Senator Tammy Duckworth on the Attack that Took Her Legs--and Having a Baby at 50
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ILLINOIS SENATOR Ladda Tammy Duckworth owns a great pair of legs. They’re painstakingly painted by an artist to match the skin tone of her arm—right down to the freckles—and the second toe on one foot is longer than the first, just like her own used to be. But Duckworth can’t stand them. “When I see myself wearing those legs in a mirror, I see loss. But when I see this”—she gestures toward the steel-and-titanium prosthesis attached to her thigh above her right knee—“I see strength. I see a reminder of where I am now.” Same thing with her wheelchair. “People always want me to hide it in pictures. I say no! I earned this wheelchair. It’s no different from a medal I wear on my chest. Why would I hide it?”...
There are so many firsts attached to Tammy Duckworth—she’s the Senate’s first member to give birth while in office, its first member born in Thailand (to an American father and a Thai mother of Chinese descent), and, of course, its first female amputee. It’s that last distinction that tends to overwhelm all the others. As a wounded veteran with a Purple Heart, she has introduced or cosponsored bills protecting the rights of veterans—and she’s been fearless in confronting the president over military and foreign affairs. Last January, when President Trump accused the Democrats of holding the military hostage over immigration, it was Duckworth who took to the Senate floor, declaring in a now-historic speech, “I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger.”
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Politicians who want to bolster their military bona fides often visit Walter Reed to have their pictures taken while shaking a vet’s hand. Among soldiers, it is jokingly referred to as “the amputee petting zoo.” With her high cheekbones and long, jet-black hair, Duckworth would have made an appealing poster girl, but she was wary of being used. When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to visit her, she said no. She might be military, but she leaned liberal, a result of growing up a mixed-race child in Southeast Asia, where her father’s development work took them to Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. “Being Amerasian, post Vietnam War, people just assumed you were the child of a GI and a prostitute. I was so lucky my parents were married and I had an American passport. I saw kids spat upon, going through garbage, selling themselves, doing whatever they could to survive because they’d been discarded.” When the Duckworth family, including her little brother, moved to Hawaii, her father, who was then in his 50s and could trace his roots all the way back to the Revolutionary War, found it nearly impossible to get a job. To survive, the family went on food stamps, and Tammy, then in high school, took a series of low-paying jobs to keep the family afloat. At one point, she sold flowers from a plastic bucket on the side of the road, an experience that profoundly shaped her worldview. “I never worked as hard as when we were at our poorest,” she says. “So I felt if we could end up there, anyone could.”...
In the Hollywood version of Duckworth’s life, she would have won that first race. She did not. Jon Carson, who ran her campaign, remains an admirer, but managing such a principled candidate didn’t make his job easy. He would have loved to have a press conference with the crew members who were shot down with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Nor did she play the game of cozying up to donors as well as he might have liked. “Donors like to feel like they’re getting special inside information,” he says. “Tammy didn’t do that. She said the same thing in front of the donors as she said to the press and the voters. That’s just who she is.” He attributes her narrow loss (2 percent) in part to vicious attacks, including a last-minute mailer from her opponent with a Photoshopped picture of Duckworth giving money away to immigrants, a dig at her support of Senator Ted Kennedy’s pro-immigration bill. Six years later, she ran again and won. Four years later, she ran against the Republican who had won Barack Obama’s old seat in the Senate and won that race too. When she took the oath of office, Durbin says, there wasn’t a dry eye in the chamber. Including his? “You bet.”
https://www.vogue.com/article/tammy-duckworth-interview-vogue-october-2018-issue
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Thanks skylucy! 
