Chapter Three

At Home in the House

In 1982, about two months before the filing deadline for John’s congressional seat, he called me. After I had settled into my county supervisor role, I rarely spoke with my great mentor because we were both so active in our jobs. “Babs,” he said, “are you sitting down?”

“What is it?” I said. “Are you okay?”

“No, but I will be. I’m calling you from a rehab facility in Arizona, and I am determined to save my life and get off my addiction to drugs and alcohol.”

Before I could catch my breath and get out a word, John calmly added, “I want you to run for my seat.”

My mind froze. I had already decided to leave elected life at the end of my two-term stint as a county supervisor two years later. I planned to either go back to journalism or continue a new career I had started as a radio talk show host at KGO radio in San Francisco. I could only work in the middle of the night, so they gave me that terrible slot during the wee hours of the morning. But I was convinced I could move up.

This call from John was so unexpected, so out of the blue, that, uncharacteristically, I could find no other words than, “Are you sure, John?”

“As sure as I’ve ever been about anything.”

And then he said again with total conviction, “I want to save my life.”

“I’ll talk to Stew and the kids. We have such a short time frame to decide.”

As soon as I hung up the phone, I ran downstairs to tell Stew. He was as stunned as I. “We’ll discuss it with Doug and Nicole tonight.” They were teenagers then.

Five minutes later, John’s brother, the all-powerful Congressman Phil Burton, called. He and I hardly knew each other. When John hired me to run his Marin campaign for Congress, Phil was opposed. He thought I was too much of a novice. John told me he stood up to Phil and said this was his campaign and I was in.

Since John had succeeded and gave me a good deal of credit, I guess Phil was won over. That was too much to hope for, though, as he said, “I’m calling you to ask you to run for John’s seat in Congress. But you are not my first choice. Art Agnos [an assemblyman and then later mayor of San Francisco] is, but he turned me down.”

So Phil didn’t exactly give me a ringing endorsement, but nevertheless it was an endorsement. He also said he would raise most of my campaign funds, but that didn’t happen because unfortunately for me, Phil found himself in a tough race against State Senator Milton Marks. The rap on Milton was that he’d “show up for the opening of an envelope” and I guess he did, because Phil had a hard race, but he won it. It also took a huge toll on him.

When Stew and I organized our family meeting later that night, everyone said, “Go for it.” We all realized openings like this come rarely. We were in.

The district six election that year would be won by whoever was the Democratic candidate, so my first and only serious hurdle was winning the primary against a wonderful woman named Louise Renne. We were both popular county supervisors, she from San Francisco, me from Marin, but had very different approaches to the battles that lay ahead in Washington, including a recession that caused increasing unemployment and the nuclear arms buildup that was creating such high anxiety in our district.

Louise was always very gentle. We had some very pleasant debates.

“When I get to Washington, I’m going to knock their socks off,” she told the audience in one of our debates.

I thought this was a little soft. So our campaign decided to riff off that difference in our styles and my slogan became: “Barbara Boxer gives a damn. Ronald Reagan doesn’t.”

Looking back, I can’t believe we actually had that slogan on posters all over the district. But I was determined to let the voters know that I wasn’t going to Washington to be soft or gentle. The issues were too profound and the people hurting too much. So I basically ran against Ronald Reagan instead of Louise, whom I really liked. I won that primary handily.

Ronald Reagan had started out as a liberal pro-union movie actor and spokesperson for General Electric. But he changed. Radically. As a political candidate he veered to the right and shortly after being elected, he became a hero to the conservative movement by firing more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981, decertifying their union and imposing a ban on rehiring any of the strikers for life. Wow! Talk about taking no prisoners. It made me furious because he was so tough on working people who actually held the life and death of millions of people in their hands. (Five years later, some air traffic controllers were allowed to reapply.)

So it was actually President Ronald Reagan who put the wind at my back—not that he wanted to, but he did. I won the primary.

But the general election race in November was tough. My opponent, Dennis McQuaid, was a smart lawyer, very articulate, and he found an issue.

District six had been gerrymandered by Phil Burton to benefit his brother, John. Phil had made the district very blue-collar and included in it the city of Vallejo, which proudly hosted Mare Island Naval Shipyard. That was a perfect demographic for John, but for me, it was problematic, to put it mildly. The construction workers and machinists were a bit taken aback by a total environmentalist women’s rights advocate and a peacenik to boot. I had to get over there and press the flesh—hard and often.

John did his best to help when he was well enough, as did Congressmen Vic Fazio and George Miller. I hired a great local Democrat named Wyman Riley who knew Vallejo inside and out.

While my ace team in Marin kept things going there, the rest of my team stepped up the pace in San Francisco, where I knocked on house doors, stood at factory gates, and went everywhere accompanied by my gay and straight supporters. We went into bars and meetings where they vouched for me.

By the time of the November general election in 1982, the deep recession had caused Reagan’s popularity to plummet in my district. His image had become someone who didn’t care about the majority of the people, but rather someone who believed in a notoriously disproven conservative theory of “trickle-down economics” that provided big tax cuts for the rich that would theoretically benefit everyone. The tax cuts didn’t benefit anyone but the rich, of course. Nothing was trickling down, except economic hardship for the middle and working class citizens. It didn’t work then and it still doesn’t work.

But it worked for me politically. I told the voters I was going to Washington for them, not for the wealthy few. I told them that I would fight for them. Hard. I worked night and day, meeting the voters wherever they were—all in my high heels. My ad showing me in a boxing ring worked very well in the blue-collar areas I needed to convince.

On election night I won and was on my way to the House of Representatives. My head was spinning. As a mom, a local elected official, and then as a candidate for Congress, I railed against the injustice of an unfair tax system, and an economy in trouble, and proclaimed the absolute imperative of a nuclear freeze. Now, thanks to the voters, I would actually have a forum to do something about all of it.

Only about eleven thousand people have served in the House of Representatives since it was organized in 1789. Now I was one of them, the fortunate daughter of an immigrant mom.

The term of a House member is two years, and every two years the Speaker of the House swears in all 435 members for that Congress. I was elected to the 98th Congress and took the oath in 1983. After the mass swearing in, those who wanted a photo with their families and the speaker got a number and were ushered into a waiting room off the speaker’s lobby, next to the House floor. When your number was called you had to get in there, pronto.

I was one of those new members who definitely wanted a photo with the speaker and my family. I was so excited. This was going to be one of the most memorable photos of my life, celebrating my first campaign for national office that touched on every issue I carried in my heart.

I had Stew, Doug, Nicole, and my mother with me. Sophie had moved out of New York in the late seventies to live near us after we lost Dad. I was waiting breathlessly for our number to be called when Stewart said he had to run to the men’s room and would be right back.

Our number was called.

I tried to stall for a moment, but was told that no delay would be tolerated, there was a long line, it was now or never. So we all ran up to pose with Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and Stewart missed the official photo.

Somehow the press got word of this comedy of errors. I don’t know why it was so significant to them. Must have been an otherwise slow news day. But that evening the papers wrote that new Congresswoman Barbara Boxer’s family photo was “the greatest leak since Watergate.” Thank God my husband has a sense of humor. And the wonderful Tip did another photo with Stew in it at the end of his long photo session later that day.

When I was sworn into the House of Representatives, I was forty-two years old. Tip was seventy, one year younger than my mother. I think my mother was more excited about meeting Tip O’Neill as he swore me in than she was about me becoming a member of the House. She never dreamed she would ever meet this hero of hers.

I found out later that my mom was quite representative of Democratic women of her age. When Tip came to the San Francisco Bay Area to do an event for me, it was as if Frank Sinatra or FDR showed up. It was a giant female senior citizen swoon.

Not that it was limited to senior citizens. I loved Tip O’Neill. Everyone did. I was fortunate to serve under him for the last four years of his tenure. I don’t think I have ever met a warmer person than Tip, who made it a point to know even the lowliest freshman in the House.

One time, early in my first term, Stewart and I were going to Cape Cod for a vacation weekend.

I happened to mention it to Tip as we were passing in the hall. It turned out that, like most Bostonians, Tip spent some time there.

“Great! Millie and I will take you out to dinner. We’ll pick you up.”

I figured that was just something nice to say, but to my surprise Tip’s office called me with a date for dinner in Chatham while we’d be there. Really? Wow!

On the appointed day, Tip pulled up in front of the hotel bigger than life as he exited this big fancy American car, his white, full head of hair a bit windblown. His wife, Millie, was sitting in the front passenger seat. No driver for Mr. Speaker? Okay! We hopped in the back and off we went with Tip O’Neill, second in line to the presidency, as our man at the wheel.

What a ride we had. As we made our way toward the restaurant, it seemed like everyone on the street called out to him. Tip was well known for saying “all politics is local” and we saw it in action. He knew everyone and everyone knew him.

“Tip… over here!”

“Tip… remember my family?”

“How are ya? How are the kids?”

I swear Millie must have told “Thomas” ten times to pay attention to the road as he swerved to make appropriate eye contact. I could tell from that drive how Millie kept his feet on the ground if not his hands on the wheel. That’s why families are so important to an elected person. We got such a kick out of seeing them together in that car, but by the time we got to the restaurant our hands were red from squeezing so hard. We were very happy that we lived to tell the tale.

The author William Novak joined us for dinner. He was helping Tip write his memoirs. It was a memorable time.

When I got to the House we had a huge freshman class. Reagan was president; the economy was terrible. Tip had a large Democratic majority in the House, but he knew how many votes he could lose on important bills and still deliver legislation.

Tip came over to me a couple of times to say something like: “Do what you have to do on this. We have enough votes.”

That kind of thing made Tip beloved. He respected each of us. He made it easy. He knew that from time to time our constituents’ interests prevented us from voting with him and in those cases he never pressured us. That earned him loyalty, deep loyalty.

On one occasion, for example, there was a big bill funding the military. I felt there were already far too many destabilizing nuclear weapons and tons of other military spending waste. When I told Tip that I would vote no, he was concerned, not so much for the final vote count but for my local California politics.

“Are you sure you should do that? You have a lot of defense contractors and military bases in California.”

“Ending the arms race was a central part of my platform,” I explained to him. “It’s what I believe, so I hope you don’t need my vote for this one.”

“Okay. Of course,” he said. “Do what you need to do to stay true to your promises… and yourself.”

That was a very important bill for Tip to get through the House, but he knew exactly why I couldn’t be with him.

As the Democratic majority leader, Republicans tried to demonize him in an election in the eighties. They put out ads in which Tip looked unhealthy, bloated, and angry. We all have photos like that. They tried to turn his amazing ability to govern for the people against him. Ronald Reagan was known to say we don’t have to look for the problem because “government is the problem,” so they tried to make Tip the symbol of big spending and pork barrel politics—in short a symbol of “the problem”—but it didn’t work.

Tip was re-elected by his usual large majority.

I met President Ronald Reagan at a White House reception for new members of Congress shortly after my swearing in. At that time presidents held a formal dinner at the White House for the freshman members of the House. I realized immediately how personable and charismatic he was, with Nancy never leaving his side. But with the nation’s economic problems, I felt a bit uncomfortable being in that opulent setting all gussied up in my best gown. In fact I felt like a hypocrite and began talking to the waiters, telling them quietly that I was going to work for them, to fight hard for an economy that worked for working people.

They looked at me in a way that said, “Sure, lady, that’s great, but don’t talk about it now, please.” It was naïve of me to bring it up, I realized in hindsight, which is always, as they say, twenty-twenty.

During my terms in the House of Representatives I fought Reagan’s policies at every level. I supported a nuclear freeze, going to the Nevada test site to protest along with colleagues like Tom Downey and Leon Panetta, and actor Martin Sheen. I worked to save the National Endowment for the Arts and environmental protection. I tried to get the equal rights amendment through the House that first year of my term, but we fell six votes short, and it’s never been voted on since. Reagan’s view was that it wasn’t necessary, and I’m convinced that’s why we failed.

Sometimes we beat him. Sometimes we didn’t.

Reagan was the first president I served with, and because of our deep differences, including his never uttering the word “AIDS” for years, I learned more about the art of tough. I had to.

I wrote a song about Ronald Reagan and the arms buildup for my singing group, the Red, White and Blues. We sang it to the tune of “Ballin’ the Jack” for our colleagues at a retreat. I would love to think it made a difference, but can’t really claim it had anything to do with Reagan eventually reaching out years later to Mikhail Gorbachev and easing the tensions that had so impacted the people affected by the nuclear arms race. Good for him on that. But in the early Reagan years? We were on the brink.

The deep anxiety that surrounded all of us at that time was crystallized by sixteen-year-old Ursell Austin in front of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, chaired by Congressman George Miller.

Sitting in front of a committee of lawmakers, she said, “I think about the bomb every day now. It makes me sad and depressed to think about a bomb ever being dropped. I hope I’m with my family. I don’t want to die alone. I think about it most on sunny days, when I’m having a good time. I think—it could happen right now… I also used to think about it when I was at a school that was built on two levels—an upper level and an underground level. When I was in the classrooms underground, I’d think about the building crashing down on me and suffocating me if the bomb dropped. I’d think about all the air being sucked out of me and I burned up under the rubble… I want to live longer, but at least I’ve lived this long. I feel the worse for little children. It’s not their fault that governments cannot find a way to solve their problems… I think the arms race has gone too far. I hope you will open your eyes and your minds and stop the arms race before it is too late for us.”

All the Republicans could say after that amazing testimony was that Miller was misusing the committee. It was in fact a perfect use of the committee—trying to understand the impact of the nuclear arms buildup on our children.

Peace activist Helen Caldecott said there was “missile envy” between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that was a great way to put it.

At the same time I was opposing Reagan on the nuclear arms buildup and other issues, there were a few things we actually agreed on. Ronald Reagan spoke out often about not playing games with the debt ceiling. He helped save Social Security. He took executive action on immigration. What I came to respect about President Reagan was that he fought for what he believed in, but whether he won or lost, he moved on.

During my first year in the House, I learned that you can’t predict which issues will become yours. You can think as I did, for example, that I’d become the voice of children’s rights, or women’s rights, or workers’ rights, and when you get into the arena, those issues are “taken.” So some freshmen in Congress become frustrated, while others find a niche nobody has occupied, or they work with the leaders on overall strategy.

I took the “niche” approach. I told my staff to reach out to the respected nonprofit, community-minded organizations that were working on issues I cared about. Thanks to my then chief of staff Sam Chapman, who stayed with me for more than twenty years, that outreach paid off. Sam had also been a county supervisor in Napa County. He knew that everything we did in D.C. had to be communicated to the people in our district. He was a great writer and he had another quality I needed. His temperament was the opposite of mine. Mine was hot, his was cool. He was cautious, caring, careful, and a wonderful example for our staff.

Groups started to come to us with their issues. On the ERA, women’s organizations asked if I could gather a large number of co-sponsors before the issue came to a vote. I loved that assignment and took it happily. Co-sponsors are those members of the House or Senate who actually put their names on a piece of legislation, giving that legislation a boost before it gets to the floor for an actual vote.

As I went around the overwhelmingly male House of Representatives gathering these signatures, I got to know many of my colleagues and, believe me, personal relationships matter tremendously. If a colleague couldn’t go so far as to put his name on the legislation, I didn’t push, but asked him if he would consider voting for us when the time came. It was very fortunate that I was able to get acquainted and form friendships from the get-go, because I had many important moments ahead when I would need support for my very own bills.

That became part two of my approach to legislating in the House: get the support of colleagues, because there is no scenario in which you can succeed without a coalition.

I had run on a platform that pledged to reduce the size and priorities of the military budget. There were reports of cost overruns on missiles, planes, and other big-ticket items, but I had none of the details, and it would be daunting to take this to the people without them. How could we get some legislation that could be understood and meaningful to regular people who had nothing to do with intimidating things like rockets, bombers, and nuclear submarines?

Then our relationship with smart “outside” groups paid off.

A woman named Dina Rasor came to us in mid 1983 from an organization called the Project on Military Procurement. She was working on waste in the Pentagon budget and told Sam that her organization was going to expose their “Catalog of Spare Parts.” Her theory, and I totally agreed with it, was that if we could show the American people the absolute rip-offs going on with purchases they could understand, they would connect the dots and realize how bloated that defense budget was.

She told Sam about the $640 toilet seat, the $7,600 coffeepot, the $436 hammers, and other egregious examples of this scam. She explained that the problem existed because the Pentagon didn’t require that its spare parts requirements be put out for competitive bids to small business. Large defense contractors were making these parts in house and charging a fortune. It took Dina’s organization to smoke this out by examining the fine print in contract after contract.

“How about some good old American competition?” I said to Dina and Sam when they laid this out for me.

“Yes, that should be the plan,” Dina agreed.

So we worked with Dina, and Donna Martin on her staff, and with Sam and Bernie Ward on our staff, and wrote the provision of a bill I called the Small Business and Federal Procurement Competition Enhancement Act. It was a mouthful, but I wanted to make the point that we were offering a pro–small business and a pro-competition bill. The actual bill language was written by the legislative counsel, as is the case in almost all bills, because no matter how good a bill may be, if it is incorrectly written, there can be unintended consequences.

We introduced our bill on October 25, 1983. I still have the photos of me holding up a drawing of the coffeepot. And for months, I wore an ordinary bracket on a chain around my neck that should have cost a few dollars rather than the hundreds of dollars the Pentagon was paying on a regular basis. It was a great way to bring attention to the subject.

Our bill was referred to the House Small Business Committee where the chairman, a wonderful man named Berkley Bedell from Iowa, passed it out of the committee and allowed me to keep my name on it. Just so you understand how generous he was… that hardly ever happens. Most chairmen take the bill and put their own name on it or attach it to a larger bill they authored. But my named stayed on the bill, which had to be approved by the full House and then by the Senate. Eventually the bill became Public Law Number 98–577. Thank you, Berkley Bedell, for your generosity of spirit.

Another friend of my bill was Senator Chuck Grassley, who held a hearing on the general subject of procurement reform and invited me to speak. Members of the House do testify from time to time before a Senate committee and I considered it a great honor. The day after I testified, my picture appeared above the fold of the Washington Post holding a photo of the $7,600 coffeepot. The caption was a quote from me:

“It [the coffeepot] might as well be made of gold.”

Another funny thing happened while I was fighting hard to pass this military procurement reform. I went home to Marin County to talk about my bill at a community meeting and point out the absurdity of the spare parts prices, when suddenly a woman in the back jumped up.

“A six-hundred-dollar toilet seat?… Really?” she exclaimed. “Where can I get one of those?”

That was in the rich part of my district.

On October 30, 1984, one month after I testified before Senator Grassley’s committee, the bill was passed by the Senate and became law. There was a hiccup right before my bill passed the Senate, though. Senator Dan Quayle had doubts about the bill, and that could have held things up, but fortunately my friend Congressman Marty Russo of Illinois swung into action, and addressed Quayle’s questions. That’s how I learned that just one senator can hold up a bill and even kill it. Later, I used that power as a senator myself from time to time.

Marty and our dear friend George Miller, the congressman from Martinez, California, were so important helping me out in the early days of my career. They were part of a “Tuesday night dinner” crowd. At the time, not one woman was part of this Tuesday group. George and Marty as well as Tom Downey decided it was time to change things, so I was invited. I guess I passed the initiation, because I was invited back and pretty soon was joined by Nancy Pelosi and Anna Eshoo. The glass ceiling—or at least the restaurant ceiling—was broken.

At these dinners, usually held in a Chinese restaurant, colleagues would talk about their families, their latest political challenges, and their priorities. A highlight of every dinner was telling stories from earlier times involving exciting victories or agonizing defeats.

A recurring theme centered around the importance of your word. When you give it, you must keep it. But you had to listen very carefully. If you were trying to get on a committee or handling a committee assignment, you had to ask each colleague for his or her vote. If they said something like “You are the greatest and I wish you nothing but success,” you couldn’t put them down as a yes. Nope. You had to listen for the words “yes, you have my vote.” Everything else was fluff.

I learned that the hard way. I once asked a colleague if he would vote to put me on the Appropriations Committee.

“Barbara, we really need a woman and you would be great,” he said.

I was flying high. But when I told Congressman Phil Burton, who was trying to help me get on that committee, he frowned.

“He’s a no, Barbara.”

I didn’t understand, but Phil was right. I missed getting on Appropriations by one vote. Lesson learned.

Clearly it was important to build friendship and trust, and breaking bread with colleagues is a great way to do it. Dan Rostenkowski, the all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which made all tax policy, was always at the Tuesday night dinner. We had northerners, southerners, east coasters, and west coasters. We were usually all Democrats but very diverse in our views, and every so often a brave Republican would wander in to join us. I look back fondly on the kind of camaraderie we had in those days, since it’s fallen by the wayside in the Congress today.

After Marty retired, and other members left office voluntarily or involuntarily, I kept the group together, even after I got to the Senate in 1993. Not once a week but every few months, particularly when Stewart would come to D.C., I would book that local Chinese restaurant close to the Capitol.

I was figuring it out, learning all the time from both successes and mistakes. With more and more colleagues helping and advising me, and with the assistance of respected outside sources and a good publicity plan, my legislative strategy was taking shape. Add a great staff and I was able to become an active and involved member of the House, and actually get something done.

One dimension of my legislative strategy became to add whenever possible a dedicated Republican to the mix. I learned that when I teamed up with Chuck Grassley on our spare parts bill. He and I teamed up again on the Military Whistleblower Protection Act, which we introduced in 1985 to guarantee that military personnel who blew the whistle on waste and fraud weren’t fired. Senator Grassley helped me get it through the House, but it didn’t make it into law until 1988. Sometimes you need to be patient. Correction: you always need to be patient.

Another extremely important bill I was proud to carry while in the House was the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It was brought to me by the dynamic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden. I was so excited that Joe had asked me to carry the House bill. Whenever there was a major idea like this, a good legislator wants a bill in the Senate and in the House. It builds more momentum and it usually guarantees hearings will be held in both bodies. The bills are usually identical.

Joe and I had developed a good relationship over the years. I had been impressed with him in 1986 when he criticized then Secretary of State George Schultz for the Reagan administration’s support of South Africa, which was still in the depth of its system of apartheid. So when Joe decided to run in the Democratic presidential primary, I participated in his campaign.

He thought I would be the right person to organize women supporters, so he sent his talented sister, Valerie Biden, to see me. We bonded immediately and brainstormed about how I would start to work in Iowa. Joe had made a very energetic and compelling speech in May of 1987, when he talked about “reclaiming the idea of America as a community” and the need to “restore America’s soul.” He was truly on his way and I was happy to help.

My plane trip into Iowa never got off the ground due to terrible storms. I was frustrated by the delay but far more distressed when Joe was accused in the media of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labor Party. Phrase for phrase.

Joe called a meeting with all of his congressional supporters. Joe wanted our views. Most of us felt the issue was hurting him far too deeply to continue, but we thought he should get out on the campaign trail to see if the public and the media would overlook his gaffe. I’m quoted in the Washington Post as saying: “If people get to know Joe and hear his ideas about the country, he has a chance, but if everywhere he goes, the only thing he can talk about is this [the charges of plagiarism], he won’t have the chance.”

Unfortunately for Joe, his campaign never recovered from the charges, which continued to dominate his every appearance. He dropped out of the race on September 23, 1987. He said his candidacy had been destroyed by “the exaggerated shadow” of his mistakes.

In February 1988, he had his first brain aneurysm, which kept him away from the Senate for months. I wasn’t the only one who wondered if his aneurysm might have been fatal if he’d continued to campaign. Who knows.

In any case, Joe was very kind and grateful to supporters like me in the years after his recovery and return to the Senate. I was really happy that he’d asked me to carry the Violence Against Women Act. As Joe said at the time we needed to put the spotlight on this “quiet” epidemic. He was so right. Even the name “domestic” violence was a misnomer, he said. It reminded him of women being thought of as household pets. I remember we both pointed out that at that time there were more shelters for animals than for battered women. That is still true today.

Joe and I made a great team on this. We built the case for it early on, as I was able to get some small provisions through as part of the Higher Education Act of 1992 that dealt with rape prevention on college campuses, an issue that continues to plague us to this day.

Carrying Joe’s bill launched me on the path of being a legislative leader when it came to protecting women. I will always treasure the words he said in the Senate on June 21, 1994, after I’d been elected to the Senate myself and, after five years, the VAWA was finally on the brink of passage:

“This bill… did not move until my friend from California came to the U.S. Senate. When the distinguished senator from California came and made the case with the passion and urgency that she does, things began to move.”

I learned there and then how important it is to thank colleagues, to share credit, to be gracious in victory. And of course I learned once again how long it sometimes takes to get things done. If you want instant gratification, this isn’t the job for you.

On September of that year the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

An interesting postscript: In 2000 the Supreme Court overturned one section of VAWA which gave women the chance at a federal cause of action if the crime against them could be proven to be a crime of hate due to their gender. It was a five-to-four vote. In the same year, a bill I authored called The Driver Privacy Protection Act that Joe helped me enact during the VAWA debate was upheld unanimously. That law protected all of us from having the personal information we use to obtain our driver’s licenses sold to the public. My bill gained traction when it was reported that a stalker followed a young California actress in her car, wrote down her license number, and then bought information including her address from the state motor vehicle bureau. He tracked her down and murdered her. I was sick at heart. (I thank my then administrative assistant Drew Littman and my chief of staff Laura Schiller for their extraordinary work on this bill that was passed in my freshman year as a senator.)

I highlight this information about the Supreme Court to point out how getting your bill across the finish line may not be the end of the story. The Supreme Court may decide in response to a case that your law is unconstitutional. In the case of keeping driver’s license information from going on sale, we won. Joe also played a major role in saving dolphins from extermination, and for that I give most of the credit to his then eight-year-old daughter, Ashley. I had a bill in the House to protect the dolphins, which were dying by the thousands due to something called “purse seining on dolphin.” This is a lethal method in which tuna fishermen surround the dolphins because tuna swim right beneath them. Then they throw a huge net around tuna and dolphins and, sadly, dolphins become an “incidental catch.”

There was a boycott of tuna sandwiches and schoolchildren like Ashley demanded action. She was determined that her dad help me pass this bill.

This issue was one I believed in. Dolphins are smart, beautiful creatures that need protection. Outside groups like Earth Island Institute really deserve credit for the bill becoming law. Activist Sam LaBudde’s video showed the hapless dolphins dying in the chase or in the nets. And there I was, in the Congress of the United States, realizing that a simple label on a can of tuna fish would let consumers know if the tuna in the can they were purchasing had been caught in a way that brought harm to dolphins.

We had many supporters in the House. What member could turn away from all those schoolchildren who were leading the tuna sandwich boycott? We had a great legislator in the Senate. Joe Biden wanted more than anything to show his daughter that her father could come through.

Feeling the pressure, in 1990 large tuna canners said they would voluntarily place the label on their cans, and the fight for the legislation became easier. It passed in 1992, and it’s estimated that because of our bill tens of thousands of dolphins have been saved every year.

Very few freshman members of the House of Representatives are well known nationally when they first arrive in Washington. I certainly wasn’t. A real exception to this, however, was Congressman John Lewis, who was elected in 1987.

John Lewis had been one of the key leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement, known for his incredible courage and his deep belief in reconciliation in the face of the ugliest racism. Lewis organized the original nonviolent sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville. He was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, and coordinated the famous Mississippi Freedom Summer. Just before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s incredible “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. in August 1963, John gave a memorable address; my favorite line was: “By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy.”

By the time Lewis was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had been arrested more than twenty times. On March 7, 1965—known as “Bloody Sunday”—Lewis and other activists marched with six hundred others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. There, he was beaten and his skull was fractured. He still bears the scars from that terrible, turbulent time as he serves his fourteenth consecutive term as the congressman from Georgia’s fifth district.

Despite the misery that he saw, the hatred he stared down, the wounds that he received, John is one of the most positive people I’ve ever met or worked with. John’s compassion, understanding, and willingness to walk in someone else’s shoes, even though his own shoes were tough enough, became evident to me in a most unexpected way. Back in 1988, then Majority Whip Tony Coelho led a fifteen-member delegation from the House of Representatives to the Middle East that included both me and the newly elected John Lewis. It was the time of the first intifada and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians were increasing dangerously, with violence and suffering all around.

We did what we could in Israel to help get the parties back to the peace table, and then went to Morocco, one of Israel’s best friends in the region. I was particularly eager to meet with King Hassan II, the reigning monarch of the country, and seek his help figuring out the best way to ease tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

John was the only African American in our delegation and I was the only woman and also the only Jewish member. There was much fuss and preparation before our meeting with the king at one of his many palaces in Marrakesh, a fascinating old city I wish we’d had more time to see. We were told to enter and wait in an arena-sized reception area that was decorated with beautiful posh couches and tables, as if twenty-five separate living rooms were arranged in the cavernous space.

Then we were summoned into an opulent meeting room. I remember leather-bound notebooks and pens for each of us and men with curlicue ballerina shoes walking in and out of the room with tea and exotic treats to eat. I’ve been in some beautiful meeting rooms over the years, but never one as majestic. It’s good to be the king.

When King Hassan arrived, everyone was quite cordial, but when the conversation got around to our trip to Israel, he suddenly became angry and went on a tirade. We had been talking about Israel’s strong push to end the intifada and how the situation was evolving into a dangerous atmosphere for both sides.

“If that’s the Jewish mind, we are all in trouble,” the king said.

As he continued to use the phrase “the Jewish mind,” he became angrier and angrier. I realized I couldn’t bear to be in that room with him.

So I stood up.

My heart was beating so fast that I dared not speak. It was just awful to hear the king keep referring to “the Jewish mind.” I looked at Tony to convey my discomfort. Tony knew me well, so he stood up too. He got it.

“This meeting is over,” he said.

One by one, our delegation of fifteen stood up and everyone walked out silently, which I could tell shocked the king and all of his party. I guess getting walked out on wasn’t something that had ever happened to Hassan before.

We went to the bus that had brought us to the palace. As we entered, everyone was very quiet until one of my colleagues broke the silence.

“Barbara, you really overreacted to that comment by the king. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

I was shocked.

“You don’t say ‘the Jewish mind.’ That’s indicative of someone who has a deep prejudice,” I insisted, “and a discriminatory attitude toward an entire religion.”

But then a couple of others who agreed I had made a big mistake chimed in. They too thought I’d ruined the whole occasion. Things were looking bad for my popularity rating, but suddenly, a deep, authoritative voice came—ironically—from the back of the van.

“Barbara’s right,” the voice said. “I know prejudice when I hear it.”

It was John Lewis, putting an end to the discussion. It was over. Every person in that van respected and accepted John’s view. As a new member of the House, it would have been easy for him to go along with the sentiment that had started to spread in that van, but he didn’t do that. He spoke his own mind without equivocation and the entire atmosphere changed. I loved him so much at that moment and I still do.

After that, Tony Coelho handled the matter in a very diplomatic and quiet way by having a meeting with the king later in the evening. I don’t know what was said, but feelings were soothed. It could have been an international incident at a delicate time in the Middle East. But he took care of it.

The next morning as we were preparing to fly out of Morocco, there was suddenly a hold on the plane. We didn’t know what to think. Then, through the narrow plane door, two men wearing those curlicue ballerina shoes marched in, carrying a gigantic hand-painted box of chocolates that King Hassan had sent us. We took it as a peace offering.

For me, the trip to Morocco was a moment of truth. I’m usually as thick-skinned as you have to be in the world of politics, but the king’s remarks were not about one person; they were about the Jewish people, and they came from someone who I had thought was a friend of Israel.

In hindsight, what I think deeply affected me was how difficult it is for Israel in that region, when even her friends would desert her. And that hurt me tremendously, as I lost a whole wing of our family during World War II simply because they were Jewish. Israel was supposed to be the safe place for a people who had struggled so hard to survive.

Israel needs friends. Friends like John Lewis. The problems between Israel and the Palestinians have gotten steadily worse since 1988. I wish I could figure out how to solve them. When I worked as a reporter for the Pacific Sun in 1973, I sat across from a very bright writer whose name was Ira Kamen. The news then was filled with trouble in the Middle East, and the Yom Kippur War had broken out between Israel and Egypt. I was down in the dumps about it and so was Ira.

In a moment of levity, he said: “Maybe Israel and Cuba should trade places. This way Cuba will be near their friends and Israel will be closer to Miami!”

Having a sense of humor helps when you’re dealing with apparently intractable problems.

My whole career was about fighting for issues that affected many people. Sometimes I was involved in issues that affected just one person.

In 1984 I received a letter from a woman named Margot Hogan, who wrote that she was about to be deported. She was an Australian who married an American who had served in World War II. They had both spent some terrible time in a Japanese prison camp. When they returned after the war to live in the United States, she thought she’d earned American citizenship simply by being his spouse.

But no. Margot, over sixty by then, said that as soon as her husband had died, she’d been notified that she was about to be deported back to Australia.

“I have a heart condition and no relatives to care for me in Australia,” she told me.

That’s when you needed to have the support of the leadership and your colleagues. Obviously these “private” bills could be abused and no doubt some were. But the only thing that could save her was a private bill. It was called A Bill for the Relief of Margot Hogan. It became law on October 19, 1984. I got it done because members of the House trusted my judgment on this. I was so grateful that Mrs. Hogan could stay in America. I was also grateful to serve in the House—a rowdy place even then, but a place where we did many good things for the people during my time there.