Lee Hamilton: Washington's bipartisan power broker

If his timing didn't hurt him, neither did his past. By age 16, Hamilton was a household name among Hoosiers. A star high school basketball player, he was injured in the Final Four game his senior year – but won one of Indiana's most coveted prizes, the Trester Award. "It was an award for the student athlete who demonstrates ... the highest character. So even as a loser, people saw what Lee was made of," says Robert McClure, one of Hamilton's early legislative assistants.

Congress suited Hamilton. He arrived at work by 5:30 every morning – for 34 years – partly for quiet time to think, partly to avoid Beltway traffic. The discipline he took from the basketball court helped him stay even-tempered, he says. He liked his colleagues but deferred socializing for dinners with his wife, a grade-school teacher, and their three children. "This was not a guy," a former staffer recalls, "on the rubber chicken circuit."

He wasn't a natural public speaker, but his talent for simplifying complex issues helped him connect with people individually or in small groups. He'd seem to fit as easily into George Bailey's old Building and Loan as he did into the halls of Congress, whose politics he insists he didn't like. He had little use for campaign funding and strategy, intricate guesswork about members' motives, or use of votes to win political points rather than solve problems: "I put up with that in order to be able to work on public policy."

Hamilton earned a reputation as evenhanded and willing to listen to multiple points of view. This made him a useful ally for bipartisan initiatives but a risk to his own party. Indeed, he was one of 31 Democrats to vote for the investigations that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

But even Hamilton's willingness to listen has its limits: Former colleagues say he's plain-spoken, but particularly frank when he's angry. "Understated, but ... firm," says James Thurber, who worked with Hamilton on a House of Representatives administrative reorganization.

That's precisely the style on display this week, as Hamilton reacts to news that the CIA destroyed tapes of detainee interrogations. In the 9/11 commission inquiry, he'd asked for any recordings the agency possessed. "We were told they did not exist," he says. "Our investigation was clearly obstructed." In common parlance, that sounds like being lied to. In legalese, it sounds like a crime. But Hamilton insists there's nuance here: "The CIA's a big organization. It could very well have been that the people we were talking to didn't know about the existence [of the tapes]. I can't say a particular official was lying. But the agency clearly ... misled us.... I'm not saying that's a crime, but I'm saying they obstructed our investigation."

This, in fact, may be Hamilton's best political strategy. You don't build a career like his by reacting emotionally. His first high-profile Congressional assignment was chairing the Iran-Contra investigation; in part on the basis of testimony from Oliver North, he closed his inquiry without recommending a criminal investigation. Two years later, Mr. North was on trial for misleading Congress. You might expect a man passionate about his distaste for government secrecy, who'd staked no small part of his reputation on that inquiry, to be angry. But Hamilton simply says: "I felt I had been lied to."

Today, Hamilton serves Congress in a different role, as a director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a congressionally chartered think tank. His office is simple, with a family portrait on a coffee table and the archive of his constituent newsletters occupying a full shelf. For all his minimalism and informality – he chats with feet propped against the coffee table and rocks on the back legs of his chair – and for all the freedom from fundraising and interest groups, he still plays his cards close to the vest.

A fuller story might tell more than the sum of its guarded parts. This is a man, after all, whose biography could be something of an allegory for modern American history.

But he has always seemed more interested in the national than the personal. He sits on any number of untold stories about America's most critical moments in the past quarter-century, but what good would it do to bring them out now?

After all, you never know when you might need to call Iran.

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