Mike Mansfield took the helm of a struggling Senate trying to overcome the reactionary power of the Southern bloc and led it to its greatest period of accomplishment ever in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mansfield’s response to this and subsequent questions, compared to what we hear from the mouths of contemporary Democrats, is a shocking reminder of how far we have fallen in the last 50 years.

A mid-1950s picture of a Washington, D.C., softball game shows Washington Sen. Henry Jackson swinging at the ball. John F. Kennedy is catching. Sen. Mike Mansfield of Montana, the umpire, was ...

Considered by many to be our nation’s greatest statesman, Montana’s Mike Mansfield rose from a hardscrabble childhood, service in three branches of the military, and working Butte’s copper ...