Citizen Mack: Politics, an Honorable Calling

By Connie Mack

A former US Senator looks back on his eighteen-year career in Washington, his battle with cancer, and his life after politics.

Citizen Mack: Politics, An Honorable Calling is former Republican US Senator Connie Mack III’s memoir, detailing his life in the world of Washington D.C. politics, and where that lead him afterwards. From his beginning as a member of the House of Representatives from Florida through the 80s, to his escalation to a Senator for the duration of the 90s, Mack offers an inside look into the political culture and climate of the nation as it closed out the twentieth century and progressed into the twenty first. Readers will experience a thorough and honest account of what the world of Washington looks like, from a man whom George W. Bush wanted as his running mate; who took part in the debate over one of the country’s most contentious Supreme Court Justice appointments; whose voice mattered when it came to deciding whether to remove President Bill Clinton from office, following his impeachment by the House. All this and more Mack recounts as a once-politician, now-citizen: Citizen Mack.

Praise for Citizen Mack

“Citizen Mack is the story of a life of public service—and a lot more. I was privileged to serve with Connie in the US Senate and can tell you his own service validates his belief that “politics is an honorable calling.” His leadership outside of politics—especially in the war on cancer—makes it equally clear that there is more to his life than politics.” —Joe Lieberman, Former US Senator

“When I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, then senator Connie Mack, whom I hardly knew, called me to say, “Don’t worry, Sam, I had the same thing, and I’m OK now—you will be too.” Can you imagine what that did for me? This wonderful man has helped people through a lifetime of selfless public service. Read his story, Citizen Mack, and consider how times have changed.” —Sam Donaldson, Former ABC News Anchor

“A wonderful book about more than politics. It is also the story of how Senator Mack and his wife, Priscilla, survived cancer and how she shed her careful cloak of privacy, joined the fight, and became an inspiration and a force in the Race for the Cure.” —Nancy G. Brinker, Founder of Susan G. Komen and Promise Fund of FL, Global Cancer Advocate, Consultant, and Three-Time US Ambassador

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781612544625

Book preview

Introduction

This book is a memoir. Not, exclusively, a political memoir, though I suspect that most readers will think of politics when they see my name. A few might think baseball, since my grandfather, with whom I share a name, was one of the great figures of the quintessentially American game.

But while my career in politics is what will be of interest to most readers, it is not the whole of my life. I was a member of the House of Representatives for six years and the US Senate for twelve. Not quite two decades, then, of my life were devoted, full time, to politics. Which seemed like enough when, in the year 2000, I turned down an offer from George W. Bush to join him on the Republican national ticket as his running mate. Vice President Mack had a nice ring to it, and like everyone in politics, I was not immune to ambition. But I wanted to become Citizen Mack once more.

There was plenty that I could do outside of Washington. There was, above all, the fight against cancer. This became the focus of my working life for the next two decades, and I gave myself over to that cause. I am as proud of my service in that cause as I am of the things that I accomplished during my time in Washington.

And, of course, I had a life before politics. I was a banker with an interest in the civic life of my community. I threw myself into the building of a hospital that the community desperately needed if it were to grow and thrive.

And, above all, I was—and am—a family man. And I should say here—and cannot say or stress enough—that I would never have been able to accomplish what I was able to without the love and support of my family: my wife, Priscilla, and my children, Debbie and Connie. It is impossible for me to express . . . what? The love? The gratitude? The debt? I feel all these things, and that doesn’t quite cover the whole of it. Words, it seems, are insufficient.

So there has been much more to my very full life than my career in politics, which some might even call brief by the standards of a time when politics has become a career for so many. I did not spend a lifetime in politics. Though there were times, certainly, when it felt that way.

And there were issues and votes that were critical and even unique in the history of our country, including one on whether or not to remove from office a president who had been impeached by the House of Representatives, something to which I have devoted a chapter of this book.

There have been fewer than two thousand members of the US Senate in its history and slightly fewer than seven hundred who have served in both the House and the Senate. So that vote was the rare experience for which the words awesome and unique are entirely appropriate.

And there were others.

During my time in the Senate, I took part in a debate over whether to grant President George H. W. Bush authority to employ the use of force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. This was just short of a formal declaration of war and something that, thankfully, not everyone who has served in the Senate has been obliged to face.

And then there was the debate over the confirmation of a president’s appointee to the Supreme Court that became, perhaps, the most contentious in American history. Until, at least, very recently.

There were many, many issues. There were several campaigns, one of which ended in one of those razor-thin outcomes that have become almost routine in Florida politics. It was eight days before the outcome of that election was formally declared. But at least it was not settled in the Supreme Court.

In my nearly twenty years in Washington, I worked with—and in many cases became close friends with—some of the great political figures of our time. John McCain and I were elected to the same freshman class in the House. I served with John in the Senate, and we were friends. Not long before writing these words, I attended memorial services for him in Arizona and Washington and then his funeral in Annapolis.

I served with Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and Jack Kemp, and they became close friends. As did Phil Gramm, Dan Coats, Joe Lieberman, and many others. Too many to list by name

I visited many other nations and met with their leaders. Maggie Thatcher. Boris Yeltsin. Bibi Netanyahu. Among others.

So while I did not spend a lifetime in politics, I had a very full—and fulfilling—political career. I hope I made a difference, and, in all humility, I believe that I did. How much of a difference will be for others to decide.

While I have been out of politics for a long time—almost two decades now—you never quite leave that world behind you. Not entirely, anyway. You go into politics in the first place because you want to serve and because you think you could make a difference—and, face it, because you have ambition—so you don’t simply turn all that off. You can’t.

It would be hard, these days, for anyone to ignore politics. Impossible, certainly, if you have devoted nearly twenty years of your time on earth to the nation’s political life.

As I write these words, the country is in the third year of the Trump presidency, and it seems the nation’s political temperature has spiked to nearly fever levels. Our debates are fierce, angry, and largely unresolved. I have stayed out of the public debates, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t follow them. I do. And like many of my countrymen, I find them—and the current political climate—troubling.

But, then, I also find myself taking time to read and to reflect on the fact that we have been here before.

My reading, for the last twenty years, has been devoted mostly to history and biography. That reading has provided me with both perspective and solace. While the times we live in may be troubled, they are hardly unique. As a nation and a people, we have been through some that were, in their way, just as bad. And some, indeed, that were worse.

Both recently and in the distant past.

Not long before writing these words, I attended a performance of the hit musical Hamilton. That musical is itself politically controversial, and it got me thinking about just how contentious our politics were when our new republic was struggling to create itself and survive.

Alexander Hamilton—one of the leading political figures of his day—was, after all, shot and killed by a political rival who was later accused of treason.

America remained a free republic despite the strains.

And then there was the feud between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and accusations of a stolen election. Then an election that was, if not stolen, certainly manipulated to the disadvantage of Andrew Jackson, who came back four years later to win the first of two terms. Jackson was—to use a term that is routinely applied to Donald Trump—disruptive. And that word may be a little soft in describing Jackson’s presidency and the forces it unleashed. This was populism, tooth and claw, yet the nation survived and went on to expand and accomplish great things . . . until 1861.

The bitterness and antagonism over the issue of slavery were, perhaps, destined to result in the Civil War—still, and by far, the nation’s greatest calamity. Some seven hundred thousand dead, which would translate to more than four million if the same proportion of today’s population were to be killed.

And then there was the assassination of President Lincoln, who had spoken of the better angels of our nature and of a healing that would require malice toward none and charity toward all.

That future must have seemed very far away at best and a ludicrous fantasy at worst. Still, history doesn’t stop, and the life of the nation went on. And that life included, for the first time, the impeachment of a president who survived conviction in the Senate by just one vote. I participated in a similar roll-call vote in the Senate more than a century later. The nation survived. Both times.

As it survived the Great Depression and World War II.

With unemployment of some 25 percent, there were serious people who believed that the Great Depression proved free market capitalism was doomed and that the United States would move to socialism. Or worse.

If, as some believe, it was war that brought the economy out of the Depression, then the cure might have been worse—and more threatening—than the disease. While it may now seem that the outcome of that conflict was inevitable, it didn’t appear that way when England was on its knees or when the German army was within sight of the spires of Moscow or when the United States Marines were down to a single operational fighter plane on the island of Guadalcanal.

This is all history that I know through my reading and that I reflect upon when the news of the day is especially troubling. You begin to wonder just how bad things might get and how badly they might end.

And then there is the history that I don’t need to read about in books because I have lived through it. As I write in this memoir, like many of my generation, I was inspired by the eloquence of John F. Kennedy, and I took to heart his famous call to action: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Kennedy was assassinated. His death was followed by the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggles, rioting in many American cities, and more assassinations—first of Martin Luther King Jr. and then of John Kennedy’s brother Robert.

There was a feeling among many, during those times, that their country was coming apart.

This was the America of my twenties.

By the time I began to think seriously about leaving my career in banking in order to run for Congress, the country had been through perhaps its greatest political scandal and crisis. Richard Nixon might easily have been the second president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives if he hadn’t resigned the office first.

While the nation steadied itself politically after the Watergate scandal, its economic future looked, at the very least . . . problematic. And we had leaders—President Carter among them—who were saying that Americans would need to get accustomed to an age of limits.

And that is where I came in, halfway through Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. A term he might not have completed, in fact, if an assassin’s bullet had traveled just an inch or so in a different direction.

When I was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives, unemployment was higher than it had been at any time since the Great Depression, and the Cold War had never been colder. Or, perhaps, hotter. Nuclear war was considered a real possibility, and the nuclear winter that followed it would, scientists told us, result in the death of millions, if not of the planet itself.

All this is a way of saying that, as a nation, we are not unaccustomed to political crises and to other challenges of all sorts. To say that the United States of America is a lucky nation or that it has a way of muddling through crises is a sort of cynical way of shrugging off our history. There was nothing lucky or serendipitous about the outcome of the Civil War, which was, in brute fact, a defining moment that came down to the essential character and the survival of the nation.

So, what has made it possible for this nation to survive these challenges and to preserve what Lincoln called the last best hope of earth?

It was, I firmly believe, the character of the American people and their commitment, above all, to freedom.

There are several times when the phrase freedom is the core of all human progress appears in this book. These are words that I used over and over during my political career. My conviction that they are profoundly and permanently true guided many of the decisions I made on the issues.

Free people will struggle to find the right path because . . . well, there is no better alternative. No king, dictator, or all-powerful state will do it for them. They can’t duck or hide. The challenges must be faced. By them.

So there will be debate and struggle and conflict. These are inevitable.

When I was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, unemployment in the United States was running above 10 percent. The Soviets were in Afghanistan, and the United States appeared to be in retreat around the world.

I joined some other newcomers in Congress who believed that the challenge these things represented could be met and overcome. We were the young Turks of our time, and we organized ourselves into something called the Conservative Opportunity Society. At first, we were dismissed in the press, by senior congressional leadership, and among Washington insiders as both extreme and irrelevant. A decade or so later, the Republican Party, to which we belonged, held a majority in the House of Representatives, where one of our COS members, Newt Gingrich, had been elected Speaker.

The American economy had, in the meantime, recovered and boomed. And the Soviet Union, which had ground freedom down into the dirt—and had demoralized and enslaved its people when it wasn’t killing them—was no more.

All that did happen. I was there, and the part that I played is detailed in this book. And the lesson I learned and want to share is that actually, it didn’t just happen. It took work and commitment, and there were false starts and dead ends and failures along with the triumphs and successes.

And that story should, I think, work to reassure people worried about the state of American politics and the future of the country. I believe that as long as we remain committed to freedom, we will deal successfully with whatever challenges we find ourselves facing. It will not be easy. Just as it wasn’t during my time in public life. Successes and victories will be impermanent. As will setbacks and defeats.

The answer to these challenges is to heed the counsel of Winston Churchill and never give up.

Freedom is hard work. Free people must think and do for themselves, and they will, inevitably, make mistakes. But as long as they remain free, they can make corrections and repair the damage and move on to better things.

If there is reason to be troubled by the current political scene, it is in the willingness of some to give up on freedom. We are told that the answer to our various troubles is not more freedom, but less. More spending. Bigger government. Socialism.

All of which means . . . less freedom.

This is the nature of our political struggle today, and while there is reason for concern, it would be wrong and cowardly to despair. Free people don’t give up or give in. They take strength from the example of people like John McCain, whose experience as a prisoner of war was brutal almost beyond belief, as was his courage in resisting. He never gave up, and he stayed in the fight until the very last days of his life.

The hard work of freedom pays off in the end. The struggle is both unavoidable and worth it. My years in politics confirmed this for me again and again. The lesson of this book is that the political life is a worthy one. That neither victories nor defeats are permanent, and that the cause of freedom is eternal and worth the struggle.

This is true for both senators and citizens.

CM

A Death in the Family

My career in politics began when I was in my early forties and decided to run for Congress. I’d never run for any political office before. The extent of my political activism had, to that point in my life, consisted of membership in a Young Democrats organization and eventually being elected president of the group. Like so many in my generation, I’d been inspired by the eloquence and the energy of John F. Kennedy. When he said, Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country, I felt like he was talking to me.

But that had been in the ’60s.

These were the ’80s. Twenty years later. I now had a family and a career, and I was deeply involved with community organizations and projects, like the building of a hospital. I’d been in charge of that effort, and we had raised the money and built the hospital from the ground up, and I felt proud of what I considered a very important effort. But I felt the urge to do something larger, the way I had back when I’d first heard that Ask not . . . speech. But the times were different, and while I was hearing the same essential message, it was being delivered by a new messenger.

I was listening to Ronald Reagan, and I believed in what he was saying about how the country had gotten off the tracks and that it was time for a renewal of the American spirit. I had also listened to Jimmy Carter, who had introduced into the American psyche the idea that we would have to learn to live with limits, to stop expecting that we would grow more prosperous from one generation to the next, and that the way to deal with this would be to bring into Washington additional, even wiser bureaucrats to make decisions about how to allocate our limited resources. My view was that the only limit we had to deal with was the limit of our own imagination.

I might not have decided to act on these beliefs, even though I felt them deeply, if it had not been for the death of my brother Michael, who had been diagnosed with melanoma when he was twenty-three years old and a senior at the University of Florida’s law school. The cancer had first appeared on his scalp, so he was unaware of it until it had grown to the point where he felt it when he combed his hair. By then, it had metastasized.

I can still remember when I got the call and he told me that it was a malignant melanoma and that there was lymph involvement on that side of his body in his neck. I was young, a little more than two years older than Mike, and at the time, I didn’t really know what that diagnosis meant. But I learned.

Like most people back then, when I heard the word cancer, my first thought was that it was a death sentence. But Michael was a fighter. His attitude from beginning to end was that he was going to beat this thing, and he was so positive and upbeat that he raised the spirits of people around him. Including me.

The first step would be surgery, and the word the doctors used when they described the operation was radical. They would be taking out most of the jawbone on one side of his face along with a lot of the tissue around it. But as they got further along, they found they could remove less than that. Michael went through the surgery and didn’t lose too much bone, though he did lose a lot of flesh to make sure the margins were clear. I didn’t know what that meant when I first heard it, but I learned. Again and again.

With the surgery behind him, Michael went back to living his life. He finished law school, first in his class with high honors. Our brother Dennis had graduated second in his class, a year earlier, with honors. Michael aimed to top that, and he had succeeded, and he had gone on to practice law, raise a family, and live a life. Meanwhile, the same doctors who had been talking like he had six months to live after the first diagnosis were now saying that it looked like the cancer was in remission. They were cautious and careful to remind him that the cancer might be hiding and could come back at any time, but Michael was so upbeat and optimistic that it was infectious. The rest of us began believing that he had beaten it, and we got on with our lives like it was all behind us. Then, one day, I got another bad-news phone call. Five years or so after that first diagnosis, the cancer was back.

I was stunned, but he was the same old Michael and he was going to beat it. He brought my spirits up again.

But this time, it was much tougher and harder to see, or even expect, any light at the end of the tunnel. Still, Michael wouldn’t let himself get down, so none of us—friends and family—were allowed to get down either. He never lost that sense of optimism. Maybe the most upset and angry I ever saw him during the whole time was when he got a letter from his insurance company that described him as terminal.

He was really hot and saying things like, "I will be the one to decide when my case is terminal. Not some insurance company. And my case is not terminal." He followed through with a letter to the insurance company telling them that it was insupportable and unforgivable to tell one of their clients who was fighting for his life that his condition was terminal. I believe they definitely got the message.

But most of the time Mike was in good spirits, even as the treatments became more and more difficult—especially the chemo—and the cancer spread through his body. He even managed to find ways to face his situation with something like humor. Mike played the piano by ear and had a good singing voice, and sometimes when people were around, he would play and sing that song from the movie M*A*S*H with the lyrics suicide is painless. Black humor, I suppose. Something to relieve the tension.

Michael, Dennis, and I had always been close, and as his condition got worse, we became even closer. We talked about things that people our age—especially men—don’t really like to talk about. But there was a sense that Michael was learning important things and that he wanted to share them, so Dennis and I learned along with him.

He was good at finding ways to talk about what he was going through without taking it head on. We had planned a skiing trip out to Colorado one year, but by then, Michael was in so much pain and his shoulder had become so terribly swollen from the cancer that he simply couldn’t take the ordeal of travel. But he wouldn’t let Dennis and me back out. He didn’t just want us to go; he insisted on it.

So we did, and before we left, Michael and I had this conversation where he started talking about how when you go down one of those black diamond trails and you’re coming into a mogul field, the worst thing you can do is to give in to your fear and hold back. The way to stay upright and get through is to keep your weight out over your skis and to just go for it.

He wasn’t really talking about skiing, of course, and I got it. There were many conversations like that, and while I don’t remember all of them, I know what he was trying to tell me, and I believe that I learned. One of the many things I learned from Michael is that when you are coming up on something that makes you afraid, something that just immobilizes you, what you have to do is keep going and fight through the fear. It is an old lesson, but when you are with someone who is actually living it, the way Michael was, that drives it home. It was a lesson that I never forgot and that came back to help me get through my own moments of fear and doubt later on.

Being with Michael through those times, helping when I could—and feeling that awful sense of helplessness when I couldn’t—brought us even closer. And almost inevitably, I began thinking and asking myself questions that I hadn’t thought about, or had time for, up to that point in my life. These were the obvious questions, and they can be made to sound trite. But when a loved one is going through what Michael was enduring—and you are face to face with it—those questions don’t seem trite at all.

So we discussed the meaning and purpose of existence here on earth. You ask yourself, Why am I here? Why am I doing what I’m doing? And you ask yourself if perhaps you should be doing something else with your life. Something larger.

Those things were on my mind. But I was doing all I could for Michael and also keeping up with my responsibilities to my career and my family, so I never had time to really explore those questions and come up with answers. I expect most people go through the same thing.

But I did, finally, take some time away to go off by myself for a few days.

My friend Gary Hudson and I owned a boat together. He was a good friend, and he and Michael were as close as you could get. Most people who live in Florida will, sooner or later, own a boat, and ours was a thirty-two-foot cruising yawl that had been built in South Freeport, Maine. It was a wooden boat and it was in pretty bad shape when we bought it. What we paid for was basically a good diesel engine. The seller threw the hull, mast, sails, and everything else in free. We named the boat Great Potential.

Gary and I worked on the boat over many weekends for a couple of years. It was berthed in a canal behind my house in Cape Coral, Florida, and he would come over with his family on weekends. Our kids would play in the pool and fish in the canal while we worked on the boat, sanding and painting like there was no tomorrow, and at the end of the day, we’d cook hamburgers on the grill and sit with our wives, visiting and talking. It was a lot of fun, and we wound up with a boat we could take out for cruises, sometimes going as far as the Keys or even the Bahamas.

My getaway trip would be for a week, and that was probably the longest the boat had been out since Gary and I bought it and started fixing it up. I would be alone with my thoughts, of course, and some reading material I had brought with me from the bank where I was president. It was the usual sort of business stuff about how to make your time count for more and your organization more efficient. Not deep reading, by any means, but I thought I might want something to occupy my mind when I got tired of my own thoughts.

So I left the dock one morning and cruised the intracoastal to an area called Johnson’s Shoals off La Costa Island, where I dropped anchor in a little protected harbor. I spent the next six days there, and I’m sure it was the longest stretch of being alone I’ve spent in my entire life. I did a little fishing. Some shelling and a little jogging on the beach. I listened to a lot of music—James Taylor and some Willie Nelson, I seem to remember, because those were Michael’s favorites and he was listening to them a lot in those days. I did a little reading in that material I’d brought along with me, and I think that actually got my thinking started along a path that went a lot further than just what steps you need to take to make more efficient use of your time in business.

I was thinking about what I wanted out of my time on earth, however much I had left of it.

I wrote down a lot of things as I was doing this. I remember I made a list of several objectives—five of them, I think—that I wanted to accomplish in my life. These were things that went beyond what I wanted to achieve in business. I remember that learning a new language and learning to play a musical instrument were both on that list. Politics, in some form, was also on that list.

My thinking, as I was out there alone on that boat, went more and more in the direction of, What do I want to do with my life? What do I really want to accomplish? And, as trite as the phrase has come to sound, I asked myself how I could make a difference. The idea of doing something in politics kept coming up in my mind. No specific plan. Just the notion that this was a place in life where I might be able to put whatever skills and talents I had to some good use.

No great sunburst appeared to me over the horizon. No definitive answers. I may have prayed while I was out there, but I’m not sure. This was very early along my road of spiritual development, and most of the thoughts I had in that line were about Michael and praying for his recovery and that he might find some relief from his suffering.

I cut my time alone out there on that boat short by a day. Instead of a week, I spent six days. But I certainly didn’t come back empty handed.

Not very long after that—a matter of a few weeks—Michael went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. By now, his situation was dire, and he wanted to try a new, radical treatment. He was in severe pain all the time and moving just made it worse. But he was determined.

So I took him. It was tough getting through the Atlanta airport and to the hospital. He was in intense pain, and if the flight attendant on the plane just brushed against his shoulder, it was agony.

We made it, finally, and got Michael into his room, and they scheduled him for tests before the experimental surgery. He had to be moved to another part of the hospital where they did the tests, and he was too weak to walk or even to get out of bed. So several orderlies came to the room to move the bed, with Michael in it. Any kind of movement—even the slightest jostling—was excruciating to Michael by this time, but the bed was big and the room was small. It was impossible to move Michael and the bed without jostling him, and every time that happened you could see in his face how much pain it was causing him. So I got frustrated, and the orderlies got impatient, and it was becoming a very unpleasant and tense scene. Then Michael raised his head up from the pillow—just a little, but as far, probably, as he could—and said, Now fellows, let’s all calm down here. I’m OK. Just take it easy and we’ll all get through this.

I think everybody in that room, just then, would have done anything for him. We were certainly able to get that wide bed through a narrow door without jostling him and causing him any more pain.

The news that came back from the tests was that the cancer had spread throughout his body and that his prognosis was . . . hopeless. But Michael still wouldn’t give in. He insisted on the surgery and he went through with it.

When it was done, we got him back into his room at the hospital and Dennis and I began taking shifts to be with him. One of us was always there, night and day, while the other one was back at the motel room. We didn’t know how long it would go on like this, but the doctors were telling us it wouldn’t be long.

My parents came up from their home in Florida, and one day, while they were there, I saw my father in the corridor, and I could tell from his look that he had bad news. It was the only kind of news we were hearing at that time, and I didn’t know just how much worse it could get.

I just talked to the doctors, my father said, and he explained that Michael had developed pneumonia.

It won’t be much longer.

So from then on, I spent as much time with Michael, in his room, as I possibly could. Just sort of hanging on to every minute, I suppose, and trying to do anything I possibly could for Michael, even though there really wasn’t very much I could do.

He was wearing a mask by that time and breathing pure oxygen through it. That would dry out his mouth and lips and make him thirsty. So every so often, I would lift the mask up and moisten his