Nancy and Jack: a political love match
At first glance, they were an unlikely duo. One – Nancy Pelosi, the future House speaker – represented tony, well-heeled San Francisco. The other – John Murtha, the powerful military appropriations chairman – hailed from Johnstown, a decaying steelmaking hub in middle Appalachia.
One district was high-tech and fashionably liberal; the other was culturally conservative and on the cusp, in the late 1980s, when they first met, of trending Republican.
The two Democrats also diverged personally. Pelosi was a small, attractive woman with a wide smile and rosy red cheeks. She was restrained, reserved, polite. At 6 foot 5, Murtha was a rugged bear of a man, a former high school basketball star and Marine. Whether in the halls of Congress or on the campaign trail, he was the gregarious type, an old-fashioned glad-hander.
But these were surface differences. Underneath, the two had a lot in common. Both were operational, pragmatic, frank, and practical. Maybe more than anything else, both liked to win.
And here’s an additional similarity: from time to time both displayed that rarest of commodities – political courage.
It was this trait that broke the ice between them. The year was 1987. It was the earliest days of Pelosi’s first House term. According to Pelosi biographer Susan Page, the issue before the House was a vote to reprimand Donora’s own Austin Murphy, a Democratic member of the House since 1977, for misuse of House funds and various other infractions.
The reprimand breezed to an easy victory. The final tally was 324 for and 68 against. One of the 68 votes against the reprimand was cast by Murtha. Another came by way of Pelosi.
Intrigued by this singular display of political independence by the new California congresswoman, Murtha approached Pelosi. Page writes that his first words to her (probably) were, “Let me tell you, you got some kind of nerve for a freshman.”
It was the start of a fruitful political relationship.
The Pelosi-Murtha partnership was cemented when the congressman from Cambria County (Murtha was raised in Mt. Pleasant) visited Pelosi in her Capitol Hill office, where he noticed a small carved figure of a coal miner.
“What are you, coming from San Francisco, doing with a coal miner?” asked a puzzled Murtha.
Pelosi explained it was a memento handed down to her by her father, former Maryland congressman Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., who had served in the House from 1939 to 1947, the year he became the longtime mayor of Baltimore.
The coal miner figure was a gift to her dad by Rep. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, who later became a U.S. senator.
Murtha never forgot that – never forgot that Pelosi’s political roots went back to her father and hard-scrabble Baltimore, its smoked-filled rooms hosting many a political deal. According to Page, he once scribbled a note to himself, “She’s from Baltimore. Don’t think she’s from San Francisco.”
Pelosi told Page for her biography, “Madam Speaker,” “The coal miner brought us together.”
Murtha chaired Pelosi’s campaign for Democratic House whip in 2001. Her opponent was Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the odds-on favorite for the job. “To insiders,” according to Page, the very notion that Murtha had agreed to run her bid for the post “was a declaration of how formidable Pelosi’s campaign would be.”
Formidable it was. Formidable it had to be. That a woman would hold a leadership position in the caucus was novel, and not a little suspect. Many old-guard Democratic males looked on Pelosi as an interloper.
Among other things, Murtha was instrumental in persuading House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt to maintain a studious neutrality in the whip contest.
In the end, Pelosi bested Hoyer by a decisive margin.
Several years later, Murtha’s principled opposition to the Iraq war provided Pelosi with political coverage for her own opposition.
Late in his life, Murtha dictated some thoughts (unearthed by a Page assistant at the University of Pittsburgh archives) about Pelosi for a book he never got around to writing. As “good a political mind as I have ever seen” was one accolade. “Fair and tuff” was another. “Able to come to a practical solution. I appreciate that more than anything else.”
The admiration was mutual. “Dear Jack,” Pelosi wrote in a longhand note to Murtha in December 2009. “You are my hero! Thanks for your leadership and for your friendship. Love Nancy.”
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently of Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.