[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 147 (Tuesday, November 29, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: November 29, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 TRIBUTE TO EX-SENATOR THOMAS H. KUCHEL

  (Mr. HORN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, last week on November 21, there passed a great 
Californian, a great American, and a great Senator of the United 
States. Thomas Henry Kuchel was born in 1910, the year that progressive 
Republican Hiram W. Johnson became Governor of California. In 1934, as 
a young law student, Tommy Kuchel managed then Senator Hiram W. 
Johnson's Los Angeles campaign headquarters.
  Elected one of the youngest State party chairmen in American history, 
and one of the youngest State assemblymen and State senators in 
California, he represented Orange County well in Sacramento in the late 
1930's. There he befriended then Attorney General Earl Warren, later to 
become another great Governor of California and, still later, the Chief 
Justice of the United States.
  In 1953, Governor Warren appointed Senator Kuchel to take the place 
of U.S. Senator Richard Nixon, who had been elected Vice President of 
the United States when President Dwight D. Eisenhower swept the Nation. 
The new Senator won elections in 1954, 1956, and 1962. He served with 
distinction in the Senate until 1969 and was Republican Whip from 1959 
to 1969, the deputy leader with Republican Leader Everett McKinley 
Dirksen of Illinois.
  In this age when we talk about bipartisanship, Senator Kuchel 
epitomized it, as did the Republican leader at that time, Senator 
Dirksen. Both spoke for the longrun national interest. Senator Kuchel 
was one of the key Members in helping to pass Medicare, cofloor manager 
with his Democratic whip counterpart Senator Humphrey of the Civil 
Rights Act of 1964, helped write in Senator Dirksen's back office what 
became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Earlier, in 1963, he had sat in 
on the extensive hearings on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When his 
legislative assistant--this Member of Congress--asked him if he wanted 
a floor statement prepared, he turned to me and said: ``Steve, I am 
doing this one myself. I am doing it for my grandchildren.'' And so he 
did. A great admirer of Winston Churchill, he took pride in the use of 
the English language. He had a good tutor--his father, the editor of an 
Orange County newspaper. His father was blind in the eyes, but not to 
evil. He drove the Ku Klux Klan out of Orange County. As a little boy 
the Senator read to his father and learned not to compromise with evil.
  Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Kuchel was one of the great legislators 
from our State in this century, and I suggest that both the other body 
and this body take his merits into consideration when they think of 
working together for the betterment of our country as a whole. If Hiram 
Johnson, his political mentor, were alive, he would say of Thomas H. 
Kuchel, ``He kept the faith.''
  Mr. Speaker, I include for printing in the Record the following 
article from the Los Angeles Times of November 23, 1994.

        Ex-Senator Kuchel Dies; Last of State's GOP Progressives

                           (By Kenneth Reich)

       Thomas H. Kuchel, U.S. senator from California for 16 years 
     and the last major officeholder from the progressive 
     Republican line in state politics that stretched back to Earl 
     Warren and Hiram Johnson, has died at age 84.
       Kuchel died Monday night at his home in Beverly Hills of 
     lung cancer, Dick Arnold, Kuchel's law partner and friend, 
     said Tuesday.
       A friend and protege of Warren, Kuchel was appointed by 
     Warren as state controller and as U.S. senator before he was 
     elected to those posts in his own right.
       Although he was the Republican whip in the Senate from 1962 
     to 1966--the second most powerful Senate leadership post in 
     his party--Kuchel refused to endorse four leading Republican 
     candidates for public office in those years: Richard M. 
     Nixon for governor of California in 1962, Barry Goldwater 
     for President and George Murphy for the U.S. Senate in 
     1964, and Ronald Reagan for governor in 1966.
       In 1968, Kuchel lost his bid for a third full term, beaten 
     in the Republican primary by right-wing educator Max 
     Rafferty, who was then defeated by Democrat Alan Cranston in 
     the general election.
       Rafferty's defeat of Kuchel was the Republican right-wing's 
     revenge for Kuchel's recalcitrance toward conservative 
     candidates, and it spelled the end of the proudly outspoken 
     progressive era in California's Republican Party. Later, when 
     the essentially moderate Pete Wilson was elected to the U.S. 
     Senate as a Republican, he was careful to support Reagan and 
     other candidates of the Republican right.
       Kuchel never apologized for being out of step with the 
     rightward drift of the GOP, which was particularly marked in 
     California.
       In an interview long after his retirement, he extolled the 
     virtues of progressivism, the essence of which he said had 
     been defined in the 19th Century by British statesman 
     Benjamin Disraeli, who remarked that the main purpose of 
     government was to ``distribute the amenities of life on an 
     ever-increasing scale to an ever-increasing number.''
       ``Progressive Republicans brought to politics the 
     philosophy of governing for the many.'' Kuchel said, ``What 
     comes particularly to my mind is Medicare. If it weren't for 
     Medicare today, there would be tens of thousands of Americans 
     living in the poorhouse, with no care. It was a baker's dozen 
     progressive Republicans in the Senate who agreed we would 
     vote for Medicare. . . . I was their spokesman, and we 
     provided the necessary margin for passage.''
       Kuchel also expressed particular pride in the progressives' 
     support of civil rights bills for the enfranchisement of 
     blacks and desegregation of public facilities during the 
     1960s.
       By contrast, he said with characteristic disdain, the main 
     feature of ``right-wing Republicans,'' as he understood them, 
     ``was militant anti-communism. . . . They seemed convinced we 
     were about to be invaded by the communists.''
       Kuchel was born Aug. 15, 1910, in Anaheim, where his 
     father, Henry Kuchel, was a newspaper publisher who had 
     crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan. His father became blind 
     the year the Senator-to-be was born, and as a boy Kuchel used 
     to read the Congressional Record to him.
       Graduated from USC in 1932 and from USC Law School in 1935. 
     Kuchel first was elected to public office at 26, winning an 
     Assembly seat from Orange County. When he was 30, he was 
     elected chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, 
     the youngest man ever to hold that position.
       It was during his legislative years that he first met 
     Warren, who became state attorney general in 1939 and 
     governor in 1943.
       ``I saw him quite often,'' Kuchel later recalled. ``I was 
     single and living in the Sutter Club during the legislative 
     sessions, and he'd stay there too when he was in Sacramento. 
     We developed a good friendship.''
       It was to be the decisive relationship in Kuckel's career. 
     When state Controller Harry B. Riley died in 1946, it was 
     Gov. Warren who called Kuchel, then a state senator fresh 
     from World War II Navy service, and told him. ``It's a fine 
     job, and I think you have the qualifications.'' Six years 
     later, when then-Sen. Nixon was elected vice president, it 
     was Warren who insisted, despite some reluctance from Kuckel, 
     on appointing him to the U.S. Senate.
       Warren was shortly to go to Washington himself, as chief 
     justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he became a leading 
     judicial liberal and eventually came under bitter attack from 
     the far right. It was appropriate that his protege, Kuchel, 
     was to emerge as the Senate's most outspoken Republican foe 
     of the far right.
       In fiscal matters, the senator was a conservative. He 
     strongly supported American involvement in Vietnam for a long 
     time. Even after the devasting Tet offensive by the North 
     Vietnamese in 1968, he remarked, ``I don't want this senator, 
     or any U.S. senator, to indicate by his words that there is 
     dissension among us'' on Vietnam policy.
       But he worked hard for such moderate causes as the 1964 
     Civil Rights Act and favored the atomic test ban treaty and 
     other steps toward detente with the Soviet Union.
       Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right 
     to his response to surge of mail that he got from members of 
     the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. 
     Kennedy became President.
       ``I got thousand of letters telling me that Chinese 
     communists were in Mexico preparing to invade California.'' 
     he recalled. After checking with military authorities. Kuchel 
     penned a short form letter in response. ``We have no evidence 
     of communists gathering in Mexico. Chinese or otherwise.'' it 
     said.
       Shortly thereafter, Kuchel learned that he was being 
     labeled a ``Comsymp,'' a term he had not heard of until then.
       ``I got a little teed off, and prepared a carefully 
     researched speech critical of the John Birch Society and that 
     kind of mentality.'' Kuchel remembered. ``I kicked them 
     around and they never forgave me.''
       About the same time, Kuchel's refusal to endorse his fellow 
     Republicans began to nettle not only the party's right wing, 
     but also many of the more orthodox conservatives who made up 
     the majority of the GOP rank and file.
       When Nixon announced his plans to run for governor of 
     California, the same year that Kuchel was standing for 
     reelection to the Senate, the former vice president said he 
     would run an independent campaign and endorse no one else on 
     the Republican ticket.
       Kuchel, feeling turnabout was fair play, decided to avoid 
     endorsing Nixon. But when Nixon ran into trouble against 
     Democratic incumbent Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, the senator 
     was pressured to give him a hand.
       Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote Kuchel a 
     pointed letter, asking what kind of Republican he was for not 
     giving such support. Eisenhower backed off when Kuchel 
     responded forcefully that in California it was traditional to 
     run one's own campaign and not get involved with others and 
     that Nixon had been first to restate the tradition.
       ``Dear Tom.'' Eisenhower responded. ``Thanks for 
     straightening me out.''
       Kuchel was reelected that year, 1962, by more than 700,000 
     votes. Nixon lost to Brown by 300,000.
       Two years later, when Goldwater ran against President 
     Lyndon B. Johnson, Kuchel refused to endorse him, explaining 
     later, ``I would have been a hypocrite if I had campaigned 
     for Goldwater, so I kept my mouth shut and campaigned for 
     other Republicans across the country. I considered myself the 
     Republican. I considered what Barry Goldwater was saying was 
     hardly Republican doctrine.''
       On his refusal to support George Murphy, who ran 
     successfully as the Republican candidate for the other Senate 
     seat from California that same year, Kuchel said, ``I never 
     coveted public office enough to become a wholesale 
     hypocrite.''
       Two years later, when Reagan ran for governor, Kuchel 
     withheld his endorsement. He said he had given a Reagan 
     emissary. Leonard Firestone, an assurance that he would 
     endorse the future President but only on condition that 
     Reagan repudiate the John Birch Society. When Reagan would 
     not do so. Kuchel made no endorsement, even though he said he 
     had been told at one point that if he did. Reagan would 
     guarantee that he would have no primary opposition in 1968.
       That certain elements of the far right would stop at 
     nothing to get Kuchel was indicated during his last term of 
     office, when his Los Angeles assistant received an affidavit 
     claiming that the senator, who was married and had a 
     daughter, was homosexual
       Kuchel was shaken, ``My God,'' he said years later, ``I 
     almost dropped. I flew out to California within two days, and 
     I asked for a meeting with the district attorney and the Los 
     Angeles chief of police. They said they would undertake an 
     investigation.''
       Quietly, with little press notice, a Los Angeles police 
     office who had assisted in preparing the affidavit was fired. 
     He and a New Jersey publisher pleaded no contest to charges 
     of libel filed by the authorities. They claimed that it has 
     been a case of mistaken identity.
       But Kuchel later said, ``It damaged me. Even though the 
     perpetrators took a plea, it hurt me.''
       Some political insiders felt that the senator lost much of 
     his zest for political life after that episode. But there 
     appeared to be other reasons as well for his inability to put 
     on a dynamic defense of his seat when he was challenged by 
     Rafferty in the 1968 GOP primary.
       As Kuchel admitted. ``My Achilles' heel was money raising, 
     I hated to indulge in it, and my campaign expenditures 
     usually were the lowest amount of anyone.''
       With Rafferty charging hard, declaring up and down the 
     state that Kuche'' was not a true Republican, the senator 
     seemed on the defensive, and often inarticulately so. A 
     dispatch by then-Times political writer Richard Bergholz said 
     of the incumbent:
       ``He talked in generalities, haltingly with little force or 
     emphasis. . . . [He] later conceded that he was something 
     less than brilliant. . . . `I was tired,' he explained. . . . 
     It was midafternoon on a campaign day which had only one 
     appearance earlier in the day.''
       When the votes were in, on an primary day most remembered 
     for the assassination that night in Los Angeles of Democratic 
     presidential contender Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Rafferty had 
     defeated Kuchel by 69,000 votes of 2.2 million cast.
       Kuchel is survived by his wife, Betty: their daughter, 
     Karen Peterson, and two grandsons, Jason and Peter Smith.
       A public memorial service is planned for 3 p.m. Nov. 30 at 
     All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills.

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