Mr. Lieberman considered himself as a centrist Democrat, solidly in his occasion’s mainstream along with his help of abortion rights, environmental protections, homosexual rights and gun management. However he was additionally unafraid to stray from Democratic orthodoxy, most notably in his constantly hawkish stands on overseas coverage.
His full-throated help of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the more and more unpopular battle that adopted doomed Mr. Lieberman’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and led to his rejection by Connecticut Democrats when he sought his fourth Senate time period in 2006. He saved his seat by working that November as an unbiased candidate and attracting substantial help from Republican and unaffiliated voters.
“I’ve not at all times match comfortably into standard political packing containers,” Mr. Lieberman stated close to the tip of his Senate profession, an understatement that tiptoed round the anger his maverick methods stoked amongst many liberals.
His transition from Al Gore’s working mate in 2000 on the Democratic ticket to high-profile cheerleader for Republican presidential candidate John McCain eight years later was a turnaround unmatched in current American politics.
In a prime-time speech on the 2008 Republican conference, Mr. Lieberman hailed McCain, a senator from Arizona and former Vietnam Conflict POW, for his braveness and accomplishment. He dismissed Barack Obama, the one-term senator from Illinois and Democratic nominee, as “a gifted and eloquent younger man” who lacked the expertise wanted within the White Home.
On worldwide journeys to Iraq and different sizzling spots, Mr. Lieberman and McCain had grow to be shut associates in addition to allies in help of the Iraq Conflict — together with President George W. Bush’s determination in 2007 to shore up the faltering U.S. navy effort with the “surge” of 1000’s of extra troops.
McCain critically thought of making Mr. Lieberman his working mate, however his advisers warned that Mr. Lieberman’s Democratic historical past and voting document, notably his stand in favor of abortion rights, would anger conference delegates and cut up the occasion. McCain as a substitute selected the right-wing populist governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a choice he later stated he regretted.
Most observers, together with Mr. Lieberman, doubted that his presence on the ticket would have saved McCain from defeat by Obama, who grew to become the primary Black president. Mr. Lieberman remarked that had he joined McCain on the poll, he would have had the excellence not solely of working for vice chairman on each occasion tickets but additionally of dropping twice. “God saved me from that — or the Republican delegates saved me from that,” he instructed the Hartford Courant.
Mr. Lieberman continued to attract Democrats’ ire after leaving the Senate in 2012, most particularly along with his efforts to mount a third-party presidential ticket within the 2024 election. As a co-chair of the centrist group No Labels, he helped lead the group’s marketing campaign to area a substitute for the major-party candidates — a transfer that some Democrats feared would take votes from President Biden and assist Donald Trump recapture the White Home.
Joseph Isadore Lieberman was born in Stamford, Conn., on Feb. 24, 1942, the oldest of three youngsters in an Orthodox Jewish household. His father, a former bakery-truck driver, finally saved sufficient to purchase a liquor retailer. His dad and mom impressed upon him the worth of training and instilled in him an ambition to succeed. He was senior class president and senior promenade king of his highschool.
He entered Yale College in 1960 as the primary member of his household to go to school, and he stated he was impressed to enter public service by President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural deal with, with its problem to “ask what you are able to do on your nation.”
Whereas in school, he labored half time on the profitable 1962 U.S. Senate marketing campaign of Abraham Ribicoff, a former Democratic congressman and governor, and the subsequent 12 months was a summer time intern in Ribicoff’s Washington workplace. Ribicoff, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, grew to become a job mannequin and taught him, Mr. Lieberman wrote, the worth of compromise over unproductive rigidity.
Mr. Lieberman furthered his political training by writing his senior thesis on John M. Bailey, a backroom pol who had lengthy dominated Connecticut’s Democratic Occasion and served as chairman of the Democratic Nationwide Committee for a lot of the Nineteen Sixties. The thesis resulted in a Bailey biography, “The Energy Dealer” (1966) — the primary of 9 books Mr. Lieberman wrote or co-wrote. Along with lessons-learned memoirs, the topics ranged from nuclear proliferation to the advantages of resting on the Sabbath.
After graduating from Yale in 1964 after which Yale Regulation Faculty in 1967, he joined a New Haven agency, grew to become energetic in native political and neighborhood work, and seemed for a chance to run for workplace. It got here in 1970 when he upset the incumbent state senator from largely Democratic New Haven within the occasion major. Amongst his doorbell-ringing volunteers was Invoice Clinton, then a Yale Regulation pupil.
Mr. Lieberman served 10 years within the state Senate, the final six as majority chief. His ambition was to be governor, however, in 1980, seeing no fast path to larger state workplace, he gave up his Senate seat to run for the open U.S. Home seat for the New Haven space.
With the district’s Democratic benefit and powerful polling numbers, his victory appeared assured. However helped by Ronald Reagan’s robust displaying within the presidential race, the Republican received. The loss was painfully embarrassing for a politician unused to defeat. Not lengthy afterward, in 1981, he and his first spouse, Elizabeth “Betty” Haas, divorced.
In Mr. Lieberman’s telling, he and his spouse — the dad and mom of two youngsters, Matt and Rebecca — drifted aside as their personalities and careers developed. The calls for of his political life had been one issue, he wrote in his 2000 memoir, “In Reward of Public Life.” One other was “that I had grow to be way more religiously observant.”
A 12 months after the divorce, a pal launched him to Hadassah Freilich Tucker, a Prague-born daughter of Holocaust survivors whose father was a rabbi. Her household — the Freilichs — immigrated to the US in 1949 after the Communists took over Czechoslovakia. When Mr. Lieberman met her, she was the divorced mom of a 6-year-old son, Ethan, and an govt at Pfizer Prescribed drugs in New York Metropolis. It was, Mr. Lieberman wrote, “chemistry at first dialog.”
They married in 1983, and she or he was her husband’s political accomplice and trusted adviser by way of the remainder of his profession. Along with his spouse, survivors embrace their daughter, Hana Lowenstein; two youngsters from his first marriage, Matt Lieberman and Rebecca Lieberman; a stepson, Ethan Tucker; two sisters; and 13 grandchildren.
In 1982, prepared for one more attempt, Mr. Lieberman ran for what had been the low-profile workplace of state legal professional normal. Promising to be the “folks’s lawyer,” he swept to victory — together with the opposite Democratic candidates for statewide state workplaces — and constructed an activist document by going after polluters, shopper rip-offs and child-support delinquents.
He simply received reelection 4 years later, after which, urged on by occasion leaders, he took on U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a three-term liberal Republican typically regarded as unbeatable. With TV assault adverts and help from Republicans sad with Weicker — together with an endorsement from outstanding conservative mental William F. Buckley Jr. — Mr. Lieberman squeaked to victory in 1988.
In Washington, Mr. Lieberman grew to become referred to as a serious-minded legislator adept at working with colleagues on each side of the aisle. One in all his earliest achievements was having a management position within the bipartisan modification in 1990 of the Clear Air Act, beefing up federal regulation of pollution.
He was additionally pleased with bipartisan authorities modifications he helped enact after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults, most prominently the creation of the Division of Homeland Safety and the restructuring of the intelligence neighborhood.
Mr. Lieberman typically voted along with his occasion, however he sided with Republicans on reducing the capital positive factors tax, funding vouchers that folks may use to ship their youngsters to non-public faculties, and putting new restrictions on shopper lawsuits towards firms, the latter of particular curiosity to Connecticut’s massive insurance coverage corporations.
His willingness to buck his occasion put him at odds with lecturers, trial legal professionals and different highly effective Democratic constituencies. Nevertheless it gave him affect throughout the more and more polarized Senate, former Senate historian Donald Ritchie stated in an interview for this obituary. Because the political center shrank, his swing vote took on added worth.
Within the run-up to the Iraq Conflict, a majority of Senate Democrats voted to authorize Bush to take navy motion towards Saddam Hussein’s regime. However in contrast to a lot of these colleagues, Mr. Lieberman continued to help the 2003 invasion after Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction didn’t materialize and U.S.-led occupation forces had been slowed down by civil battle and anti-coalition insurgency.
“This can be a battle within the battle on terrorism. Failure and defeat isn’t an possibility,” he stated in September 2003. When Senate Democrats voted unanimously in April 2007 to start withdrawing U.S. troops by the next October, he joined Republicans in opposition.
His stand was consistent with an extended document of help for intervention overseas. He co-sponsored the decision authorizing the usage of troops to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 and pressed the Clinton administration to take forceful motion towards Serbian aggression within the Balkans. He was one in every of Israel’s most fervent backers on Capitol Hill. And, in step with the pursuits of Connecticut’s massive protection trade, he supported sturdy spending on weaponry.
“Prefer it or not, we stay in an imperfect world, so, prefer it or not, you’ve obtained to face up and combat,” he instructed the New York Occasions in 1991. “If I may be simplistic about it: If good folks stand by whereas dangerous issues are being executed, evil will triumph.”
In non-public life, Mr. Lieberman was a strict observer of Orthodox Jewish guidelines. He saved a kosher weight-reduction plan, prayed every day and declined to marketing campaign on the Sabbath. He introduced ethical certitude to his public life as nicely, denouncing gratuitous intercourse and violence in movies, tv reveals and pop music.
He helped enact a 1996 regulation requiring new TV units to have a tool that enabled dad and mom to block objectionable applications, and he teamed up with conservative commentator William J. Bennett at hand out “Silver Sewer Awards” for media content material deemed “cultural air pollution.” Together with headlines, Mr. Lieberman garnered loathing from the leisure trade. “He’s a self-righteous spiritual fanatic,” document firm govt Howie Klein stated in 2000, as quoted on MTV.com. Tv critic James Poniewozik, then with Time journal, dubbed him “Schoolmarm Joe.”
Mr. Lieberman cemented his popularity for diligent morality — or moralizing, as his detractors noticed it — in 1998 when he publicly rebuked President Clinton, a private pal and fellow Democrat, for his affair with White Home intern Monica Lewinsky. He was the primary outstanding Democratic lawmaker to take action.
“Such conduct is not only inappropriate. It’s immoral,” he stated in a Senate speech that drew reward from colleagues in each events. “And it’s dangerous, for it sends a message of what’s acceptable conduct to the bigger American household — notably to our kids — which is as influential because the unfavorable messages communicated by the leisure tradition.” (In 1999, Mr. Lieberman joined all different Democratic senators in voting towards eradicating Clinton from workplace.)
For Gore, Clinton’s vice chairman, the Lewinsky speech and, extra broadly, Mr. Lieberman’s rectitude made him a very enticing working mate at a time when Gore was anxious to distance himself from Clinton’s tawdry private conduct.
On the marketing campaign’s outset, there was hypothesis that antisemitism, latent or overt, may harm the Gore-Lieberman ticket. Mr. Lieberman embraced his religion in public, usually quoting from the Hebrew Bible and giving because of God. The Anti-Defamation League requested him to cut back his spiritual references throughout the 2000 race to keep away from alienating the general public.
One in all Mr. Lieberman’s enduring themes was that faith usually, not simply the Jewish religion, deserved a extra outstanding place in public life. Years later, Mr. Lieberman instructed CNN that he encountered no antisemitism on the marketing campaign path. And the consensus amongst pundits was that Mr. Lieberman’s faith performed no position in Gore’s loss, consistent with political historical past that means a celebration’s vice-presidential alternative seldom makes a distinction within the voting.
Gore and Mr. Lieberman misplaced the election to Bush and his working mate, Dick Cheney, following a 5-to-4 Supreme Court docket ruling that awarded Florida’s disputed 25 electoral votes to the GOP ticket. However Mr. Lieberman emerged with nationwide identify recognition and, as soon as Gore declined to run once more, front-runner standing in early polling for the occasion’s 2004 presidential nomination.
Thought of essentially the most reasonable of the occasion’s 9 2004 hopefuls, Mr. Lieberman contended that his document on the atmosphere and social points mixed along with his robust stand on protection made him the Democrat greatest positioned to draw independents and defeat Bush.
What pundits described as a dearth of money and charisma labored towards him. Gore’s endorsement of one other candidate, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, was an additional blow. However the greatest impediment to Mr. Lieberman’s nomination was the anger amongst Democrats over his help of the Iraq Conflict.
He positioned fifth within the New Hampshire major, and the next Tuesday, the perfect he may do in seven state nominating contests was a distant second in Delaware. It was an unmistakable repudiation, and Mr. Lieberman dropped out that evening. (Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts finally received the nomination and misplaced the final election to incumbent Bush.)
Mr. Lieberman’s defeat two years later within the Democratic Senate major in Connecticut was an much more painful measure of his occasion standing. His challenger, rich businessman (and later governor) Ned Lamont, targeted on Mr. Lieberman’s help of Bush’s battle coverage and made heavy use of a photograph of the president embracing Lieberman on the 2005 State of the Union speech.
Mr. Lieberman, who had breezed to reelection twice earlier than, dismissed the first’s final result as unrepresentative of the state’s full citizens and, working as an unbiased within the normal election, obtained nearly 50 p.c of the vote, to Lamont’s 40 p.c and 10 p.c for the little-known GOP nominee. Mr. Lieberman later disclosed {that a} high Bush aide steered GOP cash to his marketing campaign.
Returning to the Senate as a self-described “unbiased Democrat,” Mr. Lieberman continued to caucus with the Democrats. However he considered his November victory as vindication of his unbiased document and felt, as he put it, “profoundly liberated.”
For some Democrats, Mr. Lieberman’s help of McCain two years later went past independence to apostasy. After the election, there was a transfer to strip him of his chairmanship of the Homeland Safety and Governmental Affairs Committee. However occasion leaders had been anxious to maintain him from bolting to the Republicans.
After Obama and Democratic Senate chief Harry M. Reid of Nevada urged forgiveness, Senate Democrats voted 42 to 13 to let Mr. Lieberman hold the chairmanship. His solely penalty was the lack of his seat on the Surroundings and Public Works Committee. He accepted the association, telling reporters that he regretted a few of his marketing campaign statements “and now it’s time to maneuver on.”
In 2009, he helped the brand new Obama administration get its first large win: a $787 billion bundle to stimulate the recession-racked economic system. The following 12 months, he was a frontrunner within the profitable combat — towards GOP opposition led by McCain — to repeal the Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t inform” coverage prohibiting homosexual folks from serving brazenly within the navy.
He was additionally influential in shaping Obama’s health-care initiative, though in a method that when once more infuriated some Democrats. Attentive to Connecticut’s insurance coverage trade, Mr. Lieberman threatened to filibuster the invoice if it included a government-run medical insurance possibility. With the help of each Senate Democrat wanted to beat stable GOP opposition, the administration dropped the general public possibility, and Mr. Lieberman voted in 2009 for the Reasonably priced Care Act, also called Obamacare.
Mr. Lieberman introduced in early 2011 that he wouldn’t search reelection the subsequent 12 months. By means of rationalization, he invoked Ecclesiastes. It was, he stated, “time for one more season and one other objective below heaven.” He dismissed poor political prospects as an element. He conceded that he confronted a tough marketing campaign however added, “So what else is new?”
After leaving the Senate, Mr. Lieberman grew to become senior counsel on the Manhattan-based regulation agency Kasowitz, Benson, Torres and joined firm boards. He continued to take public positions on political points. He led a gaggle against the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. He endorsed President Donald Trump’s determination to maneuver the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He promoted Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos, a constitution faculty and voucher advocate, to be training secretary.
However, Mr. Lieberman endorsed the Democratic presidential nominees in 2016 and 2020 — Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively — and instructed CNN in 2021 that Trump was “actually hurting our constitutional democracy” by persevering with to assert the 2020 election had been stolen.
He was most outstanding as a frontrunner of No Labels, a corporation based to encourage bipartisanship, and he missed no alternative to reiterate the plea he made in his 2012 farewell Senate speech. “The best impediment I see standing between us and the brighter American future all of us need is true right here in Washington,” he instructed colleagues. “It’s the partisan polarization of our politics which prevents us from making the principled compromises on which progress in a democracy relies upon.”
