When former Rep. John Dingell entered hospice care due to cancer, his wife and successor Rep. Debbie Dingell tweeted that she was “home with John and we have entered a new phase.”
If there is one thing apparent about the former congressman, who died Feb. 7 at age 92, it is that he has witnessed many phases of American life.
The Michigan Democrat was America’s longest-serving congressman, spending 59 years on Capitol Hill, beginning in 1955. His famously youthful-seeming mastery of Twitter made it easy to forget that his institutional memory is staggering. When he first became a congressman, taking over from his father, who had served 22 years, there were only 48 states in the union. Dingell was into his third term by the time Hawaii and Alaska brought the number up to 50.
Even before that, in 1938, at the age of eleven, he was appointed by his father to the Congressional Page Program. Which is why his autobiography, published last year, begins with the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Dingell and his father were in the chamber when FDR asked Congress to declare war the day after the attack. “Watching this extraordinary display of open emotion from adults was something I had never seen before,” he writes. “My father taught me that grown men don’t cry. Yet, somehow this seemed like the only right response.”
The 2010 passage of Obamacare was personal for Dingell, because his father “was the author and chief sponsor of the first universal health care bill ever introduced in the House of Representatives, back in 1943.” In 1957, then a congressman, Dingell “reintroduced my father’s health care bill.” In 1965, President Johnson signed Medicare into law at the Truman Library, with Harry Truman in attendance. Dingell, of course, “was one of the three-hundred fifty in the room.”
Dingell recalls the good and the bad of the Nixon years, as well as arguing with President Carter over a delay in backing an energy bill Dingell championed. “John,” the president said one day in the White House, “I want to have a discussion that’s both friendly and frank.” To which Dingell says he responded: “Mr. President, I can be friendly, or I can be frank, but I can’t be both.”
Dingell remembers pressing Reagan’s EPA chief Anne Gorsuch, mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, over EPA’s handling of a Superfund scandal. In expressing frustration over the light treatment of big banks after the 2008 crash, he looks back on his father’s 1933 speech in Congress excoriating bankers for trying to shift the burden onto everyday people.
He closes his book with a call to restore civility in politics. Even if you don’t agree, it’s hard to argue with a man who has seen everything.
