Contingency and Political History

A few months back I made a post on what would have been President Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday. It struck me as a fitting occasion to consider the role that chance events play in history. This week, the anniversary of another event—a death, not a birth—seems perhaps an even more appropriate time for such reflections.

It was five years ago yesterday that Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, along with his wife, Sheila, daughter Marcia, and aides Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic, and Mary McEvoy. Locked in a competitive reelection campaign, Wellstone was on his way to a funeral at the time he died. Though his opponent, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, was giving Wellstone a run for his money, the most recent polls had shown the incumbent pulling away from his challenger. One of the reasons was a controversial vote Wellstone cast in the middle of October, against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. At the time of the vote, Wellstone feared he had doomed his reelection bid. Just weeks later it seemed that Minnesotans were rewarding his risky stance.

If Wellstone had not died on that day in October 2002, I think there’s a pretty strong chance he’d be neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in a fight for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Wellstone, who considered a run for the White House in 2000, might even have entered the 2004 race to face George W. Bush. We never would have heard of Howard Dean if the 2004 nominating contest had also featured a popular, charismatic, experienced Democratic senator who had voted against the war. Whether Wellstone would have captured the nomination in 2004, or subsequently won the White House, is something we can never know. But three years after that election, and five years after the Iraq War began, it seems clear that Wellstone’s credibility with today’s Democratic primary electorate would be extraordinary.

Wellstone’s was not the only political career to get snuffed out in such a tragic way. The list of political figures who have been downed in plane crashes is actually quite astonishing. Democratic Rep. Jerry Litton died in a crash in 1976, in the middle of a Senate campaign. He would have likely defeated his Republican opponent, John Danforth, who instead went on to a long and influential career in Congress. In 1978, Virginia politician Richard Obenshain went down with a plane; he was replaced on the ballot by former Navy Secretary John Warner, who is today the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In 1991, Republican Sen. John Heinz and former Sen. John Tower both died in the space of 48 hours in separate plane crashes. Tower was certainly at the end of his career, but Heinz’s future was still bright. Believe it or not, the list goes on.

Of these men, Wellstone seems the most compelling example of political history gone awry through vehicular disaster. But in a country that celebrates its open, safe political process, these random accidents have exerted an uncomfortably significant influence in shaping the present. There’s not really a way around this, but it’s chilling all the same.