[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 15]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 20598-20601]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


         HONORING A TRUE PUBLIC SERVANT: SENATOR THOMAS KUCHEL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. STEPHEN HORN

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 10, 2002

  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, fifty years ago this December, California 
Governor Earl Warren appointed Thomas Henry Kuchel of Anaheim to the 
United States Senate seat vacated by Vice President-elect Richard 
Nixon.
  A proudly progressive Republican from Orange County, Senator Kuchel 
represented the Golden State in the Senate with great distinction from 
1953 to 1969 and played key roles in ratification of the 1963 nuclear 
test ban treaty, passage of the Interstate Highway Act, the Landrum-
Griffin Act, Medicare, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With Senator 
Hubert Humphrey, he was co-floor leader for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 
arguably the most important piece of domestic legislation in the latter 
half of the twentieth century. As ranking member of the Senate Interior 
committee, Senator Kuchel sponsored numerous laws that created and 
expanded reservoirs, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and national 
parks. He was a fine lawyer, particularly on water law.
  Senator Kuchel's Republican colleagues elected him Assistant Minority 
Leader five times--a record that remains unsurpassed today--and he was 
literally Minority Leader Everett Dirksen's ``right-hand man'' during 
the decade that he served as Whip. Senator Kuchel was also a formidable 
politician--he was the last U.S. Senate nominee to win all 58 
California counties, a feat that he accomplished in 1962 as fellow 
Republican Richard Nixon decisively lost his gubernatorial bid.
  From 1960 to 1966, I served as legislative assistant to Senator 
Kuchel. I had the sad duty of announcing his death to the House on 
November 29, 1994.
  As a memorial to this distinguished public servant, Congress 
designated the ``Thomas H. Kuchel Visitor Center'' at Redwood National 
Park as part of the Interior Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 1999. I 
requested this action at the suggestion of Jason Bezis, a young 
Californian who has done extensive research on Senator Kuchel's career 
and accomplishments. Certainly, naming the visitor center is a fitting 
tribute and I want to provide my colleagues with some of the history 
behind this action.
  In February of 1966, Senator Kuchel introduced S. 2962, a bill to 
authorize a Redwood National Park in California. He helped to shape 
this legislation in meetings with Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. 
Udall, National Park Service Director George B. Hartzog, Jr., and other 
concerned parties in 1965. He re-introduced the bill in 1967, after 
aiding in negotiations with timber companies on an agreement that 
halted ``spite cutting'' of trees within the proposed park's 
boundaries. In October of 1967, Senators Tom Kuchel, Henry Jackson, and 
Alan Bible jointly introduced S. 2515, the bill that established 
Redwood National Park when President Lyndon Johnson signed it on 
October 2, 1968 (Public Law 90-545).
  Senator Kuchel tirelessly advocated establishments of Redwood 
National Park through both words and actions. On July 29, 1966, he 
addressed the U.S. Senate: ``I have introduced S. 2962 to establish a 
Redwood National Park because God's magnificent, awe-inspiring northern 
California virgin redwood giants ought to be preserved for humanity, 
rather than be chopped down from mountainsides to be made into 2 by 
4's.''
  When logging companies accelerated their harvest of trees that were 
to be within the park, he informed their executives that they had a 
``moral obligation'' to refrain from cutting in areas that Congress was 
attempting to preserve. In his ``A Plea for Responsibility'' Senate 
address on August 10, 1966, Senator Kuchel said, ``Some of these 
redwoods have taken 2,000 years to grow into their present grandeur. 
Those who would sever them from the earth are not answerable to 
Congress or the courts. They are, however, answerable to the people of 
this country, and to posterity. These giant trees belong to the ages.''
  Senator Kuchel repeated his ``moral obligation'' argument during 
debate on the Senate floor on October 31, 1967: ``The redwoods are a 
national treasure which must be preserved. We, who are living when the 
last great primeval redwood forests are diminishing, have an obligation 
to preserve an area of national park stature where all Americans for 
now and the future, can experience the wonder of walking among these 
living remnants of past centuries.''
  When passage of the Redwood National Park bill was imminent in fall 
1968, many credited Senator Kuchel. The San Francisco Examiner dubbed 
it ``Kuchel's Park.'' The Sacramento Bee lauded Senator Kuchel's 
advocacy for the park as ``an exemplar of political statesmanship.''
  Senator Kuchel's final legislative accomplishment was the Redwood 
National Park Act, signed by President Johnson just two weeks before 
the Senator delivered his Farewell Address. Rarely has a ``lame-duck'' 
senator achieved so much.
  I believe that Senator Thomas H. Kuchel was among the most eminent 
legislators that my state of California has ever sent to our national 
Capital. To his wife Betty and daughter Karen, let me say, ``Thank you 
for sharing this great man with us.''
  I asked that the following be placed in the Record: a eulogy by San 
Diego Union-Tribune columnist Lionel Van Deerlin, a distinguished 
member of this body from 1963 to 1981, and editorials from the 
Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner about Senator Kuchel's role 
in establishment of Redwood National Park.

   [From the Office of U.S. Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, Senate Office 
                        Building, Oct. 2, 1968]

Statement by U.S. Senator Thomas H. Kuchel (R., Calif.), on the Signing 
 Into Law by President Johnson of a Bill To Create a Redwood National 
                                  Park

       (Senator Kuchel Was Co-Sponsor of the Senate Bill and Is 
     Senior Republican on the Senate Interior Committee)
       This is a most satisfying note on which to close my Senate 
     career. This new law is a capstone of my 16 years in 
     Washington. It involved California local and State 
     government, and the far-flung conservation groups, all with 
     their divergent views, and helping to bring them all 
     together. It meant close cooperation with the California 
     delegation in the House of Representatives, and long, 
     productive and happy hours with Chairman Henry Jackson and 
     other valued friends on the Senate Interior Committee. The 
     result, the Redwood National Park, represents one of 
     conservation's most dramatic victories--a long unyielding and 
     finally successful struggle against civilization's rampant 
     destruction of natural beauty. This is a nostalgic day. It is 
     a proud day, for the Congress, for California, and for the 
     people.

                                  ____
                                  

           [From the San Diego Union-Tribune, Nov. 29, 1994]

                  Kuchel, a Courageous Public Servant

                        (By Lionel Van Deerlin)

       It's a statistical fact that more than 10 million of 
     California's present population arrived since Tom Kuchel 
     served in the U.S. Senate. But this man, for whom there will 
     be a memorial service in Beverly Hills tomorrow, may have 
     done more than any other, living or dead, to make our state 
     habitable, our lives gentler.
       Kuchel (pronounced ``Kee-chul''), who died last week at age 
     84, was one the last of what sometimes seems a vanishing 
     breed: a truly moderate Republican. His Senate service 
     stretched from 1953 to 1968, an era remembered for truly 
     middle-road leadership and ideology in a state party that 
     also gave us Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, Robert Finch--and 
     their progenitor, the great Hiram Johnson.
       Tom Kuchel's was perhaps the strangest, and certainly the 
     saddest story of all. Born and reared in ultra-conservative 
     Orange County, he became a state legislator at 26 and U.S. 
     senator at 43, replacing Richard Nixon. But he was cut down 
     15 years later while still in the prime of a productive and 
     highly useful career.
       Kuchel didn't meet defeat like most public figures, beaten 
     by the other side. He was a victim of skullduggery within his 
     own ranks--made to walk the plank by Republican king-makers 
     whom Kuchel had refused to accompany to the radical right.
       Their real parting came in 1964. That's when an all-white 
     and mostly male California delegation to the Republican 
     National Convention helped nominate Barry Goldwater on a 
     historically extremist platform

[[Page 20599]]

     for president. Kuchel stayed out of the campaign, refusing to 
     endorse Goldwater. Two years later, when Ronald Reagan first 
     ran for governor, Kuchel conditioned his endorsement on a 
     demand that Reagan renounce support for the semi-secret John 
     Birch Society. Reagan refused, and so did Kuchel.
       Then still in his mid-50s, Kuchel seemed at his political 
     zenith. As assistant Republican leader of the Senate, he 
     helped enact Medicare, voting-rights legislation 
     enfranchising millions of Southern blacks and federal aid to 
     education. He supported the first Atomic Test Ban Treaty.
       These landmark accomplishments held scant appeal for party 
     faithfuls--the Henry Salvatoris, the Walter Knotts, the 
     Herbert Kalmbachs or others bent on shedding the GOP's 
     moderate image in California. But Kuchel was guilty of a 
     greater sin: He couldn't accept the almost pathological fear 
     of communism that seized so many in the post-McCarthy era.
       Along with other members of Congress, Kuchel was targeted 
     by intensive mail from members in the John Birch Society. 
     After striving to respond calmly to the society's scare 
     talk--which included a complaint that the government was 
     doing nothing to deter ``thousands of Chinese Communists who 
     are preparing to invade California from Mexico''--the senator 
     eventually responded in a widely publicized Senate speech.
       In it, he blasted ``the fright peddlers'' and a mind-set 
     that could prompt well-to-do, presumably educated Americans 
     to disseminate or even to countenance such nonsense. Kuchel 
     had checked the facts carefully with military authorities and 
     the FBI.
       ``We have no evidence of Communists gathering in Mexico, 
     Chinese or otherwise,'' he said. ``I rise today to speak of 
     another danger we confront . . . the danger of hate and 
     venom, of slander and abuse, generated by fear and heaped 
     indiscriminately upon many great Americans by a relative 
     handful of zealots.''
       Referring to a frequent use of the word treason in his 
     incoming mail, the Senator let loose.
       ``Treason!'' he shouted. ``I still cannot believe my eyes 
     when I stare at the ugliest word in the American lexicon 
     tossed about in a letter as casually as the `Dear Senator' or 
     `Dear Congressman' salutation and the `Respectfully yours' 
     with which one letter to me closed.''
       For the self-styled conservative involved in scare-
     mongering, Kuchel had this message: ``The big lie, the smear 
     and witch hunts are not the hallmarks of conservatism, but 
     are the trademarks of communism and fascism.''
       That did it. The senator's home-state enemies began 
     circling the wagons for the 1968 election, when he would be 
     seeking a fourth term. A right-wing state superintendent of 
     schools, the late Max Rafferty, was persuaded to enter the 
     Republican primary, heavily bankrolled.
       Kuchel through the years had built enough cross-party 
     support to be sure of holding the seat in the general 
     election. But the stealth campaign within his own party 
     worked. He lost Republican renomination by 69,000 of the 2.2 
     million votes cast.
       Rafferty, as it developed, played only the role of spoiler. 
     His nomination enabled Democrat Alan Cranston to win the 
     Senate seat in November of that year, when Nixon was being 
     elected president. It seems inconceivable that Cranston could 
     have beaten Kuchel.
       The GOP couldn't forgive him. Through a quarter-century in 
     retirement, Tom Kuchel continued to be treated as a political 
     pariah--never honored as an elder statesman, never invited to 
     party conventions. After his 1968 defeat, Kuchel joined the 
     law firm headed by Eugene Wyman, a former Democratic National 
     Committee member from California. Insofar as is known, he was 
     never consulted on legislative matters.
       Yet if we hear little today of John Birchers and their 
     glint-eyed imitators, Kuchel is the person chiefly to be 
     credited. He surely merits the praise on Brutus by an enemy, 
     Marc Antony:
       ``This was a man.''

                                  ____
                                  

               [From the Sacramento Bee, Sept. 12, 1968]

                           Kuchel, Public Win

       A tremendous double-barreled victory is registered in the 
     Redwood National Park bill which is expected to win easy 
     congressional approval before the end of the month.
       The first victor is the public interest. The Senate-House 
     conference measure provides almost every feature sought by 
     conservationists. The 58,000-acre park system in Northern 
     California is ample to preserve this natural heritage for all 
     the generations to come.
       The second victory is the personal one of United States 
     Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel who led the three-year fight for the 
     park. In this as in so many other battles the California 
     Republican was an exemplar of political statesmanship.
       In the redwoods campaign Kuchel fought not only for the 
     recreation and natural beauty heritage of this generation but 
     for those voiceless citizens who comprise all the generations 
     to come.
       In the course of it he tangled with representatives of the 
     lumber industry and other groups with lobbying muscle.
       The people, the general public for whom Kuchel fought, 
     could not bring to bear the same well-organized pressures. 
     Only in time will many of them come to appreciate the 
     momentousness of the issue. For had these priceless, 
     irreplaceable monarchs of the California forests been lost, 
     their like would not be seen again by man.
       Now they will continue to stand as a monument to Kuchel's 
     concern for tomorrow.
                                 ______
                                 


           [From the San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 12, 1968]

                             Kuchel's Park

       The long battle for establishment of a Redwoods National 
     Park is over, or nearly so. A Senate-House conference 
     committee has agreed on details; acceptance by both houses 
     seems certain.
       Much of the credit goes to California's Sen. Thomas H. 
     Kuchel whose tireless concentration on the project defied all 
     discouragement. Though other dedicated conservationists in 
     the Congress share the laurels, this park can fairly be 
     described as a splendid climax to Kuchel's outstanding 
     senatorial career.
       The park constitutes an elaborate compromise between the 
     claims of ardent conservationists and equally ardent timber 
     operators. A compromise can be defined as a settlement that 
     falls short of the ideal, but in this case the shortcomings 
     from both points of view must, in fair appraisal, be 
     considered minimal.
       Sen. Kuchel said, ``The bill preserves the finest remaining 
     specimens of the coast redwoods and protects the timber-based 
     economy by spreading the impact of land acquisition among 
     four companies and two counties. It makes some additional 
     federal redwood timberland available to the companies as 
     compensation.''
       An unexpected bonus is the inclusion in the park of a 33-
     mile strip of wild headlands and beaches.
       The park will contain 58,000 acres composed of new 
     purchases and existing state park lands. Management--perhaps 
     a form of partnership--remains to be worked out. We hope 
     state and federal authorities can approach this in the same 
     spirit of amity and concord that marked their relations when 
     the federal government established Yosemite National Park and 
     the state continued in ownership of the valley floor for 20 
     years.

                                  ____
                                  

            O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies

                           (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.
       The Orange County politician 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 
     Gov. Warren as state controller and as U.S. senator before he 
     was elected to those posts in his own right.
       Kuchel first was elected to public office at 26, winning an 
     Assembly seat from Orange County. By 52, he was the 
     Republican whip in the Senate--the second most powerful 
     Senate leadership post in his party. But for the four years 
     he held that office, he 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

[[Page 20600]]

     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.
       When Kuchel spoke at a graduation ceremony at UC Irvine in 
     1969, he talked about his ties to Orange County.
       ``This county has been my family's home since before the 
     Civil War,'' he said. ``My immigrant forebearers came here 
     seeking freedom. And the kind of guidelines they sought to 
     give their descendants would surely not be dissimilar from 
     those on which the University of California was founded.''
       Graduation from USC in 1932 and from USC Law School in 
     1935, Kuchel's debut in politics came in 1936 when he was 
     elected to the State Assembly to replace Edward L. Craig of 
     Brea. In that year of the Roosevelt landslide, he was the 
     only Republican candidate to be elected to partisan office in 
     Orange County, a fact he credited largely to the good name of 
     his father, who was publisher of the Anheim Gazette for 48 
     years.
       Kuchel defeated his Democratic opponent, James H. Heffran, 
     a sports writer for the Anaheim Bulletin, by a mere 1,159 
     votes.
       Kuchel's next move up the political ladder came in 1940 
     when he won a State Senate seat vacated by Democrat Harry 
     Westover.
       When he was 30, Kuchel was elected chairman of the 
     Republican State Central Committee, the youngest man ever to 
     hold that position.
       When World War II erupted, Kuchel joined the Naval Reserve 
     and was called to active duty.
       In 1944, when his Senate term ended, Kuchel was still in 
     the Navy. However his friends nominated him for a second term 
     in the Senate. Although his mother had to do his campaigning, 
     he was easily reelected and became senator in absentia. He 
     was known as Orange County's Phantom Senator until 1945, when 
     he was able to return to office.
       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 Kuchel'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 Kuchel, 
     on appointing him to the U.S. Senate.
       Warren was shortly to go to Washington himself, as chief 
     justice of the United States, 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 devastating 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 a surge of mail that he got from members 
     of the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. 
     Kennedy became President.
       ``I got thousands 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 consider 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 
     officer 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 had 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 Kuchel 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 the campaign day which had only one 
     appearance earlier in the day.''
       When the votes were in, on a 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.
       The senator went to New York to attend Kennedy's funeral. 
     There, he ran into an aging Warren, who only a year later was 
     to retire as chief justice. He told Kuchel, ``I just feel so 
     badly about your defeat, I can't talk about it.''
       As he left the Senate, Kuchel expressed pride in his 
     record, even though it appeared to have contributed to his 
     loss.
       ``Some of the votes I have cast I know have been very 
     costly to me politically,'' he told the Senate on Oct. 14, 
     1968, in his formal farewell. ``I think, however, if there is 
     one measure of satisfaction in the life of a legislator, it 
     comes at the time he tallies the votes which he believed in 
     his own mind were right, just and appropriate, even if he 
     knew that the balance of public opinion was against him, and, 
     sometimes, violently against him. . . .

[[Page 20601]]

       ``I think it is not only permissible but, indeed, vital 
     that the Senate of the United States lead public opinion 
     instead of following it. That is the difficult path but the 
     only one to tread if our republic is to remain.''
       Shortly afterward, Kuchel joined the law firm headed by 
     Eugene Wyman, a former Democratic National Committee member 
     from California. After several years of representing the firm 
     in Washington, he returned home to California and practiced 
     law with the firm in Los Angeles until his retirement as a 
     partner in 1981, although he continued to be active.

     

                          ____________________