Book Excerpt: 'Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator

Oct. 23, 2002 -- Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, writes of the lessons he's learned in more than 25 years of public service in his new book, Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator. "In 1976, the United States was a different place politically than it is today," he writes, explaining how he was spurred into a life-altering move into political office.

Excerpted from Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senatorby Orrin G. Hatch.

Chapter One: When Is the Right Time to Run?Service is the rent you pay for room on this earth.— Shirley Chisholm

Whenever people ask me about running for office, I try never to discourage them, no matter how implausible the idea might seem. I have only to look into the mirror to remember that conventional wisdom is not always an accurate predictor of one's political future.Instead, I suggest they consider the following five questions. If they honestly listen to their own answers, they will have a pretty good idea whether they are personally and professionally ready to take such a life-altering step.

Is running the right thing to do? Is it the right thing for your family, for your state and for your country? Is it the right thing for you and your own future?

The simple fact is that it is hard work trying to reconcile the demands of being a senator or representative with your responsibilities as a parent, let alone deciding where the family should live. Much will depend on the location of your home state or district. If you are from Delaware or Virginia, the travel demands are much different from what they are if you are representing Hawaii or Alaska. Still, I have always felt it important, if possible, to move your family to Washington. Their presence during the week is critical to keeping a sense of balance and perspective.

There will be significant trade-offs no matter where your family is. The constant demands on your time, meeting with constituents, campaigning and fundraising, both in Washington and back home, will force you to choose between your family and job far more often than you could ever imagine. To survive, let alone succeed, you will need an unusually patient and understanding spouse.

Do you have the personal strength, the mental and physical stamina, to run an effective campaign and bear up through the process? Running for office can be physically grueling and emotionally exhausting.

It is no place for the faint of heart or those filled with self-doubt. You can be assured of exposing yourself and your family to public scrutiny; the achievements of which you are most proud will be sullied; and your statements during the campaign will be twisted and distorted until they no longer even remotely resemble their original meanings.

As Barry Goldwater once observed, following his unsuccessful presidential campaign, "If I hadn't known Barry Goldwater in 1964, and I had to depend on the press and the cartoons, I'd have voted against the son of a bitch."

Is it the right time for you to run and are you running against the right opponent? Some consideration has to be given to the political landscape of the moment, and whether you are in tune with the people you hope to be representing. If the voters are uncomfortable with who you really are and what you believe, you may not be the right person to represent that constituency.Similarly, it helps to be running against the right opponent, against someone who has a different agenda and outlook from yours. As so many have observed, more elections are lost than they are won.

Can you attract the support you will need to put yourself in a position to win? Until a better system comes along or you are independently wealthy, you will have to raise your own funding. Running a campaign is like remodeling a house: It always ends up costing more than twice what the experts predict.

Are you running for the right office? There were some who thought my decision to run for the Senate was a sign of excessive ambition. After all, I had no previous experience in public office. It might have made more sense to run for the House of Representatives first, a more traditional path to the Senate.

Despite the considerable importance of serving in the House of Representatives, I simply was not comfortable risking my law practice for a position that might last only for two years. Moreover, I did not feel I had the economic wherewithal to begin planning the next campaign the minute the first one ended.

The final decision should always the candidate's, and the candidate's alone. No one else can be a more effective judge because ultimately the person running has the most at stake.My own decision to run had more to do with my opponent than with my own interest in becoming a United States senator. In 1976, the United States was a different place politically than it is today.

The country was headed in the wrong direction. We were struggling with double-digit inflation, high interest rates and growing unemployment. Our military strength was eroding. The nation was still reeling from the war in Vietnam and the scandals that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Congress was locked tightly in the control of the Democratic Party, and no one thought there was much of a chance that the Republicans would ever be able to regain control of either the House or the Senate. What Congress did best was spend money. The federal budget was expanding rapidly, expenditures were far outpacing revenues, and yet no one seemed concerned or even aware that they were saddling future generations with a massive debt.

Instead, Washington was governed by the belief that government was the answer to every question and the solution to every problem. All that was needed to establish a perfect society was the right number of laws, the right number of rules and regulations, and scores and scores of federal regulators charged with making sure that things worked perfectly.

To many in the western part of the country especially, we were heading toward an American brand of socialism. Naturally, one has to be careful about such generalizations. As Justice Earl Warren noted, "Many people consider the things which government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things government does for others as socialism."2 Still, the trend was there, complemented by the growing conviction that Americans could not be trusted to make the right decisions by themselves. It was as if our national motto had become: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of the government, a man would swallow up his neighbor alive."3

Moreover, the practice of religion was treated with increasing hostility. After 150 years of permissible school prayer, the Supreme Court, in Engle v. Vitale,4 banned the practice in public schools. In 1973, the monumental decision in Roe v. Wade5 legalized abortion, reading a right to an abortion into the Constitution. For many, these cases epitomized the trend toward the judicial legitimization of a devolution of moral accountability and personal responsibility.

I was convinced that someone needed to stand against these trends. Someone needed to point out the deterioration of our moral fiber, the proliferation and increasing acceptance of drugs and crime, the expansion of the welfare state. There was a need to refocus attention on the diminishment of our military, the federal takeover of our local schools and the bartering of our children's future by politicians who seemed more concerned with their next election than the need for fiscal responsibility. It was time for a different philosophy, a different kind of politician.I believed that the answer lay in lower taxes, less government, fewer regulations, less centralized power and a wiser use of the power that must be exercised on behalf of the people. As Barry Goldwater once noted, "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."6

Unlike many in office at the time, I had a greater faith in the collective wisdom of the public than in the parochial views being espoused in the echo chamber inside the Capital Beltway.Utah was also a different place then. The governor, Calvin Rampton, a Democrat who had held office for three terms, was extremely popular, although he had decided not to run for reelection. There was only one Republican in the then four-person congressional delegation, Senator Jake Garn, who had been elected in 1974.

The incumbent senator up for reelection, Frank E. "Ted" Moss, an entrenched Democrat who had held his seat for eighteen years, was considered by most political experts to have one of the safest seats in the country. U.S. News and World Report claimed he was the only incumbent running who could not be beaten. He was considered a superb campaigner who had not let his leadership position in the Senate interfere with his reputation for constituent service.

Senator Moss was extremely liberal for the state, however. His voting record was far more comparable to representatives from the eastern states than to those from the West. He was clearly part of the Democratic establishment in Washington, a willing advocate and player in the group that was leading the country in the wrong direction. In many ways, he personified the very ideas and attitudes that I found so objectionable.

I had known about Ted Moss for some time. I first saw him in person when he debated Senator Arthur V. Watkins during the 1958 campaign. Senator Watkins was a courageous and respected member of the institution. A Republican, he chaired the Senate Select Committee that recommended censure of Joseph McCarthy over his infamous search for communists in the government. It was a thankless but critical assignment that may have helped the nation weather a dangerous political storm but it probably cost him his seat.

At the time, I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, working my way through school. I started out as a janitor and then moved up to selling diamonds and cookware. At BYU, where so many students get married while still in school, someone was always interested in engagement rings or, on a more practical note, pots and pans. Like most people who had been raised in a union household, I was a Democrat. My conversion to the Republican Party would not come until I went to law school.

I came to the debate expecting to support the Democratic candidate but left far more impressed with the thoughtfulness, grace and intelligence of Senator Watkins. Despite my party affiliation, I was surprised and disappointed when Moss defeated Watkins in a three-way race, despite winning only 39 percent of the vote. The third candidate was J. Bracken Lee, a radically conservative former governor of Utah and the mayor of Salt Lake City, who entered the race to protest Watkins's actions against McCarthy. He drew a significant number of Republican votes and threw the election to Moss. For Republicans, the possibility of losing to a Democrat because of the presence of a more conservative third-party challenger has haunted every election since.By the spring of 1976, Senator Moss had attracted several Republican opponents, all of whom were already campaigning. Sherman Lloyd was a former four-term Republican member of the House of Representatives. Clinton Miller was a conservative Washington lobbyist. Desmond Barker had worked in the Nixon White House and had been in and out of state party politics for years. And the party favorite was Jack Carlson, a former Assistant Secretary at the Department of the Interior.

Jack was certainly qualified. He had two degrees from Harvard University and had served as an economic advisor to three presidents. He also had the benefit of his wife, Renee, who was an excellent politician and in many ways a more natural and instinctive campaigner than her husband. In fact, I thought she would have made a far more effective candidate, and if she had been running I probably would not have entered the race.

All four had more impressive political credentials than I had. All had more experience in Washington and a better working knowledge of Congress. All were better known to Republican Party regulars and, to some degree, to the voters. Yet I knew they also shared one fundamental flaw-none could defeat Ted Moss.

By May 1976, my law practice was just beginning to take off. I was involved in several business transactions that, if they turned out as I expected, would ensure my family a good income for some time. My wife, Elaine, and I had six children, three boys and three girls, ranging from Brent, who was eighteen, to Jess, who was six. We had a wonderful home, a four-bedroom house on the East Bench of the Wasatch Mountains, and a spectacular view of the Salt Lake valley below.

For Elaine and me, the house was especially symbolic of what we had worked so hard to accomplish, a far cry from our first home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father, Jesse, a master metal lather and local union leader, had helped me rebuild my parents' chicken coop. Together, we turned it into a tiny two-room bungalow, with a toilet and small stove, that we nicknamed "the cottage," a description that would have made even the most aggressive real estate agent cringe.

One could argue that I should have been content, but I wasn't. I could not escape the powerful and persistent belief that my state and my country were in serious trouble, headed down a dangerous and destructive path, and that if given a chance, I could make a difference. I felt it was my duty, my responsibility, to run and at least give voice to my concerns and my ideas for remedying what was wrong. It was my obligation to give the voters another choice. If they were not interested, I would be more than comfortable returning to the practice of law.

I began to think in earnest about running only a couple of weeks before the filing deadline. Like most potential candidates, I talked to my friends. Andrew Grey Nokes, a fellow attorney and a close family friend, was one of the most supportive. We spent long hours talking politics, discussing what was wrong with the country and what needed to be done. Grey continually counseled me to act on my beliefs and run. His unshakable, irrepressible support at the beginning was critical.

Also critical was the encouragement from Earnest L. Wilkinson, the former president of Brigham Young University. Wilkinson had been a senatorial candidate himself, losing badly to Moss in 1964, the year of President Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory. He introduced me to several individuals who would end up playing a key role in my campaign, particularly W. Cleon Skousen, a former law enforcement official, author, teacher and leading western states conservative.

As I talked to others, I realized that I had two things in my favor. First, an anti-Washington sentiment was sweeping the country and the state. Ironically, my lack of political experience or familiarity with Washington was suddenly a plus instead of a negative.

Second, the key to winning the primary was to survive the Republican state convention. A candidate winning 70 percent of the votes of the 2,500 delegates at the convention would avoid a public primary. If no candidate reached that level, there would be a primary between the top two. So to make it to the primary, I didn't need to convince the entire state. Instead, I needed to contact an identifiable number of delegates, most of whom could be reached in small groups. Talking to them would be very much like addressing a jury or arguing a case in a courtroom. I had spent my entire career learning how to listen and talk on my feet, how to read an audience while speaking to them. Moreover, the number of delegates had been doubled from the previous convention. At least half would be just as new as I was.

Still, more typical of the reactions to my musing was the one I received from Frank Madsen, who was also a close friend, a neighbor and a fellow church member. When I told him I was thinking of running against Senator Moss, he was incredulous.

"You're crazy," he said. "Nobody knows you; you're not known as a Republican; and you don't have any money. It's crazy."

As brutally honest and accurate as this assessment was, it only described my then current political condition. It did not reflect what could be accomplished with the right campaign.On the other hand, Frank's response did underscore another, more practical problem: money. Unlike some candidates, I had neither amassed nor inherited a small fortune. I simply couldn't afford to take off six or seven months from my law practice to run for office. Before I ran, I needed to make sure that we had enough money to literally put bread on the table through the election in November. I was too naïve at that time to worry very much about financing a campaign, assuming that if I was lucky I might be able to raise just enough funds to operate on a shoestring budget.

Amazingly, the solution to this problem had already come from the most unlikely of sources-Judge Willis Ritter, an irascible curmudgeon who had been appointed to the federal bench by President Roosevelt but who seemed more in sympathy with Judge Roy Bean. He was the chief judge of the United States District Court in Utah, an unlikely location for a man whose hatred of the media was exceeded only by his contempt for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

A small, pudgy man rumored to sip Wild Turkey in the courtroom, Judge Ritter was a mystery to many lawyers, often involving himself directly in the cases before him, questioning witnesses and shaping decisions. Yet he also had an unfailing empathy for those who were fighting what he perceived to be the establishment or the vested interest. As a relatively new lawyer in Utah, practicing in a small firm, I had many clients who fit this category, and the judge and I enjoyed a cordial relationship.

In April 1976, Judge Ritter called a scheduling conference to set his trial calendar. Every lawyer with a case currently pending before him had to be there to give a status report and explain whether he or she was ready for trial. I knew from experience that it was a mistake ever to indicate to Judge Ritter that you weren't ready. If he thought it was true, he was apt to schedule the case immediately.

Twenty-seven cases were pending that day, and I was the plaintiff's counsel in twelve. Each time Judge Ritter barked my name, I stood and said I was ready. At one point, he glared down at me, shaking his head slightly, and then a smile crossed his face. He knew there was no way I could be prepared for all twelve. They represented a good two years' worth of work. Still, he scheduled each case, creating an impossible workload if each had actually gone to trial.Judge Ritter's scheduling put a lot of pressure on my opposing counsel, and I was able to settle every case that month, winning extremely favorable settlements for my clients. In one month, I had generated enough income to cover my own and my law firm's expenses for the rest of the year.

Amazingly, my young law partner, Walt Plumb, never questioned my decision to run, even though we both knew my candidacy would affect the firm no matter what the outcome. He doubted I could win, but never once tried to talk me out of running. Walt has gone on to be a phenomenally successful attorney and is worth literally millions today. He still enjoys teasing me about the money I lost by not staying in the firm.There remained one final hurdle: Elaine. When I first explained to her that I was thinking of running, she was upset. She had a low regard for politics and for politicians. Moreover, she loved the life we had built for ourselves in Utah, her only complaint being that she wished I could spend more time with the family.At the time, I normally worked long hours during the weekdays and spent Saturday at the office. Much of Sunday was devoted to church work. Monday night, however, was our "family home evening," and the entire family would spend the evening together. We spent one Monday night talking about whether I should run. I explained to the children why I thought I needed to run and why I believed it was so important. The older ones, who were able to appreciate what was involved, were excited. Elaine was still worried. Understandably, she was convinced that politics would take up even more time and, if I won, regardless of where we lived, I would be able to spend even less time with her and the children.

I spent the better part of two weeks thinking about running, discussing the possibility with as many people as I could, seeing whether anyone else would jump in at the last second, and talking with Elaine. I also prayed, hoping to be guided to do what was right. It was a painful process. I changed my mind so many times that I began to wonder whether I would ever be able to make a final decision. I ended up filing on the last day, at the last hour.As Elaine likes to remind me, she was less than thrilled with this and cried for three days. Fortunately, as she has so often done when we've confronted some exigency, she reconciled herself to making the best of the situation and immediately made herself an invaluable and steadying asset to the campaign.

What now might look like an easy, obvious decision was in fact an extremely precarious, illogical and unlikely proposition. In some ways, the seeming impossibility was an incentive, not an impediment. The repeated advice I was given not to run had accomplished the opposite effect. It had made me even more committed to becoming a candidate. The more people cautioned me, the more they told me it would be impossible to defeat someone as entrenched as Senator Moss, the more convinced I became that I would not only run but I would win.I believed that the real challenge would not be Ted Moss. The attitudes of the state had changed, and I felt he no longer reflected the opinions or positions of most Utahns. He was vulnerable to a Republican opponent who was younger, more articulate, and more conservative. My problem would be the Republican primary, where I would face a group of challengers who all had more experience with campaigning, with the state Republican Party and with real politics. On paper, there was no way I could match the accomplishments of Jack Carlson. My political experience consisted of being elected student body president in college-for the summer school session. Fortunately, races are not won with résumés.

There were moments when I second-guessed my decision. The first occurred right after I filed. I stepped out of the secretary of state's office and found myself in front of the media. For a moment, as I looked at the gaggle of reporters and cameras, I felt I as if I were falling into a bottomless pit. My mind swirled. Fortunately, I gathered myself and said something marginally coherent, the words coming more easily once I started. Later, when the doubts reemerged, I would think back to those ten days in May and remember what had led me to run in the first place. Each time, no matter what was going on, I would again become convinced that running was the right thing to do.

My strategy was simple: come in second at the state convention and force a Republican primary. Jack Carlson had been campaigning for almost eighteen months, using his position in the Ford Administration as an effective springboard. My only hope was to meet as many of the delegates to the state convention as possible, and the best way to do that was to attend the local county conventions.

Over the next few months, Elaine, our six kids, and I crisscrossed the state in our green Ford van and attended all twenty-nine Republican county conventions. Everyone got involved, handing out literature, putting up signs and talking with the delegates. To our collective surprise, we ended up spending more time together as a family that year than ever before.

It was a summer vacation unlike any other. Normally, spending July and August driving around in a car with your parents would not be the first choice of most children, but our kids had fun, rarely complaining despite the long hours. We covered the long distances reading stories and singing songs. And naturally I was not above bribery. They well understood that if they behaved, I would spring for milkshakes.

As in most campaigns, we ate an amazing amount of fast food. Kentucky Fried Chicken was the favorite, but the real winners were the milkshakes at Granny's, a tiny hamburger joint in Heber City. Each milkshake is a colossus, a triumph of taste over gravity. The shake is so thick that it can stand inches over the top of the cup, more like an ice cream cone than a beverage. The mapmakers at Rand McNally would be shocked to learn that, according to my children, most cities and towns in Utah can only be reached by passing Granny's.

Despite the predictions of a sure defeat, by the time of the convention in July, the race had tightened. I spoke first, stressing that we needed a candidate who could bring a fresh perspective to Washington. Jack Carlson focused on issues, emphasizing his considerable insider knowledge. When the delegates voted, he won narrowly, with 930 votes to my 778. The others were far back. Our strategy had paid off. We had forced a September primary.

For the next two months, Jack and I traveled around the state, although he spent more time campaigning against Senator Moss than against me. I desperately tried to get him to debate, knowing, as the underdog and lesser-known candidate, that a debate could only raise my profile. He constantly refused, choosing instead to emphasize that I had lived in Utah for only six years.It seems that almost every opponent I have ever run against has tried to win points by pointing out that I was not born in Utah, even though it never works. On this occasion, my mother stepped into the fray and wrote a letter to the Deseret News saying that she was to blame for my not being a Utah native. She pointed out that when I was able to decide on my own where I would live, I chose to move to Salt Lake City.

With only weeks to go before the September primary, I felt I was beginning to pull ahead of Carlson, although not by an overwhelming margin. Something more was needed. Several of my campaign staff suggested I ask Ronald Reagan for his endorsement, even though it was unlikely that a Republican of his stature would get involved in a state primary contest. I resisted. By now the race was personal, and I wanted in the worst way to win the election on my own without having to ride on someone else's endorsement or coattails.

My staff argued back, pointing out that I had welcomed other endorsements, especially from people within the state. The only difference was that Reagan was from California. I swallowed my pride and agreed to make the call, starting with Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, who was from Utah and was still involved in state politics. His polling indicated I was ahead of Carlson, by as much as nine points in some surveys, and there was a strong possibility that I could win in November. I did not have enough funds to conduct my own polling, but his assessment matched what we were sensing. Wirthlin realized that an endorsement was not as a big a risk as it had seemed only months before. Moreover, for Reagan, an endorsement would give him part of the credit for my victory and a potential ally when he ran for President in 1980.

Four days before the primary, Reagan telegraphed his enthusiastic endorsement, which my campaign quickly got out to the papers. Carlson scrambled to obtain a similar statement from President Ford or his candidate for Vice President, Senator Bob Dole, but they refused to get involved, and the race was suddenly all but over.

In the end, I won the September primary by an almost two-to-one margin. I spent a total of $35,000, $18,000 of which was my own, an amazingly miniscule amount by today's standards.I could now finally focus on my most formidable opponent, Senator Moss. Once again, I was fortunate. Despite my victory, Moss refused to take me seriously. He had beaten several better-known, more established Republican challengers in the past. Even though I was ahead in the polls, he was confident he could easily win against a political novice, especially one he liked to refer to as a carpetbagger.

We debated for the first time before eight hundred Rotarians at the Hotel Utah. He spoke first, bellowing out the question, "Who is this young-upstart-attorney-from-Pittsburgh?"He elongated every word, as if each by itself was sufficient to serve as my epitaph. In one question, he had managed to underscore the fact that I was inexperienced, that I was an attorney, an occupation viewed with even more scorn than politics, and that I was not a native Utahn. He seemed confident he was hitting a political trifecta.

He could have added a few more. The debate marked the first time I had ever met a United States senator face-to-face. Moreover, he had been a senator when I was still a janitor. If he had known, I am sure he would have added "scared to death" to his litany.Knowing there was nothing I could do about my profession or my age, I decided to focus on my place of birth. "Senator," I said, anger overwhelming my nervousness, "my great-grandfather, Jeremiah Hatch, founded Vernal and Ashley Valley in eastern Utah. My great-uncle, Lorenzo Hatch, was one of the founders of Logan and Cache Valley in northern Utah, and my great uncle, Abram Hatch, helped found Heber City and Heber Valley in central Utah. They were all polygamists, and everywhere I go, people come up to me and say, 'You know, I think I'm related to you.'"

People began to laugh, but I was still angry. "If you keep denigrating my Hatch family background," I continued, staring at Moss, "the Hatch vote alone is going to rise up and bite you in the ass."

The Rotarians roared in laughter, and Senator Moss looked shocked and perplexed. The tone for the rest of the campaign was set.

Moss continued to attack my character and place of birth. With only days to go before the election, his campaign made an issue of the fact that I was a named defendant in a lawsuit alleging securities fraud, and the senator repeatedly asked whether someone being sued for fraud should represent the state.

In fact, I was being sued by none other than former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, for an alleged error or omission in a security document I had prepared. He had been one of the investors in a proposed real estate deal in Reston, Virginia. My law firm had been asked to prepare a private-placement memorandum, a legal document given to potential and actual investors to warn them of the potential risks associated with investing. As is often done with such documents, we listed every conceivable reason why someone should not participate, but Foreman went ahead. When the deal went bust, he sued me and everyone else involved, including his own lawyers and my law partner, alleging that he had been given insufficient warning of all the potential risks.

The case was settled before trial, and my partner and I were vindicated, my insurance company paying only what would have been defense costs. If I recall correctly, Foreman's own attorneys paid for almost the entire settlement.

Still, at this point, I was the defendant in a lawsuit, and the allegations were hurting me. Fortunately, my campaign staff conducted their own research and found some surprising information about Senator Moss.

The issue came to a head on the Saturday three days before the election. Senator Moss and I were both guests on a local news show hosted by Lucky Severensen, one of the top political shows in Utah at the time.

Moss raised the issue, again asking whether someone being sued for fraud should represent Utah. I patiently waited for him to finish, then explained the nature of the case and my technical involvement. When I had finished, I asked Senator Moss whether he had ever been sued. He sputtered for a minute, then said that, like most attorneys, he had probably been sued at some point during his career. I asked whether he had ever been sued for actual fraud. He emphatically said, "No!"

I paused for a moment while I reached down into my briefcase and pulled out a copy of a lawsuit for fraud that had been filed against Senator Moss. I slowly explained the differences between the lawsuit filed against me and the one against Moss. In my case, the allegations involved a single legal error, or omission, in a lengthy document, and turned on whether the long list of cautions I had included in the document had given the buyer adequate warning. In his case, the allegations involved the senator's own personal conduct and alleged actual fraud. Senator Moss looked at me in shock, speechless. The host, Lucky Severensen, leapt into the void and began demanding details about the lawsuit, questioning whether it was fair for Senator Moss to make an issue of charges filed against me but not admitting to the lawsuit against him. Moss tried to respond, but it was too late. Nothing he could say or do could remedy the damage.As often happens in politics, the number of people who actually watched the television show was tiny, probably just a handful of reporters and our respective families and campaigns. But by Monday it was hard to find a person in Utah who didn't know about the show and the blunder Moss had made.

To this day, I have wondered why he would choose to make an issue out of Foreman's lawsuit, knowing he had been sued himself. Whatever the reason, it clearly backfired.On the day of the election, Utah voted overwhelmingly for President Ford, who won every state west of the Mississippi but still ended up losing to Jimmy Carter, and for Scott Matheson, the Democratic candidate for governor. I defeated Senator Moss, 54 percent to 45 percent, helped by the hard, dedicated work of countless volunteers, campaign staff and my family; by the continued support of Ronald Reagan; and by my opponent's failure to take my candidacy seriously until the last moment.

My decision to run, which had initially seemed so preposterous, suddenly became a far more obvious proposition, as if my election was a virtual certainty the minute I announced. Yet it never would have been possible if so many seemingly unrelated factors had not come together almost simultaneously and so favorably.

When I first decided to run for the Senate, I was perhaps the only person who didn't think I was trying to build castles in the air. Through hard work and perseverance, and the support, advice and encouragement of many different people, I was able to put together a campaign that over only seven months enabled an unknown to survive a crowded Republican convention, best the favorite in the party primary and go on to defeat a supposedly invincible and powerful incumbent. I ran at the right time for me, politically, personally and financially, and for the right office.

None of that would have been possible, however, unless I was convinced, like so many other candidates, not only that I could be of service but that I had an obligation, a duty to run. To quote President Eisenhower, it was my turn in the saddle, my time to "protect the rights and privileges of free people and … preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage."7

Excerpted from Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senatorby Orrin G. Hatch, Published by Basic Books, Oct. 2002.