Gaylord Nelson

Former Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson died this morning, at 5.10am, at the age of 89. Nelson is best remembered, as his biographer suggests, for being the Senate's first environmentalist, a key player in the start of Earth Day. For those interested in politics or foreign policy, however, Nelson also left important legacies.

Through the 1930s, Wisconsin was a one-party state, dominated by the Republicans, with the key battles fought in the GOP primary between progressives of the La Follette ilk and pro-business conservatives. In the 1930s, the La Follette faction split to form its own party, the Progressives, but the third party collapsed during World War II and Young Bob La Follette, who returned to the GOP, was defeated for renomination in 1946 by Joe McCarthy. The Democrats were bystanders in all of these battles, but in the mid-1950s, Nelson, along with William Proxmire and Pat Lucey, built the modern WI Democratic Party. Proxmire was elected to the Senate in 1957, for the vacancy created by McCarthy's death; Nelson was elected governor the following year and then ousted Republican Alexander Wiley in the 1962 Senate election. Nelson, in turn, lost in the biggest Senate upset of 1980, to a mediocre Republican candidate, former congressman Bob Kasten. The outcome symbolized the decline of the liberalism that Nelson personified--a domestic emphasis on rights-related issues and a foreign policy oriented around anti-militarism and the promotion of human rights.

The Capital Times bio quotes Nelson's best line from the Vietnam debates: in 1965, when LBJ reqested from Congress a $700 million appropriation to serve as an endorsement of the President's Vietnam policy, Nelson joined Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening in voting no, commenting,"You need my vote less than I need my conscience." The previous year, he had planned to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, only to be swayed by heavy lobbying from William Fulbright. But after the 1965 vote, Nelson remained at the cutting edge of foreign policy dissent for the next decade and a half. He sponsored one of the most important measures designed to bolster Congress' standing in US foreign policy, the 1974 Nelson-Bingham amendment, which gave Congress the option of vetoing, through a joint resolution, any foreign arms sale over $25 million. The amendment helped to deter a variety of major arms sales packages in the late 1970s, especially to Pakistan and pre-revolution Iran, and paved the way for the first major foreign policy showdown of the Reagan administration, the October 1981 vote over Reagan's proposal to sell AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia.

Nelson was a quiet, thoughtful man of principle and ideas, someone uncomfortable in sound-bite politics based on partisan attacks from both sides. He was missed when he was defeated in 1980; senators like him are missed even more today.