Retired U.S. senator Lamar Alexander has produced a readable, insightful, in places surprising, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny memoir. He has, however, given it the wrong title, or rather subtitle.
For though his first government job (a summer internship) was in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, the president who most influenced his approach to politics and public service was a president under whom he never worked and with whom he never met: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
After receiving a law degree from New York University, Alexander clerked (though officially designated a low paid “aide”) for Eisenhower-appointed Fifth Circuit Judge John Minor Wisdom. Like Herbert Brownell Jr. (Eisenhower’s attorney general), Judge Wisdom had been an early Ike supporter among Republican Party activists and was a determined civil rights advocate. He took that determination to the bench after his 1957 confirmation. He is now regarded as a pivotal civil rights strategist and mover within the New Orleans-seated Fifth Circuit. He is best remembered for writing the circuit’s 1962 ruling compelling the University of Mississippi to admit its first African-American student, the now iconic James Meredith.
When the clerkship expired, Judge Wisdom recommended Alexander to a Tennessee lawyer and Republican U.S Senate candidate with views matching Wisdom’s own, Howard H. Baker Jr. At the time, the total Republican registration in Tennessee was, according to Alexander, a few thousand. But through much of the previously solid Democrat South, a hundred years of segregation-driven one-party rule had taken its toll. Voters were fed up with corruption and incompetence across the board. Baker won.
That was 1966. Two years on Senator Baker’s staff followed, after which Alexander joined Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Nixon won and Alexander entered the White House staff as an assistant and, as it turned out, student to the former Eisenhower aide and Washington icon, Bryce Harlow.
Like Judge Wisdom, Harlow brought to his work high standards of integrity and judgment, a standard that Harlow himself attributed to lessons from Eisenhower. Alexander returns to one particular lesson several times in the book. He attributes the story and words to Harlow:
“The Eisenhower Cabinet had been in a swivel over a difficult decision. Ike went around the room. Each secretary offered a different opinion.” [The gist of each was, give this issue to another department, not mine.]
“Becoming impatient, the president asked, ‘Well, what would be the right thing to do?’ The secretary of state, sitting next to the president, answered first. ‘Oh, well, the right thing would be …’ and around the table it continued, with each secretary setting aside the narrow interests of his department and agreeing that that would be the right thing to do. ‘Well then, that is what we will do,’ the president said, and he sent Press Secretary Jim Hagerty to tell the media.”
Alexander tells another, even more striking, story, drawn from a private letter Harlow sent to Alexander upon Harlow’s exit from the Nixon staff. It concerns a now-forgotten scandal, the Dixon-Yates Affair. Though the White House was not involved, senior Eisenhower staff cooked up a menu of explanations and denials—basically a coverup. They outlined a full media plan and proudly delivered it to the president at his desk. From Harlow’s letter:
“Suddenly, [Eisenhower] threw the statement over Hagerty’s head. … Plainly he was M-A-D. … ‘You listen here, boys,’ he said, ‘I’ll never put out any drivel like that as long as I am around this place. … The right thing to do in cases like this is always to tell the truth. Put out the facts very fast, don’t get cute about it, just say what the facts are, and make it as simple as you can. That way the whole damn mess will blow over and be gone in a week to 10 days, and the public will back you for being honest about it. Do it this way like you boys have it here—and we’ll all be up to our necks in trouble and will deserve it.'”
Alexander tells this story in a chapter titled: “If Nixon Had Listened to Harlow.” All these years later, he clearly laments the self-inflicted demise of what he emphasizes were a brilliantly creative president and administration.
Though listed as a “personal history,” The Education of a Senator is actually a book of lessons:
— Lessons learned by a young governor-elect who, as he prepared to take office, faced an unprecedented scandal. The outgoing Old-South Democrat governor was selling pardons to violent convicts, including some on death row. Alexander used the imperatives of the moment to foster previously unimaginable cooperation between him (only the second Republican to be elected governor of Tennessee since the end of the Civil War) and the leaders of both political parties, setting the stage for an unprecedented era of bipartisan cooperation and reform;
— Lessons in harnessing that unity to draw for the first time automobile factories from overseas and even from the contentious home state of the nation’s auto industry to the long-overlooked Tennessee;
— Lessons about what a cabinet secretary (George H.W. Bush made Alexander his secretary of education) can do when his president overlooks the essentials of winning reelection (not much, as it turns out);
— Lessons about leadership: He writes memorably of two models of leadership: that of Moses, who set great goals far beyond those anyone could imagine; and that of Count Basie, who had a way of energizing everyone in his band to perform at a higher level than they thought they could. His chapters on creating bipartisan coalitions behind contentious legislation provide a master class in elements of both leadership styles and more.
A chapter of his lessons is dedicated to senators of the future coming not only from him but from a collection of senators of the past, as in: Go to the gym each day (Alaska’s Ted Stevens, at 85, ran up and down the Capitol steps daily); travel (Mississippi’s John Stennis regretted not joining more senatorial overseas delegations, because “You learn about the world and you learn about your colleagues”); answering mail is crucial (Georgia’s Sam Nunn once asked Herman Talmadge, also of Georgia, about whether he could stop answering mail. “I receive a lot of mail from nuts,” he complained, to which Talmadge replied, “The nut vote is about one third of the vote. You’ll never get reelected if you lose the nut vote.”).
The Education of a Senator is more than a book of lessons—”Lessons and Carols” catches it better. For Alexander turns out to be an accomplished and genuinely admired musician. He has been a featured player on piano, trombone, tuba, and washboard with symphonies, the Grand Ole Opry, and a Billy Graham crusade.
One of those carols is a love song that runs throughout this very personal as well as public volume. It is the story of his years with his wife (Honey), whom he lost nearly four years ago and clearly still mourns, even as he recalls each moment with her.
Reading The Education of a Senator, it is hard not to feel that here is a great leader who (like many great leaders) is a great showman and, unlike too many, has a great heart.
The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump
by Lamar Alexander
Post Hill Press, 568 pp., $37.50
Clark S. Judge, a former speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush, is chairman of the Pacific Research Institute.
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