Scope and Content Note
The papers of Abraham Alexander Ribicoff (1910-1998) span the years 1927-1981, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1963-1980. The collection contains correspondence, memoranda, reports, press material, voting records, statements, congressional testimony, speeches, articles, printed matter, scrapbooks, other administrative and legislative matter, and miscellaneous material, including microfilm of correspondence and scrapbooks, relating chiefly to Ribicoff's senatorial career. The material is organized into eight series: Pre-Senate Records; Senate Records; Political Papers; Miscellany; 1987 Addition; 2023 Addition; Microfilm Set I: Outgoing Correspondence; and Microfilm Set II: Scrapbooks.
The papers of Abraham Ribicoff, lawyer and public official, constitute an important collection that touches upon many of the most significant developments in modern American government. [1] Ribicoff was born in a tenement in New Britain, Connecticut, on April 9, 1910, the son of a factory worker, and the urban, industrial environment in which he grew to maturity provided much of the agenda for his long years of public service. At the age of twenty-eight, after establishing a law practice in Hartford, he was elected to the lower house of the Connecticut General Assembly, where he served in the first of his many varied roles in American political life. He was a municipal judge, chairman of the Hartford Charter Revision Commission, a hearing examiner to enforce the state fair-employment practices act, a member of Congress (1949-1953), governor of Connecticut (1955-1961), secretary of health, education, and welfare (1961-1962), and United States senator (1963-1981). This collection relates principally to his service in the Senate, but there are fragments that bear upon his earlier positions as well, and researchers will often catch a glimpse of Ribicoff's experiences in state and local government with problems that concerned him as a senator and cabinet officer.
A large body of his papers relating to his governorship is in the Connecticut State Library, but important material is to be found in this collection. His election as governor in 1954 was widely applauded by reformers and the Democratic faithful, and the national significance of his victory can be gleaned from the congratulations of political figures such as W. Averell Harriman, Adlai E. Stevenson, and Bernard M. Baruch. His speech files as governor are especially useful for an examination of his evolving positions, and they contain themes that would recur throughout his career. Not the least of these themes was the plea in his inaugural message for all political factions “to cooperate to respect each other's motives, to search for areas of common agreement, to share credit, in short, to understand and practice what I should like to call the integrity of compromise. . . .”
Connecticut politics during the 1950s was characterized by strong party leadership, disciplined organizations, and an unusually high degree of straight-ticket voting, but underneath the order and regularity was one of the most diverse and volatile constituencies in the nation. Any disturbance in the surface calm revealed this political complexity, and a particularly interesting episode can be explored in the correspondence Ribicoff received during the struggle for the Democratic Senate nomination in 1958. There was an impassioned letter from Philip C. Jessup, the distinguished diplomat and jurist, who implored the governor to support Chester Bowles as “the man who can make the greatest contribution to the solution of the crucial international issues which beset us. If we do not solve them, it will in the long run make no difference to any of us what we do on various local issues.” Other correspondents were more concerned about domestic policy, and many asked Ribicoff to support former senator William Benton as “an able and progressive-minded man . . . who did more than anyone else to start McCarthyism on its downward course.” The candidacy of Thomas J. Dodd, who subsequently received the nomination, was urged by many correspondents, including a Dodd associate who advised Ribicoff that “your endorsement will be a good thing not only for Tom, but also for your own future plans.”
Ribicoff as governor clearly had his future plans well under control, and the extensive scrapbooks in the collection contain numerous press accounts describing his many initiatives in Hartford, such as highway safety reform and the abolition of county government, which inspired boomlets by admirers to secure the vice-presidency or a Senate seat for him. He quickly emerged as New England's leading governor, and it was in this capacity that he played such a critical role in the presidential aspirations of John F. Kennedy, his former colleague in the House of Representatives. Ribicoff later recalled that his relationship with Kennedy, “prior to and after the election, was on a personal face-to-face oral basis,” and thus the material in the collection bearing directly upon the Kennedy-Ribicoff relationship is not extensive. There is, nevertheless, useful data in the Ribicoff and memoranda from the Kennedy headquarters outlining campaign strategy. There is an intriguing letter from Ribicoff to Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, regarding the frequent inquiries about the potential influence of Rome in a Kennedy administration: "It is amazing how many times you must repeat yourself before it gets into the consciousness of people. From long experience, however, I know that even the most simple thoughts must be repeated over and over again."
Ribicoff resigned as governor of Connecticut to become secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Kennedy administration, but he continued to follow Connecticut developments through correspondence from journalists and political associates. Ribicoff also returned to Connecticut frequently throughout his service in the cabinet, and his scheduling files are particularly helpful for understanding his relationship to state and local politics. Itineraries and correspondence about engagements are also useful supplements to his speeches for reconstructing the Connecticut dimension of his cabinet service.
About ninety percent of this large collection documents Ribicoff's career in the Senate (1963-1981). He is perhaps best known for his long tenure on the Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chaired during the 94th through 96th Congresses, where his work in civil service, government reorganization, ethics legislation, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy policy represented major themes in the political life of the late 1970s. In addition to files on these continuing legislative interests, there is also material on many individual investigations that had lasting significance. Students of modern reform will profit, for example, from examining a series of files relating to Ribicoff's investigations of the Chevrolet Corvair and highway safety, a classic inquiry into the complex juncture of modern corporate policy, government regulation, and the consumer movement. The Corvair investigations were a natural outgrowth of his concern while governor of Connecticut with highway safety. There are also extensive files on Ribicoff's investigations of mismanagement and corruption in the conduct of the war in Vietnam, which are intriguing for what they reveal about the dynamics of congressional oversight as well as for the light they shed on military organization in the combat zone.
As a leading spokesperson for modern liberalism, Ribicoff's legislative interests touched every aspect of welfare reform, urban development, civil rights, and the federal role in education and health care. His papers are a distillation of the reform agenda of the 1960s and the 1970s. He was a prominent figure in the most important legislative initiatives of the New Frontier and the Great Society, and one can explore the entire range of domestic policy in the varied material of this collection.
Although Ribicoff was associated with many of the most advanced reform measures of our time and happily acknowledged that he “grew up with the New Deal ideology as an article of faith,” [2] he was deeply troubled by a tendency among fellow liberals to make hasty predictions about programs that had not been adequately planned or tested. This became a major theme in his strategy as a reformer. Many of his reservations were expressed in a letter about the Head Start program to Douglass Cater, a special assistant in the Johnson White House. Ribicoff understood the virtue of preschool education for disadvantaged children, but he felt that “we are wasting our resources when we commit them to programs that do not fulfill their promised results.” Head Start did not identify and attract the most seriously disadvantaged children, it did not pay sufficient attention to the child's subsequent school experience, and it suffered from fragmented administrative structures, mismanagement, and lack of coordination. “We must focus attention on the problems our efforts are designed to resolve,” he concluded, “and ignore the opportunity to satisfy ourselves with the fact we have passed, established, and funded x number of programs.”
The extensive Legislative File in the collection contains bill files, documents relating to the oversight functions of congressional committees, and the working files of various staff members. Although all of these files are fragmentary, many of the fragments provide important insights into the legislative process. Among the most interesting files are those relating to Ribicoff's role on the Finance Committee in considering the Family Assistance Plan, the Nixon administration's principal welfare reform measure. It was a far-reaching proposal for income maintenance, and Ribicoff remarked to his colleagues in the Senate that he had “never been involved in a piece of legislation as controversial, which is more diverse, and contains as many emotional, philosophical, economic, and social problems.” The proposal passed the House but failed in the Senate, and not the least of the many ironies involved was that Ribicoff found himself, “as a Democrat, fighting for the administration proposal, opposing the proposal of the man I nominated as the Democratic nominee for the presidency.”
As the Finance Committee member who was most knowledgeable about welfare measures, Ribicoff received an avalanche of mail about the Family Assistance Plan from some of the most articulate sectors of American society. Letters from university professors such as Chester McArthur Destler, an important historian of American reform, and James Tobin, who later received a Nobel Prize for economics, give the constituent correspondence files an unusually sophisticated character, and there are also letters from an array of Fortune 500 executives, civil rights spokesmen, and directors of public welfare agencies throughout the country. Ribicoff established a welfare advisory group to review the administration's proposals, and the work of these advisers can be studied in several files. There are exchanges between Ribicoff and administration officials such as Daniel P. Moynihan, Elliot Richardson, and Robert Finch, and there is a particularly poignant letter to George S. McGovern in which Ribicoff details the deficiencies of the McGovern proposals. Within the welter of technical details, however, several fundamental reform principals were always in the forefront of Ribicoff's strategy: he insisted upon (1) pilot programs to test novel propositions; (2) the establishment of attainable goals; (3) assistance to all impoverished Americans, not simply the unemployed and single-parent families; and (4) ancillary measures to create employment opportunities for able-bodied welfare recipients. Perhaps more than any of his colleagues in the Senate, he understood the “guaranteed income” features of the program and endorsed them as a radical departure from the conventional welfare system.
In addition to the strength of Ribicoff's papers for studies of government operations, social welfare policy, and urban affairs, scholars will also find the collection useful for tracing the evolution of international trade policy, arms control, consumer legislation, and environmental protection measures. Ribicoff's efforts to protect the environment were national in scope, but they were particularly relevant for the Northeast, and one finds rich material for projects concerning the Long Island Sound, the Connecticut River, and the Housatonic River valley. There are also individual documents of considerable significance, such as Ribicoff's detailed response to the elaborate questionnaire Ralph Nader circulated for his study of Congress. Several transcripts of oral history interviews conducted with members of his staff are also contained in the collection.
The 1987 Addition is comprised of files related to the Government Operations Committee’s investigation of computer crime in federal programs and private industry. Material includes correspondence, memoranda, reports, congressional testimony statements, transcripts, clippings, and other printed matter.
The 2023 Addition consists of bound volumes, titled “Speeches,” containing select speeches, hearing statements, and articles from Ribicoff's tenure as a United States senator. This material addresses a variety of topics, including defense, economics, education, energy, the environment, governmental affairs, health, international affairs, trade and finance, Jewish concerns, social justice, legal issues, taxes, transportation, and urban affairs and development.
1. This description of the collection is taken from Library of Congress Acquisitions, Manuscript Division, 1982 (Washington, D.C., 1984), 20-23
2. Abraham Ribicoff, America Can Make It! (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 7.