Tracie Mauriello, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette –
WASHINGTON — Host two conference calls, attend a Cabinet meeting, provide a mad cow disease update on a national television news program, visit an agricultural exhibit, work out, check in with staff working on a key piece of legislation, record a spot for rural radio stations, explain a new funding formula for school lunch programs, speak at a biodiversity summit, check in on employees in a financial management seminar, host a media conference call on fire prevention — and don’t forget to keep up on the Pirates.
Sound like a busy week? That’s a typical day for Tom Vilsack, who’s learned to expect the unexpected in his life.
As an infant, he was plucked out of a Pittsburgh orphanage and raised in a tumultuous adoptive household in Squirrel Hill. As an adult working as a lawyer in Iowa, he was, against the odds, propelled to the governor’s mansion where he learned enough about agriculture and public policy to wind up as President Barack Obama’s pick to lead the U.S. Agriculture Department. That’s despite having run briefly against Mr. Obama and then having served as co-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in 2008.
Mr. Vilsack, 61, didn’t believe it when he heard he was being considered for agriculture secretary. First, he had a history of opposing the president politically; second, he knew Mr. Obama wanted a diverse Cabinet, not one fleshed out with a middle-age white guy from Iowa.
“I said, ‘No, it’s not gonna happen. It just won’t happen,’ ” Mr. Vilsack said during a recent interview in Washington as he was being shuttled back to his office after an appearance on Chuck Todd’s show on MSNBC.
Emerging from a shiny black SUV with his security detail, Mr. Vilsack shuffled toward the USDA building, stopping just outside the entrance for an impromptu pep talk with a pair of staffers headed to a congressional hearing.
“When you ride in that Yukon, people stare at you and you want to puff out your chest a little bit, but I’ve seen him and he keeps his head down a little bit. He’s really low-key,” said Pittsburgh lawyer Doug Campbell, a lifelong friend.
He’s faced his share of criticism from the Minnesota-based Organic Consumers Association, which says he’s too lenient on factory farmers and producers of genetically modified crops. The conservative American Farm Bureau, meanwhile, has criticized him for attempts to increase regulations without scientific proof that genetic modification is harmful.
“I would say [Mr. Vilsack] has done a pretty good job going down that line,” said Dale Moore, chief of staff to three agriculture secretaries under the Bush administration and now is American Farm Bureau executive director of public policy. “If you’ve got both sides equally nervous and irritated with you, then you’re probably doing a good job.”
With a schedule like his, Mr. Vilsack doesn’t often get to see his wife, Christie, back in Iowa. The power couple, who met at Hamilton College in New York, soon could be seeing a lot more of each other, though: Mrs. Vilsack is challenging incumbent Republican Steve King to represent her home state in Congress.
For years, they lived average middle American lives, she as a teacher and librarian, he working at his father-in-law’s law firm. Together, they raised two boys, Jess and Douglas.
Then in 1993, Mr. Vilsack was elected mayor of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, after Edd King, the previous mayor, was assassinated by a disgruntled town resident. After three terms, Mr. Vilsack ran for governor, beating odds-on favorite Jim Ross Lightfoot to become Iowa’s first Democratic governor in three decades.
His first foray into politics had come years earlier and 714 miles away at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh. It was a campaign for student council president filled with promises to increase the pressure in water fountains and fraught with tensions between Tom and his opponent — who also was his best friend.
“I can’t believe we ran against each other. That still surprises me,” said Mr. Campbell. “That’s the last election he lost.”
Mr. Vilsack became student council vice president and rewrote the student code of conduct. Meanwhile, the hallway fountains continued to dribble out trickles of water.
“It’s interesting to see the person you were a little boy with turn into a very credible and competent public figure,” Mr. Campbell said.
Lately, Mr. Vilsack’s agency has been consumed with shepherding a massive Farm Bill through Congress.
“It’s not just about direct checks going to farmers. That’s just a small part of it,” Mr. Vilsack said, explaining that the legislation has implications for world trade, environmental regulation, food safety, energy independence and the well-being of rural communities. That’s why, on a recent Tuesday morning, he was leading a campaign to change the name to the Food Farm and Jobs Bill.
“Now that’s a victory. Touchdown!” he said that afternoon when he got an email telling him that Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., changed the name.
The new name reflects the scope of the USDA, which oversees agricultural research, animal health inspection, trade missions, school nutrition programs, food inspection, the National Forest Service, National Arboretum, natural resource conservation efforts, loans for rural housing, nutritional-supplement approval, broadband access in rural areas, development of agricultural markets, food stamp programs and wildfire prevention.
Running the agency is all consuming, said Mr. Moore.
“When the secretaries were focused on rural development, the farms said, ‘Can you focus more on us?’ and when the focus was on farmers, the rural communities say ‘What about us?’ You have people pushing and pulling at you constantly,” Mr. Moore said.
Mr. Vilsack tries to keep up by juggling an iPad, a black binder and a pile of index cards filled with talking points he revises at odd moments between speaking engagements and on car rides in his chauffeured SUV.
“He’s like a sponge,” said press secretary Courtney Rowe. “He makes notecards with questions on what he wants to know more about and what he wants to talk about. … We don’t write a single speech for him.”
Be prepared and be able to defend your positions — those are lessons he learned from Amherst College, a Massachusetts school that rejected him, said Mr. Campbell. When he interviewed there as a high school senior, he was asked how he felt about the Vietnam War. He said he was for it but couldn’t explain why. He swore that wouldn’t happen again.
“Now if you go to Tom Vilsack, he will have all the facts and figures. He will explain rationally and methodically why he feels that way,” said Mr. Campbell.
The constant preparation — facilitated by aides who give 60-second briefings before meetings — allow him to switch with agility from subject to subject.
On a recent morning, he spoke authoritatively about Third World economies at 9:05 a.m., the Steelers at 9:12, mad cow disease at 9:18, ethanol subsidies at 9:21, presidential politics at 9:22 and the Steelers again at 9:39, congressional mark-ups of the Farm Bill at 9:43 and rural development at 9:53.
It’s the sports talk that seems to keep him grounded between high-level meetings, and every USDA employee seems to know it. During the NFL draft he couldn’t walk down a hallway without taking a jab from a Baltimore Ravens fan or a high-five from a fellow Steelers fan.
His office is jammed with memorabilia from Pittsburgh teams, but is a shrine to Iowa agricultural history as well, including a portrait of Henry Wallace, the first Iowan to hold the position of agriculture secretary, and one of scientist and inventor George Washington Carver, the first black student to attend Simpson College. Both are on loan from the National Archives, but the ink drawing of Iowa’s Corn Palace — a birthday gift from President Bill Clinton — is his to keep.
Mr. Vilsack’s early tenure was marked by a regrettable knee-jerk reaction that embarrassed the president. He made international headlines when he forced out Shirley Sherrod, Georgia’s state director of rural development, after an online video made her appear racist.
He publicly apologized and offered her the job back after he learned that selective video editing resulted in a vastly erroneous characterization of her recorded remarks. She declined.
Ms. Sherrod did not respond to a request for comment on this story, but Mr. Vilsack said he has a good relationship with her now. Still, it was a difficult time.
“It’s very unfortunate the way it all turned out,” he said. “There have been a few tough days [in this job], a few we’ve had, but mostly it’s great.”
He bounces back quickly. That’s something he had to learn from a young age.
He was abandoned days after birth. Several weeks later, he was taken from Pittsburgh’s Rosalia Foundling Home and raised in a broken home by a father whose real-estate business had failed and a mother who became addicted to alcohol and pills.
Over the years, he’s become more open about his childhood but once his closest friends didn’t know how tough his life had been between third and 10th grades.
“He didn’t talk about it much but you’d go to the house and you’d notice that his mother was no longer around. The father was cooking dinners and the mother was on the third floor, and you could hear her rummaging around, and from time to time she would come down and terrorize [Tom]. She was very demanding of him,” Mr. Campbell said.
“He was in an environment that was frightening and scary, and I don’t think I really found out until I was an adult how bad it was.”
Eventually Dolly Vilsack abandoned the family and his father struggled to keep the family together. “My dad sold his membership at the PAA — Pittsburgh Athletic Association — founded in part by his grandfather, and our home at 1300 Murray Ave.” to help raise money for his son’s tuition at Shady Side Academy, said Mr. Vilsack.
Eventually, though, his mother got help for her addiction and, late in life, reconciled with her husband.
“She came to approach everything in a disciplined, deliberate way to deal with her addiction and that rubbed off on him, or at least provided an example for him that took him into the post-adolescent part of his life. He became extremely disciplined and thorough,” Mr. Campbell said. “I think what Tom saw was that life can be hard for people but they can fix themselves up and overcome it.”
