Fenno, who studied Congress close up, dies at 93
Richard F. Fenno Jr., a scholar whose close-range studies of how Congress and other parts of government actually work broke new ground in political science by focusing less on government processes and more on how the people’s representatives interact with their constituents back home, died on April 21 in Rye, New York. He was 93.
His son Craig said the cause was presumed to be the coronavirus, though his father, who was in a nursing home at his death, had not been tested.
Fenno, who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York for 46 years, wrote 19 books, most focusing on the House or Senate. Some, including “The Making of a Senator: Dan Quayle” (1989) and “Learning to Legislate: The Senate Education of Arlen Specter” (1991), were about individual members.
Others dealt with broader subjects. There was, for instance, “Going Home: Black Representatives and Their Constituents” (2003).
“Representation,” he wrote in that book, “is, at bottom, a home relationship, one that begins in the constituency and ends there.” Thus he visited the representatives he wrote about not just in Washington but also in their districts.
“Home, not Washington, is the place where most House member-constituent contact occurs,” he wrote, “and the place where judgment is ultimately rendered.”
Fenno, who joined the University of Rochester faculty in 1957 and retired in 2003, called his research method “soaking and poking” — soaking up information and poking into details. It was a brand of scholarship he imparted to generations of students.
In 1968, an eventful year in American history, one of those students, Robert Sachs, came to him with an idea that Fenno turned into a University of Rochester institution: the socalled Washington Semester, in which a student receives credit for working in the political sphere in the nation’s capital.
“Having heard professor Fenno speak enthusiastically about shadowing members of Congress and senators in the course of his research,” Sachs said by email, “I thought maybe I could also learn this way, and get involved in the world of politics at the same time.”
Sachs, whose subsequent career included working on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch, was the first of many to take the Washington Semester, a relatively new idea at the time. Another was Heather A. Higginbottom, who became a deputy secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s administration.
“The Washington Semester Program was brilliant in its simplicity,” Higginbottom said by email. “Fenno understood that to truly understand how policy is made — the dynamics that contribute to decision making — you needed to be up close and personal.”
The experience, she said, stayed with her.
“That one internship nearly 30 years ago completely informed my approach to politics and policy,” she said. “It grounded me in the pragmatism of policymaking.”
Richard Francis Fenno Jr. was born on Dec. 12, 1926, in Winchester, Massachusetts. His father was in the coal business. His mother, Mary (Tredennick) Fenno, died when he was a child.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Fenno graduated from Amherst College in 1948. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1956 with a dissertation titled “The President’s Cabinet,” which became his first book, in 1959.