�鶹��ý

In this interview, Richard Swett relates his conversion story, how he became involved in politics, and how he performed church service while also serving in Congress and later as a US ambassador. He recounts a moving story about how he softened the heart of a former opponent who was seeking revenge by opposing his ambassadorial nomination. This interview was conducted on January 11, 2022, by Richard Davis, professor emeritus of political science at BYU.

Richard Davis: Let’s start by you giving us a little bit of context and background. Tell us where you grew up and a little bit about your family and your education and how you joined the church.

Richard Swett: Well, I grew up in New Hampshire for the most part, having moved here at the age of one and a half. Before that I lived in six different states. My father was a construction manager for a large refinery construction company called M.W. Kellogg. And we came to New England when he left that company and started his own construction firm, first in Vermont but then ultimately in the Lakes Region in New Hampshire.

I started out in elementary school in Meredith, New Hampshire, and attended a first congregational church there that was at that time two hundred and fifty years old. And we then moved to Gilford, where I attended junior high school and high school at Laconia. My father was the chairman of the building committee for a new high school, and my mother served on the school board in all these communities where I lived. I have always seen my parents active at the local level.

I went on to university with no intention of having a political career. As a matter of fact, my parents taught me to be wary of lawyers and stay away from politicians. But they were very much focused on local contributions and working on local boards and commissions and doing things like that. And when I ultimately married a lawyer and ended up in politics, they quizzically looked at me and asked me where they went wrong. And I said, “You didn’t go wrong, you just taught me a very healthy caution towards these two professions, and I think that has served me very well.”

My father was a contractor, as I said, and one of the most honest people that I have ever known, and he had a great influence on my life. I tried to emulate his honesty and his straightforwardness, and I think it has served me to good stead. Although at one point I was not aware he lost a substantial amount of money, his entire wealth, because of a situation at one of his larger job sites. He ultimately paid the cost for a mistake that wasn’t necessarily his, but he, as the owner of the company, bore the responsibility. And I just have many examples from his life and my mother’s life that showed me that honesty was the best policy and that we must account for our mistakes, and they may be honest and sincere mistakes that were done without any ill intent, but just the same we must be responsible. And I think that’s something that has been missing terribly in our political system and the system of leadership that I have encountered not only here in the United States but all around the world.

Richard Davis: So tell us about your conversion.

Richard Swett: My conversion really took place in college, where it happens to a lot of young people, I think, and I was one who grew up, as I said, in the First Congregational Church in Meredith, New Hampshire. I attended Sunday school there through the sixth grade. Then we moved to Gilford and my parents gave me the option of going to church on Sunday or not, and I chose not to. They were all along the kind of parents who stayed home and drank a cup of coffee and read the Sunday newspaper while the kids walked literally two doors down the street to the church and attended Sunday school. And when it came time to choose, I chose not to attend. But when I got to college, one thing I started noticing was that my circle of friends were people who had deep faith commitments. They weren’t Latter-day Saints necessarily nor Christians necessarily; they were Jews and Hindu and other religions. But I was very interested in understanding what their faith basis was and what their relationship, through that faith, came to be with God and how it was expressed. And I think I came to recognize that there was a hole in my soul that needed to be filled, one that I felt needed to be filled by a Christian faith representation. And then, more honestly, my roommate married the sister of this beautiful woman that I eventually met, who is my wife. And she was probably the one that had the greatest influence on guiding me in the direction of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Richard Davis: So you were baptized while you were in college?

Richard Swett: I was baptized after college because it took me three and a half years to come to the conclusion. I was one of those baptisms that took place because the baptizee ran out of excuses. Some people embrace the gospel wholeheartedly and dive into the baptismal font. I kept touching my toe in, and either the water was too cold or too hot or I was just full of all kinds of excuses.

Richard Davis: When did you become interested in politics?

Richard Swett: I was able to work for five years with my own father in the business world. I worked as an architect in California six years after I graduated from college. And then I came back to the East Coast to work with my dad building renewable energy power plants. And we were building natural gas combined-cycle energy power plants. We were also building biomass power plants using wood chips as the fuel source. The objective was that I would come back, and we would develop communities that would surround these power plants so that everything came from within the local economy. At that time, we were paying an exorbitant cost for oil to foreign countries. The majority of our oil purchases came from overseas; we weren’t producing nearly as much energy here at home, as we are today. And so I was very interested in doing a community model that utilized the waste heat and the electricity produced by these power plants for the local community, which tremendously enhanced the economic opportunity in that community because all the jobs were coming from that setup. And so that was what I came back east to work with my father on.

I discovered quickly that the petroleum industry, the oil and gas industries, in the United States had very successfully locked up the energy sector for themselves, getting subsidies of all various kinds. And so they controlled the political environment that enabled them to prosper by controlling the economic environment. And I took offense at that. I thought that was bad policy for the country. I thought that was certainly bad policy for the Northeast, where we were paying exorbitant oil prices for heating oil and that sort of thing.

And so I became very interested in environmental technologies that could relieve us of that sort of stranglehold that we were caught in by the petroleum industry. And so I started looking around at ways that this could be changed. And not only was I doing things in the business world with building these kinds of facilities and these kinds of communities that were attempting to make this change, but I realized that energy policy in the Washington legislative environment was another place where that change could be made. And so I started to become very interested in what needed to be done in Washington to make that change.

You combine that with just any number of things going on at the time, such as there was a very extreme member of Congress that had just been elected in New Hampshire—a very extreme conservative member of Congress who had caused a lot of consternation in the political world. Republicans were upset that he was as extreme as he was. Democrats were intimidated by the “take no prisoners” approach that he took.

So it turned out that he was literally able to run unopposed, or it seemed that he was going to be unopposed in his second term election. And so when I saw that there were no Democrats willing to run against him, and I was not a Democrat of an extreme ideology—I’m a very moderate-to-conservative individual and believe that solutions come from all sides of the political aisle. I talked about this with my wife, who is a far better political strategist than I, and we decided that it would make a lot of sense to run for that congressional office against the incumbent congressman.

Richard Davis: So did the gospel affect your decision to become involved in politics?

Richard Swett: You know, my whole life I have wondered why religions think that they are the best and the only and that they have to eliminate anybody who has differing opinions. The first church that I came across that had such strong inclinations about their being the right church, the true church, as we call it, was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but yet they never once said that nobody else had any right or any wrong path to the truth. They were always respectful; we have always been respectful of other religions. We just have put it in terms that we are the return of the Church of Jesus Christ on the face of the earth after the keys had been taken away.

I find this church to be, I think, the most open and accepting of all religious faiths yet being able to make a very good and clear case for it being the true church of Jesus Christ here on earth. That to me was very, very important because I was one of these people, as I said earlier, who came up with every excuse not to join the church. My parents raised me, really, to believe that organized religion was an opiate of the people; that was one of the main reasons that so many human lives had been lost over the millennia. You know, you could go on with all kinds of very bad and very true representations of what organized religion had done for humanity or, more to the point, had done against humanity.

So I was not someone who was disposed to want to be in a tight-run organization that had very clear directives and follow the commandments to the letter of the law to the extent that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does. But I came to recognize and there were many events in my life that led me to that, that gave me the sense that I, as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, have an obligation to follow him sincerely and completely. And I’ll tell two quick stories, if I can make them quick, that reflect that.

When I decided to run for Congress, the very next day I was contacted by my stake president and called to be the bishop of the Concord Ward. And I said, to my surprise and to his surprise, “No, I won’t accept the calling,” which was totally counter to what I understood when I was baptized, that the callings come from God and they are never turned down. And I had never before turned down a calling, and I have never after that turned down a calling. But I turned it down that day, and President Carter, who is my stake president and a marvelous religious adviser to me while I was in my political phase, he said, “Well, we’re going to talk about this.” And he invited me over to his house for Saturday evening, from nine o’clock on, and it wasn’t until one thirty in the morning and my tie was off, my shirt was drenched with sweat; my coat was off. I had been battling literally, if not with God in person, but with his Spirit for that time. Starting out saying, “No, I have to run for Congress. I feel strongly, this is what is meant for me to do at this time.” By the end I was exhausted because I was properly put in my place, I think, to a person who understood that it was God’s will that needed to be followed and not mine and that I would not run for Congress and that I would end up being the bishop of the Concord Ward.

So then the stake president laid his hands upon my head to give me a blessing. And halfway through the blessing he rescinded the call, and tears were pouring down my face. I turned when he finished, and I looked at him, and he was likewise tearful, and I said, “You know what you just said?” And he said, “I know what I said, but it wasn’t what I intended to say,” and that was how my first calling as bishop was.

The second event was ten years later, or thereabouts. And I was called to be the bishop of the Concord Ward again, and the day before that calling came, I had been called by the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, and asked if I would serve as ambassador for the United States in Denmark.

But this time, when I went to talk to the new stake president, another good friend of mine, David Ostler. I walked in, and I said, “David, I’m just going to tell you right off the bat I accept your calling. I will serve, and I will not do what I was planning on doing.” And he looked at me and he said, “What are you talking about?” and I said, “Well, I got a call yesterday from the president, and he asked me to be the ambassador to Denmark.” And President Ostler said, “You know, we’ll find another bishop for the Concord Ward; you must go and serve your country and take that position as the ambassador to Denmark.”

So that time I was ready. I was not going to serve as the ambassador; I had already made up my mind. I was cheerful of spirit and faithful of heart, and I went right to the point, and again the Lord opened the world and gave to me what I wasn’t expecting.

The third time I was called to be the bishop of Concord Ward, I thought, “OK, so what’s going to happen in the world this time?” Nothing happened. And here I am. I’m bishop of the Concord Ward.

Richard Davis: When you were in Congress and when you were the ambassador, did you have church callings and, if so, how did you balance those with your service?

Richard Swett: Yes, I did. At first my church calling was with my wife, and we were in the nursery. So here was this newly minted member of Congress working with his wife in the nursery, and again I always laugh at the juxtaposition of where I am in the world and where the Lord places me, Because I think, as I said, he knows what I need to be kept mindful of. And so I was very much made aware that I was no big deal and that the kids in the nursery were far more important to him than anything that I was doing in Washington, DC.

I’m not sure if you know the kind of lifestyle that members of Congress live. But you are basically involved in fifteen-minute meetings all throughout the day. You give speeches at night, you do speeches in the morning at breakfast, you have fundraising calling. You are constantly on the go. I would come back to New Hampshire, and I would be gone until, you know, eleven o’clock at night or later, and my wife would have my children all lined up with bathing suits on and I took them to the local indoor swimming pool at eleven at night. And that was my time with the kids, and we would splash in the water until midnight or one in the morning. And that was how I sort of made up for my time with the kids. So when it came to Sunday morning with the nursery class at the church, all I wanted to do is just lie on the floor and go to sleep and let the children in that class crawl over me.

I knew that there were three different things that needed to happen, so my wife would kick me, and it was time to, you know, have snacks. My wife would kick me again, and it was time to make one of the tables into a little slide and help and have the kids slide down into my hands at the bottom. And that would be another, then the third kick would be a time to read a Bible story to them, and I usually let her read the Bible story and I snoozed through that. So it was humorous, to say the least, and I would not ever have admitted it at that at that time, but that’s how I conducted my first callings in the church when I was in Congress. After that I did progress to some more adult-oriented activities, but I think the more humorous one was to tell about the nursery school.

Richard Davis: What about when you were ambassador?

Richard Swett: When I was ambassador actually, I served in the bishopric, and that was a great honor and a great experience. The difficult thing about that was that I, every third month, had to conduct the month’s meetings in Danish, and I did not speak Danish—I do not speak Danish, but I knew enough. It was a marvelous experience. And I was able to serve for the whole time I was there. I was in the bishopric serving as I think the second counselor; I didn’t get promoted to first counselor, I just was the second counselor.

And while I was in Congress, I would home teach individuals who would have a chair set up in the corner where they would make me sit so they could attack me for being a Democrat, and they would try to convert me to Republicanism. And they would just have very aggressive conversations with me about the fact that I was in the wrong political party, that my political party didn’t have any belief in the Deity. These were, you know, very difficult experiences that I would have as a home teacher with my own home teaching families.

And I ultimately learned to just let them talk. And often the topic would come around to abortion and other lifestyle change choices that people make. And I would discuss with them the fact that I do not believe in abortion, and I do not practice that, but like the church that gives us the freedom of choice to join or not, I believed people needed free agency to make their own choices.

I am very much a believer that we are here in this world as human beings given by God the freedom of choice to decide for ourselves what it is we will be while we’re in this world. It has an impact on where we end up, of course, and I talked with people about that many times. But it still is centered on that freedom, because without that freedom, we might as well follow the devil, we might as well follow Satan’s crowd and give him all the glory, because that is, unfortunately, the alternative.

Richard Davis: Let me ask you about your time in Congress and your time as an ambassador. Did you seek inspiration as you made some decisions particularly about voting and Congress, and do you have any experiences that you could share?

Richard Swett: The answer is yes. As a Democrat and as a politician, I never talked about these things publicly, so this is the first time that I have made any mention of this. But I think anyone who has a faith that they truly believe in, utilizes that faith for inspiration, and I am no exception. But that’s between me and my God and me and Jesus Christ. That’s not something that I go out and say, oh, I’m getting inspiration from this prayer or that prayer. That’s not what Christ said. He obviously says don’t hide your light under a bushel, but he also says that we should not be offering up our prayers on every street corner and that we should do our works in secret.

And I am, as I said earlier, a real devotee of the conflicts of life and of even religion, where things seem not to fit nicely together. And yet I think it’s that way because it is forcing us to kind of continuously think about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and who we’re doing it for and why we’re doing it without making that a public proclamation.

And so, for that reason, I very much depend on inspiration. I still do. I do more so now as a bishop. I have far greater dependency on it, I also have a far better spirit of my own for receiving that inspiration. And I truly believe that I’m in a position now where I can help people to a much greater extent than I ever was able to as a member of Congress. So those are the things that I am constantly weighing in my mind and trying to reconcile as I go about doing what I hope is what the Lord would want me to do.

Richard Davis: So what I hear you saying is yes, that when you had to make decisions about how to vote or maybe what bills to try to work on that you saw that inspiration and you received inspiration, but you didn’t go around telling other people that God told me to do this or this or this. Because that was personal to you, and it wasn’t something you wanted to use as some sort of a political weapon or tool to persuade others. Would that be accurate?

Richard Swett: That’s pretty accurate, and what I would add to that is that I was raised on and had at the core a set of values that I believed in and that I practiced and that my consistency in practicing those values I felt was enough for people to understand and be able to predict how I would react under certain circumstances.

Now, I made a vote in my career that ended my political career. That caused tremendous consternation in the voting public.

Richard Davis: What was that vote?

Richard Swett: It was the last vote on the 1994 crime bill. It was tied at the time when I went into the well to cast my vote. I had at one point sent a letter to my constituents, many of whom were members of the National Rifle Association. And said to them that I would not do anything to diminish the Second Amendment rights that they all were adamantly emphatic should be protected.

But in that bill at that time in 1994, there was a terrible crime wave that was hitting the entire country. And so there was a lot of discussion about putting one hundred thousand police officers out on the street corner on bicycles who are out in the public and engaging with the public. Because we had it on very clear authority that communities where their law enforcement engaged with the public in this fashion the crime rate was much lower.

And I believe that we had to do something to bring the crime rate down. Now, in that very same piece of legislation was an assault weapons ban that was banning 17 assault weapons out of 782 assault weapons that one could obtain. And I knew that was in there in that legislation; it wasn’t a standalone piece of legislation. But I felt that was as important to me as was putting one hundred thousand additional police officers on the street corner. And I felt that was a justifiable vote for me to make and that I could be able to reason with my constituents that that vote wasn’t going to take away their Second Amendment rights. And that we were going to be able to curb the crime that was endemic throughout our country.

So I voted for the bill, and I was the last vote, and it passed by my vote. I went back to my office, and all hell broke loose. And I had a goon squad following me everywhere; I had death threats. I had everything that you can imagine that the NRA could throw at me thrown at me. And long story short was that I ultimately lost by a fraction of a percent.

So I understand what it means not only to know what your principles are, but to stand up for them. And that’s something that I don’t see a lot of in the political world, and I’m not bragging, I’m just stating a fact. And I think that you should know who you are and what you’re about from the minute you step into office to the end when you are either voted out or you die or you just decide that you’re going to retire. That’s my experience, yeah.

Richard Davis: So just to wrap up with the last question. What lessons have you learned about politics that you haven’t already mentioned that you’d like to share with people?

Richard Swett: The lesson that I learned from politics that I really want to leave with you and with young people who are considering getting involved is the story of how my relationship with my Senate race opponent Senator Bob Smith turned out. When I was nominated to be the ambassador, it turned out that I was blackballed in the Senate. Being blackballed is literally a black ball that is placed in the drawer of the majority leader of the Senate’s desk at the front of the Senate by one member against another individual who is being considered for an ambassadorship or an appointment of some sort or another in the government. Turns out that the black ball against me was by Senator Bob Smith—the man who defeated me in the race for his seat. And I called over two hundred times to try and get to talk to him. I met with every notable and highly placed Republican that I could to ask them if they would please talk with Senator Smith and ask him why he is blackballing me for this nomination.

And it was interesting that the person who finally got Smith to return my call was Senator [Carl] Levin from Michigan who’s a devout Jew, and he spoke to Smith, who is a devout Catholic, and was able to convince him to give me a call back. I think it was because they respected each other, they respected each other’s religion, and I think that’s an important starting point—not that they were of the same party but because they respected each other’s religious beliefs or each other’s commitment to their religious beliefs.

So I’m running through the old National Airport in this narrow hall and there are pay phones along the side, and it opens up into the old Northwestern [Airlines] circle of gates. And my pager goes off, and it says, “Senator Smith has returned your call. Call him back.” And I’m going to miss my flight, but I said I don’t care. I go to the pay phone. I get on the phone. I call Smith’s office. They answer and I say who I am. I say I’m returning the senator’s call, and they say, “Hold on and we’ll get the senator for you.” And I’m putting money into the machine, and fifteen minutes go by, and finally he comes to the phone. I said, “Bob, what gives? Why are you doing this?” And he says to me, “Well, Dick, you know, you said some things in Manchester at this rally that I really took offense to, and you also over in Keene when you were speaking at the state college, you said some things.” And he quoted what I said. And he said, “I just think that you didn’t deserve to be ambassador because of these things that you said that I found so offensive.” And he continued citing chapter and verse of various things I said on the campaign trail, all of which were true, all of which were differences of opinion on our positions on particular issues. Not once did I question his honesty or his character or anything like that. And all the while I’m thinking of the things that I heard him say about me and I thought to myself, “I could very easily feel the same way about what he said about me, but this is the world of politics.”

And finally, there was a pause and I said, “Bob, can I say something?” and he said, “Go ahead.” I said, “You won. If anybody should feel badly about what happened in that campaign, it should be me, because I didn’t win. It was a very close race, but I did not win.”

And he paused and he said, “Dick, I understand what you’re saying. I know that maybe I shouldn’t dwell on these things the way I have been. But you know, there was a time in Berlin, that you said this,” and he quotes and goes right back in the rut. It was like I was on this cart that had just almost gotten out of the rut. And then it goes back down into the rut, and I thought, as he was repeating these additional things I was thinking, how can I get through to him?

And I said a prayer and the answer was, I said, “Senator Smith, can I ask you a favor?” And he stopped and he said, “Well, I guess you can ask.” And I said, “Can you get down on your knees and pray to Heavenly Father whether Dick Swett should be ambassador to Denmark or not?” These were my words; this is absolute truth. And there’s like this dead silence.

And he says, “OK, I’ll do that.”

And I said, “Thank you, when you get an answer, call me and let me know, and whatever the answer is I will be glad to receive it, and I will be grateful that you got it.” And we said goodbye.

And two weeks went by, and I just was on pins and needles the whole time. I had no ability to focus on anything. And the phone never rang, and I finally, after two weeks, I picked up the phone and I called him. And I call his office and they answered, and he was on the phone within a minute. It was like he was waiting for my call. And the first words out of my mouth were “OK, Bob, what did God say?” And he said, “God says you should be ambassador.”

And it was a powerful affirmation in my mind that he understood that I respected his relationship with God, that I was not denigrating him in any sense; I was giving him due respect. And, in the end, he said back to me, “Dick, and I have one favor to ask of you,” and I said, “What is it?” He said, “I would like to introduce you to the committee that will be approving your nomination in the Senate,” and I said, “I would be honored to have you do that.” And he gave me the best introduction I have ever received before or since in my life.

Richard Davis: That’s a wonderful story; thank you for sharing that. It seems to me that you appealed to the better angels of his nature—that he had been driven by revenge, vengeance that he was going to make you pay for what you had done to him, that he perceived you had done to him. You appealed to something higher in him, and what you’re saying is that’s what we need to do with each other.

Richard Swett: That’s what needs to happen.