Sen. John Warner: 'I walk out, holding my head high ...'

WASHINGTON

The first thing John Warner insists everyone remember about his 30 years as a U.S. senator – about his whole life, really – is that he’s been lucky.

“Hard work and good luck – put that down!” he barked during an interview early this month, brandishing a short wooden pointer for emphasis. “I had a lot of good luck.”

Work and luck and sometimes a dash of bluster have sustained Warner through a political career that spans four decades, the terms of seven presidents, six other Virginia senators and 11 governors.

A second-choice nominee after the Republican Party’s original candidate died in a plane crash, Warner won his seat in 1978 by the narrowest margin in Virginia history. But when he retires next month at 81, he will have cast more Senate votes – 10,728 – and received more votes – 5.36 million in five elections – than any other Virginian.

As a presidential appointee and later a senator, he served through Watergate and Vietnam, eras of runaway inflation and a “hollow” military, the Iran-Contra scandal, the fall of the Soviet Union, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the horror of Sept. 11.

The Senate is where he wanted to be from his first days in politics in the 1960s. It provides “the freedom to do pretty much as you please,” tackling issues at home and around the world, he said. Senators can travel anywhere “and be well-received by foreign governments, executive branches or parliamentary leaders, because there’s only 100 of you. …

“This is a front-row seat on the greatest show on Earth.”

On being independent ...

Inside the Senate, Warner is best known as a consensus-builder.

In 2006, as the Senate headed toward a partisan showdown over judicial appointments, Warner joined a moderate “gang of 14” senators who brokered a deal to secure confirmation of several controversial GOP nominees but preserved the Democrats’ right to use Senate rules to block others.

“I remember how skillfully John brought people to the table and pushed them to achieve a result,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. Warner’s involvement in a group of mostly junior senators like herself “gave us a gravitas” that was vital, she added.

Warner had less success with his last big bid at bipartisanship, this year’s failed effort to secure passage of “cap and trade” legislation to control greenhouse gas emissions. However, his support is widely credited with getting the bill out of committee and onto the Senate floor, setting the stage for future debates on climate change.

“John Warner is very, very adept at governing,” said Jim Webb, a Democrat and Virginia’s other U.S. senator. “That requires – as much as possible – showing respect for people with all different points of view and understanding that some of these issues are long-term issues, so you’re going to be dealing with people with whom you disagree.”

“I never have seen him just offer to cut a deal – he will almost always propose some kind of change,” Webb added. Warner always anticipates how other senators might object to a bill and how it might be tweaked to satisfy them, he said.

Collins calls Warner, with his statesman-gray hair and perfectly tailored suits, “everyone’s image of what a senator should be.”

He “kind of took me under his wing,” when she came to the Senate in 1997, Collins said. Warner counseled her to take her time in making up her mind on big issues, to talk to other senators and outsiders she trusted, and not to be intimidated by party leaders.

Independence has been central to Warner’s own Senate career, sometimes imperiling him.

He was personally and politically close to Ronald Reagan, but infuriated Reaganites by refusing in 1987 to back Reagan nominee Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. In 1994, he effectively threw Virginia’s other Senate seat to the Democrats, refusing to back Republican nominee and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North. Incumbent Chuck Robb won the race.

More recently, Warner showed his independence by backing a package of state tax hikes championed in 2004 by then-Gov. Mark Warner, the man who will succeed him next month.

“I remember the day he came to Richmond” to deliver his endorsement, Mark Warner said. “He just said, 'Mark, I think I’m going to come down and say a few things.’ … That was the day he got up, as only John Warner could do, and said: 'Politics be damned. ’ It’s time to put Virginia first.”

“He hasn’t changed as much as the Senate has changed,” said Susan Magill, a former chief of staff. In their early years, Warner “was seen as one of the more conservative Republicans. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. … The Democrats are more liberal and the Republicans are more conservative. There are fewer people in the middle.”

On the military ...

Warner’s life has been entwined with the American military.

He joined the Navy when he was 17 and served in the final months of World War II.

Trained as a radioman, young Warner flirted with a career in the Navy; as World War II ended, officers volunteered to help him gain admission to the Naval Academy.

His father, a Washington physician, had other ideas. He rang up the president of Washington & Lee University, his alma mater, “and he said, 'Frank, my little boy is home from the Navy and he wants to come to Washington & Lee,’” the senator recalled. “And they had a talk, and he put the phone down, and he said, 'The president says for you to get on down and sign up.’ That’s it.

“That’s the way America treated the World War II generation. I’m not saying it’s just John Warner. That was the way America opened its arms … I wasn’t any great hero. I’d just done what I was supposed to do.”

The memory of those days, and the similarly warm welcome he got when returning from duty as a Marine officer in Korea, has influenced Warner’s entire career. He is still perplexed at how much of America lost faith in the military in the Vietnam era and is grateful that divide has not reappeared as the nation fights an unpopular war in Iraq.

Warner witnessed the birth of the all-volunteer military while serving in the Pentagon and has championed it as a legislator. He sponsored or backed dozens of military pay and benefit increases, including Tricare for Life, the 2001 reform that essentially saw the Defense Department pick up the tab for lifetime medical care for those who serve 20 years or more.

“There’s not a person in the U.S. military today whose life has not been touched in a positive way by John Warner,” Sen. Jim Webb said.

Webb was wounded as a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam and came home to an assignment on Warner’s staff in the Navy secretariat in the early 1970s. As a young officer far down the chain of command, Webb was surprised when the undersecretary took a personal interest in his welfare. Warner even helped him find a civilian job when he decided to leave the Corps.

“He did everything he could,” Webb said. “It was just his style.”

On the Senate ...

From his first days in office, Warner immersed himself in the place, his courtly manner hiding a passion for the work.

He went more than two years without missing a vote. His 15-hour workdays, he admits today, figured heavily in his divorce in 1982 from actress Elizabeth Taylor – the Angelina Jolie of her day.

Warner has “a very, very strong sense of this place” and its role in the American scheme of government, said Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat who came to the Senate with Warner and whose career has paralleled the Virginian’s.

“This is a unique place. There are some who come here and don’t understand it,” Levin said. They are frustrated by its arcane traditions and unending debates. Warner was never among them.

These days, Warner worries for the Senate’s future.

When he came to the Senate, “85 or 90 percent of the senators brought their families to Washington, maintained a home here,” he said. “We were all part of a bigger family. And we worked together. We got to know each other. We traveled together.”

That forged bonds that produced compromises vital to governing, he said.

Now, the Senate meets for maybe three days during most weeks, so members can go home and raise money on the weekends. “And if you’re not raising it for yourself … the leadership is asking you to go out and raise it for your colleagues.

“Frankly, I don’t know where it ends.”

On his office full of momentos ...

Friends in the Senate call Warner “the squire,” a title that fits his Old South gentility and hints at their affection for him. Even as movers tagged its furnishings for packing this month, his office across Constitution Avenue from the Capitol had the look and feel of a country gentleman’s study.

Virtually every inch of the walls was decorated with military memorabilia and art, including some of Warner’s own floral still lifes. On the mantle, a bust of Winston Churchill looked on as Warner greeted visitors; one end table boasted a small statue of Harry Truman in his World War Iuniform.

Even in such surroundings, Warner himself dominated the room.Reflecting on his career this month, he stretched out in a well-worn office chair, spinning stories about items in his collection.

One of his favorite paintings hung over the office sofa. “It’s been in our family over 100 years,” he said. “That’s Ben Franklin working on the Treaty of Paris. It was the first treaty that the 13 colonies, now the United States, had with a foreign nation.”

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan dispatched Warner to France for ceremonies marking the treaty’s bicentennial.

“So I saddled up and went over there for about four or five days – a fascinating trip; the French really laid on a memorial – and I took a photograph of that painting with me,” he said. At the Court of Versailles, he showed the photo to a curator and asked if he might visit the room where Franklin had worked.

“He said, ‘Oh, Monsieur, follow me,’ and I walked down there, and that room hasn’t changed one bit. … I think the draperies are the same.”

Staffers could fill volumes with other tales, not all of them entirely flattering to Warner, and the senator occasionally enjoys telling one on himself.

His home in Alexandria, he acknowledged, still contains a nightstand he appropriated from the mothballed battleship New Jersey while secretary of the Navy. Warner took it from a cabin used by legendary World War II Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, taping a note inside one drawer with instructions that it be returned to the Navy after his death.

On Iraq ...

Roughly half of Warner’s Senate career has been spent as chairman or ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which shapes and oversees the military’s annual budget.

There, Warner helped secure funding for eight aircraft carriers, all built at Northrop Grumman’s Newport News shipyard.

He co-authored the law that let the military close roughly one-fourth of its bases after the Cold War. And he helped draft congressional resolutions that authorized both Persian Gulf wars.

The current war in Iraq weighs on him, he acknowledged.

He was an early supporter of toppling Saddam Hussein, but his questions about the Bush administration’s strategy for occupying Iraq and launching a democratic government there have grown increasingly pointed in the five years since the invasion.

When the military disclosed that Iraqi prisoners had been mistreated by Americans running the Abu Ghraib prison, Warner chaired hearings in 2004 that examinedthe abuse in embarrassing detail. As insurgents inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. troops in 2006, Warner returned from a trip to Iraq to declare the war effort was “drifting sideways.”

Not long after that, Warner reflected on the unseen toll everywar takes on those who fight,recalling his struggles in Korea to cope with the deaths of his comrades.

“We lost two guys who over a period of time were sleeping in my tent,”he said, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples at the memory. Warner had the grim job of gathering and shipping home the men’s belongings.

“You don’t forget those things,” he said.

Security in Iraq is better these days, but Warner remains concerned about the Iraqi government’s slow progress in taking responsibility for the country’s security.

“We just moved into a situation we had not prepared our military toaddress. …” he said. “We underestimated this conflict – no doubt about it.”

On the future ...

Warner knows he could have been re-elected, probably without opposition, but he decided last year that it was time to move on. By the end of another term, he would be nearly 88.

His health is good, he said, though he had a pacemaker implanted this year after several bouts with an irregular heartbeat. Doctors have cautioned him to expect the normal problems that go with an octogenarian’s life.

“I feel very strongly, and I’ve seen it here, where individuals havestayed on, and their health hasimpaired their ability to do the work,” he said. “I didn’t want that to happen.”

He’s looking forward to tending his garden, painting a bit more, and spending time with his wife, Jeanne.

The Warners wed in 2003, after dating for several years. They met 30 years earlier, when Jeanne was married to Paul Vander Myde, a naval officer who admired the senator. He died in 2000.

Twice divorced, Warner had renounced any future marriages and seemed to enjoy life as one of Capitol Hill’s most eligible bachelors.

He showed up regularly on the society pages of The Washington Post through the 1980s and ’90s, most famously as an escort for television anchorwoman Barbara Walters.

But soon after he began seeing Jeanne, friends sensed Warner’swanderings had ended. He acknowledges now that she “settled” him.

“That’s all I’ll say.”

He hinted that he’ll have a relationship with the University of Virginia, where he went to law school and where he went last year to announce his retirement.

He’d also like to stay active on the edges of the federal government, Warner suggested, sharing some of what he’s learned about the military and the nation’s intelligence community.

“I walk out, holding my head high, as able as I’ve ever been,” he said. “I kind of hope that I fade away into history.”

 Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872 dale.eisman@pilotonline.com