A Montana Man's Senate
By Ronald D. Elving, CQ Staff Writer
In one of his early films, Gary Cooper's taciturn character goes about saddling his horse while a meddlesome individual from back East peppers him with questions. "Coop" offers up only an occasional "yup" or "nope" as the queries become increasingly offensive. But when he finally finishes the task, he turns deliberately to his antagonist and decks him with a single punch.
Something of that delayed impact could be felt March 24 when Mike Mansfield, like Cooper a product of Montana in the early years of the century, strode back into the Capitol. Mansfield, who just turned 95, had been waiting a long time to deliver the speech in his pocket.
It had been written late in 1963, when Mansfield, then in his third year as Senate majority leader, was under fire from fellow Democrats impatient with his tempo (he called them "cloakroom commandoes").
The speech was not delivered as planned because on the November Friday in question, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. Mansfield slipped the text into the Congressional Record and turned instead to writing a eulogy for the man with whom he had first been elected to the Senate in 1952.
Mansfield went on to serve a total of 16 years as majority leader, more than anyone else in history. His tenure in the job spanned four presidencies and as much change as in any era since the Civil War. But through the tumults over civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate, Mansfield always maintained his senatorial sense of pacing and place.
"The remedy lies not in the seeking of shortcuts, not in the cracking of non-existent whips, not in wheeling and dealing, but in an honest facing up to the situation and a resolution of it by the Senate itself," he said in the speech.
In the two decades since Mansfield left the Senate, the centrifugal forces he fought against have strengthened.
The coming of television has emphasized the theatrical function of the Senate over the deliberative. The six-year term no longer grants much respite from campaigning or fundraising. Senators now tend to be self-selected rather than chosen by their parties, yet partisanship within the chamber has intensified. The chamber's core of political centrists has contracted -- making compromise harder to achieve.
In other words, it was high time for Mansfield to ride back into town and give that speech out loud. Majority Leader Trent Lott's new lecture series on leadership presented the perfect opportunity.
The setting was right, too. Instead of returning to the chamber where he had worked for four terms, Mansfield came to the Old Senate Chamber (used 1820-59), which he had personally helped restore in the 1970s after it had fallen to such ignominious uses as furniture storage.
Beneath the arched ceiling that recalls the Pantheon in Rome, Mansfield made his case for the Senate's traditional self-image: an institution of timeless judgment and reserve, a repository of shared wisdom in which the ambitions of each member are subsumed in the interest of all. "It is not the senators as individuals who are fundamentally important," Mansfield said. "In the end, it is the institution of the Senate. It is the Senate itself, as one of the foundations of the Constitution . . . one of the rocks of the Republic."
The chamber in which Mansfield spoke was the same one once graced by the "great triumvirate" of the 1840s: Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. But it was also the room in which another Massachusetts senator, Charles Sumner, was nearly caned to death by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856.
Mansfield needs no reminder of the tensions and trauma of the Senate in any era. He has been fond of saying that politics is what we have instead of wars, but that the former should not be conducted in imitation of the latter.
Mansfield knew something about war. The son of Irish immigrants, he left school at 14 and persuaded a Navy recruiter to let him into World War I. But when told to "knock some heads together" in the early 1960s, Mansfield made it clear he would do no such thing.
"I would not presume to some notion of 'tough-mindedness,' " wrote Mansfield in 1963, explaining that he had always had trouble distinguishing that phrase from "soft-headedness" or "simple-mindedness."
He preferred, practiced and still prescribes "a high degree of accommodation, mutual restraint and a measure of courage in spite of our weaknesses."
After his military hitch, Mansfield returned to his home state and the copper mines. It was his wife, Maureen, who urged him to resume his education and who cashed in her own life insurance for tuition money.
He finished high school, then college, becoming a history professor before his first election to the House in 1942. After 34 years in Congress, he spent 12 more serving two more presidents -- Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan -- as ambassador to Japan. He still has an office in Washington, advising the investment firm of Goldman Sachs on Asian affairs.
When he stood before the Senate on March 24, he seemed as tall and self-assured as ever. The current senators listened with respect and, in some cases, evident enjoyment. Then they lined up to shake hands with the onetime teacher, one by one.
In finally delivering his remarks, Mansfield dedicated them to what he called "my three great loves: Maureen, Montana and the U.S. Senate." He had the great good fortune to have had the love of all three in return.
© 1998 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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