Former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield dies
Mr. Mansfield, who underwent surgery on Sept. 7 to have a pacemaker implanted, died at Walter Reed Army Hospital, said Charles Ferris, his attorney and one-time aide.
After he left the Senate in 1977, Mr. Mansfield was named U.S. ambassador to Japan and wielded significant influence in Tokyo for more than 11 years as the emissary of presidents of both major parties. No one before or since has served longer in that post.
But it was his 34 years in Congress, including 24 in the Senate, that secured the Montana Democrat a place in 20th-century political history. In 16 years as Senate majority leader, from President Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 to President Ford's exit in 1977, Mr. Mansfield guided a remarkably productive upper house during a turbulent political era.
The nation in that time made war on poverty, put men on the moon and, belatedly, embraced civil rights a century after the emancipation of slaves. It also confronted the failure of the Vietnam War, Cold War crises and the Watergate political scandal.
Mr. Mansfield was a pivotal figure through those years in part because he was content to share or even cede the legislative stage.
"He was a wise, decent and endlessly patient man who believed deeply in the ability of free people to govern themselves wisely," said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. "It's no coincidence that the Mansfield years remain among the most civil, and the most productive, in the Senate's history."
"We have had few like him, but then with the good Lord's help, it only takes a few," said Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.
Through Mr. Mansfield's leadership the Senate made history in 1964 by breaking through a Southern-led filibuster to pass the Civil Rights Act. The majority leader let his Republican counterpart, minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, grab the spotlight that year as Congress struggled to respond to upheaval in the South caused by the civil-rights movement.
Mr. Mansfield knew that with his own party split along ideological lines between Northerners who favored civil rights and Southerners opposed, he would need Republican help. Eventually, Dirksen delivered 27 of the 33 Republican senators on a vote to halt a Southern filibuster against civil-rights legislation.
Equality was Mr. Mansfield's mantra in the Senate. "My belief was that all senators were equal — the newest, the oldest or the most important committee chairman," Mr. Mansfield said in 2000.
He was born Michael Joseph Mansfield in New York City on March 16, 1903, the son of poor Irish immigrants. His mother died when he was 3; and his father, a hotel porter, sent him and two sisters to live with an aunt and uncle in Great Falls, Mont.
Mr. Mansfield quit school before finishing the eighth grade and in 1917, at 14, he left home to join the Navy. He stayed in the Navy 19 months, then enlisted in the Army for a year and after that put in two years with the Marine Corps, which sent him to Shanghai. That engendered what was to become a lifelong interest in Asia.
He returned to Montana in 1922 and went to work shoveling copper ore. Mr. Mansfield became engaged to a college student, Maureen Hayes, who persuaded him to resume his education. He earned his high-school diploma through a correspondence course, married Maureen and entered what is now the University of Montana.
Over the years, Mr. Mansfield would remark that Maureen, whom he was married to for 68 years until her death in September 2000, had a profound impact on his life. "The real credit for whatever standing I have in life should be given to my wife, Maureen," he said on the Senate floor in 1998.