Not only did she have gravitas; she had a one-of-a-kind sense of humor, which she used to break down even the most complicated political issues into simple terms, and to punctuate her points. She also had the most irresistible voice: deep and booming, imbued with significance and passion. Decades after my experience on the committee, I would find myself talking with her and Ann Richards—between the two of them, forget about trying to get a word in at all! They were telling me how they loved to go to the University of Texas Lady Longhorns basketball games. Barbara would be there, by then in her wheelchair, and Ann would be holding court, so to speak, right next to her. Barbara would yell directions as if she were the coach: “Why are you doing that? Jump higher! That’s not a pass!” Ann recalled how she said, “Barbara, encourage these young women, don’t just criticize them.” And Barbara turned to her and said: “When they deserve it, I will!”
She cemented her place in American history when the Judiciary Committee convened to debate whether to recommend that the full House adopt articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. Those of us on Doar’s team had put together the evidence that made a compelling case for impeachment. Based strictly on the facts and law, not politics, Doar presented proposed articles of impeachment that specified the charges against the president, citing abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. No one knew for sure how the committee vote would turn out, but no one was in doubt about how it should after Barbara Jordan spoke on July 25, 1974.
She had been a champion debater at Texas Southern University, regularly winning national contests over debaters from Ivy League schools, and she had studied the Constitution. She began her remarks by recognizing that “When that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in ‘We the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in ‘We the people.’
“Today,” she went on, “I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” She went on to explain “the nature of impeachment” and how it fits into our system of checks and balances, rooting her argument in the history of the Constitutional Convention and the debates in the states about whether to ratify the Constitution. She reviewed the charges and evidence and then concluded: “If the impeachment provision of the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth-century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder!”
As I watched the committee debate, Barbara’s commanding rhetoric, passion, and moral clarity brought me to tears. The nation reacted positively to her and the arguments she made. Little wonder that those remarks are considered among the best American speeches of the twentieth century. The committee passed the articles with six Republican votes, which led to President Nixon’s resignation on August 9. Nixon was gone, but Barbara Jordan’s powerful example persisted.
Barbara Mikulski
Hillary
As a little girl in 1930s Baltimore, Barbara Mikulski was not blessed with athletic abilities. So, the Washington Post recounted, “tired of skinning her knees trying to jump rope ‘double dutch,’ Barbara coaxed her little cousins and friends into taking part in plays and shows in her parents’ garage, shows in which she served as a playwright, producer, and director.” Though nobody could have guessed it at the time—least of all Barbara—those leadership skills would take her from her working-class neighborhood to the floor of the United States Senate.
The daughter of parents who owned a neighborhood grocery store, Barbara still remembers delivering groceries in a little red wagon, instructed by her father to never accept a tip. Her parents’ greeting to their customers—“Good morning. Can I help you?”—introduced her early on to the concept of service. So did the nuns at the Catholic school she attended, who taught her about the Christopher Movement, which is built on the belief that “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Those teachings shaped Barbara’s view of the world, and instilled a passion for social justice. “I even thought about being a Catholic nun,” she said decades later, “but that vow of obedience kind of slowed me down a little bit.”
Instead, she became a social worker, helping at-risk young people in Baltimore with her characteristic “tough love” approach. When she learned about a plan to build a sixteen-lane highway through several Baltimore neighborhoods without compensating homeowners, primarily immigrants and black Americans, she decided to do something about it. The fierce and unapologetic Barbara helped found the Southeast Council Against the Road, a name she coined for its appropriately “militant” acronym: SCAR. They took on City Hall and won, saving Baltimore’s Fells Point and Inner Harbor neighborhoods. Barbara was elected to the city council later that year.
Barbara got her start in politics at a time when women were expected to be neither seen nor heard. But three years after winning her city council seat, she announced that she planned to challenge Charles Mathias, the state’s beloved Republican senator. To some people, running against a seemingly undefeatable member of the political establishment seemed like a foolish decision. Barbara was told over and over again: “No woman can win in an ethnic, hard-hat neighborhood. No woman can win who isn’t part of the political machine.” To her, that was even more reason to run: She had nothing to lose, so why not try? She didn’t win, but she built name recognition and a following.
In 1976 she ran for Congress. This time, she won. The old boys’ network never saw her coming. But the voters of Maryland not only saw her—they elected her. “I got started in public life because of volunteers and activists who, on their own time and on their own dime, volunteered themselves to not only help me get elected but to be involved in their communities, to be civically engaged, to make their community and their country a better place,” she’d later say.
Ten years later, she again set her sights on the U.S. Senate. It was a brutal race, one that forced Barbara to hone her gift for deflecting criticism when her brash, take-no-prisoners style that might have been applauded in a male candidate was described by her opponents and the media as a liability. She was called “shrill,” “abrasive,” and an “anti-male feminist.” If the criticism hurt, Barbara didn’t let on, and she made no apologies. “Nobody would ever use the term mellow to describe me,” she agreed. “I’m not caffeine-free, that’s for sure.”
“When I beat the political bosses, when running for political office as a woman was considered a novelty, they said: ‘You don’t look the part.’ But I said, ‘This is what the part looks like, and this is what the part is going to be like.’ ”
—BARBARA MIKULSKI
Barbara wasn’t interested in changing her personality, though over time she did decide to change her appearance. (Even though, Chelsea and I agree, she shouldn’t have had to!) “A stocky, 4-foot-11, rough-edged East Baltimore politician once described as having ‘the heft of a stevedore and a voice to match,’ ” was how the Washington Post characterized her. But once she made up her mind to run for the Senate, Barbara decided the time had come to change her image. She approached the challenge the same way she approached everything else: with a fighting spirit and a twinkle in her eye. She exercised vigorously, logging miles on a stationary bike, and joked on the campaign trail about her efforts to lose weight. When she later met President Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned for her opponent, she introduced herself, saying, “I’m the one you said would go the way of the Edsel, the hula hoop and the asparagus diet. Mr. President, I’m on the asparagus diet.” She could play the game when she chose to, but she did it with a healthy dose of self-awareness, acknowledging
that “a lot of Americans, black or white or female, are always told that they don’t look the part. It’s one of the oldest code words.”
With a little help from an up-and-coming organization called EMILY’s List and a whole lot of Mikulski moxie, Barbara won that election, and became the first Democratic woman elected to the United States Senate in her own right without having first served in a relative’s seat. From the very beginning, she worked on what she called “the macro issues and the macaroni-and-cheese issues.” The big picture was important to her, but so was making sure people’s day-to-day needs were met. Over her five terms in the Senate, she fought to improve public schools and take better care of seniors and veterans. She championed civil rights and women’s rights, universal health care, and funding for science and research. As the first woman to chair the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, she put her tenacity to work on behalf of the people of Maryland and the people of America. Even after tough legislative losses, she never gave up. When Republicans blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2012, she declared: “I say to the women out there in America, let’s keep this fight going. Put on your lipstick, square your shoulders, suit up, and let’s fight for a new American revolution where women are paid equal pay for equal work, and let’s end wage discrimination in this century once and for all.”
“I might be short, but I won’t be overlooked.”
—BARBARA MIKULSKI
Of Barbara’s many accomplishments, I am personally grateful for a fight she waged within the Capitol in 1993. She’d noticed that on weekends male members of Congress would wear casual clothes to the office, but women were still required to wear skirts and pantyhose. That didn’t sit well with Barbara, so she and Republican senator Nancy Kassebaum—the only other woman in the Senate—showed up one Saturday wearing pants and told all the women staffers to do the same. “I walk in that day and you would have thought I was walking on the moon,” she recounted later. She won that fight, making her a founding member of the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit!
Barbara’s was one of the first calls I got when I was elected senator for New York. The conversation went something like this: “Congratulations. I followed it. That was a hard-fought race. Now you need to figure out how to be a Senator since you’ve been elected to serve as one.” With her help, that’s what I did. As the dean of the Senate women, she had immense expertise and was happy to share it. She’s always known that it isn’t enough to be “the first” if you’re also “the only.” She has dedicated her life to kicking down the door for other women at every level of politics. In the midst of chatter over whether the nominee—presumably a man—would put a woman on the ticket as his running mate in 1984, she commented, “We are being pursued like some kind of new fad, like a new kind of Lite Beer or something.… It can feel a little humiliating.” (Some things never seem to change, even when there are multiple women running for president!) When she arrived in Congress in 1977, there were eighteen women in Congress. Today there are more than one hundred.
Barbara was the one who officially nominated me at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, saying, “Our Founding Fathers gave us a great start. But it was the Founding Mothers who said, ‘Do not forget the ladies, for we will foment our own revolution.’ ” That’s a promise Barbara has spent her life working to keep.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Hillary
In 1985, in the midst of Liberia’s long and bloody civil war and her campaign for a seat in its senate, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf criticized military leader Samuel Doe’s regime. As a result, she was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. But against all odds, she would be released from prison after only a short time, go into exile, return, and be twice elected president, becoming the first woman elected to lead any African country.
As biographer Helene Cooper recounts in Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, perhaps her political ascent shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Days after Ellen was born in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in 1938, an old prophet who wandered through the city making predictions visited the new baby. He took one look at her and is said to have announced: “This child will be great. This child will lead.”
But, first she married and had four sons. She eventually got divorced from her husband, who beat her severely. She got an education, studying both at home and abroad, and then got to work. She landed at the Ministry of Finance of the Liberian government, eventually rising to finance minister. She later ran for a senate seat, criticizing the regime of dictator Samuel Doe. He imprisoned her and then she fled the country. During her twelve years of exile in Kenya and the United States, she worked at the World Bank and the United Nations.
“So I urge my sisters, and my brothers, not to be afraid. Be not afraid to denounce injustice, though you may be outnumbered. Be not afraid to seek peace, even if your voice may be small. Be not afraid to demand peace. If I might thus speak to girls and women everywhere, I would issue them this simple invitation: My sisters, my daughters, my friends, find your voices!”
—ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF
After a tentative truce was reached in Liberia’s civil war, she returned to run for president in 1997 against warlord Charles Taylor—whom she originally had supported in his rebellion against Doe before turning against him once, as she would later put it, “the true nature of Mr. Taylor’s intentions became known.” She lost that race, but stayed committed to Liberia.
Ellen kept going. In 2005, she ran for president again. She campaigned on the promise that she would take on corruption, rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and work toward a peaceful, democratic Liberia. As she said, “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.” Liberian women understood that. Many rallied behind Ellen, some walking for days and standing in line for hours to vote for her. As she marched through the streets of Monrovia during the last days of her campaign, people shouted, cheered, and waved signs that read “Ellen—she’s our man.” When the first round of votes was counted, she finished second, securing her place in the runoff election. On November 8, 2005, she won the runoff, beating a popular Liberian soccer star.
In her inaugural address, she called out violence perpetrated against women and girls during the civil war and promised “to make the children smile again.” Once she was president, Ellen closed Belle Yellah, the most notorious prison in Liberia. She appointed women to lead the police force and international security teams, and went out of her way to advocate for women’s inclusion in the security sector.
“My life was forever transformed when I was given the privilege to serve the people of Liberia—taking on the awesome responsibility of rebuilding a nation nearly destroyed by war and plunder. There was no roadmap for post-conflict transformation. But we knew that we could not let our country slip back into the past. We understood that our greatest responsibility was to keep the peace.”
—ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF
In 2006, she created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to eradicate corruption and heal a still-divided Liberia. She had promised to make corruption “public enemy number one.” That proved an impossible task in a country where bribes had become a way of life. She fired ministers who spent government funds as though they were their own salaries. Critics decried nepotism when she appointed her banker son to lead the national oil company of Liberia. He ultimately resigned, but her reputation undertstandably took a hit. She also publicly apologized for having supported Charles Taylor in the early years of the civil war, and sent him to The Hague to be tried for war crimes.
Despite having originally planned to serve only one term, Ellen ran for president again in 2011. The country had made progress recovering from its brutal civil war, but not nearly enough; she wanted to continue the work. Her courage in bringing peace to the war-scarred nation, and the courage of Liberian women like Leymah Gbowee, drew attention around the world. Four days before her reelection, Ellen and Leymah were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Ellen ca
lled the timing of the prize a coincidence; she never once mentioned it on the campaign trail.
By that time, I had known Ellen for a number of years. I traveled to Liberia as secretary of state in 2009. She asked me to address the Parliament while I was there and stress the need for unity in the face of ongoing problems. She told me I would be speaking to an assembly that included her political enemies and former warlords, including the ex-wife of now-convicted war criminal Charles Taylor. I returned to attend her second inauguration in 2012.
In her two terms in office, Ellen racked up a notable list of achievements: She orchestrated Liberia’s first peaceful transition of power in seventy-four years when she left office in 2018, prioritized free and compulsory primary education, signed into law the first freedom of information law in West Africa, and reduced the country’s national debt to international institutions and other countries through better budgets, debt relief, and debt cancellation. But Ellen has warned that corruption remains a problem that has to be constantly addressed by all countries, even as it seems evident that she herself should have tried to do more. (It’s also true that for the first time in many years, we in the United States know only too well what she means.)
As someone who has followed Liberia’s challenges for years, I respect Ellen for her service under very difficult conditions. Her rise is proof that an unapologetic economic-policy wonk can not only toil away behind the scenes but also win elections and lead a nation. As she has said: “I work hard, I work late, I have nothing on my conscience. When I go to bed, I sleep.” That’s a pretty good summary for any life in public service.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 33