When the Florida congressman`s pacemaker was inserted four years ago, he asked, ”How long will the battery in this thing last?”
”About 10 years,” the doctor replied.
”Then you better give me three right now and I`ll come back later if I need more,” he shot back.
At 86, Claude Densen Pepper wears two hearing aids and looks to the future through trifocals while a pacemaker steadies his heartbeat.
Nonetheless, he cuts the kind of figure that typically gets described as
”feisty” and ”indefatigable” and ”legendary.” It`s all true.
The last of the New Deal warriors, the oldest member of Congress and one of the most sought-after political speakers today, Pepper has found a whole new career in one of the major political movements of the century, the graying of America. He is Mr. Social Security, the guardian of the elderly.
As the 99th Congress adjourned last week, he won a last-minute legislative victory by pushing through a bill that eliminates most forms of mandatory retirement (he called it ”the Bill of Rights for the Elderly”), and has gone off to campaign a little for his own all-but-certain re-election and a lot more for other candidates.
Pepper always enthralls his audience. At a recent campaign appearance for Democratic congressional candidate Tom McMillen of Maryland, Pepper spoke for 60 minutes to a crowd of rapt senior citizens, generally about today`s political and economic climate and specifically about the need for Democratic Party unity and a vote for ”young McMillen here.”
As usual, he spoke without notes.
His eyes misted and his voice broke when he talked about the need for catastrophic-illness insurance and referred to his wife, Mildred, who died seven years ago of cancer. He jabbed the air angrily with a crooked finger when he talked about the lack of long-term care for the elderly.
When he and McMillen finished, the audience rushed the podium, asking to shake Pepper`s hand. ”You`re as handsome as ever,” said one gray-haired woman. Another gave him a kiss for his recent 86th birthday. ”I hope you have another 86 years in you,” said an elderly gentleman.
Although he stayed an hour later than intended, Pepper remained until he had met the last well-wisher. And as the limousine pulled away from the parking lot he was at the window, still waving goodbye.
At an age when most people have retired and gone fishing, Claude Pepper doesn`t appear to have slowed down. ”He goes from dawn to dusk. One of the biggest problems I`ve had working with him is just in getting him to sit down,” said Hays Gorey, a Time magazine reporter with whom Pepper is writing his autobiography.
Part of this activity is in his capacity as the most sought-after speaker by Democratic candidates in the last several elections. In 1982 he stumped for 73 House Democrats in 26 states. At that time, Rep. Tony Coelho, Democratic congressional campaign committee chairman, said: ”No single person had more impact on the 1982 election.”
But the current congressional break, however, is seeing less of Pepper. He will make appearances in only 10 states because he faces a December deadline from his publisher. He has returned to Florida for a much shorter, one-week stint of campaigning for his own certain re-election.
Still, Coelho said that this year Pepper ”represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and the public knows that. Whether it is campaigning for fellow Democrats or signing a direct-mail piece to solicit contributions, voters respond to him because he symbolizes the compassion which the party has long stood for.”
Certainly, his continual and highly publicized opposition to Reagan administration moves to limit Social Security benefits have earned Republican criticism.
”Claude Pepper has raised political demagogy and falsehood to new heights,” a Republican National Committee spokesman intoned of Pepper`s position in 1982.
But today, perhaps because Pepper has become so identified with his pet cause, Social Security, it seems that no one in Congress will criticize him, much like no one will say anything bad of Social Security, nor of Santa Claus. Though only in the last decade has he become known as Mr. Social Security, Pepper`s concern for senior citizens began early in his career. He introduced his first legislation on their behalf while in the Florida House of Representatives, when he helped to eliminate fishing license fees for the elderly.
But his concern for the welfare of the elderly has certainly grown from there. When the Social Security system faced budget cuts in 11 areas in 1983, Pepper fought successfully to save the foundering agency by raising revenues rather than reducing benefits. But Pepper has staked out his territory in more than Social Security–he has led the charge in such areas as mandatory retirement and age discrimination.
He is pushing also for a national health insurance program to provide catastrophic coverage. Long-term medical care for the elderly is also a Pepper concern. Then he has helped to push the funding for 10 new research and treatment centers for Alzheimer`s Disease. He has sponsored legislation creating 11 institutes of health, including the National Cancer Institute, which has become a special concern to him because it was cancer that killed his wife.
Pepper is chairman of the House Rules Committee, which not only controls the timing of new legislation, but sometimes determines whether it comes to a vote on the floor of the House at all. He also is a member of the Select Committee on Aging and chairs that committee`s Subcommittee on Health and Long-term Care.
There were two things that Pepper always assumed about growing up. The first was that he would be a lawyer and the second was that he would be a politician. When he was 16 the local justice of the peace allowed Pepper to sit in his office and use his books and typewriter. One night, in the midst of a reverie, he wrote on the wall behind the office door, ”Claude Pepper for U.S. Senate.”
Born Sept. 8, 1900, on a farm in rural Alabama, he didn`t see a paved road until he was 10, when his parents moved a short distance to the small town of Camp Hill. At 16 he left home for his first teaching job.
”It paid $60 a month,” he recalled. ”I bought a new suit of cloths and a hat on credit; so I went down to my new job wearing pince-nez eyeglasses, my wool hat and new suit. It was the first time I`d had on long trousers.”
In 1918 he entered the University of Alabama, where he starred on the debating team, made Phi Beta Kappa and ran in his first election, for student- body president. He lost.
In 1921 he entered Harvard University Law School. Upon graduation, Pepper taught law at the University of Arkansas for a year and then opened a law office in Perry, Fla., where he developed a reputation for representing the poor.
Pepper says he can`t explain how he walked away from the back woods of Alabama a liberal Democrat. But he first voted for civil rights while in the Florida House of Representatives in the late 1920s.
”A fellow from St. Petersburg, a typical racist reactionary, introduced a bill viciously condemning Mrs. Herbert Hoover for inviting the black wife of an Illinois congressman to a White House lawn tea,” he said. ”At the time I said, `I`m a Southerner and a Democrat like my ancestors before me, but I consider this resolution out of place.` That vote confronted me for years and I was later defeated in that county on account of it.”
After the loss, Pepper moved to Tallahassee, leaping back into politics a few years later. With ”The Welfare of the Common Man is the Cornerstone of the New Deal” as his lengthy campaign slogan, he ran against an incumbent Senator in 1934, losing narrowly. In 1936, after both incumbent senators had died, he ran unopposed to fill the remaining two years of one term and began his Washington career.
One of his first steps in preparation for his new post was a trip to New York to buy ”a complete new outfit–two or three suits, hats, overcoats, shirts, black tie and white tie.” Although a little more paunchy and slightly stooped, today Pepper is still dapper and usually attired in a three-piece suit and bright tie that matches a silk pocket handkerchief. Each gray hair is always in place.
Pepper`s first speech on the Senate floor attracted President Roosevelt`s attention. At that time, Senate resistance to FDR`s New Deal economic programs was growing and an appropriations bill was getting nowhere.
”I just got up and made a speech pointing out that we were near to the Promised Land, yet why did we want to do what the children of Israel did
–hesitate and then have to walk another 40 years in the wilderness,”
Pepper said, leaning back in the limousine and reminiscing during the ride back to the Capitol from the campaign appearance.
He recalls that fellow senators and the visitors to the gallery arose to applaud the young senator`s speech. It marked the start of an important friendship with Roosevelt.
”I have a copy of that maiden speech,” said Jack Ossofsky, president of the National Council on Aging. ”And in it he was fighting for assistance for the poor. There is a consistent pattern to this man, his commitment to the most vulnerable segments of our society, which has grown with his years and experience.”
Pepper was re-elected easily in 1938, but with a much narrower margin in 1944. Both his views on domestic affairs and foreign policy undermined his support among the conservative Southern Democrats.
He lost the support of business when he helped to pass the first minimum- wage law, guaranteeing workers 25 cents an hour. His lend-lease proposal to aid the Allies in World War II also cost him support.
From the window of the limousine Pepper pointed to the place just outside the Senate where he had been hanged in effigy 46 years earlier.
”I didn`t consider myself a warmonger, although apparently some people did,” he said. ”Including a group of women dressed in black, in mourning because they claimed I wanted to send their sons to war. They had a rope around my effigy`s neck, threw it over a tree limb and hauled it up.”
The effigy, 5-foot-tall likeness made of a coconut and stuffed denims with a placard hung across its chest saying, ”Claude Benedict Arnold Pepper,” hangs today in the Claude and Mildred Pepper Library at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
At the height of the McCarthy era, Pepper lost his Senate race in 1950 to George Smathers in what historian Robert Sherrill called ”the most elaborate crusade of political annihilation ever conducted in Southern politics.”
Fancy double talk, reported by Northern newspapers, but denied by Smathers, hurt Pepper badly among his less sophisticated constituents.
”Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy,” Smathers was reported to have said.
Thirty years later the New York Times reported that the comments, first published in Time magazine, were a fabrication, a joke among reporters covering the election. But the comments had taken on a life of their own in the election.
Just days before the election, thousands of copies of a booklet, ”The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper,” papered the state. Leafing through the Red Record in the back of the limousine, Pepper pointed to a photograph of himself standing next to Henry Wallace and black singer Paul Robeson taken at a rally at Madison Square Garden. ”They crucified me for that, a picture of me with a black man and one who later became known as a Communist.”
After decades, his resentment over that bruising campaign lingers.
Pepper also had been hurt by his role in the attempt to dump President Truman from the ticket during the previous presidential election in favor of Dwight Eisenhower. But at the last minute Eisenhower declined the offer, leaving Pepper in the cold. Truman turned his support to Smathers.
Pepper lost by 67,000 votes and returned to Florida broke. Resuming his law practice, he prospered, representing mostly corporate clients.
Although defeated, Pepper was never beaten, said Ken Jenne, president of the Florida Senate, whose family always supported Pepper, even in 1950.
”He makes his own luck. I`m sure he`s been disappointed, but he never lets that show. He will talk about the past, but always from the standpoint of how to build on it, how to learn from mistakes,” Jenne said. ”He`s always looking to the future. He has more enthusiasm for tomorrow than most people one-third his age.”
After an unsuccessful Senate comeback try in 1958, Pepper finally broke through in 1962, winning a new congressional seat in Miami.
Pepper is surprisingly sanguine about what many people view as a step down politically from the Senate, where he was in line to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His career in the House and committee involvement there has allowed him to do more for people, he explained.
”As chairman of the Rules Committee, I have a considerable impact upon the legislative process. It gives you a chance to progress things you believe in and hold back the things you don`t,” he said. ”I have a theory that public life is a kind of ministry. It gives me the chance to satisfy an inner yearning to do a little something for my fellow man.”
His critics suggest that his pet programs for his fellow man carry a weighty price tag in an era when the President of the United States was elected on a platform of reducing government spending.
”I take the position that it`s an outrage for research to produce the means to save life and not have those means available to everyone. Every life is precious, not just those with a lot of money. I think money is cheaper than human lives. If I have a choice between the two, I`ll spend the money.”
Back in his office, among the 50 years of framed memories that crowd the walls, nestled among pictures of Presidents and letters from heads of state are handwritten love notes by Pepper and his wife to each other.
One written to Mildred in 1978 when she was dying of cancer: ”I pray for the earlier time when we can go together as we have done for so long. I love you with all my heart . . . I just wish I had been a better husband.”
Here`s a picture of Mildred riding an elephant, there she is, skiing for the first time in her late 60s. Then, looking like the happy ending of a 1930s movie, there is a photo of the Peppers embarking on their honeymoon to Havana. ”The first time I ever saw Mrs. Pepper she was coming out of the governor`s office in Tallahassee,” he reminisces in the voice of a man who is still in love. ”She had on a yellow dress. I was never so impressed by such a beautiful lady. I was then 31 and I had already been looking into a lot of faces, but I had never met someone I wanted to marry. That night I invited her to the Speaker`s Ball. She accepted and wore a blue-sequined dress. I told her I didn`t know which sparkled more, her eyes, or her dress.”
They had a five-year courtship and were married shortly after Pepper was elected to the Senate. It is with regret that Pepper said that they never had children.
”We had 43 happy years together and a year and a half together after we found out she had cancer,” Pepper said. ”We did everything we could for her, but if I had it to do over again I`d find some more things to do for her. I`d make her get up and go driving in the afternoons.”
Pepper still lives in their apartments in Washington and Miami and has kept everything as she left it. He has even kept up a note she left pinned to the shower curtain, ”Please when you are done with your shower, remember to close the curtain.”
Whenever asked about retirement, Pepper has a pat answer. ”I always say I`ve fixed the date, the year 2000, but I reserve the right to change my mind,” he said.
On a more serious note, he said, ”As long as I`m in the physical condition so that I can do my work, and the people elect me, I will stay right here.”
