DETROIT – Eight years ago, I walked up to U.S. Senator Carl Levin at an event. The senator had recently announced he wasn’t running for reelection, and I was baffled.
True, he was going to be 80 the next year, but he looked, seemed and acted more like 65. He clearly loved his job. Though he never showed the slightest arrogance, he was one of the Senate’s most powerful figures; chair of both the Armed Services Committee and the Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee.
He was also, by near-common consent, one of the Senate’s best, most popular and most trusted members. He had served longer than any senator in Michigan history — 36 years– and, everyone knew, could have won another term virtually without trying.
Plus, to many U.S. Senators, 80 counts as high middle age. Strom Thurmond was famously there (if not all there) till he was 100, and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is apparently thinking about running for another term next year, when he will be 88.
I said some of this to Levin, and he agreed. “Yes, I feel great now,” he said. “But what I don’t know is how I will feel at 86, and I want to spend some time with Barbara and my family, and move back to Michigan, probably Detroit.”
Most politicians from places like Michigan don’t come back after long Washington careers. President Gerald Ford moved to California. Former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, now the U.S. Secretary of Energy, left the state as soon as her second term ended.
But Levin did, indeed, move back not only to Michigan but, after a brief flirtation with Ann Arbor to Detroit, where his political career began as a city councilman in 1969.
He did spend time with his wife, their three daughters and six grandchildren, and sometimes lectured at a center named for him at Wayne State University’s law school.
Unfortunately, he had been prescient about his health. He had once been a cigar smoker, and in 2017, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He fought it, and managed to complete his memoir, Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36 Years in the Senate (Wayne State University Press) and see it published earlier this year.
Lung cancer, however, is often a killer, and on July 29, he died. That was more than two weeks ago. Yet he deserves to be remembered longer than it takes to read an obituary.
For Carl Levin was the kind of senator America desperately needs today — and a master in the art of governing and getting things done. He wasn’t afraid to take unpopular stands if he had to. He once was one of only three senators to oppose a popular tax reform bill.
But that was rare. He was a proud Democrat and a liberal of the kind that grew up in a family that revered Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he said his watchword was “being pragmatic and not ideologically rigid.”
“I’ve always said if you don’t come to elected office willing to compromise, you don’t come wanting to govern.”
What he could have added is that you also need to come willing to work, hard. Levin was famous for his ability to master the details — and he put that ability to work for the taxpayers, ferreting out billions of dollars in wasteful cost overruns.
Anyone summoned before his committee who hadn’t done his or her homework was often startled to learn that Senator Levin knew as much or more about their subject than they did.
Not that he was nasty. Comedian Jon Stewart often referred to him as “Grandpa Munster” or “the kindly old shoemaker,” and that captured him perfectly. Levin, famous for a bad combover and Ben Franklin glasses worn on the bridge of his nose, was a workhorse, not a show horse, and he was able to poke fun at himself.
When one opponent, a former astronaut, began touting his manly good looks, Levin began describing himself as “plump, balding and disheveled.” He said that was politically smart, because “there are more of us than there are of them.”
He beat the astronaut, of course. He never lost an election, and won by larger margins every time. Surveys showed that voters who were far more conservative than he voted for Carl Levin because they saw him as a man of integrity. They disagreed with him on abortion and guns, but knew he would put their interests first. The last two times he ran, the Republicans barely put token names on the ballot.
Levin, who had nothing to gain except a more informed public, agreed to debate them anyway.
But most of all, he was a man of the Senate. He loved the institution and its customs. If he were there now, many Democrats would be irked because he would not support getting rid of the filibuster rule allowing senators to block a bill from coming to a vote.
When I asked him about this a few months ago, he insisted that it was necessary to “preserve the rights of the Senate minority.” However, he thought instead of accepting Republican threats to filibuster, the Democrats “should make them do it,” as in the old days, when senators sometimes spoke for hours and hours.
When I last talked with Levin, it was not long after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and what he saw as the racist, and “reckless and authoritarian” nature of the Donald Trump presidency.
He had to have known he was dying. Yet he told me he was optimistic, that “when I see the voters in this country defeating a divider and electing a unifier, it makes me feel confident that nothing will tear down this democracy.”
He was a quiet giant, who will be missed. By some, every day.
