Invisible Man:
Robert Kastenmeier's
behind-the-scenes influence on Wisconsin politics
by Leo Duran
 |
| Robert
Kastenmeier "was one of the truly outstanding members of the
House of Representatives,” said New York Times columnist Anthony
Lewis. Photo courtesy of Wisconsin State Journal. |
He fought for civil
liberties when almost no one else would. He also had the respect of liberals
and conservatives and represented the best ideals of Congress. But Washington
changed on him, and this man known for integrity and principles left the
House before it was his time.
For more than 30 years, from 1958 to 1990, Robert Kastenmeier represented
Wisconsin’s 2nd Congressional District, a region encompassing Madison.
As a young Democrat, he was forced onto this political scene. Full of trepidation
and modesty, he only did it because no one else wanted to run.
“I say I had no ambition for political office, but we had no candidate
for Congress,” Kastenmeier says, a man now in his 70s with an unadorned
but energetic voice. “I made myself available and said, ‘Look,
if we have no other candidate, I’ll assure you there will be one.’
No other candidate surfaced, so I ran for office.”
He ran during a time when candidates wouldn’t produce a glut of ads
for television. Instead, he drove and shook hands. In Congress, he made a
reputation by being courteous to all parties and earned respect by making
principled stands, something he admits is not a painless path to take. “It’s
not always easy,” he says. “It is hard to do what is right.”
But even though he was simply one voice in the House, his departure left a
void. “There is a huge hole in Congress where Kastenmeier left,”
says John Nichols, editorial writer for the Capital Times in Madison. “Kastenmeier
was a unique moral voice. He carried on the Wisconsin progressive tradition.”
Kastenmeier left when he lost reelection to a challenger unknown nationally,
but visible locally as a popular TV anchorman. The upset took even Kastenmeier
by surprise. The trend of politics, according to Nichols, was moving towards
slick, manufactured personalities. “He was very different than most
contemporary politicians,” Nichols says. “In the end, it cost
him politically.”
“We live in the age of sound bytes and money,” says Virginia Sloan,
Kastenmeier’s former counsel for the Judicial subcommittee, adding that
Kastenmeier did not fit into this mold. Instead, he was a principled man who
stood by his convictions. Politics wanted people who would shine in front
of a camera. But after the Internet boom and bust, after stem cell research
and after Sept. 11, some wish politicians like Kastenmeier never left.
Before the fall
Before Clinton’s “neo-liberalism” and before caucus scandals
and pension payouts rusted the Wisconsin tradition, Bob Kastenmeier made stands
in Congress.
“He was one of the truly outstanding members of the House of Representatives,”
said New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis at the 2002 Kastenmeier Colloquium
in Madison. “He fought for all of us against the constant pressures
to shortcut the Constitutional procedures to ensure our freedom.”
In 1972 he oversaw the repeal of the Emergency Detention Act. A remnant from
the McCarthy era, the act gave federal authorities the power to detain people
suspected of espionage or sabotage and place them in detention camps without
the benefit of a court hearing. But today, Attorney General John Ashcroft
is using criminal charges, immigration law violations and material witness
statutes to detain people, circumventing Kastenmeier’s goal for the
repeal.
“We have done the opposite,” Kastenmeier says of the current measures,
“holding people here and there, incommunicado and without due process.
I think it’s indefensible.”
 |
| Bob Kastenmeier served as Congressman for
Wisconsin's 2nd Congressional District for more than 30 years. Photo courtesy of Wisconsin State Journal. |
Civil liberty advocates
have called it a gross violation, but few in Congress were willing to
take a stand against the measures. Had Kastenmeier still been in Congress,
“He would have been a good player and an important player,”
Nichols says. Kastenmeier appealed to liberals and conservatives, he adds,
and would have provided a distinct, moral voice in the House.
Kastenmeier also made a difference in 1986 by restricting the powers of
federal authorities to use wiretapping and computer monitoring for illegal
surveillance. But with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, Congress
granted the FBI the ability to intercept conversations for surveillance
purposes.
“The final version that was passed was hastily brought to the House,”
says Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), one of the few who voted against the
Act, “And when you’re voting on a bill called the ‘USA
PATRIOT Act,’ some might say that a vote against it would be less
than patriotic.”
“A lot of politicians these days aren’t concerned about the
substance of issues as they are about the politics of them,” Sloan
says. “[Kastenmeier] really cared about the substance of things.”
There aren’t many like Kastenmeier in Congress today, according
to people like Sloan and Lewis. Based on his history with wiretapping,
Kastenmeier would have voted against the PATRIOT Act. Of those currently
in Congress, though, only 66 members of the House voted against the PATRIOT
Act, and in the Senate one person voiced opposition: Wisconsin Sen. Russ
Feingold.
Not surprisingly, some of Kastenmeier’s decisions were controversial
during his time. For example, he voted against funding for the House Un-American
Activities Committee.
“Later I took a position against the war in Vietnam,” he says,
a difficult decision to make considering the political climate at the
time favored the war.
His opponents made these decisions difficult many times later on: he didn’t
support former President George Bush, Sr.’s, resolution to send
troops to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. In his own community, a Wisconsin
State Journal columnist called his stance “confusing and counterproductive.”
Some claimed that he didn’t speak for the will of the people, but
that he acted on his own.
“He wasn’t the kind of politician who’d poll his district,
and then decide how to vote based on what the district believed,”
says Mike Remington, an attorney in Washington D.C. and former chief counsel
for Kastenmeier’s subcommittee. Instead, Kastenmeier would often
make unpopular stands on the grounds that popular opinion is not necessarily
the most ethical or Constitutional opinion.
To the public at the time––to his constituents––these
political steps took guts, though they still admired him for his convictions.
“A lot of people in the area respected him for his decisions,”
says Dennis Dresang, professor of political science at UW-Madison.
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| Campaigning in Stoughton in 1980. Photo courtesy of Robert Kastenmeier |
Background
noise
At
the height of his career, Kastenmeier chaired the Congressional Subcommittee
for Courts, Civil Rights and the Administration of Justice. It’s
here that Bob Kastenmeier earned his greatest legacy: he was the dean
of copyright law. Kastenmeier largely took on this role because he says
he had to. He says that no matter where the public placed him he would
do the best job possible, and this is where he ended up. And only in a
few cases did glory found him here.
In 1976, for example, Kastenmeier took part in completely overhauling
copyright law. VCRs, cable companies and the Internet––these
new technologies all needed to be addressed. Kastenmeier helped balance
the needs of individuals and corporations.
Then in 1984, Kastenmeier dealt with something Hollywood feared: the VCR.
Despite the testimonies of Hollywood figures like Jack Valenti, president
of the Motion Picture Association of America, who opposed the VCR, Kastenmeier
voted in favor of consumers.
“Disney wanted to extend a ban on the renting of videotapes,”
Kastenmeier says. “Well, I refused to do that. That’s why
you’re able to go to a video rental store, get a video and not pay
extra to the studio.”
These issues may have earned him fame in the national realm, but rarely
did these kinds of issues travel the thousands of miles back to Wisconsin.
To many Wisconsinites, copyrights just made roman numerals appear at the
ends of movies––it didn’t give them health care or a
strong economy, and he says that, unfortunately, he spent about more than
50 percent of his time on copyright law, more time than he would have
liked.
 |
| Bob Kastenmeier shakes hands with a constituent
on the campaign trail. Kastenmeier was a state representative for Wisconsin’s
2nd District for more than 30 years. Photo courtesy of Bob Kastenmeier |
He not only avoided glory
by working on these issues, but he is also a modest man who rarely thrust
himself into the spotlight. He was not known as a dynamic politician.
He was never the kind to pound on podiums or dart right for the cameras
after a public appearance. So Kastenmeier rarely garnered a wealth of
positive press that politicians cloy for today.
“He abhorred attention,” Remington says. “In fact, we
would do press releases about his accomplishments, like, ‘Reagan
signs Kastenmeier Bill,’ and they would sit. You’d go and
ask, ‘What in the world is going on? Where is that press release?’
He’d say, ‘Well, it was too self-congratulatory.’”
While he was off doing his “invisible” work, back in Wisconsin,
“He was known as a local guy, as just a nice guy from the area,”
Dresang says.
After more than 30 years, people found it easy to overlook the nice guy
from Watertown. In 1990, the 2nd district apparently wanted a young, dynamic
figure to speak out and stand for their rights. There, they wanted a celebrity.
Star search
Kastenmeier could be labeled as a defender of the unpopular, the protector
of the underdog. In some ways that’s what he always was: the underdog.
In Congress, “He was willing to stand up for his rights and not
prevail, not win everything,” Remington says.
Even with his first victory in the elections, Kastenmeier will say it
was a matter of circumstance. “It wasn’t Bob Kastenmeier.
It was the right time, and I was fortunate.” In 1958, he says, people
were soured to the policies of Eisenhower and wanted a change.
Then in 1990, Kastenmeier ran for his 16th reelection. After more than
30 years in politics, he planned this one would be his last, and it was.
He lost to a local celebrity, former TV news anchor and Republican Scott
Klug. “I didn’t expect to lose that last election,”
Kastenmeier says simply. But Kastenmeier was congenial to the end, leaving
his seat gracefully and wishing Klug well.
Looking back on it, even after years of toiling on copyright law, on judicial
reform and on patent issues, Kastenmeier says that at some point these
issues weren’t enough in the elections.
“Because they had nothing to do with one another,” he says
firmly. “In other words, if I served the courts well, that had nothing
to do with the district. These were things I felt I needed to do, but
these were not vote-getters.”
“He had become a national representative, maybe an international
representative,” muses Remington, “which, I suppose, doesn’t
sit very well when it doesn’t translate back into your own district,
and you didn’t try to translate it.”
People say that another reason Kastenmeier lost is that, after more than
30 years, he was simply getting old.
“[Scott] Klug’s campaign was youthful and energetic,”
Dresang says. “Kastenmeier came across as being very tired. That’s
probably what hurt him the most.”
Kastenmeier lost by a six-point margin, far more than analysts and even
Kastenmeier expected.
Afterward, the New York Times and the Washington Post printed articles
and editorials mourning his loss, calling it a surprising upset. One reads,
“[T]o the astonishment of everyone, the 66-year-old Mr. Kastenmeier
was defeated by a political unknown.” But despite being “unknown”
to these papers, Klug was well known on the TV sets of the 2nd district.
Even though Kastenmeier may have not have been a star, though, he still
walked away with a legacy.
 |
| The Robert W. Kastenmeier Courthouse in Madison
serves a testimony to his contributions to the state.
Photo by Danielle Chase |
Far from
home Years
after the election, Kastenmeier no longer lives in Wisconsin. With all
the connections and friendships he’s made in Washington, he decided
to make his second home his permanent one: he now resides in Virginia
outside of Washington. Currently he maintains an office at the Library
of Congress, but as for his other activities, “I’m reading
the morning paper,” he says, matter of factly. “I’m
not doing anything in particular.”
“When he got out,” says Remington, “he never took advantage
of it: never sold himself, never joined a law firm, never became a consultant.
My goodness, you work on intellectual property and you could sell advice
for lots of money. But that’s not Bob.”
One of the few things Kastenmeier is working on is his memoir. Although,
after more than 10 years to gather his stories, he will tell how much
progress he’s made: “I’m not very far. I have some notes,
but I wouldn’t even call them chapters.”
Kastenmeier never predicated himself or his work on prestige. “I
guess he understood that some of things in life are the invisible things
that you do to make government better,” Remington says.
Kastenmeier doesn’t need to clamor for attention, anyway, because
others are doing it for him. In honor of his services, a bright, Lego-blue
structure stands in downtown Madison named the Robert W. Kastenmeier Federal
Courthouse. The UW-Madison’s Law School presents the Kastenmeier
Colloquium every fall, and Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist was
its first speaker. “It’s very flattering,” Kastenmeier
says. “It’s reassuring that you’re recognized.”
Despite the accolades, though, “I don’t know that people will
remember me,” Kastenmeier says plainly. “I don’t think
other than the fact that I have a lecture and my name on the courthouse
will keep me alive, particularly.”
Kastenmeier believes that it’s not the personality in front of audiences
that is important. It’s the work that he put in behind the scenes
that made democracy work, and if he’s made a difference, then that
counts. If he’s forgotten, without resignation or sadness he’ll
say, “Well, that’s life.”
