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 competing, 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.
The story of this book begins in January 1977, as Senators Robert Byrd and Howard Baker become the new majority and minority leader, and the Senate prepares to deal with the newly elected president, Jimmy Carter. Some of the most iconic figures in the Senate—Sam Ervin, J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, Philip Hart, George Aiken—are gone: retired, defeated, or passed away. But the core of the Great Senate, the liberal Democrats and moderate to progressive Republicans who created a legacy of bipartisan accomplishment, seems to remain intact. Moreover, the veteran senators have been joined by talented new arrivals in both parties such as Gary Hart, Dale Bumpers, John Danforth, John Chafee, Paul Sarbanes, Richard Lugar, Joe Biden, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Reacting to the “imperial presidency” of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the Senate and the House have reasserted Congressional prerogatives and given themselves powerful new weapons for holding the executive branch accountable, such as the War Powers Act, the Budget Control and Impoundment Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Privacy Act. There are good reasons to believe that this would be a workmanlike period for the Senate, and a period of renewal for America, which had come through the crisis years of Vietnam and Watergate to celebrate a joyful bicentennial, despite the economic challenges looming since the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.
Within three years, America has plunged back into crisis. The economy has been savaged by a combination of inflation and stagnation, prompted by soaring oil prices and a surge of foreign competition that catches our industries unready. A tax revolt, starting in California, has swept across the country. A series of disasters—Love Canal, Mt. St. Helens, Three Mile Island—has rocked the country. Americans are being held hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Soviet tanks have rolled into Afghanistan, setting relations between the United States and the Soviet Union back to the darker days of the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan rides the tide of anger and rising conservatism to a landslide victory in the presidential election, winning forty-four states. The Reagan landslide is probably worth five to seven points to every Republican challenger in the country, bringing in a dozen new Republican senators, and with them, an end to the Great Senate.
An important part of the story will be, as it must, the transformation of the Republican Party. Looking back, it is evident that what made the Great Senate possible was a bipartisanism that is no longer present in our political system. That bipartisan spirit came in part from senators exercising independent judgment and being devoted to making the institution work. They loved the Senate, and they recognized the need to reconcile diverse viewpoints in order for collective action to be possible. But bipartisanship was also possible because many Republican senators were at least moderates, or even progressives. In the search for a working majority, the leaders of the great Senate had a large field of Republican senators who were willing to come together with their liberal Democratic colleagues, to overcome the opposition of the southern Democrats opposed to civil rights and Republican conservatives generally opposed to federal spending and social legislation.
In the late 1970’s, most of the Senate Democrats remained progressive (even “liberal”!) although they trimmed their sails somewhat, moving toward the center, as the economy weakened and antigovernment sentiment crested. The Senate Republicans, however, began their inexorable move to the right, particularly the newly elected senators from the mountain west and the south. Some of the leading Republican progressives or moderates retired, but others, such as Clifford Case (R-NJ) and Javits (R-NY), were defeated by right-wing challengers in Republican primaries. The rightward movement continued and accelerated through the 1980’s, 1990’s, and the last decade. Today, too often, the field of Republican moderates seems to begin with the senior senator from Maine, Olympia Snowe, and end with the junior senator from Maine, Susan Collins, although Richard Lugar continues to show the foreign policy leadership and vision that has characterized his long career.
During most of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Senate, although a political institution, was surprisingly free from partisanship. The herculean effort to give civil rights to black Americans, the tragedy of Vietnam, the crisis of Watergate, checking the imperial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon—these were not partisan issues, and the Senate responded in a bipartisan way. Moreover, a commitment to pursuing the national interest and making the Senate work acted as powerful constraints on partisanship.
Of course, elections came every two years, and political campaigns went on around the country, but the Senate stayed somehow separate, almost a demilitarized zone where partisan politics were concerned. That began to change in the late 1970’s, with the rise of the New Right and single-issue politics, marked by negative advertising and fiery grassroots campaigns around emotional issues such as abortion, guns, and the Panama Canal. The Great Senate, in those last years, held together, still capable of subordinating partisanship to accomplish the nation’s business. But the seeds of destruction were being planted. The high walls that separated the Senate from raw, endless partisan politics started to come down thirty years ago; today, the Senate often appears to be just another arena for what has been called the permanent campaign, where the Democrats and Republicans struggle for advantage, more like scorched earth than hallowed ground.
I began working on this book in the spring of 2008. The excitement of the presidential campaign had caused a group of old friends from the Senate thirty years before to get together monthly for breakfast to talk politics. Inevitably, the talk also turned nostalgically to the great days when we worked in the Senate. We were amazed at how the Senate had been missing in action throughout the presidency of George W. Bush: rolling over for the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the Supreme Court nominations that had cemented the conservative majority that had been the goal of the right wing for forty years. We reflected on how the Senate had become so partisan and ineffectual that it was barely recognizable to us.
All of that was before 2009. Any hope that a new president, a wave of public excitement and interest in politics, and an unprecedented economic crisis would prompt the Senate to rise to the occasion was quickly dashed. By the end of 2009, senators still went on the Sunday talk shows in great numbers, but the once-proud Senate, a crown jewel of our Constitutional system, had become the clearest example that our political system had broken down. As Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), one of the most serious and capable legislators, put it sadly: “We have been miniaturized.”
The Senate’s deterioration affects all of us, but it has a special poignancy for those who worked there during its great period. I came to the Senate as a summer intern in 1969, one day after graduating from college. That summer changed my life, causing me to go to law school in the hope of returning to work in the Senate. I came back in 1975 and worked there through 1987, in a range of senior positions—personal staff, committee staff, leadership staff. I worked for veteran senators Gaylord Nelson, Abraham Ribicoff, Tom Eagleton, Robert Byrd, and then a newly elected senator, Jay Rockefeller. I participated in many legislative accomplishments—domestic and international—and made lasting friends on both sides of the aisle. Every staffer’s career is unique, but what many men and women shared during that period was a sense of joyous excitement, purpose, and fulfillment.
I anticipate that some readers will conclude that the author thought the Senate was great when it was Democratic and progressive, because he himself is a progressive Democrat. It is undoubtedly true that as a progressive, believing in the necessity of a positive government action in many areas, I am more concerned about the decline of the Senate than someone whose objective is to stop the government in its tracks. But I have a long record of working successfully with Republicans while in the Senate and in the Clinton administration and have great admiration for many Republican senators, including several currently in the Senate. Readers will make their judgments about my analysis, but it is a fact that many distinguished Republicans put the blame for the condition of the current Senate squarely on their party.
As far back as 1996, several notable Republican senators chose to retire from the Senate, because of the increasingly strident right-wing position of the Republican caucus and the insistence on party unity by the Republican leader. Former Senator John Danforth has written that the Republican Party was completely taken over by the Christian right. Former senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, still prominent because of his co-chairmanship of the National Commission on Deficit Reduction, has said that the Senate changed when “the battered children from the House came over, led by Trent Lott.” The current Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, has said that his overriding objective is to defeat Barack Obama, rather than making the Senate work for the good of the country.
This book attempts to help fill a large void in understanding of the Senate. Those writing critically about today’s Senate often jump back to Lyndon Johnson’s time as majority leader to show how the Senate worked in its best days. In truth, and in spite of Robert Caro’s brilliant portrayal of Johnson’s career, the Senate’s most consequential period came after Johnson left to become vice president in 1961. As Gould has written: “For the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was a noisy summer storm that rattled the windows of the upper chamber and then moved on, leaving few traces of its passing. . . . He seemed a towering figure at the time, but his essential lack of vision about the Senate limited his impact.”
The Senate’s most historic legislative accomplishments—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—certainly could not have occurred without Lyndon Johnson’s inspired leadership from the White House. But 2011 marks a half century since Johnson left the Senate, and it seems timely to recognize that the Senate became great only after he departed. Mike Mansfield, who followed LBJ as Senate majority leader, served much longer (sixteen years, as compared to Johnson’s six), accomplished much more, and left behind the legacy of a democratized Senate, in which every senator could potentially play an important part. Robert Byrd and Howard Baker, the new leaders who play a central part in this book, were working with the opportunities and challenges of the democratized Senate that Mansfield created.
In my epilogue, I attempt to connect with the current debate about the Senate by offering a view of what has happened in the thirty years since the Senate shattered in 1980. In essence, although the Senate made a seemingly solid comeback in the mid-to-late 1980’s, after that, the continuous movement to the right by the Republican Party caused a downward spiral for the Senate that has lasted twenty years, accelerating over time. But this book is, first and foremost, my effort to recapture and celebrate the accomplishments of the great senators and the Great Senate of the 1960’s and 1970’s. I hope that the book will remind readers what they should expect from, and demand of, their Senate. I also hope that it will help inspire the new generation of senators and their staff members about what they can accomplish in Washington.
In his recent memoir, former vice president and senator Walter Mondale described the Senate as the “national mediator,” debating issues at length, educating itself and the country, balancing and resolving ideological and regional differences. To be sure, today’s intensely vitriolic political culture makes being a senator harder than ever before. The endless demands for fund-raising required for increasingly expensive campaigns drain the time and energy of senators and expose them to the ceaseless demands of a vast corps of organized interests and lobbyists. The air travel that makes regular trips home routinely possible diminishes the time that senators and their families once spent together. The impact of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the blogosphere, and the tendency of Americans to choose the news they want to hear has changed the public debate profoundly.
But these changes in our political culture make it even more imperative that we have a Senate of wise men and women, bringing experience, wisdom, and independent judgment in their collective responsibility to determine the national interest. Commentators now focus on the possible changes in the Senate rules, and some changes are indeed needed, particularly with respect to the pernicious impact of “holds,” by which one determined member can paralyze the Senate. However, what is most urgently needed is for senators to act like senators, not partisan operatives. They should not mirror, and even exacerbate, the nation’s divisions. They were sent to Washington to overcome them. In another difficult era, this is how the Senate worked to do so.