Mansfield Steps Down

He is easily the Senate's coolest elder statesman. Genial, pipe-smoking Democrat Mike Mansfield, Montana Senator since 1953 and his party's majority leader since 1961, can be sharp-tongued when he needs to be. But in 15 years of Senate floor leadership -- the longest tenure of any floor leader in the history of the upper chamber -- he is legendary for almost never having lost his temper. Other majority leaders, like Mansfield's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, bullied, threatened and arm-twist ed recalcitrant colleagues. The Montanan soothed, persuaded with calm reason and took the quiet way.

He changed the nature of the Senate. He virtually ended the parliamentary stranglehold of the filibuster, regularly forbidding Senators to engage in all-night attempts to break them. When a Democratic committee chairman wanted to steer a bill through floor debate, Mansfield graciously surrendered his front-row desk to the chairman. He consistently urged younger Senators to take the lead in proposing challenging new legislation.

Final Service. Last week Mansfield, 72, announced that he will not seek reelection this year. His voice quavering, he said that his "final public service" would be to retire and let the young leadership he fostered begin to work its own changes on the Senate. With his wife of 43 years, Maureen, he may now return to the University of Montana to teach Far Eastern history -- the very job he left to enter politics in 1943.

Pennsylvania Senator Hugh Scott, the minority leader who, along with six other Senators, is also retiring this year, said in his reply: "I have never known a finer man." Virtually all of the Senate would agree.

Mansfield is proudest of his support for the 18-year-old's right to vote, his initiation of the Senate Watergate Committee and his role in the formation of a select committee to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency. But he will be best remembered for the loose-reined openness he brought to the conduct of Senate business, and for his early, unrelenting opposition to the Viet Nam War.

The battle over who would succeed Mansfield was already joined last week. The Democratic whip, West Virginian Robert C. Byrd, has expressed interest in the leadership post, and Maine's Edmund Muskie has announced that he will seek it. Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey might also land the job next January, should something more important down Pennsylvania Avenue not come his way. Ironically, Humphrey was the man whom the modest Mansfield had proposed for the post when it became vacant in 1961.

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