The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  When I returned a few minutes later, Grace seemed close to panic.

  “Ira, it’s Chairman Brooks again,” she said, with an alarmed look. “He wanted to hold for you.”

  I picked up the phone. “Hello, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Shapiro, where you been, boy?” Brooks inquired.

  “Just down the hall, Mr. Chairman, in the men’s room,” I stammered.

  “Shapiro,” Brooks continued, “The CIA amendment? Forget it, son. Wrong bill.” And he hung up the phone.

  As suddenly as I had been condemned, I was spared. I called Eagleton to give him the good news, but his assistant said he was on the Senate floor. I rode the subway to the Capitol, went on the floor, and found him. In front of the couches where the Democratic staffers watched the Senate action, I recounted the call.

  Eagleton literally fell over laughing. He crashed on to the Senate staff couch, almost landing on a startled woman staff member. Thirty-two years later, I can see it as vividly as if it happened yesterday.

  On the evening of the closing day of the Ninety-fifth Congress in October 1978, I went looking for Senator Eagleton to tell him that the Inspectors General Act had passed both houses of Congress and would be sent to the president for signature. I found Eagleton in the Monocle restaurant, with Muskie. The two men were eating steaks, drinking wine, and relaxing from the rush of the closing day of a Congress, when the fate of many pieces of legislation gets resolved.

  Eagleton, with an impish grin, asked me to join them. Then he said, “Ed, I believe you know Ira Shapiro. He and Gaylord took away your income from making speeches.”

  Muskie gave me a sharp look. “You were wrong about that issue,” he said. “And so was Gaylord. There’s nothing wrong with giving speeches at colleges.” Then, suddenly, Muskie relaxed and smiled. “Still, I’ll admit that I had to pause when John Tower came by and said, ‘great speech, Ed.’ I knew that Tower would go downtown at lunch for an hour, give a speech to some group of bankers, and come back with $2,000.”

  IN REMARKS TO THE press, Byrd gave the Ninety-fifth Congress a grade of “A,” saying that it had dealt with more major legislation than any Congress he could recall. He was probably overstating the case, since no Congress could match the record of achievement of the historic Eighty-ninth Congress when President Lyndon Johnson drove through a raft of Great Society legislation. But Byrd could take pride in the record of the Senate in his first two years as majority leader. The Ninety-fifth Congress had compiled a remarkable record of achievement, facing one major domestic or foreign policy challenge after another. The Panama Canal treaties, the energy legislation, and the loan guarantees to New York City constituted major achievements, and in each case, the outcome had been in no way assured.

  The Senate had met the challenge time after time. On the Panama Canal treaties, many senators, particularly Democrats, had cast votes that were clearly dangerous for their own political well-being. They had also voted against the interests of some of their strongest constituencies on the natural gas legislation. But if the Senate Democrats deserved credit for political courage, the Senate Republicans deserved praise for political restraint. They had successfully employed the filibuster on labor law reform but had not resorted to it again, allowing the Senate to work its will on important issues by majority vote. The nation’s politics were moving to the right. The political currents were swirling and complex. But the Senate had managed to transcend politics to produce landmark achievements. It was not yet political scorched earth; it remained an arena where ideas were debated at length, persuasion still counted, compromise was valued, and the national interest prevailed.

  On September 26, Jimmy Carter claimed the greatest achievement of his presidency, and a truly historic accomplishment. After twelve days of direct and unprecedented presidential mediation, Carter succeeded in helping Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat reach an agreement by which Israel returned to Egypt large parts of the Sinai Desert captured in the 1967 war in exchange for Egypt making peace with Israel. Polls showed overwhelming public admiration for Jimmy Carter’s accomplishment and public confidence in Carter at its highest level since the early months of his presidency.

  Unfortunately for Democrats, in political terms, the legislative accomplishments and Carter’s historic peace making did not matter. In off-year congressional elections, voters almost always inflict losses on the party in power. In 1978, with public anger cresting, incumbents were extremely vulnerable. Despite Carter’s accomplishments, the Republicans had the momentum. Their troops were already energized by the Panama Canal treaties, the labor law reform fight, and the abortion issue, which Jesse Helms and pro-life forces had been pushing relentlessly around the country. Now thanks to Proposition 13, they were surfing the biggest political wave in many years. A New York Daily News poll, asking its readers to mark a “ballot” on taxes, got the largest response in its history, with 117,000 readers favoring slashing all taxes—property, sales, and income.

  The Republicans continued to ratchet up the pressure, using the Kemp-Roth tax cut proposal as a weapon to put Democrats on the record. On September 20, the GOP launched a seven-state campaign in support of Kemp-Roth in a Boeing 747 nicknamed the “Republican tax clipper,” featuring Reagan, Ford, and Baker. Baker, simultaneously running for reelection in Tennessee, gauging his presidential chances, and trying to atone for the Panama Canal treaties, told a cheering crowd: “It’s time to get the federal government off your back and out of your hair. . . . The Republican tax proposal may be the last chance for the free enterprise system in the United States.” Roth observed: “We have helped the rich, we’ve helped the poor, but we’ve ripped off the middle class. We have to change the country in a new direction and help our working people.”

  Democratic Senate candidates who were not burdened by past voting records moved rapidly to catch the tax-cut wave. In Minnesota, where two Senate seats were being contested because of Hubert Humphrey’s death, Robert Short, the conservative multimillionaire owner of the Minnesota Twins, seeking office for the first time, proposed slashing the federal budget by $100 billion. In a stunning upset, Short won the Democratic primary, defeating Representative Donald Fraser, a liberal stalwart of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party. In November, Short would lose to Republican David Durenberger. Rudy Boschwitz, a little-known Republican, would win Minnesota’s other seat by defeating Wendell Anderson, the former governor who had appointed himself to the Senate to fill Humphrey’s seat. In Illinois, attorney Alex Seith ran a tough, anti-tax campaign against Charles Percy. Percy’s campaign consultants had warned him for months that tax-cut fever was in the air. Percy, who did not believe in “meat axe tax cuts,” had brushed aside their concerns. But with his Senate seat suddenly in danger, Percy became a born-again tax cutter, publishing a “taxpayers’ agenda” brochure and endorsing Kemp-Roth. In his television ads, Percy told the voters of Illinois that he had “gotten the message”; they wouldn’t have to worry about Chuck Percy being a liberal Republican. Percy was not planning to go the route of Cliff Case, and he moved quickly and adroitly enough to win reelection.

  Republican political assets extended far beyond the tax revolt and the newly engaged business community. They also benefited from the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which had upheld the limits on political contributions, while concluding that limits on expenditures infringed the First Amendment. The decision opened the door to a flood of unrestricted donations to parties and an explosion of independent and corporate political action committees (PACs). The number of corporate PACs exploded from 139 in 1975 to 1,710 in 1985. Independent PACs, first counted in 1977, rose from 110 to 1,003 in eight years. “An unprecedented opportunity was created for the Republican Party by the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act,” Republican operative Lee Atwater later wrote. It was a seminal moment, a true turning point in American politics.

  By the 1978 election, conservatives controlled the five best-funded i
ndependent Political Action Committees: Ronald Reagan’s Citizens for the Republic, the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the American Medical Political Action Committee, and Gun Owners of America. Only the American Medical PAC had existed five years before. These PACs funneled significant financial resources to Republican Senate candidates. The Republicans also benefited from the small contributions resulting from the direct mail genius of Richard Viguerie, who built a mailing list of millions of names when he worked to retire George Wallace’s debt from the presidential campaign of 1972. These PACs formed so rapidly and raised money so quickly that the Democrats never really knew what hit them.

  ON ELECTION DAY 1978, the voters across the country signaled to the Washington Democrats that despite their efforts, the public mood remained angry at the federal government, deficit spending, and the level of taxation. The Senate Democratic majority was reduced by three. The House Democrats lost fifteen seats. Just on the numbers, this was not a bad result for the president’s party in an off-year election. But the evidence of a stronger tide and an uglier mood came through clearly.

  Dick Clark’s defeat shocked the Democrats most. Clark had come to the Senate in 1972, in an upset victory over the incumbent senator. He had captivated Iowans by walking the state and won by a large margin in the face of Nixon’s landslide victory. By all accounts, Clark had made a strong start in the Senate. He became a favorite of Common Cause by championing the Senate ethics code. He chaired the Africa Subcommittee of Foreign Relations, an important assignment as the Soviet Union extended its reach into Africa. Nor did he neglect home state interests.

  A week before the election, a poll by Peter Hart, the Democrats’ most trusted pollster, showed Clark with a twenty-point lead. On Sunday, two days before the election, Clark’s brother-in-law called him with a “heads up.” He and Clark’s sister were Catholic and had come out of church to find a pamphlet on their windshield that pictured a fetus and attacked Clark for favoring abortion. Every car in the parking lot had the pamphlet, and that was the case at Catholic churches all over the state. The race turned in the last forty-eight hours; Roger Jepsen, a seemingly weak candidate, stormed from behind to upset Clark.

  In Colorado, Floyd Haskell, a solid if undistinguished liberal, went down to William Armstrong, a talented arch-conservative, whose election continued the pattern of an increasingly New Right wave in the Mountain West. In New Hampshire, Tom McIntyre, a more formidable and accomplished liberal, lost to Gordon Humphrey, an airline pilot with no previous political experience. Humphrey was the darling of William Loeb, the strident right-wing editor of the Manchester Union Leader. Gun control proved to be a decisive issue, and Loeb had been gunning for McIntyre since the senator’s notable speech attacking the scorched earth tactics of the New Right during the Panama Canal debate.

  The national mood was clear. The New Right had succeeded in purging Case and scaring Percy. In Minnesota, the unconquerable Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, whose senators had included Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Eugene McCarthy, lost both Senate seats. In Massachusetts, liberal governor Michael Dukakis lost the Democratic primary to his conservative challenger, Ed King. In the Atlanta suburbs of Georgia, a young firebrand Republican, Newt Gingrich, won a congressional seat, launching a career that would help shape the next three decades in American politics.

  Jesse Helms was reelected by a comfortable margin in North Carolina, raising a record $7.7 million, which gave him a 30:1 funding advantage over his opponent. Helms had brought about a significant change in the operation of the Senate, repeatedly offering amendments to put “lib’ruls” on the record on sensitive social issues. At the same time, he created a new model for a senator: national political organizer and fund-raiser. Along with his aide, John Carbaugh, Helms had launched the Conservative Caucus in 1974. He helped create NCPAC, which historian Allan J. Lichtman called “the first all-purpose Political Action Committee of the right.” Describing itself as a “gut cutting organization”—and run by Charlie Black, a former Helms staffer, and Terry Dolan, two of the New Right’s most effective political operatives—NCPAC targeted and slammed Democratic senators relentlessly. Helms also formed his own PAC, the National Congressional Club, run by Tom Ellis, his leading political ally in North Carolina.

  Virtually single-handedly, Jesse Helms was bringing down the high wall that had separated the Senate from the outside world of partisan warfare and what would become known as the “permanent campaign,” where politics never stopped long enough to allow for the responsibilities of governing. In retrospect, it is now evident that the toxic politics that we live with today began in 1978. That was the moment that political action committees proliferated and that single-issue politics became commonplace. It was also the moment when legislative issues no longer found final resolution in Congress, but rather became ammunition for political campaigns. A strong Senate, with members of both parties whose roots were in the Great Senate of the 1960’s and earlier 1970’s, would work to resist the dangerous changes that had been unleashed. In later years, a weakened Senate would not be as successful.

  In 1964, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen had led twenty-seven out of thirty-three Republican senators to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act, at precisely the same time that his party was getting ready to give its presidential nomination to Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act. The right wing thought there was a “hidden majority” in the country that favored its position. Goldwater would, of course, be crushed by Lyndon Johnson. Dirksen and the Senate Republicans were out of step with the GOP’s rising right wing, but they understood the mood of the country.

  Now, fourteen years later, senators, Democratic and Republican, had worked effectively to make hard choices and accomplish things that were in the national interest. But unlike 1964, they would find that their legislative accomplishments were often out of touch with the mood of the country. The single-issue voters motivated by their intense feelings about abortion, guns, and the Panama Canal; the energized business community; and many members of the broad middle class, hard-pressed by inflation and seeking tax relief—this time, the “New Right” was getting closer to finding that majority; it was no longer well hidden.

  While the American people were moving to the right, liberal Democrats, frustrated by a series of administration decisions and failures, increasingly felt that Carter was not standing firm on the issues that mattered most. Byrd might have given the Ninety-fifth Congress the highest marks, but George McGovern denounced it as “the worst Congress in memory for working people.”

  Ted Kennedy had successfully spearheaded major legislation—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Airline Deregulation Act—but his mind was on the unfulfilled agenda. As part of its reform program, the Democratic Party had committed to holding its first off-year “mini-convention.” On December 9, in Memphis, Tennessee, speaking to 2,500 Democrats and reporters gathered for a workshop on health care, Kennedy delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his career. Proclaiming that “national health insurance is the great unfinished business on the agenda of the Democratic Party,” Kennedy evoked a memorable nautical image. “Sometimes a party must sail against the wind. We cannot afford to draft or lie at anchor. We cannot heed the call of those who say it is time to furl the sail.”

  The crowd went crazy, and the chairman of the workshop, Bill Clinton, the young governor of Arkansas, pounded Kennedy on the back as the ovation continued. Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, turned to Patrick Caddell, the president’s pollster, and said angrily, “That’s it. He’s running.”

  In fact, Kennedy had not yet decided to challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination for president. But his Memphis speech laid bare the fissure in the Democratic Party. As Carter struggled against an energized right wing, with the country moving in a conservative direction, he could not count on support from the liberal wing of his party. Carter and
most of the Senate Democrats were working to find the political center of the country. It remained to be seen whether the center was no man’s land.

  IRONICALLY, WHILE LIBERAL DISSENT was rising on domestic issues, and while Democratic senators were licking their wounds, Carter was earning the admiration of many Democrats by his willingness to take on the toughest foreign policy problems. On December 15, he surprised the country, and shocked the Senate, by announcing that the United States would establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and break its diplomatic ties with the Nationalist Chinese administration on Taiwan on January 1, 1979—in two weeks—and terminate its defense treaty with Taiwan a year later. After taking on the Panama Canal treaties, Jimmy Carter was walking into another foreign policy minefield and a likely battle in the Senate in the coming year.

  At the same time, a potential foreign policy disaster loomed as events began to spiral out of control in Iran. Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi’s program of land reform and economic modernization had antagonized the traditional clergy. The actions of the security police, SAVAK (an acronym for the Persian “National Intelligence and Security Organization”) and his reduction of the parliamentary process to a one-party system had cost the shah the support of secular democrats. By the spring of 1978, crackdowns on both groups inevitably created an expanding cycle of opposition.

  On September 8, Iranian troops had fired on a crowd of demonstrators in Jaleh Square, killing between 700 and 2,000 people, depending on which press reports were reliable. The next day, Tehran oil workers issued a call to strike in solidarity with those who had been killed and in protest against the shah’s imposition of martial law. In November, gangs of young men rampaged through Tehran, setting fires to banks, movie theaters, and liquor stores and shouting “Allah is great!”