Tune into Gov. Phil Scott’s pandemic media briefings and for seemingly every question about vaccines or mask mandates comes another about his centrist position in an increasingly far-right Republican Party.
“Are you uncomfortable remaining a member?” one reporter asked Scott after U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., was dumped from GOP leadership this month for repudiating former President Donald Trump.
Scott’s response: “The big tent we talk about a lot within the party doesn’t appear to exist, and I think that’s really unfortunate. All I can do is continue to serve the people in a manner that is reputable, open and welcoming.”
But 20 years ago this week, another Vermonter did something explosively different. On May 24, 2001, then U.S. Sen. James Jeffords walked into a press-packed Burlington hotel ballroom and announced he was leaving the Republican Party, single-handedly tipping control of a 50-50 chamber to the Democrats.
“Mr. Jeffords Blows Up Washington,” shouted a subsequent cover of Newsweek.
The print magazine has given way to the internet, and the man who sparked the headline died in 2014. But as commentators debate whether today’s GOP is facing a “purge” or a “civil war,” they’re finding the inside story of Jeffords’s two-decade-old defection to be surprisingly relevant.
“My father felt he couldn’t live within the bounds of the Republican Party anymore — it wasn’t the same one he knew and first joined and wasn’t doing the things he wanted,” Jeffords’ son, Leonard, says today. “He did have a pretty good idea of how historic his switch would be.”
‘Maverick Republican’
Born in Rutland on May 11, 1934, Jim Jeffords had a picture-perfect all-American childhood — so much so that the legendary artist Norman Rockwell asked him to pose as a teenager.
“If I were to pick the movie that feels most emblematic of my life story,” Jeffords began his 2003 autobiography, “I would choose ‘Mister Smith Goes to Washington,’ or some other wholesome film that shows what life was like before we became so obsessed with speed and consumption, a time when your word meant something and people were driven by ethics more than money.”
The son of a chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court had an independent streak. Shy and socially awkward, he declined Rockwell’s request shortly before setting off a classroom stink bomb that got him blackballed from the Boys State student government program.
Jeffords nonetheless won election to the Legislature as a Republican in 1966 and soon broke party ranks to become the swing vote that approved then-Democratic Gov. Phil Hoff’s seemingly radical proposal to set the state income tax rate as a fixed percentage of the federal figure.
That’s when the press first branded Jeffords a “maverick Republican.”
In 1968, Jeffords helped adopt the state’s ban on billboards before moving on to become attorney general. In that post, he started a consumer protection division, appointed the first female assistant attorney general and worked with the Legislature to draft the state’s Act 250 land use law and bottle deposit rules.
In 1972, Jeffords decided to run for governor. Republican leaders, unhappy with his rebellious voting record, made sure he didn’t win the primary. By the end of the year, the once-rising political star seemed headed for retirement — only to win Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat in 1974, three months after the Watergate scandal forced President Richard Nixon to resign.
Jeffords went to Washington with $44,000 in campaign and personal debts. His annual salary was only $600 more than that, leaving him $50 a month to live on in the nation’s capital. Soon Vermont’s congressman saw himself pictured in the national news sleeping in a motorhome and, later, on an office sofa bed.
Jeffords was more settled in 1988 when he won the U.S. Senate seat previously held by fellow Rutland Republican Robert Stafford. Souring on his party’s increasing conservatism, he opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 and his colleagues’ “Contract with America” in 1994. Yet by 2001, he rang in the new year with high hopes.
Following President George W. Bush’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, Jeffords’ party controlled all branches of the federal government for the first time in 40 years. That allowed the Vermonter to anticipate passage of several pet projects as chair of the powerful Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
But by February, Jeffords faced growing differences with Bush and his conservative colleagues, especially over the administration’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut. The senator said he’d vote for the plan if Bush set aside $180 billion to cover the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a longstanding special-education law that traditionally lacks enough funding.
The president balked. Jeffords, feeling his peers had rejected one too many of his priorities, began talking privately about bolting from the party.
Behind closed doors, Jeffords’ wife, Liz, daughter, Laura, and top staffers responded with a unanimous “no,” they later revealed to reporters. But the May weekend before his bombshell announcement, all deduced the senator was yearning to say “yes.”
‘Changing nature’
Jeffords knew Republicans had held his Senate seat longer than any other in congressional history — in this case, since the party’s creation in 1854. He also understood his defection would shift the chamber’s control (held by the GOP because of then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote) to the Democrats.
With rumors swirling around Washington, Jeffords accepted an invitation to meet with the president. The Vermonter pleaded for the administration to pay more attention to the party’s moderates. But Bush, according to later press reports, simply nodded before saying, “I don’t agree with you.”
Leonard Jeffords, now 56, remembers his father saying after his 1988 election: “My dream is one day to have a divided Senate and make the choice of switching the balance of power.” But the senator didn’t tell his son — the family’s most fervent party stalwart — about his decision until he cemented it a day before boarding a flight home.
On May 24, 2001, the senator stood before a standing-room-only crowd in Burlington and gave what he called his “Declaration of Independence.”
“Given the changing nature of the national party, it has become a struggle for our leaders to deal with me, and for me to deal with them,” he said in a live television broadcast seen by millions nationwide. “In order to best represent my state of Vermont, my own conscience, and the principles I have stood for my whole life, I will leave the Republican Party and become an independent.”
Many of Jeffords’ former colleagues were furious. The front page of the New York Post, echoing conservative commentators nationwide, deemed him “Benedict Jeffords.” His office received death threats. Peers in his musical quartet “The Singing Senators” responded with the silent treatment.
(Jeffords, a tenor, would go on to hear baritone John Ashcroft draw fire as Bush’s attorney general, bass Trent Lott resign as Senate Republican leader after comments in 2002 that were interpreted as support for segregationist policies and lead singer Larry Craig retire after a 2007 sex scandal.)
Conversely, Jeffords was suddenly the stuff of heroic profiles, be it on CBS’ “60 Minutes” or in Rolling Stone magazine. Actor Paul Newman invited him to dinner. Publishing giant Simon & Schuster signed him to a six-figure contract for two autobiographical books. The first — a 136-page recap of the switch titled “My Declaration of Independence” — was set to hit stores that September.
Katie Couric taped a television interview with the senator the night of Sept. 10. The next morning, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks changed everything. Jeffords found his book delayed and missed Newman entirely. Police evacuated and later closed his Washington offices after a fellow tenant, Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle, received an envelope containing anthrax.
Jeffords ended the year with a resolution: “Get more back to normal.”
But that didn’t happen. Jeffords’ defection temporarily stalled conservatives’ plans to speed their agenda through Congress, only to seem for naught when the GOP won control of both the House and Senate in 2002. Jeffords sought consolation by publishing his 2003 autobiography, “An Independent Man: Adventures of a Public Servant.”
“I hope you’ll see that one person can make a difference,” he wrote in it, “not just on the political landscape but in the priorities I believe are essential to a democratic nation — education, environment, the safety of the planet, health care and the support for our agricultural community — and that you can have one heck of a good time doing so.”
But as Amazon’s staff review of the book began: “One of the unintended consequences of this memoir by Vermont senator James Jeffords is a blunt reminder that the tides of history are relentless.”
‘Can you believe it?’
The fallout was just as punishing on Jeffords. Five years after his switch, he retired.
“There have been questions about my health,” he told the press in 2005. “I am feeling the aches and pains that come when you reach 70. My memory fails me on occasion, but Liz would probably argue this has been going on for the last 50 years.”
In his last formal congressional address, Jeffords said he grew up during World War II, came to Washington during the Vietnam War and was leaving during the Iraq War. He then noted he had just attended the dedication of a monument for Vermonters who fought in the Civil War.
“I am an optimist, and have been every day of my life,” he told his colleagues. “With Lincoln, I hope that the mystic chords of memory will stretch from every battlefield and patriot grave to the hearts of the living, and that we will soon again be touched by the better angels of our nature.”
Jeffords returned to his home in Shrewsbury in 2006 after Bernie Sanders won election to replace him. Four months later, Jeffords’ wife died of cancer, and he moved to a military retirement residence in Washington, D.C., near their son, daughter and two grandchildren.
Jeffords, facing Alzheimer’s disease, lived there until his death at age 80 in 2014.
“During his more than 30 years in Washington, Jim never lost the fiercely independent spirit that made Vermonters and people across America trust and respect him,” President Barack Obama said in response. “Whatever the issue — whether it was protecting the environment, supporting Americans with disabilities, or whether to authorize the war in Iraq — Jim voted his principles, even if it sometimes meant taking a lonely or unpopular stance.”
Jeffords’ legacy lives on. The national press recounted his switch earlier this year when Democrats won the presidency and the U.S. House and Senate — the latter in another 50-50 split.
“Democrats are eager to push for rapid change now that they have control,” Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen wrote in one piece. “Those champing at the bit should pause and remember a name from the past: Sen. Jim Jeffords.”
Amazon, for its part, continues to recommend his memoir.
“Cruel historical fate hardly detracts from Jeffords’ story,” the website’s staff review notes. “Indeed, its plainspoken, often self-effacing tone may make one yearn for more politicians naïve — or committed — enough to put long-term public policy ahead of lockstep party politics.”
Leonard Jeffords still remembers all the details of the 2001 announcement — including the fact he was the one to inform the Senate majority leader.
“Today there would be people my father could get along with on the moderate or independent side — Chuck Grassley and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and maybe (Democrat) Joe Manchin,” Leonard says, “although I think he would find that group smaller than it was when he was in office.”
“There are others he’d have difficulty working with,” Leonard Jeffords continues. “This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but he wouldn’t have been a big fan of the Trump presidency. And he’d be unhappy with the lack of bipartisanship. It seems like things are even more partisan now than they were 20 years ago.”
Chris Graff can attest to that. The former Associated Press correspondent recalls traveling to the nation’s capital to report on the aftershocks. He thought he’d meet Jeffords’ spokesman. Instead, the senator himself — waving a copy of Newsweek with his photo on the cover — was the first to greet him.
“Can you believe it?” Graff recalls Jeffords asking.
Believe what, the journalist thought at the time — the cover, or the fact the most sought-after man in the capital was waiting for him?
Graff, now head of communications for Montpelier’s National Life Group, still considers the switch “clearly one of the biggest stories I ever covered.” But for all the first rough drafts of history he wrote about Jeffords, he can sum up everything in one sentence: “He was way ahead of his time.”
