Editor's note: Providence Journal Washington bureau chief John E. Mulligan wrote this look back at Claiborne Pell's political career after he announced he would retire from the U.S. Senate in 1995.

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then the match of the ethnic Babel of Rhode Island and the spare, well-born Claiborne deBorda Pell was made in heaven.

He was to the manor born - to the Bellevue Avenue cottages of Newport and to Pellsbridge, a New York estate where the servants addressed him as "Mr. Claiborne."

He came of age with a front-row seat on history. He was with his diplomat father to hear London applaud Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. He was at Princeton for what he called "the last of the F. Scott Fitzgerald days" before the war. He played bit parts in the opening scenes of the Cold War, watching the tanks of Soviet occupation roll into Czechoslavakia, clerking for the authors of the United Nations charter in San Francisco.

When he tossed his high hat into the rough-and-tumble ring of the 196 2Senate race, however, Pell was deemed the least electable man in America by no less an authority than Jack Kennedy.

But Pell confounded, amused, and finally befriended such skeptics. He won that election in a quirky style that has since inspired countless parodies. During his 35 years in the Senate, the strangest old bird in American politics has pecked away at his obstacles to compile an uncommon record of achievement.

The enduring puzzle is how he managed to survive as an alien of sorts in politics. He admits a preference to ballet over baseball; he assigned a staffer to full-time research on paranormal phenomena, such as ESP and the afterlife. What other U.S. senator can get away with wearing a 50-year-old tennis sweater on his morning jog through affluent neighborhoods, or walking into a Labor Committee meeting and starting a speech that he was supposed to be delivering to the Foreign Relations Committee elsewhere in the building.

But now, Pell says, it's the "right time" to end his Senate service. "There is a natural time for all life's adventures to come to an end," he said Tuesday when he announced he will not seek reelection.

PELL SAW a textbook political opening in Rhode Island's 1960 Democratic primary, a blood match between two hard Irish pols - former Governors Dennis J. Roberts and J. Howard McGrath - both past their prime and with a whiff of scandal about them.

The newcomer unleashed on them the first modern political campaign Rhode Island had seen, pouring his own money into television, polls and professional managers. And Pell set rules for himself that became his hallmarks on and off the campaign trial:

Don't attack the other fellow. Keep a sense of humor. Do the unexpected.

When the opposition cried "carpetbagger," Pell fired back with full-page newspaper ads featuring his grand-uncle Duncan Pell, Rhode Island lieutenant governor in 1865.

When one foe called him "a creampuff," Pell rushed out and secured the endorsement of the bakers union.

When somebody sneered that little Claiborne had been raised by a nanny, Pell trotted out a very nice lady who made a very nice impression on voters.

The appeal may have been less mysterious than it appeared, based as it was on a simple tool that Pell often uses to defuse tricky or unpleasant situations: honesty.

"It's very fundamental in politics to be what you are," says Sen. John H. Chafee. " 'To thine own self be true.' Don't be out there dropping your g's and trying to get into a 'dese and dose' way of speaking to be one of the guys.

"Claiborne has always been very straightforward in that regard," said Chafee, who learned the hard way that this "creampuff" has a core of rock.

Chafee's 1972 race against Pell was a celebrated Rhode Island battle waged against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a looming threat to the local Navy complex. During the campiagn Chafee attacked Pell for concentrating on smaller issues and being out of touch with Rhode Islanders.

Chafee's loss was a difficult lesson in how sophisticated his opponent was, despite seeming ineffectual.

AFTER THE PRIMARY the 1960 general election was anticlimactic, except that Protestant Pell outpolled the Catholic John F. Kennedy at the top of Rhode Island's Democratic ticket. Pell soon found he had a place in the Kennedy crowd.

Pell and his wife, Nuala, bought the big brick row house on the cobbled streets of Georgetown that they still inhabit. It became something of a salon, stuffed with books and paintings and the odd suit of some forebear's armor, and frequented over the years by notables from Pell's intersecting worlds - politics, the arts, the paranormal.

Pell is often described as self-effacing. Maybe it's his correct manner, his slowness to anger or his mantras about sharing credit and "letting the other man have my way."

But beneath his diffident polish lies an ego; he cares deeply about his legacy and how the public sees him.

From those early days at the edge of the New Frontier, Pell has snared a lot of publicity and powered an array of his off-beat personal causes into society's mainstream.

The early 1960s were still a time when a freshman senator deferred to his elders and bided his time, perhaps cultivating influential journalists, as Pell did his old family friend, Arthur Krock of the New York Times. He won some notice when he spoke up for federal patronage of the arts, and against a hardline military response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin.

And Kennedy liked him. Often, the President had Pell aboard Air Force One for the weekend ride out of Washington. He would drop off Pell at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station on his way to Cape Cod. Sometimes, the two would helicopter across Narragansett Bay to Newport, where Pell and his family lived - in a plain, low ranch house that he helped design - with a spectacular ocean overlook.

Kennedy so liked the quiet of Hammersmith Farm, his in-laws' home, that he asked Pell to help him find a good place in Newport for a summer White House.

The prospect died when Kennedy was killed - on Pell's 45th birthday. So did Pell's hope that Kennedy would add a Polaris submarine base in Portsmouth to Rhode Island's Navy armada.

But some of Pell's other political seedlings took root, notably his visions of public support for artists, performers and intellectuals; a federally backed network of high-speed passenger rails modeled after Europe; and guaranteed college education for every student who could make the grade.

LIKE SO much of the nation's postwar social program, Pell's own agenda flowered most extravagantly with President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society."

The railroad's progress exemplifies the ebb and flow of Pell's projects.

Columnist Krock put Pell's railway plan for the Boston-Washington "Megalopolis" on the map in 1962. Pell followed up with a Senate resolution to develop high-speed service. Kennedy secured a small government study for Pell - who later noted that his chatter about 100-mile-an-hour trains had made him the butt of some Buck Rogers jokes.

By the time Pell published his own staff-assisted book on the topic, Megalopolis Unbound, in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed into law the first well-financed round of research that gave rise to concrete plans for modernizing the Northeast Corridor. The railway modernization got rolling under President Richard M. Nixon and survived the emergence of Amtrak, the private railway that depends on federal subsidies.

President Ronald Reagan applied the brakes to Pell's rail visions. By then, however, passenger trains had built up enough of a constituency - riders, unions, job-hungry local politicians and so forth - to ward off the threatened cutoff of all federal aid. So far.

Pell's direct influence on the project has waned and he has mainly left the heavy lifting to colleagues with more clout on the right committees.

The pattern fits other programs of the free-spending Johnson years. Another 1965 launch, Pell's National Endowment for the Arts, did well for two decades but nearly crashed in the controversy over subsidies for sexually graphic art.

WITH THE new Republican congressional majorities intent on budget-balancing, the NEA, the rail projects and even the Pell grants for needy college students will shrink.

Pell is philosophical, even cheerful, about the pendulum swing to a younger, more conservative Congress. "My creative period was in my first 15 years" in the Senate, he said the other day. "The pendulum will swing back to the liberal agenda - not soon, probably not in my lifetime."

Foreign affairs have been second nature to this son of a roving emissary. And Pell loves to roll out his formulations on the topic, his quotations from Talleyrand and George F. Kennan and his own summation of his dovelike bent: "Better to practice jaw-jaw than war-war."

Particularly since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Pell may be most proud of his takeoff on the Karl Marx prediction of capitalism's doom.

"Communism contains the seeds of its own destruction," goes the Pellism, because it stifles the human impulses of ambition and self-betterment.

But Pell is no soothsayer. He had misgivings about the Vietnam War during a tour of the Far East as a freshman senator - but he didn't come out as a staunch antiwar vote as early as he sometimes likes to recall. His break with President Johnson on the war came after he voted in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

Pell's warnings have not always borne out. "It is more than likely that we will have a nuclear exchange in the next 10 to 15 years," Pell said in a speech during the peak of the nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s.

The senator won't concede the conservative point that Reagan's truculence and weapons-buying spent the Soviets into bankruptcy. He prefers to think that the tides turned because of the liberals' insistence on economic pressure, exchange programs and diplomacy.

REGARDLESS OF whether the hawks or the doves take credit, the Warsaw Pact dominoes began falling and the Soviet Union collapsed on Pell's watch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He treated himself to some victory laps in 1989 and 1990, visiting the wreckage of the Berlin Wall - which he had seen erected as a new senator - and Bratislava, the Czech city where he had opened a U.S. mission as a young foreign service officer and then fled as the Soviet tanks arrived.

But those heady moments - along with some steps to shrink and stabilize the old Soviet nuclear stockpile - were among the few highlights of Pell's eight years in the Senate role he had coveted most of his career.

Midway through his chairmanship, in fact, its frustrations were misery enough to set Pell on a path to retire. His deferential style was no match for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms's conservative guerrilla warfare tactics of roadblocks and delays.

Nor, contrary to a popular line of punditry, is the job built for feats of statesmanship. True, Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., made the chairmanship a great pulpit of the antiwar movement in the 1970s - but got voted out of a job in the process.

The committee's chores - writing the State Department budget, processing diplomatic nominations, ratifying treaties - require lots of detail work with little in the way of pork or glory.

So as Pell acceded to the pleas of Democrats to run for one more term in 1990, he also prepared to abet in a committee shakeup that delegated most of the power to his junior partners.

As former Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana drily observed, "That's the reverse of what we usually do around here - most of us try to accumulate power."

PELL'S ADMIRERS were treated one last time in 1990 to the spectacle of a cocksure opponent's failure to find the right line of attack against an incumbent who seemed to be doing little more than minding the store. The years since his victory over Rep. Claudine Schneider have found Pell in better humor than he seemed in the late 1980s.

He's one of those rarities - an enthusiastic Bill Clinton booster. He has kept traveling often and widely, even leaving the world behind for a Caribbean sail last winter with one of his sons and two grandsons.

And notwithstanding his initial bout with fear and denial, Pell has edified family and friends by facing up to his recent diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. He's taking his medicine; his doctor foresees a long and symptom-free treatment.

Last week, as he chatted in his Capitol hideaway office among the heirlooms and honors and ancestral mementos, Pell ticked off a few disappointments and deplored the nastiness in today's politics.

"But, I've come to the conclusion after 35 years here that, one way or another, we seem, generally speaking, to come out the right side," Pell said.

"My father used to say that he thought he was dangerous becuase he was an old man with hope.

"I find myself 50 years later saying the same thing: I'm an old man with a lot of hope."