Some thoughts on Dick Ottinger
An old boss of mine passed away this week.
Former U.S. Rep. Richard L. Ottinger died at his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was 97.
Ottinger retired from Congress at the end of 1984, so you have to be of a certain age to recall his career — although not the causes for which he fought.
Ottinger first ran for Congress in 1964, winning in what had been a reliably Republican district in Westchester County — aided, no doubt, by President Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory that year. He entered the race with an already muscular resume: Cornell undergraduate, Harvard Law, U.S. Air Force, and director of several South American countries in the newly established Peace Corps.
The centerpiece of Ottinger’s campaign was the environment and cleaning up the Hudson River. Over the course of his career, his interests ranged far and wide, but environmental issues were at his policy core. He also was, from the start, a critic of the Vietnam War, a stance that drew the attention and ire of Johnson.
Ottinger ran for the Senate in 1970, losing in a close three-way race that featured Conservative James Buckley and Republican Charles Goodell, who had been appointed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to fill the seat of slain presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Goodell and Ottinger took votes from each other; Buckley won with a plurality.
Ottinger won re-election to the House in 1974.
I worked for Dick during the last phase of his political career, from 1980 to 1984, first as communications director for both his personal office and his energy subcommittee, later as his chief of staff. A former staffer once said to me that Dick had the policy ambitions of a senator with the (much smaller) staff of a House member. No argument there: Every morning, he would come into the office and hand me his notes scribbled on articles he had torn out of the New York Times; something had to be done about the impossibly large pile of problems confronting the world.
We — his staff — admired him for that passion, even as we groaned under the workload. As chief of staff, I had to impose priorities and hope he wouldn’t ask again about the things I had deliberately let slip. But we often took on issues for which there was little hope of making a difference — until we did, in no small part because of his unreasonable, unquenchable passion — and, well, some really good staff work.
Dick was one of the founders of the Environmental and Energy Study Conference, a highly regarded congressional organization that provided objective information on upcoming environmental, energy and natural resource issues to members of Congress — from both parties. His commitment to the environment continued after he left Congress, at the end of 1984: He helped found an environmental non-profit research organization. He joined the faculty of Pace University law school, teaching environmental law and founding the Pace Energy and Climate Center; he served as law school dean from 1994 to 1999.
Even in recent years, I might meet someone from New York who, hearing I had worked for Ottinger, would exclaim, “He was my hero growing up,” or, “He was my parents’ hero.” When you work for someone as intensely as we did, with all its complications and frustrations, it’s nice to be reminded sometimes about the inspiration a public official can evoke.
When I was named chief of staff, I headed up to New York for a series of meetings with our Westchester staff and various officials around the county. One stop was a community health center in Mount Vernon; Dick had been instrumental in getting the center funded in the 1970s. It was a vibrant, modern facility serving a previously underserved community, and when I met the director, and he heard Dick’s name, he smiled and said, “Let me shake your hand.”
Funding “earmarks” eventually got an unseemly reputation — in many cases deservedly so — but I’ve never forgotten what that one did to improve people’s lives.
“Politics ain’t beanbag,” goes the expression, usually trotted out at moments when cynicism is getting the better of kindness. In the press and in fiction, politics is exciting — like reality TV — all duplicity and backstabbing. Policy seems tedious. It’s why reporters almost always structure policy stories around the politics: It’s a continuous through-line, new developments in a long-running, familiar game of spy vs spy.
In reality, every day in Congress and any other policymaking body is a series of compromises and gray-area judgments. During my time on the Hill, there were members of Congress you avoided working with because of their reputations for, let’s say, excessive self-interest over the public interest. But if you steered clear of those political potholes, days far more frequently offered hard-won satisfactions, moments of grace and good faith.
I experienced such a moment when we needed the assistance of a deeply conservative Southern Democrat (they still existed back then). I instinctively winced at the thought, since we had no relationship with that office: different committees, different region, different politics. Dick said, “I’ll just call him.” It turned out Dick and that colleague had gotten to know — and like — each other during an overseas congressional trip. They might not agree on much, but they could always talk.
Which made working for Richard L. Ottinger special. I could go home after work and complain about my boss with the best of them, but there was never a moment I forgot the deeply human values that drove his decisions and his career.
At the end of one of those long days, I was briefing Dick on a snag I was trying to untangle on one of our projects. As I recounted the various machinations I was going through with the staff of another House member, he sighed and said: “Staff can be so vain. I sometimes think this place would run much better if we had no staff.”
I replied, “What’s funny is, staff say the same thing about members.”
Fortunately, he laughed.
More on Dick Ottinger
Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law
Natural Resources Defense Council