Whatever Happened to Joe Lieberman?

When Joe Lieberman’s family announced Wednesday afternoon that he had died, following “complications of a fall” at his home in New York City, the accolades began to pour in.

He was “a man of deep integrity,” raved the New Haven Register in its page one headline. The New York Times called him “a symbol of rectitude.” My Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines rectitude as “moral integrity,” synonymous with “virtue, goodness, morality.”

But the Joe Lieberman story is not so simple, not so pure and easy. As a New Haven Register reporter and columnist when he was Connecticut’s attorney general and then U.S. Senator, I met him many times — and followed his career as he veered off-course.

There’s no question he was a charming and likable guy. When I first met him at his Hartford office in the late 1980s during his time as the state’s attorney general, he walked toward me with that charismatic smile, shook my hand and said, “Hi, Randy!” It was as if he was greeting an old friend.

He had a warmth, a voiceism. And he knew how to use it.

He surely needed it when, as a Yale student in the 1960s, he was a “freedom rider,” joining a caravan of white students who went to Mississippi to encourage Black residents to register to vote. I give him great credit for being that brave.

When he was elected to be our Senator in 1990, my wife and I, having bought a house in the Westville area of New Haven, were Lieberman’s neighbors. On many occasions we greeted him, his wife Hadassah and their daughter Hana as they walked past our house on their way to the synagogue. Always he had that smile.

Fast forward to August 2000. I was covering an event for the Register and after I left that assignment I decided to swing by the Lieberman house. I was curious to see if he had gotten the expected phone call from Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore, inviting him to run with him as vice president.

Several other reporters and a couple of photographers were in Lieberman’s driveway, waiting for his arrival. I lucked out — almost as soon as I got there, Lieberman’s car pulled in. There he was, in the front passenger seat, talking on the phone. This was it!

He finished the call, flashed us that smile, gave a thumbs up and got out of the car to tell us the news. Yes, that was Al Gore, making The Call.

“I told him I was honored, humbled, grateful and excited to accept his offer,” Lieberman told us.

A neighbor shouted, “Good luck, Joe!”

That’s how the rest of us felt. Our hometown boy was — could it be? — on his way to the White House. He was “the first Jewish candidate on a major-party ticket,” as the Times said in its obituary.

My column reporting on this historic driveway moment was headlined “Gore’s VP Choice Should Make City Residents Proud.” The final line was “usually he does the right thing.”

But a few months later, after Gore-Lieberman lost to Bush-Cheney — thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court unforgivably halting the close re-count in Florida — Lieberman lost his way. He could no longer be counted on to do the right thing.

9-11 happened, and he changed. He became a war hawk. He beat the drums for Bush and Cheney as they told us we had to invade Iraq because Sadam Hussein was supposedly involved in the 9-11 attack and had “weapons of mass destruction.”

You know how that turned out. All those lives lost on both sides but it turned out there never were any such weapons.

Bush never apologized for deceiving us and leading us into war. Nor did Cheney. Nor did good ol’ Joe Lieberman.

In 2006, when Lieberman ran for re-election to the Senate, many of us in Connecticut instead supported Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary. Lamont, who is now Connecticut’s governor, ran on an anti-war platform and he shocked Lieberman by defeating him. But then Lieberman ran as an independent in the November election; by appealing to Republicans and conservative Democrats, he won another term.

I’m not the only New Haven-based journalist who has expressed sharp disapproval over what happened to Lieberman. This is what Paul Bass wrote in the New Haven Independent this week: “He became the darling of conservative Republicans. He advocated for bigger military budgets and assassinating foreign leaders. He teamed up with Republican U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms on anti-gay legislation. He called affirmative action ‘un-American.’ He supported Republican John McCain against Democratic nominee Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. He played a key role in killing the ‘Medicare for all’ public option-style health plan Obama tried to pass before reverting to a less ambitious Obamacare health plan.”

By the time Lieberman retired and left the Senate in 2013 he had also left New Haven. He returned to his original hometown of Stamford. I never saw him again. But as I wrote in my Substack column last November, he again disappointed and angered many Democrats by founding the No Labels party. The people behind this “unity ticket,” who are still without a presidential candidate, are trying to get on the ballot in many states, including the “swing” states that will decide whether President Biden or former president Trump is elected in November.

After what Lieberman went through with Gore in 2000, he should have known better than to work on behalf of a third party. Ralph Nader and Jill Stein surely helped Bush-Cheney win that election.

Could this be Joe Lieberman’s nightmarish legacy? This his No Labels party gives us four more years of Trump? Say it ain’t so, Joe.