Quixote from Wisconsin

It was a humid midsummer night in Washington. The city slept as best it could. On Capitol Hill, the great dome glowed above an empty plaza. But in its nearly empty chamber, the U.S. Senate was still in session--of a sort. Rhode Island's Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell, acting as presiding officer, nodded in the chair; Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey and Republican Whip Tom Kuchel slumped at their desks, staring trancelike at nothing. And from his back-row desk, Wisconsin's Democratic Senator William Proxmire talked and talked and talked, pausing only to sip butterscotch-flavored Metrecal.

Bill Proxmire talked all night long and until lunchtime the next day, and by the time he had finished he had spoken for approximately 19 hours--no Senate record.* but a respectable show, even in a venerable cave of the winds. What Democrat Proxmire had to say--that he opposed Kennedy's nomination of Lawrence J. O'Connor Jr.. a former oil company executive, as a member of the Federal Power Commission--could have been stated explicitly in two or three hours by the most verbose of Senators, though perhaps it would have received less attention. Proxmire objected to the appointment of a professional oilman to the FPC. ("It would be like asking Mickey Mantle to umpire Yankee games.") The Senate indulgently let him have his say, and even helped him out in moments of distress. When Proxmire needed to go to the bathroom or to the Democratic cloak room for a quick lunch of cottage cheese, his colleagues held the floor for him, swapping jokes to pass the time. In turn, Bill Proxmire graciously yielded the floor from time to time, to permit snippets of debate on urgent legislation. In the end. the Senate confirmed O'Connor's nomination by a vote of 83-12--but not before Bill Proxmire had established himself more firmly as a real Senate character.

The Compulsion. The individualism of William Proxmire has become more and more apparent in the three years since he took over the seat once held by the late Joe McCarthy. At first Proxmire tried valiantly to be a model freshman, voting right and listening to his seniors speak. But the compulsion to talk soon overcame him. and Proxmire wound up his first semester with a two-hour preamble to a filibuster that quickly killed a bill which would have diverted water from Lake Michigan into Chicago's sewage disposal system. Later, he spoke rudely about the iron rule of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, and advocated new appropriations that would have added an estimated $23 billion annually to the federal budget. Now, in the current session, Proxmire has inexplicably become an economic conservative. Most of his efforts have been to trim back appropriations. "He's a watchdog of the Treasury now." marvels one Wisconsin colleague. Counters Proxmire: "I've felt this way for a long time."

Bill Proxmire does nothing to discourage the picture of himself as the Senate's newest oddity--or oddest newity. A boyish, wiry man of 45, with twittering eyebrows and a well-modulated speaking voice, he rises every morning at 6, does 215 pushups, and stands on his head (to circulate the blood in the brain), then jogs two miles down Connecticut Avenue be fore catching a bus to Capitol Hill.

The Climate. Proxmire springs from a conservative Lake Forest, Ill.. Republican family, went to Yale and to Harvard business school ("I didn't raise my boy to be a Democrat," Father Theodore Proxmire once lamented. "Harvard's where it happened."). After graduation. Bill worked briefly for J. P. Morgan & Co., married a great-grandniece of John D. Rockefeller (they were subsequently divorced, and Proxmire married the pretty financial secretary of the Wisconsin Democratic Party). He served five years in the Army, and moved to Wisconsin where the climate suited his liberal views. After three tries at the Governor's mansion, he won election to the Senate in 1957. Says he: "I've been independent regularly, and the great advantage in being in politics in Wisconsin is that you can do that--you can follow the dictates of your own understanding.''

Yes. indeed.

*The record: 23 hours, held by South Carolina's Strom Thurmond while filibustering against the 1957 civil rights bill.

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