IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC LIFE by Joseph I. Lieberman & Michael D’Orso

Author:Joseph I. Lieberman & Michael D’Orso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2000-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE LIFE

AFTER MY UPSET ELECTION to the Senate, I was inundated with congratulations, advice and new friends. But perhaps the best advice I received came from an old friend, Archbishop John Whalen of the Catholic Diocese of Hartford. Before going to Washington, I made private visits to three religious leaders who meant a lot to me, to ask them for their prayers as I began this new chapter of my life: the Lubavitch rabbi Menachem Schneerson in Brooklyn, New York, who had long been an inspiration to me; the Reverend Ken Fellenbaum, an Evangelical minister, supporter and friend from Milford, Connecticut; and Archbishop Whalen at his residence in Hartford. The archbishop gave me one piece of advice I had not expected. “Leave time for solitude, Joe,” he told me. “Make space for thinking and reading.” I had no idea then how wise the archbishop’s counsel was.

When I arrived in Washington as a newly elected senator, I attended a series of orientation seminars for incoming freshmen, including one in which Alan Simpson, then senator from Wyoming, spoke about the dangers of senatorial overload. He told us how he had arrived on Capitol Hill years before, an ardent newcomer just as we were. Every day his schedule was crammed from dawn to dark with meetings (committee meetings, meetings with staff, meetings with colleagues, meetings with constituents), with speeches to make (at breakfasts, lunches and dinners), with press interviews (from newspapers and magazines and radio and television), with receptions (at cocktail parties, social events, cultural performances). Every night he would trudge home with enough paperwork to break a packhorse’s back, as he put it. Then he would rise the next morning to do it all over again. Eager, resolute, anxious to make his mark, he kept up this pace for about three months, he said, until he finally realized he was about to fall apart. At that point he called his staff together, sat them down and made an announcement. “Regarding my schedule,” he told them, “I just want to remind you of one thing: If I die, you’re all out of work.”

This is a common syndrome in any profession: the new employee eager to prove to others and to himself how well he can do his job. There is nothing wrong with such zeal, but at some point you have to learn to draw lines, to make choices, to understand that you can’t do it all, and shouldn’t.

I understood Simpson’s advice, I knew exactly what he meant …and I promptly proceeded to ignore it. Since it was the middle of the school year when I began my new job during January 1989, Hadassah stayed in Connecticut so Ethan “then thirteen “could finish eighth grade. Meanwhile I moved into a college friend’s vacant apartment for six months and, having nothing but my work to do, I did exactly what Simpson had warned against. I worked myself to death. Beyond the necessary duties that took up almost my entire day, I accepted every invitation

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