DETROIT — They say John Dingell, who was buried in Arlington National Cemetery this week, served 59 years in Congress, longer than anyone else in history.
Well, that’s technically true. But the legendary “man of the house” actually spent many more years there than that. In fact, he told me over lunch a few years ago, he first walked into Congress in January 1933, when he was six years old, and his daddy, John Dingell Sr., had just been elected to Congress in the first New Deal landslide.
“What I remember was that we walked through the biggest pair of doors I had ever seen into the biggest room I had ever seen,” he told me. What little Jack Dingell (as they called him then) didn’t know was that his country was in big trouble.
That was in depths of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover was still President, Prohibition was still in effect, and the mood in Detroit, where all the banks were about to close, was something just short of panic.
Two months later, Franklin D. Roosevelt became President, and the older Dingell would become one of the most stalwart supporters of the New Deal. In fact, within months of his arrival, he introduced a bill calling for national health insurance.
It never went anywhere, though he repeatedly reintroduced it – as did his son after him. The first Congressman Dingell knew how precious health was; a printer and construction worker, he suffered from asthma and tuberculosis for years. His son John loved where Daddy worked, and hung around Congress every chance he got. Like Zelig, he seems often to have been there even before his career began.
He worked as an elevator operator and was a page on the floor the day after Pearl Harbor and heard FDR’s famous “date that will live in infamy” speech. John Dingell Jr, then enlisted when he turned 18, and believed he would have been involved in the invasion of Japan, had it not been for the atomic bomb.
After that, it was college and law school at Georgetown, and a brief stint practicing law in Detroit.
But then, in 1955 tuberculosis finally claimed his father, who was only 61. His 29-year-old son won a special election to succeed him and was sworn in to office, and was reelected 30 times.
He gradually attained great power, especially when he served as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee – and of its oversight and investigations subcommittee – from 1981 to 1995.
From that perch he became a major force, going after corruption with the tenacity of a pit bull. U.S. Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch may not have been overly saddened by Dingell’s death; his confirmation of conflicts of interest at the Environmental Protection Agency led to the resignation of the justice’s mother, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, then the agency’s head.
Other Dingell investigations led to the perjury conviction of Michael Deaver, a key Ronald Reagan advisor, the ouster of a president of Stanford University, and the exposure of many defense contracting scandals, including the infamous $640 toilet seat for which taxpayers were billed. Once, when asked the limit of his committee’s authority, he pointed to a picture of the earth taken from space.
Some said his investigations sometimes became persecutions. In his prime, he was a large, powerful man, with a booming voice, who was sometimes called “the truck.”
But when I asked him once about having such power, he shrugged and said “I’m just a dumb Polish lawyer, trying to do the people’s business.” For his district, that often meant the automakers’ business. Dingell did, for years often fight against stricter emissions and fuel economy standards.
But later in life he became a convert to concern about climate change. He also recognized that the domestic auto industry had lost considerable clout in Congress. During the Great Recession of 2008-9, he had the formidable challenge of making Congress understand how important the auto industry still was – and making the automakers see that neither they, nor he, had the clout they once did.
During that time, after I had talked about this on the radio, John Dingell called me. “It’s a different world,” he told me.
“I told the (Big Three), ‘work with me, and I will get you a deal that you will absolutely hate. And if you don’t work with me, they will put you out of business.”
Dingell was then no longer chair of Energy and Commerce, but he still had clout. But his body, though not his mind, was giving out. He decided not to run for reelection in 2014.
Democrats, he knew, would still be in the minority, and the old-fashioned collegiality he has once enjoyed no longer existed.
His wife Debbie Dingell, who had been at his side and deeply involved in his work since their marriage in 1981, was elected to succeed him, and entered as possibly the best prepared freshman member of Congress in the history of the republic.
Late in the summer of 2013, I had a long and fascinating lunch with the longest-serving congressman in Dearborn.
I asked if he would run for Congress now, if he were 29 years old today and a winnable seat opened up.
“Probably. But if I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t,” he said. He told me he valued human decency most of all, and that there was far too little of it in public life today.
That may be why there was such an outpouring of grief when he finally died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been buried in Arlington.
We might be better served if the Man of the House had been interred beneath his real home, the Capitol itself.
