One afternoon, in March 1970, a veteran Midwestern senator rose from his seat to defend a Supreme Court nominee accused of being second-rate. “Even if he were mediocre,” Sen. Roman Hruska told his colleagues, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”
The senator’s observation was immediately regarded as an embarrassment, a dagger inadvertently plunged into the hapless nominee he sought to defend. It is also, a half-century later, just about the only thing anyone now remembers of Hruska. And yet, of course, there was a certain wisdom in what he said: “We can’t have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos,” he declared, referring to three 20th-century justices of unmatched intellect. It’s nice to be governed, in our democratic republic, by the best and the brightest, but as the rule of the best and the brightest sometimes reveals, it’s also useful to be governed by very ordinary, perhaps even “mediocre” citizens.
This paradox of democracy came to mind last week with news of the death of Roger Jepsen, a one-term Republican senator from Iowa, in a nursing home near Davenport. He was 91.
Jepsen was born on his family’s farm in northern Iowa as the grandson of Danish immigrants. He graduated from high school in 1945 and, after a year at Iowa State Teacher’s College, joined the Army, in which he briefly served as a paratrooper. After finishing his education at Arizona State University, where he earned a master’s degree in guidance counseling, he returned to Iowa not to teach but to earn a living as a salesman and insurance underwriter. Married twice, he was the father of four children by his first wife and two from his second marriage, including a stepdaughter.
His rise through the ranks of Iowa state politics was steady and swift. He was elected a supervisor of Scott County in the early 1960s and was a state senator by the end of the decade. In 1968, he became the running mate of Iowa’s five-term Gov. Robert Ray and served two terms as lieutenant governor. In 1978, a good year for Republicans halfway through the Carter administration, he upset a favorite of the Washington political establishment, freshman Democratic Sen. Dick Clark.
Jepsen was an early favorite of what would later be called the religious Right, describing himself as a born-again Christian and proponent of family values in Congress. He was a chief sponsor of the 1981 Family Protection Act, which sought unsuccessfully to restrict access to abortion and contraception services while strengthening families by extending tax incentives and educational benefits. Above all, he was a stalwart supporter of Ronald Reagan who, after his election to the presidency in 1980, relied on Jepsen to guide agricultural policy.
Plain-spoken and occasionally naive by Senate standards, Jepsen got into trouble with the press corps when, as a supporter of Israel, he opposed the Reagan administration’s proposed sale of advanced surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia but, on the threshold of a vote, was persuaded to change his mind because of “highly classified information.” A subsequent secret inquiry forced Jepsen to admit to colleagues that it was not classified information that had prompted his switch (there was none) but Reagan’s lobbying.
That, and the later revelation that the born-again defender of family values had briefly been a member in the 1970s of a Des Moines “spa” later closed for prostitution, made him a frequent target of Washington journalists. Three years later, when Reagan was returned to office in a landslide, Jepsen was defeated for reelection in Iowa.
Still, Jepsen’s instinctive common sense was decisive in ways small and large. He led the opposition to the Postal Service’s attempt to extend the size of ZIP codes from a mandatory five digits to eight. More importantly, Jepsen single-handedly persuaded Reagan that President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to Russia had no effect on the Soviet Union but was devastating to farmers.
