One of Sen. Claiborne Pell’s fond memories was of the day he introduced then-Sen. John F. Kennedy before a speech the presidential hopeful gave in downtown Providence at one of the final campaign rallies before the 1960 national election.

Journal / Files

It has become fashionable for politicians to insist they are of the people, prone to bowl or have a beer, but most such gestures are for show. Sen. Claiborne Pell was different. Despite his wealth and aristocratic bearing, he was authentically down to earth.

He could have afforded a limousine to take him from his Newport home near Bailey’s Beach to his Providence office, but instead, when in town, he rode the public bus. And he insisted on the senior citizen’s discount. It was not because he was cheap. He was thrifty. There is a difference.

I remember a day I spent with him on his sixth and last run for the U.S. Senate in 1990. On the surface, he was almost a caricature of a Bellevue Avenue noble. He seemed to have a trace of an English accent, pronouncing the word issues as “iss-yoos.” But if you probed, you would find a soul without a trace of self-indulgence. I asked him about his suit. One might have expected it was tailored on London’s Savile Row. It wasn’t. He told me he got it at a church sale for $25.

I asked why a multimillionaire would buy a used suit for $25.

“I hate money being wasted,” Senator Pell said. “It really bothers me.”

At his funeral last week, people told of how he wore his father’s belt, even though it was so big it wrapped halfway around his waist a second time. The stories were not an exaggeration. He was wearing that belt the day I was with him.

He served us for 36 years, until the age of 77, an unlikely six-term marriage of an Episcopalian blueblood and a working-class Catholic state. To me, he remains proof that even in a place known for corruption, when the people find an honorable politician, they stand by him forever.

One reason I admired him is he was almost never asked to be a guest on such Washington shout-fests as Crossfire. I am sure Chris Matthews would not have had him on Hardball. That was fine with Pell. He cared less about the spotlight than about policy.

He is known of course for the Pell Grants, which he pushed through Congress because although he was able to afford Princeton, others weren’t, and he considered it unfair. He took the lead in establishing the National Endowment for the Arts, because he felt politicians had a role to play in a nation’s culture, but only up to a point — though he did not like the modern art underwritten by the NEA, he never interfered. That, too, was an uncommon trait for a politician in so partisan an age; he never imposed his ideology where it didn’t belong.

He is perhaps less known for the area that might be his greatest legacy: his global achievements. He spent two years in the Foreign Service and was part of the conference that founded the United Nations. He understood the world. In 1991, after the first Iraq war, I interviewed a Senate committee employee named Peter Galbraith who, five years before, had been among the first U.S. investigators to document Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas against civilians. Galbraith told me he was sent there by a visionary senator who understood dangerous world developments when few others were paying attention –– Claiborne Pell.

You did not think of the word “politician” when you met Pell. You simply thought, “Senator.” And yet, to his credit, he grasped how to “do” politics. As I wrote of my campaign day with him in 1990: “This will be his sixth run, and he knows by now that you do not get elected by winning Rhode Island, you do it by winning Cranston, and Foster and Bristol, by winning Dorrance Street and the heart of the woman behind the counter at Mister Donut.”

He admitted to me that he at first wavered about running for a sixth term. If he won, he would be 77 by his term’s end, and would not have the time he wanted for his grandchildren, for writing his memoirs and perhaps a vacation in Tibet. Part of what changed his mind is that only months before, the world was transformed by the collapse of Eastern European communism. Pell was worried too about the federal commitment to education and the arts. He wanted to stay part of all of that. So I watched that day, not just as he did the glamorous tasks of giving speeches, but as he approached solitary cabdrivers to ask for their votes. As we walked past City Hall, he remembered a night at that spot exactly 30 years before when he introduced a presidential candidate named John Kennedy at one of the final campaign rallies before the 1960 national election.

Then he moved on to an elderly woman waiting for the bus, much as Pell waited for it most mornings in Newport.

“I’m Senator Pell,” he told her, and they chatted. It was memorable to see a man of history at such a humble moment.

His was an exceptional life, lived with privilege but without pretension.

He was of Princeton and of RIPTA; he served Rhode Island and he served this world.

I doubt we shall see his like again.

I will miss him.

mpatinkin@projo.com