Columnist David Broder: Udall embodied both ambition, honor

David Broder

Monday, Dec. 21, 1998 | 11:36 a.m.

IN A WEEK of military conflict in the Persian Gulf and political conflict on Capitol Hill, a gentle man left this life. Morris K. Udall, the blithe spirit who inhabited the House for 30 years, died of the Parkinson's disease which had forced his retirement in 1991.

The last years of his life were terrible -- a time of immobility and forced silence -- but what had gone before earned him a place as one of the most loved and admired politicians of his time.

He was part of an Arizona Mormon political dynasty. His father, Levi Udall, was a justice of the state Supreme Court, and his brother, Stewart, a member of the House. When Stewart Udall was named secretary of interior by President Kennedy in 1961, Mo Udall ran for, and won, his seat.

He came to Washington at the very moment when his fellow Arizonan and lifelong friend, Barry Goldwater, was establishing himself as Mr. Conservative. Udall was as staunch a liberal. He was a fighter for civil rights, federal aid to education and a clean environment. Like Goldwater, he attracted colleagues as much by his personality as by his ideas.

He had a quick sense of humor, a vast store of anecdotes and a disarming way of poking fun at himself. Reporters were inordinately fond of him, because, like Goldwater, he seemed totally free of self-importance.

When he came to Washington, Udall recruited members of the big freshman Democratic class elected in 1964 and organized the first successful rebellion that dumped a recalcitrant committee chairman.

He had less success when he challenged aged Speaker John W. McCormack in 1969 and when he vied with Hale Boggs for majority leader in 1971. The old guard punished him for his "radical" ideas, but Udall continued to kick over the traces. It was in 1971, in fact, that he teamed up with Republican Rep. John B. Anderson of Illinois, another free spirit, to pass one of the few pieces of bipartisan campaign finance legislation ever to make it through Congress.

In 1976, Udall took the biggest gamble of his political life, when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. Never has there been a campaign with more days of delightful candor and more nights of agonizing returns. Udall charmed the socks off voters far from home, asking them if they had ever imagined they'd have a chance to help "a one-eyed, Mormon liberal from Arizona like me" become president. (He'd lost an eye in a childhood accident, which did not keep him from becoming a college basketball star and, briefly, a professional player.)

But he kept losing by achingly small margins -- 2 or 3 percentage points, at most -- to the earnest Jimmy Carter, whose moralistic promises ("I will never lie to you") Udall would parody on the press bus.

One speech Udall made in New Hampshire has advice that is permanently pertinent: "Beware of the presidential candidate who has no friends his own age and confidants who can tell him to go to hell, who has no hobbies and outside interests. ... God help us from presidents who can't be a little bit gentle, and who can't gather friends around and play poker and climb a mountain. You know, these intense workaholics really worry me."

Udall's own most productive work came after he lost to Carter. As chairman of the Interior Committee, he wrote and passed strip mining laws and Alaskan land bills and national park measures that permanently improved the environment of this land.

When I wrote about him at the time of his retirement in 1991, I quoted what Archibald Cox said in a symbolic nominating speech at the 1976 Democratic convention: "By the count of votes, he did come in second, but he succeeded in the larger aim ... for he proved that a public figure, even in a long and heated political contest, can exemplify the best of the American spirit, that honor need not yield to ambition, that open-mindedness and willingness to listen are not inconsistent with devotion to principle, that civility can accompany tenacity and that humility should go hand in hand with power."

Mo Udall demonstrated all that -- and made it fun to be around him, as well. It is heartening that just weeks before he died, a new generation of Udalls was elected to the House -- his son, Mark, in Colorado and his nephew, Tom, Stewart's son, in New Mexico.

They have a great legacy on which to build.