DETROIT – U.S. Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, was running for his second term, and it was an uphill battle. President Ronald Reagan was on his way to his historic 1984 landslide, and Levin was challenged by Jack Lousma, a famous former astronaut.
Lousma’s biography began with his impressive physical characteristics; he was handsome, tall, muscular and blond.
So Levin began starting his speeches by reciting his own physical characteristics: “5’9, plump, balding and disheveled.”
But not to worry, he’d say. “Our pollsters tell us that it’s a winner because there are more of us than there are of them.”
That usually provoked uproarious laughter – and on Election Day, nearly 400,000 Reagan voters also chose Levin. He never had a close election after that, and ended up serving longer in his beloved U.S. Senate than anyone in Michigan history.
He decided to retire in 2014, although he almost certainly could have been reelected without even bothering to campaign. Now, after years of nagging by family and friends, he has finally written his autobiography: Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36 years in the Senate (Wayne State University Press, 2021.)
Though Levin had a puckish sense of humor and did, indeed, have a usually rumpled look (comedian Jon Stewart called him “that kindly old shoemaker,” or “Grandpa Munster.”) that wasn’t why he never lost an election. He was universally regarded as being a man of both compassion and flawless integrity.
David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter more noted for skewering politicians than praising them, called him “the de facto conscience of the United States Senate,” who “ferreted out wrongdoing abuses of taxpayers and failed policies.”
Levin, he noted, ran his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in a thoroughly bipartisan way – “a remarkable feat of dignity, duty, and moral strength in our era.”
The late U.S. Sen. John McCain called him “the model of serious purpose, principle and personal decency.” Once, when another Republican colleague was asked whether a trip Levin took was a needless junket, he said “are you kidding? Traveling with Carl Levin is like being in an endless seminar.”
Many politicians write memoirs, and most of them are self-promoting, deadly dull, or both. I don’t know anyone who has made it through all of Bill Clinton’s bloated memoir. Barack Obama took 768 pages just to cover his first two years in office.
Carl Levin, however, needed barely 300 pages to cover his entire life and career — and this is really less a book about Levin than about how government should work. “If you don’t come to elected office willing to compromise, you don’t come willing to govern,” he says, and his career was all about finding common ground.
That didn’t mean he was always willing to “go along to get along,” or that he had any tolerance for fraud, abuse or waste of the taxpayer money. He began his career on Detroit’s famously fractious city council, where he exposed abuses at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that were preventing blighted buildings that were ruining neighborhoods from being demolished.
He concluded that “our elected members of Congress were not taking responsibility for overseeing the programs they had voted to establish.” He vowed to do something about that, and did.
Woe unto the contractor who tried to justify charging the military $640 for a toilet seat when Levin was Senate Armed Services chair. As chair of his other power base, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he exposed a series of complex financial abuses, which he recounts here in almost too much detail.
Not bad for a man whose grandfather was a horse-and-buggy peddler from Eastern Europe. Carl Levin and his older brother, Sandy, each spent 36 years in Congress, a record no other two brothers have come close to matching.
But while the future U.S. Senator went to Harvard Law School, he did so by working the line in three dirty and sometimes dangerous auto plants in Detroit and Highland Park. He met his wife Barbara on a blind date, married her 60 years ago, and they and their three daughters have been virtually inseparable ever since.
When he decided to retire in 2014, I asked him why, since he could have won a seventh term without lifting a finger. He told me that while he felt fine and energetic at 80, he didn’t know how long that would last. Indeed, three years later, the former cigar smoker was diagnosed with lung cancer; his condition is now “stable,” he said.
Though he could be a hard-eyed realist in the Senate, he is also an optimist, and someone who still believes strongly in America. While he told me he had been disheartened by what happened in the Capitol on January 6, “I think we came out stronger,” he said. “When I see the voters in our country defeating a divider and electing a unifier, it makes me feel that nothing will tear down this democracy. “
Now almost 87, Carl Levin told me he wrote this book for “anyone who might possibly find it an incentive to go into public service,” which he called “an honorable profession.”
“Young people especially need to realize how important it is, whether elected or appointed.” That is true.
But when I finished this book, I found myself wishing someone would send a copy to every member of the U.S. Senate.
And then somehow make them read it.
-30- (Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade)
