In 1959, early into his 31-year tenure as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Bill Proxmire picked a fight with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, then the nation’s most powerful Democrat, over how LBJ did his job. A colleague likened this to a bull charging into a locomotive: “That was the bravest bull I ever saw, but I can’t say much for his judgment.”
The episode, recounted in Jonathan Kasparek’s new book, Proxmire: Bulldog of the Senate, is one of many that illustrate the uncommon spunk of the longest-serving U.S. senator in Wisconsin history. Proxmire clashed regularly with members of his own party, and all of the presidents he served under, from Eisenhower to Reagan.
For instance, Proxmire hit the campaign trail for three months in support of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential bid — which was successful, though Wisconsin went for Richard Nixon. Then he promptly attacked Kennedy’s appointments of petroleum execs to key positions (which he said gave them “a stranglehold on U.S. government policy affecting oil and gas”), as well as his policies on taxation, agriculture and military spending.
Proxmire was hard to pin down, ideologically. He was firmly anti-abortion, but also became a leading voice against military interventions. He staged marathon filibusters and went more than 20 years, from 1966 until his retirement in 1989, without a single missed roll-call vote. He spoke in favor of the U.S. joining an international accord against genocide every day the Senate was in session from 1967 until it passed in 1986 — 3,211 different speeches in all.
The book from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press is, amazingly, the first comprehensive biography of Proxmire. Kasparek, a history professor at UW-Waukesha who also wrote a well-received biography of former Wisconsin Gov. Philip La Follette, ably recounts the battles that shaped Proxmire’s legacy, including important protections for consumers and crusades against government waste, immortalized by his monthly “Golden Fleece” Award for questionable allocations, like a $6,000 report on how to buy a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.
Proxmire was unafraid of failure, having lost three straight bids for governor prior to his 1957 election to the Senate seat that opened with the death of Joe McCarthy. He was an indefatigable campaigner, known for showing up at 6 a.m. to greet factory workers arriving for their shifts and for his frugality, including essentially costless campaigns and the self-funding of his frequent return trips to Wisconsin. During one campaign, he drove 35,000 miles and shook an estimated 250,000 hands. And lost.
Rigidly self-disciplined, Proxmire pursued a daily fitness routine and even wrote books about diet and exercise. There are times when a reader of this biography might wonder whether Proxmire, who died from Alzheimer’s and eventually cancer in 2005 at age 90, was not just driven but diagnosable. But the main portrait that emerges is that of a great public servant, who gave Wisconsin his all, and made it and the nation a better place.
A book launch for Proxmire: Bulldog of the Senate will be held on March 6 at 6 p.m. in the Wisconsin Historical Museum on the Capitol Square.
