Champion of The Elderly

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(Pepper is not a man to carry a grudge, but it was not until last year that he fully forgave Smathers. When an aide suggested asking Smathers' law firm for a campaign contribution, Pepper reluctantly agreed and was surprised when he got a $350 check in reply. Shortly thereafter, Pepper walked up to Smathers, who was lunching in the House dining room, and said without smiling: "You know that check you sent in for my campaign? Well, it bounced." It had not, of course, and when Smathers realized that Pepper was joking, both knew that their enmity was over.)

Once again, Pepper returned to his law practice. He tried a senatorial comeback in 1958, but was beaten in the Democratic primary. By 1962 he was earning more than $150,000 a year, representing mainly corporate clients. But when a new Miami congressional district was created that year, he jumped back into the political swim. He missed politics, and Mildred missed the capital's social whirl. Says Brother Joe, 73, about Claude's law practice: "He was very successful. But he was miserable, just plain miserable."

Pepper did not consider it demeaning to step down from Senator to Congressman, although he concedes that "most people go the other way." If he had somehow stayed in the Senate, he figures he would have become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and might have wound up serving longer than anyone else. "But that committee doesn't save many souls," he adds. "I know I'm doing more good now."

At a Veterans Administration hospital in Miami, a patient in a wheelchair watches Pepper greeting the bedridden and says: "I'm a Republican. But I always vote for Senator Pepper. He doesn't care if you're an old Republican or an old Democrat. Just so you 're old."

Pepper is far from a one-issue legislator. In 1945 he sponsored a resolution that led to the creation of the World Health Organization and, in the late '40s, bills establishing five of the National Institutes of Health. Not only does he favor a freeze on nuclear arms now, but he advocated one after the end of World War II. Still, nothing offends his sense of justice quite as much as modern society's tendency to view the elderly as a burden or a stereotyped group. He does not feel complimented when someone tells him: "My, you don't look your age." Inwardly, he grumps, "How am I expected to look? Toothless and doddering, a caricature of my younger self?" Pepper assails "ageism" as "just as wrong as racism or sexism."

At a recent Miami dinner in his honor, Pepper spoke eloquently about growing older. "The aging process is so slow, so gradual, that all you notice is a slight diminishing of some of your faculties," he said solemnly. What the elderly want is "to be thought of as just other people. They need love. They need compassion." He concedes that attitudes toward the aging are improving and predicts that this will get much better when, as demographers predict, the elderly constitute an even larger share of the nation's population.