A 100th birthday party to remember Claiborne Pell

NEWPORT — Claiborne Pell, the six-term Rhode Island senator, was remembered by his former staffers and reporters who covered him during an event Monday to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday last November.

The panel discussion at the home of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy touched on what drove Pell’s impressive legislative record and what made the man tick, as Providence Journal reporter G. Wayne Miller put it.

The author of “An Uncommon Man: The Life and Times of Senator Claiborne Pell,” Miller said he discovered two characteristics that were fundamental to Pell. “He embraced imagination … and the word ‘impossible’ just wasn’t in his vocabulary,” he said.

Pell, who resided in Newport and was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1960, died Jan. 1, 2009, at the age of 90.

His persistence and willingness to reach across the aisle fueled his legislative accomplishments. Before filing any bill, Pell, a Democrat, insisted on securing a Republican co-sponsor, said David Evans, who served as Pell’s staff director on the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities from 1978 until Pell’s retirement at the end of 1996.

“He abhorred of the idea of partisanship,” said his former Chief of Staff Thomas Hughes. “He simply just could not believe that a partisan position was enough to keep something from happening.”

Among his most well-known accomplishments are the college grant program for students with financial need, called Pell Grants, and the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pell helped ratify the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Even when bills were to pass by overwhelming majorities, Pell pushed his staff to convert the few stragglers to achieve total consensus, said Karen Tramontano, his legislative assistant for labor and human resources.

Another boost to his agenda was his ambivalence regarding who got credit for shepherding a particular bill to passage. “Always let the other fellow have your way,” Sen. Jack Reed, who succeeded Pell, said of Pell’s philosophy.

For two years after the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant was renamed the Pell Grant, Pell refused to call it by its new name. When a staff member would give him a speech or prepared remarks to make, Pell would cross out "Pell Grant" and replace it with "BEOG," Evans said.

His lack of ego also was evident when Pell pushed back against his staff’s recommendation to hire a press secretary in the run-up to his reelection campaign in the early '70s.

“The first interview, he made it very clear to me that this is not something he wanted,” recalled Hughes, who was applying for the position. “He actually believed that if you did something notable it would be picked up in the newspaper.… And if it wasn’t of any note it wouldn’t get picked up. And you shouldn’t be hiring someone, particularly on the taxpayers’ dollar, to go out and promote what you were doing. It should all come naturally.”

In a follow-up meeting, Hughes said, Pell told him: “If we lose, I’ll be out of a job and so will you. If we win, I’ll still have a job but you won’t because I still believe this is wrong.”

Pell relented, but insisted that Hughes assume a different job.

The panelists also addressed Pell’s eccentricities and the public’s perception of them.

John Mulligan, the former Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The Providence Journal, recalled interviewing Pell for an election profile in the mid-'80s. The reporter attempted to ask Pell gently about the common caricature of him, a bit of a cartoonish figure not fully grounded in reality. Stumbling over his words, Pell offered, “Head in the clouds, Mr. Magoo?”

“I almost fell down,” Mulligan said. “It wasn’t an instant revelation, but it sort of confirmed something that was gradually dawning on me, that this guy was indeed quite self-aware. It served his interest to [have people] misread him, I believe.”

“Over the years, I and all of my colleagues here came to understand he was, to some degree, putting us on, but he would never divulge it,” Hughes said. “He wouldn’t do something and sort of wink at you, that this is a secret between you and me.”

Peter Galbraith, who served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said if a “quotable line” was put into Pell's remarks, “that’s the one he would drop.”

If not an eloquent speaker, "what he was was a legislator," he concluded.

— dgomes@newport.com