The Last Great Senate

by Ira Shapiro

  Eight new Democratic senators were elected in 1962, and they proved some of the most effective and liberal senators of their time. Their number included Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, George McGovern of South Dakota, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. The youngest man elected in 1962, barely thirty years old, with minimal qualifications, and riding on his brother’s name, was Edward M. Kennedy. The twenty-one Democratic senators elected in 1958 and 1962 formed the heart and soul of the Great Senate.

  No group in Senate history ever had a run like those elected in 1962. The fourteen years they had served in the Senate had been, to use Doris Kearns Goodwin’s famous phrase, “no ordinary time.” To be sure, it was also turbulent, emotional, and often disheartening—an era marked by assassinations, war, urban unrest, and political scandal. Four presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—had left or come to office in extraordinary and heartbreaking circumstances. The senators elected in 1962 had ridden the roller coaster of American history, shaping events, yet often being buffeted by them.

  They had come to the Senate at a moment of profound hope and optimism, thanks to Kennedy’s popularity and the end of the missile crisis. In their first year in the Senate, 1963, they had the opportunity to vote for the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and watch President Kennedy respond to the violence in Montgomery, Alabama, by making the moral case for landmark civil rights legislation. They suffered with their new Senate colleagues and the country the devastating news from Dallas that the president had been assassinated.

  In their second year, 1964, they participated in the Senate’s most towering accomplishment, breaking the southern filibuster to enact the Civil Rights Act. Just weeks later, they participated in the Senate’s great abdication of responsibility, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Johnson used as the justification for his disastrous escalation of the war in Vietnam. In 1965 and 1966, they were part of the historic 89th Congress, which worked with President Johnson to shape the landmark Great Society legislation, a progressive outpouring of laws that touched and improved almost every facet of life in America.

  In 1967 and 1968, they formed an important part of the growing Senate opposition to the Vietnam War, worked to respond to the anger and fires in American cities, and battled for one more landmark civil rights law to combat discrimination in housing. They watched with amazement as their enigmatic colleague Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, a gifted politician and a cynical intellectual who often seemed uninterested in the Senate, mounted the “kiddie crusade” that drove Lyndon Johnson out of the presidential race. They mourned the deaths by assassination of another Kennedy, their friend and Senate colleague Robert Kennedy—to them, always “Bob”—and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

  In 1969 and 1970, they took on President Richard Nixon, rejecting two of his Supreme Court nominations, and spearheaded the rising environmental movement. In 1971 and 1972, even as Nixon moved toward a landslide reelection, the senators helped abolish the draft, gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, and added Title IX to the Civil Rights Act, expanding opportunities for women in college sports.

  In 1973, the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee riveted the nation, exposing the abuses of power in Nixon’s White House and creating the path that led inexorably to his resignation. In 1973 and 1974, they played important parts in enacting the War Powers Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, and the Budget Control and Impoundment Act, a burst of legislation intended to redress the constitutional balance of power by cutting the “imperial presidency” down to size. In 1975 and 1976, they participated in the unprecedented investigation of the abuses of the intelligence community conducted by the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, and the resulting creation of a new permanent Senate Intelligence Committee in September 1976.

  By 1977, the senators who had been elected in 1962 were now serving their third terms and had become well-known national figures: Ribicoff, for denouncing the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” during the 1968 Democratic convention; Bayh, for leading the successful fights against the Supreme Court nominations of Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell; Nelson, as the father of Earth Day in 1970; McGovern, as a leading dove and Democratic presidential nominee, crushed by Nixon in the 1972 election; Inouye, for his impressive work on the Watergate Committee; and Kennedy, the last brother, an increasingly influential senator, and still a potential president despite the Chappaquiddick incident. Byrd counted on them as strong assets; each of them would be a committee chairman either in this Congress or by the start of the next one. What remained to be proven was whether they would find him to be an asset as leader, and how effectively he could follow in Mansfield’s footsteps.

  Mike Mansfield was in every way the polar opposite of his flamboyant predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. Born in New York, Mansfield moved to Montana to live with relatives after his mother died when he was seven. As a young man, Mansfield served in the army, navy, and marines and developed a fascination for Asia where he had served after World War I. He returned home to become a university professor of political science and history, but his deep interest in world affairs took him into politics. His intellect, honesty, and humility appealed to Montanans, and he was elected first to the House and then to the Senate in 1952.

  Perpetually sucking on a pipe, Mansfield was a man of few words, laconic in his personal style. He did not believe in the theatrics that had characterized LBJ’s Senate leadership. Unlike his predecessor, he did not believe in midnight Senate sessions liberally lubricated by alcohol. Nor did he believe in a Senate where seemingly impossible deadlocks were broken by covert deals in the cloakroom for which the majority leader took all the credit. He certainly never relied on arm twisting or abuse.

  Even more fundamentally, Mansfield did not believe in a Senate dominated by the majority leader or a handful of senior senators. He believed in a democratic, small-d, Senate, where all senators were adults, elected by their constituents, and all senators were equal. In fact, he treated even the senators in the minority as his equals. To a degree that stunned the senators, Mansfield believed in the “golden rule” and acted accordingly. He treated each senator the way he wanted to be treated himself and expected reciprocity.

  Most senators, starting with Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, doubted that Mansfield could possibly run the Senate according to the standard he envisioned. Under his leadership, the one hundred senators, not the majority leader, were responsible for making the Senate work. By 1963, his democratized Senate had become newly paralyzed. Very little legislation was moving, and absenteeism among senators was on the rise; they saw no reason to come to the Senate floor. Mansfield seemed unable to rouse the Senate from its torpor and made few efforts to do so. He faced intense criticism in the press, led by the reporters and columnists that Johnson had cultivated. Meanwhile, he contended with a virtual rebellion inside the Senate, led by Democrats Russell Long of Louisiana and Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, who publicly pined for a return of a strong leader.

  On Friday, November 22, 1963, Mansfield announced that on the following Monday, he would deliver a speech on the Senate floor addressing the questions that had been raised about his leadership. He gave the Senate advance notice because he wanted to ensure that a quorum—at least fifty-one senators—would be in attendance for his speech.

  The speech that Mansfield prepared for delivery was remarkable for its clarity and candor:Descriptions of the majority leader, the senator from Montana, have ranged from a benign Mr. Chips, to glamourless, to tragic mistake. . . . As for being a tragic mistake, if that means that I am neither a circus ringmaster, the master of ceremonies of a Senate night club, a tamer of Senate lions or a wheeler and dealer, then I must accept too that title. . . . But as long as I have this responsibility, it will be discharged to the best of my ability by me as I am . . . I shall not don any Mandarin’s robes or any skin other than that to which I a
m accustomed in order that I may look like a majority leader or sound like a majority leader. . . .

  He closed with an eloquent explanation of how he viewed the Senate:The Constitutional authority does not lie with the leadership. It lies with all of us individually, collectively and equally. . . . In the end, it is not the senators as individuals who are of fundamental importance. In the end, 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.

  We will never know how the Senate would have reacted to hearing this extraordinary speech—it was never given. It had to be inserted in the Congressional Record, because it was early on November 22, 1963, that Mansfield had informed the Senate about his upcoming speech. Several hours later, the Senate received the news of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.

  Mansfield’s leadership was never seriously challenged again. Galvanized by the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination, the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, and the moral imperative of action on civil rights, Mansfield’s democratized Senate met the challenge of history. So it was that in the summer of 1964, with the country and the rest of the world watching, the Senate broke the filibuster of the southern bloc to enact the most important piece of legislation in the country’s history.

  The Senate was no longer the graveyard of progressive dreams. It would become the place where those hopes and dreams were translated into legislation, carried forward with presidents where possible, and, where necessary, despite them. The Great Senate would extend the “liberal moment” of 1963 through 1966, and even the “liberal hour” of the 1960’s, well into the 1970’s.

  Respectful of all senators, whether Democratic or Republican, senior or freshman, without flamboyance, letting others take the lead and the credit, Mansfield managed to play a central role throughout the period. He combined what his principal aide and biographer Francis Valeo called “awesome patience” with utter honesty and straight dealing.

  Mansfield had given private advice to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon about Vietnam. His numerous memos were heartbreakingly prescient about the folly of escalation. It was Mansfield who gave up on Nixon’s commitment to ending the Vietnam War, after the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and encouraged senators, on a bipartisan basis, to finally cut off funding for the war. It was also Mansfield, angered at the evidence of “dirty tricks” and illegal practices in Nixon’s reelection campaign, who announced in October 1972 that the Senate would investigate these abuses. Only Mansfield could have had the stature and credibility to pick Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a former state supreme court justice who had emerged as one of Richard Nixon’s fiercest opponents, to chair the Senate Watergate committee, enlist the cooperation of the Republicans, and launch it on a bipartisan basis, just two months after Nixon had won a forty-nine-state landslide.

  Most recently, Mansfield, who had been calling for stronger oversight of the intelligence community for twenty years, created the Church Committee to investigate and illuminate the abuses of America’s intelligence agencies. The establishment of the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 1976 was one of Mansfield’s crowning achievements and a fitting coda to his extraordinary service. His decision to retire, announced without fanfare on March 4, 1976, was typical of the man. “There is a time to stay and a time to go,” Mansfield told a stunned Senate. “Thirty four years [in the House and Senate] is not a long time, but it is long enough.”

  Robert Byrd, the most conservative of the Democrats elected in 1958, would be the majority leader of the Senate in 1977, elevated by a Democratic conference generally more liberal than he. Byrd would have to lead the democratized Senate created by Mansfield, which Gary Hart, the young senator from Colorado, would describe as “a kind of controlled madhouse,” presenting great opportunities and its own special set of challenges.

  EVEN AS HE ACCEPTED congratulations for his triumph, Byrd’s mind was, undoubtedly, on Senate business. Byrd sought the position of majority leader because he thought that it was the most important and difficult job that his country had to offer (with the possible exception of the presidency). He may well have been right. He would face multiple challenges: leading the Senate Democrats; dealing with the new president and the White House; working with the Republican minority whose partisanship was intensifying; and ensuring that the Senate, with its tradition of unlimited debate, would do the nation’s business and avoid paralysis by filibuster.

  The Senate Democrats had recently lost some of their greatest members—Philip Hart, Sam Ervin, and J. William Fulbright, not to mention Mansfield himself. Nevertheless, its members still constituted a very strong caucus. Byrd could rely on a powerful core group of experienced men who had been crucial parts of the Senate for twenty or even thirty years, such as Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, Russell Long of Louisiana, Frank Church of Idaho, John Stennis of Mississippi, and William Proxmire of Wisconsin. There were also potential bright new Democratic stars who had been elected in the 1970’s, such as Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Dick Clark and John Culver of Iowa, Sam Nunn of Georgia, and Joseph Biden of Delaware. There were some great legislators among the veterans, but their past achievements had come at a time when the strength of the U.S. economy seemed beyond question. A growing economy created the budgetary resources and the political support needed to start and sustain ambitious legislative undertakings. But times were changing.

  Ever since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, the U.S. economy had been hammered by a severe recession, which was only just ending, and a more challenging future characterized by rising energy costs and intensified foreign competition. Polls, press reports, and the recent presidential campaign showed that the economic pressures felt across the country had begun to produce a new reluctance to support “big government” programs. The younger Democratic senators entered their new offices with an understanding that the weakening economy created new political imperatives. Gary Hart, elected in 1974, had been widely quoted: “We’re not just a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys.” Time would tell if the veteran Senate Democrats could adjust to a new situation.

  They would also have to simultaneously adjust to a new president. Naturally, Byrd and the other Senate Democrats were excited about having a Democrat in the White House, but they were genuinely uncertain what Jimmy Carter cared about and what he stood for. When John Kennedy became president sixteen years before, many of the senators had known him personally. More important, when Kennedy said that it was time to get the country moving again, they understood what he meant: respond to the Soviet challenge—at that time, scientific and ideological as much as military—and start passing the progressive legislation needed to complete the New Deal and Fair Deal agendas. By contrast, all they knew about Carter was that he wore his religion on his sleeve and talked about “a government as good as the American people.” The Democratic senators believed in progressive policies; Carter seemed to believe in purifying politics.

  Carter had told Byrd that he was strongly committed to strengthening ethics in government. The Senate Democrats thought that they had taken the most important step to cleaning up government by helping to drive Nixon from office. But reports of illegal campaign contributions had touched congressional leaders on both sides of the Hill, so Byrd was determined to get out ahead of the issue. He had already spoken to the incoming House Speaker, Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, and they had agreed that each house would move rapidly to adopt an ethics code, long before Carter would be able to move his own ethics legislation through Congress. The first two items of Byrd’s agenda would therefore be the Senate ethics code and completing the committee reorganization that had been in the works for several years.

  Byrd already knew to anticipate a feistier Republican minority. The Senate Republicans were principally angry at Richard Nixon, who had tarnished the Republican brand, cost them the White House, and thrown away their majority support across the c
ountry. But their resentment toward Senate Democrats was also building. The 1974 New Hampshire Senate election between Democrat John Durkin and Republican Lewis Wyman, the closest Senate election in history, had left deep scars. After New Hampshire’s election authorities had certified the Republican Wyman’s election by two votes, Durkin had petitioned the Senate to declare him the winner. It was expected that the Senate, with its Democratic majority, would do so. But the Senate deadlocked for months, unable to resolve the issue. Senate watchers were treated to the spectacle of Durkin and Wyman each maintaining desks in the rear of the Senate, until Durkin won the seat by reelection, ten months after the initial battle. Democrats won the seat, but Senate Republicans may have won the larger battle. They came away much more unified and with significant, tactical experience for dealing with the Democratic majority. They also came away from the experience, fairly or unfairly, seeing Byrd, who had taken the lead for the Democrats, as more partisan than Mansfield had ever been.

  For Byrd, who revered the Senate and its traditions, the right of extended, even unlimited, debate was the main cornerstone of the Senate’s unique place in the Constitutional system. In Byrd’s view, that right justified occasional use of the filibuster, and of course, he had resorted to this mechanism himself in 1964. Traditionally, however, a Senate vote by super-majority to invoke cloture produced an expeditious end to debate. But James Allen, a staunch conservative Democrat from Alabama and a formidable parliamentarian, had developed a new and ingenious version of the filibuster—the post-cloture filibuster. This technique enabled a single senator, using the one hour to which he was entitled after cloture was invoked, to tie up the Senate for days through dilatory tactics: calling up amendment after amendment, requesting the reading of the amendments, asking for roll call votes, suggesting the lack of a quorum. Because the time consumed by all those activities was free time, not chargeable to the senator, the process could theoretically last indefinitely.