Professional Documents
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Leahy Intro
Leahy Intro
In 1974, with my parents and my wife Marcelle’s parents; our children, Kevin, Alicia, and Mark; and my
sister, Mary, I stood in room 11 of the Vermont State House and announced my candidacy for the US
Senate. I was a thirty-three-year-old four-term Chittenden County state’s attorney, launching a campaign
I was running against a war in Southeast Asia that remained popular in Vermont, certainly with
many editorial boards that shaped consensus. But more than any single issue, what propelled me was a
belief that I understood the values of Vermont. Dublin-born parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s speech to
the Electors of Bristol was my North Star. I quoted him when he said, “Your representative owes you, not
his industry only, but his judgment.” Burke also said that a representative “ought not to sacrifice to
I won, much to the shock of the political establishment in Vermont, which didn’t see a thirty-
three-year-old, a Catholic, or a Democrat on a fast track to the Senate. I was all three. And now I was a
senator.
Within just a few months of taking office, and as the newest and most junior member of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, we were asked to vote to reauthorize and continue the war in
Vietnam. The authorization was defeated by one vote. I was proud to be that vote. My hope was
Vermonters would respect my judgment and my conscience, even if they disagreed with my vote to end
the war. I trusted that judgment and hard work were exactly what Vermonters expect from their
representatives.
The chairman of that committee was a Mississippian named John C. Stennis. He ruled the Armed
Services Committee with an iron fist, and he was an ardent defender of the war under the fourth president
who had allowed it to drag on. I worried whether he’d punish me for my vote of conscience. Instead, he
took me under his wing: “Pat, you’re not with me on this, and I’m not with you, but I do believe you did
the wrong thing for the right reasons.” That’s the Senate and the politics that I came to love, and it
became so much a part of my love of our country. The Senate where I arrived in 1974 for orientation
wasn’t just a collection of one hundred elected individuals—it wasn’t just a “who,” but a “what.” That
Senate was an idea—the idea that an institution doesn’t belong to a single party or a single ideology, nor
is it exhibited or embodied in a single issue. It was a wonderful amalgam of ideologies and accents and
characters—boy, there were characters, and in this book, you’ll meet them as I did, when I did, and learn
from them all as I did—but more than that, the Senate was a concept, an outlook about how we might live
or lead, learn or listen. It’s about keeping your word. It’s about caring for an institution and believing—
really believing—that in the end, when institutions work, when common ground is fertile, something
I am not so naive as to assume that many—or even most—who pick up this book can remember a
time when they looked at the Senate that way, not even remotely. I don’t know that any of my recent
colleagues can imagine their constituents thinking of the Senate as the nation’s conscience.
I kept thinking about them as I wrote my remarks announcing my retirement. One word visited
me again and again: “conscience.” Thirty years ago, I visited a refugee camp. I brought my camera, as I
do everywhere, so that I could show people back in Washington the human toll of an issue. Always on
visits like this, I’d ask if it was okay to take someone’s picture; to be a displaced person is to have
endured enough without having someone invade your privacy. On this trip, a man encouraged me to take
his picture. I looked at his worn and weary face through the range finder. We sat and talked afterward,
and he said simply, “Don’t forget people like me.” The black-and-white photo has hung above my desk
for thirty years since; every day I come to work, he’s looking at me, saying, “You don’t know my name,
you don’t speak my language, there’s nothing I can do to help you—but what are you doing for people
like me?” I refer to it as my “conscience photo.” Conscience—that’s what people are hungry for
America’s journey—through the eyes of someone who entered public service in awe of what government
can do and what the promise of America can mean, and can feel that awe still, even as it lives side by
It’s the story of what I learned after I announced my candidacy for the Senate in 1974, before I
returned to that very same room in the Vermont State House on November 15, 2021, and announced that I
was not going to run for a ninth term in the institution that had done so much to build the America that I
love.
But I promise you, this isn’t a story that unfolds in one straight line downward from the pinnacle
Few journeys are that way in real life, because life isn’t that way.
This is a story about the journey—America, its institutions, and the people, many heroic and all
flawed, who make and break them—most of whom do their best, all of whom matter to this precious and
I do not think all was perfect in the US Senate when I arrived as a thirty-four-year-old fresh-faced
freshman Democrat. After eight years as a prosecutor, I’d like to think that I knew how to separate fact
And there was much to question in the Senate to which I first became acquainted. Former
segregationists still held powerful gavels as chairmen—in my own caucus. America was in a continuing
struggle over civil rights, which had inspired me as a young college student—and yet the Senate was
home to only one African American. The history books taught me that the Senate had gone from enabling
segregation to joining with President Lyndon Johnson to end the era of Jim Crow, but to paraphrase
Faulkner, around me I could see that the past wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even past. In a country where the
sexual revolution and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment marked a women’s movement that
would forever change the face of the United States, I joined a Senate where I would be sworn in to serve
But make no mistake: as a young man elected in the Watergate Class of 1974 determined to clean
out the stables of Washington, I ended up finding much to preserve and protect in the world’s most
deliberative body—and learned from many imperfect people a code that I’ve tried to live by and live up
A Senate where members of a president’s party could unite and tell him it was time to go and he
had to resign. A Senate where Republicans and Democrats kept their word, valued the freedom of a six-
year term, and worked—however imperfectly—toward what most of them believed was for the good of
I look back knowing that the values of the Senate—the vision of that Senate—have been eroded,
and that the integrity and conscience the institution should stand for have been severely damaged.
What is the answer a senator writing forty-five years from now will tell us?
I hope for my children, my grandchildren, and their children that a senator forty-five years from
But more than the wish, greater than the hope, it is because I know what the Senate can be that I
have faith the Senate can be that way again. Why? Because it’s the people, not the rules, who give the
All it takes is a determined group of Americans to make the Senate the Senate again. After forty-
eight years, nine presidents, and more than four hundred Senate colleagues, most of them come and gone,
The first were the words of a folk singer and fighter who became my dear friend before we lost
him far too young. Harry Chapin said simply, “When in doubt, do something.”
The others were the words of Vermont poet laureate Robert Frost, which I first read in the library
in Montpelier, just a boy with a library card and an imagination—words that reminded me that life is all
about choices:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
To every reader and all the lives you touch: It’s up to you. Do something—and make that your
road taken.