Exit left: Ron Dellums leads the liberals out of Congress.

In May 1971, when anti-Vietnam War protesters converged on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, baton-wielding police officers thought nothing of whacking a tall black man distinguished by his dashiki and Afro, hairstyle.

But the victim of that police assault turned out to be a newly elected member of the United States Congress. He went on to lead a lawsuit based on the attack and the ensuing arrests that established the right to protest on the grounds of the Capitol.

Inside the Capitol building, he took an even more radical step. He held an unofficial hearing where U.S. Army veterans spoke of war crimes they and their fellow soldiers had committed against the people of Vietnam. One newspaper declared, "The hearings included some of the most damning statements of American conduct in war ever heard on Capitol Hill."

The New Left had arrived in the U.S. House of Representatives. And its name was Ron Dellums.

For the next twenty-seven years, Dellums established himself as a figure like none who had served before--an unrepentant radical who took the battle from the streets to the floor of Congress.

In February, Dellums is leaving the California Congressional seat he has held since Richard Nixon was President and J. Edgar Hoover still ran the FBI. His departure is a loss, not only for the progressive cause, but for America.

"Ron Dellums rose higher than anyone in American history with his politics," says Alan Charney, national director of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group Dellums co-chaired. "He clearly was someone who articulated our issues in a very forceful manner. I don't know if there was another member of Congress who combined his political point of view with his knowledge, his influence, his broad range of interests."

The departure of Dellums, the ranking Democrat on the House National Security Committee, is part of an exodus of progressive or, at least, courageous legislators. Former Banking Committee chair Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, is expected to step down in the coming months. U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers, Democrat of Arkansas, the last Southern liberal in the Senate, will leave at the end of this term. So, too, will U.S. Representative Sidney Yates, Democrat of Illinois, the longest serving member of the House and the most consistent defender of artistic and intellectual freedom in Congress.

Add the 1996 departures of relatively young Senators, such as Paul Simon, Democrat of Illinois, a staunch defender of civil liberties, and Mark Hatfield, Republican of Oregon, the closest thing the Congress knew to a pacifist, and you begin to sense the magnitude of the losses.

Former U.S. Senator George McGovern is worried. Vapid homogeneity is replacing idealism and conscience, he says. "The real independents--the people who are willing to stand up to pressures of the moment on behalf of the future--are disappearing from Congress," says McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee.

Dellums, sixty-two, says he is leaving to reclaim a personal life lost to thirty years of nonstop politics. Gonzalez, eighty-one, is in poor health, and others have their excuses. But there is not much doubt that were the Congress still in Democratic hands, the exodus would not be occurring.

"I think Dellums and a lot of the other unique people are discouraged by what's happened in recent years," says McGovern. "The triumph of the right in 1994 has taken its toll. I think there is a sense on the part of a lot of people that politics has lost its more admirable qualities. There's more emphasis on public relations and less on the great issues."

McGovern is not the only one lamenting the loss of independent, idealistic legislators. "Too many people in Congress today are Lilliputians. They can't see the big picture," says U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, who is herself a lonely voice of dissent regarding the globalization of the American economy. "Those two men, Ron Dellums and Henry Gonzalez, they saw the big picture and they dedicated their careers to lofty purposes. I shudder to think of a Congress without them."

Dissenters have historically kept Congress somewhat honest--John Quincy Adams challenging slavery, Abraham Lincoln opposing the Mexican-American War, Robert M. La Follette attacking the war profiteers of World War I, and Margaret Chase Smith condemning Joe McCarthy. But as corporate special interests hold more sway in Washington, and as polls replace ideals as engines of Congressional action, courage and independence seem to be going the way of Dellums and Gonzalez.

Kaptur worries that the majority of Americans who can't afford their own lobbyists are losing their representation in Congress.

"With the vast amount of money that is required now, it is harder and harder to get people of humble origins inside the door of the Capitol," she says. "Increasingly, we're getting a Congress where the majority of members come from a well-to-do background. So these kinds of voices, these voices from outside the corridors of power, become very precious. They represent the majority, but it is hard for them to be heard. So they have to be very strong. Representatives Dellums and Gonzalez, they were strong."

Kaptur came to admire Dellums after working with him in 1990, when she was a junior member of the House. She recognized the signs of war in the Persian Gulf. A self-described "child of the Vietnam War era," Kaptur had sworn to herself that she would not stand by and allow the Congress to relinquish its oversight role, as had happened in the early 1960s. She demanded a vote on going to war in the Persian Gulf. Her number-one ally was Dellums.

Along with fifty-two other members of the House, the unlikely pair sued then President George Bush to prevent him from unilaterally declaring war. Their initiative helped to force a Congressional debate prior to the outbreak of the war.

As they stood on the steps of the federal courthouse where the suit was filed, Kaptur expected Dellums, then one of the senior members of the House Armed Services Committee, to take the lead. Instead, he gently pushed her to speak. "He thought his reputation as an activist might hurt the cause," she recalls. "Unlike the microphone hogs who so dominate here, the issue was always more important to him than his own ego."

The same was true of Gonzalez, who joined Dellums and Kaptur in voting against authorizing the war--and then went them one better. Pointing to evidence that the Bush Administration had conspired with the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency to arm Saddam Hussein, and angered by Bush's refusal to seek a negotiated settlement when that option presented itself, Gonzalez introduced a resolution to impeach the President.

This was his third attempt to impeach a chief executive. Gonzalez had proposed impeaching Ronald Reagan in 1983 for illegally invading Grenada, and again in 1987 for his role in the Iran-contra scandal.

The first Hispanic elected to Congress from Texas, Gonzalez was a troublemaker from day one. He arrived in the Capitol in 1962 carrying with him a bill to repeal the poll tax. He once filibustered for thirty-six hours against a plan to permit the closing of public schools that anti-integrationists had targeted. His combativeness earned him dismissals as "a high-strung eccentric" and, in the words of one Reagan aide, "a vile, abusive" man.

Congress's most impassioned defender of public-housing programs throughout his thirty-five years in Washington, Gonzalez savaged the Reagan Administration for attempting to cut spending in this area, and he used his position as chairman of a key banking subcommittee to launch the investigation that would eventually prove Reagan aides had steered Housing and Urban Development contracts to political allies. "It is indeed ironic that a program the Reagan Administration had sought to terminate for six years was misused to feather the financial nest of ... Administration favorites," Gonzalez declared with delight.

Eventually, he succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to accept increased housing funding, and in gaining Congressional approval for a plan requiring the federal savings-and-loan board to subsidize low-cost mortgages for working people.

In 1989, in the midst of the savings-and-loan scandal, Gonzalez took over as chair of the Banking Committee. Congressional Quarterly called him "Congress's most aggressive inquisitor" of Charles Keating, the high-flying owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Gonzalez beat back the lobbyists who sought to forestall a tightening of regulations on the thrift industry. He also forced the S&Ls to pay higher premiums to bail out the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation--moves that saved American taxpayers billions of dollars.

"Henry has been legendary," says U.S. Representative Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and a fellow member of the Banking Committee. "You always knew, come hell or high water, Henry would fight for the little guy."

While Gonzalez stood up to the banking industry, Dellums took on a more daunting target: the military-industrial complex.

"What shaped my politics regarding war and peace was Martin Luther King Jr., the most extraordinary person that I ever heard. And when he began to talk about the issues of war and peace with such eloquence and such passion, I was drawn to that like a magnet," Dellums recalls.

A popular community activist in the San Francisco Bay area who bridged the gap between the Black Panthers and more traditional social-service agencies, Dellums agreed to run for the Berkeley City Council in 1967 only if local Democrats would get out of his way and let him practice politics on his own terms.

"That stipulation became the major tenet of Dellums's political career," observed The Oakland Tribune when Dellums announced his retirement plans. Running on a radical anti-war platform in 1970, the Berkeley councilman challenged and defeated a liberal incumbent in the Democratic primary.

Dellums's victory drew national headlines. It became the symbol of a rising new politics that no longer would compromise on issues of war and peace.

"I took the Vietnam War on very strongly. And a number of people said to me, `Well, you know, the black community's not interested in the Vietnam War.' My response was that black people in America, historically, carried the burden of racial and economic oppression, but they do not have to carry the burden of ignorance. To be in public life, you have to be part of the educative process, and my job is to go out there and help people understand the connection between waging war and spending billions of dollars on military apparati that detracted from the priorities of this country," Dellums explained years later in a discussion sponsored by the progressive Center for Defense Information.

Dellums became a national symbol of the anti-war movement, but he had to battle for respect in Congress. He won a place on the House Armed Services Committee, but not a chair--the chairman, a Southern segregationist, forced him to share a seat with someone else.

"They saw me as a caricature," he recalled. "And they saw Berkeley as `Berserkeley,' so whoever represented that area has to at best be flaky. They saw the Bay area as this hotbed of leftwing communist thought. Therefore, Ron Dellums, at a bare minimum, had to be a `commie pinko extremist.' So here comes this black guy from the Bay area talking about peace, feminism, challenging racism, challenging the priorities of the country, and talking about preserving the fragile nature of our ecological system. People looked at me as if I was a freak. And in looking back, I think the only crime that we committed was that we were twenty years ahead of our time."

Instead of storming out of the committee and struggling on the periphery, however, Dellums stuck it out. "I did not join the Armed Services Committee to learn about missiles, planes, and ships. I joined because I knew I would need to become an expert in this field in order to argue successfully for military-spending reductions that would free up resources for the desperate human needs that I see every day in my community," says Dellums.

So he became an expert. Even Dellums's harshest critics came to accept his skill as an analyst of Pentagon budgets. In 1993, he rose to the ranking position on the Armed Services Committee, becoming the first African American and the first anti-war activist ever to serve as its chair.

"At that moment, he became a historic figure in Congress," says McGovern. "To rise to the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee as a self-described radical from Berkeley is something that most members of Congress in my time would have said was impossible. But Ron did it. If the Democrats had maintained control of the House, who knows what he might have accomplished."

As it happens, Dellums was not able during his two-year tenure as chairman to achieve his goals of reorienting federal budget priorities from defense to domestic concerns, converting defense industries to nonmilitary production, or developing a foreign policy that would lead the United States to walk gently in the world.

But he did have his success. He was the prime mover behind cutting back or capping weapons programs--most notably the MX missile and the B-2 bomber. His pioneering work to expose and prevent racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the military had a dramatic impact, as did his work to promote peacekeeping as a legitimate role for the U.S. military.

The alternative budgets that Dellums developed as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus--budgets that proposed massive shifts in spending from military to human needs--became rallying points for progressive activists. "On budget issues, he really has been the voice of the left in Congress," says DSA's Charney.

But Dellums went beyond budgets and defense issues. No one fought harder for an ethical U.S. foreign policy. In 1983, Dellums sought a Congressional investigation of the Reagan Administration's invasion of Grenada. And when the Administration set out to send U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras, Dellums filed a lawsuit charging that the move violated the Neutrality Act.

Nowhere was Dellums's contribution more important than in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. When he came to Congress in 1971, Dellums introduced the first bill proposing sanctions against the African nation's white racist government. For all practical purposes, there was no anti-apartheid movement in the United States at the time, but Dellums's bill began a process that fifteen years later would lead to the House vote to enact the measure.

When South African president Nelson Mandela spoke before Congress in 1990, Dellums was invited to lead him to the podium. "One of the greatest moments for me was escorting Nelson Mandela onto the floor of Congress," Dellums says today.

After thirty years of politics, Dellums says he is ready for a break. A big motivation for his early retirement appears to be to assure the election of his longtime aide and ally, California state senator Barbara Lee, to his seat in a special election scheduled for June. Lee is a progressive, but few expect her--or anyone else--to rival Dellums's contribution to the House.

"We have some good young people coming along. I'm sure that there will be new voices to meet a new day," says Kaptur. "But Ron Dellums and Henry Gonzalez will be missed. They had a depth. They understood political and economic forces, and they were absolutely willing to question existing arrangements. They were people who were uncomfortable with the status quo. They weren't `don't-rock-the-boat' people. They were willing to rock the boat if it would make a better country."

Dellums knows some people are upset about his departure. But he also points out that he arrived in Congress on the crest of a wave of activism. For genuine change to be achieved, he says, a grassroots movement must be reenergized outside Congress.

"If people are upset by my not being here, that's a good thing," he says. "Without pressure from the street, without pressure from the community, without clear, responsible ideas being articulated, you leave elective officials to make decisions based on what's in their best interest."

He has not lost his fervor, though. "The struggle to end racism, sexism, and homophobia; to provide for a fully accessible society; to ensure that the children are educated, our families housed, our communities safe, and our environment sound; and to secure the post-Cold War peace dividend all remain urgent national priorities," he says.

Dellums is philosophical about his role. "People come and people go, but ideas stay," he says. "Being the Congressman is not about me, it's about ideas."

John Nichols, an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, covers electoral politics for The Progressive.