Why Jim Sasser mattered

The long service of a gentleman

Whatever else the late Jim Sasser was in his long public life - U.S. Senator, counselor to Presidents, ambassador to China - my memories of him now are both a bridge to Tennessee’s prouder political past and a model for honorable service and in the future.

He was also my friend. If you did not know Jim before his death on Wednesday evening, there are two commendable obituaries published in the past 24 hours, and I hope you will read them both. See this in The New York Times. And also this one over on Tennessean.com which gives more personal memories from several of Sasser’s former staff members and other Tennesseans.

Jim Sasser, 1936-2024

This morning what I remember best are three of my own Sasser encounters over the years. The first was the day I met him on a downtown sidewalk, back in 1970. I was still in college and a young news reporter for The Tennessean, when Jim was helping manage the last re-election campaign of U.S. Senator Albert Gore Sr.

The other two occasions were a couple of personal interviews that Sasser granted me in his much later post-retirement years.

The first of these interviews was on a Sunday afternoon at the Vanderbilt Plaza hotel, where Jim and Mary Sasser were staying on a visit back to Nashville to visit family. (They were now living full-time in Chapel Hill, N.C., where Jim was a distinguished faculty member at the University of North Carolina.) On this day, Jim spoke with me at length of his recollections of the Senate years, in that era of greater courtesy and cooperation among Senators.

He shared, among other thoughts, his fond memories of working with Howard H. Baker Jr., his Republican senior Senate colleague from Tennessee. (Baker’s final Senate term overlapped with Sasser’s first term, so they served together for six years.)

“My father knew Howard’s father,” Jim said, “but I did not know Howard until we got to the Senate, and we always got along. When Howard became majority leader, he would sort of look after a lot of national interests, and he was thinking about running for president so would sort of handle the Tennessee end of it and Howard would handle the national end of things. When something came up for Tennessee that we needed, we would work together and get it done.

“Howard was very nice to me. We worked very well together in Washington. I respected him. I never saw Howard get angry; he was always genial. We never took a cheap shot at each other, cooperated always on Tennessee projects. There was no hostility that I was aware of. Partisanship was there on the elections, but not on the day-to-day basis.” Sasser also told me of evenings when he and Mary would dine out with Howard and Joy Baker.

Jim would serve eighteen years in the Senate. He became chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and was in line to become the Senate Majority Leader - as Baker had been in his day - if the Democrats had held the Senate majority for another term and Sasser been re-elected a fourth time. But Jim lost his re-election to Bill Frist, who in his own campaign statements had insisted that “Eighteen years is long enough.”

After that, President Clinton nominated Sasser to be the U.S. ambassador to China, a sensitive role for American diplomacy, and by all measures he accomplished that job with great distinction. (Read especially that Times obit for how well Sasser performed in that role.)

My final interview with Jim was in April of 2021 for A Sense of Justice, my biography of the late Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of Nashville. They had known each other as young lawyers and fellow Democratic activists, and Jim also spoke of his own long friendship with the Gores. These and other early family connections - through the final third of the 20th Century - would resonate down the years and become large in the political history of Tennessee and America.

And so would Jim Sasser.

© 2024 Keel Hunt