For Proxmire, Ratification Ends His ‘Heroic . . . Lonely Fight’

“I serve notice today,” Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) said in the Senate chamber on Jan. 11, 1967, “that from now on, I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act.”

In the 19 years that followed, Proxmire gave more than 3,000 speeches on the need to ratify the Genocide Convention, an international treaty declaring it a crime to try to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

True to his word, he brought the subject up every single day that Senate rules allowed speeches, providing example after tragic example of how genocide has been allowed to occur through history and in modern-day society.

When the Senate finally voted Wednesday in favor of ratification, it was an especially personal victory for Proxmire. Indeed, Proxmire’s political reputation has been built on his intense commitment to the causes that he champions--making him either the Senate’s chief crusader or a publicity-grabbing gadfly, depending on the observer’s point of view.

Nothing but Praise

Although his fellow senators have often been irritated by his crusades, they had nothing but praise for him Wednesday as the 38-year-old treaty finally came to a Senate vote.

“He has run the distance on this Genocide Convention for all of us,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said shortly before the vote. From the Republican side of the chamber, Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (Minn.) echoed the tribute, lauding Proxmire for “a heroic fight, often a lonely fight.”

For his part, Proxmire, now 70, said he was “absolutely elated.”

Proxmire said he made the pledge to speak daily about the treaty, because “I just felt that by hammering away, day after day, I could keep the Senate from forgetting it.” But he acknowledged: “I thought we could get it in a year or two.”

As the years stretched out, he said, “every speech was different. . . . This is the kind of an issue where there are all sorts of examples.”

Less Power Role

He wielded his greatest legislative influence during his six-year stint as Banking Committee chairman in a Democratic-controlled Senate. When the 1980 election put the Senate in Republican hands, he was relegated to a much less powerful role.

Nonetheless, Proxmire, a former newspaper reporter, has remained adept at getting attention, most notably through his monthly tongue-in-cheek “Golden Fleece” awards for the “biggest, most ridiculous or most ironic waste of the taxpayers’ money.”

He often turns his barbs on his fellow senators and regularly has opposed increases in Senate pay and perquisites.

And they have often fired back. Having lost his fight against building the Hart Senate Office Building several years ago, Proxmire proposed eliminating funds for a gym in the building--only to have the Senate retaliate by eliminating, as well, the gym in an older office building where Proxmire regularly showered after his five-mile jog to work each day.

Although the Senate has finally approved ratification of the treaty, it apparently has not heard the last of Proxmire’s daily speeches. “I’m going to look around for something else,” he said wryly.