.png)
Few figures in American politics have had as long, varied and distinguished a career in public life as Lamar Alexander.
The Tennessee Republican was a White House and Senate aide, served two terms as governor, was president at the University of Tennessee, education secretary for President George H.W. Bush and then capped it all off by serving three terms in the Senate.
Those were the high points. There were also two presidential bids — those didn’t go as well. He ran better in 1996, losing to eventual GOP nominee Bob Dole. The next campaign was shorter: His 2000 campaign didn't make it out of 1999.
It’s the successes and failures alike — and at so many levels of government over nearly 60 years — that make his upcoming memoir so engrossing. The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump puts his final public role in the title. Yet it’s the sweep of his career, the second part of the title, that makes the book so fascinating.
It's out next week, but I sat down with Lamar! when he visited Washington last month. We talked about the presidents he’s known, why he thinks his party may want to move on from Trumpism and, yes, where he got that slogan with the exclamation point and all those red-and-black plaid shirts.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You got your first big break in Washington because you somehow knew Bud Wilkinson, the legendary University of Oklahoma football coach, and he had a connection with the Nixon White House through another Oklahoman?
It’s unbelievable that I would get that job. I ran into Wilkinson. He was the Nick Saban of the day. And he was such an impressive guy. He said, "I’ll call Bryce Harlow" [a top adviser to President Richard Nixon]. I said, "Okay…."
But he did, and Harlow was the guy at that time. Everybody loved him, Democrats and Republicans.
And so much of this business is relationships, right? But you still gotta work hard, make your own luck.
And I have had a lot of good fortune.
You've led a political 20th to 21st century Forrest Gump-like existence. You're a summer intern in the summer of ’63, and you are working for Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department when you happen to hear on the loudspeakers Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Mall.
I went out for lunch, and I could hear that deep, booming voice, and it was Martin Luther King. It’s just the beginning of a serendipitous journey, if I had a way to describe it.
One of my Vanderbilt classmates was Bobby Kennedy’s secretary, so I called her and said, “I need a summer job,” and I got to be an intern in the Department of Justice that summer. He and his big dog were walking up and down the hall, and he was driving around town in a convertible with his top down, hair flowing. It was an exciting time for young people.
So that's the summer of ’63, and then you serve long enough, so you go home [after retiring from the Senate] three days before January 6 [2021], right? So that's a period of 60 years, really. And you capture this well in the introduction to the book, in which you say it would be akin to veterans of the Teddy Roosevelt administration serving in the New Frontier of JFK.
If a staffer for TR were to write everything he knew between then and JFK, it's about a fourth of our country's history.
It's like John Hay working as a young staffer for Lincoln and going on to be secretary of State for TR.
It's that span. And I worked with six presidents, not counting Kennedy and Johnson. So I just stumbled from one wonderful opportunity to another.
Who had the most raw talent of those presidents that you worked with?
Well, it depends on the kind of talent. Barack Obama was the smartest guy in the room.
Overall political, the full spectrum.
The best politician was Bill Clinton. The one who best fit the job was Ronald Reagan.
Would you have beaten Clinton in ’96 had you gotten the nomination?
It would have been hard. I thought I could do better than Dole. I said to Dole: “Don’t let [Clinton] have the bridge to the future.” And Clinton took it and won it. I thought I could present a different kind of bridge to the future.
He would have been hard to beat in ’96, though, with peace and prosperity.
I think so. I think so.
In the book, you borrow the great line that the only cure for political ambition is embalming fluid. Are you at peace with never having become president?
Yeah, sure. The time I would have liked to have done it was during Covid because I thought that was such a tremendous period in our country. And the truth is that President Donald Trump's administration did well. The astonishing thing to me is that he doesn't get credit for the invention of the Covid vaccine, which didn't win the researchers who did it a Nobel Prize and saved tens of millions of lives. I can't think of any other government enterprise in the United States that equals that, except the Manhattan Project that did the atom bomb.
Why in his second term would he appoint a secretary who diminishes the Covid mRNA vaccine at a time when it's proving to be the most likely antidote to the next pandemic, and it will pay dividends for years to come?
You think that you would have been a better president than a lot of these guys that you served with, right?
Well…
Sure you do, nothing wrong with that.
I think I would have known what to do, I think I had the equipment to be president. I had a sense of history. I had been a governor, been a cabinet member, so I knew how to be an executive. I knew the difference between executive leadership and legislative leadership, which President Obama, President Joe Biden didn't know very well. They were both sort of legislators-in-chief instead of commanders-in-chief. I thought I could’ve done well.
Who impresses you today among the ranks of the governors, or the former governors?
[Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin] are two.
Is there an opening in the party for that kind of person now — a traditional, even-keeled Republican?
I’m pretty sure there is, for two reasons. One is: Even if you like chocolate ice cream, after a while, you say, “I think I might like to try vanilla.” So there might be some people who were enamored with Trump who say, “Let's try something else.”
And then I think the country is going to be ready for an American president with character, temperament, good manners, good use of language, good demeanor. The kind of person that we are happy to introduce our grandson to and hope he emulates.
Which we don't have now?
No, we don’t have that now.
I was a candidate for the first time in 1974. I was sort of a stuffed shirt, not a great candidate. But it was the Watergate year. And I remember people coming down out of the mountains in [otherwise Republican East] Tennessee and asking, “Who's the Republican so we can vote against them.” They were so mad about Watergate, and there's a chance that will happen this year and next year because of the conduct of President Trump.
It just doesn't matter who the parties nominate; they're going to pull the lever to send a message?
And even if they don't like the Democrats, which they don't, they may just say, “I'm fed up with this. Let's try something completely different.”
’74 and ’76 were kind of like ’06 and ’08, one continuous backlash cycle.
That’s right. And if you'll remember, Nixon lied. He was on his way, I think, to being one of the most consequential presidents. He lied, and he was out, and what was Jimmy Carter's line? “I'll never tell a lie.”
Do you regret not being onto the scent of Trump sooner? He’s very charming in person; he's more benign in person. And he can come off as self-aware, and he's just kind of putting on a show. And that can kind of inure people to the more malignant elements of his public character, because if you see him in private, he just wants to sell you the car; he’s a salesman.
There's some truth to that. He even can be self-aware in private. I remember he said to us, “You know, I don't drink alcohol. Can you imagine what I'd be like if I did?”
But I look at it a different way. President Obama — I disagreed with his liberal views, and he was hard to get to know, but I figured, well, the people elected me, they elected him, and so my job is to work with him when I can, not to give a running commentary on all the things that I see wrong with him. With Trump, I disagreed with his character, with his temperament, and people wanted me to say, “He did this wrong, that wrong. I said, “I'm not going to do that. I mean, they elected him. They elected me.” My job is to work with him when I can, and when I can't support him, I can do that with respect for the office, which I did.
You were not there for the vote on his second impeachment. You say bluntly in the book that if that's not high crimes and misdemeanors — what he did on January 6 — I don't know what is. You clearly would have voted to convict the second time around?
Well, let's be precise about that. I mean, it's somewhere between self-righteous and disingenuous to look back six years and say, “If I'd been on the jury or in the deliberations, I would have voted this way or that way.”
But the question is: Do I think refusing to accept the result of a certified election and then encouraging a mob to charge the Capitol to stop the certified victor from taking the presidency is a high crime or a misdemeanor? The answer is yes.
You talk about having three mentors. One is John Minor Wisdom, a federal judge. The other is Howard Baker, the former senator and Reagan’s chief of staff, and the third is Bryce Harlow, the Nixon aide. I want to talk about each of them.
People should know who John Minor Wisdom is. His name is now on the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. And you were a summer law clerk for him.
He and a handful of other Southern judges were heroes of American political history. They were political actors. They were very partisan. They were the rare Southern Republican. They were involved in getting Dwight Eisenhower over the top against Robert Taft in ’52, and then their political reward was that they were put on the bench. And they were the ones who ensured that Brown v. Board of Education was enacted in the South, which was arguably even harder than ruling on Brown itself.
Let's talk about Howard Baker for a minute, because he also was somebody who gave you a political education. Like you, he was an East Tennessee Republican.
And people should understand the political history of Tennessee, which famously has three grand divisions from east to west. The easternmost grand division is historically unionist. As you say, people vote like they shot in the Civil War, and Howard Baker comes out of that tradition. His dad was in the House, he was in the House and he eventually became the first Republican elected senator in Tennessee in 1966.
How did you meet Baker?
I was working for Judge Wisdom. I wrote Baker a letter because my clerkship ended in 1966, and I had read about the Baker family in the Knoxville Journal ever since I was a kid. I knew I was coming back to Tennessee, so I wrote him a letter and volunteered for his Senate campaign. I didn't hear from him, so I came home for Easter, went to see him, and he said, “Well, I don't have any money. I can't pay you.” And he took me over to his office, which had about three people in it, and I began as a volunteer in his 1966 campaign after he won the Republican primary. It was a smaller world back then.
You broke up a vacation with your wife to send in reams of documents to be vetted as George W. Bush's VP in 2000. Of course, the guy who ran the search named himself.
That's true.
Were you pissed at Dick Cheney for that?
I was humiliated. I was through with politics. I had done well in my first presidential campaign. I tried the second time, and as I say in the book, it lasted about as long as the Wright Brothers' flight, and I staggered out of the [2000] primary. I was sure that was the end of politics for me. I mean, I was so embarrassed, I wanted to do something else.
And here comes Cheney calling me, and says, “Governor Bush wants to consider you.” And I said, “I'm through with politics, and there's got to be a long list.” He said, “There’s only a handful.” I said, “What's a handful?” He said, “How many fingers you got on your hand?”
So I said, “Okay” and filled out the forms. But this was the first vacation [my wife] Honey and I had together without kids in years. And it took two weeks. I filled all these forms out, sent it to him, and they came back unopened.
Let’s go back to your time as governor. People hear the words “workforce development” and their eyes glaze over, and they scroll down to the next thing. But people should stop scrolling, because I think it's maybe the most moving part of this book, in terms of your public life — the story of the Knight family. It really brings to life the real flesh and blood of being in office. And, in your case, why luring Japanese automakers was so vital to Tennessee’s economy.
When I walked across the state [during my 1978 gubernatorial run], I stayed with 73 families, most of whom I hadn't known before. The Knight family lived just outside Nashville. She was a school secretary, and he was the postmaster, and she had twin boys, and when they went to bed, she said, “I’m sad, my boys are smart, but they'll never get a job around here. I'll never see my grandchildren.”
And 25 years later, one of those boys was the manager of the Nissan plant. The other one was working there, and her grandson was too. So it made a difference in their lives, and all of the other people in the area.
All right, two questions for you people will want to know. Who came up with the idea of the plaid shirt, which you wore walking across the state, and then — this is later — who came up with the idea of the Lamar exclamation point slogan?
Well, the exclamation point was [former Republican strategist] Mike Murphy. But the plaid shirt, that was Honey. She was really devastated by the ‘74 loss. And one thing about writing the memoir is I'm painfully aware of what an inconvenience it is to be married to a politician. Because for most of our marriage, I was running for something or serving in public office.
When I told her I was thinking about running again for governor, she said, “What do you want to accomplish for the state and could we have a different campaign?” So it was Honey's idea, really, to walk across the state and wear the red and black shirt.
You went and bought a bunch at an Army-Navy supplier?
I had two red-and-black shirts. I bought 14 more, and that became my uniform.
I want to talk about Tennessee's politics because you and I've had this conversation for years about the state’s robust competition between parties. I wrote a long piece about it in 2018. There is no competition now. Isn't that bad for the state?
Yes, it's not good for the state.
After working for Judge Wisdom and hearing him rail against the one-party system in Louisiana, I went back to Tennessee and was inspired by Howard Baker's effort and Bill Brock's to build a two-party system. In Tennessee, we'd had 100 years of one-party Democratic rule, which, with a few exceptions, was fairly mediocre government, a lot of back scratching, some corruption. One result of that was that by the time we got to the ‘60s, Tennessee was way back in the line. Before the one-party rule, we had a lively competition between Whigs and Democrats, right? We had Andrew Jackson Democrats versus Davy Crockett Whigs. We had three presidents, speaker of the House.
Then again, from the ‘60s to about 2008, we had really fierce competition between the parties, and it was like the Southeastern Conference football. I mean, if you're a good football player, you want to play in the Southeastern Conference, because you want to play against the best, right? So our competition attracted talented people: heart lung transplant surgeons like Bill Frist, actors like Fred Thompson, businessmen like Bob Corker, people like Al Gore, Jim Sasser, Phil Bredesen. They thought, “Well, I'll spend some time in politics.” And usually people that talented have a sense of purpose, and when they get elected there, they do a better job.
Tennessee in the ‘80s and ‘90s, according to the University of Tennessee statistics, family incomes went up faster than in any other southern state. And I'm convinced a good part of that was because of the competition that produced good leadership.
Now we're back where we were when we started, and we have one party — it's Republican. And the jury's out, but I don't think we'll be served as well if we have Democrats who can't ever elect anybody.
But what's the scenario where it’s going to be competitive again?
Well, it’s not just Tennessee. There have to be more voters in the primaries. Right now, 5 percent of registered voters pick the nominees. That leaves people who are center-left and center-right out, which is the majority of us. Our votes don't count. So the thing to do is to use social media to get more people voting in the primaries.
And, by the way, you made a prescient prediction about where our politics was going! You said it’s going to be celebrity or money.
It was sort of my last word, dropping out of the presidential contest in ’99. I said, “If we're not careful, we'll have Donald Trump versus the most recent Powerball winner versus Cher.” I misjudged Trump's arrival in politics by about 17 years.
English (US)