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1 Prologue❒ AColdWinterDay Dawn had barely broken when the crowd began to build outside Trinity Episcopal Church in Newport, Rhode Island. A frigid wind blew and snow frosted the ground. Police had restricted vehicular traffic to allow passage of the motorcade, soon to arrive, carrying a former president, the vice presidentelect , and dozens of U.S. senators, representatives, and other dignitaries. Men in sunglasses with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the church grounds, where flags flew at half-mast. It was January 5, 2009, the day of Senator Claiborne deBorda Pell’s funeral. Some of those waiting to get inside Trinity Church were members of Newport society, to which Pell and Nuala, his wife of sixty-four years, had belonged since birth. Some were working-class people who knew Pell as a tall, thin, bespectacled man who once regularly jogged along Bellevue Avenue, greeting strangers and friends that he passed. Some knew him only from the media, where he was sometimes portrayed, not inaccurately, as the capitol’s most eccentric character, as interested in the afterlife and the paranormal as the federal budget. Some knew him mostly from the ballot booth or from programs and policies he’d been instrumental in establishing. First elected in 1960, the year his friend John F. Kennedy captured the White House, Pell served thirty-six years in the U.S. Senate, the fourteenth longest term in history as of that January day. His accomplishments from those six terms touched untold millions of lives. Pell died at a few minutes past midnight on January 1, five weeks after his ninetieth birthday and more than a decade after the first symptoms of Parkinson ’s disease, which slowly stole all movement and speech, leaving him a prisoner in his own body. He died, his family with him, at his oceanfront home—a shingled, single-story house that he personally designed and which stood in modest contrast to Bellevue Avenue mansions and Bailey’s Beach, the exclusive members-only club that has been synonymous with East Coast wealth since the Gilded Age. Pell, whose colonial-era ancestors established enduring wealth from tobacco and land, and Nuala, an heiress to the A&P fortune, belonged to Bailey’s. But the Pells were unflinchingly liberal and Democratic. In the old manufacturing state of Rhode Island, where the American Industrial Revolution was born, blue-collar voters embraced their aristocratic senator with the unconventional mind. 2 ❒ p r o l o g u e The motorcades passed the waiting crowd, which by 9 a.m. was more than a block long. Former President Bill Clinton stepped out of an suv and went into the parish hall to await the procession to the church. Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whose brain cancer would claim him that summer, followed Clinton. A bus that met a jet from Washington brought more senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republicans Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch. Pell’s civility and even temper during his decades in the Senate had earned him the respect of his colleagues. “I always try to let the other fellow have my way,” is how Pell liked to explain his Congressional style. It was the best means, he maintained, to “translate ideas into actions and help people.” He had learned these philosophies from his father, a minor diplomat and oneterm Congressman who had cast an inordinate influence on his only child even after his death in the first months of Kennedy’s presidency. The doors to Trinity opened and the crowd went in, filling seats in the loft that had been reserved for the public. The overflow went into the parish hall, to watch the live-broadcast tv feed. Led by their mother, Nuala and Claiborne’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren took seats near the pulpit. The politicians settled in pews across the aisle. The organ played, the choir sang, and six Coast Guardsmen wheeled a mahogany casket draped in white to the front of the church. From early childhood, Pell had loved the sea, an affection he captured in sailboat drawings and grade-school essays about the joys of being on the water. When he was nine, he took an ocean journey that would influence him in ways a young boy could not have predicted: traveling by luxury liner with his mother and stepfather, he went to Cuba and on through the Panama Canal to California and Hawaii. “It was the most interesting voyage I have ever taken,” he...

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