Baruth Philip Edward - Senator Leahy: a life in scenes

In one very literal sense, Patrick Joseph Leahy had a Norman Rockwell Vermont childhood. In the early summer of 1940the very year of Leahys Montpelier birththe famed illustrator Norman Rockwell abruptly relocated his small family from New Rochelle, New York, to the smaller, sleepier community of Arlington, Vermont. New Rochelle had been rocked by the high-profile kidnapping and beheading of a twelve-year-old boy, son of a prominent Manhattan attorney, and the unbelievable viciousness of the act helped spur the Rockwells to finally make their Vermont summer home a permanent residence.

The Rockwells felt that their sons would receive the bucolic, innocent childhood Rockwell himself idolized as every boys ideal, writes biographer Laura Claridge, and the personalities of the Vermonters lent themselves, the artist believed, to opening a whole new panoply of models to him.

Rockwell saw 1940s Vermont as most closely approximating the idealized world that had become his own signature, and in that unusual sense, he quite deliberately selected the boyhood that lay ahead of Pat Leahy for his own three sons. Its worth noting, too, as Claridge does, that the artist came seeking not only the reality of Vermonts innocence, but a steady stream of models with which to more elaborately (and lucratively) construct the national myth of it.

Very much like Rockwells, Leahys story would increasingly intermingle the real-life savor of small-town Vermont with a celebrity dependent on conjuring the vivid impression of that sweetness in the minds of others. From the very beginning of Patrick Leahys long and productive political life, then, Vermont myth and reality would never truly be in competition, but rather in something much richer and more complex, something that can finally only be called cahoots.

Consider, for instance, what the boy saw looming directly across Montpeliers State Street each morning, when he left for his early paper route. It was then and remains now the most distinctive single postcard image in Vermont: the golden dome, one of the nations oldest continually functioning statehouses, the dome covering its impressive rotunda gleaming with twenty-three-karat gold leaf. It would be enough to rivet the ambition of any child, but particularly one whose parents talked politics relentlessly at the supper table each and every night.

And in the autumn especially, with a boa of red and orange maples strung lavishly about it, the Statehouse was not simply the seat of state power, and the family businesss bread and butterit was also heartbreakingly beautiful, civic devotion made a lovely, solid, permanent thing.

Now consider that view from Leahys side of State Street, and close one eye. The left one.

Always tall and gangly for his age, Pat Leahy had more than the one good reason to be physically awkward: he was also born legally blind in his left eye, a fact that he has managed to keep relatively quiet over the bulk of his political life. The diagnosis was congenital toxoplasmosis, an infection produced by the Toxoplasma gondii parasite and passed unknowingly from his mother at birth. The parasite reproduces only in cats (with litter boxes being the most common site of infection), and Alba Leahylike many of those afflictedapparently experienced no symptoms.

But although Leahys sight was severely affected, doctors considered the family fortunate that both eyes were not compromised. Still, the boys monocular field of vision was from the outset significantly smaller than normal, and almost entirely lacking in stereopsis, the perception of depth. Leahy has little to no peripheral vision to this day, but he compensated as he grew by swiveling his head more from side to side to increase that visual field. The tilting, rolling mannerism carried just a trace of bashfulness, and with his thick glasses and unusual early height, it all combined for the pleasant impression of a gentle giant.

But these same factors also made it very easy to stumble, growing up, and very hard to coordinate hand to eye. Leahy became a physically deliberate boy, slower in his walk than most kids his age, careful on stairs or a bicycle. He was told, many times and in many different ways over the years, that one injury to his good eye could leave him truly blind. So it was a workable handicap, but it cost him in myriad ways.

Sportsat least the popular team sportswere out.

Mary Leahy singles out the high school basketball team as something that her older brother wanted very badly, and was denied. Saint Michaels was a tiny, tiny little school, and it had a tiny, tiny little basketball team, and because he was so tall, that would have been something hed have lovedbut he couldnt, because he just had no peripheral vision or depth vision, so a ball could come at him. So what he did was become the manager of the team, and he was very involved with that. But I always kind of felt that he wished mightily that he could be out there playing.