A Senator's Personal Reflections on Public Service

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12130
• Author: Mary L. Landrieu
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Date: 01 September 2013

Perspective

Mary L. Landrieu is senior U.S. senator

from Louisiana. She was f‌i rst elected to

the Louisiana state legislature at age 23,

served eight years as a state representative,

and relinquished her seat to serve as state

treasurer from 1988 until 1996, when she

became the f‌i rst woman from Louisiana

elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate.

Senator Landrieu chairs the Senate Small

Business Committee and the Appropriations

Subcommittee on Homeland Security and

serves as a member of the Energy and

Natural Resources committees. In the after-

math of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and

the failures of the federal levee system, she

secured billions of dollars for the Gulf Coast

recovery efforts and has worked extensively

to jump-start recovery projects.

A Senator’s Personal Ref‌l ections on Public Service 671

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 73, Iss. 5, pp. 671–672. © 2013 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12130.

Published 2013. This article is a

US Government work and is in the

public domain in the USA.

Mary L. Landrieu

U.S. Senate

 e Honorable Mary Landrieu, U.S. senator

from Louisiana since 1997, addressed the 2013

annual meeting of the American Society for

Public Administration (ASPA) at a luncheon

honoring four Louisianans for their public serv-

ice.  ey included General Russel L. Honoré,

U.S. Army; Chancellor James L. Llorens,

Southern University at Baton Rouge; Mayor

Mitch Landrieu, City of New Orleans; and

Professor Astrid Merget, Public Administration

Institute at Louisiana State University Baton

Rouge and honorary co-chair of the 2013 ASPA

Conference. In her remarks, Senator Landrieu

ref‌l ected on her lineage in public service.

Introductions, such as the warm one of‌f ered

here at the ASPA conference, often herald my

family lineage as key to my record of public

service. To be sure, our family heritage highlights

my father, Moon, as mayor of New Orleans and

secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and

Urban Development; my brother, Mitch, now mayor

of New Orleans and previously lieutenant governor

of Louisiana; and my sister, Madeleine, a judge on

Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  at is

an impressive tradition, but it surely is not a matter of

the “right” schools and the “right clubs” or some other

elitist entrée.

Instead, in our family, our public service commit-

ment captures the quiet yet powerful inf‌l uences of my

childhood. Ours was a large family of nine children,

and I was the eldest. Watching out for the younger

ones both in my home and in school instilled a sense

of familial and communal responsibility early on. We

had no nannies or hired caretakers on the salary of a

public servant.

Our home celebrated caring for each other—parents

for children, older children for younger ones, and

across all ages for each other.  at sense of caring

was further reinforced and disciplined by my early

education with the Ursuline Sisters in New Orleans.

A stunning revelation came early on with volunteering

and tutoring other children. It startled me then that

children my own age could not read and that they

often lived in appalling conditions even compared

to our relatively modest circumstances.  e sisters at

the Ursuline Academy impressed upon me the duty

and the responsibility of each individual for caring for

each other—the very essence of public service.  is

ethic of public service was reinforced by my fam-

ily and augmented by my studies at Louisiana State

University.

Not long after school, those sentiments of service

prompted me to run for public of‌f‌i ce and become a

state legislator at age 23. After eight years, the citizens

then elected me state treasurer for two terms before

Louisiana sent me to the U.S. Senate.

 roughout my childhood and up to this day, natural

disasters, especially hurricanes, have punctuated my

career in public service. In the immediate aftermath of

Katrina, I was literally “on the ground” in Louisiana

for over a month—and not just inspecting, surveying,

and commiserating. I honestly did pitch in and helped

chainsaw trees out of f‌l ooded houses. My own house

as well as my parents’ family homestead suf‌f ered severe

damage.

 e citizens and my family shared the devastat-

ing experiences, but my position in public of‌f‌i ce

was empowering. Being senator helped in securing

billions of dollars in rescue and recovery funds, in

jump- starting recovery and restoration projects, and

in reforming the federal role with its capacity for

ef‌f ective disaster response.

But long before Katrina, the other storms, the oil

spills, and the f‌l ooding rivers had wrecked havoc on

the state. My upbringing instilled a sense of helping

others through those horrif‌i c times. Early training as

a Girl Scout and Brownie taught me how to “prepare”

myself and my family, let alone help others, as we

navigated disasters.

A Senator’s Personal Ref‌l ections on Public Service