[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.''
____________________