Communist Champagne for Christmas, and Congressman Pete MCloskey — A Tribute to My Former Boss on Capitol Hill


A Weekend Read:  Pete McCloskey, GOP congressman who once challenged Nixon, just died
at 96. 


[NOTE]: Pete made a lot of impact, against the Vietnam war, for the (then-new) environmental movement, and in other ways helped save and enrich the lives of many people, both far away and in the USA. 

One  American he changed was me.

The big impact started with champagne for Christmas. But first, some background from the Associated Press:

May 8, 2024
Pete McCloskey, Back in the Day

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Pete McCloskey — a proenvironment, antiwar California Republican who cowrote the Endangered Species Act and cofounded Earth Day — has died. He was 96.

A fourthgeneration Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, he often said, McCloskey represented the 12th Congressional District for 15 years, running for president against an incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972. He battled party leaders while serving seven terms in Congress and went on to publicly disavow the GOP in his later years.

He died at home Wednesday, May 8, according to Lee Houskeeper, a family friend.

[Chuck Fager]: McCloskey was a “maverick” Republican, who had built a progressive law practice in California.  In a surprise 1967 upset, he had snatched a vacant House seat from onetime child movie star Shirley Temple Black, the GOP establishment’s candidate.

During the Korean War, Pete had fought Communism and came home with major medals and battle scars.

But in the House, while still anti-communist, he soon turned against the Vietnam War. Pete investigated it in person and found the brass and bureaucrats had been lying about it, and too many of his fellow Marines (& Vietnamese civilians) were being killed and wounded for no reason.

A bumpersticker for McCloskey’s short-lived 1972 challenge to incumbent Rivhard Nixon as an antiwar presidential candidate in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

I met McCloskey in 1976, during his campaign for a fifth term. That year he was challenged by David Harris, an antiwar activist who had served a prison term for draft resistance, and was once married to singerJoan Baez. I was covering the campaign for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

I respected them both, and wrote a long piece profiling them, and the race, which Pete ultimately won. I also admired Pete’s eloquent antiwar stance.

Two years later, I had moved to the Washington area, and came to Pete’s House office looking for material for a freelance article, to be titled, “What Congress Got for Christmas.”

(Okay, it wasn’t exactly another Pentagon Papers;  but it wasn’t nothing either.)

 I had stumbled on the idea a year earlier, visiting a Congressman’s office: in mid-December, when  an aide rushed in with a gift-wrapped box. The congressman I was talking with opened it and pulled out bottles of wine and whiskey, with a card from a big corporation.

My eyes widened. Was this really a thing? I queried.

Tut-tut, dismissed the congressman: it was all legal. House rules then permitted such gifts, as long they cost no more than $35 (about $165 in 2023).

Did everybody on the Hill get Christmas whiskey? I asked.

Oh, no: the corporate Santas were too alert for that. After all, at least a few Members were teetotalers (though the donors also knew who was just kidding). Lobbyists studied them, learned their preferred (legal) pleasures, and catered to those.

Another senior House member, Rep Eddie Boland of Massachusetts, had a penchant for fine Cuban cigars. Boland shared a spartan Washington bachelor apartment for many years with House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, and it was reported  in the Boston Globe that  “The only four items ever seen in that [apartment’s] fridge,” O’Neill recalled, ”were orange juice, diet soda, beer, and cigars.”

In 1977, $35 would buy several such special stogies — though a smart lobbyist would know where the discounts could be found — and the Congressman would remember who sent them. [Note: Those were the good/bad old days: these gift rules were later tightened up  by the 110th Congress, in 2007; details at Note #37 here.]

These holiday gestures were very shrewd.  And they weren’t the only ones. 

In another Hill office I saw a gift-wrapped box opened to reveal a big, vividly  personalized birthday cake. It was from a large Sears store  (Sears being the Walmart/Amazon of its era). With it came a colorful oversized birthday card signed by scores of the store’s employees.

The card was all good wishes; no mention of the company’s policy interests; no nudges to support this bill or oppose that one. But the card and cake were personalized reminders that Sears had many voting employees, with family members, in the home district; any House member smarter than a bag of doorknobs would remember that cake when the lobbyists made business calls later.

With a few calls, I confirmed  that congressional birthday cakes were an established and pervasive Hill custom. After all, there was only one each Christmas/Hannukah per year, but there were five hundred and thirty five Member birthdays in the two chambers; that’s a lot of frosting.

All of this, again, was then entirely legal … but mainly unknown to the public. (Of course, there were other occasions when big money changed hands, outside the rules; they were heard about less often, though more widely. And when uncovered, that was not the time for cutting cake, but for lawyering up.)

By the next December, I was at work collecting anecdotes for a piece to be called “What Congress Got for Christmas.”

The Value of Knowing Nothing

I had almost gathered my quota of colorful anecdotes when I stopped by Pete’s office in the Cannon House Office Building.

Pete was welcoming, and sure enough, while we were chatting, a large, gift-wrapped parcel was brought in. McCloskey read the card: it was from the Soviet Union Merchant Fishing Board.

The Soviet Union? Fishing? (Well, Pete was a member of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee; in fact, he had just become its ranking [i.e, senior] Republican member. So fish was on the committee’s menu every day.)

Pete dug into the parcel. Out came two large bottles; one vodka, another champagne.

(Soviet champagne?)

And a couple of cans of Russian caviar.

My eyes were wide again. “What,” I asked, “are you going to do with this?”


Pete raised a bottle, a mischievous gleam in his eye.

He said, “I’m gonna drink it.”

Despite his antipathy to the Vietnam fiasco, Pete was still a confirmed Cold Warrior. But Communism aside, Russian fisheries were a long-established, major player in the world seafood industry. Their products showed up (minus hammer and sickle logos) on American tables every day (about a billion dollars worth in 2021). There was plenty of regulation involved, and their lobbyists clearly monitored Congress. Again, the “gift” parcel was all legal.


Even so, I sat there, open-mouthed. McCloskey put the bottles and tins back in the box, for later.


Then he looked up, and his eyes suddenly narrowed. I wondered if I had said something wrong.


“Do you want a job?” Pete’s tone was serious.


What? I cleared my throat. Was this a gag?

“Well,” I said, “what kind of job do you have?”

McCloskey parried with another question: “What do you know about maritime policy?”

Stunned, I thought fast: I knew two things: one, that if there was such a policy, it would be a big deal for the House Merchant Marine Committee; maybe bigger even than fish.

And two, if Pete wasn’t kidding, this was not a time for BS.

I opted for Quaker plain speaking. What did I know about “maritime policy”?

“Nothing, “ I said. No résumé padding here.

Pete banged a palm on his desk. “It’s the best place to start,” he said.

That was the entire job interview, the shortest I ever had.

Pete hired me, and I worked for him til February 1981.

McCloskey wanted me to be an investigative reporter for him, technically on the staff of the Merchant Marine Committee (Since, by the way,  abolished, in 1995).

Having become the Committee’s “ranking Republican member” (by seniority, after ten or so years on it),  he now had control over a few committee staff slots.

The various U.S. maritime industries (shipbuilding, fisheries, unions that provided crews and dockworkers, etc.) were notoriously infested with corruption, including some with ties to organized crime. The associated scandals had even reached to the Hill.

Pete was known as being a “squeaky clean” Member. He looked at me and I guess he saw an enterprising, relatively young investigative reporter, who he thought could help dig up some of this corruption. He would expose it through speeches, committee reports and the media. My ignorance
had an upside, namely that I had no entanglements with the associated (often tainted) industry groups. And if there was homework needed to get up to speed, I was ready to do it.

Expect the Unexpected

But Pete’s ambitious plan did not pan out. That’s because he hoped our exposés could open the door to a major revamp of U.S. maritime policy.

Soon that door seemed to be opening: the Committee’s Chairman, Democratic  Rep. John Murphy of New York, unexpectedy asked Pete to collaborate on a bipartisan reform bill.
Pete eagerly agreed.

But if he was now going to be partnering with the chairman, it was not exactly conducive for Pete to have a full-time staff member digging up more of the industry’s plentiful dirt; a couple of previous Democratic committee chairmen had already run into serious legal troubles. (And, in truth, there seemed to be something a bit fishy about Chairman Murphy.) I was reading up on the arcana of maritime policy, but active investigative work was abruptly put on hold.


Actually, there was more than a dubious aroma around the Chairman: in early February 1980, when I was honeymooning with a new wife, we heard a news flash that the FBI was investigating Murphy (and some other Congressional Democrats) as part of a bribery scheme called “Operation Abscam.”


In fact, Murphy and several other officials sere soon indicted and eventually went to jail.


The news report immediately torpedoed  the plan for a joint maritime reform bill; Murphy stayed in Congress for another year, but no one would go near him. The Committee was largely paralyzed.


As a result, I still had a job, but instead of investigations, the workload was shifted (and reduced to) mainly being an informal employment
 counselor. I helped to gently deflect the endless stream of job-seekers that came through Pete’s congressional office (as they did all the others).

Pete had no more job slots, so my time was largely spent revising resumés and serving up a confusing mix of personal encouragement (“Keep looking”) with as much realism (“It’s very tough” — which really meant hopeless) as they could bear.

Such “constituency service” was a standard daily function all over the Hill, but it was not what I was there for.

By early 1981, Pete decided to run for the Senate, and gave up his senior status on the Committee to focus on that campaign. The next member in seniority stepped up, and one of his first acts was to issue pink slips to all Pete’s Committee staffers, including me, to replace us with his people: the memo was terse: “ Thanks; good luck; clear out.”  Words to that effect.


Nothing personal, and we weren’t being “fired”; that’s just how the congressional cookie crumbled.

Unemployment wasn’t fun. I liked the federal paychecks, perks and parking sticker. But overall, I had found the Hill a very boring place to work. And as I went back to the hand-to-mouth freelancer’s struggle, I was inwardly mostly relieved.

My Hill sojourn taught me a major truth about life inside the Beltway: Congress was necessary— somebody has to make laws. But the continuing crowds of job-seekers were mostly afflicted with a malady commonly called “Potomac Fever.” Its main symptom was the delusion that working on the Hill was a nonstop pageant of suspense, excitement, high drama and glory.

Sure, there were moments. But in fact, most legislative work involved processes and issues that were routine, tedious, arcane. Further, most real progress was typically mind-numbingly and maddeningly slow.

[One brief example: President Truman proposed a national health insurance program in 1949, when I was a first grader; the first major approximation of it was enacted eleven presidents and more than sixty years later, as “Obamacare,” when my granddaughter was halfway through high school.]

By 1981 I realized that somehow I had developed natural antibodies to Potomac Fever; I needed work, but didn’t look for another congressional job.

Maybe I acquired this immunity from Pete. The last time I saw him I was again a freelancer, at a Hill reception after he lost the tough Senate primary.

His fifteen-year Hill tenure was also about to end. But he didn’t look defeated or dejected— instead he was ebullient and eager to put Washington behind him, get back home to California, and raise crops and hell in many other ways.

Which he did, for over forty more colorful and influential years.

But I’m not the one to tell those later chapters of his story, only another of their many distant admirers.

The Los Angeles Times said, in part:

“[McCloskey] was always somebody who had the ability to act from complete integrity and not rely on ideology or party pressure,” Helen McCloskey, the congressman’s wife of 42 years, said in an interview Wednesday night.

With a photogenic square chin and a shock of Kennedy-esque hair, McCloskey represented his San Mateo district in Congress from 1967 to 1983. In that period, he may have become “the only political figure in America who has managed to offend just about everybody,” his friend, actor Paul Newman, said in a trailer for a 2009 documentary.

His outspokenness about Vietnam earned McCloskey an exile, as he later characterized it, to the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. But even in what he first considered a congressional backwater (the Committee was abolished in 1995), McCloskey managed to upset many of his fellow Republicans.

“Well, the Congress then was much more inclined to be made up of 70-, 80- and 90-year-olds who had grown up at a time when development and progress was the keynote of the country,” he told The Times in 1985. “Environmentalists in those days were viewed as little old ladies in tennis shoes or nuts or cranks or kooks.”

In the relative obscurity of his position, McCloskey thrived. “I was able to help put together a coalition that quadrupled the money for clean water with this funny little bill called the National Environmental Policy Act,” he said. “I’ll tell you, if the Congress had known what was in it, that bill wouldn’t have passed.”

He co-authored the 1973 Endangered Species Act — “the one thing I was proudest of, in that miserable town called Washington,” he said in a 2012 interview with environmentalist Huey Johnson.

McCloskey was co-chair of the first Earth Day. Its Democratic organizers, reaching across the aisle in 1970, could find no other Republican willing to do it.

But not every Democrat was enthralled with the blunt-talking McCloskey, particularly after he started airing his views on the Middle East in the early 1980s. McCloskey supported Yasser Arafat, then chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and angered Jewish organizations with his criticism of what he saw as “the Jewish lobby’s” undue influence over U.S. policies.

In 1982, McCloskey lost to future governor Pete Wilson in a primary election for the U.S. Senate. He told The Times that his controversial positions on Israel might have contributed to his defeat.

“He has been supportive of the Palestinian people’s plight since the late 1970s,” Helen McCloskey said. “Of course, now that is very relevant.”

Returning to California, McCloskey practiced law in the San Francisco area before cutting back his hours and moving to a ranch near the tiny Yolo County town of Rumsey.

Raising Arabian horses and growing organic olives and oranges, McCloskey made a quixotic primary run in 2006 against Rep. Richard Pombo, a longtime Republican congressman known for his opposition to environmental regulations. McCloskey lost but was credited by Democrats with weakening Pombo, who was defeated in the general election.

The AP report added:

[AP]: Years after leaving Washington, McCloskey made one last bid for elective office in 2006 when he challenged Richard Pombo of Northern California’s 11th District in a primary race that McCloskey described as a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. After losing to Pombo, who had spent most of his tenure in Washington attempting to undo the Endangered Species Act, he threw his support behind Democrat Jerry McNerney, the eventual winner.

It was foolish to run against him (Pombo), but we didnt have anybody else to do it, and I could not stand what a theyd become, the franktalking former Marine colonel said of the modern GOP in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press.

McCloskey cited disillusionment from influence peddling and ethics scandals under the George W. Bush administration as reasons why he switched parties in 2007 at the age of 79. A pox on them and their values, he wrote in an open letter explaining the switch to his supporters.

“McCloskey was a rarity in American politics — his actions were guided by his sense of justice, not by political ideology, Joe Cotchett, his law partner since 2004, said in a statement. He hated inequity and did not hesitate to take on members of his own political party.”

Born in Loma Linda, California, on Sept. 29, 1927, as Paul Norton McCloskey Jr., he graduated from South Pasadena High School, where the second baseman made the schools baseball hall of fame, although he selfdeprecatingly called himself perhaps the worst player on the baseball team.

McCloskey joined the Marine Corps as an officer and led a rifle platoon during some of the most intense fighting of the Korean War. He was awarded the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism, the nation’s secondhighest honor, a Silver Star for bravery in combat and two Purple Hearts.

He earned a law degree from Stanford University and founded an environmental law firm in Palo Alto before making the move to public office. . . .

The leftleaning McCloskey had a thundering presence in Washington, attempting to get onto the floor of the 1972 Republican National Convention during his bid to unseat thenPresident Nixon on an antiVietnam War platform. He ultimately was blocked by a rule written by his friend and law school debate partner, John Ehrlichman [also a top aide to the disgraced Nixon] that said a candidate could not get to the floor with fewer than 25 delegates. McCloskey had one.

Still, McCloskey loved to say he finished second.

He would later visit Ehrlichman in prison, where Nixons former counsel served 1.5 years for conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice in the Watergate breakin that led to the presidents resignation.

While in office, McCloskey also was known for befriending Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and criticized Israeli influence on American politics. The congressman was the first to demand Nixons impeachment, and the first to demand a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that allowed the Vietnam War.

But his enduring legacy is the Endangered Species Act . . . . McCloskey cowrote the legislation in 1973, after a campaign by young people empowered by Earth Day activities successfully unseated seven of 12 Congress members known as The Dirty Dozen for their antienvironment votes.

On that day, the world changed, McCloskey recalled in 2008. Suddenly, everybody was an environmentalist. My Republican colleagues started asking me for copies of old speeches I had given on water and air quality.

“A powerful champion of endangered species, Pete, ironically, became one,” said Denis Hayes, coorganizer of the Earth Day, about the rarity of a “green, antiwar Republican.”

After 15 years in the House, he lost his run for a Senate seat to Republican Pete Wilson, who went on to be Californias governor. He moved back to rural Yolo County, relishing the life of a farmer and parttime attorney.

You know, if people call you congressman all the time, youll end up thinking youre smarter than you are, he said.

McCloskey, however, couldnt stay quiet forever.

In 2006, after his unsuccessful race against Pombo, he helped form the Revolt of the Elders Coalition, a group of retired Republican congressmen who pushed to get soldiers more money for college, undo measures that made it tougher to investigate ethics violations and rallied against those who had received funding from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, including Pombo.

If you can do something at age 80 that positively affects our country, you should be proud of it. Otherwise theres no redeeming value in getting older, he said.

McCloskey is survived by his wife, Helen — his longtime press secretary whom he married in 1978 — and four children by his first wife: Nancy, Peter, John and Kathleen.

Pete McCloskey

4 thoughts on “Communist Champagne for Christmas, and Congressman Pete MCloskey — A Tribute to My Former Boss on Capitol Hill”

  1. Thanks for the piece on Pete. I only met him once- at a Quaker fund raiser at Hidden Villa Ranch in Palo Alto. Was Bob Levering on the Guardian staff when you were? Have you seen the documentary he produced “ The Movement and the Madman” It makes a very strong case that the 1969 Moratorium significantly pulled Nixon from the. Brink of a major escalation.
    Very much look forward to your posts,
    Bob Eaton

    1. Bob Eaton,

      Thanks for the kind words about the posts.
      Bob Levering and I overlapped at the Bay Guardian, though he was on the way out (and up). Hope he continues to do well. I have not seen his documentary; sounds good, tho.

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