An Accidental Bumblebee

I was bred a New Deal Democrat. President Franklin Roosevelt was an icon in our family. But it never occurred to me to engage in politics, other than to vote robotically for Democrats. By high school, I wanted to be a poet. So troubled was my father by his conviction that a poet could never earn a living that he began pocketing Cuban cigars at social events and saving them for me in the hope that by habituating me to expensive smokes he would sabotage my determination to become a penniless poet and redirect me to a living-wage trade, such as the law.

My predilection for writing poetry, however, was seared into my psyche and reinforced in my freshman year at Yale College when I was pounced on by a fevered dorm neighbor from Groton, the elite and very conservative prep school. He was hell-bent on the United States dropping a preventive nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union. I begged to differ. I would rather see the Soviet Union conquer the United States, I told him, than blow up the world with nuclear mutual destruction. After all, like any historic conqueror, Soviet communism would collapse in time, our globe would remain intact, and democracy would have a fighting chance.

At the time, red-baiting McCarthyism was enjoying its apex. "You're a Communist," he charged. "I'm going to report you to the FBI." He never did; but the threat was so unnerving that I timidly vowed thereafter to confine my extracurricular activities to romantic poetry writing.

As for my vocational trajectory, my father succeeded. I would become a lawyer, though I still harbored a muted ambition to be a poet.

I never considered entering government. Despite our trust in Roosevelt, my family shared the collective Jewish immigrant wariness of governments, which had historically been our people's oppressors. This sentiment is best expressed by the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof when a young man asks, "Is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?"

"Of course!" the rabbi exclaims. "May God bless and keep the Tsar — far away from us."

After a two-year detour to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to serve out my military obligation as an artillery officer, I returned to Yale to attend law school. In 1959, with my new degree, I headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to clerk for a wise federal judge, appropriately named Solomon. Government service was far from my mind. I followed Judge Gus J. Solomon's firm guidance and accepted a junior position in the most prestigious corporate law firm in Portland. That year I voted for John F. Kennedy for president. It was the extent of my involvement in politics. In my mind, my future would be limited to climbing the rungs, ultimately reaching the heights of a safe, lucrative partnership within the law firm.

Judge Solomon's secretary, Helen Bradley, was a passionate activist Democrat with whom I had formed a warm friendship during my clerkship. She had worked hard for the Oregon State election to the US Senate of the liberal journalist Richard Neuberger, and then, after his sudden death, for the election of his wife, Maurine Neuberger.

In 1961, only a year and a half after I joined the law firm, I received a call from Bradley. She had heard from Senator Neuberger, who was seeking a new legislative assistant. Would I be interested? My answer was a quick, "Not for me."

Yet that night, as I talked over the possibility with my wife, my resistance softened. In those days, it seemed as if every other young lawyer in Portland was eager to get to Washington to bask in the glamour and excitement that surrounded the youthful President Kennedy. It would be a novel experience; it might even burnish my resume. Perhaps I could arrange a one-year leave of absence from the firm, secure in the knowledge that I would return to the safe bosom of Davies, Biggs, Strayer, Stoel, and Boley (which was destined to grow into the seventeenth largest corporate law firm in the United States in the 1970s).

I decided to apply for the Neuberger job. My credentials were hardly impressive. I knew less about lawmaking in Washington than the average eighth grader: I didn't realize that the Capitol, where Congress resides, was in a separate building down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Fortunately, Senator Neuberger had written Bradley that she had only one requirement for the job: the candidate must be able to write English. That I could do. I got the job without being interviewed by the senator, or even visiting Washington.

In February 1962, I arrived in Washington and began serving Senator Neuberger as her legislative assistant. She was a tenacious, independent legislator, the ninth woman ever to serve in the US Senate. Among her predecessors, she was easily the least deferential to the institution's traditional male dominance — a fearless liberal and a seasoned consumer advocate.

On her way to the Senate, Neuberger had gained national attention as an Oregon State House member who had stood before television cameras and a state senate committee in an apron, with a mixing bowl and a package of margarine on the table before her. Her target was a mandate pushed through every state house in the nation by the dairy lobby that forbade the sale of butter-colored margarine. The margarine industry, in response, had made its product a law-abiding white, accompanied by a small packet of butter-yellow dye. Neuberger demonstrated the laborious effort required to mix the margarine and the dye just to deceive butter-habituated children. Her testimony was featured on national television news. Oregon soon repealed this indefensible law. Within five years, so had every other state except Minnesota and Wisconsin, which held out for another decade.

To please my new boss, I found I had to be aggressive in finding initiatives for her to champion that could burnish her political identity as a consumer protection advocate. But I had no idea how to go about doing it. I sorely needed guidance. My first stroke of luck was to be taken in hand by the senator's chief of staff, Lloyd Tupling. The former editor of an independent muckraking newspaper in Idaho, Tupling had effectively been driven out of the state when he fearlessly attacked the consumer-rate inflation of one of the state's most powerful corporate monopolies, the federal dam–created Idaho Power.

First, Tupling told me, comb through the Washington papers and watch the TV news. Second, never write a Senate floor speech on any initiative without simultaneously drafting a press release on it.

I was readily infected with the populist spirit that had inspired Tupling to challenge the energy...