Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century.

Claude Pepper, Hays Gorey. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95. A month after Black Monday, while congressional and White House leaders held an "economic summit" to reduce the deficit, 87-year-old Rep Claude Pepper swore his opposition to including Social Security cuts in the package. Pepper threatened to use his power as Rules Committee chairman to force a separate vote on the issue. Although Social Security was one program that could stand to be cut because it fails to distinguish between rich and poor recipients, the summit left it alone. The paltry $30 billion in budget cuts that the summit finally produced can be blamed largely on Pepper's unfortunate influence.

Pepper's career in politics reflects the best and worst of the New Deal. His unbending opposition to means testing or even taxing Social Security benefits is the New Deal's worst legacy: mindless support for expensive government programs without concern that benefits be targeted to those in need. But as a senator from 1937 to 1950, Pepper showed what was noblest in the New Deal: passionate commitment to the down-and-out. Pepper sponsored the first minimum-wage, maximum-hours bill; he sponsored bills to expand government research to fight disease through the National Institutes of Health; and he helped Franklin D. Roosevelt kill tax breaks for the "economic royalists." Such positions were risky for a southerner, but Pepper was committed to helping the afflicted and opposing privilege. When World War II approached, Pepper showed he was also eager to fight Nazis: he bucked Senate isolationism by sponsoring the first Lend-Lease bill.

It all came crashing down at the height of McCarthyism in 1950, when Pepper was labeled "Red Pepper" for meeting with Josef Stalin and allowing himself...