'Pre-eminent Montanan of last century' was 98.

Mike Mansfield, the Montana miner and history professor who served as Senate majority leader and U.S. ambassador to Japan longer than anyone else, died Friday morning in Washington, D.C. He was 98.

Revered in his home state, respected by his colleagues in Congress, Mansfield was humble and straightforward, a man equally at ease in royal courts and rural Montana.

"Without question, Mike Mansfield will go down in history as the pre-eminent Montanan of the last century," said Stan Kimmitt, a Lewistown native and one of Mansfield's closest friends and co-workers. "He was a wonderful teacher, a wonderful leader, a wonderful man."

Above all else, Mansfield loved his wife, Maureen, a schoolteacher whom he met and married while working as a mucker in the Butte mines. They were married in 1932; she died just over a year ago. He credited her for all he accomplished.

"Mike was a product of Maureen," said Pat Williams, a friend and former congressman from Montana. "She insisted that Mike go to school, that he run for Congress, that he run again when he lost the Democratic primary in 1940."

The Mansfields had one daughter, Anne, a London physician who was at his bedside in Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he died early Friday.

Throughout the day, friends and colleagues reminisced about Mansfield's many years of public service and marveled at his legacy. "Mike Mansfield's long and admirable life is an example to all of us in the world of politics," said former Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who shared 15 years with Mansfield in the Senate.

Mansfield's integrity and truthfulness were without question, McGovern said. "At some early stage, he must have resolved that he was going to tell the truth and be a straight shooter, and he never varied. "

"If Mike said something, it was true," said Mary Gereau, who campaigned with Mansfield when she ran for state superintendent of public instruction in the 1940s. "He was such a person of integrity, he didn't need to campaign. He could have been senator until he died."

"Mike treated everybody the same," said John Melcher, the Democrat who won Mansfield's Senate seat when he retired in January 1977. "He told you what he believed in, and he gave you the benefit of the doubt if you didn't agree with him.

"He was not just intelligent. He had very good judgment. There was a balance to his wisdom."

Melcher said he knew he could never fill Mansfield's footsteps. "He was a giant," he said. "He portrayed everything that is good about America to the rest of the world."

McGovern remembered slipping over to Mansfield's house one late summer night in 1972 to ask for the majority leader's help. McGovern had been the Democratic Party' s presidential nominee just 12 days when his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, dropped out of the race.

"I was in trouble," McGovern said. "I urged Mike to accept the vice presidential nomination and be my running mate as a way of salvaging the ticket."

Mansfield replied: "George, Lyndon Johnson asked me the same thing when he was running for president. I told him no and I have to tell you the same thing. I don't want to be either vice president or president. I just want to be a senator from Montana."

All who knew him offered a story of Mansfield's one-word replies and common-sense rebuttals. He was the bane of commentators on Sunday morning news programs like "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation," McGovern said.

"Some guy would ask this long, long question," he said. "Senator, you know that we've been involved in Vietnam for a long time and that our involvement has been supported by three presidents. Do you think our involvement there is justified?"

And Mansfield would say, "Nope."

"They would run out of questions long before the program was over," McGovern said. "There I'd be, giving some guy on the other network this long history of Southeast Asia and where things went wrong with the French. And Mike was getting right to the point."

Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post correspondent who is writing a biography of Mansfield, recalled visiting the former ambassador's office in Washington last year and asking about a ceremony he had just attended at the White House -- a Clinton administration ceremony feting a bill enhancing trade relations with China.

"I understand you were at the White House for the China ceremony," Oberdorfer said.

"Yep," said Mansfield.

"Well, what did you think of it?"

"Talk," said Mansfield.

"What was your role?"

"Window dressing."

Do not confuse Mansfield's taciturn ways for ignorance, though, Oberdorfer said. " He was brilliant. As ambassador, I think Mansfield helped give the Japanese people a much greater sense of their independent worth. He really worked at it. Mansfield wanted the Japanese to give due consideration to U.S. views, but he also wanted them to realize that they are an important country -- that they are the second-largest economy on Earth."

Thus Mansfield's oft-quoted insistence that "the relationship between the United States and Japan is the most important bilateral relationship on Earth, bar none." And, Oberdorfer said, the ambassador's gift to visitors of Bar None candy bars.

Of course, what was remarkable about Mansfield's 11 years as ambassador to Japan was that he was appointed by both a Democratic president -- Jimmy Carter -- and then by Ronald Reagan, a Republican. He was the longest-serving U.S. ambassador to Japan in history.

In an interview several years ago with the New York Times, Mansfield recalled the telephone call from Reagan.

"The phone rang at 2 o'clock one morning, and I wondered who the hell is calling at this hour," Mansfield said. "It was President Reagan. He said, 'I'd like you to stay on. ' I said, 'I'm half-packed, ready to go.' He said, 'Unpack. I want you to stay on.' So I said, 'Hang on a minute,' and I woke Maureen. And she said yes, and so I said yes."

"Mike Mansfield was such a remarkable individual," said Paul Lauren, a history professor at the University of Montana who came to know Mike and Maureen as the founding director of UM's Mansfield Center.

"He was genuinely humble," Lauren said. "And his love for Montana was deep and abiding."

In the Japanese ambassador's office during Mansfield's tenure, visitors were greeted by a Charlie Russell painting of cowboys on the plains. A Montana road map was displayed beneath the glass of the coffee table. Montanans -- "or anyone who had ever driven through Montana," Oberdorfer said -- had easy access to the ambassador.

Mansfield was not a Montana native, Oberdorfer said. He was born, in fact, in New York City on March 16, 1903. Michael Joseph Mansfield was the son of Irish immigrants. Patrick Mansfield was a hotel porter, and then a construction worker. Josephine O 'Brien Mansfield died when her son was 7 years old, and the boy and his two sisters were sent to live with an uncle in Great Falls.

Years later, Mansfield remembered pushing his uncle's delivery cart around Great Falls, and running away from home several times. He lied to recruiters and enlisted in the Navy at age 14, serving in the Atlantic in World War I. Then came a year in the Arm y and, beginning in 1920, two years in the Marine Corps.

The Marines sent Mansfield to the Philippines, Japan and China, and the travel spawned his lifelong interest in the Far East.

He returned to Montana in 1922 and began work in th e Butte mines, using pick and shovel to clear rock and debris in the underground shafts. While working as a mucker, Mansfield met the love of his life, Maureen Hayes, and she persuaded him to attend first the Montana School of Mines, then to enroll in the University of Montana.

He finished high school by correspondence course while studying at the School of Mines. At UM, he quickly distinguished himself, earning a degree in history and a teaching job.

"Mike was a typical tweedy, pipe-smoking professor who knew more about the Far East than anyone else in Montana," said Kimmitt, who was a student in one of Mansfield' s history classes. They met again years later, when Kimmitt was secretary for the majority leader, then secretary of the Senate after Mansfield's retirement.

In his first political campaign, Mansfield finished last in a three-man primary for the Democratic nomination for Montana' s Western District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The next time, in 1942, he won a tight race for the seat vacated when Jeannette Rankin, a Republican, retired.

Mansfield spent 10 years in the House, during which he voted for a higher minimum wage, economic aid to Turkey and Greece and liberal immigration rights for people displaced in World War II, and the Marshall Plan to aid European recovery. He opposed the p eacetime draft, the 22nd Amendment's two-term limit for presidents and money for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The latter resulted in the appearance in Montana by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy when Mansfield ran against Republican Sen. Zales N. Ecton in 1952. McCarthy, the notorious "Red hunter,"

railed at Mansfield for "coddling" the Communists. Montanans sent McCarthy home, and also Ecton.

Mansfield won the Senate seat.

Lyndon Johnson tapped Mansfield as his assistant majority leader in 1956, needing a Westerner to counter-balance the Senate' s all-Southern leadership. When Johnson became vice president in 1961, Mansfield was named the Senate majority leader. He kept the job until his retirement in 1977, longer than anyone before or since.

Although quiet and reserved, Mansfield was not meek, said McGovern. "He was not an Irishman for nothing. He could sound off."

Colleagues knew when Mansfield was angry by the quiver of his pipe. "His teeth would tighten on that pipe and it would start shaking," McGovern said.

The toughest years were those during which the Johnson administration increased American involvement in Vietnam, McGovern said. Mansfield opposed the war, but felt obliged as majority leader to carry the president' s message to the Senate.

"Mike showed the strain of those days on the veins of his neck and in the lines on his face," McGovern said. " He wrote lengthy memos to Johnson explaining where he had gone wrong on the war. He did that time after time after time."

After the assassination of South Vietnam' s president in 1963, Mansfield became increasingly critical of the war, backing legislation to withdraw American troops and stop the bombing. Later, in 1973, he was a principal architect of the War Powers Act, which hoped to restrict a president' s ability to commit U.S. troops overseas without congressional consent.

In those same years, Mansfield provided the leadership essential to passage of sweeping civil rights, health, education and anti-poverty legislation. He championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public places, and the Votin g Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed the participation of Southern blacks in state and national elections.

He often said he was proudest of his work to win congressional approval of legislation that led to ratification of the 26th Amendment, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.

"Mike was so restrained," said Gereau, the former superintendent of public instruction. "He was just about unflappable."

Gereau remembered a trip she made to Congress, asking for $350,000 for Indian education. "Mike was so busy, it took me three days to get in to see him," she said.

"Mary, what do you want?" the senator asked.

"I want $350,000 to educate the Indian kids of Montana," she said.

"You know Mary, $350,000, that's a number people understand," Mansfield said. "You could probably get $350 million easier than $350,000."

"So I went and got all the other states with Indian schools, and we came back with a bigger request, and we got money for all the Indian kids in the United States," Gereau said.

Throughout it all, his friends said, Mansfield never stopped loving Montana or working for Montana. When Mike and Maureen returned to the United States from Japan in 1988, they reluctantly settled in Washington endash

not Montana endash because of the cold winters back home.

Mansfield spent the last 13 years as a senior adviser on East Asian affairs at Goldman, Sachs and Co., the investment banking firm. He continued working even after doctors fitted his failing heart with a pacemaker early last month.

"Mike was the embodiment of Montana: quiet, humble, strong, salt of the earth, committed to his wife, family, state and country," said Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a fellow Democrat.

Baucus said he visited Mansfield in the hospital last month, and they talked about world events, then about Montana, and finally Maureen.

"Maureen, what a girl she was, what a girl," Mansfield said, smiling and closing his eyes.

Mansfield will be buried Wednesday alongside his wife in Arlington National Cemetery. Mass will be celebrated at 10:45 a.m. EDT at the Fort Myer Memorial Chapel in Arlington, with readings by family members and eulogies by family and friends. President Bush ordered U.S. flags at the White House and all public facilities lowered to half-staff on the day of his burial.

To the end, his friends said, Mansfield was sharp and solid. "The real McCoy," said Williams, the former congressman, now a senior fellow at UM's O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West.

Three months ago, Williams and Mansfield exchanged letters. Mansfield's closing words hinted at his weakening health. "Pat," the older man wrote, " time is something which you never catch up with. But in time, it catches up with you."

Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com

AP-NY-10-05-01 2348EDT

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