A late-afternoon vote in August had been dragging on for a while before Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and her longtime chief of staff ambled through the US Capitol.
"I've tried to time it," David Grannis told Feinstein as he escorted his 89-year-old boss to the Senate floor, "so you will get there towards the end of the first vote. From there, we can head over to your hideaway. Whatever you'd like to do."
Feinstein slowly nodded in agreement as Grannis led her from the bustling Senate subway to the elevators that empty out just steps from the chamber. While some senators might sprint or power walk to cast their vote in time, Feinstein's aide was bringing her to the Senate 40 minutes after the roll call had started to ensure she wouldn't have to stand around on the floor for what could be an hour-long stretch of votes.
This gingerly treatment — Grannis' comment was meant for Feinstein's ears only but was still loud enough for an Insider reporter standing nearby to hear — was especially notable as her cognition and judgment increasingly come into question after three decades in the Senate.
It's also increasingly commonplace in America's gerontocracy.
Congress today is as old as the legislative branch has ever been. The 117th Congress has 21 lawmakers who are in their 80s and 103 who are in their 70s, and the average age of a senator is 63, an Insider analysis found.
Four months in the making, Insider's "Red, White, and Gray" series explores the costs, benefits, and dangers of life in a democracy helmed by those of advanced age, where issues of profound importance to the nation's youth and future — technology, civil rights, energy, the environment — are largely in the hands of those whose primes have passed.
Veteran Capitol Hill staffers told Insider that career lawmakers who serve well beyond traditional retirement age typically endure one final, grueling rite of passage before taking their place in history: a gauntlet of damning headlines and vicious rumors impugning their ability to serve.
There's plenty of reasons for this, as evidenced by an Insider report on how aging affects politicians' greatest weapon — their brains — delving into how mental acuity, cognitive function, and "crystallized intelligence" play into modern politics.
These are also very different times.
Unlike the deferential treatment given to whispers about President John F. Kennedy's extramarital affairs or President Ronald Reagan's mental health before his Alzheimer's diagnosis became public more than six years after he left office in 1994, modern politicians now have every aspect of their persona picked apart in real time. Today's media fact checkers, political opposition researchers, and self-styled social media satirists let nothing slide, presenting every well-documented blunder to the court of public opinion and airing grievances that were previously verboten.
As one of the oldest senators in office, Iowa's Chuck Grassley is — much like Feinstein — finding his every public appearance dissected online for any missteps. The 88-year-old Republican is vying for an eighth term this fall, a commitment that would keep him grinding away in Washington, DC, through his 95th birthday.
Grassley is poised to join a fraternity of federal lawmakers who in recent years have continued to serve while growing increasingly frail and in some cases dying in office. They include:
- Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina: remained in office until his 100th birthday and died in 2003
- Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts: died in office in 2009 at 77
- Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia: died in office in 2010 at 92, having spent more than half of his life in the US Senate
- Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona: died in office in 2018 at 81
- Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan: retired from Congress in 2015 and died in 2019 at 92
- Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi: retired from Congress in 2018 and died in 2019 at 81
- Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah: retired from Congress in 2019 and died this year at 88
- Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska: died in office this year at 88 while flying home from Washington, DC
Former congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle characterized age-related critiques — which tend to become more frequent and ferocious as lawmakers run for reelection into their 70s, 80s, and 90s — as demoralizing.
"Our society as a whole looks at age and sees someone who's walking with a cane or a walker and tends to think that there are mental issues as well as physical issues," a former Byrd aide said of the broadsides launched against the longest-serving senator in US history. "And that's not always the case."
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, told Insider that some political maneuvering is more tactical.
"Remember the uproar that Feinstein caused when she hugged Lindsey Graham?" Heye, a former House leadership aide, said. Many Democratic strategists urged leadership to get rid of Feinstein in late 2020, bashing her for lending credence to what they alleged was an illegitimate rush job after she congratulated the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the end of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett.
Heye added that while voters ultimately decide which candidate is best suited to represent them, nothing's going to stop ageist sniping if the opportunity presents itself.
"A moment of bipartisan affection is seen as anathema in Washington, DC, these days and provides fodder for your own side to go after you," Heye said, adding that partisans who no longer consider Feinstein liberal enough will use any excuse to force her out.
"Now, it may be valid," Heye said. "But it's also politically advantageous."
'Age really is not the issue it may appear to be'
During a floor speech on June 28, 2007, Byrd lashed out against reports about his noticeably quivering hands and cane-assisted walking.
—Grassley Works (@GrassleyWorks) September 24, 2021
Grassley's office did not respond to Insider's requests for comment about how the iconic Iowan intends to keep up with the hectic congressional workload as a nonagenarian.
Grassley has for decades delved into high-profile policy areas, leading the charge on tax law, judicial confirmations, and government whistleblower cases dating back to the Reagan administration.
Jennifer Heins, his longtime scheduler, remains glued to Grassley's side as he crisscrosses the Capitol complex, cheerily juggling daily briefing papers, committee work materials, and recording devices to capture any questions congressional reporters lob at the Iowa Republican. Heins did not respond to Insider's request for comment about their daily rigors.
Ira Shapiro, a former Senate Democratic staffer who's now an author, said Grassley is jeopardizing his legacy by stubbornly soldiering on in 2022. Shapiro framed the warning by listing examples of others he said had tragically lingered too long. Byrd, he said, "became a shadow of himself before dying in office." Thurmond withered into "a joke and an embarrassment." And Feinstein had "tarnished her storied career."
Grassley "apparently cannot conceive of life without being in the Senate, or regards himself as indispensable, or both," Shapiro wrote in a blistering op-ed article in June. "But his decision clearly shows egregiously bad judgment, which is not going to improve between ages 89 and 95."
A former Strom Thurmond aide, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the inner workings of congressional offices, said experience keeps government moving in the right direction. "Seniority protects the country. It serves the institution," the former GOP aide told Insider, adding that seasoned dealmakers are preferable to partisan bomb-throwers "with some agenda that they're driving."
Calling the shots
Heye, the GOP strategist, said that what bugged him the most about some older lawmakers staying in office is what he described as a misconstrued sense of entitlement.
"We've had situations where members of Congress are completely incapacitated — but because the seat is often viewed as theirs, they don't have to do anything about it," he said.
Thurmond and Cochran are prime examples of politicians who ceded power to their staffers while clinging to office, Heye said.
"Everybody accepted that because the office still had to function," Heye said. He added that Thurmond's final chief of staff, Robert "Duke" Short, and Cochran's final chief of staff, Brad White, "were seen as the de facto senator."
Stories about Short's shadow role abound.
A November 2002 article in The New York Times said Short "makes the decisions in his office" while Thurmond plodded along, "often confused." A March 2001 Gannett profile billed Short as "an invisible senator who shuns the limelight" yet wielded incredible power in an evenly-divided Senate.
Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, spoke fondly of Cochran. But Lott said his Mississippi delegation-mate "wasn't doing very well towards the end."
"Your friends, your staff, and your family should try to help an older member or a sick member know what their limits are," Lott told Insider.
Though Cochran announced his retirement two years before the end of his seventh term, the reputational damage had been done. An October 2017 article in Politico portrayed the 45-year lawmaker as "frail and disoriented," while a June 2014 report in The Atlantic said that "Cochran's staff moved him from place to place like a prop" on the campaign trail.
White, now the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation, told Insider his boss always had the final word.
"He never was not in control of his office or in making his own decisions," White said, adding that Cochran prided himself on independently researching issues to his satisfaction.
But mounting issues such as a bleeding ulcer that went undetected for several months and a kidney infection that landed Cochran in the hospital simply wore him down, White said.
"I don't deny that he had health issues. And I certainly don't deny that he had challenges," White said. "But the bottom line was when those challenges began to impact his ability to serve, he was ready to leave. And he did that. On his own."
But leaving Congress on one's own terms, White said, is much tougher when there's a target on your back.
"As soon as some of these older members have something that puts a little blood in the water," he said, "all the sharks come to feed."
Moving in for the kill
Congress is full of stories of knives-out moments for fading leaders.
The Knoxville Focus recounts how in 1956, Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate majority leader at the time, convinced Theodore Green, the octogenarian chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to step down.
They did that so Sen. William Fulbright, who was 40 years younger, could take over for his "increasingly deaf" colleague. The artful nudging was said to have almost backfired when Green said something about reconsidering his retirement after basking in all the praise Johnson, the future vice president and president, had lavished on him in a congratulatory speech.
"Green's comment naturally horrified Johnson and his allies and it became necessary to suspend the proceedings so that Senator Green could be taken to a back room and persuaded to issue a statement firmly resigning his committee chairmanship," the report said.
Earlier this year, would-be successors tried to topple the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, David Scott, asserting, according to Politico, that the 77-year-old, 10-term lawmaker had "noticeably slowed in the last few years." Scott's office did not respond to Insider's request for comment about the internecine tussle, but he put the prospective gavel poachers on blast in statements to other outlets.
"You have people there that want to be chairman and they see you with a cane to help you with your mobility," Scott, a Democrat from Georgia, told Politico, adding that he was recovering from surgery. "People shouldn't hold the fact that you're having a little difficulty with your leg to deny you an opportunity."
A former House Democratic leadership aide said that sometimes the threats to older members arise from within. The person, who requested anonymity in order to avoid retribution, told Insider that if older lawmakers aren't careful, they can find themselves boxed in by sneaky handlers.
"It starts with the member trusting them. And then over time it becomes a tangible power that they have … essentially their own element of the fiefdom," the former staffer said.
Even if a lawmaker figures out they're being taken advantage of, the former staffer said the need to keep up appearances in modern politics makes severing ties with nefarious aides nearly impossible.
"At a certain point, they know too much," the former staffer said, adding that longtime aides "can do too much damage" if they leave on bad terms: "Not necessarily ethically, but just in a publicly embarrassing way."
'Preserving their dignity'
Convincing career lawmakers to hang it up before they tarnish their respective legacies is tricky business, a veteran GOP leadership aide told Insider.
"Staff had a fear that their member of Congress would create a public embarrassment forcing them to resign or retire from office in disgrace without preserving their dignity," said the former GOP staffer, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the inner workings of congressional offices.
The former staffer described it as a psychological burden borne by senior aides determined to shepherd aging bosses out the door before they self-destructed.
The stakes only get higher, Heye said, as lawmakers test the limits of human endurance.
"You get reelected at 88 for a six-year term," Heye said. "Well, there's a big difference between 88 and 94 — and what can happen in that intervening time."
