Editor’s note: This commentary is by John McClaughry, the vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute.
Garrison Nelson’s lengthy tribute to James M. Jeffords is a useful contribution to Vermont political history. It is, however, very much the perspective of a liberal Democrat activist who over the years has rejoiced in the grief inflicted on Republicans by Jeffords. I would have left Jeffords’ final departure unremarked upon, but Garry’s liberal bias at least needs some tempering.
I first knew Jim Jeffords when he was a state senator in 1968. I was on the scene, if not a major player, in Republican politics from that year through 1992. That experience left me with quite a different picture of Jeffords. I frequently disagreed with his positions on national issues, but that was not the reason I came to have such a low opinion of the man. It was his duplicitous behavior as a “Republican” politician that turned my stomach.
With that disclosure, let me offer a few selected insights that Garry might not have observed, from his perch toward the left end of the political spectrum.
“The lake [Champlain] was being polluted by discharges from IPC’s plant in Ticonderoga, New York, and Jim wanted it stopped. It was a long, expensive and arduous battle, but Jim and his small and determined legal team succeeded.”
As I recall it, not exactly. Everyone agreed that IPC must stop polluting the lake, and it did. What Jeffords demanded was that a hundred years of sludge lying inert on the lake bottom be dredged up and hauled away in trucks (to where?) to punish IPC for something that should have been, but wasn’t, illegal for the previous hundred years. This would have been so costly, so impractical, and so destructive of the lake’s ecology that even the EPA rejected it, and that sediment remains there peacefully today.
What Republicans disliked about this episode was Jeffords’ determination to punish IPC by requiring a ridiculous “solution,” and his politically motivated “Don’t Do It In The Lake” bumper strips.
“[In 1972 the GOP settled on a candidate [for Governor]. It would be Luther (Fred) Hackett, a very successful insurance executive from Burlington. Fred Hackett, like Davis had never run for public office before.”
Garry forgets that Hackett had served as a leader in the House and chaired the Appropriations Committee from 1969-70. (He sat next to me in the House chamber.) He won the primary 52-48 over Jeffords. The primary was nasty not due to the two candidates, but to their mud-wrestling spokesmen, John Alden (for Jeffords) and Marshall Witten (for Hackett), who detested each other. Jeffords refused to endorse Hackett until one feeble comment shortly before the November election, and by that time the Jeffords partisans had organized the wholesale defection from Hackett that Garry describes, and for which mainstream Republicans never forgave Jeffords.
In my view the IPC lawsuit and especially his 1972 primary defeat caused Jeffords to despise the “regular Republicans” in Vermont and in Washington. I authored a piece in the Burlington Free Press in 1988 urging that Senate candidate Jeffords switch parties and run as a Democrat. I argued that he would most likely still win, and he would be relieved of the need to begin each day trying to find some way to cripple his own party.
Garry describes Fred Hackett as “estimable,” and I thoroughly agree. He was one of the most honest, capable, respected and public spirited men to serve Vermont in the past 60 years. It was a pity that he didn’t win the governorship in 1972, and he never sought elective office again. Before finally retiring from public life, he ably chaired the board of UVM during the infamous student insurrection in the 1990s.
“When Reagan’s [1980] nomination was secure … there was debate among the Republicans whether or not Jim would be included on the convention delegation in Detroit. Jim was included but left before Reagan’s acceptance speech. It was yet another of Jim’s declarations of independence.”
The Reagan delegates (I was vice chair) wanted absolutely no part of the vocally anti-Reagan Jeffords as a Vermont delegate to the 1980 Republican convention. In fact, we couldn’t fathom why Jeffords would even want to be a delegate to a convention overwhelmingly populated by people he so despised.
But Reagan’s national chairman, Paul Laxalt, called our chairman, Lawrence Wright, and explained that if a close election with a third party candidate (John Anderson, who Jeffords supported against Reagan) resulted in no electoral college majority, the contest would be settled in the House. And in the House, each state has one vote – Jeffords’ one vote could cancel California or Texas. I don’t know if Jeffords ever agreed with Laxalt to provide that one vote if it came down to that, but the Reagan committee agreed to push out a loyal Reagan delegate to make room for Jeffords.
Jeffords arrived in Detroit on opening day and immediately joined a much-televised march of the ERA women attempting to embarrass Reagan, who had declined to endorse the ERA. Then he vanished from the scene for three days, during which it was said that he was fishing with his son in northern Michigan.
In my view the IPC lawsuit and especially his 1972 primary defeat caused Jeffords to despise the “regular Republicans” in Vermont and in Washington.
On the evening of the climactic Reagan nomination, Jeffords (briefly) reappeared. He declared that he would vote for George Bush rather than Reagan, even though Bush was by then completely out of the running (and soon to be Reagan’s VP). One vivid memory I have, from the convention floor, was watching Dick Snelling and House Republican leader Bob Michel shouting in each of Jeffords’ ears to demand that he go along with the other 18 Vermont delegates for Reagan (including even Snelling, who could not bring himself to utter the “R-Word” when asked who he was supporting for president). Had Jeffords not caved in, at the end of the roll call the Vermont delegation would have presented the embarrassing spectacle of 19 delegates being polled by name, just so Jim Jeffords could alone defiantly shout “Bush” to a national TV audience.
“With all but one of the 190+ Republicans joined by the 50+ Boll Weevils [Democrats], Reagan got his [1981] tax cut passed. The lone Republican dissenter was Jim Jeffords, who believed that cutting taxes — a favorite theme of ‘supply-siders’ – would lead to greater deficits.”
In the fall of 1980 Jeffords along with every other Republican House candidate who won, pledged to support Reagan’s supply side tax rate cuts if Reagan were elected. Of those, only one reneged – James M. Jeffords. Jeffords explained that yes, he favored supply side tax rate cuts, but he had voted Nay because of the enormous tax breaks the bill gave away to the petroleum industry. In fact, of the projected $726 billion in tax reductions, only about $12 billion was specifically targeted on petroleum. This was to roll back a Carter-era excess profits levy on mom-and-pop leaseholders in the Southwest that many — even most — Democrats realized had been a mistake. After this disingenuous explanation for his defection, it’s little wonder that the detested (by Jeffords) House Republicans “marginalized” Jeffords’ as not only untrustworthy but dishonest.
“[In the 1999 Senate impeachment trial] five Republicans refused to convict Clinton and Jim was one of them.”
What Garry neglects to mention here was that Jeffords, sitting as a juror in a constitutional trial, made a confused late-night visit to the defendant’s home – the White House – to negotiate something with the defendant while the trial was proceeding. Apparently he was not allowed to speak to Clinton, but the House prosecution counsel, speaking in Vermont later, said that had a juror ever done such a thing in an ordinary criminal trial, he would have gone to jail. Apparently Jeffords didn’t learn that at Harvard Law School.
Then there was Jeffords’ famous defection that gave control of the Senate to the Democrats in 2001. Bear in mind that Jeffords had raised a large war chest in his 2000 re-election campaign from those who counted on his vote to retain Republican control of the Senate. Six months later, when Jeffords handed control to the Democrats, he was asked whether he intended to return the contributions of those he had betrayed. Jeffords reluctantly agreed to refund money contributed by Vermont Republicans – but stiffed the many others from around the country.
The stated reason for Jeffords’ defection was the refusal of the Bush-Cheney administration to accede to Jeffords’ demands for an enormous increase in special education funding. (Admittedly, the Cheney people handled this very poorly.) Jeffords certainly championed special education throughout his career, but his colleagues saw the real reason for the switch was Jeffords’ need to find another committee to chair, since his term as chairman of the Environment and Public Works committee had ended. This the Democrats agreed to, as Garry reports, but they never gave him the huge special ed increase that was his stated rationale for the putting them in control.
“Coupled with the early onset of the mind-robbing horror of Alzheimer’s disease, Jim knew that it was time to go.”
Yes, but let it be noted that Jeffords aggressively raised campaign contributions from 2001 to 2006, by trading on his overturning Republican control of the Senate and his opposition to the Bush-Cheney conservative agenda. By 2004 it was apparent to outside observers that Jeffords would be in no condition to seek re-election in 2006, but he continued to raise money from grateful liberals — $1.5 million sticks in my mind – even after he must have known that he couldn’t run. Some would call that highly unethical. (What became of the money I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that he never returned it to the contributors.)
I can recall many other instances over those years that provided important insights to the character of James Jeffords – none that I can recall on the plus side. I can respect an honest politician who has views that differ from my own – Peter Welch comes to mind. For me, though, the real test of a man or woman in public office is character – honesty, forthrightness, trustworthiness, courage and a conscious effort to avoid duplicity, insincerity, and self-serving falsehoods. In my view, over more than three decades, Jim Jeffords did not score very high on that scale. Jim’s liberal enthusiasts like Garry Nelson and Patrick Leahy may have ranked him on a different scale.
Despite what I view as his shortcomings, Jim Jeffords loved Vermont. He was not evil, venal or mean-spirited, and he undoubtedly used his office to do some good things for Vermont. I join in Garry’s final wish for him: rest in peace.
