THE EDUCATION OF A SENATOR

The former Tennessee governor and senator recounts a long life in politics.

Alexander entered the political realm in the 1960s: interning for Robert F. Kennedy when he was attorney general, then going on to hold a variety of elected posts until retiring from the U.S. Senate “three days before a mob stormed the Capitol trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president.” He came of age in the Jim Crow South and, to his credit, helped desegregate Vanderbilt University while a student there. That he joined the Republican Party was then anathema in the segregationist South, but it turned out to be timely with Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” and he became a stalwart in the Republican Senate leadership, representing an old-school, conservative ideology that no longer exists in Washington, at least out in the open. “The greatest division among Republicans is…between conservatives who think their job is finished when they make a speech and conservatives who want to govern,” he writes. Count him among the latter, and, in his engaging memoir, he enumerates bipartisan initiatives, among them efforts to “reduce federal control of schools, lower student loan interest rates, simplify college aid application forms, fund national parks,” and the like. Alexander does betray some partisanship by insisting on the use of “Democrat” as an adjective, yet although he voted with leadership against impeachment of Donald Trump on technical grounds, his reaction to Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, uprising speaks to true conservatism: “If those actions do not constitute a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ I do not know what does,” he writes. For all his disheartenment at the shape of the current GOP, Alexander closes as he began: by proclaiming public service as a noble undertaking and encouraging citizens to do their part.

Self-effacing, often humorous, but in the end a valuable operating manual for a politics that once worked.