The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  1977

  chapter 1 - THE GRIND

  chapter 2 - THE NATURAL

  chapter 3 - GREAT EXPECTATIONS, DIFFERENT AGENDAS

  chapter 4 - HAWK AND DOVE

  chapter 5 - THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY

  chapter 6 - THE LIBERAL FILIBUSTER

  1978

  chapter 7 - A YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

  chapter 8 - THE PANAMA CANAL FIGHT

  chapter 9 - VENTURING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST

  chapter 10 - AN EPIC BUSINESS-LABOR CLASH

  chapter 11 - SAVING NEW YORK

  chapter 12 - CLOSING DAYS

  1979

  chapter 13 - BEFORE THE STORM

  chapter 14 - ENERGY BATTLES AFTER THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

  chapter 15 - FIGHTING THE ECONOMIC TIDE

  chapter 16 - SALT II

  1380

  chapter 17 - A TOUGH POLITICAL CLIMATE

  chapter 18 - AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER

  chapter 19 - FIGHTING TO SURVIVE

  chapter 20 - THE LAME-DUCK SESSION

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  INTERVIEWS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  TO NANCY,

  For your love and support in this venture, and all the others.

  PROLOGUE

  On February 15, 2010, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana shocked his party and the political community by announcing that he would not seek a third term in the Senate. Fifty-four years old, Bayh had been Indiana’s governor for eight years before being elected to the Senate in 1998. A respected centrist Democrat, he had briefly pursued a presidential bid in 2008 and was reportedly one of the three people most seriously considered by Barack Obama to be his running mate. Despite a tough political environment for Democrats nationally, Bayh had already raised $13 million for his campaign and seemed to be a solid favorite to win reelection.

  But in an eight-minute announcement, Evan Bayh made it clear that he was fed up with the Senate. “There is too much partisanship and not enough progress—too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem solving,” he stated. “Even at a time of enormous challenge the people’s business is not being done.” Close friends noted that as a former governor, Bayh was used to “results, solutions and accountability” and found the Senate “frustrating.”

  Perhaps most important, it wasn’t his father’s Senate.

  Birch Bayh, a lawyer, a farmer, and an Indiana state legislative leader, narrowly won election to the Senate in 1962. He was part of the memorable class of ’62, which included Abraham Ribicoff, George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, Daniel Inouye, and Edward (“Ted”) Kennedy. These men arrived in the Senate at a unique moment of peace and prosperity when all things seemed possible in America.

  Only thirty-four years old when he came to Washington, Bayh went on to participate quickly in the passage of two historic civil rights acts and the torrent of legislation that Lyndon Johnson rammed through the 89th Congress to build a “Great Society.” He served through the national traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. He battled Richard Nixon and defeated two of his Supreme Court nominees. He authored constitutional amendments and was on the front lines expanding rights for women. His legislation to disseminate government-funded research to the private sector was described by Economist Technology Quarterly as “perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation enacted in America in the past half century,” helping to create many of the companies listed on the NASDAQ. He chaired the newly created Intelligence Committee and investigated the connection between President Jimmy Carter’s brother and the government of Libya. In the end, he was defeated in 1980 by a little-known Congressman named Dan Quayle and swept away by Ronald Reagan and the conservative political tide. Even so, Birch Bayh went down fighting for what he believed in. He left with a record of accomplishment and a reputation that still lives today.

  That was a Senate career.

  Is there any wonder then why Evan Bayh, a teenager during much of his father’s Senate service, might conclude that the Senate of the 1990’s and 2000’s was a bad joke? No one had told him that his father’s tenure precisely coincided with the eighteen-year period when the Senate was at its zenith.

  This is the story of the final four years of that era of greatness—of the last great Senate. For nearly twenty years, from 1963 to 1980, the Senate occupied a special place in America. Working with presidents when possible, holding them accountable when necessary, the Great Senate provided ballast, gravitas, and bipartisan leadership for America during the crisis years of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

  That Senate overcame our country’s legacy of racism by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, probably the most important legislative accomplishment in American history, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It attacked the premises of the Vietnam War, produced Democratic challengers to President Lyndon Johnson, and ultimately, on a bipartisan basis, cut off funding for the war. The Senate battled President Richard Nixon’s efforts to turn the Supreme Court to the right, defeating two of his nominees in two years. Through its memorable televised hearings, the Senate made Watergate understandable to the nation and called Nixon to account. It conducted an extraordinary investigation into the abuses of our nation’s intelligence agencies. And the Senate spearheaded new environmental and consumer protections and expanded food stamp and nutrition programs, as well as civil rights for minorities and women.

  It all came to an end in 1980. Ronald Reagan’s landslide election ushered in a new conservative political era, changing the Senate dramatically. On January 3, 1981, when the new Senate convened, fifty-five members had served less than six years. This represented much more than a change of party control. A basically progressive Senate had transformed into a basically conservative one.

  The men who lost their seats—particularly Bayh, Frank Church, Jacob Javits, Warren Magnuson, Gaylord Nelson, and George McGovern, along with Abraham Ribicoff, who had retired, and Edmund Muskie, who had left the Senate seven months earlier to become Secretary of State—made an indelible mark in American political history. They were replaced by some of the least effective people ever elected to the Senate. Many arrived without any political accomplishments to speak of and left six years later with that record intact.

  The election of 1980 shattered the Great Senate, and the Senate has never really regained its stature or reclaimed its special place in the life of our country. In the three decades since, the Senate, the proud “upper house,” has become basically a third wheel in our political system, while Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Bush did battle with the House of Representatives and its powerful Speakers, Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, Newt Gingrich, and Nancy Pelosi.

  The Senate’s descent from greatness did not go unnoticed. In 2005, political historian Lewis L. Gould wrote that “a profound sense of crisis now surrounds the Senate and its members,” and it would grow still worse. As Barack Obama took office in January 2009, with America facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the already diminished Senate became virtually dysfunctional: torn by partisanship, paralyzed by filibusters and holds, obsessed with fund-raising, the institution seemed frustrated by its lack of accomplishment but unable to change the situation. The once-proud Senate often seemed to be a parody of itself, or in the words of George Packer in The New Yorker, “the empty chamber.”

  In Washington, D.C., and across our nation, millions of Americans who first were drawn to politics because of John F. Kennedy, civil rights, or the Vietnam War remember the age when the Senate was
great—the Senate of Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirksen, Mike Mansfield, Jacob Javits, Howard Baker, Philip Hart, Sam Ervin, J. William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Abraham Ribicoff, Robert Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Henry Jackson, Albert Gore Sr., Edmund Muskie, Warren Magnuson, Paul Douglas, Walter Mondale, Robert Dole, Frank Church, Gaylord Nelson, John Sherman Cooper, Eugene McCarthy, George Aiken, Margaret Chase Smith, Birch Bayh, Richard Russell, George McGovern, William Proxmire, Ed Brooke, and Barry Goldwater—names that still resonate in Washington and in their states.

  The Great Senate was hardly perfect. The Senate gave Lyndon Johnson the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964 because the Democrats wanted him to look strong against Barry Goldwater in the presidential campaign. The Senate approved William Rehnquist’s nomination to the Supreme Court in December 1971 because it was tired of fighting with President Nixon and wanted to adjourn for Christmas. But the Senate of that era remained both powerful and consequential in spite of its lapses. Dealing with civil rights, war and peace, and presidential power, the Senate seemed to have a special relationship to the Constitution. It had moral authority. It occupied a unique role in our country, just as the Founders had intended.

  In the compromise that made possible the adoption of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers chose to create a bicameral legislature in which the Senate would play two central roles that the Framers saw as necessary. The Senate would serve as a check on executive power that the American people feared and detested, having just revolted against the excesses of the King of England. Consequently, the president could nominate cabinet members and judges, but the Senate had to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the treaties became effective only after two-thirds of the Senate approved them.

  But the Senate would also serve as a check on the political passions of the day, which the Founding Fathers believed might rip through the new republic and find expression in the House of Representatives, “the people’s House.” Thomas Jefferson had been abroad when the Constitution was written. He asked George Washington why he had accepted the idea of a Senate. Washington responded, “Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?” Jefferson answered, “To cool it.” Washington replied, “even so we put legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

  To discharge those responsibilities, the Constitution gave members of the Senate a six-year term, to give them more independence from the passions of the day. Senators were required to be at least thirty years of age, where House members could be twenty-five. In Federalist Paper #62, James Madison referred to “the nature of the senatorial trust, which requires great extent of information and stability of character.” Senators were also appointed by the legislatures of their state, not elected by the people until 1913 when the Constitution was amended to require popular election of senators. Daniel Webster referred to “a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence.” And each state would get two members of the Senate, regardless of their population (contrary to what Washington and Madison had originally envisioned), further ensuring extended debate and the ability to protect small states and different regional interests.

  Around the world, there is no “upper house” comparable to the U.S. Senate. In other democracies, the “upper house” is either honorific, like the British House of Lords, or involved in legislation, but with constrained powers, like the upper house of the Japanese Diet. For that reason, the U.S. Senate has long been called the world’s “greatest deliberative body.”

  Despite the accolades, the painful truth is that the Senate has failed to measure up to the challenges of the times for long periods of American history. In his 2005 book, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, Gould reached a depressing conclusion: “For protracted periods—at the start of the twentieth century, in the era of Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1920’s, and again for domestic issues in the post–World War II era—the Senate functioned not merely as a source of conservative reflections on the direction of society but as a force to genuinely impede the nation’s vitality and evolution.”

  The Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s stands as an extraordinary exception to Gould’s gloomy analysis. For a period of nearly twenty years, the Senate came closer to the ideal set forth by the Founding Fathers than at any other time in our nation’s history. Men—and the Senate was at that time comprised of all men, other than Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who was an independent stalwart for most of the period, and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, who arrived in 1979—of intelligence, experience, and genuine wisdom came together to help steer the ship of state during a perilous period.

  What made that Senate great?

  It started with a unique group of people at a unique time in American history. Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation needs no postscript. But it is certainly true that the experience that many members of the Great Senate shared by serving in World War II profoundly influenced their lives and shaped their public service. Men who had fought at Normandy or Iwo Jima or the Battle of the Bulge weren’t frightened by the need to cast a hard vote now and then. Seeing Paul Douglas or Daniel Inouye or Robert Dole on the Senate floor, living with crippling injuries or pain, and the other veterans fortunate to have escaped unscathed, set a standard of courage and character for those who followed them.

  These men returned from the war with confidence in themselves and their country. They became party builders, and, for the most part, progressives. They believed in what America could accomplish, and most of them believed strongly that government had an indispensable role to play. Having seen America’s strength, they were also willing to confront, and rectify, its weaknesses. They also got to serve at a time when America’s economic prosperity was unquestioned, and its potential seemed unlimited. That allowed for ambitious legislative efforts to build the nation, expand opportunities, and right historic wrongs.

  The Great Senate was also a magnet that drew talented, ambitious young men and women from all over the country, regardless of whether their fathers or mothers had been famous or obscure. They first came to Washington in the early to middle 1960’s, attracted to Washington by the idealism and excitement of John Kennedy’s presidency. Later, they came because of their commitment to civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, or anger over Watergate. The Senate was the place to be: where a young man or woman could hitch their star to a major national figure, make a mark at a young age, and learn firsthand the skills needed to accomplish things in politics—above all, when to stand on principle, and when to compromise for the greater good.

  It was no accident that the staff of the Great Senate included young men and women who would be future senators and congressional leaders: George Mitchell, Tom Daschle, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, Fred Thompson, Tom Foley, Jane Harman, and Norm Dicks; future press and media luminaries: Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, George Will, Mark Shields, Jeff Greenfield, Colbert King, and Steven Pearlstein; and a future secretary of state, Supreme Court justice, and president: Madeleine Albright, Stephen Breyer, and Bill Clinton. As Justice Holmes once wrote about those who had been young during the Civil War: “In [their] youth, to [their] great good fortune, [their] hearts were touched by fire.”

  But it was not just the unique senators and staffers, nor was it the crisis times they faced that made the Senate great. It was a concept of the Senate that they shared.

  Senators take the oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” But there is also an unspoken oath that many senators come to understand. The people of their states had given them the incredible privilege and honor of being U.S. senators. They had received the most venerable of titles that a democracy can bestow and a six-year term (usually leading to multiple terms) to serve. They would have the opportunity to deal with the full spectrum of issues, domestic and foreign, and they would develop expertise and experience valuable to the Senate and the country. In exchange, when they sorted out the comp
eting, cascading pressures on them, they would serve their states and would not forget their party allegiance, but the national interest would come first. They would bring their wisdom and independent judgment to bear to determine what is best for the national interest.

  And part of the unspoken oath was an obligation to help make the Senate work. As Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving Senate majority leader in history memorably noted: “In the end, it is not the individuals of the Senate who are important. It is the institution of the Senate. It is the Senate itself as one of the foundations of the Constitution. It is the Senate as one of the rocks of the Republic.” The Senate was an institution that the nation counted on to take collective action. Understanding that brought about a commitment to passionate, but not unlimited, debate; tolerance of opposing views; principled compromise; and senators’ willingness to end debate, and vote up or down, even if it sometimes meant losing.

  Those qualities characterized the great Senate and its members. Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater were poles apart politically, but no one doubted that they were both committed to the national interest and to the Senate as an institution. Because of those overriding commitments, in the Great Senate, the members competed and clashed, cooperated and compromised, and then went out to dinner together. The Great Senate worked on the basis of mutual respect, tolerance of opposing views, and openness to persuasion in the search for bipartisan solutions. The Senate has often been described as a club, but at its best, the Senate actually functioned more like a great team, in which talented individuals stepped up and did great things at crucial moments, sometimes quite unexpectedly.

  All of those qualities are missing from today’s Senate, and they have been missing for a long time. When senators see the Senate as simply a forum for their own talents and interests, when they see their own views as so important or divinely inspired that compromise becomes unacceptable, or when they regard the Senate as merely an extension of the battle between the political parties, the Senate can become polarized and paralyzed, on the path to irrelevance and decline.