Interview with Senator Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman is a lawyer and a former United States Senator from Connecticut, as well as the state’s Attorney General. He was the Democratic Party’s nominee for Vice President in 2000.
“My Way” Joe’s Way
Contents
Max Raskin: I heard at the recent Commentary magazine roast of Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik, you sung “Hello Solly.” On an average day what kind of music do you listen to?
Joe Lieberman: It varies. So almost every day, except the for Shabbat because I can't turn it on, I begin the day with WQXR, New York Public Radio. Classical music. And we love it. I mean, it just fills the house. My tastes otherwise are eclectic.
I'm an incorrigible Frank Sinatra fan. I love Broadway show music.
MR: Do you have a favorite Sinatra tune?
JL: Well, everybody loves “My Way.”
It became the theme song in my campaign the first time I ran for the Senate. Happened sort of accidentally where I attended an Italian street festival in New Haven. The orchestra was performing on Saturday night, and I remember the band leader was a man named Vinnie Carr. Vinnie Carr was not his real name, he had a very Italian given name, but when he was growing up, they thought he should sound Irish. So anyway, he introduced me. He was not neutral in my race, and he played “My Way,” and he said, “Why don't you sing a chorus?" And I did, and got a standing ovation so my staff said, “This is it. This is our campaign song.”
William F. Buckley’s Mechitza
MR: This was the race against [Lowell] Weicker?
JL: That was against Weicker, right.
MR: That was when Buckley endorses you, right?
JL: Right.
MR: Did you know him?
JL: I did. Bill Buckley graduated from Yale probably 14 years before I did in the early fifties. I graduated in the class of ‘64. But he had a lifetime devotion to the Yale Daily News where he had been editor. And I was editor in my senior year, and he just kept in touch. We began to correspond and then he lived in Stamford, Connecticut, which was my hometown. So over the years we'd keep in touch, and then he and his wife started asking me to come and visit and have dinner and I did. And they were great evenings, really like an old salon. Great conversation, spirited – a lot of different opinions, as you expect.
JL: And then, I hate to admit this – I do at some peril – we divided into rooms of men and women. And of course, the men smoked cigars and drank brandy. And the women talked and probably drank lighter drinks.
Anyway, Buckley calls me in 1988, the year I'm running against Senator Weicker. I sometimes try vainly to impersonate that wonderful voice. He said [impersonating Buckley], "Joe, I'm thinking of endorsing you. Do you think it would help?" I said, "Well, Bill, I got to think about that." Then he said, "You know how much I like you, and respect you, but please understand that if I endorse you, it's because I despise Lowell Weicker." Weicker had been a nemesis to Ronald Reagan, who was Buckley's hero, and in some ways the realization of his work.
So I said, "You know, I think it would help me, let me think about it." Weicker had this tradition of being an idiosyncratic anti-Republican Republican. When it came to election time, he turned to the Republicans and said, "I know I'm not your favorite, but that guy that the Democrats are running against me is a communist. You want to support him?"
Buckley gave me – to use a term from our shared religious orientation – and I said this to him, he gave me a hashgacha. He said to Republicans, "This guy, Lieberman, okay, might not be your first choice, but he's kosher." Which is what the rabbis do.
I actually think it helped.
Joe Six-Pack
MR: So let me ask you a couple of silly questions.
JL: Oh, yeah, I'm great at silly questions.
MR: You were mentioning drinking brandy. What's your favorite thing to drink?
JL: It's a complicated answer. Maybe for a centrist, it’s what you’d expect. Generally speaking, in the evening, I have either a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. And my tastes are eclectic. White wine, but I like a lot of different kinds of beer.
MR: What kind of beer do you drink?
JL: My favorite is Sam Adams. I'm going through a six pack of Sam Adams Winter Lager right now that is perfect.
However, I will say in full disclosure that on the day of rest ordained by God, no less, at synagogue, I have a shot or two, after services, of single malt scotch or bourbon. That's it.
MR: What kind of scotch?
JL: Glenfiddich is good. I like some of those…
MR: Did you drink Slivovitz?
JL: Every now and then, but I find it too strong and not very tasty. A lot like a harsh scotch, if you will, but worse than that. It's like old fashion whiskey, you know?
MR: Do you have a favorite niggun or song at shul? Do you sing along to anything?
JL: I sing along a lot. First off, I like to sing; the Jewish liturgy is full of evocations to sing to the Lord, as this is something that befits our Creator, and maybe enriches our own religious experience. I particularly like good Friday night praying.
MR: Do you sing “Eshes Chayil” to your wife?
JL: I do, I do. And we're quite traditional about Friday night rituals at the table. It's a little funny of us, and I don't know anybody else who does this, but my wife and I decided that the tune that is the traditional tune for “Eshet Chayil,” was repetitive, and Hadassah said there was only so much praise she could take in one dose. So we sing the first stanza and the last stanza. The song is the tribute that the man offers the woman, his wife, as a woman of valor, thanking her for all that she's meant to him in the preceding week and longer than that.
MR: I'm going to have to think how I should sing to Raina, because she's definitely a woman of valor.
JL: Yeah, she is. Her family has a great tradition, which is I don't think they sing “Eshet Chayil,” but at that point in the service, at the table, the children and Ken say to Amy what specific thing or things she did during the week that they're extremely grateful for. It's quite touching really.
Netflix and Jog
MR: Do you wear cologne?
JL: Not every day, but if I'm getting dressed to go out.
MR: What kind do you wear?
JL: I have no lasting loyalty here. I know that I'm working my way through a box of small travel-size Calvin Klein cologne.
MR: What about exercise? What do you do for exercise?
JL: I'm a big believer in exercise. For years, I jogged every day three or four miles.
MR: Would you listen to music?
JL: No, I usually jog with somebody. I started out jogging with my doctor in New Haven. This is a funny story. He was also my neighbor and my friend. A long time ago, probably the seventies, I went for my annual physical, and he said, "You're in good shape, but you're a little overweight and you're not exercising enough. You should do something like jog every morning." And I said to the late, wonderful Mark Schwartz – I said, "Mark…If I'm going to jog, you're going to jog with me."
"Okay." So we started jogging.
But my wife came along and broke up that jogging relationship because she liked to jog too.
MR: When did you jog until?
JL: Oh, it was sort of the decade of the 2000s where my knees began to give. I tried everything and then I walked and finally I had knee replacement surgery, both knees, so I don't jog anymore, but I walk or go on a treadmill and do other exercises every morning. And I try to do it in the afternoon, frankly, since the pandemic. And it's really important to me.
MR: How early do you wake up in the morning?
JL: 6:00, 6:30.
MR: Do you watch TV?
JL: Yeah, too much since the pandemic and since cable news has become so repulsively opinionated and attack-counter attack that you don't get news anymore. You watch one of the shows and you've done it. So, we turn to Netflix or Amazon Prime or we turn it off and we read a book.
MR: What’s “a book”?
JL: Well, don't feel too badly because most of my books I read on my iPad.
MR: What are you watching right now on Netflix or Amazon?
JL: At the recommendation of our – I use a word which is rarely used in this setting – machatunim, the Yiddish word, unknown in English, which describes the parents of our son-in-law. Our machatunim recommended a series, quite long, called A French Village on Amazon.
MR: Oh is this about the Nazis in France?
JL: Yeah.
The Nazis come into a village in the French countryside called Villeneuve, and it's really riveting to us. It's only coincidentally about the impact on the Jews, but it's there.
MR: My dad is a big World War II and Holocaust buff – he lived in Belgium and speaks French and he loves the show. He says it’s phenomenal.
JL: Oh, I'm glad to hear that, because one of our friends tried and they couldn't take it anymore. It was too much, or they were bored.
We are totally engaged in it. Matter of fact, we're trying not to watch too much of it too soon because we want to spread it.
MR: Do you binge watch any shows?
JL: Rarely. I mean usually on A French Village, for instance, we watch one and frankly it's so good and we're so engaged in it, but it's somewhat draining. Yesterday it happens that we watched two because we were home in the afternoon.
MR: That's how I felt about Mad Men. I really tried to savor it.
JL: This is brilliantly written and acted. It's in French, but there are subtitles.
MR: Did you ever watch The Sorrow and the Pity or any of Lanzmann’s Shoah?
JL: No. Of course I know about them, but I never did.
MR: Yeah, that's a bit much even for me. But my dad, he loves that.
JL: I probably should. My wife is the child of Holocaust survivors, and the Holocaust is part of her soul. I mean, it's in her from her parents.
Good Sabbath, Mrs. Manger
MR: Let me ask you some quickfire religious questions.
JL: Okay.
MR: Are you learning any Jewish texts right now?
JL: Well, I'm in the phase now of following the parsha – the section of the Torah we're reading, and I read from a lot of different sources.
MR: You have a good chumash that you like?
JL: Yes – I actually like the chumash of Rabbi Hertz, the English rabbi of the last century. I like his commentary. I always get Rabbi Hertz and Hirsch mixed up.
But also Rav Soloveitchik has a wonderful chumash. And I have a book that my daughter, my youngest child, also gave me of Rav Kook’s commentaries on the portion of the Torah of the week, which I find sometimes so fantastic – they’re mysterious – I have to reach to try to inhale them or understand them.
I also read Rabbi Sacks, and I'm probably going over his weekly commentaries based on ethics or leadership.
MR: All the people you named just now basically were modern orthodox. I’ve read that you don’t call yourself modern orthodox, but observant, but certainly not egalitarian. And I realize this is a ridiculous Hillel-on-one-foot question, but what leads you to daven where you daven – at a place with a mechitza.
JL: I don't know where you got that. I daven, I pray, at a place that has men and women sitting separately, but the truth is that when asked, I daven all the time at conservative or reform congregations where there's mixed gender seating. And three of our four children belong to conservative congregations, which are egalitarian because the women want that access. I don't have any problem with it personally.
MR: But you go to the shul that you choose.
JL: I do. And I mean, if the shul, the Orthodox congregation, that I go to announced tomorrow that women could, for instance, lead the praying or be called for honors at the Torah reading or sit together, although that's a really interesting halachic discussion, then I wouldn't pull out of the synagogue.
MR: Got it.
JL: One of our sons, who’s my stepson but he’s like a son to me – he’s a rabbi who’s a founder of Hadar Institute, Rabbi Ethan Tucker. They're fascinating because they have separate seating, but the women join equally in leading the service in every way. You'll have to talk to him about that.
MR: Did you ever think about making aliyah?
JL: I never did really. I was very tied to the American experience of my own life in America. I always felt this from my parents and my grandmother, my mother's mother, who lived with us – she was a very patriotic American because she remembered the old country and it was not a pleasant memory.
MR: The sixth Lubavitcher rebbe said, “America iz nisht andersh.”
JL: Yes – you can be a Jew here. And I remember her saying to me once that when she would go as a young woman, married, to synagogue on Saturday, people in the old country would curse her and sometimes throw stones at her. In America, she walked to the synagogue with her sister who lived across the street and the Christian neighbors would say, "Good Sabbath, Mrs. Manger." And my grandmother said, "You have no idea how that felt to me. It was like I had already reached olam haba, the next world." So I grew up with that affinity for our country.
John Sexton, Esq.
MR: So John Sexton has a great story about your case before the Supreme Court – it was a blue laws case, right?
JL: Yes, it was a blue laws case. It was the case of Thornton versus Caldor, and it was argued, strangely, the day after the Reagan re-election in 1984, and it was decided in 1985. Without getting into the detail, it was a case of Thornton who was a very religious Presbyterian. Connecticut repealed the blue laws that prohibited businesses from being open on Sunday, so now they were open. I was in the legislature, and we put in a clause saying that basically employers had to accommodate Sabbath observant employees. Thornton claimed that his employer, Caldor, which coincidentally was founded by a couple that were members of my synagogue in Stamford, Connecticut – that they hadn't adequately accommodated him because they sent him to work in their store in Torrington, which is a long way away. So how did I get into that? Nat Lewin, who's a great human rights lawyer, and very much on First Amendment religious cases, he headed a group called COLPA – an Orthodox legal rights group.
And he said he was representing the Thornton estate and the state ought to get involved in this. I was Attorney General then and he said, “I’ll give you half of my oral argument time.” I had not actually argued a case before Supreme Court. I thought, “Who knows when this is going to come again and I’m into the subject matter.” So I had a deputy attorney general, Elliot Gerson, and we decided we needed somebody really good to write the brief. And he said he knew John Sexton and he'd be great.
So John wrote a wonderful brief, we argued the case, and we lost it eight-to-one. And Sexton and I, if you have us on together, do a really hilarious dialogue about whether we lost eight-to-one because of my oral argument or his brief.
MR: He also jokes that he unknowingly gave you his only opportunity to argue before the Supreme Court – he didn’t know at the time but he soon became dean of NYU and stopped all political legal advocacy.
He talks about Thornton when discussing when a state’s free exercise accommodation becomes an establishment clause violation.
JL: Yeah.
Insofar as the Court is occasionally political – unfortunately it can sometimes be partisan politics – and papers of justices, particularly Blackmun, became public afterwards – but here I believe the Court was worried because it had made two decisions in the previous session that were tilted very much toward anything goes, if you will, in terms of protecting religious observance. And I always felt, maybe I'm trying to make myself feel better, that part of what the Court was doing in this case had to do with bad timing, which is they wanted to reassure people that there were still some things that they wouldn't do to force people to accommodate to somebody’s religion.
MR: There’s an apocryphal story I tell my students when talking about the independence of the Supreme Court. Arthur Burns was going down to see Nixon and some reporter asked him, “Aren't you worried about the Federal Reserve Chair appearing at the beck and call of the president – it's going to be very political?" And Burns replies, he says, "No, you don't understand, the Chairman of the Fed has to do what the president wants or else he would risk losing his independence."
JL: That's great.
I always said that whatever anybody else said about Justice Rehnquist – that I would never say too much bad about him because he was the one that stuck with us.