Category Archives: Lamar Alexander

Reminiscing with Lamar

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My brother-in-law in Memphis sent us this link to a tweet by Lamar Alexander, two-term governor of Tennessee, two-year Education secretary, and three-term U.S. senator — one of the last remaining hopes of moderate Republicans until he retired in 2020…

I responded to Steve in Memphis with my own anecdote:

I heard his story about how he decided to run again when I was flying on the campaign plane with him in 1978, one late night not long before the election. He was just chatting with a reporter from The Tennessean, and they were enjoying an end of the day drink, and I sat off to the side, quietly taking notes. I wrote a story about his description of his comeback, and it was the first time John Parish, the Dean of Tennessee journalism, told me I’d written a good political story.

Alexander was reminiscing, so I thought I’d reminisce along with him.

Of course, I’m sure Lamar doesn’t remember me. I was a rookie reporter experiencing my first statewide election (and in Tennessee, a statewide election is stateWIDE, which is why they have to fly back and forth a lot). I was just with him that one week — Parish had stepped back to allow both another reporter and me to have a week each with both nominees. I spent the next week with Jake Butcher (it became apparent to me that Jake had no business running for governor, and for once in that rookie year, the voters proved me right).

Lamar and the Tennessean guy were totally relaxed; the reporter and he were just chatting over drinks; those day were long and hard. But I was scribbling away. Being a rookie, I sort of wondered whether what I was doing was ethical — grabbing a story off Alexander’s answers to the reporter’s questions. But they could see I was taking notes. And I could see the other guy wasn’t. I just charged ahead. I think we ran the story the day after he won the election. And I got a pat on the head from The Bear. Which meant a lot back then.

I got to know Alexander better when he was governor from 1978-85. He used to drop by the paper and visit now and then when I was news editor in Jackson. But I wasn’t surprised when he came to see us at The State more than a decade later when he briefly ran for president in 1996, and I mentioned those days, and he didn’t really seem to remember. Never mind. Too bad he had to drop out in ’96. He’d have been a much better nominee than Bob Dole….

I’ll close with a picture taken on that campaign plane. Not at night, but in the early morning, when the candidate was alert and ready to go…

Lamar Alexander, back when we were all young.

I’m counting on Lamar Alexander to do the right thing

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Lamar shirt

I ran across the shirts you see above at Belk the other day. The one in the middle is a dead ringer for the one Lamar Alexander wore on his famous walk across Tennessee when he ran successfully for governor in 1978 — the first statewide political campaign I ever covered.

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Lamar, as I’ve mentioned here many times. And now, the fate of the impeachment trial may lie in his hands, assuming he does the right thing. An excerpt from an NYT story from the last few days:

WASHINGTON — The ghost of Howard H. Baker Jr., the Republican senator from Tennessee who turned against Richard M. Nixon during Watergate, is hovering over Senator Lamar Alexander.

Mr. Alexander, a third-term Republican from Tennessee who is retiring at the end of this year, has said that no one outside his family has had more influence on him than Mr. Baker, the former Senate majority leader who is remembered for the penetrating question he posed as Nixon stared down impeachment: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Now Mr. Alexander may hold in his hands the fate of another Republican president who is facing removal from office. He is one of four Republican moderates who have expressed openness to bringing witnesses into President Trump’s impeachment trial. Of the four, he stands out because he is not running for re-election and arguably has nothing to lose….

The story goes on to say Lamar “does not appear ready for a Howard Baker moment.” They based this on the fact that he wanted to wait until the first phase of the trial was completed to decide. But I have two things to say about that:

  1. That seems a reasonable hesitation to me. He was keeping his options open until the point at which a decision would have to be made.
  2. That story was written before the revelation from Bolton’s upcoming book.

So I’m going to be optimistic, counting on Lamar to do what he generally did back when I covered him as governor: the right thing.

A shot I took of Lamar on the campaign trail in 1978.

A shot I took of Lamar on the campaign trail in 1978.