His wisdom made morning commute journey of a lifetime
By JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washingtion Bureau
If I exalted myself at all with the idea that a United States senator was wheeling into my driveway to ferry me to work, John Chafee brought me to earth smartly.
``What about that mailbox?'' Chafee demanded. The box at the edge of my fraction of an acre listed ridiculously on a worm-eaten post. ``You know, with a job like that,'' he said of the neglected repair, ``the best thing is: just go to it.''
Some of the senator's staff had been horrified at his idea, six summers ago, of fetching me mornings at my house, a few miles from his, to do some talking on the drive along the Virginia palisades and across the Potomac to Capitol Hill.
Their worry over his unsupervised exposure to a reporter and tape recorder was wasted. The economy of a commuting interview was irresistible to his sense of thrift. And at the bottom of it all, John Chafee was not a man who had a lot to hide.
Not that he was free of cunning or complexity or dark thoughts. He was a human being in a line of work that amplifies every human weakness. But what I have come to believe about Chafee was that he stood upon on a remarkably square and simple foundation.
He introduced me that summer to his mental primer of sayings and promptings. Some he inherited from his father, John Sharpe Chafee, a tool-factory executive who used them as tools for living. Some were Scriptural or otherwise borrowed. Some, like ``Just go to it,'' were the senator's own coinages, amalgams of what he had learned and done smoothed and polished by long use.
Chafee put on a self-mocking tone, adding some depth and grit to his voice when he would quote these eternal verities. ``Get an early start!'' he barked early one morning, quoting his father as we whizzed down the rolling green hills of the George Washington Parkway. ``Men who built this country got an early start.''
The best-known Chafeeism, ``Don't insult the crocodile before you've crossed the stream,'' was like a lot of his admonitions in that it looks preachy on paper. Over the years, it was rare for Chafee to succumb, publicly at least, to the temptation to respond in kind to the slights and lashings of colleagues to his left and right. But sometimes he struggled visibly. I think he invoked the crocodile as more an incantation of self-restraint than as a rebuke to the rest of us.
When I was first assigned to Washington (early in what, for today, I'll call the Chafee administration) my step-mother's father began to unburden me of the political certainties I had picked up in college. Pat O'Gorman was a native of County Waterford who worked in the old Hanley Brewery, alongside John Garrahy, another exile from the Troubles, who was the father of future Governor Joe Garrahy.
So far as Pat's family knew, he voted dutifully every Election Day and he voted, practically as a matter of religious faith, for the Democrat.
Except when John Chafee was on the ballot.
``Are you treating John Chafee right?'' Pat would demand of me at family gatherings. ``The man's word is good!'' he would say, explaining once again how Governor Chafee had ``told the truth'' about the need for an unpopular tax and had paid with his job at the ballot box.
Then Pat would pump me for stories about Chafee in Washington.
Here's one that would appeal to Pat's amusement at the stereotype of flint-hearted Yankee Republicanism. Once when I was interviewing Chafee, a beam of devilment lit his face and he rushed to his bookcase and rummaged quickly through a King James version of the Bible until he found the verse in his memory. Then he read with mock foreboding in a gravelly voice: ``The wicked borrow! And they do not repay!''
Maybe someday the pendulum of American politics will swing back to the practice of compromise in pursuit of imperfect solutions. Chafee explained it not as some ethereal ideal but as a matter of hard practicality:
``One party alone can't take on the issues of high emotional content,'' he said, meaning things like budget-balancing, Social Security reform or the dispatch of American troops into harm's way. ``The other party will pillory them for it.''
That simple philosophy fell into decline, even ridicule, during the latter part of Chafee's 23-year Senate career. To me, the most striking thing about that fact was how Chafee accepted it as another part of the job and cheerfully soldiered on.
As I say, Chafee was capable of frustration and unhappiness. But what I admired in him, enough to want some for myself, was his ability to work out of a slough by dint of some simple strategems. One, of course, was work -- just get to it. Or: Always leave your work station in better condition than you found it.
Even more enviable, though, was Chafee's capacity for finding uplift in the small, everyday sensations of life.
More than once on our rides alongside the Potomac, Chafee would pause to drink in his favorite scene -- the stone spires of Georgetown University, the brightly colored boathouses on the river below, the stately arches of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
``Look at this view, the water, the crews going out!'' Chafee exclaimed.
And so I did that day. And so I will on the way to work tomorrow -- with a clean conscience, now that I have repaired that mailbox.
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