12 | AUGUST 12 • 2021
C
arl Levin was more than Michigan’s
longest-serving senator in
Washington — and the longest-serv-
ing Jewish U.S. senator in American history.
He was truly a “Giant of the Senate.
”
Ironically, another senator who was also
Jewish, Minnesota’s Al Franken, once wrote
a book with the satirical title, Al Franken,
Giant of the Senate. Like Franken, Levin was
a man who could laugh at himself. But that
phrase would be anything but satire if it
were used to describe Carl Levin. He really
was all that — and more.
Levin, who left the Senate in 2015 after
serving six terms and 36 years, died July 29,
2021. He was 87 years old.
But he is unlikely to be soon forgotten.
Levin won near-universal acclaim for the
work that he did as chair of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, where he
became famous for rooting out examples of
waste and bloated and unnecessary spend-
ing. In his role as chair of the Governmental
Affairs Investigations Subcommittee, he
fought hard and often successfully to
hold Wall Street firms accountable, nota-
bly Goldman Sachs. He tried to limit the
amount of surveillance intelligence agen-
cies did on the communications of private
American citizens.
Levin, perhaps more than any other con-
temporary senator, was a master of some-
times mind-numbing detail on virtually
every topic that came before his committee.
“You have to really know a subject if you
are going to examine or cross-examine a
witness,
” he once told the National Journal,
and woe could come unto anyone who tes-
tified before him without having done his
homework.
Yet, though he had a strong profile on
national issues, he was a Detroiter — and a
Jewish Detroiter — to the core. Born in the
city on June 28, 1934, he was the third of
three children of Bess and Saul Levin, and
grew up mainly on Boston Boulevard. All
went to Roosevelt Elementary and Central
High School in the city.
JEWISH VALUES
Earlier this year, when Sen. Levin’s book
Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36
Years in the U.S. Senate was published by
Wayne State University Press, he told me
that he had been heavily influenced by
being Jewish. “It surely did. I think the
values in Judaism are important — the
values of being charitable, of thinking of
others, the important Jewish values, which I
learned early in life.
”
The history of antisemitism, he said, “has
made me very sensitive to others who are
victims of prejudices and discrimination.
”
In the late 1970s, the senator and his
wife, Barbara, and 10 other families formed
a new congregation, T’
chiyah, a small
Reconstructionist congregation.
But besides Judaism, politics and pub-
lic service were in Carl Levin’s blood. His
father was a lawyer in practice with his
brother Theodore “Ted” Levin who later
became a highly respected U.S. District
Court judge, the one for whom the federal
courthouse in Detroit is now named.
Carl’s brother, Sander, three years older,
preceded him into politics, serving as
Michigan Senate majority leader before
losing two close elections for governor and
finally serving 36 years in the U.S. House of
Representatives, matching his brother’s time
in the Senate. “Sandy was always my hero,
”
Sen. Levin told this writer earlier this year;
the brothers remained close all their lives.
Following high school, the future sena-
Carl Levin, the people’s advocate who confronted the powerful.
A Lifetime of Service
JACK LESSENBERRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
THE PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE
SEN. CARL LEVIN (1934-2021)
From
Detroit to D.C.