Oral History with Rick Boucher, June 28, 2023 (Ms2021-048)

Ren Harman: Good afternoon this is Ren Harman the Oral History Projects

Archivist for Special Collections and University Archives that's part of

University Libraries at Virginia Tech. Today's date is June 28th, 2023 at 2:20

p.m., we are in the conference room in Special Collections on the campus of

Virginia Tech. And I have a very special guest with me this afternoon, so sir,

this is the only time that I will prompt you, but if you could just state in a

complete sentence: my name is--, when and where you were born?

Frederick C. "Rick" Boucher: This is Rick Boucher, I was born on August 1st,

1946 at approximately two in the afternoon, in Johnston Memorial Hospital in

Abingdon, Virginia.

Ren: Thank you sir, thank you. So you were born, we have mentioned this before,

in Johnston Memorial, as was I, in probably the very same hospital separated by

some years. So you were born in Abingdon, did you grow up in Abingdon and can

you just tell me a little about your early life and growing up?

Rick: 00:01:00I grew up in Abingdon, I went to the public schools in Washington County,

graduated in 1964 from Abingdon High School. Then went to Roanoke College where

I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968 and from there, I went to the

University of Virginia School of Law where I received my law degree in 1971.

Ren: Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Abingdon,

things that you did, talk a little bit about your mother and father?

Rick: My mother and father turned out to be great role models. Of course,

someone who's very young probably doesn't appreciate that fact. But the older I

became, the more I did. And their careers made them happy. It was very clear to

me that they were having fun doing what they were doing. They were both lawyers, 00:02:00they were unusual in that sense. In fact, my mother was the first woman to

practice law west of Roanoke. And that was in about 1945, when she began

practicing law in Abingdon. She also graduated from the University of Virginia

Law School and in those days, their practice was not to accept women. They had

an entirely male student body in the law school. For that matter, they had all

males in the undergraduate school also up until the 1970s when Judge Robert

Merhige in Richmond ordered that women be allowed to participate in the

University of Virginia. But in 1943 and previous years, exceptions had been made

because the men were off fighting the war. They wanted to keep the law school

open 00:03:00to keep the professors employed, and so they admitted women. Grudgingly,

I'm sure. Not a thing they really wanted to do. But they did. And my mother was

in that class of women who were the first women to be admitted to the law school

and she graduated there in about 1945. She was very quick to go through school.

She went through college, grade school and college, all by the age of about

eighteen, and so she graduated from law school when she was I think twenty-two.

And that was very young, you know by current standards, if you take the

requisite amount of time through all those grades and through a four-year

college education, you would typically graduate law school by the age of

twenty-five. But she graduated as a much younger person, entered law practice, 00:04:00and was unique in so many ways. Just enjoyed what she did. My father, also a

lawyer, practiced with her. And he was the elected Commonwealth's Attorney in

Washington County as a Republican. My mother was also very political, she was

the Chairman of the Political Party in the County, but it wasn't his party. She

was the Chairman of the Democratic Party. So I learned a couple of things from

that. First of all, bipartisanship matters, and that was instilled in me at an

early age. So political differences in terms of party really don't matter. What

does matter is doing a good job in policy, making sure that you comprehend

issues and that you act intelligently in order to resolve them. That is what I

tried to 00:05:00practice my entire career. So I learned a couple of things, first of

all that law is fun, and that politics is fun. You know as a six or seven year

old, that's about all you can comprehend and as I grew older I realized why,

because I saw the kinds of things they were working on. So I had a pretty easy

decision path for careers. Law and public service, I followed the family

tradition. I graduated law school myself and was so glad to be practicing law

and then emerged into public service. First running for State Senate at the age

of twenty-seven, and then running for Congress when I was thirty-five years old.

Fortunately winning elections along the way. I'm very fortunate to have the

career I had, I don't think I would have had it, had it not been for the role 00:06:00model and example that my parents set.

Ren: Your mother, what was her name?

Rick: Dorothy Boucher. Dorothy Buck Boucher, her father was Fred Buck. He was

also involved in public service, He was the president of the local bank and

member of the State House of Delegates and his father before him was a minister

in rural Washington County, early years of the 1900s and also a member of the

State House of Delegates. Public service ran pretty deep in the family. That's a

tradition that made a difference to me and something I try to uphold.

Ren: Your father's name?

Rick: Ralph Emerson Boucher. He was Commonwealth's Attorney in Washington County

for several terms.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about Washington County, maybe not the whole

county, but specifically Abingdon. Just for someone who might be listening who

might not be from the area. Obviously it's a 00:07:00very historic town, can you just

talk a little bit about Abingdon?

Rick: Yeah the town of Abingdon is historic. Its roots are back in the 1700s and

we still have buildings that are standing and in use today that were built in

the 1700s. It has an old and historic district. My mother actually as chairman

of the local planning commission, played a major role in establishing the

historic district in Abingdon, And that was done when it wasn't a commonly known

thing to do in communities. I think only Williamsburg at that time had a

historic district. It wasn't long after that that a number of other communities,

Charlottesville, Alexandria, among others, adopted historic districts. But

Abingdon was one of the first and again, a tribute to my mother for having

originated that idea. 00:08:00And the goal of it is to preserve the old architecture, to

make sure that part of the heritage is kept intact. So today when you drive down

Main Street and Valley Street in Abingdon, the two streets in the historic

district, you'll notice that the buildings haven't changed much. New paint has

been applied and sometimes additions have been built, very consistent in style

with the original architecture of the building. You notice a quaintness. I get a

sense of serenity from it, that you don't get in a lot of places today. And I

think that's part of what makes Abdingon unique. It's a bit of a professional

community for many counties around. Legal and medical and other professional

services like engineering and 00:09:00accounting are centered there. And the clients are

spread out over a multiple county area in the western part of the state. So it's

historic, it's thriving. Houses don't stay on the market very long, they're sold

very fast. And it's a desirable place to live.

Ren: I want to ask you, just out of curiosity, your mother and father being

lawyers during this time period, what type of law were they practicing at that time?

Rick: My father was a general purpose lawyer. He tried cases, typically

representing plaintiffs who were people injured in automobile accidents or who

had other kinds of disputes they needed litigating in court. And he performed

that litigation. He represented criminals 00:10:00in a defense capacity. He had been

Commonwealth's Attorney, the Chief Prosecutor, and after he left that position

he carried on the criminal defense practice by representing defendants. My

mother did the office practice. She was a leading real estate lawyer in the area

and she did wills and trusts. She served on a bank board, and she did corporate

work. She was the go to person for that kind of thing in the community. They

were both very successful and very happy in their work. One thing I remember

about them is that they didn't work extraordinarily long hours. When five

o'clock came, they came home. They didn't go back to the office at night. That's

very different from the way law practice is today. I was in a law firm in D.C.

for ten 00:11:00years after I left Congress, basically from 2011 through 2020, and law

practice today is much more competitive. It's much more hardworking. The client

demands are greater, and the time frames are shorter. So lawyers, I think, work

far longer hours than was the case in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up.

Ren: Back then it was more of a nine to five.

Rick: Yeah much more of that.

Ren: I want to ask you about your adolescent years at Abingdon High School, what

was Rick Boucher into then?

Rick: I loved athletics, I was on the varsity basketball team and I ran track.

The reason I started running track wasn't because I had a passion for it, but I

wanted to play basketball. And the basketball coach also was the coach of the

track team. And his insistence 00:12:00was that anyone who played basketball had to run

track. He had leverage to get a track team assembled, and he knew how to use it.

So I wound up running track because I wanted to play basketball. But the more I

got into it, the more I appreciated that. I felt like I was in such great shape

because going out every afternoon after school and running builds conditioning.

It's a kind of conditioning that just playing basketball or some other sport

like that doesn't build. Because you get a sustained level of activity over a

longer time and longer distance, it builds conditioning. I felt better, I felt

stronger. And I've kept up running until today, I'm seventy-six, I'll be

seventy-seven on August 1st of this year, and I'm on the New River Trail or the

Virginia Creeper Trail in Abingdon. 00:13:00Running days when the weather's good. I say

it's running, there are people who actually walk past me while I'm running [Laughs].

Ren: Shuffling [Laughs].

Rick: So my running is more in my mind than it is a reality, I think. Most

people who look at me wonder if I'm doing alright. But you know, it's good

psychologically, and I do stay in reasonably good shape by doing that.

Ren: I was gonna say, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, as someone who

you were my Congressman for my entire life, the majority of my life, and seeing

you through the years and then I was preparing for this interview and then when

we spoke before, watching the campaign videos and seeing pictures thinking, you

know what? Mr. Boucher hasn't changed a whole lot over these years. And I think

that's probably attributed to your track, basketball, being active. I hope that

I'm able, when I'm seventy-six years old, 00:14:00to get out on the Creeper trail and do

those things. So were they the Abingdon Falcons--or were they still the Falcons?

Rick: Yeah. In fact, we named that team, those of us who were students at

Abingdon High School, the first year that the new Abingdon High school was

opened. It was grades eight through twelve, and I was in the first cadre of

students who attended Abingdon High, and one of the things we did was have a new

name for our sports teams. I think that the principal orchestrated that. And so

we had a contest among the students of what that would be. There were

nominations of names, and then a vote, and we voted on the Falcons. And so I was

part of the student body that selected the Falcon name and it's still the

Falcons today

Ren: Do you remember 00:15:00any of the other options besides Falcons?

Rick: I don't, but you can imagine what they were. You know, bold animals, by

and large.

Ren: We're from Richlands, so we were the Blue Tornadoes which was an odd name

for the area.

Rick: 'Cause you don't have many tornadoes.

Ren: We don't have many tornadoes, for sure. So that was always kind of an odd

name for a team. So you graduate high school and then you go to Roanoke College

for undergraduate, why Roanoke?

Rick: My father had gone there, and he thought it would be a fitting place for

me to go. I interviewed there and at University of Virginia. I was accepted both

places. I think my mother was a little more prone to me going to undergraduate

school at UVA, but I liked the atmosphere at Roanoke College. I spent a day on

the campus 00:16:00there during this decision process, and really liked what I saw. And

I had a great four years at Roanoke College. I'll have to say I didn't enjoy

every moment, but I sure enjoyed the vast majority of my time there. I was in a

fraternity and still today have the friends who were fraternity brothers in my

fraternity at Roanoke College. It was a good four years. And there I was

involved in the campus verison of public service. I was the elected president of

the Student Honor Council which was modeled after UVA's Honor Council. I was in

student government, I was on what amounted to the legislative body for the

student associations. 00:17:00It was a nice well rounded experience. I played intramural

basketball and would go out and do a lot of jogging.

Ren: I'm guessing point guard?

Rick: Actually I was a forward. I'm only five [foot] eight, but I could shoot

from the outside.

Ren: Okay.

Rick: And so the coach decided, okay he's short, but he's a pretty good shot so

we'll make him a forward.

Ren: How's your jump shot today?

Rick: Umm poor. It's been a while since I tried it. The last time it was pretty terrible.

Ren: And the fraternity was Kappa Alpha, is that correct?

Rick: Yep, that's right.

Ren: At Roanoke College when you were there you said there was good times and

bad times--

Rick: No, I don't want to stress the bad times.

Ren: Yeah.

Rick: A person describing something in glowing terms that lasts for four years

would say, I enjoyed every moment of it. 00:18:00Well that's never true.

Ren: Right, right.

Rick: You never enjoy every moment of it, but no I mean, there were courses I

took that I thought I wouldn't get the most out of. That's true in any school.

Some are just going to be better than others. On the whole though, the

experience was excellent. I would say that it was enormously enjoyable, I'm very

glad I went there.

Ren: Just kind of the typical stressors of being eighteen, nineteen, twenty

years old at a university or college, you're going to have those mountain tops

and valleys of course at the same time. What was your major when you graduated?

Rick: I had two, political science and economics. So those two courses.

Ren: So I assume going to Roanoke College, you had your sights set, I assume, on

going to 00:19:00law school after.

Rick: I did. Yeah there was never doubt about that. And I knew where I wanted to

go: University of Virginia. It's a superb law school, I think it's

underrecognized in terms of its excellence across the state. But it ranks very

highly in all of the surveys. In fact at the time, it ranked number two behind

Yale. This was the late [19]60s and early [19]70s. And it did rank number two.

Of course these rankings are done by U.S. News & World Reports and they were

based on a compilation of data from a variety of different sources. They're

generally right and not specifically right. But if you're in a law school, it's

ranked in the top ten in America, you're going to a good place. And the test for

me was the big law firms, 00:20:00they were interested in hiring graduates who had done

well at that law school. So I was able to have my first job after law school at

a Wall Street law firm in New York, Milbank Tweed, and I was there for a couple

of years. Decided to go back and run for office, so after two years at Milbank

Tweed, I came back to Virginia and joined a regional law firm and immediately

set out to run for the State Senate. And the next year was elected. So I had

only been back from New York for basically a year when I was elected to the

State Senate.

Ren: Oh wow. I want to ask you a little bit about, because the timeframe that

you were at UVA in the late [19]60s and early [19]70s, being a law student at

that time and that time period, there was a lot going on in our country, in our

world. And being that close obviously to a major university, obviously it wasn't

Berkeley, but did you see any type 00:21:00of social unrest or protest at that time?

Rick: There wasn't a great deal of that at Roanoke College at that time, it was

a pretty placid place. I would say that the social upheavals that swept across

America and campuses in the late [19]60s kind of bypassed Roanoke College and

probably a lot of very small colleges too. Of course when I went to the

University of Virginia in the fall of 1968, I was in the very thick of it. Not

that I really took much part in it, I was too busy studying. But there was a lot

of activity in the undergraduate school. Lot of protest, social movement, calls

for social change.

Ren: I just can't imagine being near a university during that time and just

seeing what was happening and what was going on. 00:22:00So after you graduated from UVA

Law, you mentioned practicing law on Wall Street. So here's this young man from

Southwest Virginia going to law school at UVA and then going to Wall Street in

New York City. What was that experience like?

Rick: Large law firm, and it was in the Chase Manhattan Plaza, and I could look

out my window onto the East River and see Brooklyn across the way. And the

Brooklyn Bridge was right down below me, so I could see the traffic on the

bridge. Then the next year, my office was moved over to the west side of the

building, same floor but just on the west side. So I overlooked the Hudson and I

could see the Queen Elizabeth 2 sailing into port and then leaving. 00:23:00And this was

a big event when it happened. The tug boats and the fire boats all came out. The

fire boats were sprouting water, not to put out fire but to celebrate the

arrival in port or the exit from port, this enormous and celebrated ocean liner.

And the other associates in my group at Milbank used to have little parties when

this happened when QE2 was coming in or leaving port and we would have that in

my office. We would all have coffee and celebrate--well there wasn't much to

celebrate, it was just an excuse to get away from work for twenty minutes.

Ren: Yeah [Laughter].

Rick: But it was kinda fun.

Ren: Did you ever, I'm just curious, feel country mouse in a big city, kind of feel?

Rick: No, not for a day. Not for a day.

Ren: You just felt like you fit in?

Rick: Well I fit in 00:24:00well everywhere I went. College, law school, I graduated

very high in my class in law school. I never for a moment had any concerns that

I wouldn't fit in. It was easy.

Ren: So you never felt overwhelmed by the big city?

Rick: Of course not.

Ren: Wow.

Rick: Well you know, no, I just never did.

Ren: Just knowing Wall Street--or not knowing--or having been to Manhattan, Wall

Street, Brooklyn, those areas, and then knowing what Abingdon is, or

Charlottesville or Roanoke, I feel like if I was in your position I would have

been maybe a little more nervous. But I think that probably speaks to your

drive, I guess.

Rick: Well, I've never had doubt that I could achieve what I wanted to, if I

worked hard enough, and I always worked hard. At Milbank Tweed, what people

valued was 00:25:00your ability to do the work. Having a certain amount of social grace

was necessary in order to get the job to begin with because it was an extensive

interview process. Once you're hired that's a given and from then on, it's a

matter of how well you do your work, and I think I did mine very well. But I had

other experiences that were beyond the area of where I grew up. So I was very

lucky when I was in college I had a fraternity brother who one summer had been

invited by his family to go to England and spend the summer working in a

factory. He came into my room at the fraternity house one day and he said, 00:26:00I got

room for one more on this trip, do you want to go? And without thinking anything

at all, I said, yes, I'll go. And my parents were very happy for me to have that

experience. So they helped to make it financially possible and we lived in a

little town called Waddesdon, which was near Aylesbury in the Midlands, actually

more the Home Counties of England, Buckinghamshire, where the factory was. It

was a New Holland Machine Factory that made hay balers and they were exported

from England to South Africa where they were used in harvesting crops. And we

manufactured those out on assembly lines. The job we have was on the assembly

line. They could only pay us under English law three pounds a 00:27:00week, which was

about ten dollars. But they could give us room and board, and because we were

classified under English law not as permanent employees but as trainees, in

theory we were training to be hay baler makers, I guess. It gave us an

opportunity to have the job. The room and board was quite nice. We were in a

little country hotel and had the run of the the dining room, so we enjoyed that

thoroughly. I made a friend on that assembly line, who later went into the Royal

Air Force and then became one of the editors of The Times of London, and we're

in touch today. I go to visit Mary and Jerry, and they come over here and stay

at my place on occasion.

Ren: That's crazy.

Rick: It's nice to have that friendship, all because I worked on the assembly

line at the New Holland Machine Factory.

Ren: Yeah and to have that experience what that did and preparing you to go

somewhere 00:28:00like New York to work. I'm sure that was--

Rick: I have never felt out of place anywhere I've been.

Ren: So that first year in New York, that would've been what? 19-- let me do my

math here.

Rick: Starting in the fall of [19]68.

Ren: [19]68, starting in 1968.

Rick: No, I'm sorry, fall of [19]71.

Ren: Fall of [19]71.

Rick: Yeah. Right, fall of [19]71.

Ren: My personal question is do you remember how much your first paycheck was?

Rick: I remember how much my salary was, and it was considered to be a top of

the line salary, because this was a top of the line firm, and I think it was

eighteen thousand dollars a year.

Ren: That was--

Rick: But that was 1971, and today that same firm pays the starting associates,

which is what I was in the fall of [19]71, the last time I looked it was two

hundred fifty thousand a year.

Ren: My goodness.

Rick: Yeah so, 00:29:00that shows you the comparison of what inflation has done over the

years to salaries. Eighteen thousand dollars in 1971 would be like two hundred

fifty thousand dollars today.

Ren: Right right, that's incredible. I was just curious and we could take that

out if you want.

Rick: No, no I don't mind.

Ren: So I want to get to your political career, obviously we've talked about

your mother and father and their public service and on different sides of the

aisle. You were raised in a house where public service was obviously pretty

forefront to the family discussion, you were in this law firm in New York and

you're watching the QE2, what pulls you back to Washington County?

Rick: The desire to run for office. Pure and simple. While I was at Milbank

Tweed, I had another very fortunate experience. I went to a cocktail party

hosted by the law 00:30:00firm within the first two weeks of arriving there in September

of 1971 and the managing partner in the office was a fellow named Alexander

Forger who just, by the way, celebrated his hundredth birthday. But he was the

managing partner at Milbank Tweed in September of 1971. And at the cocktail

party I met him, and we had a brief conversation, and he said, I'm doing

something kind of interesting. I said, well what? He said, I am the New York

State Director for the McGovern for President campaign. During my years in law

school I had pretty well established my political identity. I'm firmly planted

in the Democratic Party, and on the sort of 00:31:00center-left side of the Democratic

Party, because by then I had adopted the attitude that change was needed in

America. And I was very concerned about the Vietnam War which I was against from

the start and felt so strongly was wrong, and McGovern was the person who seemed

to me to hold the promise of extracting this country from this terrible war. Mr.

Forger was the New York State Chairman, so I tucked that away, and I thought,

well that is interesting. I went off then to study for the New York Bar, the

firm gave us all a leave of absence to study for the bar and I took a bar review

course and took the bar exam in December of that year, fortunately passing it.

Then in January, early in January, I showed back up in the office, having been

absent for a couple of months 00:32:00studying for the bar, and there was a note on my

desk. And it said that Alexander Forger wants to talk to you. So I went up to

his office, which was shall we say, considerably larger than mine, with a great

view, a sweeping view out on New York Harbor and he said, I think I mentioned to

you that I'm the New York State Chairman of McGovern for president. Well that

campaign is doing really well and they need political advance people. I said,

well what's that? He said, basically what you do is you set up events for the

candidate, so you're responsible for organizing the entire event and making sure

it's successful. So that's what an advance person does, and they need some

people to work, beginning right away, in the Wisconsin primary. So would you be

interested in going to Wisconsin? And I said, well sure. When these

opportunities come along, I never hesitate. 00:33:00So that night I was on a plane to

Milwaukee and I spent two weeks before the primary doing advance work for the

McGovern campaign, for him, and set up a number of events for him. Little

rallies for him here or there, tour of a factory floor, typical kinds of things

that a presidential candidate would do in a primary campaign.

Ren: And this was leading up to the election of [19]7--?

Rick: [197]2.

Ren: [197]2.

Rick: Where McGovern confronted Richard Nixon for the presidency, so this was

the Wisconsin primary which was one of the very early ones. And we won that one,

it really put him on the road to winning the nomination, the Democratic

nomination for president. So the campaign asked me if I would stay on through

the general election, through 00:34:00the primary fights and then the election, and I

said, well I do have this obligation at the law firm so I am going to have to go

back and have that conversation. Which I did, I went back to see Alex Forger

again, and he said, fine. If you would like to do that, we'll give you a leave

of absence, this time will be without pay, because we're not going to pay you to

go campaign for McGovern for six months, but we'll take your apartment where I'm

sure you got a lease. And I did. He said, we'll put an associate in your

apartment, so you won't have to pay for that. And that made it possible for me

to do it. So I stayed with the campaign, I traveled the whole country. I visited

just about every state, setting up events for McGovern through the general

election. I made a lot of friends and political contacts. I got to know

grassroots organizing in a way that I never would have had I not 00:35:00had an

experience like that, and that gave me the skills I had to have to come back and

run for office in Virginia. So you asked me, what brought me back to Virginia?

It was in large part that experience knowing I was ready, it was also the fact

that I had grown up in a family that valued public service. And there'd always

been a lingering thought with me that I'd run for office, and the time was right

because there was a race that I thought I could win coming up the next year. So

I went back to Virginia to run for office and fortunately I was successful, was

elected to the State Senate the next year.

Ren: The presidential election of [19]72, going into that, could you see the

writing on the wall in terms of McGovern 'cause he got kind of walloped, right?

Rick: Well we could all read the polls, but we kind of put those thoughts aside 00:36:00because we were doing the right thing. Raising the Vietnam War as an issue,

helping to build momentum in the country to get us out of the war, was even more

important in my mind than who actually won the election. And I think we achieved that.

Ren: So when you came back to Washington County to win that State Senate race,

that would have been--?

Rick: [I returned in late 1973, began the State Senate race in 1974 and was

elected in] [19]75.

Ren: [19]75, because it's off years. Can you talk a little bit about that

campaign and what was that experience like being a first time candidate and

taking all the things you're learning from the McGovern campaign and taking all

the things you've learned through law school and being a lawyer and a practicing

lawyer. What was that experience like of that first campaign? I've seen some pictures.

Rick: In fact the digital collection here at Virginia Tech has got a lot of

those photos. It was a challenge because the seat was held at the time 00:37:00by a

Democrat, he was considerably more conservative than me. In fact he was on the

tail end of the old Harry Byrd organization that was so much a fixture of the

Virginia political scene from the 1920s right on through the years in which I

emerged and got active. And we could not have been more different in our points

of view. I could sense that he was not popular just from my early soundings

around the senatorial district, and so the opportunity had clearly presented

itself. So I announced and ran. I won the nomination, and then I went on to run

against a Republican in the general election, and it was a Republican 00:38:00 leading

district, so that was hard too. It was a hard fight for the nomination; it was a

hard fight to win the election. But I was successful in doing both.

Ren: Do you know what made him unpopular in the district at that time? For you

to primary him, we see that so often today, but was that commonplace back then?

Rick: It wasn't over policy. It wasn't because of any particular policy. There

had been an annexation issue that had pitted the City of Bristol against

Washington County and he more or less lined up with the city and there were

people in the county that were upset with him over that. That added a few votes

to my column. But the main problem he had was that he had just fallen out of

touch. He really hadn't bothered to go around and meet with people and let them

know what he'd been doing and what he was up to and report to 00:39:00them on his work.

And that is so essential if you're going to effectively serve in office. He just

hadn't done that. He'd been there twelve years. A lot of the people I went to

see who were prominent in the Democratic Party when I was seeking the nomination

really didn't know about him. They'd never met him and a lot of them didn't know

who their state senator was. There wasn't much allegiance for him and I was able

to build a base pretty fast across the senatorial district.

Ren: Do you remember--I'm sure you probably do--how much you won by?

Rick: It wasn't a primary, it was a convention.

Ren: Oh okay.

Rick: There were county mass meetings where delegates were chosen. The delegates

went to a convention and voted. Our people went to the mass meetings, our slate

of delegates got elected and at the convention I think the vote was something

like ninety to sixty.

Ren: 00:40:00I want to ask you, during that time and that time period, obviously this

might be a broad question and my apologies if it is, because I'm sure there was

different branches of the Democratic Party, but by and large, mid-1970s, what

were some of the foundations of the Democratic Party in terms of their policy

and things they believed in during that time?

Rick: Well, I'd have to scratch my head to come up with a lot of an answer. It

was a time of transition in politics; Virginia was undergoing a political

transition. It was the transition on the Democratic side from the Byrd

organization that had been hyper-conservative, to a more progressive kind of

politics; more represented by what was happening nationally in the Democratic

Party than what had happened in 00:41:00Virginia historically. So it was that time of

transition. That brought tension, as you can imagine. And it brought a level of

suspicion within the party, sometimes of new people that were showing up and I

had to endure my fair share of that. When I was elected to the State Senate, I

was one of the youngest by far. The only one who was in my age cohort was Virgil

Goode, and he represented Franklin County and we were both twenty-eight years

old basically. I think we were both twenty-eight, and I think the next youngest

was about thirty-seven. By a decade, we were the two youngest and he had been

there for a term already. He was elected when he was very young. And so I had to

convince some of the old Byrd organization people in the State Senate that I was

to be trusted. 00:42:00And I think they discovered that I could be, but it was a process

where I had to earn trust.

Ren: At that time being in the Virginia Senate, that was your career, that's

what you did, were you able to do other things to support yourself from a

financial standpoint?

Rick: Oh the state legislature was part time; it was then and is now.

Ren: Okay that's what--

Rick: Yeah, yeah no it is. It's part time. So the legislature met for about two

months in the early months of the year, January, February, usually adjourned by

about the 10th of March, then you'd go back to Richmond periodically for

committee meetings throughout the year, but you were free to earn your money

after that. So I had a law practice. I was in a regional law firm for a time and

then I went into my family's law firm for a time, which is where I was when I

ran for Congress. 00:43:00So yeah, I earned a living as a lawyer.

Ren: So how long did you serve in the Virginia Senate?

Rick: Seven years.

Ren: Those seven years, having an election every two years--

Rick: Every four.

Ren: Every four years.

Rick: So I only had one reelection for the State Senate, so the first term was

four years. After the reelection I served three years, and then I was elected to Congress.

Ren: And for listeners outside of Virginia, Virginia's one of those unusual

states, along with New Jersey and maybe a couple others where they have odd

year, off season elections, versus the presidential and national elections. When

you were in the Virginia Senate, what kind of drew you to run for Congress in

that house district?

Rick: I think in the McGovern Campaign, I decided what my goal was to serve in

the U.S. Congress, and I won't call the Virginia Senate 00:44:00experience a stepping

stone to that. I didn't view it that way, but it was the first step on the road

to a political career that for the most part, was as a member of Congress.

Ren: I want to know the conversation that you had assuming, and pardon me I

don't know, the conversation you had with your mother and father, when you said,

hey mom and dad or mother and father, I want to run for Congress. What were

their reactions?

Rick: For the State Senate or Congress?

Ren: For Congress.

Rick: Well that seat was held by an incumbent who was very popular at the time.

This was 1982. I started the race in 1981. And my mother, very smart in so many

ways, and wise politically, understood the district, 00:45:00she knew that it was going

to be a major fight, and she said, if you decide to run, I'm there for you

completely. But you should know that I think this is going to be a very hard

race, I'm not sure you can win. And I said, well, I'm not sure that I can win

either. But I think there's an excellent chance that I can, because just as the

incumbent in the State Senate had neglected his constituency, I didn't think

that the incumbent in the congressional seat had done much to help the

constituency. I didn't get a sense that real progress had been made, or that he

had a legislative record that amounted to very much. I thought, you know, there

are obvious things that need to be done in this congressional district. We were

desperate for new employment 00:46:00opportunities, then and to a large extent even now.

So my campaign was focused around economic development; here are the various

things that should be done to promote the economy in the region. Starting with,

saving the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Economic Development

Administration and the development arm of the Department of Commerce, the grants

and loans that build infrastructure from the Department of Agriculture's Rural

Development Agency. All of these were threatened by the budget that President

Reagan had put forward, because his goal was to essentially eliminate those

functions, believing that ought to be a state or local responsibility, but our

localities could never have financed the infrastructure on their own. They just

didn't have the dollars to do it. And so help from the federal 00:47:00government was

essential. If we were going to grow, if we had to have water and wastewater

facilities, and industrial parks and roads that were necessary to promote

economic growth, it was essential that the federal government finance the

lionshare of that. I was determined to try to make that happen, and my campaign

was built around that theme. And it was very successful because my opponent

really didn't have anything to say about it, he didn't say yea or nay, it was

like the idea hadn't really occurred.

Ren: Yeah I wanted to ask you about that. Obviously being a son of this area,

I'm just curious, I know it probably changed over the years, what was your

coalition of voters, maybe in that first congressional campaign? What was your

coalition of voters, and did that change over time, or was it always that same

group of folks?

Rick: It didn't change much over time. 00:48:00It was a couple of things, it was

organized labor, there's not a huge amount of that in Southwest Virginia, but

the mine workers had substantial presence in the coal producing counties. The

autoworkers that had, and have, a substantial presence in the New River Valley

with the large Volvo Truck manufacturing plant in Dublin, and some other

facilities throughout the district. The garment workers at that time worked in

sewing factories. The carpenters had a substantial presence. So there were

elements of organized labor that collectively made a great difference. And I had

the support of all of those, the active support. They provided volunteers for

poll working, get out the vote efforts, and other essential parts of campaign

activities. 00:49:00The community in the New River Valley, Radford and Blacksburg, were

a big base of support for me. These are college towns, progressive in their

thinking, with a corps of a Democratic Party that was very active and there were

lots of people to support the normal campaign events that all candidates need

help with. The forces were there for that and the votes were there for the

general election for the Democratic candidate. [There were families that had

been Democratic for generations which broadly supported me], and then throughout

the district, there was a smattering of people who had moved into the area from

other places, bringing their politics with them, and largely they were

progressive in their thinking and voted Democratic. So I was able to coalesce

those various groups into 00:50:00a pretty effective campaign. And that, by the way,

didn't change much as the years progressed.

Ren: I wanted to ask you, the election evening or night when you're newly

elected Congressman Rick Boucher, what was that feeling like?

Rick: Oh, it was great. But it was tenuous because there were a hundred eighty

thousand votes cast in that race, and as election night closed at around

midnight, I was ahead by about two hundred votes. Not a lot. And not all of the

precinct results were in, probably 98 percent of them, but not all. Just a few

changes here and there could make a big difference. Two hundred votes. When I

woke up the next morning, the day after the election, I was 00:51:00ahead by twelve

hundred votes because there had been a transposition error in the reporting of

votes from one of the precincts in Wise County, one of the large ones, and they

had left off the one that was the first of four digits. They only reported three

digits. So that boosted me by a thousand votes, and that was a much more

comfortable margin. Still less than 1 percent of the total vote, but a much more

comfortable margin. So under state law, the losing candidate was entitled to a

recount, paid for by the state, and of course we had that, and that wasn't

concluded until December. It was administered by the Circuit Court of Washington

County which was assigned by the State Supreme Court, the role of doing that,

Judge Aubrey Matthews presiding. All of the various voting officials 00:52:00from the

twenty-seven counties and cities of the 9th district went to Abingdon and were

supervised in a recount, administered by Judge Matthews. It took one day, and in

the end, I had actually gained about thirty votes, I think. So the initial vote

was almost exactly correct, and then it became official that I had won the seat.

But on election night you know, there was always that slight air of uncertainty.

So the celebration was tempered by the reality that there was still more to come.

Ren: And you were thirty--?

Rick: I was thirty-six.

Ren: Thirty-six, so I'm around that age and I'm just imagining, did you feel

like--I know what your answer is gonna be but I wanna ask anyways--when you feel

like you won, did you feel like a heaviness or a burden or any type of weight on

your shoulders or chest?

Rick: No, I think I had a realistic idea of what the job entailed, and I thought 00:53:00that I was ready to undertake it. I was looking forward to it. I was excited.

Ready to get started.

Ren: I do want to get to some of your legislative achievements here in just a

second, that first day stepping onto Capitol Hill, whether that was an

orientation or the first day that the Congress was seated, or whatever it is,

and I know you probably had visited and been there before, kinda that first day

where you're Congressman Boucher from the 9th district of Virginia, what was

that day like?

Rick: I remember being sworn in. There's a little bit of a ritual that takes

place with the opening of every new congressional session, where the members who

normally have an electronic voting board where they cast their votes from

terminals on the floor, that's all tabulated electronically in a very quick

matter of time, all vote by voice instead, when the nominations for Speaker are

made, it inevitably is two choices, 00:54:00the Democratic choice, the Republican

choice, and whichever party controls the majority of seats wins. But, you go

through the roll call anyway and it's a verbal roll call with everyone having to

answer, stand and say who they're for. And I remember that so distinctly. Of

course I repeated it then fourteen times, but it was the same process every

time. And I remember taking the oath of office, being sworn in by the new speaker.

Ren: 1983, correct?

Rick: Yeah, January of [19]83.

Ren: Of [19]83, now the Speaker of the House at that time would have been--?

Rick: Tip O'Neill.

Ren: Tip O'Neill, okay that's what I was thinking. When you got to Congress in

1983, of course we're in the Reagan Administration, Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of

the House, were the Democrats in control of the House during that time?

Rick: 00:55:00Yes, and had been for decades.

Ren: Right.

Rick: And remained in control until 1994, so for another decade after I showed

up there, we kept the House.

Ren: What were some legislative priorities, for you, for the 9th district, and

then also maybe some other legislation that you worked on, more larger, more

national legislation?

Rick: Okay, I mean it's a long answer.

Ren: For sure.

Rick: In those early years it was, as I indicated, making sure that the federal

role in economic development remained. And that meant funding for the

Appalachian Regional Commission, the Department of Agriculture's Rural

Development Agency, the Department of Commerce's Economic Development Agency. At

that time, the Tennessee Valley Authority that served part of my district had an

economic development program, so working to maintain that. 00:56:00And collectively,

those agencies provided the bulk of the funding for infrastructure in the

region. And that was critical to economic growth. And it was a fight, because

David Stockton was Ronald Reagan's budget director, and every budget he

assembled that the president sent to the Hill, would have eliminated all of

those economic development functions. So it was a fight. This wasn't easy. We

did keep the funding intact. The Democrats had a majority of seats, but we

barely had effective control because some of the Southern Democrats had kind of

departed to the Reagan view of economics, so the Republicans by a few votes had

a working majority. But we were able to maintain the federal role in economic

development that way. And that continued. It wasn't long until the Democrats

came thundering back, 00:57:00but for a little while, things were not so great. Tip

O'Neill was a great Speaker. He was an everyday person, very down to Earth. He

understood at a sort of core level, the American public and what the American

public needed and would respond to. So his guidance was quite good as a Speaker.

Ren: He had a unique relationship with President Reagan, didn't he?

Rick: Well they were both Irish and they celebrated that fact and they got

along. I mean, they fought over policy, but on a personal level they definitely

got along. They did very well together. And Tip O'Neill had a terrific

relationship with some of the Republican senior House members who he knew and

enjoyed getting together with socially. It was a different era then. 00:58:00 The

moderates in both parties actually comprised a core majority in the center,

that's not true today because the tensions have grown and divisions have grown

wider. Today the moderates have been relegated to irrelevancy by and large. It's

now the extremes of both parties that control the agenda, the right wing of the

Republican Party and the left wing of the Democratic Party. I don't like seeing

that because it's not good for policy making, it's not good for the country. In

those early days in the 1980s and up until the mid [19]90s, we made policy and

solved big problems in the middle. And it was done with a combination of

Republican and Democratic votes. Tip O'Neill was a practitioner of that kind of

approach and he worked very successfully with 00:59:00friends on the Republican side.

But those days are in the past now, you don't see much bipartisanship in

Congress these days.

Ren: A couple political things I want to ask you just because this is your life,

your life's work. I read a book a couple years ago and it talked about the

polarization that we see and you're talking about in Congress and it talked a

little bit about when Newt Gingrich became Speaker and it really talked a lot

about C-SPAN, the cameras were allowed or they were just constantly rolling, and

how that changed people's perceptions of their congress-people. Did you feel

that or experience that like when C-SPAN became bigger and bigger. Did you feel

that things got more polarized in that time?

Rick: Well, Gingrich polarized the house.

Ren: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, he did it purposefully and successfully. He did. He tore up the old

way of doing business and it hasn't gotten back to that balanced 01:00:00 bipartisan

policy making ever since. He was very destructive in the things that he did.

C-SPAN, I never thought it was a mover of political events. People were able to

watch the House floor proceedings through that, there were debates about whether

the cameras should remain stationary or whether they ought to rove the chamber.

None of that in the end mattered much at all. It was good fodder for cable TV

and for headlines, but it didn't really make a difference.

Ren: I think that might've been the argument he was making, he was saying, okay

let's look at Congressman Boucher advocating for whatever this person or this

station is against allowing that access that necessarily was a little different before.

Rick: I don't know.

Ren: I was just curious.

Rick: It made some headlines, but it was a tempest in a teapot. Really didn't

amount to anything.

Ren: Talked a little bit 01:01:00about this over other conversations, but some of your

greatest legislative achievements, so to speak, and I know there's one you want

to talk about probably so you can talk about it.

Rick: Well there are several. In 1982, Dick Gephardt was trying to figure out

how to best position the Democrats in the House for the impeachment of President

Clinton. And he was looking for a moderate to be the face of the Democratic

position and it had to be someone on the House Judiciary Committee because

that's where all the early proceedings were taking part, and when he looked

across the Democratic membership of the committee, 01:02:00I was the only moderate. I

literally was the only moderate. There weren't any others, everybody else was

basically from a large city and their politics were way to the left of where I

was. And so he called me and said, this will be the worst day of your life. And

I said, that's not good news coming from the Democratic leader of the House. He

said, well, I really need you to take the lead for the Democrats for the Clinton

impeachment. And I said, well-- okay. If you're convinced I need to do that, I

will--not happily--but I will. So, during the hearings, I led the Democratic

position, I drafted and we offered as our position on the House floor, a

Democratic resolution of censure of the president for events that had happened, 01:03:00but not impeachment. I argued strongly that impeachment was not the right

approach for this. I wasn't accustomed to going on TV and seeking that kind of

publicity because I thought it was largely a waste of time and detracted from

the work I was doing. But in this case calls came in, would you appear? Would

you appear? So I was on TV a lot, and it was about a month long exercise, but it

was all consuming. I devoted all of my time to it. It was sixteen hours

everyday, trying to build a coalition to win on the floor. We got some

Republican votes, not very many, not enough to win, but we came fairly close. We

were within five or six votes of our resolution of censure winning. 01:04:00So I felt

like it was good exercise, but that was hard. There are a lot of materials in

the collection here at Virginia Tech about that time and the work I did. In

later years, I chaired the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment and we had

jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency and all of the nation's

clean air laws. And it was clear to me at that time that climate change was an

enormous challenge for this country and for the world, and that if anything was

going to be done, it had to be done on a global basis. But to have global

action, the United States would have to lead by example and we would have to

adopt controls ourselves because after all, you can't really expect the

developing world that's just growing to look at us, fully developed, and say,

well you're not undertaking responsibility, so why should we? And so we had to

lead by example. 01:05:00That led me to draft and [circulate broadly among interested

parties a discussion draft of a cap and trade program], a measure known as the

Clean Energy Security Act. Henry Waxman at that time was Chairman of the Energy

and Commerce Committee, I was a member. I was, I think actually when we reported

this measure to a full House, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and

the Internet, but, in the previous Congress, I had been Chairman of the

Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality. We did all of the run up work for this

legislation. I conducted about twenty-eight days of hearings on the subject of

climate change; we looked at causes, we looked at possible solutions, we drafted

legislation, didn't introduce it at that point, but drafted and circulated

comprehensive regulatory legislation. It was a cap and trade program that would

have created 01:06:00an emissions trading system and assigned allowances for carbon

dioxide emissions to the major emitters, and then those caps would ratchet down

over the years, and allowances could be traded so that you get an efficiency in

the reduction process. And that works to drive investment to the place where the

dollars get the greatest amount of reduction for the dollars expended. So it had

a lot of appeal, it would have worked. We were able to pass the bill in the

House in 2009, but it did not pass the Senate. That is work still to be done,

and the challenge of climate change has only grown more severe. Another thing I

guess I would mention as a major achievement happened earlier in my career when

I chaired the 01:07:00Subcommittee on Science of the Committee on Science, Space, and

Technology. The National Science Foundation had the research agenda for advanced

communications, and it was building at that time equipment and helping to fund

grants that would help develop means for computers to talk to each other. And it

was known as NSFNET. It was very primitive, just purely research. But it was a

network of computers and this whole infrastructure had been funded through the

NSF through its research grants. But it was growing up pretty quickly and people

from Silicon Valley came to visit me as chairman of the subcommittee, 01:08:00and the

message was pretty uniform and that is, you know, we're ready now for

commercialization of this entity, and it no longer needs to be just a research

and education project. It needs to have full commercial standing and we need to

be able to put commercial content on this computer backbone. They didn't call it

the internet at that time, that came later. The NSF had a charter that basically

said that the NSF could only engage in functions for either educational or

research purposes, nothing else. So nothing commercial at all. So that meant the

NSF's opinion, the lawyers' opinion, they could not put commercial content on

this network they were developing. 01:09:00So I introduced a very simple bill and it

basically said there could be commercial content on the NSFNET, consistent with

maintaining the mission for research and education for the network as a whole.

But you gotta allow for commercial content. [It was one of the last bills

President George H.W. Bush signed before leaving office, allowing] for the first

commercial content on what we call the internet today. So, Google, Amazon, all

of those things came later, but that was the start. I guess if I were to point

to one issue, one achievement that I thought had the most groundbreaking

significance, that would have been it. The author of the bill that allowed the

first commercial content on the internet, and if anyone wants the footnotes that

show the history of that, look at my Wikipedia entry, there's one

footnote--quite a long footnote--it's got all of that detailed.

Ren: And to look at how much 01:10:00advertising is on the internet now versus print or

television, I saw a statistic the other day and it's amazing to know that had

that not happened, what would--

Rick: Well had that not happened there would be no Google, there would be no

Amazon. You wouldn't have any of what the internet is really used for today, you

wouldn't have electronic banking, you wouldn't be able to make a hotel

reservation or a restaurant reservation online. All of that is electronic

commerce that was enabled by allowing commercial content on the internet. Now of

course it all grew enormously, but that was the first crack in the door.

Ren: Yeah and I feel like there's someone out there--millions, billions--you and

your colleagues and others owe a big thank you for that, to be able to do those things.

Rick: Only one person ever really thanked me. I went out to Silicon Valley

probably in 2009. 01:11:00I had just become Chairman of the Subcommittee on

Communications and the Internet and so, people in Silicon Valley were interested

in talking to me and I went to Google, and Eric Smith came in. Eric was the CEO

of Google, and he had an interesting history on his own. You know he grew up in Blacksburg.

Ren: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Rick: And as a kid, he used to mow Paul Torgersen's lawn.

Ren: Yeah.

Rick: So we had quite a connection because of that. Brilliant guy, absolutely

brilliant. He runs a big foundation today that donates millions of dollars to

worthy causes around the world. When he walked into the conference room where I

was sitting in, he shook my hand and said, thank you for my job [Laughs].

Ren: [Laughs] Hey that's a good thank you coming from him!

Rick: That was quite a thank you coming from him.

Ren: So you were the U.S. Representative for the 9th district from 1983 to 2011

after that you worked in a law firm in D.C. from 2011 to 2020, would you say

retired, 01:12:00semi-retired? How would you feel?

Rick: Mostly retired, when I left the law firm my intent was to retire because I

was basically done with active work. I'm seventy-six, and the time really had

arrived for me to do things that are more personally enjoyable than working. I

wanted time I can devote to things I enjoy. Cooking, all of the activities out

of doors, jogging on the trails and hiking in the mountains, and spending time

with my wonderful wife. Those are the things I get the most fulfillment from now.

Ren: Amy is your wife's name, correct?

Rick: Amy, that's right.

Ren: Amy, I wanted to make sure we got that in there. Last question, just really

quick, obviously while we're doing this oral history and this interview you

donated your congressional papers to Virginia Tech, to Special Collections

University Archives, 01:13:00a lot of these are online and digitized, more going up to

my understanding, this oral history will accompany that collection. Just

quickly, why Virginia Tech and what do you hope researchers or community members

glean from your collection?

Rick: Good questions. Virginia Tech for obvious reasons. This was the largest

university in my congressional district, it was also the largest employer in my

congressional district. And I had worked actively with a series of Virginia Tech

presidents, four I think in total, from the time I took office until I left

Congress. They all had enormous federal agendas. This university receives a lot

of federal money for research and development, and while I wasn't lobbying for

specific appropriations or grants for sure, but what I was doing in Congress was

making sure the budgets of these 01:14:00agencies were fully funded and that the budgets

had the kinds of priorities for funding that would match the kinds of programs

Virginia Tech has. So it was important legislative work on behalf of the

university. And I carried that out throughout the entire twenty-eight years I

was in the House, so I had a close association with Virginia Tech. And of

course, the renowned digital capabilities of Virginia Tech, meant that they

could digitize most of this collection and make it available over the internet

for anyone who wanted to see it. That's a work in process. They've made great

progress, and that's still continuing. What do I hope people will gain from it?

Well, maybe it will lend to young people to sense that public service is

important, and that people should devote some part of their lives to public

service, helping others. That's been enormously fulfilling for me, 01:15:00and it's

something I learned from the experience with my family. Hopefully this

collection can pass that along to the next generations.

Ren: I'll say thank you so much for your time, for talking with me.

Rick: Thank you!

Ren: I could talk to you for three more hours if we had time I would probably

ask you so many other questions, but I do want to be respectful of your time so

I'll just say, Rick Boucher thank you so much sir, thank you for your service,

thank you for agreeing to speak with me and for sharing your oral history with

us today.

Rick: Thank you very much Ren, it's been a pleasure.

Ren: Thank you.

[End of interview]