COVER STORY || INSIDE THE SENATE THE LOST SENATE If senators can't get along, how can they govern? hirty years ago this fall, Ted Kennedy was running for president, Robert Byrd ruled the Senate floor as majority leader and a boyish Max Baucus had already jumped ahead of his freshman class by securing a seat on the powerful Finance Committee. At West Point, Army Capt. Jack Reed resigned his commission to enter THarvard Law School. In Brooklyn, state Assemblyman Chuck Schumer, Flatbush’s version of a young Lyndon Johnson, prepared to run for the House. And in Louisville, Ky., Jefferson County Judge Mitch McConnell waited — consolidating power, speaking around the state, but always with an eye toward the Senate, where he had interned for his hero, Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.), during the great civil rights debate of 1964. “That was when I first decided to try,” McConnell says. Change is a great constant in Congress: One generation is forever giving way to the next. But to look back 30 years at the Senate — when this reporter first came to Washington — is to see the last remnant of something now lost from American government. O C I T OLI By David Rogers John shinkle — P 54 POLITICO POLITICO 53 In 1979, a solid quarter of the senators had lived through the civil rights debate that elected senator — after years in the much larger House. so inspired McConnell. And in them, elements of the old Senate “club” still endured. Only a single row of lights was turned on in the ceiling — the Senate was not in Television had yet to intrude, preserving a greater intimacy and drawing senators session — and the Texan stood at the door, taking in the polished wooden desks to the floor to hear one another’s speeches. Rather than cover the Senate from TV arranged in ascending curved rows. Jenkins recalls his boss muttering as if talking screens, reporters were literally in the room, watching from galleries with a wider, to himself; the exact words were lost, but the gist was this: The Senate was “the right more personal view of the protagonists below. size.” Among the senators themselves, there were fewer former House members than Indeed, Johnson saw what makes the Senate most unique: just 100 men and women today; there were many more former governors and more state delegations where to help govern a nation that today totals more than 300 million. a Democrat held one seat and a Republican held the other. The Capitol’s old Styles The Texan’s domineering personality would turn this small arena into a center of Bridges private dining room — now often empty — was a gathering place for both creativity and ingenuity — the likes of which Caro says the Senate has not seen since. parties. When dusk fell, bourbon came out in the offices of Southern senators, timed But the lasting lesson for members today is that to function, this intimacy requires to the evening call of the whippoorwill back home. trust and personal ties. Byrd, standing center stage, had come up through the House, where his classmate Senate rules give immense power to the minority but always with the assumption Tip O’Neill was now speaker. But with his white hair combed back and puffed up, that relations among the members will smooth the way. Instead, the past 30 years have the proud West Virginian was every inch the Senate man — with the House long put witnessed a growing alienation among senators, compounded by the polarization of behind him. American politics and the media. O’Neill met with reporters every day before the House opened; Byrd held a weekly In an interview with POLITICO, Caro recalls the view from the galleries in the old news conference — on Saturdays, to maximize the impact on the Sunday papers. And Senate — and changes since. when Ronald Reagan swept into power in the 1980 election, Byrd resisted calls to don “It was dimly lit, and with its old-fashioned desks, it was evocative of an age when formalwear for the Inauguration ceremonies. The coal miner’s son kept to a business senators discussed issues back and forth at the desks, speaking to each other,” he suit; O’Neill, to the amusement of Kennedy, obliged Reagan with the help of a Boston says. “It was an age — a long age, more than a century long — in which votes were tailor and a size “52 stout” pair of striped pants and changed by arguments on the floor, and it was more gray cutaways. conducive to thoughtfulness. Today’s Senate is a world apart. “The senators were speaking to each other, not Kennedy died in August, leaving a gaping hole in to a television camera. Today they’re not talking to the chamber. Byrd is so weakened by age that he one another but to the outside world. In fact, it’s not couldn’t stand to deliver his floor tribute to his close an intimate place or the ‘right size’ anymore.” friend and onetime rival. How did this happen? From his second-floor Capitol office, McConnell Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican who has grown into the implacable master of a new led the Senate in the early ’80s and helped bring regime of bloodless, 60-vote protocols — rather than television to the chamber, has long joked that the the old-style filibuster he witnessed as an intern. airplane and air conditioning were already the ruin And Schumer, the relentless campaign director who of the old ways. One machine pulled senators away brought his Democrats back to power, embodies a from one another; the other took away the pressure new version of the old senatorial club: the political on senators to get their work done and escape party as family. Washington’s sweltering summers. Caught in the middle is Baucus, the graying “The airplane has liberated members from Finance chairman in the wheelhouse of health care Washington,” Daschle agrees. “It allows them to reform heading to the Senate floor. As a young man leave their families in their home states and work fresh from Mike Mansfield’s Montana, he beat the what’s a Tuesday-through-Thursday schedule. In old club at its own game, winning a seat on Finance the old days, you hung around weekends. Now you that had been designated for oil-rich Oklahoma. can make commitments to visit every county in Now at the peak of his power, Baucus must ride your state.” a roller-coaster debate devoid of the cooperation Lost are the car pools, weekend parties and that helped the Senate forge victories on civil rights potluck dinners that brought senators together. under Mansfield’s leadership. Alaska Republican Ted Stevens shared rides to the “People say the Senate is a club. The Senate Capitol with Maine Democrat Edmund Muskie. couldn’t be further removed from a club today,” Kennedy’s new memoirs tell of his children coming former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of ONGRESS C to his office and to family picnics. Time and again, South Dakota tells POLITICO. “Because we can’t when Southerners speak of what were surprisingly bond, we can’t trust. Because we can’t trust, we can’t close relations with the late Sen. Abraham Ribicoff cooperate. Because we can’t cooperate, we become OF IBRARY L — a Northeastern Jewish Democrat — the dysfunctional.” Then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson conversations come back to Ribicoff’s wife, Casey. “It’s a different time,” says Sen. Judd Gregg “I liked him. I liked Casey,” recalls former (R-N.H.), who will retire next year. “I don’t think there’s any question that it has Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who worked with Ribicoff on health issues on the Senate transitioned from being a place where people had an affinity for each other that was Finance Committee. “He was partisan, but he wasn’t biting anybody. It wasn’t a biting personal to a place where people are basically involved in doing a job, come to work, partisanship. ... And Casey just would kind of light up the room.” and these are the folks they work with.” Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) packed up his whole family on the Lincoln’s Birthday All is not lost. Much about that old Senate club was racist and capable of being holiday in 1977. “We made a family choice that all six of us would come,” he recalls. immensely cruel. The chamber’s doors are far more open today to women and But with the rush of more former House members — who have adjusted to keeping minorities, and small state delegations like Rhode Island’s have kept alive the best their families at home — this is a rarity now in the Senate. traditions of the old. “They didn’t change their lifestyle,” Lugar says of House members-turned-senators. Reed, the West Pointer, soon to be 60 and in his third term, has blossomed into one “They just changed the room.” of the Senate’s most respected members, smoothing the path for his younger partner, The Senate gym and congressional delegations overseas are among the last meeting freshman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Five-foot-7 “in the right atmospheric conditions,” places. More often, the pattern is all-of-one-party, male nighttime socializing, in which the former Army Ranger delights in a framed 1950s photo of LBJ towering over another arrivals from the House mix with their old House colleagues rather than with senators diminutive Rhode Islander: 90-year-old Sen. Theodore Greene. across the aisle. “He is the consummate senator,” says retired Sen.