October 20

Wayne Morse was born on the 20th in 1900. Morse is remembered primarily for his tenure as United States Senator from Oregon, a post he held from 1945 to 1969. He is also notable for being one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Ernest Gruening was the other, which gave Johnson and Nixon leave to more or less turn Vietnam into a parking lot. Morse’s public career was detailed in the documentary The Last Angry Man: The Story of America’s Most Controversial Senator. This was before government controversies involved under-age pages, interns slightly over the age of consent and shady dealings with multinational corporations. All in all Morse comes across as being a man who followed his conscience, and he had a clear conscience. That’s just me though. Whatever your opinion of Morse’s politics you have to give him credit for being incredibly tenacious and possessing impressive stamina. Why? Because in 1953, he made a filibuster lasting 22 hours and 26 minutes. I always knew that politicians could be long-winded but really now. How could he come up with enough to say that he would need almost an entire day to say it? I am fairly certain that he didn’t just read The Brothers Karamazov from the first page to the last because he would have needed a heck of a lot more time to get through that little number.