Political crises are supposed to be a thing of the past for Lee Hamilton. Lately – most notably as vice-chair of the 9/11 commission or co-chair of the Iraq Study Group – he has advocated diplomacy. He never expected, after retiring from 34 years in Congress, to make history practicing diplomacy himself.

But last summer, Iran arrested Haleh Esfandiari, who directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which Mr. Hamilton heads. Accused of spying, Ms. Esfandiari was kept under house arrest in her mother's Tehran home, and then taken to prison. A plea for her freedom had to be made, but Hamilton, who has had the cooperation of presidents and all the power of Congress behind him in the past, didn't know whom to call.

"It's a black hole," he says of Iran. "There's just no conversation between the United States and Iran." So he sent letters to the Iranian president, vice-president, and speaker of parliament. When no one answered, he sent one more – to Iran's most powerful man, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Drafted in consultation with religious leaders and translated into Farsi, the letter included a quote from the Koran. "I didn't come up with the quote," he says, "but I told those who did they damn well better be right, because I did not want to screw up the Koran talking to the supreme leader."

And then, he waited. He'd struck out with Iran's three biggest political figures, and the ayatollah, he'd been told, had never responded to an American before.

But after two months, Iran's UN representative called Hamilton to New York to read a letter from the ayatollah. A veteran of mincing language for legislation, Hamilton zeroed in on the most important sentence: "The issue" would be "addressed." The ayatollah was telling him that Esfandiari would be freed. She came home three weeks later.

He wasn't trying to make a name as a back-channel negotiator. But at a time when the US is weighing an attack on Tehran, who but the man known on both sides of the political divide in Washington as a fair-minded listener would think to pick up the phone and give Iran a call?

Hamilton is Washington's middleman, the mild-mannered moderate more interested in solutions than sound bites. People who know him well compare him as a man of character to Washington and Lincoln, or, as a man of pragmatism, to "that other Hamilton" – Alexander, the Founding Father famous for his worry about the dangers of faction.

Lee Hamilton sees it differently. He explains his old job as if he'd been a teacher, or a mayor, or served in any of hundreds of public service roles performed by thousands of people every day. But Hamilton had a job not many covet and even fewer win: He cast the votes – 16,000 of them – that passed the laws that make America run. Which puts him, he concedes, "at the center of things," but not as the benevolent power broker. It was simpler, he says: "As a member of Congress, you're a bit player in a much "larger drama."

By the 1980s, Hamilton had taken a stronger role in that drama, reaping the spoils of repeated campaign victories – clout through seniority – and chairing House committees on foreign affairs, intelligence, and economic policy. He oversaw an inquiry into the Reagan administration's covert arms sale to Iran, and, after Congress, was vice chair of the 9/11 commission and chair of the Iraq Study Group. "Quick," Hamilton's friend, Rep. Barney Frank, (D) of Massachusetts, is known to say jokingly among friends, "name a commission Hamilton hasn't been on."

His is the kind of career a person builds in cunning steps. But there is no Ivy League degree, no childhood fascination with politics, no emboldened determination to make history. Hamilton's parents – his father was a Methodist minister; his mother, a helper in the church – talked politics at dinner. But for him it was table talk, not a professional path. He wound up in Congress, he says, because being a lawyer bored him.

He'd tried a ritzy Chicago law practice and a small firm in Columbus, Ind., but neither satisfied him. So in 1963, he spent nights and weekends driving his southern Indiana district, to talk politics with anyone he'd meet. A year later – the year of Lyndon Johnson's landslide – he launched his first campaign, a $30,000 fight to regain a seat for the Democrats in a rather conservative state. "I was lucky to run in 1964. Any fool on the Democratic ticket could win in 1964, and several did," recalls Hamilton. "My wife would put me in that category, I'm sure."

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