Controlling Destiny
MARCH 14, 2008 TAGS:
By Judy Bachrach
Howard Metzenbaum wasn’t perfect – or at least not perfectly consistent. Unabashedly liberal, the cantankerous former senator from Ohio spent much of his long Senate career fighting passionately for the working man. It was Metzenbaum, for example, a fiery former union lobbyist and crusading attorney, who battled hardest for a law requiring a 60-day notice before plant closings. At the same time, as his Republican opponents wryly observed, the multimillionaire senator owned a chain of newspapers that were unabashedly non-union.
In a similar vein, in his 18 years as a senator, Metzenbaum made it his business to try to close every loophole favoring the wealthy. As an entrepreneur in the years before he went to Washington, D.C., however, he was proud of his ability to take advantage of every loophole at his disposal. One impressive year, as his tax returns showed, he managed, due to business losses, to pay no taxes. That, however, was a rare occasion. Mostly he never lost.
“I was born knowing how to make money,” he famously declared, and this was no exaggeration. Starting in the Fifties, that is exactly what he set out to do. Along with his longtime friend Ted Bonda, Metzenbaum turned his first major business enterprise, a well-lighted 24-hour parking lot at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, into APCOA, the world’s largest parking lot company. He made $6 million when it was sold to ITT, acquired 17 Avis rental franchises (the largest under single ownership) and never looked back.
But after two decades, money no longer interested him, except as a means to acquire a far more dazzling career, one exactly suited to the size of both his ego and his wallet: politics on a major scale. In vain did his Democratic primary opponent of 1970, the former astronaut John Glenn, accuse Metzenbaum of buying his Senate bid with massive purchases of airtime; Metzenbaum was candid about his methods. Yes, he said, it sure was unfair of him to buy all that TV advertising with his substantial resources.
On the other hand, Metzenbaum added, Glenn was in no position to complain, having benefited from a “$3.5 billion-dollar TV spectacular when he orbited the Earth.” Metzenbaum won that primary, but lost the election to the Republican Robert Taft Jr. Three years later, Metzenbaum was appointed by Ohio’s Democratic governor to fill a vacant Senate seat.
His battles with Glenn, however, were just beginning. In 1974, during yet another primary battle, he pilloried the national hero for never having held a job in the private sector – a fatal miscalculation. The attack was interpreted as suggesting that Glenn, who had flown 149 missions during World War II and Korea and was the holder of the Air Medal with 18 Clusters for his courageous service, had never had an actual job.
In his furious and legendary response, which now is known as the “Gold Star Mothers” speech, Glenn told Metzenbaum that his next campaign stop should be a veterans' hospital. “Look those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn't hold a job,” he snapped. “You go with me to any Gold Star mother, and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job!" Glenn won not only the primary but also the general election, and the two men did not speak for years.
(Even when they resumed civility, Glenn remained cautious: “I’ve worked with Howard Metzenbaum, and I’ve worked against Howard Metzenbaum,” he mused over a decade ago. “And it’s a whole lot more pleasant to work with him.”)
Two years after that 1974 debacle, Metzenbaum won Ohio’s other Senate seat and immediately put his position to interesting use. Filibusters; appeals for roll call votes on hundreds of amendments in order to block action on legislation of which he disapproved; holding up scores of judicial appointments as a means to get what he wanted; attacks on big oil companies and savings and loans – all these became his specialties. He was relentless in his advocacy of consumer protections (such as nutritional labeling listing fat, salt and cholesterol content in processed foods) and later, a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. After he championed the Brady Act, seeking a waiting period for handgun purchases, the NRA loathed him. In such incendiary feelings, however, the gun rights organization was not alone.
Among his angry colleagues Metzenbaum was known “Senator No” and “Headline Howard,” although these epithets were occasionally tempered by judicious reflection. “The Senate needs someone like Howard Metzenbaum,” his former Republican colleague Howard Baker of Tennessee used to say. “But only one.”
The nature of Metzenbaum’s complicated ambivalence, his crusading public face and his more difficult private one, can all be traced to his Cleveland childhood, which could serve as a primer in poverty and how to escape it. His father was a bankrupt businessman who bought and sold second-hand goods; his mother earned $13 a week in a local department store. At 10, young Howard was hauling groceries in a red wagon. At Ohio State, he managed to pay for his undergraduate and law school education through small jobs: selling chrysanthemums outside the stadium during Buckeye football games, playing trombone, selling magazines. Summers, he sold razor blades and shaving cream.
All this had a lasting effect. Put simply: Metzenbaum never forgot a defeat and never succumbed to despair. In 1943, he married Shirley Turoff, with whom he built an affectionate and stable 61-year relationship that produced four daughters. When he discovered in the 1940s that large law firms weren’t anxious to hire young Jewish lawyers, Metzenbaum and a partner started a storefront tax preparation business (the first of a string of 23) that charged just $1 a client. Then he launched an eight-year career in the Ohio Legislature where, in time, he thought, he was destined to become the state Senate majority leader.
Local newspapers, however, were likely correct in observing that ant-Semitism and his liberal leanings both played a large part in defeating that ambition. Metzenbaum lost out when five of his colleagues changed their votes. Years later he would recall with considerable satisfaction that the five wielders of his defeat were themselves subsequently voted out of office, and that “I had something to do with it.”
In other words, the rest of his life was spent controlling destiny – as well as those who had once sought to control him. He cowed two Cleveland country clubs into accepting minority members. In his U.S. Senate career he was obdurate in his opposition to “Christmas tree bills”: proposed legislation that provided expensive favors to corporations and states (in 1982 the Washington Post claimed that the price of the pork barrel legislation Metzenbaum blocked that year alone came to at least $10 billion). Six years later, he sponsored the Abandoned Infants Assistance Act, which gave $37 million to foster homes for the children of drug addicts.
In 1986, he was instrumental in pushing through a law that abolished mandatory retirement at age 70. One could argue that as Metzenbaum was 68 when he adopted this cause, he likely felt strongly about the measure. As things turned out, it would be a full nine years before the senator himself decided it was time to step down from public office – and even then he simply switched careers, choosing to head the Consumer Federation of America. So yes, very likely Metzenbaum identified with those he championed.
But that was always the case.
Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writes frequently for Obit.
Howard Metzenbaum wasn’t perfect – or at least not perfectly consistent. Unabashedly liberal, the cantankerous former senator from Ohio spent much of his long Senate career fighting passionately for the working man. It was Metzenbaum, for example, a fiery former union lobbyist and crusading attorney, who battled hardest for a law requiring a 60-day notice before plant closings. At the same time, as his Republican opponents wryly observed, the multimillionaire senator owned a chain of newspapers that were unabashedly non-union.
In a similar vein, in his 18 years as a senator, Metzenbaum made it his business to try to close every loophole favoring the wealthy. As an entrepreneur in the years before he went to Washington, D.C., however, he was proud of his ability to take advantage of every loophole at his disposal. One impressive year, as his tax returns showed, he managed, due to business losses, to pay no taxes. That, however, was a rare occasion. Mostly he never lost.
“I was born knowing how to make money,” he famously declared, and this was no exaggeration. Starting in the Fifties, that is exactly what he set out to do. Along with his longtime friend Ted Bonda, Metzenbaum turned his first major business enterprise, a well-lighted 24-hour parking lot at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, into APCOA, the world’s largest parking lot company. He made $6 million when it was sold to ITT, acquired 17 Avis rental franchises (the largest under single ownership) and never looked back.
But after two decades, money no longer interested him, except as a means to acquire a far more dazzling career, one exactly suited to the size of both his ego and his wallet: politics on a major scale. In vain did his Democratic primary opponent of 1970, the former astronaut John Glenn, accuse Metzenbaum of buying his Senate bid with massive purchases of airtime; Metzenbaum was candid about his methods. Yes, he said, it sure was unfair of him to buy all that TV advertising with his substantial resources.
On the other hand, Metzenbaum added, Glenn was in no position to complain, having benefited from a “$3.5 billion-dollar TV spectacular when he orbited the Earth.” Metzenbaum won that primary, but lost the election to the Republican Robert Taft Jr. Three years later, Metzenbaum was appointed by Ohio’s Democratic governor to fill a vacant Senate seat.His battles with Glenn, however, were just beginning. In 1974, during yet another primary battle, he pilloried the national hero for never having held a job in the private sector – a fatal miscalculation. The attack was interpreted as suggesting that Glenn, who had flown 149 missions during World War II and Korea and was the holder of the Air Medal with 18 Clusters for his courageous service, had never had an actual job.
In his furious and legendary response, which now is known as the “Gold Star Mothers” speech, Glenn told Metzenbaum that his next campaign stop should be a veterans' hospital. “Look those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn't hold a job,” he snapped. “You go with me to any Gold Star mother, and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job!" Glenn won not only the primary but also the general election, and the two men did not speak for years.
(Even when they resumed civility, Glenn remained cautious: “I’ve worked with Howard Metzenbaum, and I’ve worked against Howard Metzenbaum,” he mused over a decade ago. “And it’s a whole lot more pleasant to work with him.”)
Two years after that 1974 debacle, Metzenbaum won Ohio’s other Senate seat and immediately put his position to interesting use. Filibusters; appeals for roll call votes on hundreds of amendments in order to block action on legislation of which he disapproved; holding up scores of judicial appointments as a means to get what he wanted; attacks on big oil companies and savings and loans – all these became his specialties. He was relentless in his advocacy of consumer protections (such as nutritional labeling listing fat, salt and cholesterol content in processed foods) and later, a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. After he championed the Brady Act, seeking a waiting period for handgun purchases, the NRA loathed him. In such incendiary feelings, however, the gun rights organization was not alone.
Among his angry colleagues Metzenbaum was known “Senator No” and “Headline Howard,” although these epithets were occasionally tempered by judicious reflection. “The Senate needs someone like Howard Metzenbaum,” his former Republican colleague Howard Baker of Tennessee used to say. “But only one.”
The nature of Metzenbaum’s complicated ambivalence, his crusading public face and his more difficult private one, can all be traced to his Cleveland childhood, which could serve as a primer in poverty and how to escape it. His father was a bankrupt businessman who bought and sold second-hand goods; his mother earned $13 a week in a local department store. At 10, young Howard was hauling groceries in a red wagon. At Ohio State, he managed to pay for his undergraduate and law school education through small jobs: selling chrysanthemums outside the stadium during Buckeye football games, playing trombone, selling magazines. Summers, he sold razor blades and shaving cream.
All this had a lasting effect. Put simply: Metzenbaum never forgot a defeat and never succumbed to despair. In 1943, he married Shirley Turoff, with whom he built an affectionate and stable 61-year relationship that produced four daughters. When he discovered in the 1940s that large law firms weren’t anxious to hire young Jewish lawyers, Metzenbaum and a partner started a storefront tax preparation business (the first of a string of 23) that charged just $1 a client. Then he launched an eight-year career in the Ohio Legislature where, in time, he thought, he was destined to become the state Senate majority leader.
Local newspapers, however, were likely correct in observing that ant-Semitism and his liberal leanings both played a large part in defeating that ambition. Metzenbaum lost out when five of his colleagues changed their votes. Years later he would recall with considerable satisfaction that the five wielders of his defeat were themselves subsequently voted out of office, and that “I had something to do with it.”
In other words, the rest of his life was spent controlling destiny – as well as those who had once sought to control him. He cowed two Cleveland country clubs into accepting minority members. In his U.S. Senate career he was obdurate in his opposition to “Christmas tree bills”: proposed legislation that provided expensive favors to corporations and states (in 1982 the Washington Post claimed that the price of the pork barrel legislation Metzenbaum blocked that year alone came to at least $10 billion). Six years later, he sponsored the Abandoned Infants Assistance Act, which gave $37 million to foster homes for the children of drug addicts.
In 1986, he was instrumental in pushing through a law that abolished mandatory retirement at age 70. One could argue that as Metzenbaum was 68 when he adopted this cause, he likely felt strongly about the measure. As things turned out, it would be a full nine years before the senator himself decided it was time to step down from public office – and even then he simply switched careers, choosing to head the Consumer Federation of America. So yes, very likely Metzenbaum identified with those he championed.
But that was always the case.
Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writes frequently for Obit.
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