A Man of Thought And Action
By Colman McCarthy
Saturday, December 13, 2003; Page A23
On leaving the U.S. Senate in 1996, when reelection to a third term would have been all but certain, Paul Simon of Illinois told friends that he had wearied of the dollar chase. To run again meant really running: running to fundraising dinners, running to phone banks to make pitches for cash, running to meetings with big-bucks donors. As a member of the Senate, where raising as much as $5,000 a week every week for six years is common to win another term, Simon chose to stop running and begin walking -- away from Washington and back to his home ground of southern Illinois.
At his death at 75 on Dec. 9 in Springfield, Simon had been teaching at Southern Illinois University for seven years. In October the last of his 22 books was published by Orbis -- "Healing America: Values and Visions for the 21st Century." As did all the others, the book put on display a man of action who could think and a man of thought who could act.
I came to know Paul Simon in 1974, his first year in the House and a decade before he was to join the Senate. He phoned and invited me to lunch. Which restaurant, I asked. How about a sandwich in my office, he answered.
So it was. No expense account splurging, no preferred table at Duke Zeibert's, the popular hangout then. In shirtsleeves, and sporting the bow tie that he always wore and that inspired "the Bow Tie Brigade" of volunteers when he ran for president in 1988, Simon was the oddest of politicians: He listened more than he talked, clearly a character defect in Washington.
We were to have more visits over the years. In conversations, he was as familiar with the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a fellow Lutheran -- and Martin Marty as with the essays of Lincoln when he served, as did Simon, in the Illinois state legislature. Before getting into politics in 1954, Simon, a self-educated college dropout, bought a weekly newspaper. It was in Troy, Ill., a downstate town, he recalled, "that up until that time had neither African Americans nor Jews -- and unfortunately took pride in that fact." One of the young publisher's first hires was a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany.
Politically, Paul Simon was in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, as shaped by earlier senatorial giants such as Robert LaFollette, Paul Douglas and Philip Hart. Simon was a graceful writer who could craft flowing, unghosted sentences putting him in the company of other literate politicians who wrote their own books: Gene McCarthy, Mark Hatfield, Andy Jacobs, Harris Wofford, Ken Hechler. In addition to the conventional issues of the Senate left -- gun control, opposition to Pentagon excesses, ending capital punishment, campaign finance reform -- Simon was a bedside nurse to a few causes on life-support systems. His favorite was foreign language education. "The United States," he wrote in "The Tongue-Tied American" (1980), "continues to be the only nation where you can graduate from college without having had one year of a foreign language. . . . It is even possible to earn a doctorate here without studying any foreign language." In the land of the monolingual, he thought that "we should erect a sign at each port of entry into the United States: 'Welcome to the United States, we cannot speak your language.' " Only last week, reports appeared that the Bush administration faces a critical shortage of officials fluent in Arabic.
In his presidential try in 1988, Simon hung on for a while in the bloodletting of the primaries, but in the debates leading up to them he declined to be shaped by handlers. "My staff wanted me to do some shouting to show toughness," he recalled in "Winners and Losers," a memoir of the race. "I recognize that there are those who equate toughness with shouting, but it is not my kind of toughness. I've taken on everything from organized crime as a young newspaper publisher to the problems of corruption as a state legislator, and I got action by a more low-key, solid but tough approach. I've been able to get a great deal done in the House and Senate through the years, but none of it by shouting and screaming."
Much praise to Paul Simon for resisting. It's among the reasons he brought honor to the calling of politics, and earned gratitude from his family and friends.
Colman McCarthy is a former columnist for The Post. He teaches courses on nonviolence at seven area schools and directs the Center for Teaching Peace. |
