I watched most of the coverage surrounding the death of Ted Kennedy over the past couple of weeks, and was really taken with one particular point that was repeated several times by many commentators and reporters – Are there any “giants” left in the Senate?
Politico even ran a top story contemplating which sitting Senators could qualify as having both the Kennedy-level of allegiance from the Party base, coupled with the necessary respect among colleagues to pass legislation (John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, and Dick Durbin were their finalists). Willie Brown, on MSNBC, declared Michael Bennett of Colorado, who has yet to win a Senate term*, as the “next Ted Kennedy.” Someone – I can’t remember who – listed Sherrod Brown as the one to watch (actually, he’d make my short list as well), and a couple of people, including Lawrence O’Donnell, weirdly picked Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican, but still… a Republican.
Anyway, I may only be 29 years old, but I still got a bit nostalgic for the concept of these “Senate giants” who left the scene years before my political consciousness. My normal desire to time travel took on a very “Saunders and Diz” quality – wanting to check out the old Senate cloak room, maybe eavesdrop on a smoke-filled room, or do the Washington cocktail circuit with Mary McGrory.
As if that wasn’t enough, C-Span has spent the week running tapes from 1964 and 1965 of LBJ’s phone conversations with Senators about the Medicare vote: conversations with people like Al Gore Sr., Russell Long, and Wilbur Mills (confession: I’d never heard of Wilbur Mills before listening to these tapes on C-Span, and anyway, he was a Congressman, not a Senator.) I hadn’t actually intended to listen to the LBJ tapes on C-Span – that seemed a bit too wonky even for someone like me – but I really did get hooked.
Bottom line: the multiple paths to nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to take on a new history project… reading up on all those mid-century Senate giants I’d been hearing about. Two things had to be determined; 1) exactly which Congress best represented the era; and 2) within that term, how would I distinguish the “giants” from the more ordinary Senators? On the first, I picked the 86th Congress: 1959 – 1961. It was LBJ’s last go-round as majority leader, and many of the members stayed on to cast votes on civil rights legislation and Vietnam. The Democrats were still defined by their adherence to New Deal principles, and the New Left wouldn’t come on the scene for another 8 or 9 years. On the second determination… I basically just wikipedia’d the 86th Congress, looked through the names of Senators, and decided the “giants” were the people I’d heard of. Real scientific.
I had half expected to debunk the myth that the Senate was somehow larger then than it is now. I would’ve been a bit disappointed with that conclusion – it would kind of take the thrill out of my Saunders and Diz time-traveling fantasy (and yeah, Saunders and Diz were part of fictional 1939 Washington, so the connection requires a bit of imagination). I wasn’t disappointed though – these guys were bigger. Aside from LBJ, Long, and the senior Gore were names like Fulbright, Dirksen, Humphrey, McCarthy (Gene, not Joe), Muskie, Goldwater, Thurmond, and Mansfield. Second tier, in terms of name recognition, were Senators Kefauver, Yarborough, Javits, “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Ervin, Smathers, Church, and Russell. JFK served in Massachusetts until resigning in December ‘60, for fairly obvious reasons. Other famous family names included Thomas Dodd and Prescott Bush – both of Connecticut.
I read up a bit on many of them and made a few observations – one of which takes me down a whole other path, a whole other train of thought:
Hubert Humphrey was pretty awesome. I always liked what I knew about him – I’m partial to anyone who earns the “happy warrior” label – but the more I read about him, the more reasons I find to justify my admiration. Not to go too far out on a New-Left-bashing tangent, but I can’t believe how completely liberals turned on him in ‘68. They had quite the uncanny ability to eat their own. First, they march around asking LBJ how many kids he killed today. Everything else is forgotten: the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of the nation, the Great Society and the most far-reaching domestic program since FDR. Not enough apparently to earn any good will from the Left. But Humphrey too? He’d been fighting the good liberal fight for decades, and suddenly he gets heckled by the Left and abandoned by the people he spent his career championing? Songs like “Whatever Became of Hubert?” shouts of “sell-out” at campaign events… Were we stupid?
And here’s the sidenote: my Humphrey kick led me to watch 2 documentaries, Primary and Chisholm. Primary is about the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary between Humphrey and JFK. It basically highlights the difference between wholesale politics (JFK) and retail politics (Humphrey, in scenes walking down a street, handing out business cards).
The second film, Chisholm, was about Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Politicians kind of sucked that year, it seems. Everyone was so super-serious about everything. The documentary itself seemed like a Saturday Night Live parody – every interviewee, without fail, said that no one took Chisholm seriously because “she was black,” “she was a woman.” The full documentary was about an hour long, and they could’ve cut that in half if they’d made those points only once or twice. Was everyone in 1972 so… I don’t know… ridiculously self-righteous and politically zealous? Oh, and this one asshole who was interviewed admitted that he became politically involved because he was of draft age. This is exactly who they talk about when they talk about college students who dropped out of the movement after the draft ended. As for the politicians in the documentary, Chisholm wasn’t the only one guilty of taking herself too seriously (although she was a definite offender). For the most, they all did.
Except Hubert, who came across as an outdated, but endearing practitioner of the Old Politics: “I was there for you, and now I need you to stand with me…” Retail Hubert, with his labor audiences and his black audiences and his unfailing smile. Of course, he lost the nomination to McGovern that year, and retail politics (no matter how it’s spun every 4th year in Iowa) pretty much died off after that. It might be a stretch to say that that marked the end of the Senate giants, but it definitely was an indicator. Being good-natured and likable, trading in on favors, the meat-and-potatoes rhetoric – apparently outdated in both the Senate and on the Presidential campaign trail.
And now we are where we are. An awful August of crazy town-hall meetings, death panels, and “pulling the plug on grandma” capped off with the loss of the last Senate giant. An ideologically pure Left that seems directly descended from the Hubert-hecklers of ‘68, spineless Blue Dogs who will almost certainly never be elevated to Giant status (“weasel” apparently being their highest aim) and the batshit crazy Right, notable especially for the fact that there are actual elected members of the Senate who validate them (also notable for bringing guns to Obama events and drawing cute little Hitler mustaches on their signs).
It’s easy to trace the difference in today’s Congress in comparison to Congress in 1960 in many ways: C-Span cameras, talk radio, internet, constant fundraising keeping members out of DC on weekends, or – as one columnist put it – the end of the drinking culture. Maybe with all of those systemic changes, we’ll just have to redefine what qualifies someone as a Senate giant. A more transparent, less-clubby Senate definitely has its pluses as well, even if it does come at the expense of the more fabled, sausage-making aspect of legislating. That’s a tough concession to make after watching the coverage from this summer though. It sure would be comforting to have some happy warriors in there now: willing to both fight the good fight, and cut the needed deals.
I’m not so cynical as to believe that the era of Senate giants is gone for good. I actually really like some of the people currently serving, and I think the class of ‘06 in particular is strong enough to take on the mantle in a decade or two. Maybe it will be Sherrod Brown. Or Claire McCaskill, or Jim Webb. Maybe Tom Harkin or Dick Durbin will become the mentors and Senate elders.
Plus, there’s always Michael Bennett, legislative legend.
*Bennett was selected to complete the term of Ken Salazar after Obama picked Salazar for Secretary of the Interior.
