When Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., leaves office next week after nearly half a century in Washington, he will do so as the third in line for the presidency, the third longest-serving senator in U.S. history and as perhaps the most powerful person to have represented Vermont in Congress.

It’s an improbable end to a Senate career that, by all accounts, should never have begun.

In 1974, when Leahy first declared his Senate candidacy, he was a 33-year-old state’s attorney for Chittenden County who had never before run for statewide office. Vermonters had never elected someone so young to Congress and, perhaps more importantly, they had never sent a Democrat or a Catholic to Washington.

“Up until that point, every person who’d been elected to the U.S. Senate had come up a ladder,” recalled Chris Graff, the Associated Press’ longtime Montpelier bureau chief, who covered Leahy’s first statewide campaign. “That’s the way you did it in Vermont.”

Leahy’s Republican opponent in 1974, U.S. Rep. Richard Mallary, was straight out of central casting: He was a former dairy farmer who had spent years cutting his teeth in the state Legislature before he won Vermont’s lone seat in the U.S. House. From early on in the race, it was presumed to be his for the taking.

But by Graff’s account, Leahy made a splash.

Sen. Patrick Leahy and his wife, Marcelle, who has been by his side every moment of his nearly five decades in office, in 1982. Photo courtesy of Sen. Leahy’s office

He ran on an activist platform and was an unapologetic consumer advocate and environmentalist. He had a car phone before anyone else, Graff said, and knew when to call into the local television stations to get on air. His campaign produced a short documentary about him that would run over and over — a revolutionary move at the time. And campaigning by his side was his wife, Marcelle Leahy, whose fluency in French-Canadian helped to make inroads with oft-disenfranchised northern Vermonters.

On the campaign trail, Graff said, Leahy “would have his jacket slung over his shoulder, striding around.”

“It’s hard to imagine when you think of Pat Leahy today, but he sort of looked Kennedy-esque,” Graff recalled. “He was thin, had hair.”

Still, Leahy’s win was considered so unlikely that Graff, a young stringer at the time, was one of only a few journalists assigned to cover the Democrat’s election night party. By then, Leahy was 34.

Though many factors contributed to Leahy’s victory that year, one was surely President Richard Nixon’s tumultuous exit from the White House, which played out as Vermont’s Senate race was heating up.

The Watergate scandal had embittered many voters and, in Vermont, Leahy’s reformist rhetoric seemed to strike a chord. He won his seat along with a wave of other Democrats nationwide that year who were dubbed “Watergate babies.”

“You just saw deep dissatisfaction with politics, and Leahy was a fresh face. He really was seen as the future,” Graff said.

As Leahy prepares to leave office, the political tensions roiling the country now in many ways mirror those present when he first entered the Senate in 1975. It’s a connection Leahy has noted numerous times in his final year in office, with a sense of dismay.

“I came in thinking the Senate can be and often has been the conscience of the nation, and how thrilled I was to be part of that, knowing that there’s always been some problems in any democracy,” Leahy told VTDigger in an interview earlier this month. “But the deterioration of bipartisanship and the ability to do things for the long-term best interest of the country, that worries me.”

Now, nearly five decades after he ran as the young reformer, Leahy exits the Senate as the 82-year-old embodiment of Washington’s institutions. His ascension to power has been slow and steady, never derailed by a bid for the White House.

What resulted was a great amassing of power for Leahy — and for the small state of Vermont.

‘Patrick Leahy did that’

Leahy’s list of legislative achievements runs long and spans the globe. The man who outlasted the likes of Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy in the Senate has cast 17,374 votes in the upper chamber — more than all but one other member in Senate history.

Leahy’s accomplishments include crafting national organic foods standards, expanding the Violence Against Women Act, authoring the Innocence Protection Act, and landmark human rights work to ban the export of landmines and provide monetary support to civilians maimed by warfare abroad via the Leahy War Victims Fund. On the Senate Judiciary Committee, he played a key role in shaping the nation’s highest courts — including casting votes on the nominations of every U.S. Supreme Court justice currently on the bench.

Carolyn Dwyer, Leahy’s campaign manager and top political advisor for more than two decades, said his extensive resume posed an unusual problem on the campaign trail.

“Usually you want to try and distill it down to, ‘Here’s our three big accomplishments and the three things we really want to talk about,’” Dwyer told VTDigger. “It has always been our biggest challenge, because what do you pick?”

During a campaign trip to Vermont this fall, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who worked closely with Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told VTDigger that the real marvel to witness is the Vermonter’s behind-the-scenes efforts.

“What’s extraordinary is behind closed doors when we’re with a caucus,” Klobuchar said. “He just doesn’t sit there. He is constantly advocating for getting things done.”

Leahy took on “the causes that no one’s fighting for,” Klobuchar continued, like bringing home Alan Gross, an American government contractor imprisoned in Cuba for five years, and crusading against landmines.

“I don’t know much more of an example of a heart than taking on someone that everyone has forgotten in Cuba, or taking on landmines that are literally silent underneath the soil, ready to take someone’s leg off,” Klobuchar said. “But Patrick Leahy did that.”

The power of seniority

Unlike many of his Senate compatriots, Leahy never attempted to move up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

It’s easy to get distracted by high-profile political moves, Graff said, such as Gov. Howard Dean’s and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids and Sen. Jim Jeffords’ majority-changing departure from the Republican Party.

But it was by staying in the Senate that Leahy built his influence and reputation.

“In a way, Sen. Leahy has been in the shadow of Howard Dean or Jim Jeffords and Bernie Sanders,” Graff said. “But over time, I think that when we look at it over the 48 years, (Leahy’s) influence has been greater in the Senate, especially on the state of Vermont.”

As others ran for the White House, Graff said, Leahy was “chugging along, doing all of these things… until he reaches this pinnacle of power, which no one would have imagined that he would have reached.”

In his farewell speech last week on the Senate floor, Leahy harkened back to advice he received from his first majority leader, U.S. Sen. “Iron” Mike Mansfield, D-Mont.: “Senators should always keep their word.”

Leahy said Mansfield “understood the currency of the institution was actually trust, not ideology.”

“It was a simple formula, but it worked,” Leahy continued. “If you knew what commitments colleagues had made to each other, you could count the votes. If you could count the votes, you could set the agenda. If you knew the agenda, you could set the schedule. If you could set the schedule, you could pass legislation.”

But if trust is currency in the Senate, seniority is worth its weight in gold. And over the course of 48 years, Leahy accumulated a fortune.

Dwyer recalled a visit she took to Washington last year, when Leahy was still contemplating whether this would be the year he’d retire. Dwyer and a colleague were sitting on the balcony of Leahy’s hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol, overlooking the National Mall. It’s a grand view that Leahy often extols.

“We’re sitting out there and I looked and I thought, ‘Nobody walks away from this. Nobody walks away from this kind of power and privilege,’” Dwyer said. “You know, it’s so easy to see why people are more inclined to stay there until their last breathing moment than to walk away.”

Indeed, the only two senators in U.S. history whose tenures outlasted Leahy’s were Sens. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, who served for 51 years and 49 years, respectively. Both died while in office.

“(Leahy) made another decision and it’s still extraordinary to me, the kind of character that shows to say, ‘I’ve done what I can do and it’s time to give someone else their due,’ that Vermonters can make another choice,” Dwyer said.

Bringing home the bacon

Leahy reached the pinnacle of his influence when he became the top-ranking Democrat of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2017. There, he shaped Congress’s budgets, always making sure to get an adequate slice for Vermont.

Leahy managed to shower the state with billions of federal dollars by using congressionally directed spending — known colloquially as earmarks — and establishing a small-state minimum for such funds.

The most recent jackpot came thanks to Leahy’s influence on Congress’s pandemic relief packages. State lawmakers deemed the pandemic money a godsend from Vermont’s own St. Patrick, as the late Seven Days political columnist Peter Freyne dubbed Leahy — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address the state’s most vexing issues, such as its housing crisis and vital need for infrastructure repair.

Leahy also choreographed the return and reform of earmarks to Congress’s annual budget writing process, after a 10-year moratorium imposed by former House Speaker John Boehner, who alleged they were ripe for corruption and misuse.

In last March’s omnibus spending bill, Vermont saw a grand total of $207.2 million in earmarks. According to an analysis conducted by CQ Roll Call in September, sourced from data compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Vermont saw the second-highest per capita earmarked dollars from that bill: $321 per person.

For comparison, California, the most populous state in the country, received $774.1 million in earmarks, or $19.73 per resident.

In a September statement following CQ Roll Call’s report, Leahy hailed earmarks for their ability to “place this power in the hands of community leaders across the country so that federal resources can be directed to where they are most needed and to where they will do the most good.”

Travel throughout Vermont and you will find landmarks, buildings, hallways, streets and more named for Leahy, as a gesture of thanks for his prolific ability to bring home the bacon. Years ago, when Klobuchar and her family visited Leahy’s farm in Middlesex, her daughter jammed her finger in a car door and was taken to the hospital, where Klobuchar joked that the wing was probably named after Leahy.

On Thursday, Leahy cast his final vote in the Senate, helping to pass an omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2023. Negotiated quietly with the Appropriations Committee’s ranking member, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the $1.7 trillion budget is Leahy’s swan song.

In it, of course, is a final gift to Vermont: $212 million in earmarks, secured in large part by Leahy.

“It’s kind of an interesting position to be in,” Leahy told VTDigger shortly before the budget passed, “compared to the first day I was there, when one of the older senators said to me, ‘Boy, how old are you?’”

The question of equity

It’s ironic that a senator who was elected to office as a reformer leaves it as a zealous protector of its institutions.

“For a guy who went to Washington sort of railing against the seniority system, he’s probably the Senate’s greatest beneficiary of that seniority system,” Graff said. “And Vermont has benefited greatly from it.”

Leahy himself recognized the irony early on in his career. In a 1986 interview, he said he thought upon entering the Senate, “This seniority system is a terrible thing. It must be changed.”

“Now that I’ve studied it for 12 years, it looks like a great system,” Leahy said, smiling at the time. He’s regularly repeated the joke ever since — only tweaking the number of years he’s studied the system.

Leahy’s is a small, rural, disproportionately white state. Asked by VTDigger in December if he believes it’s fair for Vermont to benefit so grandly from his length of service, Leahy bristled. Other senators could pull the same off with hard work, he reasoned.

“Other states, if their senators want to work hard on this — a lot of them like to go on committees that get a lot of publicity, but don’t accomplish so much,” Leahy said. “There are work horses and there are show horses. Some of them are wonderful senators but they enjoy talking. I’ve made it very clear that I want to help out my state.”

The general public has, in recent years, begun to question the fairness of America’s government systems in the context of the 21st century. Along with the U.S. Supreme Court and electoral college system, the U.S. Senate has become a particular focus of progressives vying for reform. In a modern society in which populations are enormously concentrated in large cities, is it fair for a rural state like Vermont to have the same number of senators as California, with more than 60 times the population?

Other longtime senators have suffered from a souring of their home constituency. U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, was widely criticized as out-of-touch in 2019 when video footage showed her dismissing young climate activists’ pleas for a Green New Deal.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,” Feinstein told the teenagers. When one teen divulged that she was 16 years old, Feinstein retorted, “Well, you didn’t vote for me.”

Leahy hasn’t encountered that kind of pushback in Vermont. According to polling conducted by Morning Consult in 2019, he was the third-most-popular senator in the country at the time, with a 64% approval rating

Asked why she believes Leahy has stayed in voters’ good graces, Dwyer told VTDigger that “he works for Vermonters.”

“They at any time can choose to fire him from the job, and on the first couple occasions, they came close to doing that,” Dwyer said. “And I think that has instilled in him a sense of, always Vermont first, and keep close to the ground with Vermonters.”

Dwyer also said Leahy’s stances align with the state’s left-leaning electorate, making residents feel well-represented in Washington. Graff added that Vermont voters appreciate a “human” quality to their politicians, which he sees in Leahy. Before the pandemic, Graff said he would frequently see Leahy with his family at Montpelier’s weekend farmers market, buying produce and chatting like anyone else.

‘Don’t lose that sense of awe, kid.’

Despite his stature in the nation’s capital, Leahy has also maintained over the years the same sense of awe he had on his first day in office nearly five decades ago. In his farewell address, Leahy echoed his recently published memoir, pondering what he would now say to himself as a nervous, 34-year-old freshman first entering the Capitol.

“Don’t lose that sense of awe, kid,” Leahy said he’d instruct his younger self. “Hold on to it. Treasure it. Don’t even for a minute forget what a privilege and a responsibility it is to serve here. I never have forgotten.”

Graff joked that when Leahy was first elected, he seemed so starstruck that he would name-drop the political legends who became his contemporaries.

“I was just talking to Hubert Humphrey,” Graff imitated, and, “Oh, by the way, yesterday while I was sitting in the Oval Office…”

That habit hasn’t faded. While in Vermont earlier in December, Leahy casually mentioned a conversation he had with Biden that morning to discuss the appropriations package under negotiation at the time.

“He tended to be pretty much in awe of everybody and these superhuman people, bigger than life people, when he first went there,” Graff said. “And I think what’s most remarkable about his incredible journey is that now he ends his time as one of those people.”

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