Date: Fri 27-Feb-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

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Powell-commentary-Ribicoff

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ABE RIBICOFF'S TALENT WAS TO MAKE BEING POLITICALLY SHREWD LOOK CLASSY

By Chris Powell

Even in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, no one could last four decades

at the highest levels of public life without being great. But Abe Ribicoff's

greatness was that of the politician, not the world saver.

Lowell P. Weicker, Jr, who served with Ribicoff in the Senate, recalled his

former colleague as someone who "did what he thought was right and the devil

take the consequences" -- the sort of tribute that Weicker bestowed on himself

in his autobiography a few years ago. But back when Ribicoff was governor the

historian Albert E. Van Dusen credited his success to something else: "an

unerring instinct for the right move at the right time in the complicated game

of politics."

Weicker's recollection was eulogy that could become myth. US Rep Barbara B.

Kennelly, who, as daughter of Democratic State Chairman John M. Bailey, knew

Ribicoff almost from the beginning, was much closer Sunday. "He had incredible

dignity," she said. Kennelly's remark and Van Dusen's history hint at

Ribicoff's talent, which was for looking classy while being shrewd.

This was not necessarily to be wrong; in 1958 Ribicoff would not have been

given the greatest re-election of any Connecticut governor if he had not been

friendly and modest as well as an efficient and honest administrator. But

Ribicoff's political career was not filled with the great battles of principle

for which Weicker would like them both to be remembered.

To the contrary, in his first term as governor Ribicoff deliberately led

Connecticut's Democratic Party away from such battles, which Democrat Chester

Bowles had waged in his brief gubernatorial tenure and which cost him

reelection in 1950. After Ribicoff's election in 1954 it would be almost 40

years before Connecticut's Democratic Party again could bring itself to

support progressive taxation. Democrats who thought themselves principled

called Ribicoff the best Republican governor Connecticut ever had.

But in getting the party to give up those battles, Ribicoff greatly eased the

party on its way to majority status in Connecticut. After all, the state was

much more Republican in 1954 when Ribicoff, then a former US representative

and municipal court judge, defeated a Republican governor, John D. Lodge, by

three-tenths of a percent. Ribicoff was the only Democrat on the state ticket

elected that year and had to face Republican control first of the state House

of Representatives and then of the state Senate as well. So how much choice

did Ribicoff really have about replacing the charged issues of economic class

with unideological issues like highway speeding and flood relief?

Only Ribicoff's personality explained his first election as governor. Indeed,

an overwhelmingly Yankee Protestant and ethnic Catholic electorate probably

chose him more because he was Jewish than despite it. His famous "American

dream" address in the last days of the 1954 campaign, broadcast to counter

what was said to be hateful whispering against him, won the votes of many who

did not want to be thought bigoted. The address may have been just as

manipulative as today's political complaints of racism are, but in what would

become Ribicoff style, it was brilliantly high-minded.

Bored with the governorship in 1961 and excited by his intimate participation

in John F. Kennedy's successful campaign for president, Ribicoff resigned to

go to Washington as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and

Welfare. In a retrospective interview with the New Haven Register in 1985, he

himself contradicted any suggestion of his always having done the right thing.

"It was the only job I really didn't like," Ribicoff said, because "I suddenly

found that in the Cabinet I was advocating positions I didn't believe in and

was against positions that I did believe in."

So in 1962 he returned to Connecticut to seek the Democratic nomination for an

open US Senate seat. In this he relied on Chairman Bailey's rawest political

bossism to crush a challenge by a serious liberal, US Rep Frank Kowalski, at

the state convention and prevent a primary Ribicoff might have lost. But

Bailey saw that Ribicoff would be the stronger candidate in the election, and

he won, though not by as much as expected.

In the Senate Ribicoff was artful with some tough situations.

Citing compassion, he was one of only five senators to vote against censuring

his colleague from Connecticut, Thomas J. Dodd, in 1967. This compassion

happened to avoid antagonizing Dodd's many friends back home just as

Ribicoff's reelection campaign was about to begin.

And Ribicoff moved cautiously but with amazing success as the Vietnam War

exploded as a political issue in 1968. He stayed loyal to President Lyndon B.

Johnson and Chairman Bailey until Johnson withdrew as a candidate for

reelection in March. To assuage bitterness at the state convention that

summer, Ribicoff gave the anti-war people his seat as a delegate to the

national convention in Chicago. At the national convention he abruptly

nominated Sen George McGovern for president and, on national television,

condemned "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago," thereby bringing the

anti-war people firmly into his campaign after Hubert Humphrey's nomination

for president left them nowhere else to go. Ribicoff endorsed Humphrey

enthusiastically only in October as the presidential campaign suddenly

tightened.

Thus Ribicoff was comfortably reelected in the most politically turbulent year

since the Civil War. And with a Republican, Richard Nixon, now in the White

House, Ribicoff could bring himself to oppose the futile war -- later than

some in politics, still earlier than many.

But there was nothing short of grace in his retirement in 1980, when he well

might have had another term. Ribicoff gave up power while he was still the

master rather than risk embarrassment by clinging to it until the end. In his

occasional public and advisory roles afterward he was the definition of the

elder statesman. In 40 years in politics he had never disgraced himself. Every

day lately seems to make that more of an accomplishment.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)