Messenger-Inquirer from Owensboro, Kentucky • 50

4F PERSPECTIVE FROM PAGE 1F MESSENGER-INQUIRER, Sunday. August 25. 1991 Senate's hideaway offices well-kept secrets it il 1. 1 Even respected senators; have meager amenities EDS i hi i vi -f a rt- black-and-white television and no phone. "This room is perfectly adequate," Lugar said.

He used it in the 1980s to finish his book, "Letters to the Next President" For" sustenance, he made coffee in a percolator and ate candy bars, -apples and yogurt stored in a small refrigerator. Lugar is getting ready to move, and plans to leave his furniture for the next tenant, always an option. Most hideaway furniture comes from the stores of the ser-geant-at-arms, but senators are invited to bring their own and leave it behind, if they wish. Lugar will not be doing his successor any favors. I Ray Lustlg, The Washington Post Sen.

Claiborne Pell reviews a paper in the large, homey Capitol hideaway he uses as his working office. By Guy Gugliotta The Washington Post WASHINGTON Sen. Lloyd Bent-sen, D-Texas, rose from his armchair, crossed his dimly lit hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol, opened the door and peeked into the hallway. There was no one.

"Let me show you the way," he said. "It's kind of hard to get out of here if you don't know how." His visitor declined the offer, said goodbye, walked down the corridor to the right, turned left and ran into a blank wall. Doing an about-face, the visitor turned the corner again, walked past Bentsen's door (now closed), came to the end of the hall and descended a short flight of metal stairs onto the stone catwalk of a tiny rotunda. In the center was a fragile spiral staircase leading down. But where? It is easy to get lost in the bowels of the Capitol.

It teems with stairways, tunnels, trapdoors, dumbwaiters, vaults, chimneys, blind alleys, re-modelings, add-ons, take-aways, old wings and new wings. But hidden in these crevices, their locations as jealously guarded as any congressional secret, are the private offices known as "hideaways" that are apportioned as perquisites of office to 77 of the 100 senators who serve the republic. Some are seldom used and almost empty, while others are just like home and loaded with a lifetime of clutter. Some, like Bentsen's, reflect the nature of the man: courtly and elegant with a steely edge. Others are almost militantly nondescript Sen.

John W. Warner, who was once married to Elizabeth Taylor, confesses, "I am not a big memento guy," and it shows. His hideaway is a spartan, windowless, pictureless, mementoless two-room suite whose centerpiece is a round wooden table he brought from his Virginia farm. "I think people should look at each other in conferences," he explained. The table has a white paint stain on it None of the hideaways is particularly easy to find, and many, like Bentsen's, require a guide.

And none is open to the public, even though thousands of tourists walk right past some of them every day without knowing what they are looking at In fact, none of them is open to anybody except the janitorial staff, the senator who hangs out there and whoever the senator chooses to invite or honor with a key. Those who apportion and allot hideaways and their furniture maintain a conspiracy of silence. "You want to know where the hideaways are?" asked one custodian, speaking Modern censors using airbrush to wipe out history, art By Guy Gugliotta The Washington Post WASHINGTON Consider Sen. Richard G. Lugar, No.

31 in the hierarchy for a Senate hideaway office. A frugal, thoughtful man, Lugar carries a lot of weight with colleagues, and served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when Republicans held the majority in the Senate in the early 1980s. His hideaway, however, is straight out of a Cistercian monastery. It has an attactive desk with a leather chair, and a window overlooking the front grounds of the Capitol, but the amenities are minimal: a small couch, a table and an end table under which he stores a blanket and a pillow, a ing, a desk with a cheap office chair on rollers, a refrigerator, a cupboard and a cot with no bedspread. Most hideaway furniture comes from the stores of the sergeant-at-arms, but senators are invited to bring their own and leave it behind, if they wish.

Some senators have inherited a windfall. Sen. Bob Packwood, inherited a hideaway full of designer items left behind by Sen. Russell Long, whose wife, Carolyn, did such a good job fixing up her husband's office that the New York Times featured it in a 1983 piece on "Executive Suites." Packwood (No. 12) invites other Republican senators over for a hideaway lunch on occasion, and once held a party.there for a retiring staffer.

And with Carolyn Long's cocoa-colored damask drapes and wallpaper and a stupendous chandelier, Packwood's digs are as opulent as any. Still, with the exception of a pair of Oregon landscapes, a couple of photographs and some English lithographs, it lacks personal touches and seems to suffer from neglect a beautiful lady all dressed up with nowhere to go. No one could accuse Pell of neglect or of having a special decorator. Every square inch of Pell's hideaway walls is covered with a favorite piece of art or a treasured keepsake. Five Pell forbears were members of Hey, if you're trying to create a nation of ignorant youth, why not begin with their parents? So, let me try to get this straight: It's not offensive to view babes in high heels and scanty lingerie who moan on MTV all day, but it is to see ancient, anatomically accurate statues? It's OK to watch movies and television programs that constantly show strangers "bedding down" as the soap opera synopses so gingerly put it but it would be wrong to observe the same on an lamp? Maybe the argument is that in an era of rampant teen-age pregnancy, it's best not to know that sex has been on the books for, like, longer than there's been cable.

You know if it's old, maybe that means the stuff is good. Maybe if all this exists in art that's in boring museums, then we can go ahead and do it Maybe we shouldn't know anything. When a young boy wants to understand why he's built one way and a girl built another, tell him you don't model here was not Beijing, but Bucharest: If the junta gave orders to shoot people, as Nicolae Ceaucescu did, there was no predicting where the rifles would be pointed. One would like to think that this matter was considered beforehand, but was it? I think not Had the junta thought about those soldiers and the history exam, and certainly the elections, they would have guessed that Yeltsin no shrinking violet of a political figure would climb atop an armored vehicle and give both the confused soldiers and the angry citizens a figure to rally behind. The junta didn't even think to isolate the Western reporters in their Moscow ghetto, and hasn't anybody learned what CNN can do for world opinion? They didn't take the telephone lines down how hard can that be? allowing Yeltsin to communicate with George Bush and John Major, both of whom did all that they could to lay down the law from the international perspective.

One wonders what the junta members thought when Gorby canceled the exam for those kids coming into the Red Army. They were probably "fj the basis of seniority. Whenever a hideaway comes open by death, departure or defeat staffers in the Rules Committee start phoning senators, beginning with the most senior and moving down the list Bentsen is 14th on the list; Warner, 42nd. The rule is that you get to select from whatever is available at the moment you are called. If you pass, you lose your turn.

You can't wait, hoping that someone else will move to a hideaway you don't want so you can have the office you do want The idea is to get better hideaways as you climb the seniority list, and when you find one you like, you hang onto it like grim death. Sen. Claiborne Pell, No. 4 in the hierarchy, uses his enormous hideaway as his working office. Asked how and when he got it, he said only that "one way or another it came to me." Having a beautiful hideaway (Pell's has a toilet, coat closet, working fireplace and huge window) does not necessarily mean you want to show it off.

Sen. Strom Thurmond, the most senior senator of all, has "quite a nice one," a staffer said, but he wasn't interested in having it become part of this story. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, No.

5, is purported to have what one colleague calls "the Holy Grail" of hide news about this third sex? "To my knowledge, this is the first time an esteemed work of classical art has been banned in America," said Bowie, who seemed none-too-pleased with the decision. But, hey, when should art get in the way of commerce? There's a basic rule of thumb about how to treat your audience: If you address your fans as idiots, you're going to get idiots for fans. Those people in the record industry must truly believe rock music kills brain cells. Who better to know. But just to prove that Bowie's record is not a trend of one, we produce the following as Exhibit "After polling its readers, Biblical Archaeology Review has decided to publish pictures of ceramic lamps, discovered on a 1987 dig in Israel, that depict the ancients copulating.

But Editor Hershel Shanks said the July-August issue will carry the pictures on perforated pages for discreet disposal. "Don't tell us the ancients had sex! LIES got a pass on the exam. They came to political awareness entirely under a man who had broken them off from the past The coup in the Soviet Union was bound to fail. That it collapsed so fast came as something of a surprise. I gave it until Friday, but this one folded so fast that a column I wrote on Monday outlining its weaknesses was overrun before it could be published.

One might argue that the coup's collapse resulted from stunning tactical ineptitude coups have been done far better in Argentina, Chile and Panama. This junta of supposedly experienced plotters failed to take Boris Yeltsin out That is in itself an interesting statement Perhaps these experienced apparatchiki thought that the only part of the government that mattered was its head Gorbachev. Incredible as it may seem, they might not have realized that the popular election of Yeltsin only a few months ago was something as genuinely important as it was genuinely new. Take out Gorby, they might have thought and the whole country is in our hands (it worked with Nikita Khrushchev, didn't They had the generals a few of them, any By Karen Heller KnTght-FUdder Newspapers In the Annals of Inanity, we offer this latest entry: "Four nude Greek male statues will be neutered on the cover of David Bowie's latest release after several record stores threatened not to carry the album." What exactly is going on here? Are we becoming a nation of oversensi-tized boobs pardon me fools? How is it that highly acculturated music aficionados, who watch babes Congress, and all are well-remembered in hideaway portraits and other paraphernalia. Pell's father, Herbert, patented a special fork with winged tines for ease in picking up spaghetti.

A prototype of this utensil is on the wall next to a menu from the Paris restaurant Fouquet, which named an egg dish after the Pells. Sternly surveying this hodgepodge from a portrait is George M. Dallas, a Pell ancestor who also served as James Polk's vice president Pell himself, a polite patrician given to elliptical remarks, clearly enjoys his memorabilia, pointing with pride to a drawing of his World War II Coast Guard Cutter (he retired as a captain in the Coast Guard reserve). He also favors a pair of Haitian primitive art pieces he picked up during a trip; the original document for the governance of the Louisiana Territories; an 1882 painting of "Iroquois," the first American horse to win the English Derby; and the clapper bell from the Princeton University's Nassau Hall bell tower (stealing it, which Pell did as a freshman in the 1930s, is supposed to be a big deal). A row of leather attache cases, some of them incredibly ratty looking, leans up against the side of his desk: "People keep giving them to me," he said.

"I never throw them away." know what he's talking about and hold up a copy of David Bowie's latest album. When your children want to know how civilization has continued through the ages, offer up your copy of the Biblical Archaeology Review the one with the pages missing and say, "Gee, maybe the answer is inhere." It used to be that art was never the problem, only reality. We all had teachers who would passionately lecture about Michelangelo's "David" or Homer's "Iliad," but wouldn't dare speak about the reproductive system, let alone utter the word "ovum." Now, I gather, society has advanced itself to the great state we find ourselves in today. Art "and" reality are a problem; "life" is a problem. Maybe that's the real logic behind the desexed statues and per forated magazine: Perhaps if you do away with sex, life will simply go away.

appalled. After all, lies were important and the junta proved that by their belief in those lies, and they were doubtless surprised when their belief in lies collapsed round them like a demolished building. What we have seen in the past week is the death of communism. The dying has been protracted, and truthfully it is something that ought never to have been born. The home of world socialism has entered the 20th century only nine years before the end of it, but it's well and truly here at last.

Illusions die hard, but when they die, they die loudly. This brutal, bloody illusion that has caused more human misery than any of mankind's mistakes died because one man proclaimed the lie, because its defenders simply did not understand that a second man could be important and because the people had had enough of the lie. And the fools never saw it coming. Perhaps that's the epitaph for communism. Even the example of Ceaucescu was lost on the true believers.

They never saw reality coming. Having lived by the lie, they will now perish by the lie. Mourn not aways, but he, too, ducked the opportunity to display it Despite the rigors of apportionment, windfalls occasionally occur; the last time was in the early 1980s when then-Majority Leader Howard H. Baker and Rules Committee Chairman Charles McC. Mathias decided to try to get a hideaway for everyone.

It was Mathias who discovered what he called a "target of opportunity" in a third-floor document and stationery storage area. Very quickly the documents were transferred to the Hart Senate Office Building and the old spaces were divided up into hideaways. The House has no hideaways of its own (difficult with 435 members) and absolutely no interest in providing accommodations to its snooty brethren from the other end of the building. The hideaways are spotted on all four floors of the Capitol and the basement, known euphemistically as "the Terrace." Needless to say, most of the less-desirable are clustered in "the Terrace." Accommodations there can be primitive. Democrat Jeff Bingaman, the junior senator from New Mexico, stands 63rd on the seniority list (not a good number) and rates a Terrace hideaway with a low, fiberboard ceil We don't want to hear about it! We don't want to see it! Unless they did something creative we don't know about Have you noticed that all this weird stuff is occurring at the end of the 20th century? I'm not just referring to the ozone layer or the Super Soaker.

Seems that, at a time when we've never talked more about personal freedom, choices, diversity and equality, we've also become obsessed with censorship and other restrictions. And for our children, we want the best for them, perhaps better than we have, as long as we decide what that is. Yes, dear, you can buy Bowie's "Tin Machine II;" I just don't want you knowing about the male anatomy. Why, of course you can borrow the copy of Biblical Archaeology Review. Pages missing? I didn't notice any pages missing.

Or perhaps I'm wrong about the audience. Perhaps the album cover and magazine aren't intended to shelter children at all; perhaps they're intended not to offend "us." way on their side, and that gave them the Soviet Army, right? It seems from the lack of radio intercepts by our intelligence agencies that the plotters gave scant attention to sending orders out to the numerous military districts and commands in the country. The junta had Moscow, and what else mattered, right? If anything proves that Gorbachev was right when he canceled the exams, this is it The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was and is intellectually bankrupt In concentrating on the putative chief of government and the capital city only, the party proved unable to break with a past that is past The Soviet Army, I learned a few months ago, was in a state of schism. The junior officers were publishing articles ic source journals decrying the state of their country and their army. In the Russian Federation election, both the rank-and-file conscripts and the company-grade officers had voted for Yeltsin.

I forwarded that tidbit to a Pentagon-reporter friend, who confirmed it with the Defense Intelligence Agency. By Monday afternoon, we were both in agreement that this coup would fail on that basis alone. The historical only on condition that he would not be quoted by name. "Ask the senator." When the Capitol opened in 1800, no one had hideaways, offices or any other personal space beyond his desk on the floor of the Senate. If senators had constituents to see, private conferences to hold or friends to entertain far from the public eye, that was their problem.

Gradually, of course, the more enterprising among them and senators are an enterprising lot laid claim to anything that wasn't nailed down. In the first half of the 19th century, Daniel Webster used his hideaway to entertain cronies and cut deals, greasing the wheels of government with samples from the wine cellar he kept there. A little more than 100 years later, a majority leader named Lyndon B. Johnson claimed seven hideaways on two floors, known as "Johnson Ranch East" Nowadays, however, the Senate has tempered a lot of the most blatant hustling for privilege. Every senator has a suite of offices in one of the three Senate office buildings within an underground subway ride of the Capitol.

Nobody can say he "needs" a hideaway. But they still have them. The hideaways today are apportioned by the Senate Rules Committee strictly on in lingerie all day on MTV, would be shocked at the discovery that, at least in ancient Greece, men were men? Now that the record stores and Bowie's label have airbrushed history, to say nothing of the male anatomy, does that mean teens will be asking their parents and teachers whether the great classical age was overrun by eunuchs? We know the Greeks were big on wine and white robes, that they lay around Athens and yakked a lot, but how to break the an end to both American dominance in the region and Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel. But within the Israeli-occupied territories, Palestinian taxi drivers and merchants talked of their happiness at seeing the downfall of a leader they called an American pawn. The intensity of the reaction disturbed the Palestinian leadership, prompting leading East Jerusalem activist Faisel al-Husseini to hand the Soviet consul in Israel a letter Wednesday insisting that Palestinians considered the coup an internal matter.

"This feeling of welcoming change anywhere in the world stems from the fact that we, as Palestinians, are really hurting," said Husseini aide and journalist Saeb Erakat "But we have a complicated position as it is. We didn't want to complicate it further by getting involved in Soviet internal affairs." Whether that attempt at damage control will work remains to be seen. Israeli embassies around the world were quick to distribute the more inflammatory of the Palestinian statements. But Israeli leaders, despite frenzied fears in the country that a new regime might close the door to Soviet Jews, were also careful during the crisis to avoid taking sides. Their caution was matched by Syrian officials, staunch allies of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet regimes, who also took a decidedly cautious tone until it became clearer who would win the Soviet power struggle.

Failure of coup left disappointment among many in Middle East By Susan Sachs Newsday JERUSALEM The collapse of the Soviet coup has crushed the hopes of radical Arab groups and many ordinary Palestinians that a new regime might try to reassert Soviet influence in the Middle East by championing their cause. But throughout the drama in the Soviet Union, Arab moderates kept to a cautious line, neither condemning nor welcoming the coup. Except for renewing their call for an end to Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel, they sat on the sidelines, terming the Soviet crisis an internal affair. As a result the fragile Arab consensus to attend a U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored regional peace conference this fall appears to be holding. Egypt and Syria said Thursday they believe a conference might still be convened in October.

Belgium and Switzerland Thursday offered Brussels and Bern, respectively, as conference sites The question of who will represent the Palestinians at a Middle East conference remains the major obstacle, and the failed Soviet coup served only to highlight the sharp divisions in the Palestinian community. In the early hours of the coup, hard-liners in Iran and Jordan rejoiced in Gorbachev's downfall, as did the governments of Libya and Iraq. Radical factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization that oppose Palestinian participation in a regional peace conference also welcomed the coup. The PLO itself was more low-key, expressing hope for.