CAMELOT, BERLIN, BAY OF PIGS

Spent another morning, eyes increasingly strained, in front of a microfilm reader checking every story The Providence Journal and (now-defunct) Evening Bulletin published about Pell in 1961, his first year in the Senate. Got through 1960 last week and I will eventually get through the entire record, though it will be many hours until that is done. No computer data bases or Google for this... This is research the old-fashioned way, a skill I learned in the early 1970s when I took my last semester of senior year in high school off to intern with a Boston professor who assigned me projects in Harvard Med School's Countway Library. But I digress....
This is a fascinating walk back into time, to a pivotal period in American history -- when JFK and Jackie, good friends of Claiborne and wife Nuala Pell, were creating Camelot. 1961 was the year of the Berlin Crisis, the establishment of the Peace Corps, the Bay of Pigs, and much more. Pell was in the thick of it, from the start. His long experience in the Foreign Service gave him an immediate stature.
And he took care of his constituents, too -- hiring a large staff, returning often to Rhode Island, and making himself available to people and the press.
An astute piece the projo published on Nov. 13, as Pell's first year in Washington drew to a close, was headlined: "The Pell Enigma." That line could, in many respects, serve as a tag for much of his life.
In winning the 1960 primary election on his first-ever try for office -- unendorsed against two entrenched and popular members of the Rhode Island Democratic machine -- and then clobbering his GOP opponent, a WW2 war hero, in the 1960 general election -- Pell defied all expectations (even his own).
"Mr. Pell did the things the Rhode Island political handbook said a candidate could not do and win," projo staffer Paul A. Kelly wrote in that long-ago 'enigma' piece. "Unless he wants to run for president some time, Mr. Pell has no place else to go politically but where he is already. All he has to do is run again for the Senate every six years and keep on winning. He is a young man, and his chances for keeping up his performance at the polls, on the basis of his performance at the last election, seem good for a long time to come."
How prophetic those words were! When he finally retired, after six terms, in January 1997, Pell has served 36 years -- longest of any senator ever from Rhode Island. Indeed, as of last month, according to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, Pell was the 16th longest serving senator of all senators since the founding of the republic, ranking behind only such figures as his friends Tedd Kennedy and Joe Biden, two of the people who eulogized him this January at his funeral. I covered that service for the projo.