Kennedy among gallant fighters

By Lisa Mascaro (contact)

Sunday, May 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Washington — A standard strategy for interviewing members of Congress is to troll the halls around the House or Senate to try to catch them walking by.

It’s a technique I’ve used with varying degrees of success.

Some lawmakers will stop in their tracks, happy to talk. Others will bolt, or send staff to intervene, or put a cell phone to an ear as if in the midst of a very important call.

And some, as happened when I first approached Sen. Edward M. Kennedy last winter, will turn a stooped frame toward you, hear you out, and invite you to make an appointment to visit in the less haphazard setting of their office.

Which I did.

From a Senate icon who has fought a lifetime for civil rights, it was heartening for a newcomer to see both civility and a recognition of the right to question a lawmaker.

Last week, the Senate came to a near standstill as word got out that the 76-year-old had been diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid held a weekly news conference where he took no questions. Sen. John Ensign was among the many Republicans to send get-well wishes.

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein captured the mood that many might have felt but were too senatorial to express with the opening line in her news release: “My heart dropped when I heard the news about Senator Kennedy.”

Aside from celebrities, certain lawmakers in Washington may be the closest Americans get to royalty, and Kennedy has led that pack for a generation or two. These men, and increasingly more women, are giants of American history.

Just their names can convey entire eras — Calhoun, Webster, Johnson, Byrd, Kennedy. So it is startling for Washington to consider that one of those eras may be fading.

But political giants don’t easily shrink, as we have seen in recent months, even as new ones are beginning to rise.

Consider West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, who has been in the Senate twice as long as Harry Reid. The 90-year-old’s trips down the halls are long and slow, often with canes. It’s a route that many contemporaries would happily take by mechanized device.

At a recent committee hearing, after having suffered a fall at his home that now leaves him occasionally in a wheelchair, he barked away whispers of his sunset. Byrd still delivers some of the most passionate speeches on the Hill. When a reporter asked what he would say to those questioning his abilities, he responded, according to The New York Times: “Shut up.”

Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the former Navy official who was once married to Elizabeth Taylor, announced last summer he would not be seeking reelection, and a short time later an illness put him for a few days in a wheelchair.

But the 80-year-old strode through the halls last week, a key player in Senate efforts to pass a new GI Bill for post-9/11 troops. His thick gray hair, and always artfully matched handkerchiefs and ties, remind Washington of a more glamorous era.

Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, in announcing last month that he is undergoing chemotherapy again after having been diagnosed with a recurrence of Hodgkin’s disease, called it “another bump in the road,” adding, “I’ve got good shock absorbers.”

Last week he said he was betting on Kennedy to be a fighter — just like him.

In a town filled with institutions, certain lawmakers stand as one-person landmarks.

Love or hate Kennedy’s politics, the younger brother in a political dynasty has become the patriarch of his own.

Washington doesn’t seem ready to let Kennedy go. It might not yet have to.