Richard F. Fenno, Jr. 1926-2020

 
The American political process comes alive in Richard Fenno's The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle. Written before Quayle came to national prominence in 1988, the book offers a fascinating account of his efforts to master the Senate system and then exploit legislative success in winning easy reelection.  At the same time, the narrative traces the making of a law — describing the infighting, the strategies, the competing egos, the humiliations, and finally the brazen attempts at credit stealing.

The book tells how Quayle, then a freshman Republican subcommittee chairman, pushed a major job training bill through Congress in 1982 with the help of Massachusetts Democrat Edward M. Kennedy — a bipartisan alliance that angered the Reagan White house. At first opposed to the bill, the administration later sought to embrace Quayle's work as its own achievement.

Fenno portrays a buoyant, confident Quayle who disdains the fine print of legislation but relishes the leadership actions essential to enacting a law. Using his trademark "over the shoulder" method, Fenno observed Quayle and aides at close hand throughout the young senator's first six-year term, in Washington and Indiana. The result  is a readable, instructive case study of growth and development in the campaigning-governing-campaigning sequence that is part of every senator's political life.

Watch the C-SPAN interview about The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle

Review: The Senate Quintet
The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle.
The Presidential Odyssey of John Glenn.
The Emergence of a Senate Leader: Pete Domenici and the Reagan Budget. Learning to Legislate: The Senate Education of Arlen Specter. When Incumbency Fails: The Senate Career of Mark Andrews.

Bryon E. Shafer. The Journal of Politics, Vol. 56, No. 1. (February, 1994).

In magnitude alone, the collection is prodigious, having no obvious counterpart in modern political science. It will come as no surprise that the individual pieces are also models of scholarly presentation. Each is carefully organized to develop its argument. Each is open and self-conscious about the evidence going into that argument, as well — mirabile dictu — as the evidence which is missing. And each is fluently written: These books are "crafted" in the very best sense. Together, they constitute an ambitious example of what direct observation and elite interviewing can produce. Together, they offer an imposing overview of the political life of the penultimate elective elites of American politics, U.S. senators. What these books produce in intellectual terms is equally impressive. At their most immediate and accessible, they provide detailed exposition of some of the central processes of the American politics of our time. Yet while doing so, they employ a carefully specified conceptual framework, running across — and unifying — the entire project. As a result, they exemplify, in much more implicit fashion, a notion of political causality and a view of explanatory mission which are integral to the basic methodological choices of political science. Finally, in a fashion encompassing but going beyond all this, they offer succeeding generations a rich and nuanced picture of contemporary politicking: They are — as political history, too — a landmark.

…

That five contemporary and coordinated volumes, executed in this way and with this reach, are likely to sustain their landmark status long after other contemporary works have passed from the scene. Which is to say: It is a reasonable guess that Dick Fenno has written a central part of the story of the politics of our time. In other words, when political historians need to go back, for a sense of the dynamics of American political life, for the fabric of practical politicking in the late-twentieth century, they are likely to be drawn to the Senate Quintet.