In June 1972, Emanuel Celler, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, sat down for an interview with The New York Times in advance of a primary that he was virtually assured of winning.

Mr. Celler had arrived in Congress with the backing of Tammany Hall, during the presidency of Warren Harding — in 1923 — and he now, half a century later, had the support of the powerful Brooklyn party boss Meade Esposito, whose celebrity in the borough was such that a veal dish bearing his name appeared on the menu of a popular restaurant on Montague Street near the Brooklyn courthouses, which were filled with the judges he had essentially placed.

This omnipotence was to have insulated Mr. Celler from his own irrelevance. He kept such a distance from his constituents that he did not even maintain an office in the district, which encompassed largely white middle-class Flatbush, Midwood and Marine Park as well as parts of poor African-American neighborhoods in central Brooklyn. Celler was 84 years old, and he was cranky.

Of his two opponents, he concerned himself with only one, a 30-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, Elizabeth Holtzman, a reform candidate, who had been active in the civil rights movement and served as mayoral aide to John V. Lindsay. “Her fulminations are as useless, as we say, as a wine cellar without a corkscrew,” Mr. Celler told The Times, proceeding to call her campaign statements “irrational’’ and her persona, more generally, “as irritating as a hangnail.”