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10 One❒ TheMostUnlikelyCandidate claiborne pell of newport On April 9, 1960, Rhode Islanders learned that a memorable primary election was likely to unfold later that year. Congressman John E. Fogarty announced he would not seek the Senate seat that would open upon the retirement of Theodore F. Green, the ninety-two-year-old patriarch of Rhode Island politics who had served in Washington since 1936. The popular Fogarty said he would instead seek an eleventh term in the House of Representatives. With Fogarty out of contention, former governor J. Howard McGrath announced he was running. A Democrat like Fogarty and Green, McGrath, fiftysix , enjoyed the favor of some party insiders. He had been governor three times, and a U.S. Senator already, from 1947 to 1949, when he resigned to become Attorney General under President Truman. McGrath would be a credible, if unspectacular, candidate. Another prominent Democrat, four-term ex-governor Dennis J. Roberts, fifty-seven, was coy when asked if he also intended to get into the race, but many who had followed his long career assumed—correctly, as it developed—that he eventually would. Like McGrath, Roberts was a force within the Democratic Party, having served as state party chairman and a delegate three times to the Democratic National Convention. He had been a state senator and mayor for ten years of Providence, Rhode Island’s capital and largest city. Like McGrath, Roberts enjoyed widespread voter recognition. A third person mentioned in the front-page story in The Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s dominant newspaper, enjoyed no such visibility. Claiborne deBorda Pell had never even sought elective office. “I submit my candidacy to the Democratic Party and to the people of Rhode Island with confidence in my experience, and in the belief that they will consider me qualified to occupy the seat which has been so ably held by Senator Theodore Francis Green,” Pell said in a prepared statement. If the candidate felt excitement about his announcement, his words failed to reflect it. This did not seem to be a man given to emotional excess. State Democratic insiders knew “Claiborne Pell of Newport,” as the reporter called him, from his successful fundraising activities, his own considerable contributions, and the midlevel posts he had held with the state and national parties. But to most Rhode Islanders—especially those in the northern metro- m o s t u n l i k e l y c a n d i d a t e ❒ 11 politan areas that decided statewide elections—Pell was no household name. Voters may have read about his involvement in refugee-resettlement causes, a topic of the occasional newspaper piece about him or letter to the editor he had written in the 1950s. But it was equally likely that they’d heard stories about an independently wealthy, Ivy League–educated man who spoke with an odd accent and who didn’t live in the state full time. This boded poorly for a candidate in Rhode Island, where manufacturing remained the dominant economic force in 1960. People of Pell’s class owned factories and did not toil in them; the self-made man, not the one to the manor born, was the sort to find favor with blue-collar voters. Pell, forty-one, was betting on his innovative ideas for campaigning, the financial resources he and his wealthy wife Nuala would bring to the fight, his status as a World War II veteran, and his time as a Foreign Service officer, which might play well to Rhode Island’s large immigrant population. He was betting that his relative youth, like newly announced presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, would be an asset. He thought that voters might see in him the promise of a fresh face and fresh ideas, his wealth notwithstanding. Whatever the outcome, he was tired of waiting. For years, Pell had longed to follow his father to Congress—an ambition supported by Herbert, who served one undistinguished term in the House of Representatives, 1919 to 1921, from Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District. Even as he embarked on what could have been a lifelong career in international diplomacy , which had been another of Herbert’s avocations, Pell was pondering the best route to Washington. In 1946, his first year in the Foreign Service, Pell, a new vice consul at the American embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, had sought advice from his father . Should he resign from the service and move to New York, where Herbert lived, to...

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