What I Am Reading: "The Last Great Senate" by Ira Shapiro

The Last Great Senate is a sort of collective hagiography of the Senate during the Carter Administration. I have never read a book about a sports team, but I imagine that this is what it is like: a compartmentalized recounting of the team’s accomplishments, with a biographic summary of each member as they become important to the story.

Ira Shapiro was a Democratic staffer at the time, and the book is written in a Druryesque tone of awe at the grandeur and majesty of many of the Senators. Shapiro characterizes the time from 1960ish to 1980 as the time of the “Great Senate,” when the chamber assumed a major role in passing civil rights legislation, opposing the Vietnam War, and dealing with Watergate. A considerable amount of less romantic legislative activity took place during the Carter Administration, even as the country became embittered toward the government amid the worsening economy. As someone who observes a different Senate every day, the level of bipartisanship and good faith shown by the minority Republicans is almost unbelievable, with leader Howard Baker working on many issues with his Democratic colleagues, to the benefit of the administration (while some liberal Democrats, such as Scoop Jackson, fought their president bitterly on certain issues). According to Shapiro, the “Great Senate” ended with the Reagan landslide of 1980, as many of the Senate’s most distinguished Democratic members were voted out and replaced by-and-large with single-term nonentities. The Senate descended into mediocrity in the 1980s, and the familiar rancorous partisanship in the Clinton years (starting, some think, with the denial of the Tower nomination at the beginning of the first Bush Administration).

Senator Robert Byrd was majority leader at this time, and inherited Mike Mansfield’s decentralized, democratized Senate, with empowered staff and subcommittees (an arrangement that appears to have worked better than when Speaker Keverian tried it in Massachusetts).  As someone who first became educated about politics by reading about the Johnson and Nixon era, many of the characters in the book were of course very familiar. Most prominently, I am a fan of Frank Church, Senator from Idaho, and he does not disappoint on the page; shepherding many legislative accomplishments through the Senate in this timeframe, including the Panama Canal Treaty that helped to gin up the Republican base against him.

Beyond that, it is always interesting to see figures who are either relevant in the present day, such as Joe Biden, or were relevant earlier in my own lifetime, such as Ted Kennedy (of course) or Robert Byrd. Overall, I liked this book a lot, and breezed right through it. It is a straightforward history, not particularly gossipy. There are occasional repetitions, and I’m sure a Republican could find issues with bias, but it serves well as a quick history of the Carter years, and anyone looking for a quick primer on the Panama Canal Treaty, the New York City bailout (round 2), SALT II, or other issues of the day would be well-served by each of their respective chapters.