OP-ED: The congressman who got away
Some congressional potpourri:
History contains a handful of great “what ifs.” What if Lincoln had survived? What if the World War II D-Day landings had failed and the Allies were pushed back into the sea?
Then there’s the smaller stuff. What if Fred Lebder and not Austin Murphy had been elected to Congress back in the 1970s?
I’ve long considered it a minor tragedy that Murphy beat Lebder to win the Democratic nomination for Congress, at a time when winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to winning the general election.
Murphy, a Mon Valley state senator at the time, went on to have a long, mediocre congressional career. Lebder, of Uniontown, was the longtime chairman of the Fayette County Democratic Party and county commissioner.
Lebder would have made a fabulous congressman.
Love him or hate him (and not a few people disliked Lebder), he possessed the kind of political skills and instinct that would have placed him at the center of action in Congress.
Unlike Murphy, who remained on the outside looking in, Lebder would have been on the inside, advocating successfully for the kind of infrastructure and other deals crucial for the economic vitality of the district.
Both Murphy and Lebder are gone now.
A story I’ve told for years to friends illustrates one of Lebder’s strong points as a politician.
A reporter in the fall of 2008, I was on a street corner in Mt. Pleasant to cover Sen. Bob Kerry of Nebraska, who was there campaigning for Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president. Lebder, now an old man but still very much in the fight, showed up for the rally. He saw me. “Hello, Dick,” he said.
Pretty unremarkable, except for the fact that it had been years since the old political pro and insignificant me had crossed paths.
Apparently, Lebder never forgot a name or face.
DO YOU KNOW the identity of the district congressman who died by suicide while in office? That would be Samuel Kendall, a Somerset County Republican who served 14 years in the House of Representatives until his death on Jan. 8, 1933.
Kendall, 73, shot himself in his office on Capitol Hill. He was distraught over the death of his wife in August of that year. A suicide note he left behind was addressed to two surviving sons. Unable to “throw off my grief” and “no longer able to bear my suffering which I have kept from you,” Kendall concluded, “My work on earth is done.”
Kendall had lost to J. Buell Snyder, a Democrat from Perryopolis, in November 1932, an election fueled by the Great Depression and the promise of reform under Franklin Roosevelt.
An activist New Dealer, Snyder was the key figure in the construction of Connellsville Airport and Yough Dam. Chairman of the military appropriations subcommittee of the House, he was an important figure on Capitol Hill during World War II, a fact which didn’t shield him from error.
Immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Snyder boasted that the U.S. would easily and quickly defeat Japan. In fact, it took four bloody years of fighting to subdue the enemy.
JOHN MURTHA was a remarkable congressman. A Johnstown Democrat and a champion of military preparedness, he nevertheless opposed the U.S. war in Iraq waged by the George W. Bush administration.
Booed by a graduation crowd at Seton Hill University for remarks against the war, Murtha went on to win the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award.
The longtime bipartisan “dean” of the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress, Murtha was a hard-charging political dynamo.
A scene is lodged in my memory of Murtha, a tall enough fella to have played center on his high school basketball team, draping his long right arm around the shoulder of a much smaller constituent, a professor at Penn State Fayette, the esteemed Beverly Peterson.
Not only hard-charging, Murtha was hands-on as well.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.