Sherrie Harris and Tim Kaine attend a Mezzullo and McCandlish holiday party shortly after they started working together in 1988.
It was 1988, and Sherrie Harris had just interviewed for a new job as a legal administrative assistant at the law firm Mezzullo and McCandlish. She was enjoying the remaining minutes of her lunch break outside in downtown Richmond when she noticed a man in the distance, flying down the street, clutching unruly files and “obviously late for where he was going.”
As he got closer, Harris realized it was the same lawyer she had just interviewed to work with. “He looked so disorganized,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ ”
That lawyer was Tim Kaine, and in the ensuing 32 years Harris has worked with him through all the iterations of his legal and political career — from Richmond City Council member to 2016 vice presidential candidate.
Back then, Kaine was a young lawyer who had been working as a civil litigator after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1983. Harris had been working for a few years at a large Richmond law firm and was looking for a change of pace. “We kind of grew up together,” she says. When they met, “I was 28, and he was 30.”
In an email, Kaine recalls that he was impressed with Harris and her “great ability — which I saw right from the start — to tune out distractions and get the work done.”
Kaine’s work in civil rights eventually led him to run for and be elected to City Council in 1994 and, four years later, Richmond mayor. He maintained his law practice during this time, and Harris continued to work as his assistant, acting as a liaison between City Hall and the law firm.
While he was on City Council, Kaine also brought the landmark civil rights case Housing Opportunities Made Equal v. Nationwide Insurance to court, winning a record $100.5 million in damages in the case that found the insurer guilty of refusing to sell homeowner policies to black residents in some Richmond neighborhoods.
It was a huge victory, and work on the case was all-consuming for the small legal team. “It was the little guys against the big guys,” Harris recalls. “It was very stressful.”
She adds that Kaine shared his proceeds from the verdict with everyone in the law firm. “That shows you what kind of person he was,” she says. “He could have just put it in his pocket and gone about his business.”
When Kaine was elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor in 2002, Harris worked as his director of administration and scheduling, staying busy as he visited every city and county in the commonwealth. “It was tough managing his work schedule and then making sure that I allowed time for his family, which obviously was very important to him,” she says.
Kaine was elected governor in 2005, and Harris became his confidential assistant. She managed “the pod,” the area where she, the governor, his chief of staff and his assistant worked. “I would keep him on schedule,” she says. “We had signals we would give each other,” as she would indicate the end of a meeting with a pointed look.
“That was the best job I ever had,” Harris says. “I loved it. I got to meet so many people — I got to meet President Obama. My daughter gave flowers to the queen of England when she was here.”
Harris recalls that during Queen Elizabeth II’s 2007 visit to the state capitol, her daughter, Rachel, then about 6 years old, was standing on the rope line while Harris was assisting former Gov. Douglas Wilder. As Kaine and the queen walked from the governor’s mansion to the capitol, he guided the queen over to Rachel so that she could give flowers to the monarch.
“I care a lot about Sherrie’s daughter, Rachel, in the same way that Sherrie cares about my wife, Anne, and my three children,” Kaine says. “Twice, Sherrie drove me from the law office to VCU [Medical Center] so I could go in and escort Anne out to the car with one of our newborns. She has been an important part of our family life and is close to my parents and Anne’s parents, too.”
There was also tough emotional work, with Kaine involved in death row cases, both as a court-appointed attorney and later as Virginia governor reviewing clemency requests. Kaine recalls working on one such case as an attorney: “When I got the call that the Supreme Court had granted a last-minute stay of execution in the case, the pressure I had been under suddenly released, and tears started streaming down my face. I’ll never forget Sherrie just walking into my office and, without comment, putting a box of Kleenex on my desk, before turning and walking back to her cubicle.”
Harris recalls the solemn occasions when a Virginia inmate was executed while Kaine was governor. Those evenings, Harris says, “I did not leave him. He would make the decision and would communicate his decision and would go home, have dinner with his family. Then he came back after dinner to be there until the execution was carried out. It pained him.”
The 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech was another low point. Kaine was out of the country, and Harris recalls being in a meeting with his chief of staff when the phone rang. “Students had been shot, and the number kept going up and up and up,” she says. Kaine immediately returned to Virginia.
After his term as governor, Kaine began teaching at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership and School of Law, where Harris worked as his administrative coordinator. While talking to his class at the Jepson School, he let it slip that he planned to run for U.S. Senate. A student alerted the media, and “the phone started blowing up,” Harris recalls. “He comes into the law school, and I looked at him and said, ‘You told your class you were running for Senate, didn’t you?’ He looked at me sheepishly and went into his office.”
(From left) Kaine’s wife, Anne Holton, Harris and Kaine at his 60th birthday party in Washington, D.C., in 2018
Since 2013, Harris has worked as special recognitions manager and executive assistant to Sen. Kaine in his Richmond office. “I continue to handle a lot of his personal stuff,” she says, in addition to doing constituent services work and recognizing special events such as birthdays and anniversaries with personalized letters. “Having worked for him for so long, I basically know what he would do in most general situations,” she says.
In 2016, Kaine was named Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, and Harris recalls the excitement: “It was unreal to think that the man I had been working for since 1988 could possibly be vice president and maybe, someday, president.” She and her then-husband talked about what they would do if Clinton won and decided they would find a way for Harris to go to Washington, though that did not come to pass.
Oct. 10 is Harris and Kaine’s work anniversary. “I think we were fated to be colleagues in the public service work we do together,” Kaine says, “and I am so glad that is the case.”
“The guy I met in 1988 is very much the same guy I know now,” Harris says, though she can’t resist occasionally ribbing Kaine. “I tell him from time to time, ‘I knew you before you were anybody — don’t forget that.’ ”
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