Podcast Interview: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Episode Summary

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate, says his career took its real shape from an assignment nobody else wanted. As a brand new Special Assistant Attorney General in Rhode Island, he drew public utility regulation, work he calls boring and arduous, mainly because he was the newest hire and no one else would take it. When the next political turnover washed out pretty much everyone who had come in with him, Senator Whitehouse was kept on precisely because he had stuck with that unglamorous docket. He says that to this day, in fights over energy and climate, he still remembers what he learned looking through the utilities’ books about how electric rates were set and where they hid the money.

His second turning point came when a newly elected Rhode Island governor, Bruce Sundlun, made Senator Whitehouse his legal counsel. Senator Whitehouse warned the governor he had no political network and did not know the building, and Sundlun said he would have plenty of people who knew their way around the building; what he needed in his lawyer was someone exclusively loyal to him. Senator Whitehouse negotiated room for a few early mistakes, got it, and the job later led to his appointment as U.S. Attorney. The Sundlun administration also inherited a collapsed state banking system and what Senator Whitehouse describes as the worst budget deficit any state had ever reported on a percentage basis, and Senator Whitehouse says the bonds forged working through that crisis have lasted more than 30 years and are, as he puts it, even closer than personal friendship.

Senator Whitehouse’s account of working across party lines centers on Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who famously brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to dispute climate science, and his fiercest opponent on the issue. During a hearing on an unrelated ocean plastics bill, Inhofe revealed he had spent boyhood nights on the Texas shore protecting baby sea turtles from cars, then asked to be an original co-sponsor. The bill passed by unanimous consent, which Senator Whitehouse credits to colleagues seeing him and Inhofe agree on something. Senator Whitehouse’s advice is that even with someone extremely oppositional on issues, you can look for that person’s sea turtle and figure out how to work together.

On leadership, Senator Whitehouse points to two former colleagues with opposite styles who were each effective on their own terms: Harry Reid, blunt and combative, a former amateur boxer from a rough Nevada town, and Ted Kennedy, friendly, loquacious, and garrulous. Part of leadership, Senator Whitehouse says, is simply being true to your own skill set: you can’t pretend to be Winston Churchill when you’re not.

What You’ll Learn

Protect your long-term reputation: Senator Whitehouse says DOJ lawyers enjoy a presumption of regularity in court, earned through decades of propriety, and gaining an edge in one case by playing dirty is not worth losing it.

Show respect before you ask for help: before entering the Senate race, Senator Whitehouse waited to see whether Representatives Patrick Kennedy and Jim Langevin wanted to run, and both endorsed him within about two weeks of his declaring.

Don’t worry too much about the job you’re given, Senator Whitehouse says: public utility regulation, the assignment no one else wanted when he was a new state lawyer, proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Persuade with simple words, knowledge, foresight, and persistence, Senator Whitehouse says, citing Churchill’s advice that short words are best and old words, when short, are best of all.

Avoid the habits that are fatal to leadership: Senator Whitehouse names lying, walking away from deals when things get tough, and repeating what was said in private.

Look for the fun as well as the drudgery: Senator Whitehouse’s community dinners, hot dogs in summer and pasta in veterans halls in winter, made him a much better candidate through all that exposure and let people see him in a natural setting.

About Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Sheldon Whitehouse is the United States Senator from Rhode Island, currently the Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a senior member of the Judiciary, Budget, and Finance Committees. He grew up around the world in a multigenerational Foreign Service family, living in Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, the Congo, Guinea, Laos, and Thailand. He graduated from Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, and after clerking on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, he joined the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office, later served as counsel to Governor Bruce Sundlun and as U.S. Attorney, and was elected Rhode Island’s Attorney General before winning his Senate seat in 2006.

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