[Mb-civic] A Credo We Could Use - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Credo We Could Use
Maine's Stanley Tupper Practiced His Principles

By David S. Broder
Thursday, February 16, 2006; A27

Stanley R. Tupper served in the House of Representatives for only six 
years, from 1961 to 1967, and retired voluntarily to his home in 
Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He was never prominent on TV talk shows and his 
name was rarely in the headlines, even back then.

But last week he was the subject of a speech on the floor of the Maine 
House of Representatives by an old friend of mine, state Rep. Janet 
Mills of Farmington, who wanted her contemporaries to know what Tupper 
-- who died last month at 84 and declined to have any funeral service -- 
had meant to her and to the wider world.

Mills, who had visited Tupper last summer in Boothbay Harbor and -- she 
told me -- talked with him on the phone just days before he died, 
described him to her colleagues as "an individual who was as steadfast 
as the town's sturdy old-growth spruce and granite shore, as affable and 
good-natured as the gulls that happily wing along that shore, as 
practical and hard-working as the local lobstermen and laborers who ply 
their trade in the markets and the sea nearby."

After graduating from local schools and attending Middlebury College, he 
served in the Border Patrol and, during World War II, in the Navy. He 
"read law" in his father's law office and was admitted to the bar 
without a formal law degree. As a young lawyer, he organized a 
cooperative for local lobstermen and later, as state fisheries 
commissioner, developed programs to help them market their catch.

Elected to Congress in 1960, Tupper was a Republican notable for his 
independence. He supported the great civil rights and voting rights acts 
of 1964 and 1965 and -- even more controversially -- co-sponsored the 
legislation that became the Medicare law.

Condemned by the medical establishment for that act of apostasy, he told 
Mills during their visit last summer "how he got himself invited to 
speak to the medical association's convention that year. He said it was 
like being a gun control advocate at an NRA convention, [but] he 
patiently explained to them exactly what that legislation did, how it 
would save lives, keep seniors healthy and become an economic mainstay 
of our culture in decades to come.

"And they sat on their hands," Mills said. "They hated him. They hated 
his ideas. But he had faced them down. . . . He stood his ground. He 
knew he was right."

In the autumn of 1964 Tupper did something that outraged conservatives 
even more. He refused to endorse Barry Goldwater for president, to 
protest the Republican nominee's stand on civil rights -- despite being 
an officer in the Air Force Reserve unit that Goldwater commanded on 
Capitol Hill. After the election, Goldwater, being the man he was, wrote 
Tupper thanking him for his "consistent honesty" and for sticking to his 
principles.

People were like that -- back then.

Tupper retired from Congress in 1967, and, with a long-held interest in 
U.S.-Canadian relations, he served as U.S. commissioner to the Montreal 
World's Fair. He passed up several chances to run for governor. But as a 
private citizen, he remained actively involved in public affairs, 
opposing the Vietnam War, heading Common Cause in Maine, chairing a 
legislative ethics commission and -- in 2000 -- serving as co-chairman 
of John McCain's Maine campaign.

Mills sent me a copy of Tupper's campaign brochure from 1964, the year 
in which he won a 203-vote victory over Democrat Ken Curtis, later the 
governor of Maine. As with Goldwater, Tupper's personal character helped 
overcome any political differences. He and Curtis remained fast friends 
for life.

The brochure said, "Stan believes a congressman should think issues 
through clearly on their individual merits without being concerned about 
labels; have imagination and the ability to suggest positive ideas; be 
sympathetic to the desires and aspirations of his constituents when not 
in conflict with the security and well-being of the nation; have 
personal courage to vote as he thinks wisest in face of political 
pressure and criticism; keep his constituents informed of his views -- 
it is just as important that people have opportunity to disagree as to 
agree with their representative; and, finally, that he should place a 
higher priority on conscience than on reelection."

That's as good a credo as I've ever read -- and he lived up to it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502001.html
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