Lion of the Senate: When Ted Kennedy Rallied the Democrats in a GOP Congress - Softcover

Littlefield, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476796165 ISBN 13: 9781476796161

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

An insider’s look at the two years when Senator Ted Kennedy held at bay both Newt Gingrich and his Republican majority: “For those who love politics and care about policy—and those looking for an account of how Washington used to work, Lion of the Senate is pure catnip” (USA TODAY).

The November 1994 election swept a new breed of Republicans into control of the United States Congress. Led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Republicans were determined to enact a radically conservative agenda that would reshape American government. Some wanted to shut down the government. If Gingrich’s “Contract with America” been enacted, they would have shredded the federal safety net, decimated the federal programs, and struck down the regulatory framework that protects health, safety, and the environment. And, were it not for Ted Kennedy, who had defeated Mitt Romney for his Senate seat in 1994, they would have succeeded.

In Lion of the Senate Nick Littlefield and David Nexon describe never-before-disclosed maneuvers of closed-door meetings in which Kennedy galvanized his party, including the two pivotal years, 1995 and 1996, when the Republicans held control of Congress and he fought to preserve the mission of the Democratic Party in the face of the right-wing onslaught. Here is the nitty-gritty of Kennedy’s role, and the details of a fascinating, bare-knuckled, and frequently hilarious fight in the United States Senate.

“Compelling…as a story about how the Senate operates—well, how the Senate used to operate—and a story about perhaps the greatest Senate lawmaker of the second half of the twentieth century, Lion of the Senate succeeds” (The Washington Post) as a political lesson for all time. With an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin, this is “a fine rendering that deserves a wide readership” (Kirkus Reviews).

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nick Littlefield was Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Chief of Staff for the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee from 1989 to 1998. Recognized as one of the best-respected and most powerful staff members in Congress during his tenure on Capitol Hill, Littlefield was at Senator Kennedy’s side while he spearheaded historic legislation in health care and civil rights.

Before joining Kennedy, Littlefield was a federal prosecutor in New York, chief counsel to an anti-corruption commission in Massachusetts, lecturer at Harvard Law School, and a partner in the law firm Foley Hoag. After leaving Washington in 1998, he returned to his law firm in Boston, where he continued to work on expanding access to healthcare but now from the private sector. Nick retired in 2012. He and his wife, Jenny, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have three grown children, and six grandchildren.

David Nexon served as Senator Kennedy’s senior health policy advisor and directed Kennedy’s Senate HELP Committee health staff from 1983–2005. Nexon was the lead health staffer on the Kassebaum-Kennedy health insurance reform, the Child Health Insurance Program, Medicare drug coverage, and other major initiatives. He is currently an executive at the Advanced Medical Technology Association and lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife, Lainey.

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Lion of the Senate

Chapter 1

ELECTION DAY

GLOUCESTER

When the doors of the Veterans Memorial Elementary School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, opened to admit the first voters at 7:00 in the morning on Election Day 1994, I was standing outside the school holding a red, white, and blue “Kennedy for Senate” sign, “doing visibility,” as they call it in Massachusetts politics. I had taken two weeks off from my job working for Kennedy in Washington to volunteer on the campaign. It was his tradition that for the final weekend and until the polls closed on Election Day, everyone involved in the campaign would leave the Boston headquarters and spread out across the state to help in local cities and towns. I chose to work in Gloucester, an hour north of Boston. Over the long hours in the early morning New England chill, holding my sign and saying “Good morning” to voters, I thought about what had brought me, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer and father of three, to this school and this moment.

I’d grown up in Providence, Rhode Island, and gone to Harvard College. My first job after college was as a Broadway singer in My Fair Lady in summer stock and in Kismet with Alfred Drake at Lincoln Center in New York. After one year in the professional theater I left to go to law school. I thought law and musical theater were the opposite poles in my life, never imagining that singing would become a great political asset, especially when I worked for Kennedy.

When I was in law school at the University of Pennsylvania, part of a generation urged to go into public service by President John F. Kennedy, I worked on my first political campaign, for Governor John Chafee of Rhode Island, a progressive Republican. I drove Chafee around in a yellow and blue truck with speakers on the roof blasting a campaign ditty I’d written: “Keep the man you can trust in Rhode Island, with Chafee we’re moving along. Keep the man you can trust in Rhode Island, and keep Rhode Island strong.” Chafee won the election, and I finished law school. In 1968 he asked me to run his reelection campaign, which I did while studying for the New York Bar Exam. His defeat, due to his courageous support for a new state income tax, was my first political disappointment.

In 1970, while working at a New York law firm, I ran the “Lawyers Committee against the Vietnam War,” raising money for congressional antiwar candidates across the country. One of these candidates, the brilliant antiwar and civil rights activist Allard Lowenstein, recruited me to run a nationwide voter registration drive called Registration Summer the next year. A constitutional amendment lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen had just passed, and we wanted to register young people, who we hoped would help stop the war with their votes. In 1972 I left my law firm and ran Al’s campaign to return to Congress. His loss was another profound disappointment; I was beginning to understand that losses are frequently part of politics and that losing hurts a great deal.

After the campaign the Republican U.S. attorney appointed me an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan and the Bronx). There I prosecuted corrupt politicians, drug dealers who were part of the infamous “French connection,” tax swindlers, and worked on white-collar and organized crime cases. I conducted over two dozen trials and learned how to make a convincing argument in front of a Manhattan jury, a formidable task for a Bostonian. When my four-year term ended I wanted to go home to New England to reconnect with my family and lifetime friends, so I accepted a job as a lecturer at Harvard Law School. I soon was running Harvard’s trial advocacy program, which I did for twelve years; I also taught prosecution and investigations and started a course called “The Government Lawyer” to encourage students to work in government by showing them the excitement and responsibility involved.

In 1978 the Massachusetts legislature established a special commission to investigate corruption in the state’s public construction projects. Bill Ward, the president of Amherst College, was appointed head of the commission; on the recommendation of Harvard Professor Archibald Cox and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whom he knew through Amherst, Ward asked me to become chief counsel and executive director. We wanted to excite public opinion about the costs of corruption, which had become a way of life in Massachusetts. We hoped to convince a reluctant legislature to rewrite the laws and fix the problems we would identify. We decided that presenting evidence of the widespread kickbacks that we uncovered was the best way of doing this. Because there were still afternoon papers as well as afternoon and evening news shows that had to be filled, we determined to try to hold full public hearings every morning, and revelations from these hearings became our signature “bribe a day before lunch.” Our eighteen months of public hearings were covered extensively in the media.

One of my favorite bribery cases was that of William Masiello, who ran a pizza parlor in Worcester and decided he could make more money if he opened an architectural firm. Masiello quickly got public work by paying off the Worcester County commissioners and persuading them that there should be a new courthouse in each town in Worcester County, which is why, to this day, that area has four virtually identical courthouses within a radius of fifty miles. Masiello eventually succeeded in winning bribery-greased contracts all over the state.

The Ward Commission served its purpose: the legislature passed criminal laws to strengthen public corruption prosecutions and reform the construction process from bid to completion. It also created a permanent Inspector General’s Office to continue our work.

When the Ward Commission ended in 1981, I was married and the father of three, so for financial reasons I had to think about going back to a law firm. I took a job at Foley, Hoag and Eliot and spent almost eight years there. In the fall of 1988 Gregory Craig, an old friend from the Lowenstein campaign, called to tell me he was leaving his job as foreign policy advisor for Senator Kennedy. He told me that it was a tradition in Kennedy’s office to find candidates to succeed you when you left, and he was calling to urge me to be his replacement.

The idea of working for Kennedy was very enticing, but I wasn’t sure foreign policy was the right fit for me. As I was hesitating about the job, Ranny Cooper, the senator’s chief of staff, called to tell me that there was also a vacancy coming up in domestic policy for staff director for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, which Kennedy chaired. The Labor Committee had jurisdiction over health care, medical research, doctor training, people with disabilities, the Food and Drug Administration, and education, including higher education, student loans, and school reform. It also had jurisdiction over jobs and job training, wages, labor, civil rights in the workplace, and even the arts and children’s issues, such as Head Start and child care.

I wanted to go back to government, but not as a prosecutor. I had learned from prosecuting two cases in which we mistakenly arrested the wrong person that the truth could be elusive and the consequences of mistakes dire. Although the falsely convicted bank robber and the wrongly identified international drug dealer were ultimately released, I no longer wanted to take the chance of ruining a person’s...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476796165
• ISBN 13: 9781476796161
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 528
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar