APRIL 1 • 2021 | 15

an endless debate would soon 
back down.

DETROIT ROOTS
But though he is a man of the 
Senate, Carl Levin is, even more 
so, a man whose roots are firmly 
in Detroit. 
The one incident he cites 
at the very beginning of this 
book, something that shaped 
his career, happened when 
he was Detroit City Council 
president in 1975 and incompe-
tent administrators at the U.S. 
Department of Housing and 
Urban Development were refus-
ing to tear down blighted homes 
they owned.
He led the Council to defy 
HUD and tear down the homes 
anyway, and dared HUD to sue, 
saying, “Do you think even one 
out of 12 jurors would vote to 
convict?”
They didn’t sue. Levin said 
HUD’s incompetence “convinced 
me that our elected members 
of Congress were not taking 
responsibility for overseeing 
the programs they had voted to 
establish.
”

That helped lead him to the 
Senate, where he rigorously tried 
for a third of a century to hold 
those responsible who ran, and 
sometimes mismanaged, the 
country he loved.
The voters clearly felt he did 
something right. 
They reelected 
him the most 
times in Michigan 
— and longer 
than all but 19 
senators in the 
history of the 
country; one of 
whom beat him 
by a mere 13 days 
is Joe Biden. (An 
interesting bit of trivia: Levin is 
also the longest-serving Jewish 
senator in U.S. history.) 
A few years ago, not long after 
Levin announced he would not 
be a candidate for a seventh term 
in 2014, I asked him … why not?
True, he was going to be 80 
that year, but many senators 
serve well past that — and Levin 
seemed more like a 60-year-old. 
He was strong, intellectually vig-
orous and at the top of his game 

as chair of the powerful Senate 
Armed Services Committee. 
Throughout Michigan, he was 
widely respected, even loved.
Republicans had barely fielded 
even token opposition in his 
last two races; winning reelec-
tion one more time 
would have been a 
virtual certainty. So 
why not run again? 
Levin smiled.
Yes, he said, he 
did feel great, phys-
ically and mentally 
— “Now, yes. But I 
don’t know how I 
will feel at 86 [the 
year his next term 
would have ended]. Besides,
” he 
added, “I want to spend more 
time with Barbara and get back 
to Michigan. 
That was all true — and reflec-
tive of who Levin is. Few long-
time senators or congressmen 
return to their home states after 
their political careers; they stay 
in Washington or retire to the 
Sunbelt. 
Not Levin; he and Barbara, 
who will celebrate their 60th 

wedding anniversary this year, 
came back to where his political 
career began, Detroit, where 
he served two terms on City 
Council half a century ago, 
before his first campaign for the 
Senate in 1978.
Leaving the Senate hasn’t 
meant retirement; he joined the 
Honigman law firm in Detroit 
and helped establish the Levin 
Center at Wayne State University 
Law School, which is designed to 
focus on, he said, “the essential 
role that fact-based bipartisan 
legislative oversight plays in our 
nation’s constitutional system of 
government with its emphasis on 
checks and balances,
” which was, 
in fact, perhaps the main focus of 
Carl Levin’s career in the Senate.
His thought that nobody can 
be too sure of their health after 
80 turned out, sadly, to be all too 
true; in 2017, Levin, a former 
cigar smoker, was diagnosed 
with lung cancer.
Fortunately, he was able to 
fight it; today at age 86, although 
his voice is raspy and no longer 
as powerful, he says his health is 
“stable.
” 

DETAILS
Getting to the Heart 
of the Matter: My 36 
Years in the Senate.
By Carl Levin 
338 pages; $29.99. 
Wayne State 
University Press, 
2021

TOP ROW: Conferring with Michigan 
congressman John Dingell before testifying 
together. Signing ceremony with President 
George W. Bush on the FY 2004 National 
Defense Authorization Act, Nov. 24, 2003. 
Left to right: Sen. John Warner, Sen. Levin, 
Rep. Tom Davis, Sen. Susan Collins, Rep. 
Duncan Hunter. 

BOTTOM ROW: Carl and Sandy Levin at one 
of dozens of State of the Union addresses 
where they always sat together. Going 
after Chinese counterfeit auto parts before 
the U.S.-China Economic Security Review 
Commission, June 7, 2006. 

HS19604, CARL M. LEVIN PAPERS, BENTLEY HISTORICAL 
LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

PHOTO BY JAY MALLIN/THE WASHINGTON 
POST VIA GETTY IMAGES