Guide to the Brock Adams Papers
1947-1998

Biographical Note

Brock Adams was a liberal Democrat whose record of public service spanned almost 40 years. He served in both houses of the U.S. Congress and as Secretary of Transportation under President Jimmy Carter.

Brockman Adams was born on January 13, 1927, in Atlanta, Georgia, but grew up in Portland and Seattle. Upon graduation from Seattle’s Broadway High School in 1944, he enrolled in the University of Washington. He interrupted his studies to enlist in the U.S. Navy, where he served for two years. He returned to the University in 1946 and graduated summa cum laude in 1949 with a degree in economics. During his senior year he served as President of the Associated Students of the University of Washington and was the first student to both serve in that post and receive the President’s Medal of Excellence as the University’s top scholar. After receiving a law degree from Harvard University in 1952, Adams entered private practice in Seattle.

Adams entered electoral politics in 1958 with an unsuccessful challenge of King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll. He was an early organizer for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and eventually chaired Kennedy’s Western Washington organization. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Adams U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington. Adams resigned this position in March 1964 to run for Congress. In November he was elected to represent Washington’s Seventh Congressional District, the south side of Seattle and its southern suburbs, Renton and Kent. In this area are the major Boeing manufacturing plants. He was reelected six times by ever-increasing margins and served on the following committees: Interstate and Foreign Commerce; District of Columbia; Revenue and Financial Affairs; Banking and Currency; and Agriculture.

Adams' record on social issues was solidly liberal. He was an advocate of civil rights, the 18 year old vote and the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1967 Adams broke with President Lyndon Johnson over his escalation of the Vietnam war. In 1969 he urged President Richard Nixon to speed up the withdrawal of U.S. troops. He condemned the bombings of North Vietnam and was one of the 85 Congressmen who supported the October 15th 1969 Vietnam War Moratorium march. In 1971 he called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of the year.

The two issues with which Adams was primarily concerned during his tenure in the U.S. House were transportation and economic policy. As chairman of the subcommittee on Transportation and Aeronautics, Congressman Adams worked to strengthen the nation’s railroad system. In 1973 he sponsored the Shoup-Adams bill which saved Northeastern railroads and restructured them into a viable system. In 1966, with Senator Magnuson, he sponsored legislation to relieve a national box car shortage and in 1974 introduced the Rail Freight Transportation Improvement Act to make available more rail equipment. Adams was also a proponent of rapid transit and introduced legislation to provide federal assistance to cities for design and construction of mass transportation facilities. Along with other members of the Washington State delegation, he pushed unsuccessfully for a government loan to Boeing for development of the Supersonic Transport (SST). During the energy crisis in 1974, Adams introduced legislation to ration fuel.

Adams was outspoken in issues involving the economy and the federal budget. He was an advocate of tax reform and proposed a minimum tax on wealthy individuals and corporations. As a member of the Steering and Policy Committee of the House Majority in 1974, he helped develop the Democratic position on the economy.

Adams was involved in a bitter battle to reform the House District of Columbia Committee, which was the governing body for the District. The Committee had for years been controlled by a conservative Southern faction. Motivated by concern for the problems of urban decay in the nation’s capitol, Adams succeeded, in 1973, in guiding through Congress a bill that gave the District a measure of home rule.

Adams helped to craft the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The law called for the creation of a Budget Committee in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and required that Congress create an overall budget before passing spending or revenue legislation. Although the law did not require the new process to be inaugurated until 1976 for the 1977 fiscal year, Congress chose to write non-binding budget resolutions in 1975 to guide spending for the 1976 fiscal year.

Adams ran as the liberal caucus’ candidate for chairman of the new House Budget Committee in the spring of 1974, but he was defeated by Al Ullman of Oregon. Ulmann, however, soon resigned to take over as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Adams won the race to succeed him. In implementing the new budget process, the new chairman had to contend with a sharply divided House. Republicans were unhappy with high levels of spending on non-military programs while liberal Democrats were upset over cuts in spending on social programs. After a series of contentious battles, Adams was able to push the first budget resolutions through the House with the very slimmest of margins.

Adams worked on behalf of Governor Jimmy Carter in his bid for the presidency in 1976 and served as executive director of Carter’s Washington State campaign. President Carter subsequently appointed Adams, who had developed an expertise in many transportation issues in the House, Secretary of Transportation in his new administration. Adams resigned his House seat in January 1977.

Adams’ tenure as Secretary of Transportation was marked by several well-publicized policy disagreements with the White House. President Carter came out early and enthusiastically for airline deregulation. Adams, who had spoken out against deregulation while in Congress, advocated a much more cautious approach to what he would call “regulatory reform.” Civil Aeronautics Board Chairman and pro-deregulation economist Alfred Kahn, rather than Adams, would be the architect of the Administration’s airline strategy. However, Adams, with his legislative experience and personal connections on Capitol Hill, would play an important role in the eventual passage of the landmark Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, legislation that spurred subsequent efforts to deregulate a host of other industries.

There were also policy differences in the area of energy, another top Carter Administration priority. Adams advocated that transportation initiatives that reduced the use of energy, including increased automobile fuel efficiency and improved mass transit, be an integral part of the Administration’s energy strategy. Such measures were largely absent from the proposal Carter presented Congress in March 1977 and continued to be overlooked as primacy on energy policy was given to the newly created Department of Energy.

In spite of these setbacks, Adams had his successes. He reorganized the department, another Carter Administration priority, and was regarded as a good administrator. He disposed of several controversial issues left over from the Ford Administration, most notably that of airbags in passenger cars. Early in his tenure Adams scrapped the demonstration program devised by his predecessor and ordered that by model year 1984 all passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. must include passive restraints (motorized seat belts or airbags). Congressional efforts to veto Adams’ order proved unsuccessful. Adams also raised fuel efficiency standards and challenged American automakers to reinvent the car to make it more socially responsible and environmentally friendly.

Adams pushed the Department of Transportation in the area of affirmative action by requiring grant recipients to include measures that promoted minority businesses and by establishing the Minority Business Resource Center. Adams also proposed regulations mandating that federally funded transportation facilities and programs be accessible to all, regardless of physical limitation.

Adams resigned his cabinet position in July 1979 as part of a Cabinet shakeup by the Carter Administration. While Adams and the Administration had policy differences, Adams and the White House were also in conflict over the hiring of top departmental aides. In addition, Adams felt his access to the President was unduly hampered by White House aides. After his resignation Adams entered into private practice with the Washington office of a Seattle law firm working on transportation and international trade issues.

In 1985 Adams signaled his interest in winning the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Slade Gorton in the 1986 election. (An earlier campaign for the Senate in 1976 was aborted when Henry M. Jackson, whom Adams hoped to succeed, pulled out of the Presidential race.) Although given little chance of beating the incumbent after a long absence from public office and from Washington State, he was able to keep other prominent Democratic challengers out of the race. During the campaign he made issues of Gorton’s vote to confirm Daniel Manion, a controversial Reagan Administration judicial nominee, and the Reagan Administration’s decision to name the Hanford Nuclear Reservation as one of three possible sites for a high-level nuclear waste dump. Adams surprised political pundits with a strong showing in the September open primary, which places both candidates together on the ballot. He went on to upset Gorton in the general election.

As a freshman Senator Adams was appointed to the Senate’s Committees on Commerce, Science and Transportation; Foreign Relations; Labor and Human Relations; and Rules. In 1989, Adams took a seat on the Appropriations Committee and left the Commerce and Foreign Relations Committees. He maintained a consistently liberal record, opposing the Reagan and Bush Administrations most notably in foreign policy, environmental and social matters.

Adams fought to protect Congressional authority in the foreign policy arena. He was a vocal critic of the Reagan Administration’s proposal to provide U.S. naval escorts to Kuwaiti oil tankers sailing in the Persian Gulf, where the tankers were the targets of attack in the Iran-Iraq conflict. He argued that invoking the War Powers Act would provide the necessary debate over the United States’ deepening involvement in the Persian Gulf region. He sat on the special War Powers Subcommittee established by the Foreign Relations Committee to consider the issue. A series of bills, resolutions and amendments sponsored by Adams and his allies was ultimately unsuccessful in invoking the War Powers Act. However, his skillful legislative maneuvering forced a compromise and full debate of the policy. He continued to push for a greater Congressional role when he urged President George Bush to seek “explicit authorization” from Congress before launching an attack on Iraq in retaliation for its invasion of Kuwait. Adams was also a consistent opponent of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and the Salvadoran military.

On environmental matters, Adams was closely aligned with conservationists. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was a central topic of Adams’ Senate campaign, and it remained a focus of Adams’ activities in the Senate. He continued to fight the Department of Energy’s consideration of the site as a nuclear waste repository, and he opposed continued production of nuclear weapons at the Hanford site. He advocated monies be spent on clean up and diversification of the Tri-Cities economy.

In the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound Adams introduced legislation that would ban single-hulled oil tankers from Puget Sound and impose spill containment and contingency planning requirements. In the heated debate over the Pacific Northwest’s old growth forests, Adams was a leading advocate of forest preservation. He opposed exports of logs from federal lands and encouraged economic diversification of timber-dependent communities.

Adams used his position on the Senate Appropriate Committee to support many Washington State projects. As Chairman of the Committee’s Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, Adams drew on his experience as chair of the House District Committee and continued to advocate for greater self-determination for the District’s citizens.

Adams’s work on health care focused on issues related to women and seniors. He was a staunch advocate of abortion rights and a leading supporter of the Women’s Health Equity Act. As Chairman of the Aging Subcommittee of the Labor and Human Relations Committee in 1991-92, Adams highlighted the health problems of older Americans. He also used his seat on the Appropriations Committee to fight for increased funding for research for cancer and AIDS.

In March 1992, shortly after Adams launched his reelection campaign, the Seattle Times published a front-page story in which several unnamed women accused Adams of sexual misconduct over a period of twenty years. At an emotional news conference that same day, Adams angrily denied the allegations, but announced his decision to suspend his reelection campaign. At the conclusion of his term, he retired from public life. After a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, he died at his home in Stevensville, Maryland in September 2004.

Scope and Content

Correspondence, legislative files, campaign files, minutes, speeches and writings, press releases, clippings, case files, committee files, trip files, subject files, audio recordings, video recordings, object, photographs, microfilm.

Arrangement

Organized into 4 accessions:

Accession No. 1096-001, Brock Adams papers, 1965-1976

Accession No. 1096-016, Brock Adams papers, 1947-1993

Accession No. 1096-017, Brock Adams microfilm, undated

Accession No. 1096-018, Brock Adams papers, 1987-1992

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Inventory