View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Bowdoin College Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons George J. Mitchell Oral History Project Special Collections and Archives 10-5-2009 Interview with Tom Daffron by Brien Williams Thomas 'Tom' A. Daffron Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/mitchelloralhistory Part of the Law and Politics Commons, Oral History Commons, Political History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Daffron, Thomas 'Tom' A., "Interview with Tom Daffron by Brien Williams" (2009). George J. Mitchell Oral History Project. 156. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/mitchelloralhistory/156 This Interview is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Collections and Archives at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in George J. Mitchell Oral History Project by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. George J. Mitchell Oral History Project Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, 3000 College Sta., Brunswick, Maine 04011 © Bowdoin College Thomas A. “Tom” Daffron GMOH# 153 (Interviewer: Brien Williams) October 5, 2009 Brien Williams: This is an oral history interview for the George J. Mitchell Oral History Project at Bowdoin College with Thomas Daffron. We are in his office, Jefferson Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., where he serves as chief operating officer. Today is Monday, October 5, 2009, and I am Brien Williams. Let me ask you first to give me your full name and spelling, please? Thomas Daffron: First name Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S, middle initial A, last name Daffron, D- A-F-F-R-O-N. BW: And your date and place of birth? TD: January 23, 1949, New York City. BW: And your parents’ names. TD: Thomas A. Daffron, Jr., I’m actually the third, although I don’t use it, and Katherine M. Daffron, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. They’re both deceased. BW: Tell me a little bit about your own family background and your education. TD: I have a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia. I was a newspaper reporter for several years prior to coming to Washington. I came to Washington on a nine-month fellowship to learn about Congress, and that was many years ago, I was offered a job by a U.S. senator and I stayed in Washington. And although I had a couple of periods where I left, once to spend a year in Maine working for International Paper, and four years in Baltimore working for a baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, the rest of the time I’ve been here. And I’ve been generally in politics and government, but I’ve been back and forth. I worked for four different senators. The longest stint was with Senator Cohen but I started with Senator Percy from Illinois, and then I went with Congressman Cohen, who subsequently became Senator Cohen, and I left for awhile. I came back with Fred Thompson from Tennessee, and left for a longer period of time, and my last stint was with Lisa Murkowski, who’s a senator from Alaska. And I was chief of staff in every instance except with Percy, where I was essentially a speech writer – that wasn’t my title, but that’s what I did. Page 1 of 27 I’ve also worked in two or three government relations jobs here in Washington, and I had the baseball job – every red-blooded American boy’s dream is to work for a baseball team, and I was lucky enough to have it happen to me. BW: What period were you -? TD: I was at the Orioles from 1990 to 1994. I met a gentleman named Eli Jacobs through Bill Cohen and we got to know each other, because I did various things to prepare for his various campaigns. And one day we were down at the Jefferson Hotel, just exchanging idle chatter, and he said, “I just was approved by the American League to buy the Orioles.” And I said well, “I’m a baseball fanatic, if you ever need any help, let me know.” But I thought the same sort of likelihood is that, if somebody says, ‘if you’re ever in Bangkok, stop by and see me.’ But he did call me back, and I did get a job, and it was a very interesting four-year period, and Eli eventually sold the Orioles and I went back into government work. But it was an interesting experience, I enjoyed it. Not one I would have anticipated. BW: Was that before the Edward Bennett Williams time, or after? TD: Actually Jacobs bought the team from the Williams estate, from Agnes Williams, and it was sold, the next owner is Peter Angelos, who owns it to this day. BW: Right. So I take it then, your career has been sort of in and out of politics. TD: Yes, when I started as a newspaper reporter I covered a lot of politics. I came down here – something called the American Political Science Association runs a congressional fellowship program and I was assigned to, you get four months, you get a little orientation, then get four months in the House and four in the Senate, and I spent four months with Mo Udall, the congressman from Arizona, and four months with Chuck Percy. I wanted to see Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate, and when it was over Senator Percy offered me a job. And I had three small children at the time and it was for [what seemed like] an outlandish sum of money at the time, [compared to what I was paid] for [ ] writing editorials. You can imagine how much they paid me writing editorials if a government job looked like an economic bonanza. But I liked Washington and I decided to stay, and three years after that I was offered a job by then-Congressman Cohen, who was relatively new, and I stayed with him for five years in the House and ten or eleven, seventeen altogether so it must have been twelve, five in the House and five plus, eleven plus in the Senate. And I had two stints with him, I left Bill briefly in 1988-89, and came back when my [first] successor [retired] [ ]. My second successor was Bob Tyrer, who succeeded handsomely and has been with Bill for most of his adult life. In fact, except for six months as a newspaper reporter, Bob’s always worked for Bill. And Bob came to our office as a seventeen-year-old intern. He was a student at George Page 2 of 27 Washington University, and said he’d heard Bill speak at some Unitarian church out in Michigan and said he wanted a job. And I said, “We don’t have any jobs.” And so he wrote me a letter and said – and I’d put a P.S. on it saying, ‘if you want to volunteer, it doesn’t pay anything, let me know,’ so he volunteered and that’s the start of history. That was in 1975, we’re now in 2009, what’s that, thirty-four years, he’s been gone six months, so Bob has been with Bill – I always thought I would have the record, but no, Bob was with Bill a lot longer than I was. BW: Do you come from a political family? TD: No, my father was a newspaperman, and I was not going to do that. I was going to go to law school, [but] I just couldn’t bear the thought of three years in law school and left after a few weeks. My mother and father, well my mother was a very active Democrat; my father was a newspaperman so he was sort of nonpartisan. And we lived in suburban New York, which was then very Republican, and they were one of the few Democratic families in the community. But no, neither one of them were terribly active in politics. I always was interested in it. I earlier had had some association with people in politics and it all seemed very seductive, and then was in the newspaper business, I covered it, it seemed exciting and glamorous and so forth. And I enjoyed it, but I had no plans to do this. In fact, like so many people who have graduated from college, I had no idea what I was going to do, and this was sort of all happenstance. BW: Talk a little bit about Percy and his brand of Republicanism. TD: Well I am a moderate Republican. Most, with the exception of Thompson, almost all of the people I’ve worked with, I’ve been Susan Collins’ consultant for fifteen years, and she used to work for me in Bill’s office, and with Bill and Chuck, they were all moderate Republicans, when there were very many more [moderates]. And there really was not a lot of difference between the center right Democrats, I mean the difference between Udall and Percy from an ideological standpoint was very small, but there was also a lot more of them. When I went to work with Percy there were, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty moderate Republicans. And one of the most conservative guys in the caucus at that time was Bob Dole, and Bob Dole, by the time he left, was one of the most, considered a moderate to liberal Republican.