Joe Lieberman

Joe Lieberman, born in 1942, United States senator (1989- ) from Connecticut and the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the 2000 election. The running mate of presidential nominee Al Gore, Lieberman was the first Jewish person to win a spot on a major party’s national ticket. In one of the closest and most disputed elections in U.S. history, Gore and Lieberman were defeated by the Republican ticket of Texas governor George W. Bush and running mate Dick Cheney.

Joseph Isadore Lieberman was born on February 24, 1942, in Stamford, Connecticut. He attended public school in Stamford and entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1960. As a student he was chairman of the Yale Daily News and was active in the civil rights movement. He attended the March on Washington in the summer of 1963 and traveled to Mississippi that fall to help secure voting rights for the state’s blacks at a time when civil rights workers often met violent resistance. Lieberman received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1964 and a law degree in 1967 from Yale. Lieberman’s first marriage to Betty Haas ended in divorce in 1981. Two years later he married Hadassah Freilich. They have four children, three from their first marriages. Lieberman is an Orthodox Jew.

Lieberman served in the Connecticut State Senate from 1971 to 1981. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980, but in 1982 he was elected state attorney general. As attorney general, he developed a reputation as an aggressive prosecutor of environmental polluters. Lieberman went to court to stop the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, from dumping sewage into the Connecticut River, which then flowed into his state. In 1988 he ran against a popular incumbent U.S. senator, Lowell Weicker. Lieberman successfully positioned himself as a more conservative choice than the moderate Republican Weicker, and he won a narrow upset victory. Six years later, Lieberman was reelected with 67 percent of the vote, the most overwhelming victory in the history of U.S. Senate races in Connecticut.

In the Senate, Lieberman won respect as a moderate Democrat with an interest in moral and cultural issues. He has been outspoken in his opposition to excessive sex and violence in Hollywood motion pictures. In 1995 he became the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats and businesspeople who work to influence national policies. Lieberman attracted wide attention in 1998 when he denounced President Bill Clinton from the Senate floor for Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Political analysts said that Lieberman’s reputation for thoughtfulness and for having high ethical standards were principal factors in Gore’s decision to select Lieberman as his running mate. While running for vice president, Lieberman also ran for reelection to the Senate. Although he and Gore lost the presidential election, Lieberman was reelected to a third term in the Senate.

In 2003 Lieberman announced that he was running for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2004 presidential election, but he dropped out of the race in February 2004 after a poor showing in the early primaries. His support for the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq in 2003 (see U.S.-Iraq War) was unpopular with many traditional Democratic Party supporters, and in August 2006 Lieberman lost the Connecticut Democratic primary election to Ned Lamont, an antiwar businessman. Lieberman then ran for the Senate as an independent candidate and won the November election with the support of many Republican voters.