Senator Jay Rockefeller: A Passion for Public Service

Senator Jay Rockefeller’s office in the Hart Senate Office Building, where he met with the Zuckerman Fellows on our field trip to Washington, D.C., is filled with works of art. An Asian pastoral, on several panels, is on the back wall. In a recess, you can see a black-and-white photograph of a young man writing columns of Chinese characters on a chalkboard. Near the entrance hang artisan quilts from West Virginia, his adopted state, which he has served as governor and senator.

As we learned on our visit, these objects evoke the story of Rockefeller’s life and career—one marked by his determination to pursue his passions and seek new challenges. When he was a college student, for example, Rockefeller spent three years studying Japanese in Tokyo before graduating from Harvard. “The experience gave me time to learn something about who I am and what I wanted to be in life,” Rockefeller told the Fellows.

After Harvard, Rockefeller helped launch the Peace Corps as an assistant to its first director, Sargent Shriver, and as operations director in the Phillipines. Then he joined the VISTA program (Volunteers In Service To America, now part of Americorps), and worked in West Virginia. He grew to love the state, settled there, and went into politics, winning races for the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1966 and secretary of state in 1968 before losing his first race for governor in 1972. In 1976, believing, in his words, that “the electorate was testing me,” he ran again and won. As a native of an Appalachian state myself, I can easily see how this warm and gracious New Yorker found his home in the mountains and won over its people.

Rockefeller ran for the senate and won in 1984, after serving two terms as governor. Commenting on the best way for a senator to succeed, Rockefeller said, “A senator gets to pick twelve to fifteen issues to become expert on, while building seniority. That is the path to making a difference.”

—Brian Berger