Proxmire was more than a maverick;He was a unique Wisconsin character

The stories about Bill Proxmire, who died this week at age 90, all say he was a maverick, and he was.

But more than that, he was a character. He was quirky. He was eccentric.

On some things, he was a fanatic. At times, there was even a touch of the crackpot.

But the people of Wisconsin liked his style.

He was known nationally for his Golden Fleece Awards to spotlight and ridicule what he saw as wasteful spending, but he was almost as well-known for his hair transplant and his fanatic exercise and diet regimens.

In Wisconsin, people might have thought he was a little unusual. But they knew he worked hard, never missed a vote, and raised some hell in Washington on their behalf. And they saw a lot of him.

If you lived in Wisconsin between 1955 and 1985 and you didn't shake Bill Proxmire's hand at least once, you must have been homebound.

He was everywhere there was a crowd -- sporting events, fairs, festivals, parades, dinners, shopping malls -- shaking hands at a breakneck clip. As soon as he had shaken most hands or the crowd thinned, he was off to the next stop.

It wasn't quality time with your Senator. He was pumping hands as fast as he could, and there was no time for chitchat.

One day when he was shaking hands outside of Camp Randall stadium before a Badger football game, I tried an experiment. "I'm Bill Proxmire, your hired hand in Washington," he said, giving my hand a quick shake.

I hung on, got eye contact, and said, "Senator, I'd like to talk to you about the nuclear weapons freeze."

"Call me at the office," he said, looking over my shoulder, loosening my grip and reaching out for the next person. And that was that.

I didn't know Prox, but I don't think he'd mind if I call him that. I guess I covered him a couple of times in the 1970s as a reporter, but never spent any time with him. By the time I started serious interviewing for my biography of Gaylord Nelson, Proxmire was already slipping. It was one of the obvious interviews -- he and Nelson served together for 18 years -- but it did not happen and it's one I regret missing out on.

That doesn't mean I didn't accumulate any Proxmire stories, of course. They are legion, and you can't talk about Wisconsin politics in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s without hearing about Prox -- and most had something to do with his hand-shaking.

While he was shaking hands, sometimes with his fingers bandaged to cover or prevent blisters, he was also clicking a counter in his pocket to keep the day's tally.

There are tales of Prox eating a can of sardines for dinner alone in his motel room after a day of pressing the flesh; shaking hands so energetically at State Fair that he failed to recognize Nelson until the second time he came through the line; walking through the state Democratic convention, waving to everyone on the floor, and heading out the back door for another event to shake more hands; walking down a line of cars stuck in a snowstorm to shake hands with the drivers. If they're not all true, they're all plausible.

Former staffers tell of Proxmire batting out his own press releases on a typewriter in the Senate office. And they recall his insistence on prompt attention to constituent letters, and how Prox might stop at a staffer's desk and ask to see the oldest unanswered letter on the desk.

When Proxmire was elected to the Senate after Joe McCarthy's death in 1957, it was electrifying for the Democrats. When he was reelected the next year and Nelson was elected governor, Wisconsin was a two-party state for the first time in decades.

A couple of excerpts from the Nelson bio:

Three-time Loser Wins

Walter Kohler, his opponent, had beaten Proxmire for governor in 1952 and 1954,[and Vernon Thomson had beaten him in 1956] but this time the Democrats were energized and unified while Republicans were divided and dispirited. When the GOP tagged him “a three-time loser,” Proxmire responded on radio that he would take the votes of everyone who had ever lost or failed “in business, love, sports, or politics” and give the Republicans the votes of everyone who had always succeeded and won everything. Proxmire won a fifty-six per cent of the vote to become the first Democratic Senator from Wisconsin in nearly twenty years, and only the third in the Twentieth Century. Proxmire promptly announced he would seek a full term in 1958...

Although electrifying, the Proxmire victory was not a clear signal that Democrats were now competitive in statewide races. Proxmire, in four frenetic campaigns in six years, had raised face-to-face campaigning to a new level – one that has yet to be matched in Wisconsin politics. Seemingly inexhaustible, Proxmire would travel the state alone, often shaking thousands of hands in a day. Anywhere there was a crowd – a convention, sporting event, fish fry, parade, plant gate, rally or fair – Proxmire was there, pumping hands, exiting as soon as he had met everyone and heading for the next stop. During his four campaigns, most voters had probably seen Proxmire or had shaken his hand. While Democrats celebrated his victory, they wondered whether it was a personal victory or a sign their party had come of age. The 1958 campaign would be the next test.

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Gaylord and Prox

Except for their politics, and the fact that both of their fathers were physicians, Nelson and Proxmire were very different people. Proxmire, who grew up in the wealthy suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, earned degrees from Yale and Harvard, married a Rockefeller, and decided he wanted a political career – as a Democrat. He moved to Madison in 1949 for a short-lived stint as a Capital Times reporter, won an Assembly seat in 1950, and started running statewide two years later. He had chosen Wisconsin as a state that might be open to an outsider, and the fledgling Democratic Organizing Committee was open to all comers. There were few places where one could be the party’s nominee for governor three years after moving into the state. Proxmire was intense, serious, focused, driven, named “most energetic and biggest grind” in prep school. When he was determined to improve his golf game, he once played ninety holes in a day. Proxmire was a health fanatic whose daily regimen included enormous amounts of exercise and a Spartan, non-alcoholic diet.

Nelson, the small town boy who did the bare minimum in school, would rather “bat the breeze” than make a formal speech. He was passionate about politics and ambitious in his career, but no one had ever accused him of being a grind. He said more than once that if he had to campaign like Proxmire did, spending every available minute shaking someone’s hand, he would not run. Nelson was softer around the edges – friendlier, more approachable, more charming, more likely to be socializing than studying, and far more likely than Proxmire to eat heartily and have a drink in his hand. An athlete as a young man, he stayed in shape, using the barbells and punching bag in the Senate gym. He was strong enough to rip a three-inch thick telephone book in half, and was a master of one-armed pushups. “He puts matchsticks between his knuckles, then bends down and picks them out with his teeth,” a gym employee said. But physical fitness was not his religion, as it seemed to be Proxmire’s.

At a party at the Nelsons’, Proxmire said he did two hundred pushups every morning, and, when Nelson challenged his claim, dropped to the floor to prove it. “Oh, I thought you meant one-armed pushups,” Nelson said after watching Proxmire do a few. “Anybody can do them with two arms.” Nelson demonstrated what he meant and Proxmire, who had never tried the technique before, could not do a single one, much to his chagrin and the amusement of onlookers. His wife said Proxmire unsuccessfully tried one-armed pushups a number of times at home before finally giving up.

Despite the contrasts in their approach to life and politics, Nelson and Proxmire were friends, campaigned for one another, and managed a cooperative and peaceful coexistence in the Senate. But they were never close; their differences were too great.

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The Wisconsin Historical Society has posted an "in memoriam" page with information and photos from Proxmire's career.

Washington Post photo gallery.