An Uncommon Man: The Life and Times of Senator Claiborne Pell

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This 12th free offering is the prologue to "An Uncommon Man: The Life and Time of Senator Claiborne Pell," edition published in 2011 by University Press of New England, in Kindle and hardcover editions.

Newport: President John F. Kennedy with Pell, circa 1961.

Prologue: A Cold Winter Day

 

Dawn had barely broken when the crowd began to build outside Trinity Episcopal Church. A frigid wind blew and snow frosted the Newport, Rhode Island, ground. Police had restricted vehicular traffic to allow passage of the motorcade carrying a former president, the vice president-elect, and dozens of U.S. senators, representatives and other dignitaries who would be arriving. Men in sunglasses with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the church grounds, where flags flew at half-mast.

It was Jan. 5, 2009, the day of Senator Claiborne deBorda Pell’s funeral.

Some of those waiting to get inside Trinity Church were members of Newport society, to which Pell and Nuala, his wife of 64 years, had belonged since birth. Some were working-class people who knew Pell as a tall, thin, bespectacled man who once regularly jogged along Bellevue Avenue, greeting strangers and friends that he passed. Some knew him only from the media, where he was sometimes portrayed, not inaccurately, as the capitol’s most eccentric character, as interested in the afterlife and the paranormal as the federal budget. Some knew him mostly from the ballot booth or from programs and policies he’d been instrumental in establishing. First elected in 1960, the year his friend John F. Kennedy captured the White House, Pell served 36 years in the U.S. Senate, 14^th longest in history as of that January day. His accomplishments from those six terms touched untold millions of lives.

Pell died at a few minutes past midnight on Jan. 1, five weeks after his 90^th birthday and more than a decade after the first symptoms of the Parkinson’s Disease that slowly stole all movement and speech, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. He died, his family with him, at his oceanfront home -- a shingled, single-story house that he personally designed and which stood in modest contrast to Bellevue Avenue mansions and Bailey’s Beach, the exclusive members-only club that has been synonymous with East Coast wealth since the Gilded Age. Pell, whose colonial-era ancestors established enduring wealth from tobacco and land, and Nuala, an heiress to the A&P fortune, belonged to Bailey’s. But the Pells were unflinchingly liberal and Democratic. In the old manufacturing state of Rhode Island, where the American Industrial Revolution was born, blue-collar voters embraced their aristocratic senator with the unconventional mind.

The motorcades passed the waiting crowd, which by 9 a.m. was more than a block long. Former President Bill Clinton stepped out of an SUV and went into the parish hall to await the procession to the church. Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whose malignant brain cancer would claim him that summer, followed Clinton. A bus that met a jet from Washington brought more senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republicans Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch. Pell’s civility and even temper during his decades in the Senate earned him the respect of his colleagues. “I always try to let the other fellow have my way,” is how Pell liked to explain his Congressional style. It was the best means, he maintained, to “translate ideas into actions and help people,” as he described the heart of his legislative style. He had learned these philosophies from his father, a minor diplomat and one-term Congressman who had cast an inordinate influence on his only child even after his own death in the first months of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

The doors to Trinity opened and the crowd went in, filling seats in the loft that had been reserved for the public. The overflow went into the parish hall, to watch the live-broadcast TV feed. Led by their mother, Nuala and Claiborne’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren took seats near the pulpit. The politicians settled in pews across the aisle. The organ played, the choir sang, and six Coast Guardsmen wheeled a mahogany casket draped in white to the front of the church.

 From early childhood, Pell had loved the sea, an affection he captured in sailboat drawings and grade-school essays about the joys of being on the water. When he was nine, he took an ocean journey that would influence him in ways a young boy could not have predicted: traveling by luxury liner with his mother and stepfather, he went to Cuba and on through the Panama Canal to California and Hawaii. “It was the most interesting voyage I have ever taken,’’ he wrote, when he was 12, in an essay entitled The Story of My Life. 

An early passport for the world-traveler.

After graduating from college in 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, pointedly remaining in the reserves until mandatory retirement at age 60, when he was nearing the end of his third Senate term.

In the many stories that had accompanied his retirement from the Senate, Pell had named the 1972 Seabed Arms Control treaty, which kept the Cold War nuclear arms race from spreading to the ocean floor by prohibiting the testing or storage of weapons deep undersea, as among his favorite achievements. He pointed also to his National Sea Grant College and Program Act of 1966, which provided unprecedented federal funding of university-based oceanography. And one of his deepest regrets, he said 1996, was in failing to achieve U.S. ratification of the international Law of the Sea Treaty, which establishes ocean boundaries and protects global maritime resources.

In planning his funeral, Pell requested a ceremonial honor guard from his beloved service. The Coast Guard granted his wish -- and added meaning when selecting Pell’s pallbearers. Two of the six had graduated college with the help of Pell Grants, the tuition-assistance program for lower-  and middle-income students that Pell called his greatest achievement. Since their inception in 1972, the grants by 2009 had been awarded to more than 115 million recipients. Without them, many could not have earned a college degree.

Kennedy left his wife, Vicki, in their pew and walked slowly to the pulpit.

In his nearly eight-minute eulogy, the last substantial speech the final Kennedy brother would make, Ted talked of Pell’s fortitude when he and Nuala lost two of their grown children. His hands trembling but his voice strong, he spoke of his family’s long relationship with Pell, which began before the Second World War -- and of his own friendship with Pell and their 34 years together in the Senate. He spoke of Pell’s political support for his president brother and his support for hos own son, Patrick Kennedy, representative from Rhode Island’s 1^st Congressional District, which includes Newport. He recalled the summer tradition of sailing with Vicki on his sailboat, Maya, from Long Island to Newport, enroute to their home in Hyannisport on Cape Cod. During their overnight visits with the Pells, Claiborne, who owned no yacht, relished sailing on Ted’s sailboat Mya, even after Parkinson’s Disease left him in a wheelchair and unable to speak. “The quiet joy of the wind on his face was a site to behold,” Kennedy said.     

Kennedy closed with tribute.

“During his brilliant career, he amassed a treasure trove of accomplishments that few will ever match,” Kennedy said, citing the Pell Grants, Pell’s 1965 legislation that established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Seabed Treaty. It was Claiborne Pell who advocated the power of diplomacy  before resorting to the power of military might. And it was Claiborne Pell who was a environmentalist long before that was cool. Claiborne Pell was a senator of high character, great decency and fundamental honesty. And that’s why he became the longest serving senator in the history of Rhode Island. He was a senator for our time and for all time. He was an original. He was my friend and I will miss him very much.”

Kennedy returned to his pew and Clinton took the pulpit of the historic old church, which has overlooked Newport Harbor since 1726. Drawing laughter, the former president told of first seeing Pell: in 1964, when he was a freshman at Georgetown University living in a dorm that overlooked the backyard of the Pells’ Washington home.

“I was this goggle-eyed kid from Arkansas. I had never been anywhere or  seen anything and here I was in Washington, D.C., and I got to be a voyeur looking down on all the dinner parties of this elegant man. So I got very interested in the Pell family. And I read up on them, you know. And I realized that they were a form of American royalty. I knew that because it took me 29 years and six moths to get in the front door of that house I’d been staring at. When I became president, Senator and Mrs. Pell, who had supported my campaign, invited me in the front door. I received one of Claiborne Pell’s courtly tours of his home, which was like getting a tour of the family history. There were all these relatives he had with wigs on. Where I came from only people who were bald wore wigs. And they weren’t white and curled. It was amazing.

“And even after all those years, I still felt as I did when I was a boy: that there was something almost magical about this man who was born to aristocracy but cared about people like the people I grew up with.”

He cared, too, Clinton said, for the citizens of the world. Clinton spoke of Pell’s belief that together, nations can solve the planet’s problems -- a belief that took root in his childhood travels and solidified in 1945 in San Francisco, where delegates of 50 countries drafted the U.N. Charter. Pell served as an assistant for the American delegation.

“Every time I saw him -- every single time -- he would pull out this dog-eared copy of the U.N. Charter,’’ Clinton said. “It was light blue, frayed around the edges. I was so intimidated. There I was in the White House and I actually went home one night and read it all again to make sure I could pass a test in case Senator Pell asked me any questions. But I got the message and so did everybody else that ever came in contact with him: that America could not go forward in a world that had only a global economy without a sense of global politics and social responsibility.”

The ex president ended with a reference to ancestors.

“The Pell family’s wealth began with a royal grant of land in Westchester County where Hilary and I now live,” he said. “It occurred to me that if we had met 300 years ago, he would be my lord and I would be his serf. All I can tell you is: I would have been proud to serve him. He was the right kind of aristocrat: a champion by choice, not circumstance, of the common good and our common future and our common dreams, in a long life of grace, generous spirit, kind heart, and determination, right to the very end. That life is his last true Pell Grant.”

Despite the work of transitioning from the Bush to the Obama administration, Biden had taken the morning off to eulogize the man who befriended him when he arrived in Washington in 1972 as a 29-year-old senator-elect. Biden had just lost his wife and baby daughter in a car accident. “You made your home my own,” Biden said, turning to Nuala. In the Senate, Pell became Biden’s mentor.

The vice-president-elect, who served with Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, enumerated more of Pell’s accomplishments, including legislation that helped build Amtrak and a lesser-publicized campaign against drunk driving -- a cause Pell embraced when two of his staff members, including one central in the fight for Pell Grants, were killed by drunk drivers. In these efforts and in all of his Congressional dealings, Biden said -- and all of his campaigns, none of which he ever lost -- Pell brought a gentlemanly sensibility that seemed outdated in an era of hot tempers and mud.

“I’m told, Ted,” Biden said, “that your brother, President Kennedy, once said Claiborne Pell was the least electable man in America -- a view that, I suppose, was shared by at least six of his opponents when he ran for the United States Senate over the course of 36 years.”

Laughter filled Trinity Church.

“I understand how people could think that,” Biden continued. Here was a graduate of an exclusive college-preparatory school and Princeton, who later earned an advanced degree from another Ivy league School, Columbia -- a man born into wealth who married into more and had traveled the world many times over before ever seeking office.

“He didn’t have a great deal in common, I suspect, with many of his constituents in terms of background, except this: I think Claiborne realized that many of the traits he learned in his upbringing -- honesty, integrity, fair play -- they didn’t only belong to those  who could afford to embrace the sense of noblesse oblige. He understood, in my view, that nobility lives in the heart of every man and woman regardless of their situation in life. He understood that the aspirations of the mother living on Bellevue Avenue here in Newport were no more lofty, no more considerable, than the dream of a mother living in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.…each of those mothers wanted their children to have the opportunity to make the most of their gifts and the most of their lives.”

Biden told some favorite stories, drawing laughter with the one about Pell going for a jog on a trip to Rome dressed in an Oxford button-down shirt, Bermuda shorts, black socks and leather shoes -- an image of Pell that his friends and family knew well. Sweat suits and Nikes were not Pell’s style.

“To be honest, he was a quirky guy, Nuala,” Biden said.

Biden consoles Nuala Pell at the senator's funeral.

The mourners laughed -- Nuala most appreciatively, for she understood best what Biden meant. For two thirds of a century, she had experienced his odd dress, his obsession with ancestors, his bad driving, his frugality, his fascination with ESP and the possibility of life after death, his manner of speaking, as if he had indeed traveled forward in time from the 1600s, when Thomas Pell was named First Lord of the Manor of Pelham. These traits were all part of his charm, which sometimes annoyed but often amused his wife. This and his handsome looks and ever-curious mind were why Nuala had fallen in love when they met in the summer of 1944, when she was 20, and why she married him four months later. Claiborne Pell was different. Unlike most other young men of her circle, he aspired to be something more than a rich guy who threw parties.

Biden’s eulogy was nearing a half hour, but he had one more story.

“One day, I was sitting in the Foreign Relations Committee room waiting for a head of state to come in.” Pell was there.

“He took his jacket off, which was rare -- I can’t remember why -- and I noticed his belt went all the way around the back and it went all the way to the back loop. I looked at him and I said, `Claiborne, that’s an interesting belt.’

“He said, `it was my father’s.’ And his father was a big man.

“I looked at him and I said, `Well, Claiborne, why don’t you just have it cut off?’

“He unleashed the whole belt and held it up and said, `Joe, this is genuine rawhide.’ I’ll never forget that: `This is genuine rawhide.’ I thought, God bless me!”

Almost a half century before, Pell’s father, Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr., had been remembered here in Trinity Church after dying of a heart attack in Munich, Germany, on July 17, 1961. A plaque in Herbert’s name hung from the wall behind the pulpit from which distinguished men now eulogized his son. “Lay Reader in this Church,” the plaque read. “Kind and beloved Public Servant & Scholar. Member 66^th United States Congress. United States Minister to Portugal and to Hungary.” 

Elected from Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District, Herbert served one term, from 1919 to 1921, in the U.S. House of Representatives. Losing re-election, he became chairman of the New York’s Democratic State Committee, remaining until 1926. His friend President Franklin Delano Roosevelt named him minister to Portugal in 1937, and then, in 1941, minister to Hungary. When Hitler’s war forced Herbert to return home, Roosevelt named him a delegate to the United Nations War Crimes Commission.

Herbert was more an intellectual than a politician -- a bibliophile, art collector and writer whose inheritance allowed him to do whatever he desired. Herbert owned properties in Manhattan, New York state and Newport, and kept a staff that included a chauffeur and a personal secretary. He traveled extensively, preferring to stay at the many European and American men’s clubs to which he belonged. But of all his passions, none rivaled the interest he took in his only child.

Herbert made the decisive decisions about Claiborne’s education. He critiqued the young boy’s penmanship and tennis serve and brought Claiborne along with him on his world adventures. He used his considerable influence in attempting to place the young man into the military and, after the war, public service. He advised Claiborne on matters of business, politics, ethics and love. He responded at length when Claiborne sought his counsel, as Claiborne regularly did. He established the trust fund that would free his son, as his parents had freed him, from the concerns of  earning the daily bread. He taught his son that the family had maintained its wealth since the 17^th Century not with the sort of obscene extravagance that had eroded many a Gilded-Age fortune, but by living a refined life without want, but with limits that protected the base for subsequent generations.

“Financial independence, even the humblest, is not a necessity but it is a most desirable concomitant of spiritual and intellectual freedom,” he wrote to his son in 1939, the year Claiborne turned 21 and Herbert, 55, gave him control of the trust. With the money came words of fatherly wisdom. “I strongly advise you not to make the mistake I made: Do not accumulate possessions. I do not say that if I had my life to live over again I would own nothing except my clothes, but I would give a lot of heart to following that drastic course than to doing what I did.”

Claiborne was six months into his first Senate term when Herbert died, without warning or goodbye, 4,000 miles away. Claiborne flew to Germany to oversee his cremation, returning with his father’s ashes, which were scattered in the ocean off Jamestown, an island community next to Newport. Already obsessive about Pell family ancestry, as Herbert had been, Claiborne decorated his Washington and Newport homes with paintings and mementoes of his father. He began wearing his clothes, much too big for him. Herbert stood six-feet-five-inches tall and weighed nearly 250 pounds; at six-foot-two and 156 pounds, Claiborne was physically slight by comparison.

But it was not the only measure by which Pell likened himself to his father -- and in which he saw himself short. This senator who would draw many of the nation’s political elite to his funeral was never convinced he was the man his father had been. It was a judgment that would both drive and haunt Pell, in his legislative career and personal life. It was central to the fascination he developed with the paranormal and his largely unpublicized but obsessive quest to learn what, if anything, lay beyond death -- and whether it was possible to communicate to those who were departed.         

If it was, perhaps he could reach his father, who had not lived to see what his son had become. Perhaps he could receive Herbert’s approval.

Senator Jack Reed, who received Pell’s endorsement and succeeded him in the Senate, joined the other eulogists in praising his predecessor’s accomplishments. Like Biden, Reed had a funny story related to Pell’s forbears. It took place in 1992, when Reed, a freshman member of the House, was waiting with Pell for President George H. W. Bush to sign the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which provides the funding for Pell Grants. Reed, the son of a janitor and a housewife, had grown up admiring Pell.

“Now, Claiborne was a master of many things, but small talk was not one of them,” Reed told the mourners. “We got through the weather and the traffic pretty quickly and we were rapidly moving into the area of awkward silence. But I was sitting next to one of my heroes and felt compelled to keep talking so I blurted out:

“ `Are you going up to Rhode Island this weekend, senator?’

“Claiborne perked up noticeably and said: ‘Well, no, Jack, I’m going up to Fort Ticonderoga for a family reunion.’

“I was a bit thrown by the response, so I said: `Why would you ever go up there for a family reunion?’

“ `Well, Jack, you see, we own it.’ ”

Laughter filled the church.

``For a moment, I thought he was pulling my leg,” Reed continued. “But that was not Claiborne Pell. As President Bush entered, we stood up and I realized one more reason why Claiborne Pell was so unique and so deserving of trust: he owned his own fort.”

The last to speak was Nick Pell, 31, Claiborne’s oldest grandson. Tall and slim like his grandfather, Nick listed the qualities he would remember best about his grandfather: his stubborn resolve, his patriotism, and his generosity to his family and constituents, though not in the ordinary sense to himself. Pell could have bought many things, but he had heeded his father’s 1939 admonition about possessions.

“My grandfather will be remembered by those who loved him for his extreme frugality,” Nick said. “For some, this may be a negative trait, but in true New England WASP form, my grandfather was actually quite proud of his ability to conserve resources. He served famously bad cigars and wine. He jogged in actual business suits that had been reluctantly retired. He drove a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, which was outfitted with tattered red upholstery, a roof held together with duct tape, and an accelerator which was so old it required calf-strengthening exercises just to depress the pedal. When it finally fell apart, he replaced it with a Dodge Spirit which he had purchased used from Thrifty Rental Car.  I guess Hertz was too expensive.

“When my sister lived with him in Washington for the summer, he used to make her gather hors d’oeuvres from cocktail parties as he’d just as soon not pay for dinner. He used to say `food is fuel’ and `never turn down a meal, as you never know when your next one will come.’ He was able to strike the perfect balance between a gentleman and a man in tattered suits living from meal to meal.”

 Nick did not repeat his grandfather’s Congressional achievements, some of which came after years of work. What he would remember with deepest respect was his grandfather’s inner strength as his Parkinson’s advanced and freedom slipped away.

“He won some impressive battles during his time on the hill,” the grandson said, “but in my mind, his greatest show of strength was his battle with his failing health. He had been sick for well over ten years and while his body gave out long ago, his will to live was of mythic proportions. He showcased what we in the family call ‘warrior spirit’  -- and his resolve to live and enjoy time with the people he loved most, his family, his friends, and his constituents. It’s as if God had told him years ago that his time was up and he just said,  ‘Not until I’m ready.’ ”

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