[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 41 (Thursday, April 2, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3174-S3176]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             BELLA S. ABZUG

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I was greatly saddened to learn 
of the death of Bella S. Abzug. While we began our association as 
political rivals, past quickly became past, and I came to respect and 
admire her as a friend and colleague.
  She served three terms in the United States Congress with 
extraordinary distinction, establishing an unparalleled record of 
commitment to women's issues that would distinguish her career. With a 
rare combination of intellect, energy, and wit, Bella properly won a 
place on the national stage. And she did not stop there--in short order 
Bella Abzug became an international figure. As President of the Women's 
Environment and Development Organization, she added her voice to a wide 
range of international debates with a style that was all her own. 
Bella's stature was such that in 1995 she was selected to lead a 
delegation of United States nongovernmental organizations to the United 
Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. She 
made us proud.
  To know Bella Abzug was to know a woman of indefatigable passion for 
the fray. Regardless of the issue, whenever New Yorkers needed an 
outspoken advocate, Bella could be counted on to lead the charge. She 
will be missed.
  I ask that her obituary from the New York Times of April 1, 1998 be 
printed in the Record.
  The obituary follows:

             [From the New York Times, Wed., Apr. 1, 1998]

    Bella Abzug, 77, Congresswoman And a Founding Feminist, Is Dead

                          (By Laura Mansnerus)

       Bella S. Abzug, New Yorker, feminist, antiwar activist, 
     politician and lawyer, died yesterday at Columbia-
     Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 77.
       She died of complications following heart surgery, said 
     Harold Holzer, who was her spokesman when she served in 
     Congress. She had been hospitalized for weeks, and had been 
     in poor health for several years, he said.
       Ms. Abzug represented the West Side of Manhattan for three 
     Congressional terms in the 1970's. She brought with her a 
     belligerent, exuberant politics that made her a national 
     character. Often called just Bella, she was recognizable 
     everywhere by her big hats and a voice that Norman Mailer 
     said ``could boil the fat off a taxicab driver's neck.''
       She opposed the Vietnam War, championed what was then 
     called women's liberation and was one of the first to call 
     for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. Long after 
     it ceased to be fashionable, she called her politics radical. 
     During her last campaign, for Congress in 1986, she told The 
     New York Times, ``I am not a centrist.''
       Bella Abzug was a founding feminist, and an enduring one. 
     In the movement's giddy, sloganeering early days, Ms. Abzug 
     was, like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, an icon, the hat 
     bobbing before the cameras at marches and rallies.
       After leaving the House in January 1977, she worked for 
     women's rights for two more decades. She founded an 
     international women's group that worked on environmental 
     issues. And she was a leader of a conference of nongovernment 
     organizations that paralleled the United Nations' fourth 
     World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
       Even then, she continued to rankle. Former President George 
     Bush, on a private visit to China that coincided with the 
     Beijing conference, said to a meeting of food

[[Page S3175]]

     production executives: ``I feel somewhat sorry for the 
     Chinese, having Bella Abzug running around. Bella Abzug is 
     one who has always represented the extremes of the women's 
     movement.''
       When told of Mr. Bush's remark, Ms. Abzug, 75, and in a 
     wheelchair, retorted: ``He was addressing a fertilizer group? 
     That's appropriate.''
       Her forceful personality and direct manner made her a 
     lightning rod for criticism from those who opposed the idea 
     of holding a women's conference. After Bob Dole, then the 
     Senate majority leader, said he could not imagine why anyone 
     ``would want to attend a conference co-chaired by Bella 
     Abzug,'' she responded that she was not running the meeting 
     but simply participating with more than 30,000 other women 
     over how best to achieve equal rights.
       But much of what Ms. Abzug agitated for--abortion rights, 
     day care, laws against employment discrimination--was by that 
     time mainstream political fare.
       In Congress, ``she was first on almost everything, on 
     everything that ever mattered,'' said Esther Newberg, Ms. 
     Abzug's first administrative assistant and one of many staff 
     members who quit but remained devoted. ``She was first to 
     call for Richard Nixon's impeachment, first to call for an 
     end to the war.''
       Ms. Abzug made enemies easily--``Sometimes the hat and the 
     mouth took over,'' Ms. Newberg said--but Ms. Abzug saw that 
     as a consequence of a refusal to compromise, as well as a 
     matter of sport. Of her time in the House, Ms. Abzug wrote in 
     a journal that was published in 1972 as ``Bella.'' ``I spend 
     all day figuring out how to beat the machine and knock the 
     crap out of the political power structure.''
       She worked relentlessly at organizing and coalition-
     building. A founder of Women Strike for Peace and the 
     National Women's Political Caucus, she spent a lifetime 
     prodding for change, with a lawyer's enthusiasm for political 
     channels, through organizations from the P.T.A. to the United 
     Nations.
       She made friends easily, too. ``She's fierce and intense 
     and funny,'' said her longtime friend Gloria Steinem. ``She 
     takes everyone seriously. When she argues with you fiercely, 
     it's because she takes you seriously. And she's willing to 
     change her mind. That's so rare.''


                  her first speech in a subway station

       Bella Savitzky Abzug was born on July 24, 1920 in the 
     Bronx, the second daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia. 
     Her father, Emanuel Savitzky, whom Ms. Abzug later described 
     as ``this humanist butcher,'' ran (and named) the Live and 
     Let Live Meat Market on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan.
       She said she knew from the age of 11 that she wanted to be 
     a lawyer, and not longer afterward gave her first public 
     speech, in a subway station, while collection for a Zionist 
     youth organization. She went from Hunter College, where she 
     was student body president, to Columbia University Law 
     School, where she was an editor of The Law Review, to a 
     practice representing union workers.
       Ms. Abzug traced the wearing of her trademark wide-brimmed 
     hats to those days. She once recalled: ``When I was a young 
     lawyer, I would go to people's offices and they would always 
     say: `Sit here. We'll wait for the lawyer.' Working women 
     wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously.
       ``After a while, I started liking them. When I got to 
     Congress, they made a big thing of it. So I was watching. Did 
     they want me to wear it or not? They didn't want me to wear 
     it, so I did.''
       All the while, she was a leftist and an agitator. Years 
     later, in a moment of exasperation with her Congressional 
     aids, she wrote: ``I just don't understand young people 
     today, quite frankly. Our struggle was political, ideological 
     and economic, and we felt we couldn't make something of 
     ourselves unless we bettered society. We saw the two 
     together.''
       In the 1950's, Ms. Abzug's law practice turned to other 
     cases identified with the left. One client was Willie McGee, 
     a black Mississippian convicted of raping a white woman and 
     sentenced to death. Ms. Abzug, who was pregnant at the time, 
     argued the case in Mississippi while white supremacist groups 
     threatened her. Though the Supreme Court stayed the execution 
     twice, Mr. McGee was eventually executed.
       She also represented people accused of Communist activities 
     by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Congressional committee and its 
     counterpart in Albany.
       In the 1960's, Ms. Abzug became an antiwar activist. A 
     founder of Women Strike for Peace, she was its chief 
     lobbyist, opposing nuclear testing and, later, the Vietnam 
     War. She organized insurgent Democrats into other groups, 
     too, becoming a leader of the movement against President 
     Lydon B. Johnson and prominent in the 1968 Presidential 
     campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy.
       During those years, Ms. Abzug started navigating New York 
     City politics. She and her husband, Martin Abzug, moved from 
     Mount Vernon, the Westchester suburb where they had raised 
     their two daughters, to a town house at 37 Bank Street in 
     Greenwich Village. In 1970, Ms. Abzug ran for Congress.
       The 19th Congressional District, which snaked from lower 
     Manhattan to the West 80's, had four registered Democrats to 
     every Republican and had been represented in Congress for 
     seven terms by Leonard Farbstein, a solid but rather 
     somnolent liberal. Ms. Abzug won the Democratic primary with 
     54 percent of the vote.


                   campaign became a women's crusade

       At this point, Bella Abzug became national news, a flash of 
     local color in a political year. She seemed to be everywhere, 
     clapping backs and jabbing biceps. Her campaign headquarters 
     next to the Lion's Head, a writers' and journalists' bar in 
     Greenwich Village, was also a daycare center for her legions 
     of female volunteers. The women's crusade she led brought 
     considerable, if sometimes derisive, attention.
       Though she eventually took 55 percent of the vote, she had 
     genuine Republican opposition, unusual in an era when New 
     Yorks' main political action consisted of various Democratic 
     factions knifing one another. The Republican-Liberal 
     candidate way Barry Farber, a well-known radio talk show 
     host. Mr. Farber drew many Democrats who resented Mr. 
     Farbstein's humiliation or were simply put off by Ms. Abzug's 
     style.
       To her chagrin, Mr. Farber accused Ms. Abzug, who advocated 
     direct negotiations between Israelis and Arabs, of flagging 
     in her support of Israel. For years after that, she made a 
     point of stating her Jewish credentials, dating to childhood: 
     her family was religious and she went regularly to synagogue 
     (though she was bother that women were relegated to the back 
     rows of the balcony), studied Hebrew and was enrolled for a 
     time at the Jewish Theological Seminary.


                   setting her sights on the pentagon

       When Ms. Abzug went to Washington, she set her sights on a 
     appointment to the House Armed Services Committee. She wanted 
     a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam 
     and she vowed to take on the military-industrial complex. She 
     wanted an end to the draft. She wanted national health 
     insurance, legislation to finance day-care centers and 
     housing, and more money for New York City, all to be paid for 
     with billions siphoned from the Pentagon's budget.
       She got little of this, but during the next six years ``she 
     was indefatigable,' Ms. Newberg recalled.
       ``She yelled a lot,'' Ms. Newberg said, ``only because she 
     couldn't get everything done.'' And if she couldn't, she 
     added, ti was partly because ``her agenda was too pure for 
     her moment in time.''
       Ms. Abzug became expert at parliamentary rules, worked them 
     skillfully and was famously well prepared for every vote, 
     hearing and committee spat. The ``sunshine law'' requiring 
     governing bodies to meet publicly came out of a subcommittee 
     she headed. She coaxed funds for New York from the Public 
     Works Committee. She was a sponsor of the women's equal 
     rights amendment.
       ``She was one of the most exciting, enlightened legislators 
     that ever served in the Congress,'' said Representative 
     Charles B. Rangel of Manhattan, with whom Ms. Abzug sometimes 
     collaborated and sometimes sparred.
       From her first day on Capitol Hill, to the day she dismayed 
     her colleagues by introducing her Vietnam resolution, Ms. 
     Abzug derided the Congressional club, the seniority system, 
     the log-rolling and back-scratch. She did not spare fellow 
     Democrats; when she spoke of liberals, it was usually 
     dismissively. She badgered the House leadership over 
     committee appointments and votes.
       She badgered the President, too. Invited to a reception at 
     Richard Nixon's White House, she accepted (while writing in 
     her journal, ``Who wants to listen to his pious idiocies?''), 
     then told Nixon in the receiving line that her constituents 
     demanded a withdrawal from Vietnam.
       For all of her railing against Democrats who went along to 
     get along, Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill named her one of his 
     dozen assistant whips, and by most accounts she worked well 
     with some of the crustiest fixtures in the House.
       Still, in 1972 Ralph Nader estimated that Ms. Abzug's 
     sponsorship of a measure often cost it 20 to 30 votes. Her 
     reputation as an irritant came from all quarters. Jimmy 
     Breslin wrote of a campaign worker who went to the Lion's 
     Head one night, holding his side and vowing never to work for 
     Ms. Abzug again. ``She punched me,'' he said, in a quarrel 
     over scheduling. The next day, Mr. Breslin wrote, Ms. Abzug 
     called the aid. ``Michael, I called to apologize,'' she said. 
     ``How's your kidney?''
       Mr. Breslin also recounted the Congresswoman's introduction 
     to Sol Linowitz, the former chairman of the Xerox Corporation 
     and a Democratic Party luminary: ``Are you the man that used 
     to be the head of the Xerox?'' Ms. Abzug asked. ``That's 
     right,'' Mr. Linowitz replied. ``I'm glad to meet a big 
     shot,'' Ms. Abzug said. ``I'm in hock $35,000 on my 
     campaign.''
       Ms. Abzug acknowledged loneliness in her years in Congress. 
     ``Outside of Martin and the kids, I don't feel very related 
     to most people at this point,'' she wrote in 1971. ``I feel 
     detached in social situations. I'm always thinking about 
     other things, about Congress, about the issues, about the 
     political coalition I'm trying to organize. It never leaves 
     me. I even have trouble relating to some of my closest 
     friends, though God knows I still love them, even if they 
     don't know it.''
       Always, she returned to Manhattan to spend weekends with 
     her husband.
       She had married Martin Abzug in 1944. The two New Yorkers 
     met on a bus in Miami, on the way to a Yehudi Menuhin 
     concern. Mr. Abzug, a stockbroker and an author of two 
     published novels, had next to no interest in

[[Page S3176]]

     politics. In an interview in 1970, he murmured, while his 
     wife was out of the room, ``The political bug is a curious 
     bug.'' But he was also, she said, her best friend and 
     supporter, and ``one of the few unneurotic people left in 
     society.''


                  corrosive ambition hampers a career

       Ms. Abzug's own ambition was too corrosive for many people, 
     even--or, perhaps, especially--for her fellow New York 
     Democrats. When the State Legislature sliced up her district 
     in 1972, they urged her to challenge one of the two 
     conservative incumbent Democrats in adjoining districts, 
     Representative John J. Rooney or Representative John M. 
     Murphy. Instead, she opposed a liberal Democrat, William 
     Fitts Ryan, in the 20th District, encompassing the Upper 
     West Side and the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
       The primary was bitter and, eventually, politically 
     expensive to Ms. Abzug. Bill Ryan was one of the earliest 
     heroes of the city's insurgent Democrats, an early opponent 
     of the Vietnam War and a genuinely well-liked man who, as 
     many of his constituents knew, was waging a gallant fight 
     against cancer.
       Mr. Ryan defeated Ms. Abzug in the Democratic primary but 
     died before the general election. The Democratic County 
     Committee appointed Ms. Abzug as the candidate to replace 
     him, but she was challenged by Mr. Ryan's widow, Priscilla, 
     who ran on the Liberal line. Ms. Abzug won in November, but 
     she had made dedicated enemies who believed she was an overly 
     aggressive politician who would not hesitate to attack anyone 
     who got in her way. Ten years later, she was denied a seat in 
     the state's delegation to the national party's biannual 
     conference because New York leaders considered her 
     disruptive.
       In 1976, she gave up her House seat to run for the Senate. 
     She lost in the primary, to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by a 
     margin of only 1 percent. Two more campaigns quickly 
     followed. (In a 1978 interview, she said: ``I'm a politician. 
     I run for office, That's my profession.'') She lost to Edward 
     I. Koch in a crowded mayoral primary in 1977. The next year, 
     running for the House again, she lost, again by 1 percent, to 
     a little-known Republican, S. William Green.
       She was appointed co-chairwoman of President Jimmy Carter's 
     National Advisory Committee on Women, and then after 
     disagreeing with him over economic policy, was dismissed. The 
     majority of the committee members resigned in protest. Ms. 
     Abzug, unapologetic, said with a shrug, ``I've got to find 
     myself another big, nonpaying job.''
       Her next and last campaign was in 1986, this time for a 
     House seat in Westchester County. She won the primary in a 
     burst of the old, ebullient campaigning style, but lost in 
     November to Joseph J. DioGuardi, the Republican incumbent.
       It was during that campaign that Martin Abzug died. Her 
     friends said Ms. Abzug never recovered. Nine years later, she 
     said in an interview, ``I haven't been entirely the same 
     since.''
       There was one more bid for office for her old house seat on 
     the Upper West Side, when she announced her candidacy to 
     replace Representative Ted Weiss on his death just before the 
     1992 election. But she was quickly eliminated from the field 
     at the party convention.
       During the next decade, Ms. Abzug suffered from ill health, 
     including breast cancer, but continued to practice law and 
     work for women's groups. She wrote a book, ``Gender Gap,'' 
     with her old friend Mim Kelber. She started a lobbying group 
     called Women U.S.A. and founded the Women's Environment and 
     Development Organization, a nonprofit group that works with 
     international agencies.
       In addition to her daughters, Eve and Liz, Ms. Abzug is 
     survived by her sister, Helene Alexander of Great Neck, N.Y.
       ``I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a 
     prizefighter, a man hater, you name it.'' Ms. Abzug said of 
     herself in ``Bella.'' ``they call me Battling Bella, Mother 
     Courage and a Jewish mother with more complaints than 
     Portnoy.''
       ``There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, 
     rude, profane, brash and overbearing. Whether I'm any of 
     these things or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But 
     whatever I am--and this ought to be made very clear at the 
     outset--I am a very serious woman.''

                          ____________________