If you’ve ever watched Senate proceedings on C-SPAN 2, you know senators spend most of their time milling about the chamber, but sometimes, on particularly important or solemn occasions, we sit in the seat we’ve been assigned. Soon after I arrived in Washington, a member of the Senate floor staff came to me with the seating chart of the Senate Chamber. Seats are chosen based on seniority, and when your number is up, you are given a choice of the seats that remain. Well, when I was shown the floor chart, there was just one spot left: the very last seat, in the corner, where even the light is not very good. The first time I took this seat, I looked around the room and thought to myself, None of these people are ever going to die, retire, or be defeated. I would always be last among my colleagues. But the experience also reminded me of walking into the auditorium at Manual High School my first day, feeling like the odd man out in the back. As I had that day, I set a goal on this one: despite my standing as the lowest ranked of my colleagues, I would work to be the most effective senator I could and to eventually gain the respect of my peers.
I’d been a student of the Senate for a long time, and I knew what this meant. I was not a singular savior who had arrived with the ability to immediately make a difference or prove a point. At its best, the Senate is a place where consensus is necessary and my main job was to practice patience, make decisions on principle, as I’d learned from John Sherman Cooper, and try to ensure I got a second term. To do all of those things, I first had to get to know the institution, and understand its rhythm and workings—something that would take me an entire term in office.
I liked Phil Gramm immediately, but he was also the colleague I found most intimidating. A fellow freshman, he’d been elected to the Senate from Texas after serving three terms in the House, and I soon found out it was going to be pretty hard to feel good about myself if I constantly had to be compared to Phil. A former college economics professor, he was extremely bright and, perhaps due to his experience on the House side (a distinct advantage shared by many senators, and one I’d often envy that first term), he seemed to find his footing from day one. Just two years into it, he introduced the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, designed to cut the federal deficit, which, at the time, was the largest in history. It bewildered me that he had been able to help enact a major piece of legislation while I was still trying to figure out how to get from my office in the Russell building to the Capitol.
As green as I felt, at least I was a member of the majority party, and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. It was an honor to serve at the same time as Reagan. He made conservatism appealing because he was appealing. Unlike the eat-your-spinach types like Barry Goldwater, he delivered the right message with cheery humor and everyman common sense. And when he put his philosophy into action, we soon found out that having conservative views was more than just okay. The economy took off like a rocket after the across-the-board tax cuts he championed.
Of course, that’s not to say that I always agreed with him. In fact, the only time people took notice of me my first uneasy years in the Senate was for something most freshman senators try to avoid—voting against the president of my own party. Less than two years into my first term, when people still didn’t know my name, President Reagan vetoed a measure that would have imposed stiff economic sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Going against party lines, I voted to override Reagan’s veto.
My vote wasn’t going to make me popular with my president, many in my party, or even some of the voters back home. Larry Cox, one of my closest aides in Kentucky, had become my state director, and it was his job to keep me informed of the opinions of the people in Kentucky. Their concerns were about jobs, the collapse of the tobacco market, and the farm credit crisis that had left many Kentucky farmers in a desperate financial position. “People think we have enough to worry about here without getting involved with what’s going on in South Africa,” Larry told me.
In weighing my position, I thought again of John Sherman Cooper and his choice twenty years earlier to go against some in his party, including the GOP nominee for president, Barry Goldwater, to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I felt we needed to do everything we could to change the apartheid regime, and my vote on this would be the first time I’d show my colleagues, and myself, that while I was a great admirer of Reagan, I wasn’t afraid to go against the prevailing party view if I thought it was wrong. Remaining true to my conviction was, as Cooper taught me and Edmund Burke had argued two centuries earlier, the essential element of being a good senator.
Another critical requisite for becoming an effective senator is to remain one, and I therefore knew that one of my most important jobs during my first term was to make sure I got a second one. I also knew something else. I’d been paying careful attention to Bob Dole, the majority leader at the time. He sat at a desk at the front of the chamber, and I studied the way he conducted the business of the Senate, the influence he held from that chair. While I would venture a guess that the ultimate goal of many of my colleagues was to one day sit at the desk in the Oval Office, that wasn’t my goal. When it came to what I most desired, and the place from which I thought I could make the greatest difference, I knew deep down it was the majority leader’s desk I hoped to occupy one day. And I planned to do everything I could to prove myself capable of doing so.
By the time my first term was complete and I faced a reelection campaign in 1990, I was feeling more confident. But I had a long fight ahead of me. To get to the Senate, I had succeeded in convincing the voters to fire Huddleston, but most Kentuckians still didn’t have a good idea of who they’d hired to replace him. Hoping to change that, I invested a considerable amount of resources into building a state staff as talented and hardworking as my staff in DC. I opened six state offices and made the somewhat overambitious pledge to visit every one of Kentucky’s 120 counties during the first two years of my term. Nearly every weekend, and during all of my recesses, I went home to Kentucky to attend town hall meetings everywhere from Paducah to Pikeville. Some days I’d begin with a meeting as early as 7:30 a.m., followed by a lunch meeting at noon, and end with a 6:00 p.m. meeting that would go into the night.
Meanwhile, I supported Vice President George H. W. Bush as the Republican presidential candidate over Majority Leader Bob Dole. I decided to tell Dole, in person, that I’d be supporting Bush. He was not pleased. When colleagues asked me how he’d reacted, I jokingly told them he was fine, and that I didn’t have too much trouble getting used to my new office in the basement next to the boiler. (Of course, Dole and I later became fast friends and frequent allies.)
I prepared for a tough campaign against former Louisville mayor Harvey Sloane. It was a terrible political environment: Bush was unpopular, there was a fear of impending war in the Persian Gulf, and gas prices were spiking. All of this made it a tough setting for a run for reelection, and I turned to the incredibly talented Steven Law to run my race. But it became tough for me in a way I couldn’t have imagined as personal matters overshadowed the difficulties of the campaign.
My dad became very sick during the course of it. Two years earlier, he’d been diagnosed with colon cancer, and as my campaign began, it was becoming clear to my mom and me that my dad’s condition was worsening. By this time, they were living in Shelbyville, Kentucky, about thirty miles outside Louisville. My mom had never gotten over the idea that Louisville was too big for her small-town tendencies, and they were both much happier in Shelbyville, which reminded them of Athens, Alabama. My dad had retired from DuPont, but the quiet life did not suit him. He took a job with the Roll Forming Corporation in Shelbyville, as well as getting into politics himself. He became the Republican Party chairman of Shelby County, where he was a beloved and respected figure. Knowing how hard he worked in this position, and how much he cared about seeing his home county embrace conservative ideas, he’d be pleased to know that Shelby County now votes overwhelmingly Republican.
His illness, and what was clearly becoming the prospect of his death, was extremely hard on me. There are people we can’t ever imagine dying because they’re so alive, and this was my dad. I was with him every chance I had, and when I couldn’t be, my state director and good friend Larry Cox was—making sure my dad got to the hospital for his treatments, and after he was hospitalized, checking in on my mom. In August, my dad’s condition further worsened, and we were told there were no other protocols to help him. He died on September 28.
These few weeks were among the hardest in my life. I deeply missed my dad and was worried about what his death would mean for my mom—how she’d get along without him. At the same time, I had just seen my oldest daughter off to college in Massachusetts, and I missed her terribly. On top of all of this, the campaign was taking a lot out of me. In fact, a week before election night, it looked as if I might lose the race. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how I got through it all, but I do know that I’m grateful to a local minister who spent many long hours on the phone with me during this time.
I’m also grateful that the people of Kentucky voted to keep me in office for a second term. Come election night, delivering my victory speech, I was exhausted, spent, and very emotional as I dedicated my win to the person I’d most wished could have been there to see it: my dad.
When I first set the goal of becoming a senator, a large reason was the chance to weigh in not only on matters of importance to Kentucky, but also on national ones. Few decisions are more important than those surrounding war and peace, and the weight of my job—and the steadiness it required—became clear to me in a very concrete way at the beginning of my second term, when I was forced to face the prospect of our nation at war. A few weeks after the election, in January of 1991, I had just left for a short vacation when I got word that President Bush was calling a special session of Congress to debate the Persian Gulf War resolution, giving him the authority to do any and all things necessary to extricate Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Five months earlier, on August 2, 1990, Hussein’s forces committed an egregious act of aggression on Kuwait, a sovereign ally of ours, taking control of the country and, with it, 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves.
The resolution passed the House rather overwhelmingly, 250–183, but it was to be an altogether different story in the Senate. As the subject was seriously debated—there were few senators who didn’t speak on the issue—I was well aware of the gravity of it all. Our mission was clear—to get Iraq out of Kuwait—but of course, it wasn’t possible to know if we’d be successful.
That said, I felt confident in my vote to support the resolution. This was a clear case of a very bad guy whose actions were wreaking havoc on the citizens of Kuwait and the world oil supply. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to put politics aside. Senator Al Gore had been keeping his own counsel, appearing undecided for as long as possible to create a lot of drama around his vote. As Bob Dole would later tell me, a few hours before the vote Gore found Dole in the Republican cloakroom. Gore told Dole—who was controlling the floor time given to those voting in support of the resolution—that if he was allowed to speak toward the end of the debate, he would vote in favor of the resolution. It was clear to me what he was doing. At the time, much as a result of George McGovern’s overwhelming loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, Democrats believed that to win the White House, they could not be seen as dovish. By getting the time to speak in favor of this resolution—and what he was really after, the extra attention—Gore’s main objective was, opportunistically, to show himself to be on the right side of an important national security issue. It was vintage Al Gore.
The resolution passed the Senate fifty-two votes to forty-seven, and the war that followed was extraordinarily successful. In daily Senate briefings from military brass up in S-407, the secure room on the fourth floor of the Capitol, I saw how the impressive accuracy of our precision bombing technology was enabling us to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. On February 24, 1991, ground forces went into Kuwait, and in less than a week, they’d mopped up the Iraqi army and forced them out of the country.
The American public seemed overwhelmingly pleased with the quick success of this mission in Kuwait, and afterward, Bush enjoyed a nearly 90 percent approval rating. With the 1992 presidential campaign just around the corner, we thought he had earned an easy reelection. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The tide quickly began to turn. The Berlin Wall had come down in late 1989; the Soviet Union was breaking up. The Russians sided with us in the Persian Gulf War, and now, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, a petulant mood settled over the nation.
Bush had already broken his infamous “Read my lips: no new taxes” promise, and people were especially angry about Congress’s vote, two years earlier, to give itself a 40 percent pay raise. These two issues became war drums for the Democrats, and coupled with an economy that was growing fast but not fast enough, an anti-incumbent mood began to settle over the country. Nobody represented this more than Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire. If my approach to politics and life has been the long game, his might be described as the few-minutes game. Appearing on Larry King Live on February 20, 1992, he announced his intention to run as an independent if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states. They did, and he spent tens of millions of dollars to self-finance a new party called the Reform Party, which may just as well have been called the Perot Party, as it was little more than an exercise in ego.
I was the Kentucky campaign chairman for Bush in 1992, and as I traveled the state, attending campaign events, I felt how dispirited and down people were. And the more dispirited they felt, the more the young, articulate, and charismatic governor from Arkansas captured their imagination.
Bill Clinton’s path to the nomination—which included accusations from Gennifer Flowers that she and Clinton had had a twelve-year affair, a Bill and Hillary appearance on 60 Minutes denying it, and then Clinton’s admitting it was true—was shaky, to say the least. People obviously seemed willing to overlook this, evidenced by Clinton’s strong showing in the primaries.
It was a terrible election night. Perot received 19 percent of the vote, Bush 37, and Clinton 43. The conventional wisdom afterward was that Perot had cost Bush the election, but in reviewing the election, many pollsters concluded that Clinton would have won with or without Perot in the race. The results made me think of British prime minister Winston Churchill being defeated in July of 1945. After successfully guiding his country through World War II, it was as if the British decided to give Churchill a gold watch and say, “Thank you very much, but you’re retired.”
Luckily, as discouraged as I felt about the election results and the idea of having to face life in the Senate with a Democrat in the White House, I had a few personal reasons to celebrate. Under Howard Schnellenberger, my beloved University of Louisville football team began the season 7–0, just as the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville was getting under way. Second to my work in the Senate, this center is the thing about which I’m most passionate and proud, and, just like my work in the Senate, creating it had required slow and steady work. The center provides a scholarship to forty of the best and brightest undergraduate students—ten in every incoming freshman class—all Kentucky natives. My hope, which has certainly come to fruition, is that by studying in Kentucky, these bright young men and women will then choose to remain in Kentucky after graduation, using their talent and leadership skills to advance our state. In addition to the scholarships, the center also provides students the opportunity to meet and interact with the long list of incredibly talented speakers we would bring—Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts, Vice President Joe Biden—exposing them to excellence and encouraging them to set their horizons higher. After I had worked for many years to get the center off the ground, in 1991 it was gratifying to welcome the first ten scholars to the program that fall.
But I must say,
even as pleased as I was with these developments, they greatly paled in comparison to the major highlight of 1993: my marriage to Elaine Chao. As great as my political ambitions were, so was my ambition to find the perfect partner. And in Elaine, I did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Love
It was my friend Julia Chang Bloch who had first suggested that I meet Elaine. I’d known Julia and her husband, Stuart, since I was a staffer for Senator Marlow Cook in 1969, and we had become close friends. Julia would soon be appointed the ambassador to Nepal, becoming the first Asian American US ambassador in history. I’d been divorced for nearly ten years and was growing increasingly tired of the single life.
“Okay,” I said to Julia one evening. “I’m looking to meet someone new.”
Elaine Chao was, at the time, serving as the chair of the Federal Maritime Commission. I know this doesn’t sound very romantic, but after Julia mentioned to Elaine that I might be calling, I asked my assistant to call Elaine’s assistant to arrange a meeting.
I had a particular event in mind for our first date: a party in honor of Vice President George H. W. Bush, hosted by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, at his lavish home in McLean, just outside Washington. Elaine and I joined about fifty others for a formal sit-down dinner, followed by a private, and moving, performance by Roberta Flack. When I picked Elaine up at her apartment at the Watergate, I was taken by her beauty, and proud to have her on my arm that evening.
The Long Game Page 8