Sidey wrote, adding that “joylessness is not healthy for an administration which could use, most of all, a good chuckle at its own inflated notion of itself.” He also said no one was more aware of the war raging in Vietnam than the White House.
But in choosing Noyes’ “The Victory Ball” to make his point, Gross selected a work which sprung from the time in which he himself served.
Gross was an Army soldier who served in France in World War I, for which he later received the Purple Heart for combat wounds. Prior to that his artillery unit pursued Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa after his forces’ murderous 1916 raid into the United States at Columbus, N.M.
The State Historical Society’s Annals of Iowa, in a 2006 article based on research of the congressman’s papers at the Herbert Hoover Presdential Library and Museum in West Branch, report that Gross had falsified his age to enlist in the First Iowa Field Artillery at age 16.
More than 116,000 Americans died in World War I. More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.
Journalist Bill Kauffman, in his 1999 article on Gross, “The Eternal Flamethrower,” published in The American Enterprise magazine, noted that Gross said his only regret upon leaving office, after not seeking re-election in 1974, was that he did not vote “no’ instead of “present” on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Gross died in 1987 and was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.
Gross was no dove. Kauffman noted the congressman once called the Peace Corps “a haven for draft dodgers.” But Gross knew what it was like to serve in war.
And maybe, beyond his reputation as the so-called watchdog of the federal treasury, inside that crusty curmudgeon there also stirred an aging World War I doughboy who, as the Noyes poem said, saw the shadows of dead men standing by the wall.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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A good read. Thanks, Pat.