http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/national/16proxmire.html
Generally, he was a liberal, and he was a fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam, but he never toed the party line.
In 1982, a convention of feminists booed him because he had voted against liberalizing abortion rights. Democrats were also upset when he voted to approve the conservative William H. Rehnquist as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
But he was best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, which he announced in monthly press releases to call attention to what he believed to be frivolous government spending. An award, for instance, went to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to learn why people fall in love.
Although he spent only a few hundred dollars on his campaigns, all of it out of his own pocket, Mr. Proxmire was easily re-elected five times.
Another Golden Fleece Award went to the National Institute for Mental Health, which spent $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel
The Federal Aviation Administration also felt Mr. Proxmire's wrath, for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated. Other Fleece recipients were the Justice Department, for spending $27,000 to determine why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, and the Pentagon, for a $3,000 study to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas in the rain.
From the beginning of his career in Washington, Mr. Proxmire was a loner, frequently at odds not just with Republicans but also with members of his own party.
Early in his first term, he clashed with the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, because he thought Johnson was compromising too much on civil rights legislation. He also did not like Johnson's support of tax breaks for the oil industry