It's been a while since we've had politicians like Wayne Morse or Tom McCall -- Morse, the Oregon senator and very early opponent of the Vietnam war, like Obama a Constitutional scholar, who was in order a Republican, an Independent and a Democrat (who in the Eisenhower administration sat in the aisle of the Senate because he refused to join either side!); and McCall, the moderate Republican famous for saying visit Oregon but don't stay (famous last words), whom I profiled in Oregon Business Magazine when I worked there, honored to spend a week with him with a tape recorder on, an extraordinary experience, whose desk was messier than mine and who said, so my boss could hear, "empty desk, empty mind" (which shut up my boss on this issue); two principled politicians who were not ideologues, which is the occupational hazard today. I miss them. Moreso, the country misses them.
My play about Wayne Morse, 1989, originally commissioned as a teleplay by Oregon Public Broadcasting, which fell through the cracks for political reasons after a changing of the guard and which I later revived as a one-person stage show, which toured the state a few years ago.
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