John Dingell: The Dean Who Made Modern America
The goodbyes began on Wednesday, Feb. 6, when Congresswoman Debbie Dingell’s tweet lit up smartphone screens across metro Detroit. “Friends and colleagues know me and know I would be in Washington right now unless something was up,” she wrote. “I am home with John and we have entered a new phase. He is my love and we have been a team for nearly 40 years.”
Alumni of Team Dingell—there are, literally, generations of them—texted back and forth, sharing their favorite stories about the old bull. Lists of Dingellisms—his folksy, old-fashioned sayings—were compiled and shared. Former aides laughingly remembered him describing someone as “madder than a boiled owl,” or dismissing a suggestion as “as useful as side-pockets on a cow.”
With Debbie’s permission, they showed up at the Dingells’ home in Dearborn, a steady stream of people who loved The Dean, who owed their careers to him, who couldn’t imagine Michigan without him, who wanted to thank him one last time. Just before he died on Thursday night, he was talking and laughing with his wife, Debbie. “He was my love,” Mrs. Dingell told local reporters through sobs.
He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education deemed “separate but equal” unconstitutional; he remained in office into the second term of the nation’s first black president. His 59 years in Congress are the most of anyone in American history and span more than a quarter of the time since the Constitution created the legislative branch. He was sworn in at 29, the same age Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is today. She would have to remain in the House until 2078 to match his tenure. He was there for the administrations of 11 of the nation’s 45 presidents. “Presidents come and presidents go,” Bill Clinton said at a 2005 celebration of Dingell’s 50th year in Congress. “John Dingell goes on forever.”
“He was a force in politics, not just in Michigan, but throughout the country,” Jeff Donofrio, Dingell’s former district director, said a few hours before the former congressman’s death was announced the night of Thursday, Feb. 7. “There’s really nobody in America who isn’t impacted—often in ways they don’t understand—by his work in Washington.”
Modern America is as much a creation of John Dingell’s life work as anyone’s. If you or a parent or grandparent have relied on Medicare or Medicaid; if you’ve seethed about the lack of gun control; if you’ve cheered that segregation of public places is illegal and employment discrimination is banned; if you’re thankful for the continued existence of the U.S. auto industry; if you’ve raged about gas-guzzling cars contributing to climate change; if your health insurance is purchased on the Obamacare exchanges; if you’ve swum in lakes or rivers or oceans free from toxic pollution; if you’ve drunk a glass of or bathed your children in tap water with confidence that it’s free from contamination; then John Dingell played a role in your life.
His father, John Sr., a printer by trade and union activist by choice, was elected to Congress in 1932 on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coattails. Nine years later, while serving as a congressional page, 15-year-old John Jr. (or “Jack,” as he was known at the time) was in the House chamber for FDR’s address declaring that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had forever marked Dec. 7, 1941, as a “date which will live in infamy.” The war came, and when he turned 18, Dingell joined the Army and was slated to take part in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. A case of meningitis laid him up for two months at a hospital instead.
After two years in the armed forces, he finished his college degree and went to law school before entertaining a brief career as an attorney and prosecutor in his native Detroit. When his father died in 1955, John ran to succeed him in the House. He won on a platform of clean drinking water, worker-friendly regulations and support for civil rights.
By the time he left Congress in January 2015, he’d reshaped American life. John Dingell pushed for universal single-payer health care before “Medicare for all” was a rallying cry—before Medicare even existed. His father introduced legislation in 1943 that would have established national health insurance as part of Social Security. The younger Dingell picked up the baton. Starting in 1957 and continuing for the next five decades, Dingell reintroduced a bill to provide universal health insurance. In the early 1960s, he agitated for the expansion of Social Security to provide health care to senior citizens. His efforts resulted in the creation of Medicare, whose enactment Dingell presided over in the House in 1965. Forty-five years later, he lent the same gavel to Nancy Pelosi to use for the vote on the Affordable Care Act.
Among the legislation he authored or led the charge in passing: the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Water Quality Act of 1965 and the Clean Air Act of 1990. He worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which resulted in a bruising primary fight and the burning of a cross on Dingell’s lawn for the second time in his life (his father had been an anti-Klan activist, and even as an old man, John Jr. remembered being 5 or 6 years old and looking out the front window of his family’s home to see a flaming cross). “Of all the bills I’ve played a part in helping pass into law,” he wrote in his 2018 memoir, The Dean, “that remains the one I’m most proud of.”
He was a consumer advocate who raged against, for example, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall financial regulations in 1999. “What we are creating now is a group of institutions which are too big to fail,” he said on the House floor in November 1999, presaging the financial industry’s meltdown and subsequent bailouts by almost a decade. “Taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight, and it is going to cost a lot of money, and it is coming.”
He was a dependable Democrat in the model of the Catholic social justice, New Deal-infused politics of his youth. But his record was not that of a doctrinaire liberal. He was intransigent when others tried to apply regulations to the auto industry. “His record on consumer protection is excellent,” Ralph Nader said in 1972. That was before the two battled over efforts to make seat belts mandatory in cars and to improve fuel efficiency standards. “Dingell can now be considered the No. 1 enemy of consumers on Capitol Hill,” Nader said in 1980.
He was an ardent supporter of civil rights, but he opposed cross-district busing and in 1972, supported a proposed constitutional amendment to ban it, bowing to political pressure from his heavily white, suburban Detroit district.
He was an environmentalist and legislated some of the most important water-safety laws in American history, but his opposition to major increases in fuel efficiency standards for cars has contributed to climate change and the rapid rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
An avid hunter, he was a longtime board member of the National Rifle Association, and pushed the organization to largely abandon its focus on sport shooting in favor of a more robust role as a political lobby, transforming the group into the political heavyweight it is today. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he used his perch in Congress to single-handedly stifle gun-control efforts. In an NRA video, he once referred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as a group of “jackbooted fascists.” More than a decade later, he took issue when NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre called federal agents “jackbooted thugs” shortly after the Oklahoma City Bombing. After supporting the Clinton crime bill in 1994 despite his vocal opposition to the assault weapons ban it included, he resigned from the NRA’s board but not his membership in the group.
Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson gave Dingell the moniker “Mr. Mean.” He wielded his power like the titans of yore (doubtless inspired by the model of the late House Speaker Sam Rayburn, whom he counted as a mentor). As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for more than a decade, he took on an expansive portfolio and grew it. “He said, ‘If it moves, it’s energy, and if it doesn’t, it’s commerce,’” Congressman Fred Upton remembered in a 2009 tribute to Dingell on the House floor.
In 1982, the Detroit Free Press called him the “junkyard dog of Congress” for his territorial and sharp-toothed defense of the domestic auto industry. For decades, he slow-walked the passage of stringent smog and fuel economy standards, resisting any attempt to make cars more efficient, lest they strain metro Detroit’s biggest employers. President Jimmy Carter once called Dingell to the White House for a “friendly and frank” personal conversation about auto emissions. “Mr. President,” Dingell said, “I can be friendly, or I can be frank, but I can’t be both.”
When freshman Congressman David Bonior, a fellow Democrat from metro Detroit, testified in 1977 in favor of requiring seat belts in cars, moved by the death of a close friend in a car accident, Dingell was indignant that Bonior hadn’t informed him ahead of time. “Within hours, [he] confronted me on the floor of the House, chewing my ass out in front of four or five members of the Michigan delegation,” Bonior wrote in his 2018 memoir, Whip. “We didn’t talk for two years.” (They later reconciled, became allies, and Dingell aided Bonior in his election as House Democratic whip in 1991.)
Perhaps the most brutal example of Dingell’s bruising style came in 1991. Incensed by the efforts of Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.) to increase fuel economy standards in cars, Dingell went nuclear—literally—and retaliated by introducing legislation that would strip Nevada of any say in the creation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in the state.
Time mellowed the old bear. In 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped oust Dingell as chairman of Energy and Commerce over fears within the caucus that he would not be aggressive enough in combating climate change. In a tight vote, Rep. Henry Waxman of California defeated him, and Dingell became a backbencher for the first time in four decades.
Age and gravity slumped his barrel-chested, 6’3” frame. He came to rely on a cane, and, after a knee replacement, an electric scooter to move around the Hill. On it was a faux license plate: “The Dean.”
He could be gregarious, easy with a smile or joke, kind to children. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, he visited with House pages (the author among them) and offered comfort and reassurance. Coming from someone who’d been in our shoes 60 years earlier during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his words had credibility.
He loathed Donald Trump—in his memoir, he refers to him as an “orange son of a bitch”—and in retirement, became a happy warrior for the resistance, amassing a Twitter following nearly a quarter-million strong. In recent years, thanks in large part to his buoyant personality on Twitter, his image became something like that of America’s Political Grandpa, known for his sassy rejoinders, cheerful dad jokes and plainspoken smackdowns. For anyone who knew him as a Capitol Hill power broker whose committee staff kept a framed photo of Planet Earth as an indication of what Dingell saw as his legislative jurisdiction, this was an odd turn, but he embraced it with vim.
At his father’s funeral Mass in 1955, Dingell was first approached about running for Congress. When he returned to work, his office desk was thick with messages from friends encouraging him to run. His mother urged him to do so, as well. Even in grief, even through tears, the work of politics went on.
A version of this obituary was first published by Politico Magazine on Feb. 8, shortly after Dingell’s death.
