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bring in the names of proposed chairmen for the full committees, normally just redesignating those who had been chairmen before, and under our reorganization legislation, which we had enacted maybe four years before in '69, the chairmen of full committees -- their names would be submitted formally by Ways and Means Committee, which had the jurisdiction taken away from it and given to the Steering Committee, and there'd be a secret vote on each name or actually maybe on all the names together -- I just can't remember what the original proposal was, I think even at the very beginning we voted separately on each name.

So at the Steering Committee there was an enormous surprise, because the Steering Committee brought in three new committee chairmen deposing three of the old ones. Maybe it was even four of them. The four were: Hebert from Armed Services; Poague from Agriculture, Patman from Bank and Currency, and Hays from House Administration -- to get rid of them.

So I was surprised and approved of the three that I've named but didn't approve of Wayne Hays being deposed because I thought he was a good chairman, and I did not think the other three were good chairmen. And I'm not talking about their philosophy, because I don't think that you depose a chairman because his philosophy doesn't happen to correspond with yours, because generally the conservatives are going to be in control more than the liberals; an if it becomes a question of just chopping the heads off when the political philosophy changes, then the liberals will suffer more than the conservatives. The question becomes: had he served well as a chairman? Okay.