poll: best U.S. Senator from Massachusetts the past 70 years

[franksolich]

This belongs elsewhere on conservativecave, but is being posted here so that lurking primitives may see it.  As we all know, lurking primitives, when coming here, restrict their excursions solely to the DUmpster and the DUmping Ground, carefully avoiding all the illumination of the other forums here.

Who was the best U.S. Senator from Massachusetts the past 70 years, say, since circa 1940?

Henry Cabot Lodge (1902-1985) was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1936, not an especially good year for Republicans, defeating the Massachusetts machine.  He was handily re-elected in 1942, after having joined the Army Reserve.  When Franklin Roosevelt ordered all those in Congress who were then in the military, to resign one of their two positions (Congress or the military), Lodge resigned from the Senate.

In 1946, after the second world war ended, Lodge re-entered politics, defeating the  corrupt decadent old senescent David Walsh.  Lodge was an eastern establishment Republican, and was the national campaign manager for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

It was in 1952, however, that angry Robert Taft Republicans in Massachusetts united with the Democrats, and Congressman John Kennedy narrowly unseated Lodge.

Lodge became American ambassador to the United Nations, and diligently pursued the cold war policies necessary for the preservation of liberty and freedom throughout the world.  In 1960, Lodge became the Republican vice-presidential candidate, running with Richard Nixon, who lost in a narrow race that year.

His old foe Kennedy named Lodge U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, for reasons one might easily imagine.  In 1964, in an attempt to derail the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, Lodge ran as a write-in candidate in the New Hampshire Republican primary, and won.  The attempts of his supporters (Lodge did not actively pursue the nomination himself) ultimately failed.

Lodge remained U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, and later, to West Germany.

Charles Sinclar Weeks (1893-1972) was appointed to the seat vacated by Lodge in 1944, and served until 1946, declining to run for election.

He was a veteran of the National Guard and of the first world war, a prominent businessman, and treasurer of the national Republican party during the early 1940s.

Leverett Saltonstall (1892-1979), at the time governor of Massachusetts, was elected in a special election (to succeed Weeks, who had succeeded Lodge) in 1944; as he had been a successful governor, lowering state taxes and paying off 90% of the state debt, he was handily elected and re-elected in 1944, 1948, 1954, and 1960, despite the best efforts of the Massachusetts machine to depose him.

Edward Brooke (1919- ) was first elected in 1966, to take the place of the retiring Saltonstall; a veteran of the second world war, he was also the first U.S. Senator of African derivation since Reconstruction, and the last until 1992.  In his first two of his three campaigns, he was heavily opposed by the Massachusetts machine, but won both times by substantial margins.

However, running for a third term in 1978, Brooke was defeated by the racist Massachusetts machine.  George Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

----------

Okay, I selected Saltonstall, known for his good breeding, elegant manners, and utter honesty.  Despite his blue-blooded background, Saltonstall was famous for getting along--in both politics and social encounters--with the common man, the blue-collar man, the working man.

The Massachusetts Democrats really loathed him for that touch; it's all good.

[GOBUCKS]

Yeah, coach, but did Saltonstall ever drown any skanks?

[franksolich]

Yeah, coach, but did Saltonstall ever drown any skanks?

No, sir; according to the history books, not a whiff of a scandal touched any of the first three.

The last-named, of course, the dalliances of Brooke, but Brooke's "crimes," when compared with those of dead ted--not to mention the other Democrats who were U.S. Senators from Massachusetts the past 70 years, amount to comparing a parking ticket with motor vehicular homicide.

The media at the time (the campaign of 1978) however did a pretty damned good job, making a parking ticket seem a much worse crime than manslaughter.

[AllosaursRus]

No, sir; according to the history books, not a whiff of a scandal touched any of the first three.

The last-named, of course, the dalliances of Brooke, but Brooke's "crimes," when compared with those of dead ted--not to mention the other Democrats who were U.S. Senators from Massachusetts the past 70 years, amount to comparing a parking ticket with motor vehicular homicide.

The media at the time (the campaign of 1978) however did a pretty damned good job, making a parking ticket seem a much worse crime than manslaughter.

Yep, just imagine a Repub gettin' away with manslaughter back in the day.

[zeitgeist]

I am down for Saltonstall as well.  Massachusetts is the furthest south one can go in the north and contains some of the nations biggest bigots, Republican and Democrat.

(present board members excluded of course )

Yeah coach, as I recall Brooke got a pretty good shafting in the press and on late night talk radio back in the day.   

They really do need to do something about their loss of population, last I knew they were still hemorrhaging folk to surrounding states.  Kids go to school there and may spend a year or two at a first job before the realize the screwing they are taking in the wallet, bingo they are gone to greener pastures. 

[franksolich]

Yeah coach, as I recall Brooke got a pretty good shafting in the press and on late night talk radio back in the day.

When I was in high school and Brooke was still a U.S. Senator, I wrote him a letter, as I was "researching" the Senate, asking him about Sinclair Weeks.

We didn't have the internet then.

Weeks was a generation older than Brooke, and unbeknownst to me, had died a few years previously.

Brooke (or his office staff more likely) wrote me back, describing Weeks in a most gracious and warm manner; the sort of gracious and warm reply one might expect of Clare Boothe Luce.

Undoubtedly there were sharp differences between the two--the conservative Republican and the liberal Republican--but there was none of that in this letter.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Where's the option for Fat Teddy?

 

[AllosaursRus]

When I was in high school and Brooke was still a U.S. Senator, I wrote him a letter, as I was "researching" the Senate, asking him about Sinclair Weeks.

We didn't have the internet then.

Weeks was a generation older than Brooke, and unbeknownst to me, had died a few years previously.

Brooke (or his office staff more likely) wrote me back, describing Weeks in a most gracious and warm manner; the sort of gracious and warm reply one might expect of Clare Boothe Luce.

Undoubtedly there were sharp differences between the two--the conservative Republican and the liberal Republican--but there was none of that in this letter.

So Frank, what do ya 'spose his real feelings were for Weeks? We all know after one passes, only your good points are ever brought forward. Hell, look at Teddy "the Swimmer" Kennedy! You'd think the man was some sort of Saint! We was one of the biggest anti-American POS's in history! I think Benedict Arnold was more a patriot than Fat Ted!

[franksolich]

So Frank, what do ya 'spose his real feelings were for Weeks?

I dunno; but if the class and grace of that letter was Brooke's, it showed a man of class and grace.  Sinclair Weeks continued being active in Massachusetts Republican circles after he retired from his seat in the Senate, and Brooke credited him with helping him get elected attorney general of Massachusetts in the early 1960s, and while he (Brooke) was in that office.

Surely they must have had serious political differences, Weeks from the Boston blue-bloods and Brooke originally from the slums of Washington, D.C., one a rock-ribbed conservative and the other a flaming liberal, but Brooke was nothing but warm and gracious in his remembrence of the older man.

I did this often while in high school, writing to U.S. Senators inquiring of their predecessors.

All the then-Republican senators always responded, with the statistical information and some kind comments, even if their predecessors had been Democrats.

None--I repeat, none--of the then-Democrat senators ever responded, unless they were gentlemen from the south.

The funniest response I got was from then-Senator John McClellan (D-Arkansas), in which he lauded his predecessor, Harriet Caraway (also a Democrat), to the skies, remembering her in warm, flowery phrases.

It was funny because in actual history, the Democrat senatorial primary of 1942 in Arkansas rated as one of the nastiest, bitterest, meanest contests in American history, in which incumbent Caraway and challenger McClellan minced no words in disparaging the character of the other.

But to get dead ted to comment upon Benjamin Smith (D-Massachusetts), his own immediate predecessor, who had kindly held his (Kennedy's) seat in place, was a waste of paper and ink.

[franksolich]

Where's the option for Fat Teddy?

 

Well, one could write in his name.

Besides dead ted (1962-2009), there was Benjamin Smith (1961-1962), John Kennedy (1953-1961), and David Walsh (sometime in the 1920s-1947).

Barney Frank and Gerry Studds by the way were not new phenomenae among Massachusetts Democrats; David Walsh was a notorious corrupt pederast, too.

[zeitgeist]

When I was in high school and Brooke was still a U.S. Senator, I wrote him a letter, as I was "researching" the Senate, asking him about Sinclair Weeks.

We didn't have the internet then.

Weeks was a generation older than Brooke, and unbeknownst to me, had died a few years previously.

Brooke (or his office staff more likely) wrote me back, describing Weeks in a most gracious and warm manner; the sort of gracious and warm reply one might expect of Clare Boothe Luce.

Undoubtedly there were sharp differences between the two--the conservative Republican and the liberal Republican--but there was none of that in this letter.

I was in Miami going to summer school (due to earlier indiscretions) when Fat Teddy put the blond in the pond.   It was the first ( and only) time I ever called a radio talk show to express my opinion Fat Teddy should be tried for vehicular manslaughter.  Unlike my comment on Boston, Miami, at the time, was the furthest north you could go in the south, plus there were still lots of anti-Castro / Kennedy Cubans. 

[franksolich]

You know, when in high school, I could name every person from every state who had served in the U.S. Senate since 1941, his party, how he first came into office (elected or appointed), and whether he retired, or was beaten in his party's primary, or beaten in the general election.

But then I got into British history, and never looked back; I doubt I could repeat the same feat today, especially given that much water has passed the dam since then.

Among the correspondence there were my inquiries about Wayne Morse (D-Oregon), made to both his successor, Robert Packwood (R-Oregon), and Clare Boothe Luce.

The 1968 senatorial race in Oregon had been a mean, vicious one, pitting the grouchy old incumbent against the Republican newcomer, but Packwood was gracious in his remembrances of the grouchy old loser.

Clare Boothe Luce, who had said that Wayne Morse had been kicked in the head by an ass (thus costing her the ambassadorship to Brazil in the late 1950s) was a little more, uh, direct, but still kind.

The only non-southern Democrat senators I ever heard from was, first, Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), about his predecessor, the grouchy mean old curmudgeon Ernest Gruening.  

The pro-war (Vietnam War) Gravel had beaten the anti-war Gruening in the Alaska Democrat primary of 1968, and that too had been a bitter, bruising fight.

But Gravel merely recited statistical information (what Gruening had done after losing, where he was, what he was up to), and no personal comments.

The second Democrat was George McGovern (D-South Dakota), who remembered one of his predecessors, the Republican Gladys Pyle, in affectionate terms.

But generally, the only Democrats authentically gentlemen and ladies proved to be southern Democrats.

[Chris_]

But generally, the only Democrats authentically gentlemen and ladies proved to be southern Democrats.

Likely because, at least in my experience, most southerners tend to be that way naturally......I suspect that it is a cultural thing.....

doc

[franksolich]

Likely because, at least in my experience, most southerners tend to be that way naturally......I suspect that it is a cultural thing.....

Imagine the impact that had upon a 13-, 14-, 15-year old kid in the Sandhills of Nebraska at the time.

All of the older siblings, with the help of pharmaceuticals and propaganda, had turned into flaming liberals by that time (and although now gone from this time and place, perhaps still voting Democrat [joke]), alleging that only Democrats and liberals cared.

And here I was, amassing more-than-ample proof that no, in fact only Republicans and southern Democrats cared, and cared about responding to someone who could not possibly do them any good in return; my father oftentimes commented that I got more mail from Congress, than he did bills.....and he wasn't wrong, either.

[Chris_]

Imagine the impact that had upon a 13-, 14-, 15-year old kid in the Sandhills of Nebraska at the time.

All of the older siblings, with the help of pharmaceuticals and propaganda, had turned into flaming liberals by that time (and although now gone from this time and place, perhaps still voting Democrat [joke]), alleging that only Democrats and liberals cared.

And here I was, amassing more-than-ample proof that no, in fact only Republicans and southern Democrats cared, and cared about responding to someone who could not possibly do them any good in return; my father oftentimes commented that I got more mail from Congress, than he did bills.....and he wasn't wrong, either.

It's also interesting (setting aside the reason it happened), that all of those southern Democrats ultimately became Republicans.......

doc