According to Bob Byrd’s count, 11,709 people have served in the Congress of the United States since it was first founded. Only two have served longer than he.
You might wonder if this 86-year-old senator from West Virginia should have retired by now. To a questioner who asks what keeps him going, he answers: “Love for the Constitution of the United States.”
In a speech that I attended recently, he told of going to a little two-room school when he was a child. “I studied at night by the light of a kerosene lamp,” he recalled. Decades later when he was in the Senate, he received his law degree after completing his studies at George Washington University. His diploma was handed to him on graduation day in 1963 by President John Kennedy.
This short, thin, white-haired dynamo of a man speaks with passion about the plight of his country. “We must defeat those who would tear our republic down,” he proclaims, leaving no doubt about who “those” are.
In his newly published book, “Losing America,” Byrd denounces the attacks on the separation of powers in the federal government, a separation that he calls “the guarantor of our liberties.”
This man possesses an acute sense of history and fears the effects from the servility of elected representatives in the House and, especially, the Senate. Of too many of his colleagues, it can be said that, “when the president says ‘jump,’ they ask ‘how high?’”
“God give us men,” he cries, without feeling the need to add “and women.” Strong statesmen are desperately needed at this time in history, Byrd believes, because the administration “follows policies of utter recklessness. Today, I fear, we see our government at its worst.”
The crowd packing the church where the senator spoke cheered him to the heavens. The many young people there greeted him like a pop star, celebrating his every sentence. They rose to their feet several times during his talk, cheering both his analysis of what’s wrong and his call to action.
Introducing Byrd was another elder statesman, 72-year-old Ted Kennedy. The Massachusetts veteran senator praised his colleague “for never being a rubber stamp for the White House.” He went on to say of the venerable West Virginian: “Bob always speaks his mind, regardless of the consequences.”
Kennedy recalled Byrd’s vote against the Iraq war and the way he said, on the Senate floor, “I weep for my country.” For himself, the Massachusetts senator called that same invasion “the greatest blunder in American foreign policy.”
Bob Byrd believes in the ability of the individual to make a difference. “Awaken,” he cries, hoping that individual Americans will rise up and show leadership, persuading their fellow citizens to get involved in effecting change.
I found it exhilarating to see up close an elected leader who embodies so many of the classical virtues. He began his talk by reciting from heart a poem that he had presumably learned long ago. His oratorical skills remind me of the rhetorical style inherited from the ancient Greek and Roman orators.
In a fine review essay on Byrd in the current New York Review of Books, Russell Baker describes the Senate as it was in 1959 when Byrd broke in. Of its purpose, he writes: “The Senate was created to prevent presidents from governing recklessly and to bring them to their senses when they persisted in governing recklessly anyhow.”
In what Russell Baker, approvingly, calls “a highly intemperate book,” Senator Byrd “flails away at Bush and his docile Congress with the zeal of a campus radical.”
Now retired himself (though still writing occasional pieces), Baker makes a gerontological point about his subject. “Byrd,” he writes, “has discovered–in the nick of time–that very old age, however heavy its hardships, can also leave one free at last. How sweet it must be for a politician, after half a century of holding his tongue, to speak his mind as Byrd does in appraising the President.”
The reviewer makes the point that Byrd’s political leanings are not what his new book and his recent speeches might indicate. “During his half-century in Congress no one ever accused Byrd of being a liberal or even a hothead,” Baker writes. In fact, examining his record would cause deep distress to most liberals. So it seems as if this is a man who, in old age, feels free to rise to the occasion.
At a time of crisis in America’s political system, Senator Byrd asserts his deeply held convictions about the dangers to our liberties, dangers that most politicians seem content to ignore. As an older person myself, with a vivid sense of the history that has transpired in my lifetime, I applaud this senator and hope that he can rouse us to action for our beloved country.
Richard Griffin