WASHINGTON — Just outside the Senate chamber is a gilded parlor where Hillary Rodham Clinton has passed many times during her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. That dream dashed, she’ll be back.
And this time, she might want to look up: Adorning the walls of the Reception Room are portraits of seven former senators honored by their colleagues for distinguishing themselves and the Senate with sweeping changes to public policy.
Six of the seven scored their legislative achievements despite unfulfilled presidential hopes. And most, like Clinton, were controversial figures in their day, accused of relentless partisanship who might not have been chosen for the honor by their contemporaries.
Role models, perhaps, for the junior senator from New York who never expected to finish her second six-year term and must now chart her own course in the Senate.
Note to Clinton: The Senate’s “Hall of Fame” is not full.
Three spaces for medallion portraits remain empty.
Those honored were chosen for, among other things, their “acts of statesmanship transcending party and state lines,” according to guidelines set forth by the first committee to choose honorees, chaired by Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
They are: Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who ran for president in 1836; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who ran in 1824; and Henry Clay of Kentucky, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, Robert Taft of Ohio and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who each ran for president multiple times.
The seventh senator never ran for president, “but only because he was ineligible,” said Associate Senate Historian Don Ritchie.
Sen. Robert F. Wagner of New York was born in Germany and barred by the Constitution.
According to one who knows, senators who don’t make it to the White House generally thrive when they decide that public service, not necessarily through the presidency, is their goal.
“I think an awful lot of it is your view about the Senate,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said during an interview in the richly adorned chamber a few days before he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Recalling his own failed presidential run in 1980 and the years it took for him to push through sweeping anti-discrimination laws, Kennedy said the post-presidential path for senators is in large part a matter of temperament.
“If it’s something you relish and your view of it is a high honor, (then) I think you look with enthusiasm,” he said.
The effort to honor distinguished senators in this way began a half-century ago in the hands of another Kennedy, one who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “Profiles in Courage,” about senators who had defied public opinion to do what they thought was right.
Then 38, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts chaired a five-member panel in 1957 charged with picking the first “famous five.” After spending two years gathering and weighing opinions of 160 scholars, the panel had narrowed the list from more than 1,000 //former senators down to 65. On March 12, 1959, the Kennedy Committee unveiled the portraits.
They began with Webster, Calhoun and Clay, the Great Triumvirate, whose legislative compromises held the nation together before the Civil War.
Like Clinton, those three were controversial figures in their day. She might find their rhetoric — about each other — amusing if not familiar.
Calhoun called Clay “a creator of wicked schemes,” according to an account of Kennedy’s remarks that day.
Clay on Calhoun: “Ambitious, selfishly partisan” with “too much genius and too little common sense.” John Quincy Adams, meanwhile, acknowledged Webster’s “gigantic intellect” but disparaged his “ravenous ambition,” Kennedy said.
His committee also chose La Follette, a progressive Republican who opposed American involvement in World War I and came close to being expelled by his colleagues for that stance. Rounding out the first five was Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former president and a leading voice of conservatism who opposed the New Deal and in 1947 helped write the Taft-Hartley Act controlling labor unions and banning closed shops.
In 2000, the Senate added Vandenberg and Wagner to the gallery.
Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the start of the Cold War, forged bipartisan backing for the Marshall Plan and NATO. When present-day senators refrain from criticizing a president while he is overseas, they often invoke Vandenberg’s words from 1948: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” Wagner was honored for his role in a long list of Depression era social legislation, particularly the Wagner Labor Act that guaranteed labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively.
