TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2010

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The brothers Levin, staying true to their roots

levins from C1

as long together in Congress. Their com- bined years of service (58) are bested by only one other set of brothers. The Ken- nedys needed three able-bodied men to amass 64.5 years, while just two Levins may surpass this number in the next three years, given their good health and margins of victory that have increased over their last four re-election cam- paigns. “I don’t know if you could run Gandhi against Carl and have it be successful,” says Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D).

Carl, 75, took office in 1979, when his

current commander in chief was a high- schooler rolling doobies in Honolulu. Sandy, 78, followed exactly four years lat- er. In Carl’s office there’s a photograph from 1983 after their swearing-in. The brothers are bending down to their mother, who was in a wheelchair, as their wives and Tip O’Neill look on. A reporter in the room said how proud she must be of having two sons in Congress; Mrs. Lev- in replied, with typical spartan charm, “If that’s what they want, it’s okay with me.” “Look at our black hair,” Sandy says

with gentle whimsy, holding the photo. “Forget black,” Carl rasps. “Look at our

hair.”

Their mother’s father was a peddler

before he opened a general store in Bir- mingham, Mich. Their father’s father was a cigar maker who was run out of Chicago because he was a union guy. Their father and uncle sold candy on trains when they were young and later became a lawyer and a federal judge. Prominent civic activism flowered from the rich soil of working-class life, and Carl and Sandy were raised in Detroit’s strong Jewish community to aspire to lofty goals. They worked at Chrysler and General

Motors, Carl on the line and Sandy load- ing steel. In their teens they road-tripped together to California and Mexico, sleep- ing in their car. They drove taxicabs dur- ing summers home from Harvard Law School, where they were roommates in Carl’s first year and Sandy’s third. They each practiced law before they ran for of- fice, Sandy in the state Senate and Carl on the Detroit City Council. Sandy’s two campaigns for governor in the early ’70s gave the Levin name statewide cachet, which helped eventually propel Carl to the U.S. Senate, where the younger brother blazed a trail for the other Levin to reach the Hill. The brothers have stuck around the Capitol for three decades, ac- crued seniority and now sit in catbird seats, gavel-ready, representing the na- tion’s most economically ravaged state. “Michigan is so battered, with the col- lapse of the auto industry, the unemploy- ment — people want comfort,” says veter- an Michigan journalist Jack Lessenberry, who has covered the Levins for decades. “They like the fact that we have two guys who have been around for a long time and are now powerful.” “For Michigan, it’s a huge advantage,”

says Saul Anuzis, former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. “They are your typical tax-and-spend Democrats, which many people in Michigan would have a problem with, but whether we agree or disagree with dollars being spent in federal government, the reality is we now have extra clout for our state when it comes to setting policy, to getting tax dollars back, to looking out for our in- terests vis-a-vis national politics.” Granholm, a longtime friend of the

family, credits Carl with courting techno- logical investment for battery manufac- turing and alternative energy in the de- fense and auto industries, and Sandy with helping to shepherd the state’s No

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ANDREW CUTRARO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEAM PLAYERS: Sander and Carl Levin in 1996. Together, they’ve served in Congress for 58 years, second only to the Kennedy brothers’ 64.5 years.

“When I see two siblings who are fighting . . . it is painful. . . . I weep for people who don’t understand the wonders you can have with brothers, sisters, who are close.”

Sen. Carl Levin

gle. Both Levins are “very decent legisla- tors who have a lot of respect from peo- ple in both parties. What you see is what you get.”

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

THE MEMORIES STACK UP:Family pictures adorn a wall in Sen. Carl Levin’s office. Carl came to Capitol Hill in 1979; Sander followed four years later.

Worker Left Behind program, which was created by Sandy’s son Andy, the state’s chief workforce officer. “I think it makes it easier to maintain your character and integrity when your biggest partner — and the person you least like to let down — is right there with you,” Andy says. “And the way they play sports together really symbolizes both their relationship and approach to the world: They play with ferocious com- petitiveness but also with a sort of grand gentlemanliness. They always say they fouled the other one and they always say it should be the other’s advantage.” Colleagues and friends praise their high energy, good humor and devotion to their families and each other, painting Carl as a tough public-defender type and Sandy as a bit of a wise philosopher. For- mer Michigan governor James Blan- chard, who 40 years ago was a field or-

ganizer for Sandy, says the elder Levin virtually founded the modern Demo- cratic Party of Michigan by bringing it up to speed with polling and television strategy during his 1970 campaign for governor.

Carl is “a terrific travel buddy,” says

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who has jetted with the younger Levin to Bosnia, Iraq and Colombia as part of their work on Armed Services. “He’s got one little suit- case and an all-purpose wardrobe. In the field he takes off the jacket and tie and rolls up his sleeves, and then somehow puts himself back together when he goes to meet with a prime minister.” “I think he’ll bring a return to regular

order,” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), rank- ing member of Ways and Means, says of Sandy’s March 4 appointment as interim chairman after Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) stepped aside to deal with an ethics tan-

What you see: Two old men slurping bean soup and Diet Coke in Carl’s office on Friday afternoon at the end of a whirl- wind week of legislative jujitsu that re- sulted in what they say is the biggest vote of their careers (next to their votes against the Iraq War Resolution). They’re each wearing black pinstriped pants (wool for Sandy and cotton for Carl), ties patterned with red and blue, and white dress shirts whose breast pockets are stuffed with bits of paper (both are known for the grandfatherly habit of clipping and distributing newspaper ar- ticles to staff ). What you get: A meandering dialogue about life, from the 1930s to today, from playing football with a balled-up sock in their childhood home, to sneaking into operas in Boston during law school (Carl loves Mozart and Richard Strauss; Sandy prefers Puccini), to high-priority family dinners on Sundays, to painful defeats in two gubernatorial races and being over- looked for a coveted U.S. attorney post, to raising (combined) seven children and 14 grandchildren, to weekend retreats at a bedroomless shack (named “the Lion’s Den”) on their pastoral acreage 40 miles north of Detroit, to coping with the dev- astating loss of Sandy’s wife, Vicki, in 2008, to having late-night dinners of stuffed cabbage prepared by Carl’s wife, Barbara, at Carl’s house in Capitol Hill af- ter marathon sessions on health care re- form. From sitting side by side on cross- country car trips to sitting side by side

during State of the Union addresses. “When I see two siblings who are fight-

ing, who don’t get along, who are es- tranged — it is painful,” Carl says. “It is literally, physically painful. I weep for people who don’t understand the won- ders you can have with brothers, sisters, who are close.” And have they had a moment to revel

in the rarity of their dual chairmanships? “We’re aware of it,” Carl says. “We ha-

ven’t had much time to discuss it because we’ve been so damn busy.” “Well it’s an opportunity and a respon-

sibility,” Sandy says solemnly. And what can America expect from their committees through the rest of the year? “Now it’s jobs and keeping people’s homes, giving middle-income families a chance to keep what they’ve worked for,” Sandy says. “Our families were given op- portunities. On Ways and Means we’re going to try preserve the opportunities in this society. . . . We have a sense of the blessings of our opportunity. And our parents said, ‘Be ready to participate.’ ” Carl? “Wars, wars,” Carl says, shaking his

head. “The number one thing is we’re en- gaged in two wars. Any issues related to how do we support our troops, succeed in our mission and cover all the budget issues. And train the Afghan army police. A huge issue for me is how well or poorly we’re doing at that.” And then the inevitable issue, chair- men: After all this, does your mind ever flirt with retirement? “No, I don’t think about it,” Sandy says. “No,” Carl says. “Nice try. Next ques-

tion.”

zakd@washpost.com

With ‘Matterhorn,’ first-time novelist Karl Marlantes is in peak form

book world from C1

unlike the infamous Hill 937, or Ham- burger Hill. The substance of the plot is familiar, fused in our collective memory as the futility of politicized and “limited” warfare: the taking of dubious objectives in countless missions to Search and De- stroy. It’s been said that in war, all victory is

fleeting, but for the young Marines of Bravo Company, it’s not even momen- tarily satisfying. Victory means establishing a firebase on Mat- terhorn (and other hills), dig- ging fortifications, abandoning them to the enemy, then taking them back three days later. They don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish, and in the end they don’t care. They mere- ly endure. In what might be lit- erature’s most sustained depic- tion of the drudgery of jungle warfare — rivaling Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” — the men of Bravo en- dure leeches, diarrhea, jungle rot, mal- nutrition, dehydration, immersion foot and stupidity run amok. Senior officers define their objective simply (to kill “gooks”) and micromanage their troops incessantly, radios crackling with re- quests for body counts even in the mid- dle of firefights. Between maddening doses of bureau-

cratic incompetence, racial conflict bor- dering on mutiny and junior officers caught in the middle, killing is about the only thing that makes sense. But the Ma-

rines in Bravo aren’t quite sure whom they’d like to kill more: the enemy out there or the enemy within. This is a war not of conquest, after all, but of attrition, where body counts are inflated like Leh- man Brothers balance sheets, troop re- supply is neglected or denied outright, and the most successful officers are the politically savvy ones. Meanwhile, sol- diers remind themselves of the honor- bound traditions of the Corps: Semper Fi and never leave a Marine behind. For days on end, dehydrated and starving, they carry the rotting corpses of their fallen comrades rather than succumb to a loss of honor. To an outsider, it seems at best impractical and at worst suicidal.

Second Lt. Waino Mellas, the

Marlantes wrote his book on Vietnam over 30 years.

beating heart of this multi- character narrative, is a platoon leader with ambitions: running Bravo Company, winning a medal, justifying his decision to be here, both to himself and his antiwar ex-girlfriend back

home. It doesn’t take long before his fo- cus shifts to the less lofty pursuit of sur- vival. The novel is set in 1969, the year after

the Tet Offensive and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, a time when political tensions threaten to boil over into self- destruction. In the rear, racial agendas dominate the enlisted ranks, but in the bush, desperate Marines need one an- other more than they need Panthers and Klansmen. Fighting their way up the hill-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

side of their former firebase, hatred and jealousy evaporate, even the Corps itself disappears. Every grunt bleeds red and craves only one thing — to get out. Yet here Lt. Mellas achieves a clarity he gets nowhere else. He does his duty, not to God, country or ideology, but to the men

hunkered beside him, for whom he feels an emotion he can only call love. Ironically, the best parts of “Matter-

horn” aren’t the battle scenes, which are at times rendered with a literal precision that borders on mechanical. Rather it is Marlantes’s treatment of pre-combat ten-

sion and rear-echelon politics. It’s these in-between spaces that create the real terror of “Matterhorn”: military and ra- cial politics; fragging that threatens the unit with implosion; and night watch in the jungle, where tigers are as dangerous as the NVA.

Given the long list of stellar works, fic- tion and nonfiction, to come from the Vietnam experience, one might question what more can be said about it. In some ways “Matterhorn” isn’t new at all, but it reminds us of the horror of all war by lay- ing waste to romantic notions and na- palming the cool factor of video games and “Generation Kill.” Marlantes denies us the heartbreaking beauty found in James Webb’s “Fields of Fire,” while re- fusing the hallucinatory madness of “Dispatches.” Lt. Mellas questions everything about the war and its prosecution, yet remains in it nonetheless. To follow him, we are forced at gunpoint down a long jungle path where no atrocity goes undescribed, where glory is reduced to a vague and senseless dream, and the theater of the absurd is decidedly unfunny. Lt. Mellas and his cohort find meaning not in death but in the most immediate realities — kill or be killed, save and be saved — and when you’re finished, maybe, maybe, you’ll get a cold beer and a hot shower and a week’s R&R in Bangkok.

bookworld@washpost.com

Masiel is a novelist who spent 10 years in the Merchant Marines and is the author of “2182 Kilohertz” and “The Western Limit of the World.” Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58