The Last Hurrah is the finest fiction about American politics. Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 book won the Atlantic prize for best novel, and John Ford made it into a movie.
Spencer Tracy won a best actor award for his portrayal of Frank Skeffington, a fictionalized James Michael Curley (the four-term Boston mayor, two-term convict, and one-term Massachusetts governor). O’Connor’s book and Ford’s film are valedictories to the broad-shouldered, deep-chested, Irish-Catholic Democratic political machines that ran Northeastern and Midwestern cities from about the Roaring ’20s to around the time when things all went wrong in the late ’60s.
Neither WASP nor woke, operations from the Daley family in Chicago to Tammany Hall in New York provided for immigrants’ needs. They staffed competent and brave civil services. Their machines provided the brains and backbones of support for presidents from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy, a golden age of American statesmanship.
The only thing The Last Hurrah got wrong is that it was not yet over around the time when the Dodgers departed for the Left Coast. The Mets rose out of Queens in the 1960s, and so would Pete King.
The son of a World War II veteran and NYPD lieutenant, raised in Sunnyside, educated by the Jesuits at Brooklyn Prep, then by the Franciscans at their college in that borough of churches, and finally at Notre Dame Law, King served with the Fighting 69th and then launched his career in Nassau County Republican politics.
The Nassau GOP in the late 20th century was Tammany brought a few miles east, an efficient machine that would have made boss Silent Charlie Murphy proud. National Democrats lost Irish Catholics between 1968 and 1972 over their dumb and wrong-headed support of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” But King kept a photo of Al Smith, Democratic nominee for president in 1928 and the first Catholic to contest for the White House, displayed in his district office. That was meaningful.
Elected in 1992, King made his bones convincing Bill Clinton, over Prime Minister John Major’s opposition, to give Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams a U.S. visa in 1994. Adams came not to run guns for the Provisional Irish Republican Army but to convince Irish America that the time had come to finally take the gun out of Irish politics. King was brave and right, and Adams’s visit was crucial.
King then played a significant role in 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, which (please, God) ended the Irish Troubles. His efforts have helped save hundreds of lives, earning King the enduring thanks of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and an unlikely but sincere friendship with Ian Paisley, the late Ulster unionist. A believer in old-school, transactional politics, King was the only Republican to vote against every article of impeachment against Clinton.
The key and awful event of King’s political life was Sept. 11. He lost 150 constituents and friends, including an FDNY fireman-godson, Michael Boyle, a loss so painful he spoke of it only with difficulty. Going forward, his twin goals became support for first responders killed, injured, or sickened because of that day and counterterrorism.
It’s impossible to gainsay King’s sincere, gut-level, emotional care for New York first responders and to service members who volunteered to avenge their 2001 losses. King never missed a wake or funeral (he would humbly ask families beforehand if he was welcome) for anyone murdered that terrible day or for any who fell in wars that followed who was even remotely connected with his district.
It’s insufficiently recognized that we have already lost at least as many police officers and firemen to Sept. 11-related diseases as we did in 102 fiery minutes on that day. After 18 years of effort against New York-haters in the congressional GOP, against Foghorn Leghorns who beat their breasts about first responders while stiffing duty-injured officers and firemen, King finally succeeded in getting Sept. 11 victim healthcare funded in perpetuity.
King also strongly supported former President George W. Bush, with whom he developed a real friendship. He backed Bush’s hard campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, including retired Gen. David Petraeus’s war-winning, 2007-08 surge in Iraq.
Re-assuming the Homeland Security Committee chairmanship in 2011, King held controversial hearings on the Islamist radicalization of a very small but dangerous minority of American Muslims. He persevered through liberal criticism, with quiet support from the Obama administration and patriotic Muslim American witnesses, in defense of necessary counterterror efforts such as those led by his grade school classmate, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly. King raised sadly accurate warnings of attacks that were to come in Boston in 2013.
King’s last years in Congress were marked by his championing of well-deserved aid for victims of Superstorm Sandy. These again were cynically opposed by oleaginous Republicans such as Ted Cruz, who begged aid for their own constituents when later hit by disasters.
Unlike Republicans in districts gerrymandered to be lily-white, King won thumping reelections as a Bill Buckley-Ronald Reagan conservative in an increasingly diverse district, due to colorblind constituent service in the best Tammany tradition. He maintained easy good relations with liberals such as his House office building neighbor John Lewis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
King fought for nonpartisan causes, such as increased funding for women’s cancer research. He supported unions and immigrants, as loyal to core Catholic teachings on these subjects as those on abortion while growing more supportive over the years of gay rights. I suspect King saw in nonwhite immigrants the best of the Irish who stumbled, hungry and sick, off of coffin ships in New York Harbor, in need of government help, almost 175 years ago. It’s no surprise that one of his last votes was in favor of generous aid for coronavirus victims.
Meanwhile, King kindly and patiently maintained a rotating “no-brain trust” of often “otherwise unemployable Irish” staff such as me. All of us, of varied backgrounds, remain deeply indebted to him, not just for obvious career reasons, but for his example of how best to try and live our personal, family, and faith lives.
The Last Hurrah ends with Skeffington eulogized by a boyhood friend who became a parish priest. The wise monsignor observes, “To have left the lot of many around you a little bit better than it once was” and “to have been genuinely loved by a great many people … is no small thing to have happened to any man.”
The same may be said of King. Congress is the lesser for his departure.
Kevin Carroll proudly served as senior counsel to Pete King from 2011-13 and is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
