The lone figure in wraparound sunglasses walks briskly towards the Senate office building and the Capitol under a chill morning light. Clearly a man with a mission, he doesn’t miss a step as he greets a passerby with a beaming smile.
Even under his winter wraps, this pilgrim of politics stands out from the packs of lobbyists, bureaucrats and tourists heading to the halls of Congress. He quit the Senate in 1989 after 31 years, the most vocal and widely known critic of government waste, whose Golden Fleece awards spotlighted the more outrageous examples of abuse and misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Yet he has chosen to stay-not as a player but as a sort of professor emeritus eager to share his wisdom with all comers, new and old alike. A freshman Democratic senator from Wisconsin, 42-year-old Russell Feingold, describes him as “one of the most visible and accessible politicians in American history.”
Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.) speaks of him as being ahead of his time. “I think he reeked of integrity,” Dole said last week. Some people got tired of his Golden Fleece awards, but he was on the cutting edge of doing something about government waste. He saw the budget crisis before it hit.”
William Proxmire, the 79-year-old retired senator from Wisconsin, now spends his weekdays in a spartan office at the Library of Congress. His work space, he hastens to inform you, is a mere 6-by-9 feet-a virtual prison cell compared to the the high-ceilinged splendor of the Senate.
“I work on various articles here and there about the economy and government,” Proxmire later tells a visitor to the nearby reading room reserved for present and past members of Congress. “Some get printed, but a lot of them don’t.”
The senator who railed against government waste may lack a regular pulpit, but he seems ever the watchdog, still given to quickly offering possible cures for the ills of government.
“The most obvious is to reform campaign financing. Congress goes along with big spending programs because big spenders make big contributions to campaigns. Boy, do these contributions pay off! They contribute millions and get back billions.”
Democrat Proxmire speaks approvingly of the two top-drawer items in the Republicans’ much-promoted “Contract With America”: the balanced-budget amendment and term limits.
“It’s going to be tough to impose a discipline on Congress,” he says of the budget amendment.
“I think (House Speaker) Newt Gingrich has some very good suggestions,” he adds. “But personally, I don’t think his program adds up fiscally. He’s for increasing military spending. That’s absolutely insane. The Soviet Union has vanished from the face of the Earth.”
Despite his own long Senate career, Proxmire is all for term limits because of the tremendous advantage incumbents enjoy in raising money and outspending challengers.
Members of Congress operate with much larger staffs than they did 35 years ago and, according to Proxmire, 30 to 50 percent of these staffers “have nothing to do with legislation and are back in the state or in the congressional district campaigning to re-elect their member.”
The unfortunate result of this trend, says Proxmire, is that “so much of the campaign money is spent on destroying your opponent with bad publicity, exaggerating any mistakes he may have made. We are such a television society that this has a tremendous effect.”
As he approaches his 80th birthday, Proxmire retains an abiding interest not only in the afflictions of the body politic but also in the power shortages of what poet Walt Whitman rhapsodized as the body electric.
No doubt inspired by his physician-father, Dr. Theodore Proxmire of Lake Forest, Ill., he has become a published health, exercise and diet enthusiast with his privately printed book last year, “Your Joy Ride to Health.”
The book is written in dialogue style and features Mom, Dad and children Mary and John discussing among themselves such topics as “Smiling While Exercising,” “Making Eating a Fun-Fest,” “Water: the Great Diet Freebie,” “The Yam What Am” and “Smiling to Self Esteem.”
“The mistake I made was to publish it myself,” Proxmire says. “I had written five other books but didn’t realize that when you publish your own book, you have a hell of a time getting into the bookstores.”
Time has treated Proxmire gently. He still stands straight and tall in a preppy-looking ensemble: neatly pressed chinos, sensible black walking shoes, a prim white shirt and conservative tie peaking out from under a black-and-white flannel shirt.
One concession to age is that he no longer jogs but walks the six miles from his house to Capitol Hill, a 90-minute trek each way.
Serious about his health
Proxmire came into the world as Edward William Proxmire. “Mother was St. Louis Irish-her parents, Rose O’Reilly and Pat Flanigan, came from Dublin,” Proxmire says. “Father was from Lancaster, Ohio, and of German stock.”
At age 7 or 8 he decided to drop his first name, as it was too often associated in those days with the playboy Prince of Wales. Being a fan of silent movie star William S. Hart, then an action figure in “every kid’s fantasy,” Proxmire switched to William, or just plain Bill. Proxmire’s older brother, Ted, was killed in a plane crash in 1938 while serving with the Army Air Corps.
In his personal life, Proxmire practices what he preaches about the importance of diet (“I’m a borderline vegetarian”) and exercise. After rising at 5:30 or 6 a.m. and doing calisthenics for 35 minutes, he has a carrot, a quarter of a cantaloupe, an orange juice chaser and a banana with skim milk. For variety, he sometimes has spinach on whole wheat bread, oysters or liver.
Lunch is a high-fiber event: All-Bran, wheat germ, almonds, sunflower seeds and a cup of skim milk four days a week. Fruit dominates the rest of the week: raspberries (“terrific fiber”), strawberries, red grapes, low-fat yogurt, an apple or pear, and a kiwi.
His wife, Ellen, supervises the preparation of dinner, which consists of more traditional fare such as salmon, vegetables and soup (invariably black bean). He doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol, coffee or tea. Other than an occasional night out for dinner with his wife or children, Proxmire avoids the capital party circuit and is usually in bed by 9 p.m.
Raised in the privileged Republican enclave of Lake Forest, he attended an Eastern prep school, the Hill School, and received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1938 and his master’s in business administration from Harvard in 1940.
“I was in the Army in World War II for five years, and it gave me a chance to think about what I wanted to do with my life,” he recalls. Before the war he’d worked briefly for the J.P. Morgan investment banking house, which later brought him the sobriquet “Wall Streeter” from opponents. “I thought banking is fine,” he says, “but it was not the kind of thing I really wanted to do.”
After the war he returned to Harvard, taught political theory and comparative government, and received a second master’s degree, in public administration, in 1948. Until then he had never thought much about politics. Nevertheless, he decided to try journalism and politics.
“My father was a very strong Republican, and my friends at the Hill School, Yale and Harvard were all Republicans,” Proxmire says. “But Democrats seemed more interested in solving problems than Republicans. I decided to become a Democrat because they seemed more congenial to what I had learned about politics.”
From journalism to politics
He began looking around for a newspaper job at a time when most newspapers were fonts of conservatism. There were offers in Kansas, the state of Washington, Oregon and Wisconsin. He settled on the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., where he was a general assignment reporter.
Wisconsin was “an attractive place,” and the publisher was much to his liking-“very, very liberal” and a faithful supporter of Robert La Follette, the legendary governor, U.S. senator and Progressive candidate for president.
Unfortunately for the newly minted Democrat, the publisher’s distinctively progressive views had their limits. When Proxmire organized a chapter of the Newspaper Guild at the paper, openly challenging the publisher’s nonunion policy for employees, his career as a journalist fizzled and he turned to politics.
Winning a seat in the Wisconsin legislature, he began the political climb, including three unsuccessful attempts for the governor’s office, that would propel him to the U.S. Senate.
In 1957 he won a special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, who had created a sensation in the early 1950s with his charges of communist subversion in top levels of the U.S. government and the Army. Proxmire became the first Democratic senator elected from Wisconsin since Franklin Roosevelt’s sweeping presidential victory in 1932.
In the Senate he gained attention by feuding with the powerful Democratic majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, accusing the Texan of shutting out Northern senators from playing a significant role in policymaking. Proxmire once charged that Johnson stifled floor debate and instead preferred to work policy matters out “over the telephone, in the (Senate) cloakroom or almost any private place where dissent can be silenced without public knowledge.”
Initially, critics tagged Proxmire as a traditional liberal proponent of big spending programs. But within a year he had done an about-face and begun the lonely trek in quest of fiscal prudence. The Chicago Tribune, noting “his Democratic affiliation and past addiction to giddy liberalism,” editorialized in 1958 that the senator’s “sudden rash of conservatism . . . is one of the miracles of the day.”
Guarding taxpayers’ money
Over the years, Proxmire succeeded in making headlines with his open ways. In the 1960s he repaid $9,000 to the federal treasury for the salary of an aide stationed in Madison who was at the same time pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1965 he repaid with interest $1,800 earned by his son and stepdaughter in summer jobs with the federal government to avoid any suggestion they were hired because of his Senate position. He also didn’t shy away from publishing his entire 1972 federal income tax return in the Congressional Record, including the $2,758 cost of his highly publicized hair transplant, which he claimed as a medical expense.
Proxmire enjoys talking about his family. In 1967 his wife and some friends opened a business called Wonderful Weddings Inc., serving as a sort of surrogate mother of the bride in arranging all the nuptial details from invitations to honeymoon.
As the business expanded, he says, his wife and her partners decided to drop the wedding operation and now concentrate on convention planning. “They decided to change because invariably the bride’s and groom’s parents would fight about everything and make a lot of trouble.”
Son Teddy works for a Washington brokerage firm. Daughter Elsie, a physician, lives in California and is married to a physician-lawyer who advises attorneys about malpractice suits. They’re children from his first marriage to a kin of the oil magnate-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller. He and Ellen, whom he married in 1956, have a son, Douglas, a lawyer in suburban McLean, Va., who’s named for Proxmire’s idol: the late Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois.
A positive mental attitude is crucial in Proxmire’s thinking. “I say to myself every morning and night, `Never be unpleasant to anybody; look for something nice; say something good; if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.’ “
Oh yes, he reminds, “Don’t forget to smile.”
