Requiem for a Liberal
This is my last "Strange
Bedfellow." When I return from vacation, I'm going to take a break from
politics and try my hand at a column about the arts. To ease the transition, I
thought it might be fitting to pay tribute to someone whose career spans these
two worlds. He is Sidney R. Yates, the Democratic congressman who represents my
birth-district on the North Side of Chicago. When Yates retires at the end of
this congressional term at 89, he will have served in the House, but for one
two-year interruption, since 1948. Leaving with him, I fear, will be not only a
chunk of postwar history but much of the enlightenment that remains in the
lower chamber.
I'm far
from objective on this topic. Yates gave me my first paid job as a
congressional page many summers ago, and the first writing I ever did about
politics was answering constituent mail in his office. But my real gratitude is
for what Yates' example teaches: that politicians aren't required to preen and
pander or to speak only for the parochial interests of their districts. Yates
has held the esteem and affection of the people he has represented for half a
century by thinking about their good in a more elevated way. He is a liberal,
one of the nearly extinct Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson variety. But in
another way, I think of Sidney Yates as one of the only true conservatives
around. He has found his mission in preserving what matters in our culture, and
in standing in the way of attempts to coarsen and reduce it.
Up on the Hill a few weeks ago, I stopped by his office in
the Rayburn Building for lunch. As ever, I was greeted by his chief aide, Mary
Bain, who is an extraordinary story of liberal longevity in her own right. Mary
came to Washington to work on the New Deal National Youth Administration in
1935 and has been with Yates since 1965. She and the boss were busy sorting 50
years' worth of files and packing them up for the Truman Library. On the table
were things they had found: a note from Eleanor Roosevelt expressing outrage
about some now obscure postal reorganization bill, and a yellowed copy of the
Chicago Sun-Times from July 15, 1965, the day after Adlai Stevenson
died.
Sifting
through these relics left Yates in a more wistful mood than usual. Though he
can usually be counted on for a bit of patter from Gilbert and Sullivan, most
of which he knows by heart, he told me he felt it had been too long since he
reread Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in the classic translation by
Brian Hooker. He began reciting it for me from memory:
I carry my adornments on
my soul.I do not dress up like a popinjay; But inwardly, I keep my
daintiness.
The lines
apply to no one so well as the congressman from the 9 th District of
Chicago, who must be the only politician left in the House who avoids publicity
and whose style is to follow the dictates of his conscience without making a
spectacle of himself doing so.
As Yates recounted over soup and sandwiches, he
didn't go into politics to save the world. He did it because he was bored
working for his father-in-law's law firm. In 1939, he ran against the Chicago
Democratic machine for a seat on the City Council and not surprisingly lost.
Recognizing that the only way in was with the blessing of the regular
organization, he got it in 1948, when he was allowed to run for Congress as a
sacrificial lamb. According to the elaborate ethnic spoils system of those
days, the North Side House seat belonged to the Germans. But the German
candidate who'd been slated to run decided in the face of a looming Republican
sweep that he'd like to be postmaster, so Yates, who is Jewish, got his chance.
He ran on a Democratic ticket with Harry Truman for president, Stevenson for
governor, and Paul Douglas for senator. "I was the tail on the dog, and we all
won," he said.
Almost as
soon as he was elected, Yates attempted self-immolation by voting against the
McCarran Act, which placed McCarthyite restrictions on visitors to the United
States. Colleagues told him that if he voted against it, he'd be a one term
congressman, and they were nearly right. His opponent in 1950 passed out pink
leaflets asking if the 9 th District wanted a congressman who voted
with the Communist Party. But Yates wrote a thoughtful letter to his
constituents--the first of several hundred to come--explaining why he thought
the bill was unconstitutional and eked out a narrow re-election. After
surviving another close call in 1952, he was regularly returned by lopsided
margins. In the House, he continued to get excited about injustices that
bothered hardly anyone else. Around the same time, he saved the career of Hyman
Rickover, the father of the nuclear fleet, when Rickover was passed over for
promotion to admiral in part because of anti-Semitism in the Navy.
Though he had the endorsement of Mayor Richard J. Daley,
Yates was never a machine man. In 1962 he had become the leader of the Illinois
delegation by virtue of seniority, and Daley decided it was time for him to run
for the Senate, in a kamikaze challenge to the Republican incumbent, Everett
Dirksen. Yates lost, and a freshman named Daniel Rostenkowski assumed his place
as head of the delegation. After a stint working for Stevenson at the U.S.
Mission to the United Nations, Yates returned. But with his seniority erased,
he began to narrow his focus to the issues that truly motivated him: Israel,
the arts, and the environment.
The year
he returned to Congress, 1965, the national endowments for the arts and
humanities were voted into existence. When Yates became chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on the Interior, the national endowment
budgets fell under his jurisdiction. In the 1970s, he was known as a
tough-minded supporter who could be counted on for a meticulous review of how
the endowments were spending their money. But after attempts to eliminate them
began under President Reagan, and intensified with the Mapplethorpe fiasco,
Yates' career became preoccupied with keeping them alive.
He has managed to do so, at times through sheer
force of will. Other representatives invite Hollywood celebrities to testify
before their committees; Yates invited Yo-Yo Ma to play a Bach suite before
his, soothing the savage breast of the NEA's opponents. After Democrats lost
the House, the NEA budget was cut in half. This year, Yates is battling to save
it once more. He now leaves that mission to two New Yorkers: Louise Slaughter,
a Democrat, and Amo Houghton, a patrician Republican. Whether his successors in
this role succeed or not, I suspect that Yates will one day be better
remembered for another accomplishment: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
which he and his wife, Addie, worked for years to bring into existence.
As we finished lunch, I
asked whether I was right in assuming Yates thought term limits were a bad
idea. "To the contrary, Jacob," he declared. "Twenty-four terms is enough for
anyone."
