An endangered species: Senator John Chafee is fighting an uphill battle to moderate the Republican "revolution."

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf

It is not every day that one sees a United States senator atop a dozen-foot tall herbivorous mammal. But there it is, hanging outside John Chafee's office, a black-and-white photo of the senator as a younger man, wearing a broad smile, astride a mammoth gray elephant.

"Pretty good, wasn't it?" Chafee asks in a thick Rhode Island accent. He laughs. "I'm not sure I qualify as an expert elephant rider, but I hung on then."

He's still hanging on. A moderate Republican in an era of conservative politicians, Chafee is known among party leaders as a "problem senator." Though he voted to approve the budget, it was only after grumbling loudly about tax cuts. "Bad policy and bad politics," he calls them. Chafee signed onto Medicaid reform only after pushing for--and winning, with the help of other moderates--revisions in the plan to turn the entire program over to the states. He voted for a reduction in student aid but only after reducing the cuts by one-hall "I am an enthusiastic supporter" of the GOP program, he tells me. But he has to tell me. Unlike with other Republicans, asking, "What does Chafee think of the GOP program?" is not a stupid question.

The "hollowing of the center," as Brookings scholar Robert Reischauer describes current trends, is perhaps the central story of modem politics-particularly among Republicans. Due to changes in the nominating process, redistricting, and the impact of a few dynamic personalities, the Republican party is now controlled by a faction of extreme conservatives. The territory held by truly centrist legislators, those willing and interested in building bridges across party lines, is shrinking. Those who remain feel the sand shifting beneath their feet.

John Chafee stands in that center and is for that reason, among others, an intriguing figure: He's a hero of sorts to liberals who might consider him a dubious ally. He's a heretic to party leaders who nevertheless need his support. He is both an inspiring reminder of the tradition of moderation, consensus, and principle and a compelling example of how even the most strong-willed of moderates have been brought on board--or simply squelched--by the radical right. If Republicans continue to shove aside the mainstream bloc of their own party, the country will suffer--and, in the end, so might the GOP itself.

Chafee won his Senate seat in 1976, strangely enough, buttressed by voters' memory of an election he had lost. Running for his fourth two-year term as governor in 1968, Chafee told voters he would need to raise the state income tax. His opponent, Democrat Frank Licht, seized the issue, promised to avoid a tax and won the election. After he took office, Licht raised the tax anyway.

Rhode Islanders later rewarded Chafee's honesty. "I remember hearing people say in `76, `Oh well, Chafee told the truth back then, and that's why I'm voting for him'," says John Mulligan, Washington bureau chief of the Providence Journal-Bulletin. "He has this image of Yankee rectitude, and it's held him in pretty good stead."

That rectitude comes largely from Chafee's background. His father, a tool manufacturer and the descendant of a Rhode Island family that stretches to the 17th century, placed such great emphasis on manners that he once chastised his son for tooting his car horn at a farmhand on a country road. And Chafee's children remember their grandfather paying them 50 cents for every aphorism they'd memorize. Lincoln Chafee, the senator's son and the mayor of his father's home town of Warwick, Rhode Island, rattles them off "Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, do without," he says. "Make haste, not waste."

John Chafee says he had few thoughts of entering politics while growing up. His great-grandfather and great uncle had both served as governor, he says, but "in those days, you were governor of Rhode Island for a year so everybody and his brother had served as governor. I never met a politician before I went to college."

At Yale, Chafee brushed against prominent politicians, as well as future statesmen. Along with George Bush, he was "tapped" into the prestigious secret society Skull and Bones. Also like Bush, he fought in World War R, with the Marines in the historic landing at Guadalcanal. When he returned, he finished at Yale, then Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Providence before heading off to Korea, where he commanded a rifle company.

"You learned from men like Chafee," writes James Brady, a lieutenant under the captain's command in Korea, in his memoir The Coldest War, "a Yalie with a law degree from Harvard, who came from money, a handsome, patrician man, physically courageous and tireless. From all that could have come arrogance, snobbery. He possessed neither of those traits, he was only calm and vigorous and efficient, usually cheerful, decent and humane, a good man, a fine officer."

It was rare for men of Chafee's...