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The Eternal Flamethrower
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Oct 27, 2008 06:28pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| News Date | UTC0:0 |
| Description | The American taxpayer never had a more colorfully ornery friend than Iowa farmboy Harold Royce Gross, who looked as though he ought to be playing the puckered parsimonious accountant pouring cold water on Jimmy Stewart's dreams in a Frank Capra movie.
Gross was a Des Moines and Waterloo reporter and newscaster billed as "the man with the fastest tongue in radio." Among his employers was WHO, which had a slower-tongued baseball announcer named Reagan. But Dutch went west and Gross went east, after upsetting an incumbent Republican in a 1948 primary in which the antiwar Gross was vilified as a "radical leftist." He stalked congressional spendthrifts for 13 terms until his retirement in 1975.
As a freshman he voted against the Marshall Plan; a quarter-century later he opposed the bombing of Cambodia because it cost too much. In between he railed against the space program, foreign aid, congressional junkets, and every post office and bridge he could find. (Sometimes his targets merged: "Well, even if we don't get to the moon first, we'll be there first with foreign aid" he cracked.) His only regret was voting "present" instead of "no" on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Gross voted against the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations so often that Minority Leader Gerald Ford remarked, "There are three parties in the House: Democrats, Republicans, and H. R. Gross." |
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