WASHINGTON — Over nearly a half-century, Ted Kennedy watched his beloved Senate change from a collegial boys’ club known for bipartisan deal-cutting to a far less friendly place dominated by polarized parties, where broad compromise is a dying art.
His death Tuesday at 77 after a battle with brain cancer leaves the Senate without one of its consummate bridge-builders — possibly the best-known and most respected of an ever-dwindling breed of lawmakers willing and able to reach across the political aisle to strike bargains on big issues.
It’s also a reminder of a bygone era in what is often called the world’s greatest deliberative body, when coalition-building was the rule, not the exception — because it had to be.
“He’s one of the members that was trained and came of age in the Senate in the 1960s, when each party was divided into major factions, and so to pass any major piece of legislation, it took a real coalition of some factions from the Democratic Party and some from the Republican Party. There was no such thing as a party-line vote in those days,” said Betty Koed, a Senate historian.
Now an all-one-party vote — or one with just a few defectors from the other party — is the norm.
Back then, conservative Southerners were a force in both parties, and liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans were smaller but often powerful minorities that could band together to get big things — like civil rights laws — done.
Kennedy was part of a generation of policymakers that took those lessons into the 1980s and 1990s, as both parties began to solidify and strove to forge agreements that could transcend the ever-hardening party lines.
“A major element of that tradition will be lost now” with Kennedy’s death, Koed said.
Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who served as GOP leader from 1985 to 1996, says Kennedy’s style was firmly rooted in the Senate of the past, where liberals like him had to strike sometimes unlikely bargains to get things done, but is just as relevant today.
“Kennedy understood, just like Ronald Reagan used to tell me when I was the leader, ‘I want it all, but if I can get 70 percent, I’ll run with it.’ That was sort of Kennedy’s attitude — he knew in the legislative process you’ve got to allow some give and take,” Dole said.
The lesson holds true today, Dole said, as Democrats like Sen. Max Baucus of Montana and Republicans like Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming search for the elusive middle on a health care overhaul — something Kennedy called “the cause of my life.”
But few if any members of today’s Senate have the kind of reputation and respect Kennedy did, which enabled him to bring others along on difficult issues, Dole said.
“Kennedy had the aura and the mystique. He didn’t have to pay homage to anybody,” Dole said. “He could be very independent and strike his own deal, and you knew you either went along with him or a lot of the time (were going to) be left out in the cold because he was going to get a bill.”
The Senate Kennedy joined in 1962 was almost entirely white and even more male-dominated than today’s; just two women were serving there when he arrived in 1962, and it wasn’t until more than 30 years later that more than two served simultaneously. It was also a much more social place than the Senate of today, in part because transportation to and from the capital was slower and more cumbersome. Lawmakers were usually in Washington all week and sometimes through the weekends, forging legislative partnerships at restaurants and bars, dinner parties and barbecues, Koed said.
Today senators typically jet in on Mondays or Tuesdays for weekday schedules packed with meetings and fundraisers, then escape Thursday or early Friday for a weekend back home.
“There was a certain degree of collegiality and senatorial courtesy, and also of rising above partisan stakes and trying to find a common national interest, and I think he was certainly the champion in that regard,” said Nick Allard, Kennedy’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee in the mid-1980s. “There are fewer in the Senate these days that do that — it’s more of a win-or-lose partisan atmosphere.”
Kennedy was a strong partisan in his own right, but his adversaries sought him out as a quintessential Senate “workhorse” — another quality senators, historians and aides say is harder to find in today’s Senate — who was willing to help get something done.
“He’d come over and say, ‘You know, we’ve got to get some Republicans, and if you can get me a couple or three I can talk to, maybe we can get a bill,’” Dole said. “You don’t see a lot of that now.”
Kennedy worked with former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming on immigration legislation in the 1980s that Kennedy ultimately decided to vote against — but that Simpson believes would never have become law without Kennedy’s initial collaboration.
“As a legislator, you want to find a legislator to work with, not some guy who is just going to give speeches and screw you up. Kennedy was a master legislator,” Simpson says of his former colleague in a forthcoming biography of Simpson by Don Hardy, his former chief of staff.
Simpson was traveling out of the country Thursday and could not be reached for further comment. He told his biographer last year that the Senate is forever changed from the one in which he and Kennedy first worked together.
“The thing about the Senate is, the giants are gone,” Simpson told Hardy. “Whether they were Republican or Democrat, they were giants in days long past.”
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