Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who lost an epic battle with cancer Sunday morning, played major and often controversial roles across a more than four-decade political career while successfully navigating state politics like no one before, and perhaps no one who will follow.
Known for his smarts, relentlessness and work habits that exhausted much younger staff members, Mr. Specter also displayed a vastly underrated local touch that likely explained more than anything else why he survived a Pennsylvania record of 30 years as senator.
A fierce independence that some thought was motivated only by political self-preservation eventually cost him his seat when he switched to the Democratic Party in 2009 after spending most of his career as a Republican.
The loss definitively demonstrated that Mr. Specter was never as revered in his state as perhaps Sen. Edward Kennedy was in Massachusetts, but he died at age 82 having set standards that politicians who seek or hold statewide office will struggle to match.
"There is no doubt about it," said G. Terry Madonna, Ph.D., the noted political analyst. "He was the most influential senator in the history of the state. ⦠No one was tougher. No one was less concerned that what he did might be controversial."
Yes, Mr. Specter was the author of the single-bullet theory, the endlessly questioned explanation of how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
Yes, his tangle with Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork during a confirmation hearing forever undermined his credentials with conservative Republicans.
Yes, his intense questioning of Anita Hill during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearing alienated women and liberal friends and almost cost him his seat.
And yes, his search back to Scottish law to vote "not proved" after the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton had people scratching their heads.
"Arlen had his ups and downs like all of us, but his ups were very high. He was one of the hardest-working and one of the best senators we ever had," former Gov. William W. Scranton said in a statement. "He really did a job for all of us."
For 30 years, almost every Northeast Pennsylvania project that required federal money also required Arlen Specter.
Mr. Specter is survived by his family and a legacy that touches historic events, but locally he is survived by the Steamtown National Historic Site, the Tobyhanna Army Depot and levees along the Lackawanna River and Susquehanna River that give thousands of riverside residents peace of mind.
Also surviving are the Mall at Steamtown, the new control tower at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport, the renovated Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Plains Twp., the downtown movie theater in Wilkes-Barre, the Pine Street housing development in Hazleton and transportation center there, countless road and bridge construction projects and on and on across Pennsylvania.
And if or when the long-planned downtown transportation center in Scranton, the passenger train between Scranton and New York City and the widening of Interstate 81 between Clarks Summit and Nanticoke to three lanes come to pass, local historians will be able to look back and report that Arlen Specter helped them all along.
All benefited from federal money obtained with help from Mr. Specter.
Earmarks - those special set-asides allocated by congressmen and senators for favored projects - no longer exist so there is considerable doubt that millions of dollars in federal aid will pour into the region the way Mr. Specter made it rain from his perch on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"What a great friend to Scranton and Northeastern Pennsylvania," said former Mayor Jim Connors, who ran the city for 12 of Mr. Specter's 30 years. "We'd watch him on television, all those hearings and the next thing you'd know, he'd be walking down Providence Road with us."
Mr. Connors told the story of joining Mr. Specter and an Army Corps of Engineers colonel as they scaled the stairs of City Hall for a public meeting with flooded-out citizens.
"He said, 'Now colonel, when we go upstairs and I ask you if we're going to get the money to fix this river, you're going to say yes, right?" Mr. Specter asked.
"Right," the colonel said sheepishly.
The levees the citizens wanted were built.
"He'd tease me a lot, he was so powerful and he'd always say what a great honor it was to be in Scranton and with the great mayor of Scranton," Mr. Connors said. "He would joke about how he was 'spending more time with Mayor Connors than I am with my wife and people are beginning to wonder.'"
Mr. Specter tried a stand-up comedy career toward the end of his Senate days with mixed results at best, but all the time he spent here was no accident.
The senator was known for doing his best to travel to all 67 Pennsylvania counties every year. He didn't always succeed but he visited every county multiple times. He traveled to Northeast Pennsylvania hundreds of times - 15 visits to Tobyhanna alone. That might explain why, when he lost the Democratic primary to Rep. Joe Sestak in 2010, Lackawanna County was one of only three counties Mr. Specter won.
"He knew every official, in every area, in every part of the state," said Andy Wallace, Mr. Specter's northeast regional director for almost his entire tenure and the senior member of his staff when he retired. "He knew every commissioner by name, he knew every mayor by name, he knew county elected official by name, he knew all the party people by name and he called them and spoke to them."
"No one worked the state like he did," said Christopher Nicholas, who managed Mr. Specter's last two re-election campaigns. "He's just relentless, he wanted it more than the next guy."
After losing his first run for the Senate to Republican John Heinz in 1976, Mr. Specter won five terms, gaining a reputation as an aggressive campaigner. Running against him was described by one political consultant as "listening to your (school) teacher scratch her fingernails against the blackboard for the entire day."
Mr. Nicholas said there was "never a dull day in Specterpalooza," his name for the way Mr. Specter juggled politics, policy and fundraising on local visits across the state.
"You always had to bring your 'A' game. He did not suffer fools at all," he said.
Washingtonian Magazine ranked Mr. Specter among the meanest bosses in Congress, based on anonymous conversations with Capitol Hill aides.
Mr. Wallace did not dispute his former boss' demanding nature, but always felt the "meanest" characterization was unfair.
"When he yells at you, you learn from it. If you can work for him, you can work for anybody," Mr. Wallace said. "His mantra and his motto was always, 'Never give in' (the name of one of his books) ... He works through everything (including cancer) and he encouraged everyone else to work through everything. He was tough, he was driven and he was dedicated, He worked 14 hours a day and he expected everyone else to work 14 hours a day. He wouldn't ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself."
Mr. Specter fought off Hodgkin's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and survived a brain tumor and heart bypass surgery and kept working much of the time.
Asked how he did it during a Times-Tribune editorial board meeting, Mr. Specter, his hair white, said, "Two martinis a night."
But if you worked for him and encountered personal trouble, his compassionate side emerged. Few people know that, like his boss, Mr. Wallace beat cancer multiple times with the help of the same doctor, John Glick. Mr. Specter introduced them. Mr. Wallace choked up thinking about the man who, in his final years in office, routinely referred to him as "Sen. Wallace."
"He was a boss on the surface when it came to work. When we were alone, he was a compassionate, considerate man and one of the best friends I ever had," Mr. Wallace said.
Helga Hooper, Ph.D., a psychologist, Republican and Holocaust survivor who lives in Clifford Twp., said Mr. Specter was like "an older brother" to her. Believing Anita Hill lied during her testimony on Justice Thomas' sexual harassment of her, Dr. Hooper campaigned for Mr. Specter in 1992 when his questioning of Ms. Hill almost cost him the election to Democrat Lynn Yeakel.
She knew Mr. Specter, a huge supporter of funding the National Institutes of Health, as a leader on research into women's health issues.
"I have never seen a man so brave and so strong and so focused on what he knew he had to do," Dr. Hooper said.
He emphasized doing.
When U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-11, was Hazleton's mayor, Mr. Specter helped obtain money for the Pine Street housing project.
"He knew it inside and out, he knew what federal money we were going after," Mr. Barletta said. "We were tapping into state, local, federal, private, and he was on top of it ... He was always interested when you had a vision for something big."
Unwilling, Mr. Specter said, to have his 30-year record judged in a primary election solely by Republicans who were growing more conservative and more disenchanted with him, Mr. Specter switched parties and lost the Democratic primary to Rep. Joe Sestak. He was done in by a television commercial that showed the allegiance to President George W. Bush that helped him win his last election.
His party switch fed the notion that Mr. Specter's opinions shifted with the political winds, and that bothers Mr. Barletta.
"I don't think that was really the guy," he said. "I think people on both sides, you always knew where Arlen Specter stood ... I see Arlen more as a deal-maker, someone who could get something done, get people in a room and get something done. He was for the end line, the goal line."
Leo Vergnetti, a longtime local friend, said Mr. Specter is "one of those guys you wish you had today."
"He's the type of guy that the country is starving for," Mr. Vergnetti said. "Whenever you hear on television now that we're looking for people who come across the aisle, make things happen and get together and compromise a little bit on each side .... Well, Arlen Specter was the master of that. And instead of getting credit for that, in the end, he got the blame for it."
Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com