November 4, 1929—To this point, the career of Hiram Bingham III read like something out of a novel or even film—the Indiana Jones movies, according to more than a few aficionados. But now, the scholar-explorer-politician experienced something far less glorious: censure by colleagues in the U.S. Senate for conduct deemed too flagrantly offensive even by the standards of that influence-friendly legislative body.
Why is it that Connecticut senators land in big trouble about every 40 years? Chris Dodd’s current thrashing about over the Countrywide loan scandal was preceded by his father Thomas’s loss of a censure vote in 1967 for converting campaign funds to his personal use.
But, as Mark Twain noted, history doesn’t repeat itself—it rhymes. Unlike the two Dodds, Bingham was a Republican, and his career prior to his fall ranged considerably further afield than politics. The Senate vote did, though, foreshadow his fall from office.
Two words in the first sentence were designed to lure you into this post: “Indiana Jones.” George Lucas, the producer of the four films, told good friend and director Steven Spielberg that he conceived of his academic adventurer by watching old-time serials, and there seems no reason to doubt him. The film-school generation of him, Spielberg, Scorsese, DePalma, and Coppola could barely conceive of a world outside the movies.
But the men whose film genres they would study like sacred texts could imagine such a world very well, and they were the ones who made the likes of Bingham and fellow adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews fodder for Saturday matinees long ago.
Film fans, in pointing to the resemblances between Bingham and Indiana Jones, stress that both were academics who rediscovered great civilizations in exotic lands. But they sometimes forget another crucial similarity: both kept landing in deep doo-doo.
There’s that 1911 expedition to Machu Picchu, for instance—the one that made his reputation when, as a Yale adjunct professor of Latin American history, he came upon amazing Incan ruins. The trouble was, however, that a) like the Indians of Columbus’ day, the indigenous people of Peru in Bingham’s time never realized they were “lost”; b) Bingham might not even have been the first white to re-discover these ruins; and c) he took back with him artifacts that neither he nor Yale ever returned.
That last offense was quickly glossed over—after all, his university and the media believed, the complaints were coming from people who weren’t one of us, as they used to say, with all kinds of heavy winks, in those days.
In the Senate, though, Bingham was making 96 white guys look like baboons—and they didn’t appreciate it.
Bingham, an explorer as well as son and grandson of Protestant missionaries, had lost his moral compass. But his real offense, it turned out, was not simply aiding and abetting a lobbyist, but doing so in such a way that the fellow became, for all intents and purposes, an actual part of the government.
Bingham brought on his difficulties not just by acting unethically, but by acting with criminal stupidity. He asked to speak as part of an investigation where his name had not even come up.
Sure, homestate newspapers had raised the issue of Bingham’s use of government funds to employ Charles Eyanson, a lobbyist with the Manufacturers Association of Connecticut. But you know what? What happens in Connecticut stays in Connecticut as far as Congress is concerned.
Our nation’s capital prefers that you keep your doings to yourself and not go advertising it. The Senate has been called more than once a giant “gentleman’s club.”
Why is it that Connecticut senators land in big trouble about every 40 years? Chris Dodd’s current thrashing about over the Countrywide loan scandal was preceded by his father Thomas’s loss of a censure vote in 1967 for converting campaign funds to his personal use.
But, as Mark Twain noted, history doesn’t repeat itself—it rhymes. Unlike the two Dodds, Bingham was a Republican, and his career prior to his fall ranged considerably further afield than politics. The Senate vote did, though, foreshadow his fall from office.
Two words in the first sentence were designed to lure you into this post: “Indiana Jones.” George Lucas, the producer of the four films, told good friend and director Steven Spielberg that he conceived of his academic adventurer by watching old-time serials, and there seems no reason to doubt him. The film-school generation of him, Spielberg, Scorsese, DePalma, and Coppola could barely conceive of a world outside the movies.
But the men whose film genres they would study like sacred texts could imagine such a world very well, and they were the ones who made the likes of Bingham and fellow adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews fodder for Saturday matinees long ago.
Film fans, in pointing to the resemblances between Bingham and Indiana Jones, stress that both were academics who rediscovered great civilizations in exotic lands. But they sometimes forget another crucial similarity: both kept landing in deep doo-doo.
There’s that 1911 expedition to Machu Picchu, for instance—the one that made his reputation when, as a Yale adjunct professor of Latin American history, he came upon amazing Incan ruins. The trouble was, however, that a) like the Indians of Columbus’ day, the indigenous people of Peru in Bingham’s time never realized they were “lost”; b) Bingham might not even have been the first white to re-discover these ruins; and c) he took back with him artifacts that neither he nor Yale ever returned.
That last offense was quickly glossed over—after all, his university and the media believed, the complaints were coming from people who weren’t one of us, as they used to say, with all kinds of heavy winks, in those days.
In the Senate, though, Bingham was making 96 white guys look like baboons—and they didn’t appreciate it.
Bingham, an explorer as well as son and grandson of Protestant missionaries, had lost his moral compass. But his real offense, it turned out, was not simply aiding and abetting a lobbyist, but doing so in such a way that the fellow became, for all intents and purposes, an actual part of the government.
Bingham brought on his difficulties not just by acting unethically, but by acting with criminal stupidity. He asked to speak as part of an investigation where his name had not even come up.
Sure, homestate newspapers had raised the issue of Bingham’s use of government funds to employ Charles Eyanson, a lobbyist with the Manufacturers Association of Connecticut. But you know what? What happens in Connecticut stays in Connecticut as far as Congress is concerned.
Our nation’s capital prefers that you keep your doings to yourself and not go advertising it. The Senate has been called more than once a giant “gentleman’s club.”
Given pols’ considerable tolerance for each other’s peccadilloes, the phrase has taken on a double meaning over time. It’s not enough that you’re a garden-variety nincompoop, crook, or hypocrite to earn the harsh public rebuke of your colleagues—in escalating order of severity, reprimand, censure or expulsion. You have to do something positively dunderheaded—the moral equivalent of robbing a bank in front of a half million people—for Congress to act:
* It took Joe McCarthy making us look like the laughingstock of every foreign embassy around the world, not to mention attacking our own army, in front of TV cameras before the Senate decided in 1954 to censure him.
* It took Joe McCarthy making us look like the laughingstock of every foreign embassy around the world, not to mention attacking our own army, in front of TV cameras before the Senate decided in 1954 to censure him.
* It took Harrison Williams of New Jersey to be caught on video peddling his influence in the Abscam investigation for the Senate to force his resignation in 1982 before an expulsion vote could be held.
* It took Bob Packwood not only to put an uncivil tongue in the mouth of every woman he met in the course of business, but to record his misdeeds in his diaries--and threaten to expose wrongdoing by his colleagues--for the Senate Committee on Ethics to recommend expulsion in 1995—and force his resignation.
You're not going to believe this, but Bingham didn’t deny the charges concerning Eyanson when he appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee—he admitted them, even providing details. He had needed Eyanson’s expertise for hearings on the tariff, he explained. Once his GOP colleagues decided to hold hearings on the tariff behind closed doors, Bingham felt lost without Eyanson.
Now, Capitol Hill can be notorious for its dependence on staffers. But an admitted dependence on lobbyists is really upping the ante.
The senator needed Eyanson so badly that he worked out these arrangements with him:
* Bingham’s aide would resign;
You're not going to believe this, but Bingham didn’t deny the charges concerning Eyanson when he appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee—he admitted them, even providing details. He had needed Eyanson’s expertise for hearings on the tariff, he explained. Once his GOP colleagues decided to hold hearings on the tariff behind closed doors, Bingham felt lost without Eyanson.
Now, Capitol Hill can be notorious for its dependence on staffers. But an admitted dependence on lobbyists is really upping the ante.
The senator needed Eyanson so badly that he worked out these arrangements with him:
* Bingham’s aide would resign;
* Bingham would appoint Eyanson to fill the post;
* But the aide would continue his duties and draw his regular salary, which Eyanson had so generously given back to him;
* But the aide would continue his duties and draw his regular salary, which Eyanson had so generously given back to him;
* Eyanson, all the while, would continue to be employed by his lobbying group.
Oh, but here’s the thing: Bingham refused to acknowledge that Eyanson was a lobbyist, because, as the senator defined it, that would involve “going around visiting congressmen and senators and trying to get them to do something they did not want to do."
It reminds me of the moment in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon, when Congressman Bill Hungate joked that Republicans would say that one couldn’t infer an elephant was in the room—“it could be a mouse with a glandular condition.”
The Senate tried to sidestep Bingham’s “mouse with a glandular condition,” but he kept making it impossible. The investigating committee took note of the fact that the Manufacturers’ Association had obtained secret information only made possible through Eyanson’s attendance behind closed doors, but it did not level any formal charges against Bingham, or even recommend censure.
But Bingham overplayed his hand, accusing the investigation of partisanship because chairman George Norris, a GOP progressive side, had placed critics of the Hoover administration on the panel. That was enough for Norris (who, incidentally, was one of the heroes of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage), who lost no time introducing a resolution censuring Bingham for behavior “contrary to good morals and senatorial ethics.”
By the time the resolution came up for a vote a week later, in somewhat watered-down form (stating that Bingham had no corrupt motives in his conduct), the margin against him was a lopsided 54 to 22, with Midwestern and Western senators joining with Norris—and, of course, Democrats—in condemning Bingham.
After he was voted out of office in 1932, Bingham became an aviation lobbyist himself, and resumed two old avocations: writing history books and flying. He died in 1956, but the debate over the proper place of lobbyists in the political life of Washington survives him.
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