Not just survive, often thrive.

He chaired four Senate committees. He’s gone up against Senate legends, CIA officials, the Justice Department, and ethics boards. He rivaled Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Shelby, 88, got the last laugh Thursday afternoon as he and longtime friend Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) received a standing ovation moments before the bill nearly of the duo’s $1.7 trillion funding the federal government has received broad bipartisan approval. The two leaders of the credit committee kissed a few days before retiring and heading away into the political sunset.

House approves $1.7 trillion omnibus bill

While Leahy has always been a Vermont liberal, Shelby has, in his own words, “evolved” over the years. But he always found the political sweet spot and kept winning.

His career is a rebuke to two trends in today’s Senate: those who rush to social media and cable news with outlandish actions to get attention, and those who sit quietly on the fringes of the legislature. and follow the instructions of their party leaders.

“If all you’re interested in is doing whatever it takes to please everyone — saying, ‘This is to help me get re-elected’ — you’re going to be a member of the House or a senator of no consequence. here,” Shelby said in a lengthy interview Monday in her office where just about everything had been packed up and sent to storage. “And you’ll be here for the wrong reason.”

Shelby believes his continued popularity at home comes from an understanding that voters still value a “senator of consequence,” especially in the mold of the former Southern senator who has spent decades gaining power and using it. to help voters.

Born in Birmingham in 1934, Shelby attended the University of Alabama and Birmingham School of Law, before winning a state Senate seat. He won a House seat in 1978 and entered Congress with a collection of rising stars that then included Representatives. Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)

In 1986, he got into a tough Senate race against an incumbent, Jeremiah Denton, who was a beloved war hero who had spent 7½ years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“A tough race,” Shelby recalled, winning by less than 7,000 votes, just 0.6% for his margin. He would never face a campaign like that again.

He joined another class of future congressional statesmen: Thomas A. Daschle (DS.D.) and Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), future majority leaders; John McCain (R-Arizona), himself a Vietnam hero who won the 2008 presidential nomination; and Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), the longest serving woman in Senate history.

“We were all ambitious. We knew that,” he recalled, noting that he was the last person in office from those classes of 1978 and 1986.

Early on, he asked Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (DW.Va.) for a seat on the Appropriations Committee. “Clearly Republican leanings,” Byrd told senior Democrats, explaining his rejection.

Shelby soon discovered that the days of southern conservatives dominating the Democratic caucus were over, and after winning a second term in 1992, he openly quarreled with President Bill Clinton. White House officials retaliated by offering Shelby a single ticket to the ceremony honoring Alabama’s soccer national championship. Howell Heflin, the Democratic state senator, got 15 tickets.

The day after Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections, Shelby switched parties. He set out to reshape his state’s economy, beginning with Huntsville.

“A few decades ago, this was a sleepy town near the Tennessee border. Today it is a thriving technology hub for cutting-edge industries like space exploration and missile defense,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a speech. in tribute to Shelby.

And a trip to Singapore led Shelby to make Mobile Port one of the deepest in the country. But prominent senators do more than provide dollars to their states, and Shelby’s first chairmanship came on the Intelligence Committee.

He counts his vote to authorize the war in Iraq in 2002 among his greatest regrets, accusing CIA officials of misleading Congress about the regime’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

“Our intelligence officers and everyone else told us that was what they were doing,” he said, wishing he had listened to his own doubts at the time. “I think we all needed more data. »

Instead, he spent two years fending off a Justice Department investigation into allegations he leaked classified information during a congressional investigation into the 2001 terrorist attacks. No charges have been filed. filed and the Senate Ethics Committee dismissed the case without any sanction.

When he recounts his former battles, they often end with the same sentence: “We won this”.

This is how he described a battle with McCain over a dispute over mobile shipbuilding, and how he and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) once again defeated McCain in a dispute over the purchase of Russian rockets for the American aerospace industry, with emphasis on Huntville.

“And we won that,” he said, smiling. “McCain congratulated me on that.”

The legendary battles with the Arizonan began, like so many in the Senate, on more personal terms. “I think the separation of McCain and Shelby came from John Tower,” he recalled.

The former GOP senator from Texas was nominated by President George HW Bush in 1989 to serve as Secretary of Defense, and Shelby initially pledged to support McCain’s close friend.

But Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, didn’t like Tower and held weeks of hearings, including allegations of personal misconduct. Shelby remained loyal to its president, opposing Tower.

He loved to travel the world, especially with his wife, Annette Shelby, the first woman to earn a professorship at Georgetown University’s business school. Leahy recalled how his wife, Marcelle, and Annette Shelby helped salvage a tense meeting in Havana with Cuban President Raúl Castro.

“I’m a teacher in Georgetown and I’ve taught a lot of Cubans,” Annette Shelby told Castro, after Marcelle Leahy pushed the notorious dictator’s brother to talk about great-grandchildren.

“Well, the half-hour meeting has become two hours,” Senator Leahy said Friday.

Shelby has maintained a fairly firm conservative stance for most of her tenure. As the Banking Committee’s top Republican, he pulled out in 2008 of the talks that would lead to the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

Almost nothing changed politically, as his reelection came like clockwork, still between 63 and 68 percent, but before the 2016 campaign, Shelby heard footsteps.

Several veteran senators had been taken in by hardline ideologues during GOP primary campaigns, so Shelby prepared, hiring McConnell’s top political advisers to run a modern campaign. Trump’s ascendancy in Alabama complicated matters, bringing out many new voters who weren’t natural Shelby supporters.

“I never ran with Donald Trump. No, I didn’t. I ran ahead of him by 20 points,” Shelby said. He won his primary with 65% of the vote, well ahead of the Trump’s 43% plurality.

During his last term, Shelby attempted to play the role of institutional gatekeeper. When the Washington Post reported that, in his thirties, Republican candidate Roy Moore romantically pursued teenage girls, Shelby broke ranks in that 2017 special election.

“He would have been the face of the party for the wrong reasons, and the face of Alabama for the wrong reasons,” Shelby said Monday.

He announced he would write in a different candidate, and nearly 23,000 Alabamians followed suit.

Moore, who received a belated endorsement from Trump, lost by less than 22,000 votes.

Shortly after Shelby announced he would not be seeking re-election this year, Trump jumped into Alabama politics again, endorsing Rep. Mo Brooks (R), a controversial figure who spoke out during the January 6, 2021 rally before the attack on the Capitol.

Shelby lent her support to Katie Britt, her former chief of staff active in state business circles. He funneled $6 million into a super PAC that beat out Brooks, who often objected to the kind of big-spending deals Shelby used to boost Alabama.

Britt won the primary. In the general election, she received very similar approval to Shelby: more than 66% of voters backed her.

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Britt’s campaign hat hung in Shelby’s office, one of the last things left. He hopes she will follow her path to becoming a consecutive senator.

“I am, by nature, not against everything. There’s a lot of things I’m tough on, tough on the right,” Shelby said. “And a lot of things that I think there are tomorrow. The clock is ticking, we are evolving.