As the first Greek-American woman elected to Congress,
Olympia J. Snowe represented Maine for 34 years—16
as a House Member and 18 as a Senator. Representing a
politically independent constituency, Snowe worked to
balance her personal convictions with the needs of her party
and her rural state. Throughout her career, Snowe was often
a key swing vote in both the House and Senate. A pragmatic
politician, Snowe studied issues, and routinely challenged
her own assumptions. “I love facts. I love memos. I am
always seeking more information.” She once admitted,
“I am always challenging my own views for fear that I am
getting it wrong.”1
Olympia Snowe was born Olympia Jean Bouchles on
February 21, 1947, in Augusta, Maine, the daughter of
George and Georgia Bouchles. She had one brother, John.
The Bouchles operated the State Street Diner, located right
down the road from the Maine state house, which was
always packed with politicians. In 1955, when Snowe was
eight, her mother died from breast cancer. Tragedy struck
again in November 1956, when her father died of a heart
attack. Snowe was sent to Auburn, Maine, to live with her
mother’s brother, James Goranites, a barber, his wife, Mary,
a textile mill worker, and their five children. She attended
a Greek Orthodox girls’ boarding school in Garrison, New
York. Traveling back and forth from school alone on the
train gave her a sense of independence and confidence.
Snowe cited a successful run for dorm president in eighth
grade as her first involvement in politics.2 After ninth grade,
in 1962, she returned to Maine full time to attend Auburn’s
Edward Little High School.3
After graduating in 1965, Snowe earned a BA in political
science from the University of Maine at Orono and married
state representative Peter Snowe in 1969. In 1970 she worked
at the Auburn Board of Voter Registration as a Republican
and campaigned for Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s final
election to the U.S. Senate. In 1972 Snowe began working as
an office manager for newly elected House Republican and
future Secretary of Defense, William Sebastian Cohen.4
In April 1973, while returning to Auburn from his
Augusta office in a late season snow storm, Peter Snowe was
killed instantly when his car flipped over on the icy highway.
At the urging of Maine Republican officials, Snowe ran
successfully for her late husband’s seat. “I certainly had not
contemplated running for public office. I like behind-the-scenes
work,” she recalled. “The only reason why I decided
I should probably do it was that I had such a strong passion for politics.” She won a full term in 1974 and was elected to
an open state senate seat in 1976.5
In 1978, when Cohen vacated his House seat to run for
the Senate, Snowe entered the race to succeed him. The
district—one of two in Maine—covered the rural northern
two-thirds of the state. Snowe’s principal opponent was
Democrat Markham Gartley, Maine’s secretary of state who
was the first prisoner of war released from North Vietnam
in 1972.6 Snowe used campaign tactics she learned from
Cohen, crisscrossing the district—geographically, the
largest district east of the Mississippi River—by foot in a
flannel shirt and hiking boots, attending town meetings
along the way. With more than one-third of the state’s
population registered as Independents—more than registered
Republicans or Democrats—the Maine electorate generally
favored moderate politicians.7 On Election Day, Snowe
prevailed with 51 percent of the vote to Gartley’s 41 percent.8
With her victory, Snowe became the youngest Republican
woman to serve in the 96th Congress (1979–1981), as well
as the first Greek-American woman to be elected.9
Snowe won her next five elections to the House by at
least two-thirds of the vote. Her elections in 1990 and
1992, however, proved difficult. A nationwide recession
threatened the many industrial jobs in the district and
created backlash against the Republican incumbent. Facing
Maine state representative Patrick McGowan in 1990,
she won with 51 percent of the vote. In 1992 she beat
McGowan with a 49 percent plurality—her victory aided by
a late entry from Green Party candidate Jonathan K. Carter,
who pulled in some of McGowan’s Democratic base.10
When Snowe took her seat in the 96th Congress (1979–1981), she received seats on three committees: Government
Operations; Small Business; and the Select Committee
on Aging. Two years later she took a seat on the Foreign
Affairs Committee—where she remained for the balance
of her House career. In the 98th Congress (1983–1985),
after leaving Small Business, Snowe was assigned to the
Joint Economic Committee, where she remained until
her final House term, when she won a seat on the Budget
Committee. Snowe was a member of the Congressional
Caucus for Women’s Issues for her entire career, chairing the
caucus during the 98th Congress.11
Snowe’s moderation and willingness to compromise won
her bipartisan respect. Recognized as a loyal Republican (she
was named a GOP deputy Whip in 1984), Snowe also often
spilt from her party on economic issues and reproductive rights.12 Snowe routinely broke from the Ronald Reagan
and George H. W. Bush administrations, voting with their
positions only 48 percent of the time.13 On her independence
from the party line, Snowe noted, “You know you are right
and you believe you are right and you speak out.”14
From her position on the Small Business Committee,
Snowe favored trade protection in order to shield textile,
shoe, and timber exporters in her district.15 She voted
against the United States-Canada free trade agreement
in 1988, citing unfair competition from Canadian
government-subsidized industries.16 As a member of
the Foreign Affairs Committee, Snowe supported a
nuclear armaments freeze, aid for Nicaraguan rebels, and
sanctions against South Africa to protest that nation’s
apartheid system.17
In 1989 Olympia Snowe married Maine Governor John
Rettie McKernan Jr., a former U.S. House Member. “What
holds our relationship together is the fact that we love
politics,” Snowe noted.18 In 1991 Snowe lost her college-aged
stepson to a heart condition. Her life, often marked by
tragedy, would have “discouraged a lesser person,” a colleague
later remarked. “I admire her ability to overcome adversity.”19
In 1994, when the Senate Majority Leader, Democrat
George J. Mitchell of Maine, announced his retirement,
Snowe declared her candidacy for the vacant seat.20 In the
general election, she faced Mitchell’s handpicked candidate,
two-term Representative Thomas Hiram Andrews from
southeastern Maine. Snowe’s well-organized campaign and
House experience helped her prevail with 60 percent of the
vote. In 2000 she won re-election with 69 percent and in
2006, she prevailed with 74 percent.21
Snowe’s initial committee assignments in the Senate—Budget; Foreign Relations; Small Business; and Commerce,
Science, and Transportation—reflected the expertise
she had developed in the House. She later served on the
Armed Services Committee and, in 2000, left the Budget
Committee to join the powerful Finance Committee. In the
108th Congress (2003–2005), Snowe also joined the Select
Intelligence Committee. Snowe was the first woman to
chair the Small Business Committee, a position she held in
the 108th and 109th Congresses (2003–2007), and served
as chair of the Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on
Oceans, Fisheries, and Coast Guard in the 109th Congress
(2005–2007).22
Fiercely protective of jobs for her Maine constituents,
Snowe sought protection for Maine’s fishing industry and
military bases. She also sought aid for Bath Iron Works, one
of Maine’s largest employers which built ships for the Navy.23
Throughout her career, Snowe supported women’s health
issues, including reproductive rights, allying with Democrats
against a proposed Republican ban on “partial birth”
abortion. She also joined her colleagues across the aisle to
support a proposal to cover contraceptives under federal
employees’ health insurance plans.24 In July 1999, after
the Senate rejected a Democratic proposal to strengthen
patients’ rights, Snowe built a coalition of support for her
measure that gave women who underwent mastectomies
the right to longer hospital stays if their doctor deemed it
medically necessary.25 In 2008 she successfully shepherded
legislation that banned job and health insurance
discrimination based on genetic testing. Having worked
with Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter of New
York for more than a decade on this issue, Snowe called the
bill’s passage one of the “major satisfactions of my career.”26
Snowe maintained her political independence in the Senate
and she became a key go-between for Senate Democrats and
Republicans. “The Democrats talk to me when they want to
walk across the political aisle,” she noted in 2001. “We can
have our differences here, but we ought to be able to talk with
each other without being punished for it.”27 Snowe proved a
critical vote for Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of
Nevada when it came to seeking cloture—a key parliamentary
hurdle for bringing bills to the Senate Floor.28
From her position as co-chair of the Senate Centrist
Coalition—a bipartisan group of consensus-builders—and
her seat on the Finance Committee, she helped write an
amendment to major campaign finance reforms, convincing
reluctant colleagues to support the legislation.29 She and
Independent Senator James Merrill Jeffords of Vermont
co-wrote an amendment to a campaign finance law in
2001, prohibiting the use of union or corporate money to
fund election ads in the weeks before an election.30 In the
same Congress, Jeffords, Snowe, and Democratic Senator
Ronald Lee Wyden of Oregon teamed up with other centrist
Democratic and Republican Senators to write a “tripartisan”
agreement to leverage the private market to improve drug
coverage for senior citizens under Medicare and to ensure
that federal benefits uniformly reached elderly Americans,
regardless of social class.31
In 2005, early in the 109th Congress (2005–2007),
Snowe helped organize the bipartisan “Gang of 14.” These
Senators sought a compromise to prevent Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist of Tennessee from altering Senate
Rules to prevent a filibuster on judicial nominees—a
strategy known as the “nuclear option”—by lobbying to
allow long-delayed nominees a vote on the Senate Floor.32
Later that year, Snowe was one of only a handful of
Republicans to oppose President George W. Bush’s attempts
to reform Social Security by allowing workers to invest part
of their payroll taxes into private accounts.33 Snowe opposed
the program out of concern about how it would affect
senior citizens who were already receiving Social Security
benefits. Citing a system that kept seniors out of poverty for
more than 70 years, she observed, “I don’t think we want to
erode the principles of that system.”34
After Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in
2008, his administration often appealed to Snowe when
certain bills faced close votes in the Senate. She was one
of only three Republican Senators—along with Susan M.
Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—to
back Obama’s economic stimulus package in 2009 amid
the onset of the Great Recession. After fighting for cost
reductions, Snowe agreed to support the scaled-back
measure.35 Both Maine Senators claimed it would be
beneficial in Maine, where unemployment rates were higher
than at any point in nearly two decades.36
Snowe broke with the Republican Party once again when
she voted in favor of the Finance Committee’s version of
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, becoming
the only Republican Senator to support the legislation on
Capitol Hill. Petitioned by Obama and Senate Democrats
for her vote, she claimed she “went back and forth” on her
decision right up until the committee met on October 13,
2009. Though she decried the tight deadlines for passage set
by Democratic leadership, Maine’s explosive insurance rates
were a deciding factor for her support.37 Despite Democratic
lobbying efforts, including one-on-one visits with President
Obama, Snowe refused to support the final version of the
bill when it came to a vote on the Senate Floor in December
2009. She opposed insurance requirements the bill placed
on small businesses as well as the increases in Medicare
payroll taxes.38
In February 2012, Snowe shocked observers when she
announced that she would not seek re-election to a fourth
Senate term. The partisanship had become too onerous,
she said. “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the
partisanship of the recent years in the Senate to change over
the short term,” she noted. “So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to
commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate.”39
Following her retirement from the Senate, Snowe
founded Olympia’s List, a nonprofit devoted to promoting
candidates who supported bipartisan solutions, and the
Women’s Leadership Institute to support and cultivate new
generations of women leaders.40
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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