While lecturing to my American Government classes at UALR, I sometimes would mention that I had served as an intern with Sen. Claiborne Pell, since many students in the class had a grant which bore his name.
Few students, however, even those who were receiving grants named after him, knew anything about him or the state he represented. That lack of knowledge then and now stimulated me to write this story using some of my personal memories of a senator who was as eccentric as he was important.
In the mid-'60s after graduating from college, I found myself as an evening intern in the Providence office of Sen. Claiborne Pell, the junior senator from Rhode Island. I had been afflicted with the political science bug and was then enrolled at the University of Rhode Island studying for an MA in government.
At that time I had never personally met a United States senator, never mind interning for one. This was pretty heady stuff for me, solving the world's problems by cutting out newspaper clippings for the senator's staff to send congratulatory letters to his constituents (Dear Mr. and Mrs. Beagle: your son made Eagle), stuff like that.
Although Pell won his Senate seat in 1960 and never lost an election thereafter, John F. Kennedy called him the least electable man in America because of his many peculiar behaviors.
But Pell knew the value of interns and their networking ability, and I soon found myself in Newport for an intern reception. The ocean-worn gray-shingled one-story house was perched right on the cliff walk that slinked around Mansion Row. The senator was famous for wearing thread-bare suits, even jogging and rowing in them, but as I recall was garbed causally that day. While we were munching on hot dogs, a large black car drew up near the house. Out came Mrs. Kennedy and two small children, Caroline Kennedy and John Jr. Later, John's roommate at Brown and best friend would be Jeff Ledbetter, the son of my late colleague, Cal Ledbetter. Just two years removed from the assassination of her husband and their father, it was a sunny and beautiful sad day that I will never forget.
During my studies at Brown, I became somewhat more familiar with the junior senator from Rhode Island. Most of Pell's eccentric behavior was largely unknown to me, but I did see that his mild and seemingly never unruffled manner could be a great asset in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. After all, he was the son of a diplomat (the United States Ambassador to Portugal) and he was no wimp, having been detained several times by the Nazis for taking emergency supplies to prisoners of war in Germany.
Pell's peculiarities are of the stuff that urban political legends are made. I once saw him in one of his political commercials sitting in a Central Falls bar outfitted in a suit with a group of burly blue-collar workers, answering foreign-policy questions. The scene was so incongruously incongruous that it came across as natural.
The classic Pell story, who by the way was interested in the paranormal, was told to me by a friend of mine who was his campaign aide. Apparently on the campaign trail, a sudden rainstorm enmeshed the streets in water. Seeing a Thom McAn shoe store (a well known thrifty shoe-store chain in Rhode Island) the aide went to fetch Pell a pair of rubber shoes. When the aide told Pell where he had got the galoshes, Pell said earnestly, "please thank Mr. McAn for the rubbers."
Pell later became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee but had to contend with Jesse Helms, the outspoken and often bully-like senator from North Carolina. Perhaps too courteous to deal with Helms, Pell's legacy is nonetheless cemented with the passage of Pell grants, which have provided higher-education opportunities to several generations of students. Pell also pushed through the bill that created the National Endowment for the Humanities. These giant accomplishments were accompanied by foresight for high-speed railroads and research in oceanography.
I recall one of my instructors criticizing Pell for his esoteric policy perspectives rather than dealing with bread-and-butter issues, but time has borne out the importance of Pell's policy agenda as the nation has confronted weakening transportation infrastructure, fishery shortages, ocean pollution and climate change.
It is probably fair to say that they don't make senators like Claiborne Pell anymore. Courteous and humble to a fault, committed to making a difference in education, the arts, and more, Claiborne Pell's legacy is secure.
The noted congressional scholar, Richard Fenno, who traveled with Pell and David Pryor in their Senate campaigns to detect their congressional style, called Pell along with Pryor "Senate institutions," meaning their popularity with their constituents made them practically unbeatable.
Pell would have liked this appraisal and probably would have thought: Not bad for an unpretentious, peculiar senator from Rhode Island.
Art English is professor emeritus in American government, Arkansas politics and constitutional law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Editorial on 06/15/2015