For as many enemies as the superhero is upset, Batman has a formidable team of supporters, starting with his colleague Robin, Gotham City Commissioner James Gordon and his ever-faithful butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
But one of the most ardent supporters of Caped Crusader is not in a comic book, but in the US Senate and is known as the Bat for more than 80 years.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and the longest-serving member of the current Senate, is a Batman enthusiast who has turned his fandom into philanthropy. He even used comics to convey his legislative agenda.
Now pro tempore president of the Senate, Leahy is the third in line to the presidential succession. Although he is unlikely to ever have to serve as president, his high-profile position sheds more light on his colorful resume – which includes multiple appearances in “Batman” movies.
When not working in the Senate chambers of Washington, Leahy retreats to Gotham, where Batman fights cartoon villains and restrains Batmobile. It’s a comfort he took when he was 4 years old.
“If you live in the real world all the time, it can be kind of boring,” the senator told the Vermont weekly Seven Days in 2008.
WHEN LEAHY SAW ME WITH BATMAN
Leahy declined an interview for this story through her spokesperson, but her affinity for all things Batman is well documented. As he wrote in the preface “The Cartoon Detective: 80 Years of Batman”, he was born just one year after the publication of Batman’s first comic in 1939.
He first discovered Batman when he was 4 years old, when he received his first library card. He attended the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, where he spent many afternoons examining comics. While her friends at school broke up with Superman, Leahy found a “related” relationship with the Bat.
“Entering the world of Batman through my imagination opened an early door to a lifelong love of reading,” he wrote in his preface.
He would continue to spend hours at the library every day until adulthood, and even after moving to Washington, he would make time to enter. He is a vocal advocate for literacy and library preservation, so that children can have formative experiences similar to books.
“Some of my fondest childhood memories were at the library, where everyone fit in and the possibilities were endless,” he wrote on his Senate website.
LEAHY APPEARANCES FROM PAGE TO SCREEN
Leahy was elected to the Senate in 1974, and until the mid-1990s, her affinity for Batman did not have much to do with her duties on Capitol Hill.
That changed in 1996, when Leahy collaborated with DC Comics to create “Batman: Death of the Innocents: The Horror of Landmines,” a graphic novel that warns of the dangers of landmines. Leahy has long argued for an end to the use of landmines and told Capitol Hill Roll Call that she placed copies of the comic strip on each senator’s desk that year.
Leahy’s first foray into the scene – something she does strict when Batman is involved – came in 1995, when he appeared in “Batman Forever”, critically offended. In the same year, he voiced a character named “Territorial Governor” in “Batman: The Animated Series.”
Since then, Leahy has appeared in almost as many “Batman” movies as Caped Crusader himself. He usually appears as a frowning politician (although in “Batman & Robin”, in which his son Mark also had a cameo, he was allowed to enjoy a mischievous party). He even met with an explosive ending as a curious senator named Purrington in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
“I explain to everyone that it was in the air to be in the air, because my wife is a registered nurse,” he joked on Roll Call in 2016. “He put me back and I never missed a vote.”
His most notable cameo, however, appeared in “The Dark Knight” in 2008, when he confronts Heath Ledger’s Joker and tells the famous villain that “he is not intimidated by thieves”. The really fit joker responds by grabbing Leahy’s character and threatening him with a knife.
Ledger, who died before the film’s release, is Leahy’s favorite Joker.
“She scared me when she came to me with the knife,” he told Roll Call. – I didn’t have to act.
He will be missing from the upcoming reboot “The Batman”, starring Robert Pattinson. Citing a busy schedule, he told the Burlington Free Press that he “didn’t even look to be in it.”
“I have too many other things going on with Covid, with the credit bills,” he told the newspaper in August.
While her film roles have certainly satisfied her inner fanboy, Leahy does it for the library where her love of reading flourished. He donates every fee from his appearances and checks on royalties from residual issues to his beloved Kellogg-Hubbard library, where he helped fund a children’s wing named for him. From her roles in The Dark Knight alone, Leahy donated more than $ 150,000 back to her hometown library, said Carolyn Brennan, co-director of the library.
In 2012, the library hung a plaque honoring Leahy, whom staff called a “superhero.”
WHY LEAHY LOVES BATMAN
Leahy found Batman as a boy, but his love for the fictional hero is fundamental to who he is and the legislator he became. Batman instilled in Leahy a love of reading and promoting literacy and justice (though as a government servant, not as a capable vigilante).
Leahy preferred Batman to other characters, because unlike Superman, like his god or Super-Power Spider-Man, Batman was just a man, albeit an extremely rich one, with “human strengths and weaknesses.” The danger facing Batman was different from that of other heroes – feeling real, Leahy wrote in the preface to the DC collection.
“Batman has triumphed through his superior intellect and detective skills, through the freedoms of great wealth and pure will,” Leahy wrote in his preface. “Not superpowers, but skill, science and rationality.”
Like Bruce Wayne, Leahy is just a man, though one with more power than the majority and the chance to make real, tangible changes in his own Gotham. Following the example of Batman, he swore to use this power wisely.