GREENBRAE, Calif.

IN HIS LAST YEAR in the U.S. Senate, 1997, I interviewed my cousin in his cluttered, hideaway office off the Senate floor. The walls were so covered with paintings and photographs as to be nearly invisible — I lost track counting at 137. Most were of family: portraits of his father, his children and his ancestors. There were also commemorative medals of his service in Slovakia and Hungary, decorations from foreign governments, awards from organizations, photos of him with some presidents and a few popes, and a white scarf presented by the Dalai Lama.

Surrounded by mementos of both his patrician origins and his career as a liberal Democrat, I needed to find out how he reconciled such apparently conflicting philosophies. How could a man who had in all seriousness taught his children that Pells were the “crème de la crème” of American society be an effective advocate for the disadvantaged?

Born in 1918, my older cousin went to private schools, learned languages in Europe and summered in Newport. But despite being rich, he said that he had felt “perfectly ordinary” growing up. The example he gave, however, made me wonder what he saw as “ordinary.”

“Because my parents were divorced,” he said, “I lived 10 months a year in England with my mother, and we spent a lot of time with a great friend of hers, Lord Gladstone. His favorite occupation was chopping down trees. So after tea each afternoon I was given a little hatchet and a little tree to chop down.”

The future senator became acquainted with the needs of poor people while at Princeton during the Depression. There, he helped distribute excess food from the college’s swank eating clubs to black families living nearby. Since he did not need to earn an income, it was assumed that he would go into public service.

A lifelong worker for peace, he saw the effects of war close up. During a visit to his father in Lisbon in 1940, he learned that the Portuguese Red Cross needed a driver for a risky mission to transport Christmas relief packages to British prisoners of war interned at a camp in Germany. Claiborne volunteered, maneuvering a converted ambulance stocked with medicine, plum puddings, food, cigarettes and clothing across wartime Europe, through snowdrifts and war zones, to the POW camp.

Along the way in France, he entered a café — only to discover that it was an Axis headquarters filled with German and Italian soldiers. Using his facility with languages and his documentation from the Red Cross, he talked his way out. Along the way, he saw the Nazi war machine “sucking everything out of France as quickly as France can make it.” He saw Jews interned in occupied France, hungry, diseased and filthy.

Claiborne spent some years in the Foreign Service and, by 1959, was managing investments and involved in Democratic Party politics. With formal manners that belied his kindliness, he struck me as diffident and vague — convinced of the importance of his ancestry, quite out of touch with the world most people lived in and rather charmingly eccentric.

So I was dumbfounded when, one morning in 1959 when I was visiting him in Newport, Claiborne asked me a question as he wandered downstairs in his bathrobe, spectacles on his nose and a few papers in his hand. “Eve,” he asked, “Would you have a look at my C.V.? I’m thinking of running for the Senate.”

If he had said he was joining the circus, I couldn’t have been more surprised. But I looked over the résumé he put into my hand: He’d been arrested by Communists three times; he’d been an official at the founding of the United Nations. It was hard for me to imagine this gaunt, slightly fragile-looking man standing up to the Nazis in Danzig in the ’30s or as a cook on a Coast Guard ship in World War II, rescuing downed airmen in the North Atlantic — both of which he did.

Still, since I saw no hint of a common touch, I couldn’t imagine how his campaign as a Democrat in a working-class state could succeed. Moreover, I believed, he had a house in Rhode Island mostly because his New York family had summered in Newport and therefore would likely be considered a carpetbagger.

I was no prophet. Despite not being endorsed in the primary election by the Democratic Party, Claiborne swept into office in 1960 — running ahead of John F. Kennedy in the state. He, his father, and his loyal wife each put up $50,000 to finance the run, and he organized a bare-bones grassroots campaign. For 36 years, he served his state and his country in the Senate. But he stayed close to his family, of which he was modestly proud. While not as prominent as the Adamses or Roosevelts, he said, Pells have been a “force for decency” over the centuries, a minor family in U.S. political history.

In 1970, when I was involved with radical politics, airlines had special low rates for young people. I wanted to attend a Washington conference on prisons, but I was short of money. Though 33, far too old to qualify, I looked younger, so I borrowed the driver’s license of a younger friend, Elissa Mattross, and bought a cheap youth-fare ticket to Washington.

All went well with my false identification, but United Airlines lost my suitcase. They promised to find and deliver it to the place where I was staying, which was Claiborne’s house. “It will be there this evening, Miss Mattross,” the airline clerk said apologetically.

So I had to tell Claiborne that I had cheated the airline, that a bag to be delivered to “Miss Mattross” at their address was actually for me.

Claiborne got furious, the only time I ever saw him angry. “You must never do something like that! If you are strapped, you must ask for help. That’s what a family is for!” he fumed.

Caught in the act, I was mortified and could only apologize. At the time I felt that, besides his moral outrage at what I had done, he could have been afraid that the airline might find me out and visualized an embarrassing headline: “Senator’s Kin Nabbed in Scam.” Now I believe that he felt his patriarchal sense of obligation was at stake: He would gladly have given me a ticket, and I was especially in the wrong to have taken a risk that could reflect badly on him.

When I asked him at the end of our interview what he thought characterized our family, he replied, “The spirit of bourgeois oblige.” A small smile; he didn’t really mean that, but he wouldn’t say “noblesse oblige.” He went on: “What the Europeans call the patrician philosophy. We maintain a certain level of culture and education. As soon as we have acquired enough money to live on, we stop making it and do what we enjoy or we add to the commonweal.”

As the outpouring of tributes to Claiborne makes clear, his life’s work added much to the commonweal.

Eve Pell is a writer in California. Her book, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, is coming out in February from State University of New York Press.