John Dingell, who served his country and the people of Michigan for six decades, died Feb. 7. We join the rest of Washington in offering our prayers for his soul and his family.
Our job, though, is one of telling the truth without fear or favor. The niceties most people extend to the recently deceased cannot be steadfastly observed by journalists when the deceased is a public figure, particularly one who has wielded as much power and helped shape Washington as much as Dingell has.
We’re not suggesting Dingell deserves extraordinary opprobrium. Instead, we’re saying John Dingell embodied Congress and official Washington for the past few decades, for better and for worse.
He embodied, for instance, the continuity that makes our democracy strong and the traditions that make America great. He took over his congressional seat in 1955 from his father, John Dingell Sr., who had held it for 22 years, and he was replaced by his revolving-door lobbyist wife.
Congressional seats often stay in the same family for many years: the Kennedys, the Duncan Hunters, the Rockefellers, Gores, Frelinghuysens, Fishes, and so on. Even our presidency went Bush-Clinton-Bush (and then almost to another Clinton).
Legacies are a central part of Congress. But that doesn’t make them a good thing. Dingell, because his father was in Congress, grew up in D.C., attending Georgetown Prep and prowling the halls of Capitol Hill. He even went to college and law school in D.C., spending only a few months living in Michigan before he took his father’s seat. Then, he was permanently ensconced in his House seat for decades before taking a D.C.-based lobbyist as his wife.
While this pedigree helped Dingell learn the ways of Washington, and while it clearly reflected the will of the voters, it hardly reflects the founders’ idea of a representative as someone from and of a particular place.
In Dingell’s defense, commentators will point to his furious defense of Detroit. Again, bringing home the bacon and trying to steer policy to help local industries is an honored tradition inside the Beltway. But it’s also corrupt to have a member of Congress working to bail out, subsidize, and protect a pet industry at every turn. But that’s what Dingell did.
“Dingell is the big voice for the Big 3 in a tough Congress,” Automotive News wrote in 1991. The Detroit News this week called him “the industry’s go-to guy,” and GM officials praised his “unwavering support.”
Complicating this all was his marriage to his wife Debbie, a longtime GM official in Washington, who spent time as a lobbyist. People who knew them tell touching stories of how close they were and how solicitous he was of his “Lovely Wife Debbie.” If John was somewhere, Debbie was there too. She wasn’t merely a GM official; she was also a Democratic operative. She was about politics and industry. He was about politics and industry. “We’re a team,” John would say.
Over the years John Dingell served his wife’s industry, often at the expense of others. He pushed protectionist trade policies, hurting consumers and import businesses. He pushed wage and price controls, which GM favored but which harmed its suppliers. He was the leading champion of the Detroit bailout which cost taxpayers more than $10 billion and undermined free-market capitalism.
Dingell served his country in Congress longer than anyone in history and came to embody that industry more than anyone else — both for better and for worse.
