Maine Aide Climbs Senate Ranks
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 – It was the painful electoral defeat of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota that most recently changed Gary Myrick’s fortunes in the nation’s capital.
“That was hard, very hard,” said the 37-year-old Guilford native, who used to work for Daschle. “The election in general was hard. But you have to move forward. You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”
On election night, Myrick watched the returns with the man he has worked for during the last two years as his closest adviser on the Senate floor, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada.
Following Daschle’s defeat, Reid was elected by his fellow Democratic senators to become the party’s leader in that chamber. As Reid’s star has risen in American politics, so too has that of Myrick’s, who has been made second-in-command to the new Senate leader.
“He basically grew up in the cloakroom,” said Susan McCue, Reid’s chief of staff, about the room just off of the Senate floor where intense negotiations over legislation often take place.
” For the past two years they’ve worked seamlessly together on the floor. [Reid has] been dependent on Gary as his right-hand man to help him through the many complicated negotiations that take behind the scenes,” McCue said.
53-year-old Marty Paone, who oversees the entire Democratic floor staff and was Myrick’s boss when the latter was the floor counsel, said Myrick has risen to the top because of his ability to keep cool under tense situations and build as well as maintain political relationships.
“You have to get along,” Paone said. “Your enemy today may be your friend tomorrow.”
As Reid’s closest adviser on the Senate floor, Myrick has negotiated with Republicans on thousands of bills. But ever since Democrats became the minority, Myrick has had to help his party play smart defense, sometimes using filibusters when needed.
The sense of fair play and bipartisanship that Myrick and his Republican counterparts talk about will be sorely tested if Republicans proceed with a tricky procedural move intended to prevent Democrats from using filibusters to delay or block confirmation of federal judges.
It is one area that Myrick refuses to discuss, saying only, “I’m worried about the institution.”
Myrick, who is soft-spoken like his current boss, stands at about 5’10” tall. He is bald on top, and the hair on the sides of his head is closely cropped. If you talk to him long enough, the dry sense of humor for which he’s famous seeps through, evidenced by his talk about the car he drives: a blue 1989 Mercedes whale of a car that he bought from a friend and that his friends sometimes rib him about.
“There are some warning lights. It’s like a Christmas tree,” he said, laughing about the car’s mechanical problems. “I’d keep it forever, but my wife has had enough.”
Myrick, who is married now and has a 3-year-old son named Henry, was never into college or high school politics when he was growing up. Even so, Myrick abruptly left the University of Maine in 1989 before his senior semester to work for the Maine legislature as a page. It was not so much for politics as it was a way to bolster his odds of getting into law school.
“They’ve always been OK,” he said of his grades, “but they’ve never been stellar. “So I knew I had to work hard.”
That summer he worked at the Mobil gas station by his house, the same one he worked at in high school to earn enough money to buy his first car, a 1966 Mercury Comet, which he bought for $200. “It had low miles but a lot of rust,” he said.
By Labor Day, he was heading down to Washington as an intern for one of the nation’s foremost political icons, Maine Sen. George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, traveling with a Mitchell staffer who was driving Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie’s car down to the capital.
At the end of his internship he came back to the state legislature for another term while finishing college thanks to independent study. Later that spring he took a staff assistant job in Sen. Mitchell’s legislative office. This time it was for good.
He would eventually move to Mitchell’s leadership office, and then on to his cloakroom staff. While working there, Myrick got into to law school, enrolling in a four-year night program at American University.
It was a degree that that Myrick always thought he would use back in Maine, an idea he hasn’t ruled out.
Soon after Mitchell left the Senate in 1995, Myrick graduated from law school. He was promoted to the Senate floor staff by Daschle, who became the Senate’s new majority leader, and would work there until he became Reid’s floor counsel.
Reid, who is credited with being a parliamentary wiz on the floor, defers to Myrick for the credit.
“All the articles that have been written about how much I know about floor procedures, and I’m a master of the procedures of the Senate. Basically I owe all that to Gary,” Reid said. “There isn’t anything that I’ve done that we haven’t worked closely on.”
As Reid’s deputy chief of staff, Myrick’s focus will now shift to managing a much larger operation, from hiring, overseeing policy directives and yes, keeping an eye on the Senate floor.
Growing up, politics were a constant topic of discussion around the Myrick household. Gary’s father, Warren Myrick, was a library trustee and a member of Guilford’s planning board and was active with the county Democratic Party. He was “a joiner,” according to Gary’s sister, Elizabeth, who also now lives in the Washington area.
Gary Myrick also found special opportunities for his family to see Washington in ways most people never can.
Just a year or two into President Clinton’s second term, Myrick secured a ticket to the Senate gallery for his sister to see Clinton give his state of the Union address.
More recently, he brought his sister and parents to Daschle’s office balcony in the Capitol. Warren Myrick died last year from a neck injury, and the trip down to see his son would be his last. Gary’s mother remembers the occasion vividly.
“It was raining, but I didn’t care,” Carole Myrick said. “It was just wonderful.”
“Coming from Guilford, Maine, that’s a pretty amazing experience,” Elizabeth Myrick said. “That would be an amazing experience for anyone.”
“If things had been different,” said Gary’s brother, Jeffrey, who lives in Standish, the senior Myrick might have run for the state House. An interest in politics, Gary Myrick’s family members say, was something he and his father shared in particular.
David Schiappa, the equivalent to Myrick on the Republican side and who shares a common interest in home renovation with Myrick, praised his temperament and political skills, calling him a friend.
He said that his communication with Myrick is always good, even though they know they are playing for very different teams. “He’s an institutional guy,” Schiappa said. “I hope he sticks around for a while.”
Myrick stresses that in Guilford, where everyone knows everyone else, a person’s word is everything. In this regard, the U.S. Senate is not so different from his hometown.
He compared the day-to-day legislative contests with Republicans on the Senate floor to the vintage animated cartoon characters Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog.
After trying to outwit the other all day, the two would stop when the closing whistle blows, clock out and go home.
“The relationship we have with the Republican floor staff is just like that,” Myrick said. “They protect their rights, we protect our rights. Fight like hell during the day.
“As stressful as it is, you get to the end of the day and you still have the relationships because you’ve been honest. And you clock out, and you go home, and you start again the next day.”
