Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

It has to be considered a bad political omen for any new year to begin with the death of Sen. Claiborne Pell. With him dies another piece of a political era where government and politics were fairer, more generous, more open-minded, less harsh and just plain better.

The  six-term U.S. Senator who will be laid to rest today was a man of class and grace. Despite his birth into wealth and privilege, and 36 years spent in “the world’s most exclusive club,” he truly cared about ordinary Americans and Rhode Island, and showed true interest and concern for the lives they led.  Although he was truly elite, he was never an elitist.
Some stanzas from the poem “Richard Corey” come to mind:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
  Clean favored, and imperially slim.
 
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
 
And he was rich — yes, richer than a king,
 And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
 To make us wish that we were in his place.

When Pell was called “the gentleman from Rhode Island,” it was not some nicety of senatorial etiquette, it was an apt description. He was not only a gentleman, but a gentle man. He seemed not to have a nasty thing to say about anyone, not even political opponents.
It is perhaps well that Pell got out of the Senate when he did, after the 1996 election. Where once he may have epitomized the typical senator: patrician, noblesse oblige, high-minded if sometimes a bit wooly, and yes, he wouldn’t mind it being said of him, liberal. Today the epitome of a typical senator seems to be a snarling, partisan, go-for-the-throat, every-man-for-himself, mean-spirited demagogue — some Dixie used car dealer on steroids and amphetamines. Senator Pell just would not fit in.
The blue-blooded Pell’s six terms serving blue-collar Rhode Island also says something for the state and its politics. Make all the jokes you will about Rhode Island politicians, but for every scoundrel that is brought to the fore, we seem to also elect a Claiborne Pell or a John Chafee or a John Pastore or, in current times, a Jack Reed.
While he was a nice guy, Pell was no pushover. He often got his way by a stubborn toughness — he stood his ground until he got his way.
His crowning achievement was surely the Pell Grant program that has helped literally tens of millions of American young people go to college and stay there, going as long and far as their brains and effort will take them, not to be yanked out of their lecture halls or dormitories by a lack of funds. But he also deeply enriched the country’s arts and humanities with programs that came under no end of ideological fire and partisan attempts to kill them with ginned-up controversy.
Pell never let it happen. He has been gone from the Senate for a dozen years but the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities survive, and Pell Grants have become such an integral part of higher education in America that they will never go away.
Pell had an extensive resume in foreign affairs dating back to when he would accompany his diplomat father on visits abroad and late in his career he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But his interests could veer all the way to the oddball, including his fascination with UFOs as well as ESP and other paranormal phenomenon.
You just never knew with Pell.
I remember one day after I had been a reporter for The Times for a few years, I was sitting in the newsroom trying to dig up a story when I saw two men in the front of the room talking with the editorial clerk. Their backs were to me so I couldn’t see who they were, so I went back to the telephone and started dialing.
The editorial clerk came to my desk and, as I am sure you have guessed by now, one of the guys at the front of the room was the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, having arrived unannounced and unbidden, wondering if there was anything we wanted to talk to him about. I remember thinking at the time that there was no impending election or any other motive for an important and busy senator to want to stop by for no particular reason and open himself up to anything a newspaper might want to ask him.
The lone aide who was with him explained that the senator had been walking around Downtown Pawtucket to see how things were doing and he decided to stop by The Times.
Pell would frequently just go to a city or town and walk around, introducing himself to pedestrians and visiting shops and businesses to find out what was important to the people there and what their senator might be able to do for them.
No advance teams, no press releases, no camera crews, no big entourage. Just Senator Pell and perhaps an assistant “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Except he really meant it.
So while former President Bill Clinton and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden and onetime colleague Sen. Ted Kennedy will be attending Pell’s funeral today, I’m betting we’ll also find some of those shopkeepers who answered his questions and a few of the pedestrians who shook his hand.
He would like that.
Perhaps at his funeral service someone will take the opportunity to quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”
And that is sad, because we could use a few dozen more Claiborne Pells in all aspects of public life these days.