James K. W. Atherton/The Washington Post -
Mr. Pike pats the classified material on the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war that the White House turned over to the House Intelligence
Committee on September 10, 1975.
Otis G. Pike, a nine-term New York
congressman who was a persistent critic of Pentagon overspending and
led one of the first congressional investigations of abuses by U.S.
intelligence agencies, died Jan. 20 at a hospice in Vero Beach, Fla. He
was 92.
His daughter, Lois Pike Eyre, confirmed the death and said she did not yet know the cause.
Mr. Pike, who was elected to the House of Representatives in
1960, was regarded as an independent-minded maverick during his 18 years
in Congress. He was a Democrat elected from a Republican-leaning
district on Long Island, a Marine Corps veteran who was skeptical of
Vietnam War escalation, and a patrician, bow-tied lawyer with a wicked
sense of humor, which he used to ridicule wasteful spending.
In
1973, Mr. Pike was credited with single-handedly grounding a $14 million
program that awarded extra pay for flight duty to generals and admirals
who never piloted anything more aerodynamic than a desk at the
Pentagon.
Standing on the floor of the House with his arms outstretched like a plane in flight, Mr. Pike used mockery to plead his case.
“If
the in-basket is continually loaded on the starboard, or right-hand,
side of the desk, and the out-basket is continually empty on the port,
or left-hand, side of the desk,” said Mr. Pike, who flew 120 missions as
a Marine pilot in World War II, “wood fatigue sets in, the landing gear
tends to buckle and the whole fuselage crashes down on your feet.”
As the chamber echoed with laughter, the flight-pay policy was abolished.
Mr.
Pike had his most conspicuous moment in the public eye in 1975, after
revelations of the CIA’s “family jewels” — suspected involvement in
clandestine operations that may have included killings and coups
overseas and spying on U.S. citizens.
In July 1975, he became
chairman of a committee that was the House counterpart of a Senate
committee led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho). Both panels reviewed
activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, marking the first
time Congress had examined secret dealings and suspected abuses by the
CIA since the spy agency’s founding in 1947.
During the
often-testy hearings, Time magazine called Mr. Pike “the model of a
properly pugnacious public servant — sharp-tongued and not easily
intimidated.”
Mr. Pike challenged CIA Director William E. Colby
to accept greater oversight of the CIA’s budget — then, as now, a
secret, off-the-books appropriation. The CIA balked, saying the
country’s intelligence operations could be hurt by opening its books.
Mr.
Pike was alarmed by CIA excesses, including suspected involvement in
efforts to oust leaders in Chile and other countries. After Secretary of
State Henry A. Kissinger withheld certain documents and limited the
number of State Department officials who could testify, the Pike
Committee voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The contempt
went both ways, as Kissinger charged the committee with acting “in a
tendentious, misleading and totally irresponsible fashion.”
Among
other findings, the Pike Committee called for central congressional
oversight over intelligence operations, a prohibition of CIA-sponsored
killings and more transparency in the intelligence budget.
“It
took this investigation” into the CIA, Mr. Pike said in a 1976 New
Republic interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “to convince
me that I had always been told lies [and] to make me realize that I was
tired of being told lies.”
When Mr. Pike’s committee was scheduled
to release its full report in January 1976, the full House of
Representatives voted to keep it secret, citing national security
concerns. A copy of the 338-page report was obtained by Daniel Schorr of
CBS News and published by the Village Voice in New York.
Summoned
to appear before a House committee, Schorr steadfastly refused to name
the source of the leak and kept the secret until his death in 2010. Mr.
Pike was adamant in conversations with his family and others, his son
said, that he did not give the report to Schorr.
In the end,
because the document was never officially released, Mr. Pike’s
investigation was soon overshadowed by the Senate’s Church Committee,
some of whose recommendations were adopted in measures to rein in the
excesses of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Otis Grey
Pike was born Aug. 31, 1921, in Riverhead, N.Y., a town on the northern
shore of Long Island then known for its potato farms and fishing fleet.
He was an orphan by 6 and was raised by two older sisters and an aunt.
One of his sisters was a social worker during the Depression and told Mr. Pike about a local farm family.
“All
they had for Sunday dinner was boiled potatoes,” he recalled in a 1967
interview with the New Yorker magazine. “I was surprised that in a great
country like America such a thing could happen. All my family had
always been Republicans, but that kind of thing, and what Franklin
Roosevelt tried to do about it, turned me into a Democrat.”
Mr. Pike graduated from Princeton University in 1946 and from Columbia University law school in 1948.
He practiced law in his home town, was elected justice of the
peace and served on his town council. After losing his first
congressional bid in 1958, Mr. Pike defeated the Republican incumbent,
Stuyvesant Wainwright II, two years later. He went on to hold seats on
the Armed Services and Ways and Means committees.
Mr. Pike enjoyed
singing and playing the piano and ukulele. By the time he decided not
to seek reelection in 1978, he lamented to The Washington Post that
Congress was no longer much fun and had become dominated by “two kinds
of people — millionaires and Boy Scouts.”
After his congressional
career, he wrote a column on public affairs for Newsday and the Newhouse
News Service until 1999. He retired to Vero Beach.
His first wife, Doris Orth Pike, died in 1996 after 50 years of marriage. A son, Robert Pike, died in 2010.
Survivors
include his wife of 10 years, Barbe Bonjour Pike of Vero Beach; two
children from his first marriage, Lois Pike Eyre of Riverhead and
Douglas Pike of Paoli, Pa.; and two grandchildren.
While
speaking out against what he considered outlandish defense spending
during the Vietnam War, Mr. Pike cited the example of small metal rods
with a retail cost of 50 cents. The Pentagon, which bought them for
$25.55 apiece, described them as “precision shafting.”
“For once,” Mr. Pike declared on the House floor, “the American taxpayer got precisely what he paid for.”
No comments:
Post a Comment