Senator William Proxmire Has Died
William Proxmire, the maverick senator who represented Wisconsin from 1957 to 1989, died today.
The press insists on emphasizing his ineffectual attempt to curb wasteful federal spending, but I think Proxmire should be remembered more for his tireless campaign to get the United States to ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Every day that the Senate was in session for nineteen years Senator Proxmire gave a freshly prepared speech, all too often to an empty chamber, calling for the ratification of the Convention on Genocide. The Senate finally ratified the treaty in 1986, 38 years after it had been adopted by the UN General Assembly. Of all the politicians in Samantha Power's book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Proxmire is the only one who was unafraid to assert our responsibility to act in the face of genocide.
So it is, I think, much better to remember Senator Proxmire as the hero who finally shamed us into doing one big thing that was right, than as the gadfly who couldn't keep us from doing all the small things we knew were wrong.