Claiborne Pell listens to the Dalai Lama in 2005 at Salve Regina University in Newport when he received the Claiborne Pell Center Award for making a difference and promoting dialogue and action for a more peaceful world.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Claiborne deBorda Pell, the quirky Newport blueblood who held the affections of blue-collar Rhode Island and championed better education of the poor during a 36-year Senate career, died yesterday. The onetime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — who witnessed history at close hand, from the rise of Adolph Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall — was 90 years old.

Senator Pell in 1984.

The Providence Journal /Frieda Squires

Pell, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease since before his retirement in 1997, died peacefully at his Newport home, minutes after the new year began. With him were his wife of 64 years, Nuala O’Donnell Pell, and other family members.

Bipartisan praise poured in from around the country for Pell, an unabashed liberal with family and personal ties to such Democratic icons as Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

President Bush “was saddened to learn of the death of Senator Claiborne Pell,” according to a statement issued by White House spokesman Trey Bohn. “He was a beloved statesman and his many years serving our nation left a legacy that will long be remembered. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the people of Rhode Island.”

Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, a longtime friend and Senate colleague, called Pell “one of our country’s greatest public servants.” In a statement, Biden called Pell “a man of extraordinary integrity, grace and decency” who was “a leader in the effort to reduce the size of the world’s nuclear arsenal and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.”

Many praised Pell’s work to create the 1972-vintage program of college grants to lower-income students that has assisted in the education of more than 50 million Americans. The Pell Grants are, in Biden’s words, “a legacy that will live on for generations to come.”

Even as the disease gradually robbed him of speech and mobility, Pell remained active in retirement. During last year’s historic presidential election, Pell enthusiastically supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., while his wife endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. In the days before Rhode Island’s presidential primary, Mrs. Pell appeared at an event with Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife; the wheelchair-bound senator attended a rally for Clinton, who raised a warm ovation when she introduced the former senator.

From the moment he burst onto the local political scene in 1960 to his long valedictory in the mid-1990s, Pell and his unlikely triumphs were the stuff of local legend. His courtly, old-school demeanor and his distracted, ungainly manner were fodder for a thousand parodies on the political circuit from the Blackstone Valley to Capitol Hill.

Particularly in the harsh spotlight of national politics, Pell’s idiosyncrasies drew ridicule as well as affection, often emboldening his adversaries. In the years after he realized the lifelong ambition of becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1987, Pell raised eyebrows by acquiescing in a shakeup of the panel’s structure that delegated most of the power to his junior subcommittee.

“That’s the reverse of what we usually do around here — most of us try to accumulate power,” Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the former committee chairman, dryly observed at the time. Pell also came in for criticism for his hesitancy to launch a committee inquiry into then-President George H.W. Bush’s decision to go to war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

In 1960, Claiborne Pell, and his wife Nuala, at right, chats with presidential candidate John F. Kennedy at Hyannis Airport.

Journal files

During his final reelection campaign, against then-Rep. Claudine Schneider in 1990, Pell famously drew a blank when he was asked in a debate what legislation he had authored that specifically helped his home-state constituents.

“I couldn’t give you a specific answer,” Pell replied. “My memory’s not as good as it should be.”

Pell defeated Republican Schneider in a landslide — following a career-long pattern of confounding opponents who mistook his absentmindedness and politesse for softness. Along the way, Pell worked so assiduously at self-effacement that it became his hallmark.

“I always try to let the other fellow have my way,” he said again and again — one of many vintage “Pellisms” passed down through generations of Rhode Island reporters and politicos, along with an amusing hoard of anecdotes that showed the senator’s blithe unawareness of the popular culture that surrounded him.

Pell was, no doubt about it, one of the strangest birds in American politics.

He was an old-money millionaire who, literally, jogged into his eighth decade among the Gilded Age cottages of Bellevue Avenue, clad in beat-up Bermudas or frayed dress pants and the remains of his Princeton (Class of ’40) letter sweater.

He was a champion as a father of the National Endowment for the Arts for federal patronage of artists — including modern abstractionists and the controversial performance artists whose work he privately disliked. Pell’s own taste ran to such 19th-century American painters as George Caleb Bingham.

Pell meets supporters in 1972 with his wife and daughter.

Journal files

He was such a poor driver that for years he drove in a white Mustang that was fitted with a roll-bar. That feature — plus the array of body dents and the pelican hood ornament he had borrowed from his family crest — always distinguished Pell’s car from the somber sedans at the foot of the Capitol steps.

But beneath the patrician veneer that seemed to endear him to generations of Rhode Islanders, Pell carried a dogged persistence that won him a remarkable record of achievement during his 36 years in the Senate.

The only child of Herbert Claiborne and Matilda (Bigelow) Pell Jr., Claiborne deBorda Pell was born in New York City on Nov. 22, 1918, into a family whose forbears included fighters on both sides of the American Revolution, five members of Congress and a vice president (George M. Dallas, who served under President James K. Polk from 1845 to 1849).

Pell’s father represented Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district in the House from 1918-20. As president, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him minister to Portugal and Hungary.

His father’s work gave Pell a front-row seat on history and shaped his ambitions. Father and son were on hand, for example, to hear London applaud Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the years before World War II.

The future senator drew particular inspiration from Herbert Pell’s little-noted efforts on behalf of Jews in flight from prewar Nazi Germany. For decades, Pell cherished an old photograph in his Capitol office that depicted his father, then New York State Democratic chairman, with Navy Secretary Roosevelt, and New York Gov. Al Smith.

The family summered often in Newport, moving there permanently when Claiborne was 9. He received his early education at St. George’s School and studied at Princeton during what he later called “the last of the F. Scott Fitzgerald days.”

Senator Pell campaigning for reelection in downtown Providence in 1972.

Journal files

Young Pell ran cross-country, played on a rugby team that won the Intercollegiate Championship and graduated cum laude in 1940. He later earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Columbia.

After graduation, Pell worked as a roustabout in the Oklahoma oil fields. Then he made his first sally into foreign affairs as a private secretary at the American Legation in Portugal. After the war broke out, Pell drove trucks carrying emergency supplies to prisoners of war in Germany. He was arrested several times by the Nazi government.

Four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pell enlisted in the Coast Guard as a ship’s cook. He saw duty in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean before he contracted undulant fever and was sent to the Newport Naval Hospital. There he met his future wife, Nuala O’Donnell, a fellow Newporter whose great-grandfather founded the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Pell played bit parts in the opening scenes of the Cold War, watching the tanks of Soviet occupation roll into Czechoslovakia and clerking for the creators of the United Nations in San Francisco. As a senator, Pell could always produce a well-thumbed blue copy of the U.N. charter from his jacket pocket.

Pell’s tour in the Foreign Service included assignments to the consulate in Genoa, Italy, and the State Department’s Baltic Bureau.

In 1951, the Pells built a shingled ranch house, largely of Pell’s design, overlooking Rhode Island Sound on Ledge Road, near Bailey’s Beach in Newport — his home for the rest of his life.

Pell spent much of the 1950s in investment banking, but kept active in politics. When he jumped into the free-for-all to succeed retiring Sen. Theodore F. Green in 1960, no less an authority than Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy called Pell the least electable man in America.

Rhode Island politicians tended to dismiss Pell’s candidacy as a sideshow to the blood match between two Irish pols — Dennis J. Roberts and J. Howard McGrath, both former governors, both past their prime and both with a whiff of scandal about them.

The newcomer unleashed the first modern political campaign the state had seen, pouring his own money into television, polls and professional managers of the Democratic primary campaign. And Pell set rules for himself that became his hallmarks on and off the campaign trail: 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 trumpeted the endorsement of the bakers union.

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

Pell’s appeal may have been less mysterious than it appeared, based as it was on the simple tool with which Pell disarmed opponents for decades: a self-deprecating brand of honesty.

The late Sen. John H. Chafee, a failed Pell challenger who became his Senate colleague for two decades, once said, “It’s very fundamental in politics to be what you are. ‘To thine own self be true.’ Claiborne has always been very straightforward in that regard.”

After winning the 1960 Democratic primary, Protestant Pell outpolled the Catholic Kennedy at the top of the ticket in the general election. Soon enough, Pell had found a niche in “Camelot.”

Claiborne and Nuala Pell bought a big brick house in Georgetown that they made into something of a salon, stuffed with books and paintings and the odd suit of ancestral armor, and frequented over the years by notables from Pell’s intersecting worlds — politics, the arts, the paranormal.

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 took Pell aboard Air Force One for the weekend ride out of Washington. He would drop Pell off at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station on his way to Cape Cod. Sometimes, the two would helicopter across Narragansett Bay to Newport.

Some of Pell’s most ambitious ideas took root during what he later called “my creative period,” his first two Senate terms — a period that included the flowering of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society,” with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and the expansion of welfare.

Pell saw to fruition his visions of public support for artists, performers and intellectuals; a federally backed network of high-speed passenger rails modeled after those in Europe; and guaranteed college education for every student who could make the grade, later christened “Pell Grants.”

Chafee’s 1972 campaign 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. Ticket-splitting Rhode Islanders gave President Richard M. Nixon a majority for reelection but chose Pell over Chafee, who had been Nixon’s Navy secretary.

That was Pell’s last difficult campaign. But it was not the last time that a self-confident opponent decided that the mild-mannered Democrat could be knocked off.

The high-water mark for Pell’s brand of Democratic liberalism may have come before the 1972 elections. He spent much of the rest of his Senate career defending such programs as Pell Grants, the Northeast Corridor rail improvements and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities from the encroachments of budget hawks and conservative opponents.

But Pell also plugged away at his favorite initiatives. Some, like his unsuccessful crusade to move the United States to the metric system, seemed quixotic. Others look visionary in retrospect.

After two young staffers were killed in separate, alcohol-related car accidents in the 1970s, Pell undertook a quiet assault upon nation’s tolerance of drunken driving. Characteristically, he foresaw a key role for the federal government and he looked for guidance to European countries where drunken driving was not taken so lightly.

Pell was far from alone; grass-roots organizations and activist judges around the country were also building a head of steam behind the movement against alcohol-related accidents. But Pell was one of the few in Congress to take up the cause. President Reagan signed into law the Pell-sponsored legislation that prodded states to raise their drinking ages to 21 and created a national data bank of driving records.

In the global arena, Pell was a longtime advocate of nuclear-arms limitations and a backer of the brief nuclear freeze movement; he differed sharply with President Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up.

He never accepted the conservative argument that Reagan won the Cold War by outspending the Soviets into bankruptcy, preferring the liberal explanation that economic pressure, exchange programs and diplomacy conspired to do in a fatally flawed Communist system.

Pell spent 8 of his last 10 years in the Senate as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But he found himself less than happy with the job, partly because of its heavy load of budget work and review of presidential appointments. He was also under continual pressure from the conservative senior Republican on the panel, the late Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

But Pell did take pride in the Senate’s ratification of long-dormant nuclear-arms treaties.

In 1990, Pell’s admirers were treated one last time to the spectacle of a cocksure opponent’s failure to find the right line of attack against an incumbent who seemed beatable.

During that campaign against Schneider, the congresswoman’s staff was astonished when Pell insisted on warning her, as a courtesy, when he was about to air advertisements on television.

Pell displayed his wry fatalism again in 1995 when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, an illness of the central nervous system that erodes posture, speech, gait and other motor functions. “At my age, I’ll be long gone before I feel the effects,” he joked.

Later that year, though given a doctor’s green light to run again, Pell announced that he would not seek a seventh Senate term.

News clippings from Pell’s last 15 months in the Senate read like a valedictory scrapbook, harking back to milestones in Pell’s life — such as the 30th anniversary of the Medicare program that happened also to mark the triumphs and travails of his nation and his party over the course of eight decades.

One colleague after another remarked on his qualities of civility and being a gentleman that set Pell apart from many practitioners of modern politics. Pell was modest in his criticisms of the sharpness that had come to dominate political discourse by the end of his career.

Pell put much more emphasis on his continuing belief, as he put it in one interview days before his last Senate session, “that government — and the federal government in particular — can, should and does make a positive impact on the lives of most Americans.”

Pell added: “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.”

In retirement, Pell often showed his wistfulness for the life he had left behind in the Capitol. But he tried to continue his engagement with public affairs. In 1998, he made his third visit to Fidel Castro’s Cuba — to much less controversy than his first shortly after his election in 1960.

Pell was cheerfully philosophical about the conservative shift in American politics that began with President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, swept the Republicans to majority control of both houses of Congress in 1994, and continued into the administration of President George W. Bush.

He never adopted the fashion that led more timorous Democrats to stop answering to the description of “liberal.”

“The pendulum will swing back to the liberal agenda — not soon, probably not in my lifetime,” he would often say.

Pell’s longtime chief of staff, Thomas G. Hughes, recalled yesterday that Pell “always rallied” to the attentions of former colleagues and constituents when he encountered them at public events around the state — even though the senator was wheelchair-bound an unable to speak during his later years.

Hughes recalled a Rhode Island campaign event last summer that featured Biden, before the Democratic senator from Delaware become Obama’s running mate. “Senator Biden, God bless him, sat with Senator Pell, who couldn’t speak back to him, and just talked to him for what must have been 30 minutes. He talked about the campaign, about their times together in the Senate,” Hughes recalled.

As ever in such circumstances, Hughes said it was clear in Pell’s attentive and widening eyes that he was taking in and appreciating every syllable of his old friend’s political update.

In addition to his wife, Nuala, Pell is survived by his son, Christopher T.H. Pell of Newport; his daughter Dallas Pell of New York; five grandchildren and five great grandchildren. His son, Herbert C. Pell III, died in 1999; his daughter Julia Pell died in 2006.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com