I really want to do something that is worth looking back on and that I can be proud of in the years ahead. —DANFORTH, SENATE DIARY
Jack Danforth’s voice precedes him. I can hear it through the wall as I wait in the 19th-floor conference room of Dowd Bennett, the Clayton law firm where he is a partner: that polite basso that over the course of half a century intoned in the U.S. Senate, the United Nations, and Washington National Cathedral; the voice of Republican moderation, of civility, of noblesse oblige, of a lawyer-cum-Episcopal-minister known with affection (and some eye-rolls) as “St. Jack”; that rare conservative voice on cable TV willing to criticize the Christian right, Donald Trump, and even his own onetime protégé, Sen. Josh Hawley; the voice that Danforth’s beloved GOP now seems to tune out. He lumbers in and grins. We shake hands.
Danforth is 84 and still stands well over 6 feet, yet his eyes have softened at the edges. In a phone call before this interview, he learned that my research had led me to his archived papers at the State Historical Society of Missouri—there are 377 boxes in all—to which he’d muttered, “Sounds like you have a grotesque project ahead of you.” But when we meet, he’s pleased to discuss his legacy—both the bright spots and darker ones. He settles into a swivel chair with a bottle of water and a cup of green tea.
Behind him, out the window to the east, a distant downtown rises at the end of a lush carpet of treetops. Somewhere in that skyline is the headquarters of Nestlé Purina, successor to Ralston Purina, the animal-feed and cereal giant founded by Jack’s grandfather, William H. Danforth. Somewhere under those treetops is the campus named after Jack’s late brother, Bill, a longtime chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Somewhere just to the southeast of us is the collegiate-gothic house in Clayton where these brothers grew up with their other siblings, Dotty and Don Jr. And to the northwest, out of view, is the research hub and startup incubator bearing the name of their father: The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.
Jack’s footprint is visible from here, too: Below us, for example, runs the MetroLink system that he championed in the Senate early on. But that’s only a slice of his legacy—and only the physical kind. For decades, in speeches, sermons, books, op-eds, and TV appearances, Danforth has offered a variety of diagnoses and prescriptions to America. America doesn’t always seem to listen. He has long called for closing the budget deficit; it’s now at its highest level since World War II, and voters in neither party list it as a high priority. He laments the reemergence of populism; it’s thriving on both sides. He has warned against viewing political opponents as enemies; negative partisanship is soaring, and the Missouri GOP’s 2022 Senate hopefuls are trampling each other to show they won’t back down to the “radical left.”
His most consistent theme, though, has been that religion can unify the country. He insists that it’s possible—necessary, even—for the faithful to participate in politics while honoring the separation of church and state. In 2009, he set up the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Wash. U. with a $30 million endowment from the now-dissolved Danforth Foundation. It appears to be the nation’s first. Currently, it has eight full-time faculty and offers a minor degree to undergraduates; a major curriculum is in the works, and its events pack the university’s chapel. Still, these are early days for the center. Its ultimate impact remains to be seen.
So I ask Danforth about the impact of various other initiatives, decisions, and pieces of legislation: Did they have the effect he’d hoped for? And over and over, in between sips of water, his answer is the same: “I don’t know.”
This astonishes me. How could Jack Danforth not know whether he made a difference? Isn’t that why he got into politics? Maybe there’s a mundane explanation: That time and age have removed him from it. Or maybe he’s honoring his grandfather’s dictum to “serve humbly.” Or maybe he doesn’t need to know because the Danforth fortune has insulated him from the consequences of his public service. Or maybe he doesn’t want to know, for fear of second-guessing and regret.
So I ask him, in essence: How do you spend your whole life swinging at pitches, connect with the ball over and over, and yet never look to see where the ball went?
He is silent, reclined in his chair, brow furrowed. He sits up straight, plunks his bottle hard onto the table, sinks back into his chair. For 29 long seconds, he says nothing.
It would be very easy to be a demagogue and to take on the very hot issues...and just get on the popular side of everything, and I could probably last forever if I did that. But it is just not worth doing. —DANFORTH, SENATE DIARY
In late January 2006, Danforth traveled to Yale Law School as a distinguished alumnus to give a lecture. During his stay, he attended a dinner party where the school’s dean seated him next to a promising third-year student from Missouri: Josh Hawley. Hawley was 26 years old and already had a book about Teddy Roosevelt in the works. He was active in Yale’s chapter of the Federalist Society. As Danforth remembers it, the young man showed an interest in the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville and the role that communities (as opposed to individuals) play in determining what’s true and good. Danforth was “very, very taken” with this young Christian conservative. Hawley went on after graduation to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts and to practice at a religious-liberty advocacy firm. They stayed in touch. (Hawley did not respond to SLM’s interview requests.)
In 2016, when Hawley ran for Missouri attorney general, he aired a TV ad attacking “career politicians just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” He won—and within seven months, he formed an exploratory committee to run for Senate. Some national Republican heavyweights had reportedly urged him to do this. Locally, Danforth and other members of Missouri’s old guard publicly called on Hawley to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill. “We respect your reluctance to become a candidate,” they wrote in a letter dated July 20, 2017, “[but] you have the training and ability to be a leading voice for the constitutional order...”
Yet a few weeks later, Danforth complicated matters by publishing a sensational anti-Trump broadside, “Why Trump is Not a Republican,” in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. This put Hawley in a tight spot. The GOP was split between Trumpist and establishment factions, so folks began to wonder: Which side was Hawley on? Somehow, he managed to win over sufficient numbers on both sides. Danforth, for his part, gave money to the campaign and encouraged other donors to do so. Hawley prevailed in November 2018.
Danforth recalls sending him a congratulatory letter afterward, telling Hawley that he could become an intellectual leader in the Senate on the order of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York. Yet in a phone call around that time, Danforth says, Hawley struck an “aggressive” tone, declaring his independence from party elders. Their communication, according to Danforth, dwindled to nothing.
Then came the November 2020 election. After losing the White House, Trump pushed the narrative that the election had been rigged. In court after court, scores of judges ruled against his legal challenges. But Trump seized on the idea that the tide could decisively turn on January 6, at the joint session of Congress dedicated to certifying electoral votes—an event that’s usually a formality. He began promoting a D.C. rally set for that date. With a week to go, Hawley announced that he would formally object to the certification. He was the first senator to do so. Trump was elated. He and Hawley and others took to using the Twitter hashtag #JAN6.
Unlike Trump, Hawley wasn’t alleging fraud, per se, only that Pennsylvania had not followed its own constitution in handling its mail-in ballots. He justified his move by pointing to Missourians’ concerns about election integrity. Yet Hawley never acknowledged that he himself may have stoked those concerns by voicing his own: on Twitter, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, in a Senate hearing. He decried ballot harvesting and filed a bill to ban it. Then he hyped January 6. Just a few days before, he wrote on Twitter, “Glad to see more senators joining the fight on #JAN6,” and then, 10 minutes later, “It’s time to STAND UP,” to which Trump replied, “So true. Thanks Josh!” On Fox News, host Bret Baier pressed Hawley: “Are you trying to say that as of January 20, that Trump will be president?” Hawley’s response: “Well, Bret, that depends on what happens on Wednesday.”
Danforth spent January 6 at his winter home near Palm Springs, California. He watched his television in horror as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. At one point, they banged on a door leading to a hideaway office for senior senators that he himself once occupied. He also saw the now-iconic photo snapped earlier that day: Hawley, a half-hour before the first barricade breach, raising his fist in solidarity with several hundred protesters outside the Capitol.
The next morning, Danforth started speaking out. He told several media outlets that supporting Hawley was the worst mistake of his life. He doubted that Hawley had foreknowledge of the violence but insisted that the junior senator, a constitutional lawyer, knew better than to promote January 6 as decisive. Hawley created a powder keg, Danforth said, and lit the match.
I ask Danforth: Do you think Hawley evolved, or had he always been the same person and you failed to see it? Danforth shrugs; he doesn’t know. Then I ask: Did this experience make you hesitant to help future rising stars in the GOP? He chuckles, describes his recent track record as “awful,” and says, “For now, I’m not gonna do anything.”
Professor Marie Griffith, who directs the Center on Religion and Politics at Wash. U., points out that Danforth has always been an admirable and powerful man—both as a politician and a member of a philanthropic family. “Powerful people get flattered,” she says, “and I think that’s created challenges for Jack. When so many people are out there flattering you, it can be difficult to have your radar up all the time and distinguish your true friends from the phonies.”
Danforth - Country Day
JOHN C. DANFORTH PAPERS (CA5455); THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI RESEARCH CENTER-COLUMBIA
Most kids enjoy sports. I enjoyed arguments. —DANFORTH, FAITH AND POLITICS
Ten-year-old Jack Danforth peered down onto the Senate floor, thinking: This is what I want to do. It was 1947. He was visiting D.C. with his family. He had no idea what the senators were up to. As they walked out, his father said, “What a bunch of windbags.” But the boy was intrigued.
Just as well: He burned to play baseball but felt like a “gangling klutz.” The boys at Country Day School, which he attended through high school, teased him for that, and for the white patch in his hair. Yet he earned the nickname “Senator” partly by excelling in public debate at school assemblies—and even then, he took the Republican stance. What stirred him were ideas, says childhood friend Walter Diggs, not so much the horse race: “He was interested in the right and wrong of policy.” Diggs noticed another pattern during sleepovers at the Danforths’: Your breakfast cereal had to be Ralston Purina.
By that time, Jack’s grandfather, who donned checkerboard suits to honor the family company’s logo, had not only built a business empire but also published the popular self-help book I Dare You!, in which he called on readers to “Aspire nobly, adventure daringly, and serve humbly.” In birthday letters from grandpa, Jack would read the private family slogan: “Cast no stigma on the Danforth escutcheon.”
He risked doing so in his freshman year at Princeton, which he admits was boozy. At a house party back home in St. Louis, while his friends boasted of their drinking, Danforth found some glass gallons of milk in the kitchen, set them on a table, stood over everyone and exhorted them to drink up to support Missouri farmers. One girl at the party found that performance a little weird but charming: Sally Dobson, who happened to live a few houses away from the Danforths. They fell in love and made the almost unheard-of decision to marry while Jack was still at Princeton (after securing permission from the university).
As a religion major, Danforth felt a calling to the Episcopal priesthood. He pursued a graduate degree at Yale Divinity School. But once in New Haven, he discovered that he lacked the mind of a theologian and the personality of a pastor. He still went through with ordination but earned a second degree in law. After a few years doing tax law at a white-shoe Wall Street firm, Danforth moved with his wife and young daughters back home to a house in Creve Coeur. He practiced at the downtown firm known today as Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, but again, he yearned for something else. He finished a multi-week criminal trial, and then, at age 31, he threw his hat in the ring for Missouri attorney general.
He wasn’t supposed to win. Democrats had held every statewide office for 23 years. Sally didn’t even want him to; she had just given birth to their fourth child. “I’d be out campaigning,” Danforth recalls, “and I’d come home late at night, and she’d be in bed in the dark. And I have this vivid memory: She said, ‘You’re working so hard, I’m afraid you’re going to win.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t have a chance.’”
He was wrong. Republican watch parties had long been exercises in stoicism, but the party at The Chase Park Plaza after Danforth’s upset win in 1968 was raucous. “They were beside themselves with joy,” Danforth would later write, “shouting and whistling, pounding me on the back. Then I saw, sitting on the edge of the stage, her head down with sorrow, the love of my life, literally floored by shock at the victory, disappointment that we would leave St. Louis, and postpartum blues.” The next day, Jack and Sally agreed on a plan: He would serve one term, then walk away from politics.
But four years in elected office have a way of turning into 26 if you’re good at it—so good they end up calling you the “father” of Missouri’s modern Republican Party.
Danforth came to Jefferson City as a good-government warrior. Over eight years, he and his staff would win the removal of a sheriff in Pemiscot County for not enforcing vice laws and of a prosecutor in Texas County for accepting bribes. They would raid sex-work facilities near Ft. Leonard Wood and file environmental and consumer litigation.
Upon arrival, Danforth’s primary target was what he called the “spoils system”—a network of special assistant attorneys general spread throughout the state who received stipends but, Danforth argued, were mostly expected to provide political support for their boss rather than legal work for Missourians. He swapped out the stipends for full-time staff salaries, held onto the most talented Democrats in the office, and began recruiting talent.
It wasn’t an easy sell. His assistants toiled in the basement of the Missouri Supreme Court, which often flooded. Danforth promised them low pay for hard work but also opportunities beyond their experience levels. Thus he amassed in Jeff City a platoon of fresh-faced Republicans in suits. They included a future governor and U.S. senator (Christopher “Kit” Bond), a future governor and U.S. attorney general (John Ashcroft), and a future chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (Al Sikes). He even hired a young Democrat and future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas).
For Danforth himself, the AG post proved the perfect vehicle for making good on his Country Day moniker: In 1976, he won the election to the U.S. Senate. One headline declared: “Danforth Being Watched For Bigger Things.”
It is a job in which I tend to lose on the issues and it is terribly interesting and a whale of a lot of fun. —DANFORTH, SENATE DIARY
On January 3, 1977, Danforth pressed the record button and dictated the first words of his oral Senate diary: “I arrived at the office at about 7:30 a.m. The office was closed… We had to call security for the key. It took them a while to get there, during which time we waited around in the hallway.” All of the poetry you’d expect from a tax-lawyer-turned-prosecutor. But over the next seven years, his tape recorder—which he’d reach for at day’s end, in his office or in his Mercedes steering homeward—would become a repository of feelings that the buttoned-down Danforth rarely let the public see.
The 40-year-old junior senator took note of “the exceptional cordiality” of his colleagues; of the attendants in the Senate gym’s locker room who tried to towel off his back after a shower; of the hectic schedule in which he had to vote on things without any time to consider them; of the all-night sessions during which he’d snooze in the Republican cloakroom. The Senate “is the most childish operation in the world,” he vented in October of that first year. “It is really a prima donna’s dream.”
Danforth watched his own philosophical purity founder on the shoals of reality. He voted for an ethics bill that he panned in his diary as “foolish” because a “nay” vote would’ve been “impossible to explain” to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He engaged in logrolling, or voting as an exchange of legislative favors rather than on the merits, though didn’t “feel particularly good about it.” He gave a “yea” vote to a public works program that he considered wrong-headed because, as a measure to bring jobs to Missouri, it was better than nothing. “I paid absolutely no attention to broader public questions,” he lamented in that situation, “my exclusive concern was what was in it for the State of Missouri… I’m not sure that I feel exactly like Mr. Statesman...”
But in 1978, Danforth did take a stand on principle that enraged Missourians—and may’ve been the least popular of his career. At issue were proposed treaties to transfer control of the Panama Canal, built by the U.S. in the early 1900s, back to Panama. Conservatives saw this as a squandering of national pride and sovereignty, and they let him know: About 20,000 constituent letters flowed in opposing the treaty, with only 500 supporting it. But Danforth did his homework. He flew to Panama with a Senate delegation, looked Panamanians in the eye, and noted their intense national pride. On a helicopter ride, he gazed down at the verdant, manicured lawns of the homes inside the Canal Zone, and just outside of it, the sprawling slums, and thought: How much longer do we want to defend this? Back in Washington, Danforth spoke to a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said that the top brass supported the treaties and that, if they weren’t signed, terrorism and violence against Americans would likely follow. So Danforth made up his mind: He would vote for the treaties.
After he announced it, his office phones rattled; some callers were abusive. “I really feel as though I’m at the bottom of the barrel right now,” he recorded. He would later face an icy reception from his right flank back home and outright hostility at town hall meetings (one man in Dallas County called him a traitor to his face). But Danforth tried to let it go. “It is a pretty sad existence, I think, for a politician to just fret forever about his own popularity and about his own ability to win the next election,” he recorded. “There is a kind of a sense of abandon about doing what you know is right.”
This high road, of course, was no refuge from the teasing of Missouri’s senior senator, Tom Eagleton, who called Danforth “Panama Jack” ever after. Eagleton was a Democrat but ended up being one of his best friends in the Senate; other Democratic friends included Moynihan, who addressed Danforth as “Your Eminence,” and Russell Long of Louisiana, who once draped his arm around Danforth and, according to the diary, “said that in about 15 years, I will be a great senator, but he has never seen anyone who is so tenacious about some very bad ideas.”
JOHN C. DANFORTH PAPERS (CA5455); SHSMO-COLUMBIA
Danforth came to relish a principled fight on the floor, even if defeat was certain. This trait, along with his diligence and open-mindedness, won him respect in the Senate, observed his chief of staff and best friend since childhood, Alexander Netchvolodoff, in an internal memo typed up in 1980. But, his friend wrote, “There are those on the Hill that do regard you as a bit too quixotic.” Netchvolodoff pointed out another weakness: Danforth had thin skin. “The public does not give a person with your talent, blessings, and responsibility—no matter how outrageous the provocation or difficult the task—any sympathy,” he wrote. “You must learn to live without it...”
And indeed, the blessings abounded: Danforth’s financial disclosure in 1978 revealed family holdings of at least $7.3 million (the equivalent of $24 million today), suggesting that he was among the nation’s wealthiest senators. (“It is a little bit embarrassing to be talking about how much money you have,” he confided to his tape recorder.) Ralston Purina stock accounted for much of that wealth, though his portfolio was in a blind trust. Some on Capitol Hill reportedly called him “Dog Chow Jack.”
But if there was any notion of Danforth as an aristocrat dabbling in politics, he dispelled it. In 1981, Ronald Reagan took the White House and Republicans the Senate, allowing Danforth to slide over to the chairmanship of the Senate’s potent trade subcommittee. That body “was the most active and aggressive focal point on trade in Congress in the 1980s,” says I.M. Destler, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the author of a book on that decade’s U.S. trade policy. Danforth, he says, “was a primary player. He certainly had an impact.”
Danforth voiced a frustration that decades later would find an echo in Trumpism: that the playing field of global trade was tilted against America. It may’ve been tolerable, Danforth conceded, that amid the smoldering ruins of World War II and the worldwide fight against Communism, the U.S. would nurture its allies’ economies. But by the 1980s, a cattle farmer in the Show-Me State could only dream of wide-open access to the Japanese beef market but could easily find a Toyota for sale—all while Missouri’s own auto plants, as well as shoe factories, were hemorrhaging jobs or shuttering.
Danforth’s solution was neither protectionism (favored by the Left) nor laissez-faire economics (favored by Reaganites). He urged a middle way that he called “fair trade,” in which everyone would play by the same rules. To achieve it, Danforth enshrined into law certain mechanisms aimed at “reciprocity”—the idea that the U.S. won’t allow access to its own market unless a trading partner offers the same amount of overall access in return.
“Now it’s taken for granted,” says Susan Schwab, who served as U.S. trade representative under President George W. Bush. “But truth be told, Danforth was at the beginning of that.” In a 1986 profile, The New York Times called the Missourian “not only the Senate’s heavy hitter on trade but its heavy thinker.”
Schwab worked for years as Danforth’s legislative assistant—a job that afforded her a seat at the policymaking table but also entailed “pretty pathetic” pay and long nights. Some nights, though, Danforth would lead bleary-eyed aides to the Senate dining room for bean soup. He asked about their lives and insisted they call him “Jack.” “I was once told by a senior staffer in [Long’s] office that the only way you can really measure a senator’s character is how they treat their staff, because everyone else they have to be nice to,” Schwab says. “And Sen. Danforth had a reputation for being a really good guy to work for.” (Several ex-aides confirm this, as does Sheila Burke, the chief of staff to then-majority leader Bob Dole of Kansas: “He was terrific with his staff. There were certainly enough members who weren’t.”)
New hires learned to distill memos to a single page for their boss, who was an auditory learner. “You’d be explaining these very serious issues, and he’d be trying to balance a pencil between his nose and upper lip,” recalls legislative assistant Peter Leibold, “and you’d get the feeling he’s not paying one bit of attention. And then out of the blue, he’d ask you the most piercing question that would get right to the core of the issue.”
Danforth hunkered down with aides at annual retreats—often in a facility near the National Cathedral, where he gave sermons. They'd sit in a circle, and he'd listen to them. “I’m not saying he accepted everything,” says legislative director Jonathan Chambers, “but he was willing to use the reputation he’d built up to advance your idea.” Some of these retreats changed American law. After one retreat, Dave Kautter, an aide who would go on to become the U.S. Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy, suggested something novel for the time: a tax credit to entice businesses to boost spending on research and development. Danforth was intrigued. They spent a couple years honing the idea, then the senator managed to twist enough arms in both chambers to get a temporary version of it tacked onto the massive 1981 tax overhaul. It has since become permanent, and the Treasury has estimated that for the decade starting in 2017, it will reduce the tax burden by $148 billion—one of the largest business tax expenditures. According to government and private-sector analyses, it appears to have spurred R&D spending, though quantifying that—or linking it to specific innovations—is difficult.
But it did likely benefit big St. Louis firms: the Mallinckrodt chemical company, the seed-and-pesticide giant Monsanto, and defense contractor McDonnell Douglas. Over the years, Danforth was upfront about taking these businesses’ interests into account. The famously pushy TV host John McLaughlin once asked him on-the-air if he was carrying McDonnell Douglas’ water by opposing a budget bill. “Sure,” Danforth said with a relaxed smile. “I think it’s the job of any member of Congress to help their constituents… [But] I’m not interested in carrying the ball for big business. I’m interested in keeping jobs…”
Danforth didn’t enjoy gabbing with the media, though two of his good friends were in that industry: Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, and George Will, its conservative columnist. The senator crossed paths with all kinds of cultural and political elites during these years; the pairings were sometimes surreal. There was Danforth, chatting about Cambodia with Joan Baez in his office or hanging out with Willie Nelson after a White House dinner or, at one Senate hearing on explicit rock lyrics, stating into his microphone: “Mr. Zappa, thank you very much for being with us. Please proceed.” There was Danforth, dining at a table with the vice president, the secretary of commerce, the director of the FBI, and a Supreme Court justice, a moment that he described in his diary as “mind-boggling to this lawyer from mid-America.” There was Danforth, on an impromptu jog with then-VP George H. W. Bush and four surrounding secret agents. (“There is something extraordinarily relaxed about running with somebody when you’re both wearing T-shirts and shorts,” Danforth recorded.)
Danforth’s first preference for downtime, however, was to spend it with Sally and his kids. “A lot of people on Capitol Hill would go out,” Kautter says, “but he’d head home.” Mary Stillman, the Danforths' second-oldest daughter, backs up this recollection: “I cannot tell you a graduation or birthday dinner he missed.”
Danforth’s rapport with his own party was complex. Like most Republicans, he abhorred deficits and wanted a robust foreign policy. He usually voted with the party on abortion. At least in the early years, he and Sally hosted lavish fundraising dinners for the GOP under broad tents in their back yard.
But Danforth had an independent streak. His lifetime rating with the American Conservative Union Foundation was 57 percent. (A rating of 100 percent would’ve represented perfect alignment with the ACU’s preferences.) When the party rallied behind measures to allow organized prayer in public schools and ban flag-burning, Danforth stood against both. He fought hard, too, for certain forms of federal regulation, such as beefed-up oversight of the trucking and cable TV industries, and mandatory airbags in automobiles. (At one hearing on airbags, he excused himself with his typical wry tone: “I have to go to the floor to make a speech, which I am sure the world is waiting for.”)
Still, his occasional support for measures put forth by Democrats did not win him their universal affection. Some called him “St. Jack.” “The pejorative sense [of St. Jack] was that he was unwilling to bend, that he just never descended to nastiness,” recalls Netchvolodoff. “And people regarded that as a holier-than-thou behavior. It was like, ‘Come on, get real. Don’t you have any emotion under all that?’” That sense of the sobriquet made Danforth cringe; he never claimed to be perfect or God’s emissary. What he did do—to a degree noticed by both parties—was operate in a forthright, gracious way. And perhaps, some observers have suggested, what bothered his critics was that deep down, they knew they should, too.
But Danforth did have emotions. And in the climactic year of 1991, they erupted. Three decades later, as he sits in the Dowd Bennett conference room and describes to me those swirling days, his voice crescendos. “I was in a fight without rules!” he says, leaning forward. “People were throwing bricks! What am I supposed to do?”
To be part of the Senate and not be consumed by it is a major challenge. —DANFORTH, SENATE DIARY
On a spring day in 1991, Danforth invited Leibold, his aide, to walk through a park near the Capitol and plot strategy. (He called these jaunts “constitutionals”; for aides of smaller stature, the pace was brisk.) The issue was civil rights. Danforth had long been interested in it. As a 29-year-old in the mid-’60s, he had voiced support for the civil rights movement, then at its peak, and had served on the board of trustees at Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr., in Atlanta. The situation that day was less dramatic than the Freedom Rides: A series of Supreme Court decisions had made it easier for businesses to get away with discriminatory hiring practices. Even so, Danforth wanted to plug those holes.
The previous year, Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Democratic “Lion of the Senate” from Massachusetts, had filed a bill to do just that. Danforth wasn’t always allied with Kennedy on civil rights (or much else), but in that case, he had been. So had a sufficient number of other Republicans to secure passage. Yet President Bush had vetoed it, and an override attempt had fallen short by one vote. So Danforth and Leibold hit on the idea of working in reverse: This time, a band of Republican senators would craft the bill themselves, stick together on it, then gain the thumbs-up of Kennedy and, by extension, the other Dems, thus forming a veto-proof coalition. Right there in the park, Danforth resolved to go for it. Meanwhile, he would try to win over the White House.
By June, however, the administration wasn’t budging. It warned that Danforth’s bill would frighten companies into hiring more individuals from protected classes than were qualified—leading to so-called “racial quotas”—and thereby harm business. Danforth considered that a scare tactic. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s the worst thing a politician can do, to use race as a partisan issue,” he told a reporter.
Then a surprise announcement scrambled the racial politics of the moment: Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal icon and the first Black member of the Supreme Court, was retiring for health reasons. Bush would get to nominate his replacement. Quickly, the president zeroed in on a new African American judge on the prestigious federal appeals bench in D.C.: Clarence Thomas. The phone soon rang at Danforth’s home. As he would later recount in his memoir Resurrection, it was Vice President Dan Quayle asking, in essence: If we chose Thomas, how hard would you go to bat for him in the Senate? Danforth’s response: I’ll give him everything I got.
Their bond went back years. In 1974, Attorney General Danforth had traveled to Yale on a mission to persuade a promising Black law student to follow him back to Jeff City. Thomas, then a Democrat who’d grown up poor in rural Georgia, accepted the offer. He impressed his boss enough to be invited onto his Senate staff. After switching his party identity to Republican, Thomas rose up the ranks of legal Washington, first to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and then to the federal appeals bench.
Both men knew this nomination fight could get nasty. Danforth had left a 1987 World Series game at Busch Stadium and rushed back to D.C. in time to deliver an impassioned speech in defense of his former law professor, Judge Robert Bork. Bork’s nomination to the high court was being fatally torpedoed by those on the left who insisted that he was a right-wing extremist. (Danforth’s words that day triggered a heated floor debate with his nextdoor neighbor in the Senate, Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware, and later, thank-you letters from Bork and Reagan.)
Danforth nevertheless volunteered as Clarence Thomas’ surrogate and defender, he later said, because he knew the judge to be a good man and loved him.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, law professor Anita Hill was fielding phone calls from reporters and Senate staffers. According to her memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, she declined at first to answer questions or testify in a public hearing about rumors that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at the EEOC. But she then agreed to come forward with her own statement and sit for an FBI interview so that the committee could consider that info behind closed doors. The committee did so and appeared to be on the cusp of approving Thomas for a floor vote when someone leaked the allegations to the press. The story detonated. On October 8, 1991, Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, delayed the vote to hear testimony.
Danforth knew how to play up his anger in negotiations, aides say. One recalls watching him deliver a fiery speech to a colleague only to give a sly wink on his way out. But that day, in a small conference room with several senators, Danforth went into what he’d later remember as a genuine “table-pounding, shouting, red-in-the-face, profane rage.” To the Democrats in the room, he threatened to scuttle the civil rights bill. He then went out onto the floor and stormed against Senate leaks with such vigor that he knocked off his own wristwatch. “I guess that’s the way we do things around here,” he shouted, “I guess if we wanna defeat somebody, we destroy ’em!”
Days later, Hill testified at a hearing that Thomas had pressured her for dates, made comments about the porn character Long Dong Silver, and asked how a pubic hair got onto his can of Coke. Danforth had already asked Thomas privately whether these accusations were true, promising to support him regardless. Thomas denied them, as well as any possibility of a misunderstanding. Danforth believed him.
On the Friday morning that Thomas was set to testify, Danforth pulled the judge and both of their wives into his small office restroom. He hit play on a tape recorder so they could listen to the chorus of the song “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” then Danforth told him to go forward in the name of Christ. Thomas walked out, and in a pair of hearings, categorically denied Hill’s story and railed against the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” The committee deadlocked on the vote, sending the nomination to the entire Senate.
That Sunday, Danforth appeared on Face the Nation. He argued that Hill wasn’t telling the truth but perhaps wasn’t lying, either. He implied that she might be suffering from “erotomania,” a rare condition in which a subordinate believes the fantasy that their boss has a romantic interest in them. Hill would later write that Danforth’s “misuse of psychiatry” was “irresponsible and dangerous,” and that he “was being nothing less than illogical in believing the least likely explanation rather than a more likely one...” Rob McDonald, Danforth’s administrative assistant, later told him: “You were about as far in the gutter as I can ever remember seeing you.”
By this stage, Danforth was in a frenzy, cursing into phones and popping Pepto-Bismol tablets like M&Ms. He tried to nail down damaging accounts from Hill’s former law students and hold a press conference about them; his staffers sabotaged those efforts, and one almost resigned. “In my quest for affidavits, I was showing no concern at all about fairness for Anita Hill,” Danforth would later write in his memoir, adding: “It was as if my sense of right and wrong could be switched on and off like a light as circumstances required.” On October 15, Thomas was confirmed by a narrow margin.
When the dust cleared, Danforth pivoted. Working with Democrats who’d fought the nomination, he brokered the intricate compromise necessary to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Bush signed it in a Rose Garden ceremony. Some have suspected that the president felt a debt to Danforth or wished to avoid an embarrassing veto override. Danforth waves away these hypotheses. He says Bush was a good man who wanted to do the right thing. (Jon M. Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, says he’s unaware of any recent deep dive into the measure’s impact, but suspects that it has boosted the hiring of protected classes, especially at large companies; it also “keeps the courthouse open” for discrimination victims in certain scenarios, he says.)
For years afterward, Danforth mulled the Thomas-Hill drama. Before leaving office, in 1995, he interviewed certain key actors and wrote his memoir about it. “I think he was trying to understand himself,” says Chambers, the legislative director. “People tried to discourage him from writing it.” In the preface, Danforth noted that thousands of people wrote him letters, most supporting Thomas. Almost all of those that didn’t came from women describing their own experiences with sexual harassment. “I believe that for them,” Danforth wrote, “[Thomas] quite literally bore the sins of others.”
A starkly different narrative was put forth that same year by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, then of The Wall Street Journal, in their book Strange Justice. Their thesis: Hill had spoken the truth—and by implication, Danforth had championed a liar. The dueling accounts from Thomas and Hill were irreconcilable, they wrote, and the “preponderance of evidence” tilted toward Thomas as the perjurer.
Danforth says he’s neither read that book nor had contact with Hill. “My decision to defend [Thomas] was easy,” he later wrote. “He is my friend. I stuck by my friend. That was that.”
Because conspiracy theories are destructive of the bond that connects us to each other and to our government, it’s our responsibility as citizens to greet them with disbelief, and debunk them… —DANFORTH, THE RELEVANCE OF RELIGION
Armed guards stood on the 15th floor of the One Metropolitan Square building downtown for much of the year 2000. They blocked reporters from disturbing Danforth or his team of 74 people. By then, he’d returned to Bryan Cave—the same law firm he’d left in 1968 to go into public service. But that year he had an assignment from the Department of Justice: Investigate, as special counsel, possible wrongdoing by the government in its storming of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, years earlier.
Danforth led a 10-month, $17 million investigation. They gathered 2 million documents, sifted through rubble, and even reenacted certain events. On July 21, he cleared the government of “bad acts” but not “bad judgment.” While some of its agents had lied and withheld information, he saw no evidence of a “massive conspiracy.” “We all have the responsibility to distinguish between healthy skepticism about government and the destructive assumption that government is an evil force engaged in dark acts,” he wrote in the report’s preface.
Earlier that week, a secret meeting had indeed occurred, without evil undertones: Danforth and his wife had flown to Chicago and chatted with Republican George W. Bush about the prospect of Danforth becoming his running mate. In Bush’s post-presidential memoir, he would write that he was “intrigued” by the Missourian and “thought seriously” about selecting him, although ultimately landed on Dick Cheney. (Danforth later said that he and Sally weren’t thrilled at the prospect anyway.)
But Danforth’s time on history’s stage still wasn’t over. When Reagan died, in 2004, Danforth gave the homily at his state funeral in the National Cathedral, then rode in the motorcade to the internment in California. When Bush asked him to be a special envoy to Sudan, Danforth accepted, and over nine or 10 “hard trips” to Africa helped broker the peace agreement that was signed in a crowded stadium on January 9, 2005—a “brilliantly sunny” day that Danforth would later recall as “one of the high points of my life.” (The peace, sadly, disintegrated.) When Bush then asked Danforth to be American ambassador to the U.N., Danforth again accepted, but expressed frustration with the “mush” of diplomat-speak and served for less than a year. “Forty-seven years ago, I married the girl of my dreams, and, at this point in my life, what is important is to spend more time with her,” he wrote in his resignation letter. (He has always insisted that this, and not politics, was his central reason for resigning.)
Once again, Danforth found himself at Bryan Cave—but the relationship was on a collision course. He grew worried about Barbara Morriss, a friend since kindergarten and the widow of his deceased Country Day classmate, Reuben Morriss. The Morrisses’ son, Doug, who ran a private equity firm (and referred to Danforth as “Uncle Jack”), was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of misappropriating $9.1 million from investors for his personal use. A federal judge ordered him to pay it back. He also went to prison for tax evasion. While all this was still playing out, Barbara realized something was awry. Doug, court records suggest, had nearly drained $43 million in family trusts through risky loans and ventures.
Danforth looked into her finances and suggested that she might have a viable claim against the bank, Wells Fargo, for not stopping this. (Wells Fargo denied liability, arguing that she knowingly signed all of the necessary documents that Doug put in front of her and assumed the risks.) Danforth was willing to testify for her. The problem: Wells Fargo was a major client of Bryan Cave. To determine whether he had an ethical conflict in testifying, Danforth retained Kansas City lawyer Gene Voigts, who advised that he didn’t. So he testified—and helped Barbara Morriss win a St. Louis County record jury verdict of $78 million in May 2015.
In the next few weeks, Danforth, by then a retired partner at the firm, left for Dowd Bennett. Bryan Cave sent a statement to news outlets lauding his “decades of service to the country.” Danforth’s version: The firm asked him to leave. If the latter is true, had he done something unethical in their eyes, or had a large and angry client demanded that heads roll? Neither Bryan Cave nor the bank’s other attorneys in this case responded to SLM’s interview requests. Asked if he knew whether Bryan Cave filed a bar complaint against Danforth, Voigts says, “Not that I’m aware of, but never in my wildest dreams would I imagine that.” Danforth acknowledges that the episode was “very embarrassing” for the firm but doesn’t believe he did anything wrong. “No doubt I was going to help Barbara,” he says. “I don’t know if at that point I even thought Wells Fargo was a client of Bryan Cave...I just knew she needed a lawyer, because she was wiped out.”
Arguably, it was a case with a handful of analogues across Danforth’s career—situations where his fierce loyalty to a trusted friend blinded him to certain consequences, facts, or collateral damage.
On February 24 of that same year, Danforth received a call from a different friend in a crisis: Missouri state auditor Tom Schweich. Schweich had worked for Danforth on the Waco investigation, followed him to the U.N., then later threw himself into state politics. Having twice been elected auditor, he was now running in the Republican gubernatorial primary. But Schweich was consumed by suspicions that a whispering campaign was spreading the falsehood that he was Jewish. (His grandfather was Jewish, but Tom was Episcopalian.) He believed that John Hancock, the state GOP chairman, was behind it, and he wanted to go public about it. Danforth advised him not to.
Two days later, Schweich fatally shot himself. During a memorial service homily at the Church of St. Michael & St. George in Clayton, Danforth said he felt haunted by their final conversation. “He may have thought that I had abandoned him,” Danforth told those sitting in the pews. He spoke of his own “overwhelming anger that politics has gone so hideously wrong and that the death of Tom Schweich is the natural consequence of what politics has become…Words do hurt. Words can kill.”
Yet there was more to Schweich’s death than politics. According to the police report, his widow, Kathy, told detectives that he’d never seen a psychiatrist but did get depressed on occasion, and in the past had talked about killing himself—sometimes while handling firearms. Danforth told detectives that Schweich was “a very intense, passionate individual who often seemed ‘hyper-sensitive.’” Dan Reidenberg of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education tells SLM that “while there might be a triggering event, suicide is always based in several factors.”
Mike Kelley, a Democratic operative who appears with Hancock on Hancock & Kelley on FOX 2, says, “I have great sympathy for Tom’s friends and family. Sometimes it’s easier to place blame than to recognize that a person had some serious mental health challenges—and believe me, I’ve dealt with those. Danforth was grieving. He was hurt. But to go after John Hancock was unwarranted. Although he’s wrong on every political issue, he would never denigrate someone’s faith.”
Hancock maintains to this day that at one point, he did think Schweich was Jewish, but doesn’t recall mentioning that to party donors, and if he’d done so, it would’ve been without malice. There wasn’t even an incentive, he insists, to launch a whispering campaign: Schweich had already won two statewide GOP primaries with a Jewish last name, and Eric Greitens, who is Jewish, won the governor’s race in 2016. Anti-Semitism in Missouri politics, Hancock concludes, is “just simply not a thing.” He says that Danforth’s words did “great damage to his life,” but adds, “I don’t harbor any ill will toward him.”
What makes civility possible is an element of doubt that your side might be wrong and the other side might be right. The implanting of that doubt is a great gift…—DANFORTH, SPEECH AT YALE, 1993
Rush Limbaugh was clearly triggered by the profile of Danforth that the Washington Post ran in 2006—the one that portrayed the ex-senator as “a man of God and the GOP” urging his party to resist pressure by the Christian right and pursue moderation.
“Yeah, it just sounds so wonderful,” the conservative provocateur said on his radio show, “[but] nobody is going to be able to find for me, in any library anywhere, Great Moderates in American History.” Limbaugh blasted Danforth for participating in what he called “a hit piece on conservatives who are Christian… I don’t see anybody else telling any other group of Americans to get yourselves out of the politics.”
Danforth was advising no such thing, of course. Later that year, he published Faith and Politics and followed it up in 2015 with The Relevance of Religion, laying out his suggestions for Christian voters and officeholders trying to navigate the political arena. His theme in a word: humility. To equate one’s political views with the will of God, he concludes, is idolatry. “We are seekers of the truth, but we do not embody the truth,” he writes. “And in humility, we should recognize that the same can be said about our most ardent foes.”
That’s not an invitation to pacifism in the face of evil, he points out. An admirer of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Danforth fears that loving thy neighbor as thyself in politics will let the strong subjugate the weak. But to him, unambiguous evil—say, slavery or genocide—is rare. The bulk of politics is not a Manichaean throwdown. “That some subjects are so profound as to be beyond compromise cannot mean that every subject is a matter of principle and closed to negotiation,” he writes.
Take concern for the destitute. You needn’t sift much through the Bible, Danforth says, to notice its command to help the poor. Yet reasonable people will disagree, he adds, on how best to help them. Danforth warns that certain forms of government welfare risk turning people into “wards of the state.” He prefers solutions like the low-income housing tax credit, which he played a major role in reforming in the late ’80s. (I ask if he’d like to discuss any private donations that he has made to charity; he declines.)
John C. Danforth Papers (CA5455); The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Columbia
JOHN C. DANFORTH PAPERS (CA5455); SHSMO-COLUMBIA
But Danforth also recognizes that in dire situations, only the state can help. In 1984, at the request of Senate leadership, he flew to sub-Saharan Africa to assess severe food shortages. He met with emaciated villagers, saw their failed crops and diet of tree leaves and cashews, snapped photos of children struggling to survive. On the same day that he returned to Washington, he had the photos turned into slides and showed them to Reagan in the Oval Office, convincing him of the need to act. He then maneuvered over the next three months to get $90 million authorized for emergency food aid to Africa. “It would have been impossible to avert catastrophe without prompt and massive help from Washington,” he later reflected.
But whichever policies a Christian pursues, Danforth contends, they’ll almost never have direct support in Scripture. To him, the Bible suggests only a general approach. One part of that approach is behaving honorably, even to your fiercest enemies, and even when you don’t feel like it. Another part is having the humility to compromise. (Compromise, granted, was much easier during Danforth’s tenure in the U.S. Capitol, before ideological sorting, polarization, thin majorities, and obstructive tactics led Congress into dysfunction.) The Christian right’s certainty, he says, is inimical to compromise.
Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center, argues that Danforth’s fear of a Christian right takeover of the party never came to pass. But he agrees that “any sectarian identification is harmful to the national GOP, even if it helps in certain parts of the country.” Christians have become essential to its coalition; keeping them happily in it while broadening it, Olsen says, is “where the GOP needs to go.”
Danforth wants these kinds of discussions to endure, hence the Center on Religion and Politics that he endowed at Wash. U. According to its director, Marie Griffith, he’s made it clear that she’s in charge. He’ll weigh in but never exert control. Nor does he wish to crank out mini-Danforths, but rather, enable scholars to explore and argue at the nexus of the two fields. “He could’ve created a think tank, something that was more like [the American Enterprise Institute] or Brookings,” she says. “But he put it within a university very intentionally. He was interested in enhancing education, not creating more politicians or people in his image.”
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
I know about my own unsuccessful quest for certainty. It is the story of my life. —DANFORTH, FAITH AND POLITICS
Danforth is silent. Reclining in an office chair, he ponders his lack of attention to his impact. “You know what?” he says at last. “I think that particularly in politics, government, maybe even life, that a lot of stuff you do, you do thinking, ‘Hey, this is really gonna be dramatic. The world is gonna be much better.’ And then the results are unclear or ambiguous.”
Examples do abound. In 1995, he raised funds and used leftover campaign cash to set up InterACT, a mentoring program for kids in the urban core. It died within a few years. He spearheaded St. Louis 2004, a nonprofit that tried to fast-track regional improvements ahead of the World’s Fair anniversary. It catalyzed Great Rivers Greenway and some renovations downtown, but Danforth says it could’ve accomplished even more with a tighter focus.
Most recently, Danforth has tried in vain to persuade his party to kick its Trump habit. “It’s hard for him,” says Stillman, his daughter. He poured himself into growing and sustaining the GOP, she says, and today “it’s not anything like he had in mind.” The choice looming for the party, as Danforth sees it, is whether to keep members like him in the fold. “Are we all to be primaried?” he asks. Olsen of the EPPC predicts that a purge would doom Republicans. Populists and establishmentarians must learn to coexist, he says, or face defeat.
As for the party’s voters, they may be tilting Trumpward: In a February poll by Echelon Insights, their strongest preferences were for candidates who support America First policies and “won’t back down in a fight with the Democrats.” By the looks of social media, several Missouri GOP candidates for Senate in 2022—Eric Greitens, Eric Schmitt, Mark McCloskey—have fully absorbed those findings. Greitens, the ex-governor who resigned under multiple investigations and today denies wrongdoing, had the highest intra-party approval in a July poll by Saint Louis University/YouGov. “Would that not be a combo,” Danforth deadpans, imagining Greitens and Hawley in D.C. “The most disreputable duo in the Senate!”
According to federal filings, Danforth isn’t above donating to Trumpists: In the last cycle, he gave at least $2,000 to David Perdue, a Trump-aligned Senate candidate in Georgia. (He did it, he says, hoping the GOP would hold that chamber.) So I ask which he’d prefer: Democrats or Trumpists in power? “‘None of the above’ is how I feel right now,” he says.
Danforth dislikes Trumpism and populism of all stripes for the same reason: They’re “divisive.” He dislikes how they encourage folks to see themselves as victims of elites. I mention that left-of-center populists also harp on wealth inequality, and I ask: Is it inherently divisive to broach that topic? “No,” he says, “if what you’re pointing out is a problem to be addressed by all of us.” He presumes the goodness of Americans; if pitched right, they’d accept a solution. But populists fail, he says, when they denounce large swaths of the populace as villains. Could it be, I wonder, that part of his aversion to populism is that, in its narrative of haves vs. have-nots, the Danforths may be cast as villains? “I hope not,” he says, then pauses. “I’m very, very proud of my family,” he adds.
He said as much during a graveside eulogy for his brother Bill at Bellefontaine Cemetery on September 19, 2020. He reminded his gathered relatives that for them, “It’s not enough just to get through life, and it’s certainly not enough to grab more stuff for ourselves. Our obligation is to produce for God’s kingdom.” Bill achieved blazing success at Wash. U. and the plant science center, he said. For everyone else, a dose of realism is in order, for “despite our best efforts, things might not turn out as well as we hoped.”
Yet failure needn’t lead to despair, in Danforth’s mind. As an Episcopalian, he believes that folks who at least attempt to do good can join up with God in the afterlife. His equanimity may also flow from his politics. In the 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, political philosopher Thomas Sowell wrote that historically, the left has focused on results while the right has focused on process. Maybe that’s partly why the conservative Danforth struggles to answer a question about his impact—because to him, impact isn’t what matters most. He already assumes that grand plans and schemes (including his) usually fall short. Maybe for Danforth, the crucial question is about his process: Did he give life his best shot, and was he a good person along the way? To answer is to reckon with his kindness and candor, his obstinacy, his flashes of recklessness, and his grace.
“If you’re in the Senate, you think, ‘I’m a really big deal,’” he tells me. “[We think] legislation is gonna fix it... And what it’s like is moving the ball a yard up and down the field, rather than a touchdown. Is that worth doing? Yes. I think it is.” His voice softens. “I think this is what I said at my brother Bill’s funeral, ‘Let’s be a family that tries. Let’s be known for that. That at least we tried. And maybe it’ll work out, and maybe it won’t. But let’s just try it.’”
Editor's Note: This story has been updated from the print version to reflect the correct newspaper in which Danforth's "Why Trump is Not a Republican" op-ed appeared.
