Subseries: William Proxmire, 1985 March 27
Note: Access online.

INTRODUCTION

CAME TO WISCONSIN TO WORK AS A REPORTER ON THE CAPITAL TIMES AND TO GET INTO POLITICS
Scope and Content Note: “I was anxious to get into politics from the time I went there. I had that in mind from the very beginning.” Decision to come to Wisconsin was influenced by a Harvard professor who “advised me that that was a perfectly reasonable and effective way of getting into politics.” Capital Times was peculiar in that “it was extraordinarily politically oriented” and one of the few pro-Democratic newspapers in the country. As a reporter, he got a political beat. Wrote releases for the Democratic caucus in the legislature. Acted as a chauffeur for various candidates.

EARLY POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
Scope and Content Note: Elected to the legislature in 1950. Ran for governor in 1952, “kind of sudden because I only came to the state in 1949, but that was a year when nobody wanted to run for governor.” Incumbent Governor Kohler was a liberal Republican and everyone expected him to win by a landslide. Proxmire made the race anyway in order to get “name recognition.” The governorship receives “an enormous” amount of attention in Wisconsin.

1950 ASSEMBLY RACE
Scope and Content Note: Ran against a sixty-five year old incumbent; Proxmire was thirty-four years old. “So I ran an invisible, sort of retail-type campaign.” Did no advertising and spent little money. Having left the Capital Times job, spent “all my time running for office,” ten to fourteen hours a day. Studied the election results of the previous few elections for his district and found that seventy percent of the votes in the Democratic primary were cast in ten of the twenty-eight precincts. So, he went door to door in those precincts. “I'd go to each door, and I'd introduce myself, and then when I got home I'd drop a note saying how much I enjoyed meeting the people who were there. Just before the election we dropped a note reminding them to vote. And also before the election my wife or I got on the phone and called about half the people I had met to remind them to vote.” Won a close election. His opponent had been on the county board for about twenty years; was an established farmer. Was considered a good man, but was not especially identified with the young DOC people.

1952 GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Scope and Content Note: Ran on primarily state issues, as opposed to a greater concentration on national issues in 1954. “I simply campaigned on his record and on the fact that people in the state had not had the kind of just representation of the working people, the small business people, and the farmers that our party stood for and our party was anxious to provide.” Did not criticize Kohler personally, just his record. Also used the McCarthy issue. “Operation Truth,” which proceeded the gubernatorial campaign; would follow McCarthy around, set up loudspeakers across the street from where he was speaking, and accuse him of being a fraud, of not having been effective in getting rid of Communists. McCarthy was a source of money for Proxmire's campaign, since people thought it was important for a strong gubernatorial showing in order to beat McCarthy. For that time, a lot of money was spent, much of it having been raised outside Wisconsin.

“JOE MUST GO” MOVEMENT
Scope and Content Note: Proxmire was involved, lent his name to the effort, but was not a leader of the effort.

1954 GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Scope and Content Note: Primary campaign with Jim Doyle, “a very, very tough opponent.” Good speaker, smart, with more support from the party than Proxmire. Milwaukee Journal expected Doyle to win.

PROXMIRE'S ROLE WITHIN THE DOC IN THE EARLY 1950s
Scope and Content Note: Spoke at many meetings. Tried to help candidates. “Sometimes I'd drive a hundred and fifty miles out in the state to give a speech to...there'd be only ten or fifteen people who'd show up.” Get home at two in the morning and get up for work a few hours later.

PERSONAL FINANCES DURING THE 1950s
Scope and Content Note: Had a series of jobs: sold advertising for Union Labor News; Brooks Implement Company, the super salesman for which was Adolph Loftus, father of Tom Loftus, current speaker of the Wisconsin assembly. Wife's family and his own were well off “and they helped out some. And we lived pretty simply.” More financial help from his family than from his wife's, despite the fact that hers, the Rockefellers, were much wealthier. One needs a job with a good deal of independence if one intends to run for office. Must make a sacrifice, which is very hard on ones family.

MORE ON 1954 GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Scope and Content Note: Very close. Labor wanted Proxmire to have a recount, but he refused “because I knew I was too far behind.” “Labor was as excited as the dickens.” Proxmire felt both he and the party would be better off not asking for a recount which would look like “spoil sports.”

LABOR SUPPORT FOR PROXMIRE
Scope and Content Note: Supported by both the AFL and the CIO. “AFL with less enthusiasm, but they were less enthusiastic about everything. CIO was much more active politically.”

1956 GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION
Scope and Content Note: Ran for governor rather than senator, because he thought he had a better chance of winning that contest because he had done so well in 1954 and because he would not be running against an incumbent. “I thought I was going to win in '56.” Knew the issues very well, having ran twice previously. Vernon Thomson, his opponent, was an “extraordinarily bright man, probably the brightest man they've had in that Republican Party in Wisconsin in my career.”

REPUDIATION OF DEMOCRATIC ATTORNEY GENERAL NOMINEE, ROBERT LA FOLLETTE SUCHER, 1956
Scope and Content Note: Grandson of old Bob La Follette. “A real character. He was a heavy drinker.” Involved in riotous parties in hotels during his campaign. “I thought, if he were successful in becoming the attorney general...that it would set us back ten years.” Proxmire persuaded Sucher's primary opponent, Frank Nikolay, to run as an independent. “Now there were some people in the party who thought that was a terrible thing to do and that I was jealous of Sucher and so forth, but most of the people felt it was exactly right because they knew him. And he was a nice fellow and the great thing about Sucher was that after all that campaign, he was not the least bit bitter. He didn't show any malice. He had all kinds of reason to be furious at me.” Proxmire campaigned for Nikolay.

ISSUES DURING THE 1954 AND 1956 CAMPAIGNS
Scope and Content Note: Different from 1952. The longtime Republican tenth district elected a Democrat, Lester Johnson, in 1953 special election because of the farm policies of Ezra Taft Benson. In 1952 Proxmire got only thirty percent of the farm vote; in 1954, he got a majority of the farm vote. In 1954 “I hit that Ezra Taft Benson thing very, very hard.” Did a series of radio spots on Kohler and Benson and the “absolutely heartless policy which was ruining the Wisconsin farmer.” “Kohler made the mistake of trying to answer me. And, God, I came back and just, I thought, just demolished him on the issue.” Farm vote was very important at the time. Since then the number of dairy farms in Wisconsin has declined from 107,000 to 40,000. Like 1954, the Eisenhower record was dwelt upon in 1956. Nevertheless, Eisenhower won by a landsli but Proxmire did very well anyway. “All the handshaking and t intense campaigning...paid off.” It was prior to either the 1 or the 1956 campaign that Proxmire called a series of town meetings. Would speak at four or five of them a day. “Terrif turnouts. The farmers were so mad. They just jammed these meetings.... Where we'd normally get three or four or five people, I'd get two hundred and three hundred people at every place I went.”

PROXMIRE CAMPAIGN TECHNIQUES
Scope and Content Note: Started in 1953 or 1954 sending congratulations to parents of newborns and couples just married. Got the names from the Milwaukee and Madison newspapers.

END OF TAPE 59, SIDE 1

INTRODUCTION

1957 SENATE ELECTION
Scope and Content Note: Felt he had a good chance because it was a special election and the turnout for special elections is lighter. “The people who come out are the people who are unhappy and fed up. By 1957 there was a recession in the country.” Campaigned largely on the economy and won nine out of ten congressional districts. Proxmire would have run against McCarthy in 1958 if McCarthy had not died. Others were also interested, but he would have had a big advantage because of his many campaigns and his decisive defeat of Jim Doyle in the 1954 primary. In the 1957 primary, his opponent, Clem Zablocki, only carried two counties, Milwaukee and Portage, the latter having a big Polish population. Proxmire feels McCarthy would have been more vulnerable in 1958 than Kohler was in 1957.

PROXMIRE'S POLITICAL OFFICE PREFERENCES
Scope and Content Note: The U.S. Senate was not necessarily Proxmire's goal, rather than governor. “I was very, very interested in state government. And I enjoyed the state legislature very much. I liked being a legislator, frankly, better than being an executive because you can be more of a free spirit and you're not responsible for everything in sight and you don't have to delegate authority to literally hundreds and hundreds of people to carry out your policies and all kinds of agencies over which you don't know much except the names of the people that run them.... That didn't appeal to me a great deal.”

FACTIONS WITHIN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN
Scope and Content Note: “They were real differences, I think. There's no question that they were personal. They weren't ideological. We didn't have much in the way ideological differences at that time. A little later on, after I got to the senate, began to vote against some of the spending programs, that became an issue.”

ANTI-PROXMIRE FEELING IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN
Scope and Content Note: Anecdote about Lucey, Reynolds, and Bill Duffy visiting him after McCarthy's death and encouraging him to run for the senate as the logical, best known candidate. Meanwhile, Henry Reuss got interested in running and started “Operation Sounding Board” which consisted of meetings of Democrats around the state to determine a favorite candidate. “The reason for it was because they wanted to get me out of the race. They figured that I wasn't as close to the party as some of the other people were.” The first visit of “Operation Sounding Board” was in Green Bay and the first speaker was Reynolds who got up, praised Proxmire, and then called for Reuss to be the candidate. “The son of a gun didn't tell me.... It was all right for him to be for anybody he wanted to, but to tell me he was for me and then to go out and make that speech for Reuss was just.... The floor just fell right out from under me.” Proxmire attended all the “Operation Sounding Board” meetings, but Reuss was in Washington and Proxmire and his wife sat in the front row at each meeting “and people were intimidated.... So the 'Sounding board' thing turned out to be a rally for me and that worked out nicely.... By and large, I've been lucky in that. I think they had every reason for people in the party to be resentful because here's this guy comes in from the east...from out of state, moves in on their party; they've done all this work; they've served some of them in the Progressive Party; and this outsider comes in and moves into the juiciest places, runs for governor; when he feels like running for the senate, he runs for the senate; and they had every reason on the face of the earth to resent me, but they were very, very good about it.”

GERMAN INFLUENCE IN WISCONSIN POLITICS
Scope and Content Note: Woodrow Wilson's entry into World War I against the Germans “just demolished the Democratic Party.” “When we were just beginning to come back and Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing....”

REASONS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC BREAKTHROUGH IN 1958
Scope and Content Note: “I think it was the fact that the Republicans made the mistake that parties always make and it was inevitable, they became too ideological, they became too conservative.” Instead of “becoming a little more liberal to absorb our challenge, they went to kind of the other extreme.... It was their mistake as well as the fact that we had good young people in the party.”

PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENTS AS U.S. SENATOR
Scope and Content Note: Truth-in-lending act. Stopping the supersonic transport (SST). Banking deregulation bill, 1980, which ended limits on the amount of interest savings accounts can earn.

DISAPPOINTMENTS AS U.S. SENATOR
Scope and Content Note: Inability to get the Genocide Treaty ratified. Has spoken in favor of its ratification every day of each senate session since January 11, 1967. Much closer now than at any time previous; President Reagan appears to favor it.

RECALLS NO INACCURACIES IN JAY SYKES' PROXMIRE

MORE ON ACHIEVEMENTS AS SENATOR
Scope and Content Note: Has not missed a vote since April 1966, the longest record in the history of the senate “by far.” Previous record was seven years. “The other thing was that I'm the only candidate in the last fifteen or twenty years who had been elected to office without spending any money to speak of. Both in 1976 and 1982; I spent 177 dollars in 1976 and 145 dollars in 1982.” Best record in five of the last seven years in the roll call of the Taxpayers' Union, which keeps track of spending bills in the senate. Golden Fleece awards: two-thirds of those identified wind up being discontinued or sharply cut back.

ASSESSMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN
Scope and Content Note: Growth of Democratic Party of Wisconsin is “a good example of real success by hard work.” Good competitive balance between Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin. All constitutional offices and both houses of the legislature are now Democratic. “I think that's a remarkable achievement when you consider what we had to struggle from.” A good showing in the last presidential election, despite Reagan's victory. “Somehow I think our party has more of an image of youth and vigor than the Republican Party has.”

CAMPAIGN FINANCING TODAY
Scope and Content Note: In regard to his inexpensive campaigns, “you don't know how long you can get away with this kind of stuff.... Campaigns have gotten so expensive and, after all, people do watch television.” Predicts over two million dollars will be spent on behalf of Senator Robert Kasten in the 1986 campaign.

END OF INTERVIEW