Fighting the Unbeatable Foe

Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, the Washington Years

Tom Diemer

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011009

Howard Metzenbaum's Senate years

"Profile in Courage is only one of the profiles drawn in this striking book. It is also a profile in passion for rectitude and a profile in persistence in battling for the average American, often against great odds." —Daniel Schorr, Senior News Analyst, National Public Radio

"Tom Diemer does a masterful job of lifting the curtain on how the senator known as 'the abominable No man' became the liberal conscience of the U.S. Senate. The fights are as relevant today as they were in the '70s, '80s, or '90s—gun control, abortion rights, judicial nomination—and the deals, some unsavory, some noble, reflect the values of a man looking out for the little guy and unafraid of offending the powerful." —Eleanor Clift, contributing editor, Newsweek

"In my experience, the Senate rewards persistence, hard work, patience, and downright cussedness. Howard Metzenbaum had them all."
—Mike DeWine, U.S. Senator from Ohio, 1995–2007

Howard Metzenbaum, a poor Jewish kid from the inner city of Cleveland who fought his way to wealth and the United States Senate, became one of Ohio's most dominant politicians in the second half of the twentieth century. He represented his state for nineteen years on Capitol Hill, despite being to the political left of most of his heartland constituents. Fighting the Unbeatable Foe tells his story—from his stunning upset of John Glenn to his years as a powerful and outspoken member of the U.S. Senate.

Metzenbaum joined the Senate in 1974 and, despite never holding an official party leadership post or chairing a committee, fought his way to the top. He succeeded through sheer force of will and with a brilliant mind and a steely determination that drove him to take extreme measures to get his way. Though known to his colleagues as "Senator No" because of his willingness to tie up the Senate in parliamentary knots for hours on end to block legislation he didn't like, hallmarks of conservative politicians, Metzenbaum was among the Senate's most unabashedly liberal members.

Fighting the Unbeatable Foe is the first biography of Metzenbaum, a fascinating individual who, against the odds, rose from humble beginnings to become a multimillionaire businessman and one of the most effective and powerful senators in the land. By conducting interviews with Metzenbaum's friends, foes, political scientists, and journalists and consulting primary-source materials, Tom Diemer provides new details about Metzenbaum's business deals, his successes on Capitol Hill, and also his embarrassing failures and miscalculations. Metzenbaum remains among the most interesting and paradoxical figures in the history of Ohio politics. His story will be enjoyed by anyone interested in Ohio history and politics.

CHAPTER 1

Starting Up in Politics

“Jimmy made the name.”
Irwyn Metzenbaum, 1995

No one thought of James “Jimmy” Metzenbaum as a role model. He was an original—and not one easily copied. Other members of the Metzenbaum tribe made way for the diminutive attorney. He was by turns brilliant, foppish, righteous, egotistical, detached, and yet devoted. The love of his life—the only person that made him truly happy—was his wife Bessie.

At times mistakenly referred to as Howard Metzenbaum’s “Uncle Jimmy,” he was in fact first cousin to Metzenbaum’s father, Charles. One of Jimmy Metzenbaum’s eight siblings, Myron Metzenbaum, was a well-known plastic surgeon who invented the Metzenbaum scissors, a surgical device often mentioned on the television program M*A*S*H.

Buddy Rand, who in later years would cross paths—and then swords—with Howard Metzenbaum, worked in Jimmy Metzenbaum’s law office for three years in the late 1930s. Rand remembers him as a workaholic and a tyrant who kept him as late as eleven PM and then demanded that he accompany him in an old Pierce-Arrow motor car to Lake View Cemetery to drop by his widow’s mausoleum. By Rand’s account, Jimmy was a publicity hound who pressured reporters to recognize him as a self-effacing citizen-lawmaker. Privately, he betrayed a difficult, eccentric personality that bedeviled associates and subordinates.

“He was a son of a bitch,” Irwyn Metzenbaum said bluntly when asked about his combative cousin. By comparison, “Howard had more tact.”¹ Politics was James Metzenbaum’s second career. His calling was the law, and as befits the profession he was meticulous about his personal appearance. He was partial to bow ties and often wore a tuxedo shirt under his well-pressed business suit for court dates and trips to Columbus, where he served as a state senator. He was a fiend for detail. In a rage, he once denounced a secretary for a misplaced semicolon, Rand said, finally suggesting the poor woman jump out of a window.

Through most of his career, public and private, the dominant figure in James P. Metzenbaum’s life was a dead woman—his wife, Bessie Benner. She died during childbirth in 1920 when her husband was an up-and-coming lawyer on the brink of his first big legal and political victory. The baby was lost too. Jimmy was inconsolable. Childless, he devoted the rest of his life to his work, her memory, and other people’s children. Not infrequently during business meetings at his Euclid home, he would leap up and rush across the room to kiss a picture of Bessie. “I would work on briefs until ten or eleven pm and then drive out to the cemetery with him,” Rand said of his trying experience. During those morbid, late-night vigils, Rand would stand in the background as Jimmy approached the mausoleum. He could hear him mumbling, “Oh, Bessie,” and recounting the events of the day. The grieving widower had his own key to the cemetery gate and kept an electric light burning in tribute outside the stone edifice at the foot of a steep hill in the graveyard.

That was the private James Metzenbaum. In Columbus, former representative Charles A. Vanik saw another side of him when both served in the state legislature during the years before the war. “I encountered a real tiger,” Vanik said. “He was smart, abrasive, and argumentative. Jimmy was not really a role model. Jimmy was a tough, mean son of a bitch. If they ever say that about Howard, Howard was an innocent compared to his uncle. Some of that runs in the blood. His uncle was a wise guy, very bright and pompous about his knowledge.”² So that was the impression the first Senator Metzenbaum left with Charlie Vanik. But it was not the total measure of the man.

In 1932, the Cleveland Press wrote of a Cleveland school board member who “nearly everybody calls Jimmy, not because anyone depreciates his talents, but because he stands just shoulder high to a man of average stature, and because of the informality of his manner.” The same Press article—the kind of flattering puff piece that would make any politician’s day—told of a man “whose shirt may be a small off-size, but he has never had to stuff it for any job, public or private he has ever tackled, and that’s more than can be said for many a fellow who has strutted his way to high position wearing a 19½ inch neckband.”³

Jimmy never finished high school. But he taught himself the basics and managed to graduate from the Western Reserve Law School without the benefit of an undergraduate degree. He taught at the college for one year before starting his own civil practice in 1905. He made his reputation arguing Ohio’s first zoning case on behalf of the city of Euclid before the United States Supreme Court. The brief against the right-to-zone was handled by Newton D. Baker, a renowned trial lawyer and former mayor of Cleveland, representing a real-estate firm. Jimmy was so intimidated by the formidable Baker that he breached Supreme Court protocol after his appearance in Washington and telegraphed an addendum to his oral argument to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president of the United States.

No harm was done. Taft even referred to the postscript when he ruled in James Metzenbaum’s favor in 1926. The court decided it was within the scope of the police powers of cities and villages to determine which areas of a community should remain residential and free of industry and commercial development. The case, Ambler v. Village of Euclid, was a milestone. For the first time, the highest court in the land established the right of cities across the country to enact zoning laws without being sued by developers for violating property rights. For his successful argument, Metzenbaum was recognized as a zoning expert and went on to author a massive three-volume book called The Law of Zoning. He also made his mark on the Cleveland school board between 1931 and 1933 and in the Ohio legislature, where he served three non-consecutive terms in 1935–36, 1941–42, and 1945–46. He didn’t accept compensation or even mileage reimbursement, giving his salary to charity. Before he was through, Jimmy ran for lieutenant governor, Congress, and the Ohio Supreme Court, losing all of those races. His behavior bemused the media as well as many of his colleagues.

After his stint with the school board, he headed for Columbus and the statehouse, home to the General Assembly chambers and the governor’s office. In 1935, as a freshman member of the Ohio House of Representatives, he earned his bona fides with a suspicious Democratic leadership. Because of his audacity and rebel image on the Cleveland school board, the leaders in Columbus were wary of Jimmy when he banty-roostered his way into the General Assembly in January 1935. He had been a strident critic of the school board’s established order. “They had heard alarming reports that he would be a troublemaker and a disturber of the peace in the quiet Senate chamber. The lawmakers’ fears were more or less confirmed when he didn’t ask for any patronage and didn’t ask to be put on any committee.”⁴

Strange indeed: a politician who didn’t have his hand out. Jimmy bided his time. He familiarized himself with the nuances of parliamentary procedure and guarded against any “steamroller” legislation that might overpower his position. Trust grew between the legislative chieftains and their new man. As the months rolled by, Jimmy “failed to detect any signs of a steamroller. There was no whip cracking. On every occasion he voted regularly with the Democratic leaders, who reached the conclusion that perhaps Metzenbaum wouldn’t be a hell raiser after all.”⁵ Metzenbaum emerged not as a hellion but as a troubleshooter for the majority leadership, and—remarkably for a freshman—he was entrusted with some of the most difficult, complex legislation. He authored the School Foundation Act, a formula for public school funding, which combined state aid with local property taxes and which would remain the law in Ohio for nearly forty years. He also shepherded bills on banking and welfare (called “poor relief” during the Depression) through the legislative maze. For his efforts, the Columbus Citizen named him the “Legislature’s Man of the Year” in 1935. “You can walk into the Senate chambers early in the morning or late at night, and usually there’s the bald little head of Jimmy Metzenbaum poring over a pile of important looking papers at his desk. And Jimmy Metzenbaum, with all this work, signed over his Senate paycheck to charity.”⁶

Out of office by choice in 1937, he was selected as special counsel to a state senate committee investigating graft in the administration of Governor Martin L. Davey, a combative partisan who had a role in dividing the Ohio Democratic Party in the late 1930s. (The governor’s loyalists in the party were sometimes referred to as “Daveycrats.”) In the course of an aggressive investigation, Jimmy struck some as a self-promoter, yet his tediously detailed interrogation of witnesses was hardly designed to make headlines. “He doesn’t fit into any of the accepted patterns, so you must take him as he is. He has his peculiarities, but he gets results. He may be too unduly considerate of the other fellow to those who prefer their meat raw, but there isn’t anything wrong with his sense of direction.”⁷ Edgy lawmakers, perhaps nervous about his direction, shut down the corruption investigation, but not before Jimmy made an enemy out of Davey. The governor vigorously opposed him when Jimmy ran (unsuccessfully) for lieutenant governor the following year.

That was the political pinnacle for James Metzenbaum. He came back to the state Senate in 1941 and was elected again to a final two-year term in 1944. The little guy in the bow tie wasn’t warm and fuzzy. And he lost every time he sought higher office. He made his last bid in 1950, running as an independent for the Ohio Supreme Court. But in the process, as the Cleveland Press reported, he enshrined the Metzenbaum name in the “select circle of politically magic names” in Cuyahoga County.⁸ “It was not as powerful as some of the Irish names,” said Irwyn Metzenbaum. But with “a name like Sweeney, Corrigan, or Metzenbaum, you could run for anything.” In 1942, three Metzenbaums were on the Democratic primary ballot in Cuyahoga County: neophyte Howard running for the Ohio House, Jimmy running for Congress, and Irwyn trying for the state Senate. Only Howard made it, but the Metzenbaum name was becoming familiar to voters in the state’s largest county.

Away from politics in the postwar years, Jimmy Metzenbaum maintained a lucrative civil practice and kept up an interest in libraries, gardening, and underprivileged youth. His dream was to establish a model orphanage. In 1946, he acquired an undeveloped 101-acre plot on a hillside in suburban Chesterland in Geauga County. He called it Wisteria Hill—the vine had been a favorite of his wife’s—and he went about clearing brush and renovating a ramshackle cabin with his own hands. Administered by the Bessie Benner Foundation, which he created in 1948, it became a day camp for Girl Scouts, disadvantaged children, and youngsters with cerebral palsy. “Jimmy Metzenbaum … is a little man with a big heart,” Cleveland Press columnist Bob Seltzer wrote after touring Wisteria Hill.⁹

The extent of Jimmy’s devotion to Bessie was revealed in 1935 when a tax agent discovered that Metzenbaum had never probated her will. Their home in Euclid was still in her name and $7,591 was scattered in savings accounts, checking accounts, war savings stamps, and a sealed envelope. The wealth included $135 in gold coins, which by 1935 were not accepted as legal currency. The taxman, one H. W. Putnam, got interested in Mrs. Metzenbaum’s estate as he nosed around county records to look for unpaid inheritance taxes. Jimmy Metzenbaum, who had never invested his late wife’s money or even opened a strong box she left behind, readily paid the $240.34 tax bill. He was still living part time in the suburban home, but he had also taken a room on the tenth floor of the Statler Hilton hotel near his law office in downtown Cleveland. “Love Lives On, Won’t Touch Wife’s Estate,” the Cleveland Press headlined in 1935: “After her death, Mr. Metzenbaum maintained the shaded old house at 24000 Euclid Avenue, in Euclid, just as it had been during her life time. He did most of the work himself, save for a caretaker. He pruned his own trees, and the furnishings and other accessories of the house he allowed no one to disturb, living on there alone, with his memories.”¹⁰

N. R. Howard, a reporter, told of his search for the Metzenbaum psyche during an encounter in the early 1920s with an old-line pol, Councilman John Reynolds. “Jack, who is this guy, Metzenbaum?” he asked innocently. “Who is James Metzenbaum? No one knows who he is,” Reynolds responded. “He is a lawyer. A fine lawyer. He is a ‘loner’ who is no one’s confidant. He is a strange person … He goes with no one. Yes, indeed. Who is James Metzenbaum?” In the same piece, the columnist told of developing a friendship with Jimmy, who first told him, disingenuously, “Oh, you don’t want anything of me. … Newspapers aren’t interested in me. I’m just a nobody.”¹¹

In fact, Jimmy carefully cultivated relationships with reporters—as did cousin Howard—and late-night visits to city rooms were not uncommon. The Cleveland Press described Jimmy Metzenbaum as a full-blooded politician who “has a retentive mind that remembers volume and page and paragraph. He has a logical mind that almost uncannily seizes upon the essentials of a proposition. He has an agile and subtle tongue that wads these essentials up into a hard lump and hurls them with telling effect at the opposition.”¹²

Agile, even theatrical, Jimmy Metzenbaum had what critics call the classic liberal disease. He strove for the greater good in the public arena, but had trouble translating that commonality to his private life. This difficulty in relating was compounded by lifelong grief over the death of his beloved Bessie. “He had never learned communication on an informal level with other people, for all his true brilliance at business and law,” his reporter friend, N. R. Howard, wrote.¹³ An incident in 1959, less than two years before his death, suggests a warmer James Metzenbaum, perhaps known only to a few. The bellmen, maids, and other employees at the Statler Hilton presented Jimmy with a scroll proclaiming him “the most distinguished permanent guest of the hotel” and thanking him for his thoughtfulness and kindness. The old man almost broke down. He had lived alone in room 1048 of the hotel for thirty years.¹⁴

The First Campaign

Jimmy Metzenbaum was staying weekends at the Statler and serving his second term in the state Senate when his career intersected with his cousin’s aspirations. Howard, then the other Metzenbaum, took his first tentative steps toward a political career in 1942. Howard had returned to Cleveland from OSU as a committed FDR Democrat interested in labor law. That was fortunate because he found out in a hurry that Cleveland’s big firms were not hiring “nice young Jewish lawyers.”¹⁵ He was admitted to the bar in 1941 and worked for small law firms in exchange for a desk and telephone. He shared space at the Leader Building in downtown Cleveland with Sidney Moss, an attorney who would become a confidant and one of his closest friends. With Moss’s help, Howard started a small business preparing income-tax returns for $1 apiece. His brother, Irwyn, had a similar one-man operation. This was a time when low-income Americans filled out their own tax returns—there was no H&R Block. Soon Metzenbaum and a partner ...