Joseph Lieberman, 82, senator, VP nominee
Joseph Isadore Lieberman — a fixture in Connecticut civic life and in Washington political circles, a path-breaking vice presidential nominee, and an enduring symbol of the acceptance of Jews in the American mainstream — died Wednesday in New York City. He was 82.
A family statement attributed the death to complications from a fall. “Senator Lieberman’s love of God, his family, and America endured throughout his life of service in the public interest,” the family said.
Mr. Lieberman, a four-term senator, was selected in 2000 by Vice President Al Gore as his running mate on the Democrats’ national ticket, and though the two won the popular vote, they lost the more critical contest in the Electoral College after a bruising 36-day election overtime that awarded the presidency to George W. Bush on the basis of high-tension recounts, arcane disputes over “hanging chads,’’ and a divisive Supreme Court ruling.
But in some ways, Mr. Lieberman’s legacy may be based less on being part of a losing effort than on being the first member of his ancient faith to win a spot on a national ticket, an achievement all the more remarkable because of his profile as an Orthodox Jew who spoke openly about blessings, quoted Scripture, and followed the strict kosher dietary rules and whose religious beliefs kept him from the public arena during the Jewish Sabbath, which begins at sundown on Friday evenings.
By breaking through that barrier, Mr. Lieberman was an emblem of arrival in the ultimate nation of arrival. By century’s end, the country’s Jews had so successfully become a chunk in the American melting pot that they could tell their children that they could be anything they wanted in the United States, except president. With one phone call from Gore, that truth seemed on the verge of being shattered, along with one of the last great barriers in American life.
Besides being a breakthrough candidate, Mr. Lieberman added a dash of conservative sobriety to the Democratic ticket and offered a pro-business balance to the Gore campaign, which emphasized environmental issues that unsettled corporate leaders.
When he returned to the Senate after the 2000 election was resolved, Mr. Lieberman noted that “while my faith was the focus of much of the early media reaction to my candidacy, it was not even mentioned at the end of the campaign.’’ The proof came in two dimensions: in the polling place and in the public opinion polls. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, taken in mid-September 2000, found that more than three Americans out of four said nothing about Mr. Lieberman’s selection troubled them.
That is not to say that he slipped through public life without controversy. As a young man, he was a reform figure in Connecticut politics, but as an older man, he lost a Senate reelection primary to Ned Lamont, a business executive who outflanked him on the left and eclipsed him as a latter-day reformer. Undeterred, Mr. Lieberman ran and won his seat as an independent, a description he defiantly embraced but then caucused with the Democrats.
Moreover, as the years passed, some of his longtime allies became concerned about what they regarded as his rightward shift, apparent not only in his appearance before the 2008 Republican National Convention in support of its presidential nominee, John McCain — an act that some of them never forgave and that endangered his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee — but also, among other positions, for backing the war in Iraq, for his views on internet free speech, and for speaking on behalf of Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, in her confirmation hearings.
Mr. Lieberman, the son of Henry and Marcia Lieberman, was born in Stamford, Conn., and held degrees from Yale College and Yale Law School. While at Yale he encountered two of the signal influences of his life.
One was a personal connection with Kingman Brewster, the president of the university, and, like Mr. Lieberman, a onetime editor of the Yale Daily News. Brewster would later recruit Mr. Lieberman to help steer Yale through the tumult of the student rebellion years.
The other was an intellectual confrontation with the life and legacy of John Bailey, the Connecticut political boss who was the subject of his Yale thesis, which he eventually transformed into a book. The New York Times reviewer said the Lieberman volume “attempts to explain the gradually shifting political world in which Mr. Bailey operated” and added, “Unfortunately, the subject matter is so vast, and Mr. Lieberman’s preoccupation with distant detail too great.’’
Mr. Lieberman practiced briefly with Wiggin & Dana, where he was the first Jew to become an associate in the last surviving white-shoe New Haven law firm. But private practice was not to his taste nor to his rhythms. “He was well known in the community but he was always careful not to take on a legal matter that would compromise his public efforts and his ethics,’’ said James Segaloff, a prominent lawyer who later was briefly Mr. Lieberman’s law partner in New Haven.
He was elected to the state Senate in 1970 and, after only four years in the body, was selected as its majority leader. After losing a congressional race, he was elected attorney general in 1982, but only after he took a political gamble by choosing not to attend the state convention because it was held on the Sabbath. Against the advice of his elders and his advisers, unanimous in the view that such a gesture would shine too much attention on his Jewish identity, Mr. Lieberman sent a video message to the convention.
He won the nomination and then the office and used it as a platform for consumer and environmental initiatives. Mr. Lieberman had strong ties with the iconic Connecticut political figures Abraham Ribicoff, a former governor, senator, and Kennedy administration Cabinet official, and Ella Grasso, a revered former governor. Throughout his career, his political base was composed largely of Catholics, especially those of Irish, Italian, Polish, and, later, Hispanic heritage.
“It was thought that his being an observant Jew would hurt him politically,’’ US Circuit Judge José Cabranes, perhaps his closest friend, said in an interview. “But it didn’t. Members of various religious groups supported him precisely because he was so observant.”
Mr. Lieberman’s challenge to incumbent GOP Senator Lowell Weicker in 1988 was one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country. Mr. Lieberman, an underdog who in some respects ran to the right of the liberal Weicker, won the contest by the slender margin of 10,596 votes. One of the factors: the endorsement of conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr., and his brother, former senator James Buckley. Six years later he won reelection by the biggest margin in the state’s history at that time.
Mr. Lieberman was not the servant of preconceptions or, as his critics would say, strong ideological moorings. His condemnation of President Bill Clinton for his liaison with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was the first and the most ardent of any Democrat. He was chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, a forum that boosted the career of Clinton but that also attracted the bitter resentment of liberal Democrats.
In the Senate, he was regarded as a congenial colleague possessed of a searching mind along with a gift for friendship. “Over the 40 years of public service that Joe Lieberman and I shared representing the people of Connecticut, including the 24 years we served together in the US Senate, we never had a cross word or a single breach in our decades of friendship,” said former senator Christopher J. Dodd, who preceded Mr. Lieberman in the chamber.
Mr. Lieberman’s first marriage, to Betty Haas, with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Rebecca, ended in divorce. In 1982, he married the former Hadassah Freilich Tucker, with whom he had a daughter, Hani. He also was the stepfather of Ethan Tucker.
When he left the Senate, Mr. Lieberman moved to New York, was active in the campaign against the Iran nuclear pact, and taught at Yeshiva University.
Mr. Lieberman’s nomination as vice president remains a powerful point of pride for American Jews, a robust element of the Democratic electoral coalition and a voting group generally more liberal than he was. Even so, the major political utility of his selection may have been as an outreach to conservative Christians.
But, according to Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, the selection on the Democratic ticket with a Southern Baptist helped make Orthodox Judaism socially acceptable. This came, said the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps the famous Jewish theologian of the 20th century, “just decades after Jews warned each other to be ‘a Jew at home and a man on the streets,’ that is, to conceal their religious practices."