Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like the man she might serve as vice president, prizes loyalty in her ranks and occasional mischief in her workplace.So when a top communications aide prepared to defect last year to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, Duckworth recognized an opportunity. She recorded a
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like the man she might serve as vice president, prizes loyalty in her ranks and occasional mischief in her workplace.
There are more accomplished legislators than Duckworth under consideration. There are more prolific policy thinkers and more electric campaigners. “Why did some troops come home from a trauma and survive and thrive? And why do some come home and kill themselves?” Duckworth asked, without answering. “You could almost say that I’m a success story of someone who survived a trauma. But it wasn’t easy. And I think that’s what Vice President Biden and I have in common. We’ve been able to face the demons. We’ve been able to face the fear, the doubts and all of that, and we’re still here. But we both know that it’s not easy.
Those close to Duckworth still describe her present career as something of a consolation prize. Plan A was flying helicopters, and she did not surrender the vision easily. Friends said such earnest alarm over would-be speech infringement reflects Duckworth’s itinerant youth across Southeast Asia, which often exposed her to repressive governments and introduced her to the tenets of U.S. democracy through the rose-colored lens of a child expat.
“There’s a built-in flexibility with children who’ve grown up as expats,” said Alison Parsons, a close friend who attended school with Duckworth in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Bangkok. “You have to be able to reinvent yourself. I’m not talking about flip-flopping, but you have to be able to make friends, to make connections on a dime.”
She found herself taken with the ostensible meritocracy, she said, that allowed a “little Asian girl” to rise so long as she could shoot straight, even as one fellow cadet, Bryan Bowlsbey, tested her nerves. Her last waking day in Iraq, Nov. 12, 2004, began unremarkably. Duckworth’s crew was conducting “taxi service,” in her telling: shuttling people and supplies, with a stop at a base in Baghdad to acquire Christmas ornaments.
Duckworth’s mother and her husband took turns counting to 60 at her side, guiding her from one minute to the next. And soon, there was another patient on the hospital grounds: Her father, who had suffered a heart attack in Hawaii shortly before his daughter’s injuries, had another after traveling to see her. He died a few weeks after Christmas.
It was not until later that year, she said, that a call from Durbin made her consider an alternate path. There was a congressional seat coming open in the Chicago suburbs with the retirement of a long-tenured Republican, Henry Hyde.By the summer, with a full return to combat looking remote, Duckworth had been casting about for her next “mission,” she said. A campaign seemed as good an option as any.
Her military background was more of an asset in the general election for a right-leaning district. She remarked to voters that she had been shot down “18 months after the mission was accomplished,” nodding at the Bush administration’s infamous premature victory lap. Perhaps this was inevitable. Major policy feats can be elusive in the minority party. Voters who know much about Duckworth nationally seem likelier to recall her path to Washington than her work while there. Since defeating Mark Kirk, the incumbent Republican senator, in 2016, she has probably received the most attention for another personal turn: bringing her newborn to a Senate vote, a first for the chamber.
Trump has signed into law legislation that Duckworth pushed involving veteran entrepreneurship and expanded access to lactation rooms in airports. Her office is quick to cite an analysis last year identifying her as the most effective freshman Democratic senator.
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