Books : In Praise of Public Life : Excerpts

Chapter Seven: The Life

After my upset election to the Senate, I was inundated with congratulations, advice and new friends. But perhaps the best advice I received came from an old friend, Archbishop John Whalen of the Catholic Diocese of Hartford. Before going to Washington, I made private visits to three religious leaders who meant a lot to me, to ask them for their prayers as I began this new chapter of my life: the Lubavitch rabbi Menachem Schneerson in Brooklyn, New York, who had long been an inspiration to me; the Reverend Ken Fellenbaum, an Evangelical minister, supporter and friend from Milford, Connecticut; and Archbishop Whalen at his residence in Hartford. The archbishop gave me one piece of advice I had not expected. "Leave time for solitude, Joe," he told me. "Make space for thinking and reading." I had no idea then how wise the archbishop's counsel was.

When I arrived in Washington as a newly elected senator, I attended a series of orientation seminars for incoming freshmen, including one in which Alan Simpson, then senator from Wyoming, spoke about the dangers of senatorial overload. He told us how he had arrived on Capitol Hill years before, an ardent newcomer just as we were. Every day his schedule was crammed from dawn to dark with meetings (committee meetings, meetings with staff, meetings with colleagues, meetings with constituents), with speeches to make (at breakfasts, lunches and dinners), with press interviews (from newspapers and magazines and radio and television), with receptions (at cocktail parties, social events, cultural performances). Every night he would trudge home with enough paperwork to break a packhorse's back, as he put it. Then he would rise the next morning to do it all over again. Eager, resolute, anxious to make his mark, he kept up this pace for about three months, he said, until he finally realized he was about to fall apart. At that point he called his staff together, sat them down and made an announcement. "Regarding my schedule," he told them, "I just want to remind you of one thing: If I die, you're all out of work."

This is a common syndrome in any profession: the new employee eager to prove to others and to himself how well he can do his job. There is nothing wrong with such zeal, but at some point you have to learn to draw lines, to make choices, to understand that you can't do it all, and shouldn't.

I understood Simpson's advice, I knew exactly what he meant...and I promptly proceeded to ignore it. Since it was the middle of the school year when I began my new job during January 1989, Hadassah stayed in Connecticut so Ethan -- then thirteen -- could finish eighth grade. Meanwhile I moved into a college friend's vacant apartment for six months and, having nothing but my work to do, I did exactly what Simpson had warned against. I worked myself to death. Beyond the necessary duties that took up almost my entire day, I accepted every invitation possible, attended every reception I could, made the optional almost a requirement, and was up until well past midnight each evening reading and studying the paperwork I'd lugged home. It didn't take me long to realize that this was not the most effective way to be a senator. First, like Simpson, I soon understood that at this rate I was going to kill myself. And secondly, when you are a politician in a city like Washington, there are always invitations, every night, to events and gatherings that can seem alluringly fascinating, occasionally glamorous and possibly important, and are actually often pleasant, and sometimes even worthwhile. But the trade-off for your own precious time and energy is a high price to pay, and you quickly learn to pick and choose these invitations carefully.

I'll never forget getting an invitation from Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska, to attend a dinner he and his wife, Cathy, were hosting at their home in honor of Warren Rudman, the senator from New Hampshire. Rudman, whose office was fortunately right next to mine, became a mentor to me. He was a notorious recluse when it came to evening events. He never went out at night. "It's a waste of time," he told me once. "I can't take it. I go home and read books."

When I saw Stevens on the Senate floor the next day, I told him I'd gotten the invitation and that Hadassah and I would love to come. "But what's the occasion?" I asked him. "Is it Warren's birthday?"

"Oh, no, no," he said. "The dinner is in honor of Warren because he's agreed to come."

Ted Stevens's comment made me laugh, but it also made me think. In spite of the extremes to which Warren Rudman went to protect his private time, he was widely regarded as a superb senator, one of the best. That confirmed what I had learned during my madcap first six months in Washington, which is that a lot of what I was spending my time on did nothing to make me a better senator for my state or country. Besides, my wife and infant child had come to live in Washington with me, and I wanted to spend time with them.

When you're elected to Congress, you suddenly work in a place where you don't live, or to put it another way, you suddenly live in two places. "When you're a senator," one of my colleagues once glumly said to me, "home is where you're not." One of the first decisions you have to make is whether you are going to bring your family to Washington with you. I remember one of my Senate colleagues who had come to Washington married, and after a few years with his wife living in his home state, got divorced, advising me: "You don't appreciate it now, Joe," he said, "but this is where you work. You're going to spend as much as three-quarters of your time here, and if you leave your wife in Connecticut, it will just not be good for your marriage." He was right, and we decided that Hadassah and Hani, who was then barely a year old, would move to Washington in June 1989.

Another thing that surprised me when I first arrived in the capital was how many of my colleagues in the Senate do not own residences in their home states because they also want their families with them in Washington and can't afford to own two homes. The annual salary of a U.S. senator in 1989 was $89,500 -- not enough to maintain two mortgages. Today it is $141,300, a lot of money for most Americans, but by itself still not enough to easily pay for two homes, at least not when one of them is in as expensive a city as Washington. John Rowland, a former congressman and now governor of Connecticut, called me after the 1988 election and said, "Congratulations, you now live in two of the most expensive real estate markets in America at the same time." What some of my colleagues do once they are elected is sell their house in their home state and maintain their legal residence there with a family member or friend.

For me, this was a dilemma. First, my family and I were very attached to our home and neighbors in New Haven. They were our dearest friends. Some of them were members of our synagogue and Sabbath Bible-study group, and were with us at our times of greatest personal joy and sadness. Our Connecticut friends were friends before I became a senator and would be friends after. We didn't want to cut ourselves off from them or from the city of New Haven, which I had loved since I arrived at Yale in 1960. I was also politically sensitive about not having a house in Connecticut and opening myself to accusations by an opponent of "going Washington" and abandoning my roots. But that's what Hadassah and I might have been forced to do if it had not been for help from our family that enabled us to live in a townhouse in the Burleith section of Washington and still keep our home in New Haven.

After we married in 1983, Hadassah had for a time continued her career in health care consulting and public relations, commuting a few days a week to New York from our home in Connecticut. But that became difficult, so she began working part-time in New Haven. When we came to Washington, she wanted to work, and we needed the additional income. Having a full- or part-time job was a relative rarity for senators' wives a generation ago but is much more common today. The role of spouses in public life has changed over the past thirty years in much the same way the role of spouses in all walks of life has changed. Politically and independently active spouses such as Eleanor Roosevelt were an extreme exception until the 1970s. A wife's role -- and they were almost always wives, since the politicians were almost always men -- was to support and encourage her husband's career while taking care of her home and family. During the First World War a group of wives, calling themselves the Ladies of the Senate, began meeting once a week to roll bandages for the war effort and then have lunch together. When Hadassah arrived in Washington, this group was still meeting, but their number was smaller. Many of the wives -- and husbands (the group is now called Spouses of the Senate) -- didn't have the time. Most of them had jobs and careers of their own. Hadassah would try hard not to miss the weekly lunches of this group because she enjoyed the company and derived comfort and counsel from the only women in Washington who were living pretty much the same life she was.

When Hadassah began looking for a job in Washington, we both agreed to be careful about avoiding anything that might appear to be a conflict of interest. We both wanted her to pursue her own career as independently as possible from mine. But we found, as she began to interview for jobs, that prospective employers were more interested in entertaining or employing her as Senator Lieberman's wife than as an independent, capable, experienced candidate for a job. Others were worried about how much work she would miss when she returned to Connecticut with me. After several weeks of elegant lunch meetings with no offers she could accept, Hadassah told me, "At this rate, I'm going to get fat before I get a job."

She finally did find appropriate employment, first with the National Research Council, building private sector support for better math and science education, and then as a consultant with a public affairs firm that agreed to protect her from conflicts of interest. She worked only for nonprofit organizations and did no lobbying. In the last few years, as our daughter Hani, who is now eleven, has grown older, Hadassah has begun working part-time out of our home as a women's health care consultant, so we can all spend more time together.

This gets back to the warning Alan Simpson issued when I first came to Washington, and it's a challenge to anyone in any career. Balancing one's job and one's life is tremendously difficult. But it is also tremendously essential.

Once, Hadassah and I were talking about how being a senator might change a person, and she warned, "Remember, being a senator is just your job. It's not you." She was so right. Being a senator is a great job, a great honor and a great opportunity, but it is, after all, just my job. When a senator begins to think of himself only as "The Senator," he is on the road to trouble. Coming to Washington with children, particularly an infant, helped keep me from inhaling the intoxicating aura of the capital, as I know it does for all my colleagues who are parents. There is nothing like coming home and changing a baby's diaper to remind you that "being a senator is just your job." The presence of children in the house also creates a pull -- some might call it guilt -- that helps members of Congress go home and thereby avoid getting stretched thin by their work schedules.

When Hadassah heard that Hillary Clinton was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate from New York, she said, "I just don't understand why she'd want a job where she has to wait at the end of the day until the Senate majority leader tells her she can go home." That is the voice of a spouse who has kept dinner in the oven too many nights, waiting for my Senate colleagues to stop speaking and for the Senate leaders to agree there would be no more votes so we could go home. In fact, a lot of us try to live close enough to the Capitol that we can go home for dinner to see our families and still be able to rush back when the cloakroom staff calls to say a vote is about to occur.

Now add to this busy life in Washington the fact that it is not home. We live in Connecticut and want and need to be there, too, with our family, friends and constituents. Before air-conditioning (which enables Congress to stay in session during the torrid Washington summer) and airplanes (which enable us to leave the capital and return quickly), members of Congress would come to Washington in January, stay in session for several months and then go home for several months. No more. Today we are all in varying degrees of constant motion between Washington, our home states and, when we are in reelection cycle, other places around the country for campaign fund-raising. I am lucky because the planes make the relatively short trip to Connecticut or nearby New York airports very frequently and quickly. Many of my colleagues have to allot the better part of a day for westward travel.

When our daughter Hani was younger, our family would go home to New Haven two or even three weekends a month. Now, since she is in school in D.C. and has friends there, we don't want to pull her out too often, so we go together to New Haven for one weekend a month, as well as for the summer recess and holidays. I make the trip several other days a month by myself. And when we are all in Washington together, Hadassah and I try not to go out more than one night a week. Because we have three grown children, we know how quickly Hani's childhood will be over, and we don't want to miss it.

In the helter-skelter push and pull of Senate life, Hadassah and I have found that our religious observances provide very welcome relief, particularly the Sabbath, that weekly sanctuary between sunset on Friday and sundown on Saturday. This is the time when the worldly concerns of the rest of the week are put on hold so that we can focus on appreciating all that God has given us. It is a day apart, when my family and I are able to reconnect with one another and with our spiritual selves, to pray, to talk, to read, to rest or to just plain enjoy ourselves. It is a "time beyond time," as one rabbi called it. In fact, I usually don't wear a watch on the Sabbath. I treasure that time, twenty-four hours with no meetings, no telephone calls, no television, no radio, no traveling, no business of any sort. My Connecticut Senate colleague, Chris Dodd, once joked with me that he would consider converting to Judaism just for the weekends.

As I promised during my campaign for the Senate in 1988, when there are meetings or votes on the Sabbath that affect people's health, well-being or security, I have attended. For me, this is consistent with rabbinic opinions that have, for instance, instructed doctors that they must ignore specific prohibitions of the Sabbath (such as not using a phone, a car or electricity) to protect someone's health or life. That certainly makes sense since the purpose of the Sabbath is to honor and appreciate God's creation. How, then, could we allow technical rules of Sabbath observance to stop us from protecting God's greatest creation -- people?

In my eleven years in Washington, I have attended crisis meetings at the White House three or four times on Saturdays and the Senate has been in session twenty-five or thirty times on the Sabbath. My colleagues want to be with their families or constituents on Friday night and Saturday so, when we're at the Capitol, it is for something important, like the Gulf war debate, the federal budget crises of 1990 and 1995 or the impeachment trial of President Clinton. On those occasions I have tried hard to fulfill my responsibility to the public without violating the specific rules that have been established over the centuries to protect the Sabbath as a day of rest, and make it different. For example, if we are meeting on both Friday night and Saturday, I will stay at a hotel near the Capitol, usually with Hadassah and Hani to avoid driving a car. If we're meeting on only one of those days, I'll walk the four miles between our home and the Capitol. Particularly when these walks are at night, the Capitol police provide me with an escort, on foot and in an accompanying car, which has led me to wish my European immigrant grandmother, Baba, could see me.

My Senate colleagues, just like my Connecticut constituents, have been not just tolerant but very respectful of my religious observance, which I truly appreciate. On my very first Sabbath at the Capitol, in 1989, before I had the routine down, I was planning to sleep on a cot in the Senate gym until Al Gore insisted I stay at his parents' apartment across the street. When I see Al's wonderful mother, Pauline, she always calls me her "tenant." During the impeachment trial, my Senate colleague Slade Gorton of Washington graciously offered to host Hadassah, Hani and me in his Capitol Hill home. And a Sabbath in the Senate never passes without Barbara Mikulski of Maryland coming over to say, in pretty good Polish-American Yiddish, "Good Shabbos, Joey."

On every other day of the week, it is Jewish tradition to pray three times -- morning, afternoon and evening. The afternoon service is, for me, the most difficult to stop for because it is in the middle of the workday. That is also why it is most important. So I have put a small prayer book next to the phone on the desk in my Senate office to remind me to pause and enjoy the perspective and calm that prayer offers. It definitely eases my way through the day.

For many members of Congress, religious observance also provides the most significant nonpolitical communities we belong to in Washington. The members of our churches and synagogues, like our neighbors and the parents of our children's schoolmates, become our second-home communities away from our communities in our home states or districts and make our lives in Washington richer than just a revolving door at the Capitol.

One of the worst consequences of the hectic lives senators lead is that we don't see enough of each other away from work. That is a shame because, believe it or not, senators are a very interesting and enjoyable group to spend time with. They are naturally affable, or they wouldn't be in politics. Sometimes people will ask me who are my best friends in the Senate. I always begin my answer with Chris Dodd, but after that it depends on which of the other senators our schedule has allowed or forced me to spend the most time with in recent weeks. In the old days, when members of Congress came to Washington for months at a time, they and their families would socialize with one another on weekends. Almost none of that happens now. Since the pace of work was slower then, members also took the time to gather at the end of the day for social drinks. That rarely happens anymore. In fact, there is very little drinking by members of the Senate today, alone or together. Since much of the bygone family and collegial socializing naturally crossed party lines, I am sure it helped avoid some of the rancorous and destructive partisanship that erupts too often today.

But there are still two good times I have found to get to know my colleagues personally. One is when we have traveled to foreign countries and spent extended time in close quarters together. The other is the weekly Senate prayer breakfast, at which about twenty or thirty current and former senators gather privately in a room at the Capitol each Wednesday morning with our chaplain, Lloyd Ogilvie, for prayer, reflection and conversation. This is the place and time in the Capitol that has felt most like home to me, when party affiliation is irrelevant and we speak of our faith, experience, priorities and concern for one another.

I remember once reading a description of Washington as America's temple of power, where senators are the high priests. That, of course, is greatly overstated, as the pace of our lives suggests, but the capital can be a very seductive and ego-inflating place. Senators are given much respect and deference, and run the risk of being misguided by this attention. Doors are opened for us; good seats at sporting and entertainment events and restaurants are easily obtained. Wealthy and famous people entertain us. Sometimes you've got to remind yourself who you are and why you wanted to be there. If you don't, the odds are that the media and your constituents eventually will.

I would guess that one of the most prevalent public misconceptions of the "seductive" life of members of Congress in Washington, particularly in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal, concerns their sexual excesses and infidelities. It may be happening more than I think, but I just haven't seen very much of it among my colleagues. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that the freedom politicians of earlier eras had to pursue private sexual relationships while the press looked the other way is now a thing of the distant past. Ask Gary Hart, or President Clinton.

As far as elected officials using their position of power to take advantage of women, that has changed too. First, women have thankfully become more self-protective and assertive than they were a generation ago; they simply won't stand for such behavior. And they have the law to support them. Any senator who might be thinking of chasing a staff member around his desk or planting a kiss on her lips need only be reminded of Bob Packwood to think again.

I am, of course, not saying that there is no sexual misconduct in Washington, but I would guess that the level of such activity is less among the group of men and women with whom I work on Capitol Hill than among a random group of 535 people in most other jobs in our society. People in public life are as full of frailties and vulnerabilities as anyone else, but their lives are lived today in a context of microscopic scrutiny that does not compare to the relative freedom and privacy they enjoyed a generation ago and that most other people in our society still enjoy. The fear of personal mortification, career destruction and emotional devastation for family and friends is a powerful deterrent for any public figure who is tempted to pursue an immoral relationship.

I have tried in this chapter to describe through my own experiences the impact that public life has on the private lives of people in politics, and how my family and I have worked hard to separate the two. It does take work, because public life is time-consuming and all-encompassing, and can be uniquely intrusive unless you protect your privacy and do not behave in a way that encourages media or political intrusion. But I remain convinced that the opportunities for making a difference that come with public life are worth the efforts that are necessary to protect the rest of your life.