New York Times/Op-Ed Janunary 12, 2002
Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H. By BILL KELLER
Whenever a truly dreadful person dies or retires and the chorus of polite, speak-no-ill-of-the-departed accolades begins, I think of the nasty bee-sting E. E. Cummings bestowed on the editor and poet Louis Untermeyer. Untermeyer's influential 1919 anthology, Modern American Poetry, omitted some of the great poetic innovators of the time, but included three poems by Untermeyer himself and one by his wife. Cummings gutted him in four lines.
mr u will not be missed who as an anthologist sold the many on the few not excluding mr u
The epigram was mean-spirited (later Untermeyer editions included the overlooked poets, and plenty of Cummings), but it was a memorable kick against the collective deference that accumulates around powerful people.
In that dyspeptic spirit I'd like to begin the new year by bidding farewell to three men whose departure will raise the median decency of the United States Senate. In their remaining, lame-duck months, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Phil Gramm will enjoy the ritual tributes of colleagues and the sanitized adieus of home-state editorialists. Let's be frank. They will leave behind an institution they have helped appreciably to debase.
Senators Helms, Gramm and Thurmond have in common the fact that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the American right. Point to an act of cultural division, bullying unilateralism or anti-government populism committed in the Senate during their decades there and you will usually find these three men among the sponsors. But there are others in the Senate who have voted for egregious causes, right and left, and still others who have never stood for much of anything. What sets these three apart is that each has made his own special contribution to the cynicism of our public life.
It is tempting to excuse them, in their twilight, for at least having made the place more colorful. Mr. Helms affected a theatrically courtly demeanor, sirring and ma'aming witnesses he regarded as infidels. (His manners were selective; it was the courtly Mr. Helms who once remarked that if President Clinton visited North Carolina he'd "better have a bodyguard.") Mr. Gramm pokes witty fun at his own orneriness. "People say I don't have a heart," he once joked. "I do. I keep it in a quart jar on my desk." As David Plotz wrote in Slate, Senator Gramm is a mean, bitter pessimist, but "he has benefited from one of the strangest prejudices of politics: that meanness is a synonym for integrity." Mr. Thurmond benefits from another prejudice, our instinctive American admiration for those who correct themselves. He abandoned his ardent segregationist views when the demographics of his state made that expedient, and even hired actual black people to work on his Senate staff, a fact sometimes reported with such awe that you'd think he'd marched with Dr. King in Selma.
I wish I could summon up tributes to these men, if only for the contrarian pleasure of defying the liberal tradition of these pages. But alas, it has to be said that each of them has impoverished our precious political culture.
Mr. Thurmond's contribution is that he helped make Congress ridiculous. I can't think of a more cringe- making spectacle in public life than watching Mr. Thurmond, age 99, being shoveled into his seat at some committee he is only dimly aware of attending, and listening as he struggles to read a text prepared for him by an aide, losing his place at the end of each line. The Senate has never been a youth center, but Mr. Thurmond has deteriorated like Dorian Gray's picture while his constituents acquiesced and his colleagues averted their eyes. His embarrassing political shtick includes a self-conscious virility, manifested in his ability to produce children into his 70's and in his famously cute habit of leering at female interns, groping female senators and acclaiming the beauty of female witnesses before his various committees. Senator Thurmond did not invent the role of Washington lecher, but he helped cultivate the men's-club chauvinism in which Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton and Gary Condit operated.
Please understand, Mr. Thurmond's sin is not that he grew old; it is that growing old was the sum of his career. The message of his nearly half-century in the Senate is that success is to be measured not by tangible accomplishments — Mr. Thurmond has none, unless you count getting post offices and schools named for himself, and wangling an appointment for his 29-year-old son and namesake as the top federal attorney for South Carolina — but by political longevity. What Mr. Thurmond represents is the transformation of senators into self-perpetuating instruments of incumbency. For years, "Senator Thurmond" has been a shell inhabited by party leaders, campaign donors and staff who operate behind his Oz-like seniority, the way Communist Party apparatchiks ruled in the name of the sickly Leonid Brezhnev. I don't believe in term limits, on the principle that voters are entitled to make their own mistakes, but Mr. Thurmond makes me less certain of my conviction.
Mr. Gramm should be remembered for perfecting one of the more duplicitous roles in politics — the anti-government welfare queen. He has run his every campaign as a scourge of government spending and a champion of the beleaguered little taxpayer. At the same time he has built a great money sluice from Washington to his home state and pandered to the energy, banking and insurance lobbies that underwrite his political ambitions. His politics could be called hypocrisy, but only in a language that places a huge premium on understatement.
Contrast Mr. Gramm with Representative Dick Armey, another Texan with a mean streak, a Ph.D. in economics and a professed distaste for government spending. Mr. Armey, who is also retiring after this Congress, had the intellectual integrity to fight federal farm subsidies and to engineer the closing of unneeded military bases, including one serving his home district. Not so Mr. Gramm, who once boasted, "I'm carrying so much pork, I'm beginning to get trichinosis."
One of Senator Gramm's most generous benefactors was Enron, which lavished money on his campaigns and paid his wife handsomely as a corporate director. Senator Gramm, in turn, had a hand in legislation that exempted Enron's explosive energy derivatives business from government regulation and oversight. How big a hand, and whether that legislation enabled the secret funny business that led to the company's collapse, may emerge in one of the many investigations under way. Enron's business was built on the premise that just about anything could be turned into a commodity and bought and sold. The beleaguered little taxpayers who lost their jobs and pensions in the Enron fiasco will be interested to know whether that included their senator.
Mr. Helms leaves behind at least a double legacy. He helped perfect fear-mongering as a form of fund- raising, using his own and allied political action committees to raise many millions by appealing to the crudest bigotries of voters. The technique is now pervasive across the political spectrum, but Mr. Helms helped pioneer those alarming boldface solicitations that warn: "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior." (Yes, that's an actual letter that went out over his signature.)
Mr. Helms has also diminished American stature abroad by using senatorial obstruction and intimidation to undermine our diplomatic service and pre-empt our foreign policy. As the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the past 15 years, and as the mentor of a right-wing mafia within the Republican Party, he has been an author of much of what makes the world resentful of America: our stingy foreign aid, our lordly attitude toward any multilateral organization, our disdain for treaties, our support of despotic regimes from apartheid-era South Africa to the juntas of Latin America.
Mr. Helms will not be missed; Unrelenting jingoist, He sold us bullies of their realms, Not excluding Mr. Helms.
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