Bill Broomfield died last week, and even if you remember him, you probably didn’t even notice. Nobody in the media did until yesterday, five days after he passed. There will be modest-sized obituaries in the Detroit newspapers today, and that will be about that.
But this is a man who went to Congress a year after John Dingell arrived, stayed thirty-six years, and could have stayed many more if he had wanted to. Presidents of both parties respected him, and he respected them. Broomfield, who was a Republican, never had any great power, partly by chance. He arrived in Washington two years after the GOP lost the majority in the House, and voluntarily retired two years before they got it back again.
Had he stayed, he would have been chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, but in life and politics, timing are everything. Bill Broomfield never served a day in a House of Representatives that had a Republican majority.
John Dingell went to his grave earlier this month with as much fanfare I’ve ever seen for someone not a president or a pope. William S. Broomfield will go to his quietly, remarked on in passing only by political old-timers.
Broomfield is little remembered today, because he authored no major bills, was never caught in any scandals, never had a temper tantrum in public or swore at a colleague.
What he did do was work hard and diligently, mostly behind the scenes, and never embarrass his country or his President, regardless of that President’s political party.
Once, I mentioned Broomfield to the flamboyant attorney Geoffrey Fieger. When we were boys, Bill Broomfield represented all of Oakland County for a time. “Oh yeah, I remember him. He never did anything. He was there forever, and never did anything.”
Well, that wasn’t quite true. He did a fair amount off the radar. Unlike almost any politician today, Broomfield preferred being a work horse, not a show horse.
When it came to domestic issues, he was a typical Republican of his day, perhaps a little more conservative than most, though he told me he was very proud of voting for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. But when it came to his specialty, foreign affairs, he believed firmly that politics should stop at the water’s edge, and that this nation should present a united front to the world. The eight presidents he served with appreciated that.
Lyndon Johnson appointed him Ambassador to the United Nations’ General Assembly for a year, even though Broomfield voted against nearly all his Great Society legislation.
“I can honestly say I liked working with all the presidents,” he told me, a dozen years after he left office. “but the thing I enjoyed most of all was taking care of people’s problems, my constituents’ problems, you know.” Broomfield didn’t just leave that to his staff; sometimes, when Congress was not in session, he showed up early in the morning to do it himself.
But when he reached 70, he’d had enough. He was tired of the endless quorum calls, and didn’t like the growing hostility between the parties. The last time I talked to him was soon after then-Vice President Cheney had sworn at a Democratic senator, and Broomfield was appalled.
“The idea that one party can do everything (by itself) on these complicated issues doesn’t make sense,” he told me. William S. Broomfield was a man, you might say, of an analog age. But it might be a better world if there were still a place in politics for men like him.
