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Larry Tye is the author of “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” and “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon.” This column first appeared in the Boston Globe.
It’s laudable when American politicians turn to America’s past for guidance, but too often they fail to learn the true lessons of that history, the way two elected officials from Maine are right now.
Sen. Susan Collins perpetually cites as her role model Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the iconic Maine lawmaker who for four terms held the seat fellow Republican Collins does now.
Seventy-five years ago last month, Smith unleashed a lacerating attack on the bullying Sen. Joseph McCarthy that ensured her place in history. That could be a model for Collins to take on President Donald Trump, a McCarthy-like demagogue. But Collins, up for reelection next year, has done nothing even close.
Gov. Janet Mills, on the other hand, has shown precisely the sort of backbone that would have delighted Smith, a friend of Mills’ father. When Trump tried to browbeat her into agreeing with his anti-transgender agenda, she pushed back: “I’m complying with state and federal laws.” She’s even cited Robert Kennedy, one of Smith’s fellow senators, as her inspiration.
Mills, however, misses RFK’s real lesson: The best way to change national policies is to seek national elective office like Kennedy did in 1964, when he challenged a middle-of-the-road U.S. Senate incumbent much like Collins. So how about it, governor: Will you run against Collins next year if she continues to waffle about standing up to Trump?
Crossing swords with the president is hardly easy, of course. Trump has demonstrated his readiness to eviscerate his opponents, even ones from his own party. But it wasn’t easy for Smith to go up against McCarthy at the start of his red-baiting crusade in 1950, when no other Republican would. What’s more, she was the Senate’s only woman. It would be her proudest moment in the chamber, and one for which she would pay dearly.
On June 1, 1950, Smith took to the Senate floor to implore her colleagues “to do some soul-searching — for us to weigh our consciences — on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America. … Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.” She never mentioned McCarthy, but all of America knew she was talking about him.
It was a 15-minute act of sheer courage, one that McCarthy listened to silently from his desk two rows behind Smith’s. The counterattack was as fast as it was furious. Columnist and McCarthy friend Westbrook Pegler derided Smith as “a Moses in nylons” who “took advantage … of her sex.” Others suggested that she and McCarthy had been romantically involved, or she’d wanted to be, and that the speech was personal revenge.
McCarthy had the most belittling quip, dismissing Smith and the half-dozen Republican co-signatories to her Declaration of Conscience as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” His words were reinforced by splenetic action. Using his authority as the ranking Republican, in 1951 he dumped Smith from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he’d named her to, replacing her with the more hawklike Richard Nixon.
Kennedy’s challenge in taking on Sen. Kenneth Keating of New York was even more daunting. The silver-haired incumbent, a born and bred New Yorker, had won all seven elections he had contested. Kennedy, a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, sent a young aide across the state to assess his chances, and the news wasn’t good: Keating would trounce Kennedy by 650,000 votes.
Yet on Aug. 25, 1964, the U.S. attorney general announced to New York and the world that he was running and meant to win. “There may be some who believe that where a candidate voted in the past is more important than his capacity to serve the state,” he said in an unmistakable Boston accent. “I base [my candidacy] on the conviction that my experience and my record equip me to understand New York’s problems and to do something about them.”
Even with his family money and connections, it wasn’t easy for RFK. Through early October it looked like he might lose, but that prospect propelled him to break out of his shell, let the public see his wit and spunk and focus on issues that mattered, like ending poverty and the war in Vietnam. In the end he won by 719,693 votes, the biggest margin a New York Democrat had managed, for senator or governor, since 1934.
Are you listening, Mills?
At 77, and after 35 years of public service, you might be too tired to run for the Senate even if it would help your fellow Democrats retake that chamber and restrain the president. But as you recently wrote in a Boston Globe Opinion essay, channeling RFK’s call to arms 60 years earlier, “Each of us can send forth that tiny ripple of hope; we can restore the rule of law, we can revive our rights, recharge our nation, and rewrite the history of our world.”