Columnist David Broder: Mansfield is monumental figure

David Broder

Monday, March 22, 1999 | 11:42 a.m.

I HAD LUNCH last week with the man I think may be the greatest living American. He is Mike Mansfield, the former Senate majority leader and ambassador to Japan.

One thing I know for sure. There are few American lives that match the one Mansfield has lived in his 96 years. Beginning six years ago, when he was a mere lad of 90, several of the reporters who had covered Mansfield over the years have joined him for birthday lunches at the invitation of his great friend, Washington attorney and former Senate aide Charles Ferris. Each year, we feast on the wisdom and simple goodness of this magnificent Montanan.

Consider just the bare outlines of the journey he has traveled from his birth in the Bowery when the century was only three years old. He fibbed about his age to join the Navy at 14 and later served in the Army and the Marines, including a stint in China that fed a lifelong fascination with Asia.

He went to Montana and worked in the copper mines, but met a young schoolteacher who recognized his exceptional qualities and encouraged him to pursue an education. After 68 years of marriage to Maureen Hayes, that teacher, his devotion is undiminished. When the Montana Legislature recently proposed erecting a statue of Mansfield in the state capitol in Helena, Mansfield replied: "If it's just me, no; if it's Maureen and me, OK."

He was elected to the House in 1942 and to the Senate 10 years later. He served as Democratic majority leader longer than anyone else in this century, from 1961 to his retirement in 1976, and then began a second, equally distinguished career as ambassador to Japan from 1977 to 1988 -- establishing a longevity record in that post as well.

Still lean and erect as a cowhand, with a memory for names, dates and places that any history major (or newspaper reporter) would kill for, Mansfield can bring to life his own intimate experiences from the mining camps in the frontier West to the maneuverings that produced the great civil rights bills of the 1960s and the tragedy of Vietnam.

But this is no elder living in the past. As a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, Mansfield reads five newspapers a day and meets with a steady stream of officials from around the world. His judgments are acute; in a few, well-phrased sentences, he can define the differences between Al Gore and Bill Bradley, and tell you why one would make a better president than the other.

Or, he can take a question about China's likely intentions for the next decade, and deliver an unrehearsed, 10-minute discourse on the political geography and national psychology of that country -- down to its occupation of a tiny reef off Palawan, which he helpfully (and accurately) identifies as "the westernmost of the Philippines."

His knowledge takes your breath away. And then, being the modest Mike Mansfield he always has been, he adds this commentary on his own performance: "A lot of wind."

His hallmark -- what has made him loved as much as he is respected -- is his kindness and self-effacement. In the days he ran the Senate, he relished coming onto programs like "Meet the Press," listening to us pompous journalists formulate endlessly verbose questions, and answering, "Yep." Or "Nope." And then he would grin mischievously as we scrambled for a follow-up.

He has an uncanny knack of finding exactly the right word. When the conversation at lunch turned to American foreign policy, Mansfield called it "haphazard." That's better than 3,000 words from Henry Kissinger. And it's about as tough as Mansfield ever lets himself be. He does not go overboard, either in praise or condemnation, so when he says Gov. Marc Racicot of Montana would make a wonderful Republican vice presidential candidate, you know he means it.

He is a monumental figure, who adamantly refuses to write his memoirs. You will find no entry for him in the current "Who's Who." But you leave his company thinking that a nation that produces such a citizen just might make it through another century.