Honoring Jim Sasser: From Senate to Diplomacy
A tribute to Jim Sasser, the last Democrat to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Senate and a former U.S. Ambassador to China, who passed away at 87.
Jim Sasser, the last Democrat to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Senate, who later went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to China during the Clinton administration, died on Tuesday. He was 87.
Sasser died at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at about 5:40 p.m. on Sept. 10, his family confirmed, days before his 88th birthday.
“As his friends and former staff will attest, Dad loved his family, the State of Tennessee, his years serving in the U.S. Senate, and old cars, too, and loved them in that order,” his children Gray and Elizabeth Sasser said in a statement. “He believed in the nobility of public service and the transformational power of government.”
Former U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, told The Tennessean on Tuesday that Sasser “represented the best in public service.”
“He was humble, gentle, kind, smart. He knew regular people and regular people loved him,” Cooper said. “He wasn’t flashy, showy. He didn’t run for president. He just wanted to represent Tennesseans, and he did an awesome job at it.”
Former Vice President and U.S. Sen. Al Gore described Sasser as “a man of outstanding character and conviction, a great United States Senator and later an outstanding diplomat in the truest sense of the word.”
“It is impossible to put into words how much Jim Sasser meant to me and my family,” Gore said in a statement. “Throughout his career in public service, Jim represented the best of Tennessee and the best of America. He was an effective leader not simply because he spoke clearly and persuasively about the initiatives he believed in, but also because he listened intently to the concerns, hopes, and aspirations of his constituents and colleagues.”
Sasser was born in Memphis on Sept. 30, 1936. He attended public schools in Nashville and the University of Tennessee for a year, transferring to Vanderbilt University for his undergraduate studies and law school. He met his wife, Mary, in an undergraduate history class there. Sasser graduated from Vanderbilt Law School in 1961 and served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve for six years.
After graduation, Sasser joined the Nashville firm of Goodpasture, Carpenter, Woods and Sasser, where he stayed until 1972.
A long-time Democratic activist, Sasser’s political work began in his early 20s as regional youth director for the late U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s 1960 campaign. He later managed Al Gore Sr.’s unsuccessful 1970 reelection bid in Middle Tennessee, later saying through the experience he was “bitten by the political bug.”
When a newspaper story announced he was running for chair of the state Democratic party, it was news to Sasser.
“I ran down and picked up the paper, and sure enough, it was in there,” Sasser later said during a 2014 panel at Vanderbilt Law School. “I thought, ‘why not?'”
He won his the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1976, defeating Nashville entrepreneur John Jay Hooker, and went on to defeat one-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Brock. Brock had defeated Sen. Al Gore, Sr. in a bitter contest in 1970, and the Gore family supported Sasser’s campaign.
“In that campaign, he and his wife Mary crisscrossed the state on separate schedules while friends and family babysat their two children, Gray and Elizabeth, who were 6 and 4 years old. Mary was every bit as popular as he was,” recalls Wally Dietz, a former Sasser staffer who now leads Metro Nashville’s Department of Law.
An avid student of history, on long trips between campaign stops, Sasser would listen to tapes of speeches by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dietz said.
“The Senator stunned the political world when he won by over 80,000 votes,” Dietz said.
Mark McNeely, a media relations staffer for Sasser, described him as “very smart, astute politically, cautious to a fault, but a great political mind.”
“I thought I knew the state of Tennessee, but working for him, I visited every county seat in the state, visited every media outlet in the state,” McNeely said. “He really thrived on getting out and meeting the people. He loved grassroots politics.”
Senate leader on domestic, foreign policy
Sasser went on to serve three terms in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 1995, rising to chair the Senate Budget Committee.
In the Senate, Sasser developed a reputation as a serious legislator and established relationships with Senators and Congressional representatives of both parties, becoming a leader in both domestic affairs and foreign policy, Dietz said.
“He was a good and decent man and was so dedicated to his family. At our first staff meeting in D.C., he instructed us to notify him immediately if he got a call from his family,” Dietz told The Tennessean.
Sasser also assembled what became regarded as one of the best constituent services teams in Congress, Dietz recalls.
“All these years after he left the Senate, hardly a week goes by without someone asking us if we are kin to Jim Sasser before regaling us with a story of how Dad helped their aunt with a Social Security disability claim, unlocked a sticky wicket at the Small Business Administration for their mom, or helped their grandfather receive his earned VA benefits,” the Sassers said their statement. “We know Dad was always proudest of those quiet achievements on behalf of so many Tennesseans.”
As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sasser negotiated budget agreements with the Bush administration that moved toward a more balanced budget. In 1993, he spearheaded passage of President Bill Clinton’s first budget, which reduced the national deficit dramatically, and passed without any Republican votes.
“He’s probably the most important Tennessean that most people have forgotten about,” Cooper said.
He was a great supporter of the Tennessee Valley Authority, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon said.
Sasser was also instrumental in reauthorizing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — known as IDEA — which offers supports to meet the needs and improve educational outcomes to provide an equitable education for students with disabilities.
He maintained a friendly relationship with his Republican colleague, U.S. Sen. Howard Baker, McNeely recalled, saying their cooperation “got things done for Tennessee.”
“We never had a sharp word, never took a cheap shot at each other,” Sasser said of Baker in 2014.
Sasser’s wife, Mary, was well liked by all, Gordon said.
“I could just see her getting along with all the spouses and telling Jim, ‘don’t say anything bad about this one or that one, because his wife is a friend of mine,'” Gordon said. “He loved the Senate and tried to make it work.”
1994 campaign defeat to Bill Frist
Sasser was widely anticipated to be elected to Senate majority leader leading up to elections in 1994. The position was recently opened by the retirement of then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
The 1994 campaign was harsh for Sasser: in what the three-term senator called a “political earthquake,” heart surgeon Dr. Bill Frist — who had never cast a vote until the age of 37 — won with the campaign slogan of “18 years is long enough.”
Throughout the campaign, Sasser hammered Frist for his affluent upbringing in one of Tennessee’s most wealthy and politically influential families.
Shortly after leading the announcement of a Tyson Food plant, a major employer in Obion County, Sasser spoke at a campaign rally in Paris, Tennessee, where he called Frist “out of touch with reality.”
“Dr. Frist thinks cotton is something you ask the nurse to bring you in the operation room,” he told the crowd.
Sasser even ran a number of TV ads in September 1994 accusing Frist of trying to buy the U.S. Senate seat to benefit the Frist-family owned health care company HCA, as well as spending millions to fight laws aimed at reducing costs of prescription drugs.
Frist gave the ire right back, however, with several campaign slogans and themes attacking Sasser. From quips about Sasser’s love of stray cats, to finally landing on the “18 years is long enough” slogan, Frist seemed mostly focused on Sasser’s tenure and his party affiliation Clinton.
Cooper and Sasser campaigned together throughout the 1994 election cycle, crisscrossing the state from Memphis to Mountain City. But Democrats had a tough year, losing control of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years, dragged down by Clinton’s unpopularity.
“He would have been then Senate Majority Leader because he was universally popular in the Senate. People could trust him, people liked him, you know? It wasn’t at all about Jim Sasser. It was about, how could he help the Senate? How could he help America?” Cooper said. “He was just an amazingly kind, good, decent, fair, honorable person. Can you want more than that?”
Post-Senate work in China
In 1996, Clinton appointed Sasser to serve as the 6th U.S. Ambassador to China, where he played a pivotal role in strengthening relations between China and the U.S.
“He became ambassador to China when people were just recognizing China was waking up and becoming a world power,” Gordon said. “He was, I think, beneficial in making Congress better aware of that.”
Sasser was still ambassador in 1999 when the U.S. embassy in Beijing was besieged after the U.S. military mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War.
“Halfway around the world, the American Air Force destroyed the Chinese Embassy by mistake. It was an errant bomb. Sasser on duty in Beijing when anti-American riots broke out. It was a very tense time,” Cooper said. “Jim Sasser was always good at handling controversy and getting people to return to their senses.”
As ambassador to China, Sasser was also largely responsible for the introduction of Chinese pandas to the Memphis Zoo, one of the few zoos in the country honored with that distinction, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, said.
“Jim and Mary were a wonderful couple who provided invaluable service to our state,” Cohen said. “He led a remarkable life, served Tennessee with distinction, and will be missed.”
After his retirement, he returned to the United States, and provided strategic consulting to international companies, ultimately serving as a senior adviser to FedEx and a senior counselor to APCO Worldwide.
According to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he served on the advisory board of the Honors Burch Field Research Seminar in Domestic and International Affairs and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, vice-chair of the Committee on US-China Relations, vice chair of the US-China Foundation, and a member of the Yale University International Advisory Board of the Culture and Civilization of China.
In 2013, Sasser and his wife Mary Sasser donated their archives to Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections.
Apart from just being the place Sasser earned his degree, the school holds even more personal significance: he met Mary in a history class on the campus.
“Mary and I have chosen Vanderbilt as the home for our records because in many ways it is where our journey began,” he told Vanderbilt University in an official statement at the time. “We met as students there in the ‘50s and the education that it provided us, as undergraduates and then for me as a law student, proved to be the foundation for decades of public service for which we are both enormously grateful. We are hopeful that this record, and all of the stories that it tells, will be useful to future students, scholars and researchers.”
The collections included photographs and memorabilia from the couple’s time in China when Sasser served as the U.S. ambassador, as well as the gavel Sasser used while leading the Senate Budget Committee for six years.
Sasser held honorary degrees from Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee, and Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and served as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University;
Sasser served as a board member of the Nashville Symphony Association; president of the Nashville United Nations Association; executive secretary of the Nashville Committee on Foreign Relations; and member of the Nashville State Planning Commission and the Nashville Chamber of Commerce. He also served as a trustee to the Sergeant Alvin C. York Historical Association and the American Judicature Society.
Tennessee House Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville, recalls meeting Sasser during a stop in his hometown of Lebanon as one of his earliest memories of Tennessee politics.
“From that moment and throughout his illustrious career, he represented the consummate public servant to me and a model what an elected official should be – a fighter and a true representative of the people and above all, a thinker,” Clemmons said. “For a life well-lived, I join many others by being forever grateful to the first U.S. Senator to look me in the eyes and shake my hand.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-10 13:00:00
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