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An Outspoken Senate Outsider

An Outspoken Senate Outsider
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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September 29, 1977, Page 98Buy Reprints
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WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — James George Abourezk is nobody's idea of the typical United States senator. His clothes are often rumpled. He prefers beer busts to champagne soirees. Just about everybody calls him Jim.

But many of his col Man leagues were privately calling him other names as in the they groggily bobbed in News and out of the Senate chamber in the predawn hush today during his all‐night filibuster against attempts to end Federal price regulation of natural gas.

He was asked this morning whether fellow senators were talking to him. “Not many,” he replied with a broad grin. “And when they do, they're grouchy.”

Jim Abourezk was anything but grouchy as he slipped away from the floor for a one‐hour nap in the gymnasium during a brief Senate recess. In the words of one staff aide: “He was really flying high. I've never seen him so excited and full of energy.”

The filibuster‐by‐amendments that he and Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, have conducted has displayed a talent that few Senate colleagues knew Mr. Abourezk had. They all knew him as an outspoken liberal maverick. But few knew that in less than five years in the Senate he had mastered the intricacies of parliamentary procedures.

Standing His Ground

There was none of the polite giveand‐take that is usually a feature of Senate debates as he stood his ground against Democrats and Republicans alike hour after hour.

Never a member of “the club,” as the Senate's inner power circle is called, Mr. Abourezk obviously feels freer than at any time in his political career to fight for what he thinks is right. He announced last January that he would not seek re‐election when his term ends late next year.

“I want to be my own person again,” he said recently. Jim Abourezk, the person, is a gregarious man of 46, intelligent, restless, a man who thrives on good fellowship and a good fight.

The son of a Lebanese peddler, Mr. Abourezk was born on Feb. 21, 1931, on the Rosebud Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota. He never forgot his upbringing, and is perhaps the Senate's foremost champion of Indian rights.

After four years of service in the Navy during his late teens, he worked his way through the South Dakota School of Mines by teaching judo, then went to work on an engineering job in California.

Restless after a year, he packed up his family—a wife and three children—and went back home to enter law school at the University of South Dakota. He began private practice in 1966.

Learned Many Trades

Along the way, he had learned many trades. He was a bartender and a bouncer. He was a rancher and a farmer. He sold used cars and peddled groceries on the road. He owned a night club, was a surveyor and dealt black‐’ jack in an American Legion club. And in 1970 he was elected: to Congress.

After a single two‐year term in the House, he won a Senate seat in 1972 and set out to redress the grievances of the American Indian. He helped create the American Indian Policy Review Commission, which subsequently issued a report accusing the Bureau of Indian Affairs of abuses such as paternalism and the misspending of Government funds.

The only person of Arab descent in the Senate, he has been highly critical of what he calls the “Israel lobby” in Washington. And he has sought almost from his first day in the Senate to break up major oil companies.

In announcing he would not seek another term, Mr. Abourezk said he had found it impossible to be a good senator without neglecting his family. Furthermore, he has expressed frustration from time to time over the difficulty of getting anything done in the Senate.

“Whoever you plug in up here, nothing ever really changes,” he once said. “It's the system itself.”

Results of Polls

Political friends suspect, too, that he decided not to seek re‐election because South Dakota polls showed him to be trailing likely opponents.

He has an image as a man who never puts on airs. Even members of his staff call him Jim, and his favorite relaxation is giving all‐night beer parties for staff aides and a few close friends.

An accomplished guitar player, he is a devotee of country and country rock music and he helped create an archive for folk music in the Library of Congress.

Quite stocky (he is 5 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs about 200 pounds), he fights a constant battle to keep his weight down. As part of that battle, he has become almost exclusively vegetarian—despite the .fact he comes from a beef‐producing state.

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