David Maraniss, an associate editor of The Washington Post and the author of biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, Vince Lombardi and Al Gore, takes on John Dingell in a column in the Post.
Maraniss writes:
One could say that Dingell outlasted the two institutions he loved most, Congress and Detroit. Which went bankrupt first is as much a theological question as a political or economic one, as is the question of which might have the better chance of returning to past glory, but there is no question about Dingell’s place in congressional history.
Maraniss describes Dingell as "an old-school social Democrat who devoted his life not to the celebrity of politics but to the inner workings of the legislative world."
He understood that world better than any of his colleagues and probably revered it more, or at least what it once was, having grown up in it as a cloakroom page and as the son of a congressman who bestowed on him both a name and a life’s profession. Follow the line of Dingells back to his father’s first election to the House and you travel back in time to 1933, the year that FDR entered the White House.
In his heyday as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Dingell had the biggest staff and largest budget and came closest to issues that defined and shaped the lives of all Americans, Maraniss says.
Dingell attached himself to the cultural mores of his Detroit heritage, according to Maraniss, but in his life’s story, a tale of two cities, Washington, not Detroit, was the dominant place. He grew up mostly in Washington and went to school here at Georgetown Prep and Georgetown before beginning his unprecedented run in Congress.
