Bredesen, Henry Steer State’s Financial Ship
From the Tennessean: State Sen. Douglas Henry has been around the block a few times. After 36 years in the Senate, and almost as many chairing its Finance, Ways and Means Committee, Henry has seen almost everything state government can dream up. He knows which proposals are innovative and which ones have already been tried, tested and sent packing from the marketplace of ideas.
“People raise things all the time around here that I’ve seen go through,” the Nashville Democrat said in an interview in his legislative office. “We’ve been there, we’ve done that, as the saying goes.”
Henry, 80, is seeking a 10th four-year term representing District 21, but he has some competition from within both major political parties this year.
Henry will face a Democratic opponent, Gary Pennington, on Aug. 3. The primary winner will face one of two Republicans, Manuel Fonseca or Bob Krumm, in the November general election.
Pennington, who buys and sells real estate, said he was running because after Henry’s many years in office, “enough’s enough. It’s too long.”
Fonseca and Krumm praised Henry, saying their reasons for running had little to do with his Senate performance.
“He’s an icon,” said Fonseca, a district chief with the Nashville Fire Department who said he had expected Henry to retire and didn’t want to wait another four years to run. “If I wasn’t running, I would vote for him. But it’s time to step down and let other people bring in new ideas.”
Krumm, who says he wants to restore ethics to the General Assembly after five current and former legislators were indicted on bribery charges last year, said he had no doubts about Henry’s character.
“He’s one of the best people up there,” said Krumm, a commercial builder. “I wish he would hold his peers to that standard as well. It’s too much of a good-old-boy network up there.”
Henry said, however, that he successfully sponsored legislation during the special ethics session this year that made taking or offering bribes a Class B felony for legislators. Those offenses had been Class C felonies, with a lighter penalty.
“In a year when there’s so much focus on ethics, he’s somebody who has stood out for decades,” said Nick Bailey, a Nashville attorney who is Henry’s campaign manager. “It’s a time when people long for that sort of integrity in public office.”
After the recent retirement of Sen. Curtis Person, it’s Henry and Lt. Gov. John Wilder, D-Mason, who now possess the Senate’s deepest reservoirs of institutional knowledge and memory. That’s one reason Henry is running again.
He said he initially planned to step down. “My wife thought it was about time I stuck around the house a little more,” he said.
But Gov. Phil Bredesen and others asked him to stay on and help steer the state’s financial ship. Henry, who has chaired the Senate’s finance committee since 1977, said it was “nice to be wanted.”
Bredesen, who also hopes to win another four years in office this fall, said he values Henry’s experience.
“Sen. Henry has enormous knowledge about our state, and especially about its finances, and that’s been invaluable over his long career in public service,” Bredesen said in a statement. “He has been very helpful to me and generous with his knowledge, and our state can benefit tremendously from his service.”
Henry, also an attorney, has long been financially comfortable enough to devote himself to public service full time. His grandfather was a co-founder of National Life & Accident Insurance Co., which in 1925 launched WSM radio and the show that would become known as the “Grand Ole Opry.”
Henry said he was “born into a fortunate situation” and “didn’t have to work to provide for my family,” though he did work as a lawyer for National Life for 15 years.
“I could do what I wanted to,” he said. “But after a while, dancing girls and polo ponies get kind of tiresome, don’t you think? So instead of dancing girls and polo ponies, I served the state — or tried to.”
Bailey said Henry had returned more than $1 million in salary and other compensation to the state during his legislative career, which also includes a two-year House term in the 1950s, and has always traveled to legislative conferences on his own dime.
“As an attorney, that’s been his one client, the state of Tennessee, for many years,” Bailey said.
Person, a Memphis Republican who served in the legislature for 40 years, said Henry “truly cares and wants to make a difference.”
Nicknamed “Duck,” Henry is known by many people for his courtly manner. When a reporter walked into his office on a sweltering June day, the senator immediately put on his seersucker suit jacket for the interview. A longtime cigar smoker, he said he didn’t smoke around women because it would be “very discourteous.”
He’s also a student of history who speaks seven languages and reads books in Latin, Bailey said.
“He’s a true Renaissance man,” said Nancy Russell, an analyst for the Senate finance committee and assistant to Henry for the past 25 years.
When the FBI revealed the code name “Tennessee Waltz” for the sting that led to the bribery arrests, Henry said investigators had disrespected an official state song. That was only his latest defense of a state symbol.
In 1988, Henry and Person stepped into a Capitol elevator and found themselves standing on carpet bearing the state seal. Person recalled the scene:
“He looked at me, and he looked down at that seal, and he said, ‘Senator Person, this is wrong.’
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
“He said, ‘We’re standing on the great seal of the state of Tennessee, and this is wrong. This should not be allowed. You never stand on the great seal.’ …
“Well, we went on up, and a couple of hours later I got back on the elevator. That carpet was gone.”
A year earlier, Henry led a group of legislative Democrats who removed a portrait of William G. Brownlow, a Republican governor from 1865 to 1869, from the Capitol’s Legislative Library. Brownlow was a rough-and-tumble character known as “the fighting parson,” and Henry told The New York Times that “impressionable schoolchildren” shouldn’t see him alongside other governors on the Capitol’s walls.
Republican lawmakers criticized the move, saying Henry and his colleagues were trying to erase history.
Pointing to a portrait of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in his office, Henry, who was born at 18th Avenue and Division Street in Nashville, said it was important to serve one’s state first and foremost.
“I’m a state man,” he said. “I don’t want to go to Congress, I don’t want to be president. I want to serve Tennessee as best I can.” •
By Michael Cass
07/12/2006
