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20 | Ship Shape

G

odesconRt RiBed hiMseLf as a budget groupie but Commerce

was his No. 1 committee. With broader jurisdiction than any

other substantive committee in the Senate, Commerce covers sci-

ence and transportation, including aviation, space exploration and ship-

ping by land and sea, as well as fisheries and telecommunications.

The last chairmanship available to the freshest of the freshmen was

the Merchant Marine Subcommittee, about which he knew nothing. He

immersed himself in the intricacies of maritime regulation and global

competition. A billion dollars’ worth of federal subsidies dating back to

World War I added up to “giving free dope to a junkie,” one critic wrote.

“The situation is so bad that the government now has to pay public

money to have privately owned ships built in noncompetitive domestic

shipyards. But even worse, despite all this gravy, the industry still has

trouble staying afloat.” The American Merchant Marine was burdened

with both the highest operating and the highest construction costs in

the industry, as well as whirlpools of red tape. Foreign carriers were

handling three-quarters of all goods entering or leaving the U.S. by

ship.^1

Through myriad court cases and bureaucratic turgidity, one of the ma-

jor facets of U.S. maritime law, the Shipping Act of 1916, had evolved into

a convoluted regulatory regime that met neither the carriers’ nor the ship-

pers’ needs. It was an arcane field of law with few political rewards, espe-

cially for a freshman senator. “The politically tricky part was that ship-

ping conferences existed in every trade lane in the world by virtue of

having antitrust immunity,” says Chris Koch, an expert on maritime law.

“Slade was no great fan of antitrust immunity,” his former aide notes.

“He was, however, a pragmatist, and international shipping conferences

were not going to be abolished as a political matter in the 1980s by a bill

in the U.S. Senate eliminating their antitrust immunity. Nor was a politi-

cal coalition to support an outright abolishment of shipping conferences

going to get the support of carriers, ports or maritime labor.”