R.I.P., Claiborne Pell

While Rhode Island is justly known for its share of political chicanery, we Ocean Staters generally do pretty well in selecting our senators, a relative handful of whom have represented the state for most of the last half-century. Pell was among this select group.

Here's part of a look at Pell, written by the ProJo's John Mulligan after the senator announced in 1995 his plans to retire.

He was to the manor born - to the Bellevue Avenue cottages of Newport and to Pellsbridge, a New York estate where the servants addressed him as "Mr. Claiborne."

He came of age with a front-row seat on history. He was with his diplomat father to hear London applaud Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. He was at Princeton for what he called "the last of the F. Scott Fitzgerald days" before the war. He played bit parts in the opening scenes of the Cold War, watching the tanks of Soviet occupation roll into Czechoslavakia, clerking for the authors of the United Nations charter in San Francisco.

When he tossed his high hat into the rough-and-tumble ring of the 196 2Senate race, however, Pell was deemed the least electable man in America by no less an authority than Jack Kennedy.

But Pell confounded, amused, and finally befriended such skeptics. He won that election in a quirky style that has since inspired countless parodies. During his 35 years in the Senate, the strangest old bird in American politics has pecked away at his obstacles to compile an uncommon record of achievement.