Bourke B. Hickenlooper - A Political Life

A Political Life

When he ran for lieutenant governor, the first time unsuccessfully in 1936, Hickenlooper told voters they could call him plain "Hick" because of the difficulty of pronouncing his name. He told a yarn about his going as a child to a drugstore in the county seat of Bedford to obtain a nickel's worth of asafetida for his mother. The druggist just gave him the asafetida, a pungent herb used in cooking, to avoid having to write out both "asafetida" and the long name "Bourke Blakemore Hickenlooper."

As lieutenant governor, Hickenlooper saved a Cedar Rapids woman from drowning in the Cedar River. The extensive publicity from his rescue mission generated him much support when he ran for governor in 1942.

In 1944, Hickenlooper easily unseated the Democrat Guy M. Gillette in the U.S. Senate election. As a senator from 1945 to 1969, Hickenlooper was among the most conservative and isolationist members of his party. He became the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, serving alongside longtime Democratic chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. In 1967, near the end of his Senate tenure, Hickenlooper and Fulbright were instrumental in the drafting of the Consular Treaty, the first such international agreement between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

Hickenlooper was a co-author of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which initiated the development of atomic power for peaceful uses. He also chaired the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee. In this capacity, Hickenlooper questioned the whereabouts of missing uranium from an AEC laboratory in Illinois and urged the removal of AEC chairman David Lilienthal, who claimed no knowledge of the incident. Though the AEC committee declined by a 9 to 8 vote to remove Lilienthal, he nevertheless resigned some six months later, having claimed that his career had been ruined by the mystery of the missing uranium.

In 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Hickenlooper as a U.S. representative to the United Nations General Assembly. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson named him to a congressional team to oversee the elections in the former South Vietnam.

Hickenlooper in time became one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, having served from 1962 to 1969 as the Republican Policy Committee chairman. In this position, he developed an intense intraparty rivalry with fellow Midwesterner Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate Republican leader from 1959 to 1969. Hickenlooper opposed civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dirksen was working in collaboration with U.S. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, the Democratic floor manager of the legislation and later Vice President of the United States from 1965 to 1969. Dirksen persuaded all but six of the Republican senators to support the 1964 measure. Hickenlooper hence joined Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, John G. Tower of Texas, Edwin L. Mechem of New Mexico, and Milward Simpson of Wyoming in voting against the bill championed by their other GOP colleagues. Hickenlooper said that his opposition to civil rights legislation was based on a fear that such laws would lead to "bureaucrats snooping into every area of American life."

Hickenlooper once told an interviewer that he particularly enjoyed campaigning for office, having so frequently been before the voters for consideration. Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop once said in humor that the name Bourke B. Hickenlooper is "exactly the same name an English satirist would choose for an Iowa Republican."

The Mason City Globe-Gazette in Mason City noted on Hickenlooper's death that he despaired of obtaining political success because of his name. "The abbreviation used by friends was even worse. But Hickenlooper found the secret in kidding about his last name in public, making more jokes about it than his political foes."