Michael
Mansfield, the son of poor Irish immigrants,
was born in New York City on 16th March,
1903. His mother died three years later and his father sent him to
live with an aunt and uncle in Great Falls, Montana. At the age of
14 Mansfield left home to join the United
States Navy.
He completed several Atlantic crossings in the crew of a troopship
before the authorities found him out and discharged him.
After
the First World War Mansfield served in the
United
States Army (1919-1920)
and the United
States Marines (1920-1922).
He then worked as a miner in Butte, Montana before enrolling in the
Montana School of Mines (1927-28). Mansfield graduated from Montana
State University at Missoula in 1933 and spent two years at the University
of California before teaching Latin American and East Asian history
at the University of Montana.
A
member of the Democratic Party, Mansfield
was elected to the 78th Congress in 1942. At the end of the Second
World War President Harry S. Truman
consulted Mansfield about the possible terms for a Japanese surrender.
Truman took Mansfield advice that Emperor
Hirohito should remain on the throne in order to avert
a massive popular resistance to American occupation.
After
the war Mansfield's liberal views made him a target of Joseph
McCarthy. However, Mansfield was extremely popular in Montana
and he was able to survive the senator's smear campaign.
Ten
years later he was a successful candidate for the Senate. He was Democratic
whip (1957-61) before replacing Lyndon
B. Johnson as majority leader in 1961. He served under President
John
F. Kennedy and
was sent to Indochina on a fact-finding mission. He advise to Kennedy
to curb U.S. involvement in Vietnam was
ignored.
Mansfield
played an important role in the passing of the Civil
Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights
Act (1965). He also emerged as one of the most outspoken critics
of the Vietnam War. On one occasion J complained
to Mansfield about not receiving better support in the Senate from
"my majority leader". Mansfield replied: "I'm not your
majority leader. I'm the Senate's majority leader."
Mansfield
was not a candidate for the Senate in 1976 and the following year
President Jimmy Carter appointed him
Ambassador to Japan, a post he held until 1988. In his final years
he was senior advisor to Goldman, Sachs & Company. Mike Mansfield
died of a heart attack in Washington
on 5th October, 2001.
(1)
I.
F. Stone, I.
F. Stone's Weekly (30th
September, 1963)
It's
not so much the killings as the lack of contrition. The morning
after the Birmingham bombing, the Senate in its expansive fashion
filled thirty-five pages of the Congressional Record with remarks
on diverse matters before resuming debate on the nuclear test ban
treaty. But the speeches on the bombing in Birmingham filled barely
a single page. Of 100 ordinarily loquacious Senators, only four felt
moved to speak. Javits of New York and Kuchel of California expressed
outrage. The Majority Leader, Mansfield, also spoke up, but half his
time was devoted to defending J. Edgar Hoover from charges of indifference
to racial bombings. His speech was remarkable only for its inane phrasing.
"There can be no excuse for an occurrence of that kind,"
Mansfield said of the bombing, in which four little girls at Sunday
School were killed, "under any possible circumstances."
Negroes might otherwise have supposed that states' rights or the doctrine
of interposition or the failure of the Minister that morning to say
'Sir' to a passing white man might be regarded as a mitigating circumstance.
Even so Mansfield's proposition was too radical for his Southern colleagues.
Only Fulbright rose to associate himself with Mansfield's remarks
and to express condemnation.
(2)
Nick Anderson, Los
Angeles Times (10th June, 2001)
Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving Senate majority leader, who shepherded
landmark legislation in the 1960s and '70s on issues from civil rights
to political reform and set a standard for civility in a lawmaking
arena now often consumed by partisan vitriol, died Friday. He was
98.
Mansfield,
who underwent surgery on Sept. 7 to have a pacemaker implanted in
his chest, died at Walter Reed Army Hospital, said Charles Ferris,
his attorney and one-time Senate aide.
After he
left the Senate in 1977, Mansfield was named US 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, Mansfield guided a remarkably
productive upper house of Congress 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.
Ironically,
Mansfield was a pivotal figure through those years in part because
he - unlike so many leading politicians then and now - was content
to share or even cede the legislative stage.
Many historians
regard Mansfield as the antithesis of the majority leader who preceded
him, Lyndon B. Johnson. While Johnson as the Senate leader and then
as president was a personality who dominated the legislative agenda
in a way that few ever have, Mansfield was a self-effacing figure
whose stated goal was simply to let the Senate work its will.
(3)
Washington Post (6th
October, 2001)
Mike Mansfield, the Montana Democrat and longest-serving Senate majority
leader, who died yesterday morning at 98, was one of the upstanding
congressional leaders of the 20th century. His career as majority
leader spanned the presidencies and tumultuous times of John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He served under two
presidents - Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan - as a highly respected
American ambassador to Japan. And throughout, the characteristics
of his public service were the same: a soft voice, self-effacement,
reverence for the institutions he served and rock-solid integrity.
At every step of the way
during the most momentous events of the 1960s and '70s, Mike Mansfield
was there, playing a quiet but pivotal role. He held the Senate together
at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, helped pass the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, became an
early and influential critic of the Vietnam War, helped see the nation
through the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination and unrest in cities
and campuses, prodded the Senate forward to investigate Watergate
and guided the transition from Nixon to Ford, all the while molding
the Senate into an institution that did more of the public's business
in the public's full sight.
(4)
Harold Jackson, The
Guardian (8th October, 2001)
Late in 1962, President
John Kennedy asked one of his closest congressional friends, the man
he had hand-picked as majority leader of the US Senate, to assess
the uncertain political situation in South Vietnam. As a former professor
of far eastern history, Senator Mike Mansfield, who has died aged
98, knew the country and its leaders well.
In a confidential report
to Kennedy, Mansfield said he saw little point in America continuing
to support President Diem's tottering regime. Kennedy, publicly committed
to such support, was furious.
When the two men met on
the presidential yacht to discuss the assessment, he berated Mansfield
for his pessimism. "You asked me to go there," Mansfield
responded and stuck to his guns.
Within a year both Diem
and Kennedy had been assassinated, successive governments in Vietnam
had grown ever more remote from reality, and President Lyndon Johnson
had embarked on his disastrous military intervention. Had Mansfield's
advice been heeded, America might have avoided one of the most traumatic
episodes in its history.
It was, however, typical
of the senator that, although he vigorously sustained his opposition
to the war and to many more of Johnson's foreign policies, he lent
his considerable clout to getting the president's domestic legislation
on to the statute book. Without Mansfield's low-key but persistent
efforts, neither the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, nor
many of the other measures that transformed American life would have
passed into law as effectively as they did.
Last
updated: 8th September, 2002
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