Feature Article |
The Full Specter
After four decades in public life, Arlen Specter is still as brash, complicated and unpredictable as ever. Here, an oral history of the career of one of the country's most famous (and infamous) senators
By Andrew Putz, with reporting by Larry Platt and Robert Huber
- Illustration by Rob Day
Raised in Russell, Kansas — the prairie outpost that also gave the world Bob Dole — and schooled at Penn and Yale, Arlen Specter first made his name as a young attorney taking on the Teamsters and working on the Warren Commission. In the years since — as district attorney, defense attorney, perpetual candidate, senator — Specter took his place in the city's political pantheon, alongside such icons as Rizzo, Tate and Dilworth.
For the past quarter-century, he's also been a Zelig-like national figure. From his role in sinking Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination to his cross-examination of Anita Hill, from stem-cell research to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Specter's greatest talent may be his unique ability to put himself — somehow, some way — in the center of the nation's most important debates.
It's not just Specter's ubiquity, though, that has led us to think of him as an institution. It's also the niche he's carved out for himself as one of the few true wild cards of Washington politics. He is reviled by those on both the right and the left. Charming and churlish, brilliant and pedantic, he can be fiercely independent, entertainingly eccentric, and simply maddening. In September, Specter voted along with his party to approve a bill governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, just hours after he had declared the bill blatantly unconstitutional.
The move was pure Specter. And it made us wonder: What it is that makes Specter so, well, Specterian? To figure that out, we rounded up stories and comments from the Senator's friends, colleagues, foes and foils, to get their take on the career of one of the city's most interesting and inscrutable political figures.
For the past quarter-century, he's also been a Zelig-like national figure. From his role in sinking Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination to his cross-examination of Anita Hill, from stem-cell research to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Specter's greatest talent may be his unique ability to put himself — somehow, some way — in the center of the nation's most important debates.
It's not just Specter's ubiquity, though, that has led us to think of him as an institution. It's also the niche he's carved out for himself as one of the few true wild cards of Washington politics. He is reviled by those on both the right and the left. Charming and churlish, brilliant and pedantic, he can be fiercely independent, entertainingly eccentric, and simply maddening. In September, Specter voted along with his party to approve a bill governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, just hours after he had declared the bill blatantly unconstitutional.
The move was pure Specter. And it made us wonder: What it is that makes Specter so, well, Specterian? To figure that out, we rounded up stories and comments from the Senator's friends, colleagues, foes and foils, to get their take on the career of one of the city's most interesting and inscrutable political figures.
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