The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  Byrd, who had written the history of the Roman Senate, as well as the American Senate, had served longer than any senator in the history of the United States. He would always be remembered for his total commitment to the Senate and its responsibilities in the constitutional system. In the last decade of his life, Byrd would earn the admiration of many Americans for blasting the “supine Senate” for failing to stop the decision to go to war in Iraq. Kennedy and Byrd each proved that it was possible to be a great senator even without a great Senate.

  IT IS NOW GENERALLY recognized that the 1980 election was a turning point in American political history, with Ronald Reagan winning the presidency and the Senate changing drastically. Reagan’s victory represented more than the electorate’s verdict that Jimmy Carter was a failed president. It was the triumph of what Dominic Sandbrook has called “the populist right,” and it reflected a significant departure by the Republican Party from its tradition of moderate conservatism, respect for privacy and individual freedom, and support for civil rights.

  But Reagan’s presidency would be followed by a further lurch to the right by the Republican Party, in 1994–1996, that would make Democrats, and many Republicans, long for the days of Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s relative moderation, pragmatism, and willingness to make deals across party lines. Those who thought that the Republican Party could go no further right learned otherwise in 2010, with the advent of the Tea Party. Mike Huckabee, whose surprisingly successful campaign for the 2008 Republican nomination drew support from the Christian Right, captured the new mood of today’s Republican Party, saying: “Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time, being nominated in this atmosphere.” And in this atmosphere, the Senate is our most vulnerable political institution, because bipartisan comity is the oxygen that is needs to function successfully.

  The question is—in this atmosphere, can the Senate somehow transform itself? Critics frequently suggest that the sixty-vote minimum required to cut off filibusters is the key to the body’s dysfunctions, but I remain skeptical that basic changes can be made in that area. The minority party will never agree to diminish the power it currently has, and the majority party, after considering it, will decide that it would be disastrous to ram through a change by majority vote. Moreover, as Senator Dodd reminded us: “In a nation founded in revolution against tyrannical rule . . . there should be one institution that would always provide a space where dissent was valued and respected.”

  But the Senate should be able to respect dissent without condemning itself to paralysis. Certain changes in the Senate rules are absolutely essential. In 2010, the country watched one senator, Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning, block the extension of unemployment benefits for two weeks, when even his Republican colleagues supported the legislation. The country also saw a single senator, Alabama senator Richard Shelby, block the confirmation of seventy Obama administration executive branch nominees, for reasons unrelated to their positions.

  This is madness. The Senate needs to agree upon rules changes that protect the minority party, but prevent individual senators from paralyzing the institution or blocking the president from staffing the executive branch. Justice Robert Jackson once wrote: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Neither are the Senate rules.

  To turn back the current wave of intense partisanship, the most fundamental change must come from senators themselves. The Republican caucus includes a significant number of senators who have been positive and constructive forces in the past, but at some point decided that it was necessary to join a unified Republican minority. In the lame-duck session of 2010, the Republican senators showed how quickly the Senate could change when they returned to exercising their independent judgment—in essence, to being senators. The Senate enacted legislation to end the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for gays and lesbians in the military because eight Republican senators refused to follow their leader in opposition. The Senate ratified the START treaty limiting nuclear arms because thirteen Republican senators refused to follow the Republican leader. For instance, Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee went into a confidential briefing on START opposed to the treaty, listened to the presentation, and came out convinced that he should support it. His change of position was striking, because it happens so rarely these days. But that’s the way the last Great Senate worked all the time.

  America is adrift in turbulent and dangerous waters. Facing enormous challenges at home and abroad, we urgently need our once-vaunted political system to function at its best, instead of at its worst. To be sure, it is more difficult to be a senator today than it was in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The increasingly vitriolic political culture, fueled by a twenty-four-hour news cycle, the endless pressure to raise money, the proliferation of lobbyists and demanding, organized interests are all well known, and they take a toll. But all those factors make it more essential that our country has a Senate of men and women who bring wisdom, judgment, experience, and independence to their work, along with an understanding that the Senate must be able to take collective action in the national interest.

  This book tells the story of The Last Great Senate. “Last” can be defined to mean that there have been, and can be, no other great Senates. But “last” can also be defined as “most recent,” meaning that there can be another Great Senate after all.

  The men and women who are senators today, and those who will join them after the next election, have it in their power to begin making the Senate great again. They have the enormous honor and privilege of walking where the giants walked—Humphrey and Javits, Mansfield and Dirksen, Kennedy and Baker, Jackson and Byrd. It is my hope that they will look at the struggles, accomplishments, and lessons of the last Great Senate, and the urgent needs of our country, and make us proud again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A first-time author, I discovered that the allegedly solitary work of writing a book is not really so solitary. So many friends and acquaintances in the political community expressed their strong belief that this was an exciting book—that the Great Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s should not be forgotten. I am enormously grateful for the enthusiastic encouragement that I received over the past three years.

  Initial thanks go to five friends with whom I worked in the Senate in 1978—Richard Wegman, Brian Conboy, Alan Bennett, Paul Hoff, and Paul Rosenthal. In 2008, the excitement of the presidential campaign brought us together monthly for breakfast. Inevitably, we also recalled the great times that we had working in the Senate. It was after one of our breakfasts in June 2008 that I decided to write about the Senate when it was great. The instant, unfeigned excitement of my family and closest friends about the book gave me the jumpstart that a major project needs.

  My thanks also go to a number of gifted writers and savvy political people who were kind enough to read parts or all of my draft manuscript: Ken Ackerman, Al Crenshaw, Margaret Crenshaw, Mary Eccles, Alan Ehrenhalt, Peter Fenn, Tamera Luzzatto, Edie Mossberg, Walt Mossberg, Carey Parker, Donald Ritchie (the Senate Historian), Matt Seiden, Wendy Sherman, and Bruce Stokes. Special appreciation goes to Ken, because I also benefited greatly from the workshop he teaches on narrative history; to Alan, because he gave me the single best piece of advice that I received—“don’t research and interview forever; write as much book as you have time for”; and Wendy, for looking at a proposed eight-word title, crossing out four of the words and leaving “The Last Great Senate” on the napkin in the restaurant. I am also extremely grateful to Heather Moore, the Senate photo historian, for helping me find many of the wonderful pictures included in this book.

  Howard Paster, a major political figure in Washington for more than three decades, passed away on August 11. He shared his vivid recollections and great insights about the Senate with me several times, including once just a few weeks before his death. His many friends will miss his wisdom and generosity of spirit.

  I benefited immeasurably from the excellent work of Joe Marks, my research assi
stant, who pored over newspapers, magazines, and congressional proceedings to help me reconstruct the public record. I found Joe through Madeleine Albright; she recommended him as a former (and future) journalist who was one of her best graduate students at Georgetown. As usual, Madeleine’s assessment was unerring.

  Kathy Anderson, my agent, has been the wonderful friend and astute adviser that an aspiring author needs. She had built some credibility with me in 2004 when she advised me not to write a book about my losing congressional campaign. This time, she loved the idea of a book about the Great Senate, never doubting that it was potentially an important book that could find an eager audience. Based on this track record, I never question her judgment.

  I will always feel a great debt of gratitude to Peter Osnos and Susan Weinberg, the founder and publisher, respectively, of PublicAffairs, for giving an unproven author the chance and support to write this book. Our initial meeting in August 2009 was one that I won’t ever forget. They encouraged me to tell the story the way I wanted, as long as I promised not to make it a memoir or trudge through the entire 1960’s and 1970’s year by year. They also gave me a terrific editor in Brandon Proia, who has combined a great gift for narrative and language, deep interest in the subject, tremendous responsiveness, and unfailing humor and warmth. I am grateful to the whole PublicAffairs team, including Martha Whitt, for meticulously copyediting the manuscript, Michelle Welsh-Horst, for pulling together all the pieces and compiling the final version, and Tessa Shanks, for her efforts to create anticipation and interest in the book. Together, they made the publication process an enjoyable adventure, constantly moving forward.

  At this point, the author usually apologizes to his or her family because of the time that writing took away from them. That didn’t happen in our case. We have four generations living within twenty minutes of each other, and the excitement resulting from the birth of our twin grandsons two years ago—so, we see each other all the time. I will apologize, though, for how much I have talked about the book, and thank everyone for putting up with me.

  To my daughter Susanna, my son Brian, my son-in-law Gabe, and my grandsons, Jacob and Zev: I hope that the book can contribute to a national debate that brings about a political system in our country more effective, courageous, and far-sighted than what we have today.

  Finally, of course, my greatest thanks go to my wife, Nancy. I remember her eyes lighting up when I told her the idea for the book. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “You have to write it.” It wasn’t quite the same as the radiant excitement of June 1969 when we started our marriage and I first came to the Great Senate. But it wasn’t that different, either.

  IRA SHAPIRO

  October 2011

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Any book that chronicles history presents formidable research challenges. My book is a little unusual, because it attempts to recount and recapture the working of the U.S. Senate over a four-term period, from January 1977 through December 1980, rather than focusing on the work of one senator, or the development of one piece of legislation. Moreover, the narrative about the four years is “backlit” by the achievements and disappointments of the Senate during the previous fifteen years, and the book concludes with an epilogue that attempts to explain what has happened since the great Senate shattered in 1980. Consequently, the book actually spans close to fifty years. When one casts the net that wide, it goes without saying that it is impossible to research everything, or to know everything, and I certainly don’t pretend to have accomplished either.

  My basic approach was to rely on the public record of the actions of the Senate and the leading senators of the time. The principal sources fell into two categories. First, there was the Senate’s actions and proceedings, in committee hearings and markups and floor statements and debates, and reported through leading newspapers and magazines, most notably, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time, and Congressional Quarterly.

  Second, I have drawn heavily on the biographies that have been written about leading senators. Any author who undertakes to write about the Senate labors in the shadow of Robert Caro’s brilliant Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, and I derived a great deal of insight and knowledge from Caro’s book. I am also indebted to the work of other historians and journalists, and while it is dangerous to single out sources that were most helpful, there are several biographies that I found myself returning to repeatedly: J. Lee Annis’s biography of Howard Baker, Don Oberdorfer’s biography of Mike Mansfield, Francis Valeo’s memoir about Mansfield, Robert G. Kaufman’s biography of Henry Jackson, Byron Hulsey’s biography of Everett Dirksen, Adam Clymer’s biography of Ted Kennedy, LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer’s biography of Frank Church, William Link’s biography of Jesse Helms, Bill Christofferson’s biography of Gaylord Nelson, Randall Bennett Woods’biography of J. William Fulbright, Karl Campbell’s biography of Sam Ervin, Stephen Gillon’s biography of Walter Mondale, and Jules Witcover’s recently released biography of Joe Biden. Special appreciation goes to Oberdorfer and Valeo, because it is impossible to understand the Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s without understanding Mansfield’s central role in creating a democratized Senate.

  Third, I have benefited greatly from memoirs, or other books, written by the senators. In this category, most valuable to me were the memoirs of Jacob Javits, George McGovern, Paul Douglas, John Tower, Trent Lott, John Danforth, and the very recently released memoirs of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. While I found Robert Byrd’s autobiography to be disappointing, Senator Byrd’s superb Addresses on the History of the Senate, Vol. 2, more than made up for it, and was extraordinarily valuable. Thomas Eagleton’s War and Presidential Power: A Chronicle of Congressional Surrender is a vivid study of a senator grappling with an executive branch opposed to Congress’s effort to reassert its authority to declare war.

  My book also draws on, and benefits from, a number of valuable books about the Senate, including such classics as Donald Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World and Ross Baker’s Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate. Lewis Gould’s The Most Exclusive Club is a wonderful volume about the twentieth-century Senate. I hope that I benefited from several books that capture the complex texture and rhythm of the Senate on a day-to-day basis. In this regard, several wonderful books about the Senate in the 1970’s were delights to reread—Eric Redman’s, The Dance of Legislation , Elizabeth Drew’s Senator, Bernard Asbell’s The Senate Nobody Knows, and Senator William Cohen’s Roll Call—as was Harry McPherson’s A Political Education , depicting the Senate of the late 1950’s. It was great fun to reread Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, the 1959 Pulitzer Prize–winner that first hooked me, and countless other Americans, on the Senate, and politics in general.

  I must give special mention to Ambassador William Jorden’s Panama Odyssey, published in 1984. With the possible exception of Caro’s masterpiece, no book captures the actions of U.S. senators as vividly as Jorden, once a distinguished New York Times diplomatic correspondent, did in describing the epic Senate battle over the Panama Canal treaties. As a former international trade negotiator, I also recommend it as a book that superbly captures the roller-coaster nature of high-stakes international negotiations. Jorden’s book provides the major source for my description of the Senate’s consideration of the Panama Canal treaties. My chapter on the Chrysler loan guarantee act also draws heavily from the insightful book New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System, by Robert Reich and John Donohue.

  Because the narrative focuses on the Senate during the years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, I relied heavily on some of the important books about that presidency. President Carter’s 1982 memoir, Keeping Faith, and his newly released White House Diary were indispensable to me, as was Vice President Mondale’s memoir, The Good Fight. Betty Glad’s 2009 book on Carter’s foreign policy was also particularly helpful to me.

  The Senate of the late 1970’s did its work during crisis years for America, at precisely a moment when American politics w
as changing profoundly. It is well known that the political currents in America were moving strongly to the right, that special-interest groups were turning to new, sophisticated, and targeted lobbying techniques, and that political campaigns were becoming more costly and more vicious. In retrospect, it is quite clear that today’s toxic politics were born in the late 1970’s and are closely related to the rise of the New Right. Among the sources most helpful to me on these issues were Link’s biography of Jesse Helms, Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan, Adam Clymer, Drawing a Line at the Big Ditch, John Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy, Alan Crawford’s Thunder on the Right, Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970’s and the Rise of the Populist Right, and, coincidentally, the work of two of my old friends from Brandeis, where I attended college: Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, and Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Republican Counter-Establishment.

  I would never presume to write the biography of any individual senator without delving deeply into his or her papers, but because of the scope and span of my book, I decided not to rely on senatorial papers. I conducted approximately ninety interviews with senators and staff members of that era. I understand that there is some controversy among historians about the utility and validity of doing interviews, with Dr. Wilentz, among others, suggesting that interviews are potentially unreliable and blur the line between history and journalism. In this case, I was frankly more concerned by the fact that I could never do as many interviews as I would ideally like to do—so many former senators and staff members had wonderful insights and recollections to contribute. I finally resolved the issue by recognizing that the book was not going to be based primarily on interviews; rather, I hope it is animated by them.