On a wall of his cluttered office hangs the faded letter that Claude Denson Pepper wrote, before leaving for work one July morning in 1978, to his wife of 43 years as she lay dying of cancer.
"Dearest Mildred," it said. "You have not awakened. I pray for the early time when we can go together as we have done for so long. I love you with all my heart."Claude Pepper, 88, never old enough nor lonely enough to quit, waited more than a decade for that time, which came Tuesday. As he lay dying at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the love letters came flooding in from the nation.
"Perk up," said one card scrawled by a shaky hand. "You work so hard, you're probably just exhausted."
Many of the well-wishers were Americans 65 and older. President Bush, who will reach that age next month, paid a bedside visit. To senior America, the withered, dog-faced congressman from Florida was a peerless hero, an ever-alert guardian of the fastest growing and, in his view, the most commonly mistreated segment of the population.
The oldest member of Congress and chairman of the House Rules Committee, Pepper was known both as Mr. Social Security and Mr. Medicaid, for his efforts to establish and strengthen both programs. And thanks to him, federal law now bans employers from forcing workers to retire before age 70.
His own advice to the older set was to "keep on doing what you're doing," but maybe at a slower pace.
"I was playing golf one day," he said a few years back, "when I noticed my partner's clubs were lighter than mine. I found I could handle them easier. So I changed to less weighty clubs.
"So that's what you do in life," he said. "When you come to a time when there's a need for any sort of change, simply lighten your clubs and go right ahead."
Despite heart surgery in 1976, despite relying on a pacemaker since 1982, despite dismal hearing and vision - he wore a hearing aid in each ear and thick, horn-rimmed trifocals over his blue-gray eyes - he never lightened that much of his load. Though emotionally numbed for more than a year by the death of his wife, Pepper charged back in the 1980s, keeping long office hours and gallivanting around the country to push his own social legislation in the face of Ronald Reagan's budget cuts.
"I've got a lot to do," he said. "Except for my terrible burden of loneliness, I enjoy life. It has always been good to me."
His legislative achievements, spanning full careers in both the Senate and House, were legend, reaching far beyond concern for the elderly. He fought for the first minimum wage, 25 cents an hour, in 1938. His first bill, that same year, extended federal assistance to handicapped children. He was among the first members of Congress to support equal rights and equal pay for women.
Born in 1900 in rural Alabama, Pepper was a pre-eminent eyewitness to America's turbulent journey through the 20th century. He was 5 years old, in 1905, when he first saw an automobile. He witnessed the celestial passing of Halley's Comet in 1910 and again in 1986. He met Orville Wrightand greeted the Apollo 11 crew on their return to Earth.
He stared Adolf Hitler down in a Nuremberg beer hall, sized up Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin and earned Winston Churchill's undying affection for casting the only vote in the Senate for the Lend-Lease Act the first time around.
It long annoyed Pepper that some of the younger generation presumed to think that he championed the elderly because he was old himself. He was 28 years old and a member of the Florida Legislature when he introduced a bill waiving fishing license fees for senior citizens. He was in his 30s when he took up Franklin Delano Roosevelt's crusade for Social Security. "I was a New Dealer," he has said, "before there was a New Deal."
One of his first bills, in 1937, created the National Cancer Institute, the first of several government centers to explore cures for diseases that especially afflict the elderly.
He was 36 when he was elected to the Senate, where he remained for 14 years until his defeat in 1950 by fellow Democrat George Smathers in an extremely bitter election. After an interim and lucrative 12-year period in private law practice, Pepper spent 26 years in the House.
A homely man, 5-foot-7, with a bulbous red nose and the mournful face of a basset hound, Pepper lived on his dreams. As a farm boy in Dudleyville, Ala., he carved "Claude Pepper, U.S. Senator" into a tree trunk when he was 10 years old.