On the sidelines of history

The first time Jim Oliver set foot in Washington was “very exciting.”

He was 16 and had never ridden in an airplane before. He had come to Congress from Wisconsin to work as a page. The year was 1967.

So, yes. Life outside the Cheese State was exciting.

And times were interesting. Talk inside Congress was of the Vietnam War.

“For the most part, I did what I do now, which is answer phones in the Cloak Room,” Oliver said this week.

As 2007 marches to a close, so does the congressional career of Oliver, who has spent the last 30 years working in the Republican House Cloak Room.

The only other real job he ever held was in Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign in 1975. He started off as a volunteer, but eventually became the campaign’s accountant despite having no accounting experience.

It was the first campaign that required expenditure reports to the Federal Election Commission. Oliver said it went well, except for an incident involving apples.

“We made a couple of mistakes along the way,” he said. “We weren’t sure how to account for some Michigan apples donated in a primary state … but we got through it all right.”

So far, Oliver feels no nostalgia or sadness about leaving the Cloak Room. Nor does he want a big sendoff, instead preferring to leave a lengthy career quietly. The 57-year-old retiree looks ahead to the cabin he plans to build on a lake in Indiana. He grew up in Mulberry, Ind., a town of 1,000 that he says is unknown even to people in the state. His family later moved to Wisconsin.

When he started out in Washington, Oliver directed pages from the page desk on the House floor for a semester.

“I answered the phones and told all the other pages what to do,” he said proudly.

What were pages like in those days?

“Pages may or may not have behaved themselves all that well, but it didn’t make the papers all that much,” Oliver recalled.

“It was a lot looser. Those were the days when the pages didn’t have a dormitory. They had their own apartments, lived in boarding houses, sometimes they made their own rules.”

Did he? “I was perfect,” said Oliver.

In those days, he recalled, lawmakers spent more time on the House floor and were friendlier with the pages.

Which, as history has shown, can be good and bad.

In 1977, the page supervisor, who had been Oliver’s boss when he was a page, retired, and Oliver assumed the post. Three years later, the scandal involving Rep. Dan Crane (R-Ill.) exploded after it was revealed that the congressman had sex several times at his suburban apartment with a 17-year-old female page.

When the Crane page scandal hit, Oliver said, “it was like being under a microscope for a year by the ethics committee and the FBI.”

In 1983, the House ethics committee reprimanded Crane along with Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), who in 1973 had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old male page. Studds invited the page to his Georgetown apartment and later took him on a two-week trip to Portugal.

Both lawmakers admitted to the charges. The full House censured them in 1983.
Oliver said he felt he did as much as he could to protect the pages.

“I’m sure there’s a lot that goes on that we didn’t know at the time because they [pages] were so scattered around Capitol Hill,” he said. One direct result, he added, was the creation of the page dorm.

Oliver’s thoughts on the scandals: “Well, I thought they were entirely inappropriate … but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Both were punished and investigated.”

At the time, Oliver was congratulated for not being part of any misbehavior. “I was half offended that they felt compelled to say that much,” he said.

Nine years later, he switched jobs. This time, he moved about 20 feet down the hallway to the Cloak Room, where he has worked ever since, answering phones and relaying the schedule and getting members of Congress their messages. He has also worked with a group of 21 pages assigned to the Cloak Room.

Two years ago, he was a bystander again when the scandal surrounding Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) unfolded. “I thought it was entirely inappropriate,” Oliver said. “At the same time, I think that the press was expecting more from the people who work with the page program than might reasonably be expected.”

Oliver said he compares working in the House Cloak Room to the TV show “M*A*S*H,” “where serious business is being done, but not everyone needs to take [himself] all that seriously.”

He recalled passing the time with former members such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who served in the House in the late 1960s, and George H.W. Bush, who served in the House at the same time.

Bush “would chat with pages like anyone else,” Oliver said of Bush père. “He was very nice … always popular with the pages.”

Former Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio), now in prison for racketeering charges, was another favorite. “Pages looked forward to his one-minutes and invited him to speak at their graduation at least two or three times,” he said.

In his off time, Oliver’s side project was the 200-year-old Congressional Cemetery. From 1989 to 2001, he volunteered to help manage and maintain it, doing everything from cutting the grass to digging holes for burials.  

On the topic of leaving, Oliver seems at peace.

“I would say it’s just about time,” he said. “I’m not as young as I used to be and find it hard to stay up for special orders until midnight at least once a week.”