[T]he climax arrives on Page 219, when Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is flying from Washington, D.C., to a closed-door location unknown to anyone else in the nation’s capital.
“It staggered the mind,” Philip Baruth writes in the new biography “Senator Leahy: A Life in Scenes.” “And the truth was that Leahy was all but beside himself with excitement.”
In 1974, Leahy became, at age 34, the youngest Vermonter ever elected to his post. In 1992, he wrote the first law by any government to ban the export of landmines. In 2001, he ascended to the role of chairman of the Judiciary Committee and, in 2012, became his chamber’s longest-serving current member.
“Leahy had come an extremely long way,” Baruth writes, “from a gangly kid with one good eye, soaking up 1940s Flash Gordon and Batman serials in a tiny theater in Montpelier, to a 30-year-plus veteran of the U.S. Senate.”
Landing at the airport a decade ago, Leahy prepared to step into another big, bright spotlight: the one illuminating his surprise cameo role opposite the late Oscar-winning actor Heath Ledger in the movie “The Dark Knight.”
“We’re not intimidated by thugs,” Leahy, clad in his best suit, said as the character of the Joker threatened him with a prop knife.
Then again, Ledger wasn’t afraid to grab his target’s head with both hands, the book reveals, while director Christopher Nolan wrestled with whether the senator should exude fear or, as seen in the film, defiance.
“It was a truly amazing moment,” Baruth writes, “when set against the long arc of Leahy’s political career: the very same Top Cop image that Leahy had developed as a young Chittenden County state’s attorney … now being explicitly deployed by a major Hollywood director to a worldwide audience.”
Leahy may be 77, but “A Life in Scenes” is the first book to chronicle his story.
Suffice to say, it doesn’t follow the usual script.
‘It’s a scholarly biography’
“If any reader comes to this biography in search of a comprehensive history of his important committee work or votes cast, he or she will be bitterly disappointed,” Baruth writes in the introduction. “On that score, a much better book than mine remains to be written. Instead, I have contented myself here with telling a sequence of targeted stories, a chronological selection meant to capture most of the eventful life of my subject, but also to cast light on a larger argument about the America we inhabit now.”
Baruth, a Chittenden County state senator and English professor at the University of Vermont, is more accustomed to writing novels. The New York Times named his “The X President” one of its 2003 notable books, while The Washington Post deemed his “The Brothers Boswell” a 2009 “best book.”
Then the author bought a ticket to “The Dark Knight.”
“All of a sudden, Pat Leahy comes on the screen,” he recalls today, “and I thought, ‘I have to read the book on him,’ only to find out there wasn’t even a chapter of a book on him.”
And so, for the past six years, Baruth has interviewed the senator, his family, past and present aides and political reporters for a 344-page hardcover set for release Tuesday by the University Press of New England.
“It’s a scholarly biography,” the author asserts. “That said, I’m also a novelist, and what’s paramount for me is character and holding a reader’s attention via plot.”
So don’t be surprised when Chapter 4 ends with its subject voting against a 1975 call for further military funding in Vietnam:
“Leahy walked out of the Capitol Building that evening, and the soft D.C. springtime hit him like a kiss on the cheek. The Capitol and the Mall had never seemed more beautiful. He had been in public service his entire postgraduate life, and while that totaled less than 10 years, it had been a decade packed with achievement, particularly on the criminal justice side — and yet, for the very first time in his public career, Leahy felt as though in some small part his actions had genuinely helped to alter the course of history.”
And Chapter 5 fast-forwards nearly two decades to begin with Leahy’s 1992 introduction to Bobby Muller, a co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines seeking to address the plight of upward of 20,000 annual victims, most of them children:
“Muller had pulled a series of long strings to get the meeting, but he felt that the senior senator from Vermont was uniquely positioned to help. … For all his imposing physicality, Pat Leahy has always been a deeply sentimental man, and he has never made much of an effort to hide that fact. Today, it’s not unusual to see Leahy choke up during an after-dinner speech, not a rarity to see him wipe away tears. Most often he is speaking about children when the mood turns misty in this way.”
‘You can see what doesn’t go’
One might wonder if Baruth, former leader of state Senate Democrats, has the objectivity to write about a fellow party stalwart. Take the book’s assertion that “in terms of sheer media savvy, Leahy brought Kennedy-style politics to Vermont.” Or that its subject is “arguably the most powerful lawmaker Vermonters have ever sent to Washington.”
Then again, read all 33 pages of endnotes and you’ll find Baruth has anticipated any and all responses.
“Of course, a case can be made — and a recent biography of former governor Phil Hoff makes it very convincingly — that Hoff is the real heir to Kennedy in Vermont,” he writes. “As the authors of ‘Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State’ argue, Hoff’s style on the campaign trail in 1962 was modeled explicitly on Kennedy. … My own point above is more specifically that Leahy is the first Vermont politician to use the range of broadcast media as overwhelmingly and successfully as Kennedy did.”
Baruth adds that Leahy himself views Justin Smith Morrill (1810-1898) as the single most impressive Vermont senator: “He not only brought about the creation of the Library of Congress, but also the land grant colleges, and his work with Lincoln was visionary and absolutely essential,” Leahy told the author. “He even helped President Lincoln with the construction of the railroads out West. I think in many ways he’s the greatest Vermonter ever.”
Today’s readers might add the headline-grabbing names of the late U.S. Sen. James Jeffords, who left the Republican Party in 2001 and shifted control of his chamber to the Democrats; and former Gov. Howard Dean and current U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who captured national attention as Democratic presidential candidates in, respectively, 2004 and 2016.
“Why is it Vermont politicians keep catching the wave?” Baruth says. “Blue America has imagined the state as its capital.” The author contends that while Jeffords, Dean and Sanders have experienced their own proverbial 15 minutes of fame, “Pat Leahy has been the most consistent, methodical balance to conservatism. He’s there year after year.”
The same can’t be said for the senator’s biography. Directed by a sign over his desk — “Don’t be boring” — Baruth structured his book using the same framework as Nolan’s movie trilogy, with the titles “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises” morphing into the section headings “Leahy Begins,” “The Top Cop” and “The Top Cop Rises.”
“Once I realized that was going to be the structure,” the author says, “you can see what doesn’t go.”
And so Baruth cut a chapter on Leahy’s 1998 race against Tunbridge farmer Fred Tuttle (VTDigger published it last fall as a stand-alone piece) and scrapped another on the senator’s role in U.S. Supreme Court nominations.
In their stead, Baruth focuses on Leahy’s initial 1974 campaign, his receipt of an anthrax-laced letter and attention after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and his lifelong connection to a certain caped crusader.
‘Actively constructed as a hero’
“Why was Pat Leahy the first — and still technically the only — Democrat ever elected to the Senate from the state of Vermont?” Baruth writes in the introduction. “Why was he specifically targeted in 2001 with the most lethal bioweapon ever detected? And why would Leahy appear in not one, but a string of Batman films, recordings, and comic books, over a span of some two decades?”
The book argues the answers are related.
“Leahy was the first Democrat ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Vermont,” Baruth writes, “not solely because he was a skilled professional with a very strong track record in criminal justice, although that he absolutely was, but also because he was more than willing to be actively constructed as a hero — to be the top cop not merely in the street-level reality of Chittenden County, but also in the greater evolving imaginary of post-Watergate Vermont.”
“The Batman credits and pop cultural cred are not and never have been merely a lark, or a whimsical overlay to an otherwise very serious career,” the author continues. “Rather, these elements — from the Batman cameos to the high-profile Senate hearings to the walk-on appearances at Grateful Dead shows to the Sunday morning show ubiquity — have always been tangible, active components of a highly successful political image drawn simultaneously from high, low, and popular cultures.”
The book does point to some problems — specifically, Leahy’s introduction of such unsuccessful bills as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, seen by many internet users as an attempt to help the entertainment industry legislate censorship; and, “far and away the most damaging,” his 1987 resignation from the Senate Intelligence Committee after he leaked a confidential report to NBC.
“Of course, no politician, no matter how prodigious, comes to master forces on so titanic a scale without incident,” Baruth writes. “If Leahy’s intuitive grasp of media has made him the vastly powerful figure he is today, it is also telling that his most damaging political missteps have stemmed from failed attempts to manipulate or control the flow of those same media.”
But the book makes no mention of close electoral contests against Republicans Stewart Ledbetter in 1980 and James Douglas in 1992, nor does it reference Leahy’s support of EB-5 immigrant-funded development before several Northeast Kingdom projects were declared to be part of a “Ponzi-like” scheme.
Instead, the text “admiringly profiles” its subject, Publishers Weekly notes in a review, and “brings Leahy’s long string of accomplishments to life.”
Retired state Archivist D. Gregory Sanford hasn’t read the book whose back cover promises “the blockbuster life of America’s most senior senator,” but he can’t recall any similar work featuring such “movie trailer hype.” Instead, he is reminded of Joe Sherman’s “Fast Lane on a Dirt Road: Vermont Transformed, 1945-1990,” in which the author explains the state’s political and socio-economic changes by exploring personal history.
“There have been idiosyncratic ponderings on Vermont that have been effective,” Sanford notes. “Stories can be told in many ways.”
Baruth’s book is a testament to that.
“The life of Patrick Leahy is replete with powerful, dramatic, sensational moments — and I have allowed myself the luxury throughout of simply jump-cutting from one to the next,” the author writes. “I find it hard to believe that the average reader — or the myth-making subject of this biography himself — would have it any other way.”