Jack Reed, Rhode Island’s senior senator, was first elected to the House in 1990 and the Senate in 1996. He grew up in working-class Cranston, the second of three children of a school custodian and a housewife. Disappointed that she never got to go to college, Mary Reed prepared her children for success in school. She insisted on music and art classes for Jack beginning at age 5. But her son was fascinated by history and World War II as a child, and eventually decided he wanted to go to the U.S. Military Academy. At LaSalle Academy, a Catholic prep school in Providence, he played football, though he was small for the sport. He also ran track, was elected to the student council and worked on the school newspaper. Reed was accepted at West Point, and then went on to serve in the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. He also received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School while in the Army, and after retiring from active duty, he graduated from Harvard Law School. Throughout his life, Reed has maintained connections with West Point, teaching there briefly in the late 1970s, serving on the academy’s governing board and choosing it as the site of his wedding in April 2005. Read More

Jack Reed, Rhode Island’s senior senator, was first elected to the House in 1990 and the Senate in 1996. He grew up in working-class Cranston, the second of three children of a school custodian and a housewife. Disappointed that she never got to go to college, Mary Reed prepared her children for success in school. She insisted on music and art classes for Jack beginning at age 5. But her son was fascinated by history and World War II as a child, and eventually decided he wanted to go to the U.S. Military Academy. At LaSalle Academy, a Catholic prep school in Providence, he played football, though he was small for the sport. He also ran track, was elected to the student council and worked on the school newspaper. Reed was accepted at West Point, and then went on to serve in the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. He also received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School while in the Army, and after retiring from active duty, he graduated from Harvard Law School. Throughout his life, Reed has maintained connections with West Point, teaching there briefly in the late 1970s, serving on the academy’s governing board and choosing it as the site of his wedding in April 2005.

In 1984, at 35, Reed won public office for the first time, beating an incumbent in the primary for the state Senate, where he served six years. When Republican Claudine Schneider left the U.S. House to run against Sen. Claiborne Pell in 1990, Reed ran for her seat. He beat former Rep. Edward Beard 49%-27% in the Democratic primary and won the general election 59%-41%. In 1995, when Pell announced his retirement after 36 years, Reed ran for the Senate. Reed had no serious competition for the Democratic nomination and faced state Treasurer Nancy Mayer in the general election. National Republicans spent nearly $1 million on ads attacking Reed as a liberal for opposing bills requiring welfare recipients to work and for supporting labor unions—not especially harmful charges in liberal, heavily unionized Rhode Island. Reed spent $2.7 million to Mayer’s $773,000. His biography was his message: Reed launched his campaign in a public school conference room named for his late father, he stressed his bootstraps rise from a working-class background and he called for education spending to help others achieve the same success. He won 63%-35%.

Reed arrived as one of the few senators of his generation with military experience and has been regarded by many colleagues as an authority on defense and military matters. He has served on the Armed Services Committee since January 1999, and he got a waiver from the Democratic leadership to remain on the panel after securing a seat on the Appropriations Committee in 2007.

Reed supported President Bill Clinton’s bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, but in October 2002, he opposed the Iraq war resolution. Reed argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grossly underestimated the strength of anti-American insurgents in Iraq and failed to send in adequate troops and equipment. Reed has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan frequently, often straying from the safe zones to talk with officers and soldiers on the front lines. In 2005, after his fifth trip to Iraq, he said: “My job is to be critical about what’s going on and what needs to be improved. I think my criticism has been accurate, certainly in the operations in this region, in that we didn’t organize ourselves for the appropriate occupation and stabilization” after the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

In 2006, Reed was at the forefront of Democratic efforts to convince President George W. Bush to redeploy forces in Iraq. With Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, he sponsored a bill calling for a “phased redeployment” in six months, with no deadline for complete withdrawal and with some U.S. forces remaining to transition to training Iraqi security forces. The Levin-Reed amendment lost 60-39. That summer, Reed said that Iraq had deteriorated into a “low-grade civil war,” but pointed to gains in training Iraqis. In December 2006, he said the Iraq Study Group’s report “may be the last chance to get it right” and noted that its recommendations were “strikingly similar” to the Levin-Reed amendment. After President Bush’s successful troop surge in 2007, Reed continued to push for alternatives that would leave only a residual force in Iraq for counter-terrorism, protection of U.S. personnel and logistical support for Iraqi security forces. But most Republicans were opposed, and Reed failed to gain the 60 votes required to force a final vote.

Reed accompanied Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on his 2008 trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama later considered him a potential running mate until Reed ruled himself out. He also was on the short list of possible defense secretaries, but Obama decided to retain Robert Gates. In September 2009, while Obama was mulling strategy in Afghanistan, Reed expressed doubts about sending more troops and said the burden of proof was on commanders to justify a troop increase. After a visit there in July 2010, Reed was cautiously upbeat. Also that year, he told National Journal, “I’ve been to Afghanistan 11 times. I do not just seek out just one opinion. I talk to people in the field, diplomats and soldiers. I go recognizing, frankly, everyone has an institutional agenda. I try to approach all these things with a questioning mind.”

Reed has long backed efforts to permanently increase the size of the Army. In 2003, the Senate voted 52-45 for his amendment to add 10,000 troops, but it was dropped in conference with the House. The following year, he and Nebraska GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel called for an increase of 30,000 troops, and the Senate agreed to 20,000. In 2006, Reed worked with the Republican leadership to add $3.7 billion for more soldiers and Marines, and sponsored an amendment to add $10 billion to replace damaged or destroyed equipment.

On most issues, Reed has had a solidly liberal voting record. In February 2009, a National Journal examination of roll call votes dating to the 1980s found him to be the most liberal senator, slightly ahead of Barbara Boxer of California and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

He has championed the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program popular with members of Congress from the Northeast. In February 2011, he and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine wrote to White House budget chief Jacob Lew protesting proposed cuts to LIHEAP. Reed was the lead opponent of a bill to prevent victims from suing to hold gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their products. He has supported extensions of unemployment benefits and work-share programs, like those in Rhode Island, in which employers reduce the hours of full-time employees in order to avoid lay-offs during financial hard times.

Reed is the second ranking Democrat on the Banking Committee, just behind South Dakota’s Tim Johnson, who became chairman after the retirement of Connecticut’s Christopher Dodd in 2010. On the committee, Reed pushed for expanding the affordable housing fund and said that federal regulators had been too complacent in overseeing the financial derivatives market. He was assigned by Dodd to work on derivatives provisions of the financial regulation bill of 2010. He also advanced a proposal to require hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capitalists to provide information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would determine whether they pose a systemic risk to the financial markets. He sponsored a bill in February 2010 to create a National Institute of Finance to help regulators monitor systemic risk in the system. In June 2010, Senate conferees rejected by a 10-2 vote his amendment requiring that the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

In Rhode Island politics, Reed has always been his own man, unentangled with local Democratic Party affairs. He was re-elected 78%-22% in 2002 and 73%-26% in 2008. This is a Senate seat whose members have had long tenures. Theodore Green, elected at age 69, served 24 years; Claiborne Pell, elected at 41, served 36 years. Reed, first elected at 47, has the potential for similarly long service.