To former Sen. Bill Nelson, politics and public service remain 'a noble calling'

Good fortune seems to have followed Bill Nelson most of his adult life – aided by an engaging personality, a sterling education, an ingrained work ethic and a full-bore desire to succeed.

As in most lives, there also has been a fateful element of luck. As a congressman representing the Space Coast, he was selected to be a crew member of the 1986 Columbia space shuttle mission. Just 10 days after he and his fellow astronauts returned to Earth, the next shuttle was launched. Less than two minutes into the flight of the Challenger it exploded, killing its seven crew members.

As a politician of the Democratic persuasion, Nelson enjoyed more than four decades of victories, including elections to the Florida House of Representatives, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate – marred only by a gubernatorial primary defeat in 1990 – until a hair-breadth loss to Republican Rick Scott in 2018’s senate race ended his elective career.

A Florida native, Nelson did undergraduate work at the University of Florida before graduating from Yale, earning his law degree from the University of Virginia and serving two years active duty in the Army. Along the way, he met numerous people who influenced his love of politics and nurtured his ambition to seek elective office. Now 77, he and his wife, Grace, live in the Orlando area.

Q. When and where did a political career start to appear desirable and what is it about elective politics that appealed to you?

A. I got introduced to politics fairly early – as student body president in junior high and high school in Melbourne. Between my junior and senior years I had this incredible experience of being elected international president of Key Club, the high school service organization sponsored by Kiwanis. It took me all over the United States and Canada, and then I went to Europe representing the young people of America on Radio Free Europe.

In the summer after high school, I became state president of the 4-H Clubs of Florida and then went on to the University of Florida and was elected president of the freshman class. All that led me to be interested in politics and public service.

During two summers in college, I was an intern for Sen. George Smathers. The second year I was up there, I met Sen. Smathers’ younger son, Bruce. I was transferring universities and we ended up being roommates at Yale. I was also influenced considerably by a young, very attractive president named Kennedy. I got a glimpse of that world through the eyes of my college roommate, whose father was a friend and confidant of Kennedy. That just all the more increased my interest in politics and government.

Q. Kennedy was elected when you were a teenager and assassinated three years later. When you heard the news, you were in college. What did you do?

A. Bruce said, “Let’s go to Washington.” His dad, Sen. Smathers, took us – two college kids – to the White House. This was Monday, Nov. 25, 1963, the morning of the funeral. They formed up in front of the White House with the caisson and the riderless horse with the boots turned backward in the stirrups leading the procession and Mrs. Kennedy, flanked by Bobby and Teddy, following down to the church.

Bruce and I were then told to get on the press bus that was taking reporters to a knoll overlooking the gravesite. We were positioned above the ceremony, looking down. When they did the taps and then the 21-gun salute, I remember being shocked because at that point you’re so conditioned to the assassination that the first instinct, when I heard the rifle shots, was to look at President Johnson, who was standing there by the casket at the gravesite, and then I realized what the shots were. For a kid, that was quite an experience.

Q. You had been in politics more than two decades before you were elected to the U.S. Senate, so you weren’t exactly a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” neophyte. But did you enter the Senate with ideals that simply proved to be unrealizable?

A. To the contrary. I’ve always felt that the value of this kind of work is not politics and government per se, it is public service. That assumes that you understand that you serve the public, you don’t serve yourself – albeit there’s always a conflict in a political elected position that you have to worry about being elected and therefore there is obviously a need for that kind of promotion in order to be elected. If you stray off the north star, though – which is service to the people you have been elected to represent –  then it goes haywire. And in many cases what we see is people who are in it for themselves, not in it to serve the public.

I’m basically an optimist, though my optimism has been tried, especially in these times of extreme polarization, ideological rigidity and excessive partisanship. And it’s gotten much more so of late. When I came in as a young congressman in 1978, Democrats and Republicans were fighting each other, but you were usually personal friends. That was representative of the leadership – Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker, and Bob Michaels, the Republican leader. When it was time to do the deal, they’d get it done. That started to change when Newt Gingrich came into the House. He was much more slash-and-burn, in-your-face, a form of highly partisan extreme ideological politics, and that has continued.

Q. Most political observers regarded you as a centrist Democrat. Who were the senators with whom you were the most simpatico, no matter their party affiliation?

A. I came to love almost all the senators. Anybody who reaches that body, unless it’s a fluke, has usually got something on the ball. The friendships often defied ideology. I’ve always looked for the good and the value in each person. As the politics have gotten more extreme, that’s been harder to do.

Q. What have you observed from personal experience about the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates, Sen. Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris?

A. One of my best friends in the Senate was Joe Biden. We served together and of course we stayed in touch when he was V.P. – and I’m trying to help him every way I can right now.

Joe is genuine. What you see is what you get. And what you see is a very wonderful human being who loves his fellow human beings, and you can see that in the way he greets people. It’s more than the folderol, the hail-fellow-well-met. He means it. He’ll walk into a room and if there are young children in the room and the adults are moving to greet him he’ll go straight to the children, and if they’re little tykes, he’ll get down on a knee so he is eye level with them. He’s just that genuine.

One day early in her first few months, the brand-new senator from California, Kamala Harris, came onto the Senate floor. I was speaking – mainly to an empty chamber – about how over the years I’d been in the Senate, since the debacle of the election of 2000, there had been attempts at suppressing certain Democratic votes. She sat down and listened to the whole speech. And that started a relationship in which she ended up coming to Florida twice with me during the campaign of 2018.

Q. In a world populated by more than seven billion people, fewer than 600 have been launched into space. Since the first Congress in 1789, just over 1,300 people have been U.S. senators. You have done both. What have you taken from these highly unlikely, exceptional experiences?

A. First of all, I deem politics, government and public service a noble calling, and I always have. That has been my life’s passion, and so to have been able to serve my country for 44 years is just extremely fulfilling.

When you look out the window of a spacecraft, there is a fundamental effect that it has on you – there’s a term that’s been applied by astronauts called “the overview effect.” You see this beautiful creation – colorful, suspended in the middle of nothing – and realize we’re all in this together. It’s so beautiful and yet it’s so fragile.

With the naked eye you can see how we’re messing it up. For example, coming over Brazil in daylight you could see from the color contrast how we’re destroying the rain forest. Looking out that same window to the east to the mouth of the Amazon you could see the silt flowing out hundreds of miles into the Atlantic.

And at night, within the space of just a minute or so you’re right over the lights of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and to the north the lights of Beirut and to the east the lights of Damascus and a little bit to the south the lights of Jordan. It was so peaceful in the window of that spacecraft, but it was anything but on the face of the Earth below.

It gives you an expanded perspective. And something will happen most every day that rekindles a memory of that experience. My faith has informed my public service. That space flight helped inform my politics. I became more of an environmentalist when I went into space because I could see the fragility of the Earth. I could look at the rim of the Earth – that thin film we call the atmosphere – and see that it sustains all of life. I became more convinced I wanted to be a better steward of what we have.

Thomas Oldt can be reached at tom@troldt.com.