VALENTINE, Neb. — Beyond the Badlands, deep within the undulating landscape of the Sandhills, this speck of a city where Tim Walz spent a decade of his childhood rises abruptly out of the vastness.

It is as remote as anywhere in the Midwest, an island of civilization in a Rhode-Island-size county with just 6,000 people and 184,000 beef cows. But as Walz entered his freshman year of high school, his life seemed storybook large.

Walz played football, basketball and golf, sometimes riding in a bus hundreds of miles to compete against other schools, classmates said. He enjoyed a life of stability and privilege as a child of James Walz, who had one of the most important jobs in town as school superintendent, and Darlene Walz, a homemaker. Within the confines of Valentine, at least, Tim Walz had it all.

But after his first year at Valentine High School, Walz was gone — headed to an even more remote, smaller community called Butte, where his mother’s family had lived for generations.

Much later, friends would learn why: His father was seriously ill with lung cancer, and the family needed help to care for him.

In his later political journey from Congress to Minnesota governor and now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Walz has often spoken of his small-town upbringing — including at his convention introduction on Wednesday in Chicago, when he walked out to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” and nodded to his time in Butte.

But those speeches have rarely captured the depth of the challenge Walz faced, according to classmates and family members, as his teenage years were upended and his father’s illness plunged his family into medical debt and led Walz into the Army National Guard.

Walz has said the events fostered his views on life and death, underscored the obligations of a community to help those in need, and ultimately convinced him to get into politics — shaping an outlook that he is now putting at the center of his campaign message as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. As Walz has embraced his roots in the rural Midwest on the trail, he is also championing policies that he has said would make health care a basic human right by easing medical debt for families.

“It shaped me later in life and certainly shaped me as it deals with health care,” Walz has said of his father’s death.

In some ways, Walz’s small-town childhood offers a contrast from that of his Republican counterpart, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. In his best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance wrote about the decline of the Ohio industrial town where he grew up, a heroin-using mother and an absent father, and finding refuge by visiting his grandmother in a small Kentucky town where his dysfunctional and often-violent family had roots.

As Walz has told the story, his childhood began as an idyllic time shaped by community values in tiny Nebraska towns and the closeness of family — but then took a destabilizing turn that would set the course of the rest of his life.

“My father died [after] a long illness, and my mother ended up having to go back to work in her 60s,” Walz said in an oral history for Veterans History Project. “There was no money.” In fact, he said in his convention speech, there was “a mountain of medical debt.”

***

Walz was a child of rural Nebraska, moving regularly as his father jumped to new postings as a school superintendent. Born in 1964 in West Point and baptized at St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church in Dodge — both small farming towns in the eastern half of the state — he moved hundreds of miles west with his family to Valentine in 1969. His parents were Democrats in an overwhelmingly Republican town, although locals said politics was not nearly as divisive then as today. The Walz family set down roots and created traditions in the city of 2,600, heading to Frosty’s for a shake, or to the mill pond for fishing, or hiking in the nearby canyons and floating down the Niobrara River.

Walz played football on high school fields across the state, as well as basketball in a second-floor gym with a stained wooden ceiling that could have been the setting for the movie “Hoosiers,” with bleachers seating about 400 people. The teams were small and not always competitive, but aside from the cattle auction and the county fair, high school games were among the biggest attractions in town. Walz was considered a standout for the local Badgers because of his size and determination, classmates said, although there were initially only 19 football players, which shrank to 14 due to injuries. The freshman team with Walz won only one game, according to his yearbook, leaving the coach after one particularly brutal loss to note: “Even though we got beat 44-0, they never did give up.”

As Walz has told it, he spent summers working at a ranch outside town.

“I grew up summers working Everett Brown’s Hereford ranch about 60 miles from anywhere, working cattle, building fences, putting up hay,” Walz said earlier this year. At the end of the day when he was “a young 14-old,” he said, he retired to a bunkhouse where other ranch hands were playing cards and cursing, while he would read National Geographic magazines and “really started to understand how big the world is.”

Everett Brown’s son, Greg Brown, said in an interview that he recalled Walz working at the ranch and he confirmed that they kept National Geographics in the bunkhouse. But he said that Walz only worked at the ranch for one summer, and then only for a few weeks.

“He got tired of it and he left,” Greg Brown said. “My dad hauled him to town,” about 20 miles to Valentine. “My dad was pretty good at taking in high school kids from Omaha and Valentine. He made them work and if they didn’t, then he took them to town.”

Walz declined an interview request.

From one perspective, life in Valentine was isolated; it was a three-hour drive over the Sandhills and across the Badlands to get to the comparative metropolis of Rapid City, S.D. But Valentine was just large enough, with a vibrant main street and a thriving culture, to feel like more than a little city, Walz’s classmates said. And Walz, as an athlete and son of an important local official, had standing among teens in the town.

“There was a social hierarchy, country kids wearing wranglers and cowboy hats, city kids wearing sneakers,” recalled classmate Brad Rodgers, a veterinarian who said his elementary education was in a remote one-room schoolhouse. “Tim wore sneakers; he hung out with the ‘cool’ kids.”

Little of that vibrant small-town life awaited Walz, then 15 years old, and his family as they left Valentine and moved to Butte on a summer day in 1979.

***

The route from Valentine to Butte is a two-hour drive across the crop fields and ranch lands of northern Nebraska, with hardly a commercial establishment in sight, along two-lane roads, some of them unpaved, until arriving at the town of a few hundred people surrounded by farm fields.

Walz’s mother’s family had deep roots in Butte. Her brother, Jerome Reiman, owned a farm there, as did other relatives. Walz’s parents later told the family they had always intended to move to Butte, but James Walz’s illness sped up the plan. The extended family in Butte would help care for him and his children, and they hoped the slower pace of life would be good for James’s health and also enable him to be superintendent of a smaller school.

The Walz family moved into a two-story house, a few blocks off a quiet business district. The house had been moved from a nearby town and placed on a corner, a block from a red-brick building with the words “High School” over the entry. As school began in the fall, James Walz took over as superintendent and Tim Walz joined a sophomore class of about two dozen, half of whom Walz has said were his cousins.

Everyone in Butte was family of some sort, whether it was by blood or proximity. But it was clear to Walz’s family that he had no intention of following his relatives into the agriculture business.

“He wasn’t into farming at all,” said Reiman, Walz’s 84-year-old uncle who stressed that he saw nothing wrong with Walz’s view, figuring that his nephew wanted to become a teacher like his father.

Lynita Fry, a classmate of Walz’s, said life in the close-knit town provided a shelter to the family in a difficult moment: “You were raised by the whole town. … If you did anything, by the time you got home, your mom already knew about it. You could go to anybody’s house because they knew who you were. Everybody was like a big family. … We were pretty protected from a lot of things.”

Walz’s life settled into a new pattern, as he went to classes and played sports on even smaller teams. He dreamed of going to college, but as his father became sicker, the family worried about how to pay the bills. Butte had limited nearby medical care, and the family began taking him 234 miles southeast to Omaha for treatment.

Walz soon decided to follow his father, a veteran of the Korean War, into the military. The pair drove an hour west to Springview, met a farmer who was a lieutenant in a local unit, and then signed the paperwork, Walz later said in an oral history.

“You picked up your high school junior and took him, and we were in,” Walz said. He joined the National Guard and took his first flight, traveling to Fort Benning in Georgia for basic training. It was, Walz said, a “piece of America.”

Or, as Walz more colorfully recalled it in a speech: “Two days after my 17th birthday, my chain-smoking, Korean War veteran father took me to join the army.”

Walz found refuge in football. Even though Butte High School’s team was small, it had enough boys to put 11 players on the field. The team went 8-1 in Walz’s senior year and he was an all-star, playing guard or tackle, according to his former coach, Kevin Kirwan.

“He loved football,” Kirwan said. “He was tough. I always referred to him as the kid that could spit dirt, wipe sweat from his eyes, wipe the blood off his arm and want more.”

Everybody knew that James Walz was increasingly ill, Kirwan said, and townspeople pitched in to help, bringing food and doing whatever else was needed for the family.

After graduating from high school, Walz used the GI Bill to enter Nebraska’s Chadron State College, 262 miles west of Butte, while his father continued treatment for lung cancer.

One day in January 1984 while Walz was at college, he received an urgent call to come to the hospital. His father had gone into a coma.

“I remember sitting in that hospital room, no one really knowing what to do … because the question was about keeping him on life support, and having to make decisions about your dad,” he recalled during his 2018 campaign for governor.

James Walz died at 54 years old and was buried in Butte.

In his convention speech, Walz said in reference to the medical debt: “Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits.” But in other settings, Walz has said that wasn’t nearly enough. He has said that the final week of his father’s time in the hospital was so expensive it “cost my mom a decade of having to go back to work” at a local nursing home. Walz and his campaign did not respond to questions from The Washington Post about whether the family had medical insurance and the cost of James Walz’s final week at the hospital.

Walz was in despair. He briefly lost the incentive to remain in college. Feeling “ripped up” over his father’s death, as he told the newspaper then called the Minneapolis Star Tribune in a 2018 interview, he wandered around the South, traveling to Houston and Jonesboro, Ark., where he got a factory job building tanning beds.

To those who know him, this is considered his darkest period — but also a turning point that later provided fuel for Walz’s political foundations after he resumed classes, joined student government and then enrolled in a program to teach in China.

Walz saw the values of small-town America in the tragedy as his mother also was bolstered by support from the Butte community — an experience that has become a touchstone for him when explaining why the family remains so devoted to the town.

“Being a single mom and having to figure out how to pay those bills, to get your kids to go to school, and restructuring your life is quite an undertaking,” said Julie Walz, his sister-in-law.

“The interconnectedness and how people help each other there is quite remarkable,” she said, recalling a similar experience after her husband — Walz’s younger brother, Craig — died in 2016 when a tree fell on his tent on a camping trip. “Having that support system in place, when something like that happens to your family, was something that cannot be replaced.”

Michael Bartlett, who grew up in Valentine and lifted weights with Walz in the basement of his home in Chadron, said that as he has watched Walz ascend onto a national stage, he is certain that his move to Butte and his father’s death was a defining moment.

“Knowing his dad is terminal, it changes your perspective on lots of things; it forces your hand, to grow up a little bit,” Bartlett said. “He had a maturity level at an early age. That was due to losing his dad.”

As Walz has charted an unusual path from teacher and football coach to congressman and Minnesota governor, he has pointed to his mother’s struggles with medical debt as one of the foundations of his political career. Earlier this year, he signed the Minnesota Debt Fairness Act, which requires that debt passed to a spouse after death be forgiven — echoing the situation his mother faced.

Shortly after Walz was named as the vice-presidential candidate, he and Harris filmed a conversation where one of her questions was: “Tell me about your dad.”

As Walz recounted the story of his father’s death again, he said it shaped him deeply to this day.

“We’re fine pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps,” Walz told Harris. “We had no boots.”

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report

CHICAGO — Jesse Jackson sat in a wheelchair near the back wall of a darkened restaurant at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. It was late Thursday morning, the final day of the Democratic National Convention. Slowed by Parkinson’s disease at age 82, the reverend was eating, or trying to eat, a breakfast of strawberries, grapes and cantaloupe.

With determined effort, he would stab his fork into a piece of fruit, then lift it slowly toward his mouth. Five seconds, 10 seconds, finally his lips would part and the fruit would go in. Sometimes it got stuck there, caught halfway, but he kept working at it, keeping hope alive, as he has been doing for all of his long and singular life.

The room was closed to the public, leaving Jackson alone with a nurse and two aides, Shelley Davis and Christopher Hodges, who called themselves handlers. That meant taking care of a range of tasks, from arranging their boss’s toiletries in the morning to scheduling his trips and visitors to translating his every word. Back in the 1980s, when he twice ran for president, Jackson was the political bard of America, whose soaring riffs on the lives of forgotten people evoked the poetry of Langston Hughes or Philip Levine and the wailing saxophone soul of John Coltrane. It was not just the call-and-response chants of “I am somebody!” and “Keep hope alive!,” but the word portraits of the maids who “catch the early bus” and “change the beds you slept in.”

Now words are slow to form, one by one, each a struggle, soft, guttural, blurring, indistinct, his mouth barely moving.

But his mind is still active. When Davis and Hodges were asked what hours they worked for the reverend, a twinkle came to Jackson’s eyes. He said something. What was it?

“He said 9 to 5,” translated Davis, and he and Hodges broke out laughing. Of all the things Jesse Jackson is and has been, a 9-to-5 man is not one of them. Last year, he officially retired from his longtime position as the head of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, though he preferred to say that he didn’t retire but “pivoted.” And even with Parkinson’s, the work goes on.

“We have never done 9 to 5,” said Davis, who has worked for Jackson for 24 years and once Googled “Prince Charles’s butler” to learn how to best do his job.

“Even when he was in the hospital [with covid, in 2021] he was not 9 to 5,” added Hodges. “We’d get phone calls day and night. You know, even when we leave, we never really leave. This person wants to talk to the reverend. That person. It never ends.”

Along with his ability to entrance with words, Jackson’s other dominant characteristic has been his willingness to show up, year after year. If it was not literally 24-7, it was close. If there was a civil rights rally, Jackson was there. If union workers were picketing, he would join the line. If an Indian nation was fighting a desecration of its lands, he joined their struggle. He was with civil rights activists, peace activists, labor activists, climate activists, human rights activists, anti-nuclear activists. Whatever was going on in what he saw as the struggle, he was there.

He was in Selma in 1965 the week of the bloody police action against civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He was in the parking lot of the Lorraine Hotel on that early April night in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And he was in Chicago’s Grant Park, holding an American flag and with tears streaming down his cheeks, on the night in November 2008 when Barack Obama was elected the first Black president.

For most of Jackson’s adult life, Chicago, the host city of the Democratic convention, was where he showed up most. Of all the luminaries with Windy City connections who appeared at the United Center this week, including Barack Obama and talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, only former first lady Michelle Obama could make a stronger claim to Chicago, and she by only a few months. The South Side of Chicago has been Jackson’s home base for six decades, since he arrived in 1964, the year of Michelle’s birth, to study at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Jackson did not speak at this Chicago convention, but he was there, and his legacy was everywhere, if underappreciated. Early on the first night, before prime time but with the arena nearly full, he was pushed onstage in his wheelchair by two of his sons and his most famous disciple, the Rev. Al Sharpton. The thunderous applause went on for several minutes. Cameras panned to members of the audience in tears. Jackson’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling, his puffed cheeks rising from a broad smile. He lifted his hands and gave a thumbs-up sign.

And then he was wheeled off, and the convention moved on, leaving him behind. It was on convention eve, out at the commodious Rainbow PUSH headquarters at the corner of 50th and Drexel Boulevard on Chicago’s South Side, that Jackson’s life and contributions were fully recognized. Hundreds of national activists and Chicago citizens filled the hall as dozens of speakers from the progressive movement paid tribute. “The progressive caucus arose from the vision of Jesse Jackson,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “We are here on your shoulders, Reverend.” Jackson, in a blue suit and paisley tie, sat in his wheelchair at the front of the middle-right aisle, taking it all in, unable to show his appreciation with more than a thin smile.

While he was never a party insider, Jackson trained a platoon of Black women organizers who rose through the ranks to high leadership positions. Donna Brazile, who twice led the Democratic National Committee, worked on his 1984 campaign. Leah Daughtry, another former Jackson aide, ran the conventions in 2008 and 2016. And Minyon Moore, who worked on Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns, was the chairperson of this year’s convention. “Reverend would always say: ‘They stole Minyon. They stole Donna,’” Davis recalled at Thursday’s breakfast. “Anyone that started with him, he’d smile and say they were stolen from him.”

“David stole Minyon,” Jackson said, overhearing Davis’s explanation, referring to David Wilhelm, who began with Jackson in 1988 and took Moore with him when he went on to help run Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign four years later.

The restaurant conversation was then interrupted by the appearance of Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), whose aide had arranged a brief stop-in through handler Davis.

“Hey, Rev., how you doing?” she said, moving behind his wheelchair to give Jackson a hug. “So good to see you. You know Chicago is the city that raised me. Cabrini-Green on the North Side. Granddaddy had a little church on the South Side. So I owe you. I owe you for so much.”

Pressley went on, reminiscing to the group: “You know, when I was an aide to Senator [John] Kerry, or when I was on the Boston City Council, I was in a lot of rooms with Reverend Jackson. And he would always acknowledge me, turn to me as the only other person of color in the room. He always made me feel seen and made sure they listened to me.”

They posed for a few cellphone pictures. Jackson smiled. “Always handsome,” Pressley said. The congresswoman said she had to move on, she was going to an interfaith vigil calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

In the old days, before his disease slowed him down, Jackson would have been there, too, he said. His voice was still blurred, but he had something more he wanted to say. He was against all violence. Violence on any side. Violence only hurt the cause, he said. And so did any expression of antisemitism. And one more thing. “Netanyahu is responsible for the spread of antisemitism more than [Louis] Farrakhan,” he said, as Davis translated. The Chicago-based leader of the Nation of Islam was known for making antisemitic statements. “But Netanyahu’s bombs killed thousands of people,” Jackson said of the Israeli prime minister. “Farrakhan never killed anyone.”

Davis then announced that someone else was at the front of the restaurant waiting to see him: the representative from the South Korean consulate. Jackson stuck his fork into a hunk of melon and slowly raised it to his mouth. The piece was too big. He had to put it down, and his nurse cut it for him.

Anthony S. Fauci was hospitalized with West Nile virus this month, according to a spokesperson for the nation’s former top infectious-disease official.

Fauci, 83, ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades before he retired in 2022. He achieved unprecedented fame while enduring withering political attacks as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Fauci, 83, was hospitalized for six days before he returned home.

“Tony Fauci has been hospitalized with a case of West Nile virus. He is now home and is recovering. A full recovery is expected,” the spokesperson said.

West Nile virus is a mosquito-borne illness that can cause fever, body aches, diarrhea and rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are no vaccines or treatments for the virus.

Even though he left government nearly two years ago, Fauci has continued to face fierce political attacks from congressional Republicans for his role in the nation’s coronavirus response.

In June, he testified before a House panel investigating the response, with Republican lawmakers accusing him of orchestrating a coverup of the virus’s origins, which Fauci fiercely rejected as “simply preposterous.” The infectious-disease expert said Republicans have distorted emails between himself and other scientists as they discussed whether a laboratory leak of the coronavirus was possible.

After leaving government, Fauci joined the faculty at Georgetown University, where he serves as a distinguished professor in the School of Medicine. He also holds a position in the university’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

This summer, Fauci released a memoir called “On Call” that recounted his long career in public health and medicine, including the leading role he played in responding to the nation’s AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, and his unlikely rise to fame and political notoriety as the face of the coronavirus response under President Donald Trump.

After a long day of campaigning ahead of a tough primary in 2012, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) brought his two closest friends in Congress to an Italian restaurant in North Jersey.

Then-Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) couldn’t understand how all of these people were smoking cigars indoors, violating state law. “What are they gonna do,” Pascrell told Doyle, lighting his own cigar, “call the cops?”

Pascrell turned and introduced Doyle and then-Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.) to the local police chief, yes, with a cigar in hand. He went on to win by more than 20 percentage points, as Doyle recalled in an interview Wednesday.

It was vintage Pascrell, working as hard as ever to keep representing his constituents while maintaining the political touch of the local mayor that he was before winning his first House term in 1996.

Pascrell, 87, died Wednesday after a weeks-long battle with health ailments that sent him back and forth to the hospital, prompting an outpouring of goodwill for a unique character and an increasingly vanishing part of the House Democratic Caucus.

Pascrell never served as a full committee chair, nor did he climb into elected leadership positions. Yet, he held an unofficial title that carried weight in the caucus.

“Bill was certainly the mayor of ‘The Corner,’” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), a close ally of Pascrell’s.

That’s the far left corner of the House chamber, on the Democratic side, where Pascrell most often took the very corner seat. Originally referred to as the “Pennsylvania Corner,” that spot served as the longtime roost for former congressman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a legendary 36-year member who controlled the Pentagon’s budget and wielded vast influence until his death in 2010.

With no official seating, the House floor operates like a high school cafeteria. Just as how football players might choose to sit together, the California and Texas GOP delegations, for example, sit toward the back of the middle section on the Republican side and older members of the Congressional Black Caucus sit toward the front rows on the left flank of the floor.

For Murtha and friends, they found themselves in “the corner.”

Their crew symbolized the 20th-century Democratic Party, built upon political machines honed in Irish, Italian, Polish and other ethnic neighborhoods. They were not exclusively White men — the late Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) was a “Corner” regular, and Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (D-Calif.) has had a long-standing gig as stand-up comic at fundraisers for Pascrell.

Pascrell, as their oldest colleague and oftentimes most colorful, served as their elder statesman.

“He was a man of his time,” Capuano recalled in a telephone interview Thursday.

They considered themselves street smart, learning how to count votes, both on legislation and internal Democratic leadership races. Powerful figures such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) courted their support well ahead of her historic rise to become the first female House speaker in 2007.

But demographic change, along with state legislators drawing district lines in certain shapes, has forced many of these Democrats to confront challenges from younger, more progressive and diverse primary challengers. A few lost and some retired ahead of tough primaries, understanding their party’s evolution and leaving without many regrets.

But Pascrell managed to stay ahead of the curve. He crushed a primary challenge in June from New Jersey’s longest-tenured Muslim mayor who took on Pascrell for being too pro-Israel. Pascrell won with nearly 77 percent of the vote.

A native of Paterson, N.J., once known as “Silk City” for its dominance of that fiber’s industry early last century, Pascrell represented that region first in the state assembly and then won the mayor’s race in 1990.

After the 1994 Republican tidal wave, Democrats recruited Pascrell to reclaim the congressional seat in 1996. He focused heavily on his liberal base of labor unions, first on infrastructure projects through the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and for the past 17 years on the influential Ways and Means Committee.

Often called “Silky” by colleagues, for his city’s past and his own flowing hairstyle, Pascrell fought for funding for local fire departments, forging an early bond with then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.). As president, Biden in June signed into law an updated version of Pascrell’s 2000 Fire Act, the last major bill signing the lawmaker attended at the White House.

Pascrell developed the knack for loving a good debate but also never suffering fools lightly. In a new academic study of congressional rhetoric, Pascrell managed to be the second-best Democrat in Congress at maintaining “constructive debate” with Republicans, trailing only Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.). Yet, he also dished out the most “personal attacks” on Democrats through his speeches and other public statements.

“He could be very blunt, but he had a heart of gold,” Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), a 26-year member of Congress and “The Corner,” said in an interview Thursday.

He tied the Ways and Means Committee into knots in 2017, early in Donald Trump’s presidency, as he led the push to get the real estate tycoon to release his tax returns. Pascrell forced the committee into votes that embarrassed Republicans who said publicly they wanted the returns released but then voted against forcing the issue.

“Do my friends and colleagues on this committee have the courage to put their country first? Pascrell asked at one hearing. “Or will we continue to hide the president’s secrets?”

Doyle and Capuano both ruefully recalled Murtha’s challenge to Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) for House majority leader after the 2006 midterms bumped Democrats into the majority and their ally Pelosi into the speaker’s chair.

They maintained two sets of whip lists: one for the overly optimistic Murtha, who heard members say “I love you” and thought they were supporting him; and the other for their more realistic assessment of how Hoyer would thump Murtha.

“That was nothing but pure loyalty,” Capuano said. “When one of your team dives in the water, you dive in the water and ask questions later.”

After Murtha’s death, the corner seat fell to then-Rep. Paul Kanjorski as the most senior Pennsylvania Democrat. He lost in the 2010 general election, and then Tim Holden (D-Pa.) took over the seat as the dean of the state’s delegation, only to lose in a 2012 primary and confer dean status on Doyle.

“I never sat in that chair,” Doyle said. “Jack had a curse on that chair!”

Instead, over the years, any non-Pennsylvania Democrat could take the seat, and in recent years, that fell to Pascrell.

No one’s quite sure who gets first honor of that chair now. It could be Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), a 32-year veteran and ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, or Rep. Matt Cartwright, the dean of Pennsylvania Democrats, or Larson, the closest friend to Pascrell still in office.

Pascrell never left Paterson, just like Capuano never left Somerville, just outside Boston, where he, too, served as mayor. And just like Bob Brady, who resigned in 2019 and lost his bid for mayor, never left Philadelphia.

“None of us were born with silver spoons in our mouths,” Doyle said.

Sometimes they were a debate society. Capuano credits his discussion with “Corner” buddies with helping him study the Iraq situation. He voted against the 2002 war resolution, just like Doyle.

Murtha and Pascrell voted for the war and eventually switched sides. “I have since regretted that vote deeply,” Pascrell wrote in a 2007 op-ed titled “A Historic Error.”

And oftentimes being part of “The Corner” meant having fun and playing practical jokes on each other.

Like clockwork, as Pascrell’s January birthday approached, his friends would send out invites for his “90th birthday party.”

A baseball fanatic, Pascrell played in the Congressional Baseball Game well into his 70s until Doyle, the team manager, talked him into a dual role of hitting coach and assistant manager. One year, however, staffers forgot to include Pascrell in the game program; Pascrell blamed Doyle, shunning him for weeks.

Finally, during votes, Doyle pulled Pascrell away from the corner. “I’m asking for your forgiveness,” he recalled telling his close friend.

A pause hung in the air. “I need time,” Pascrell said.

Pascrell loved poetry, scrawling out verses on sometimes discombobulated sheets of white paper stuffed inside his coat pockets. Larson so enjoyed a 2007 poem about their colleague, then-Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), that he entered it into the Congressional Record on a dare by Pascrell and friends.

“As cold and dark and empty and hollow as these moments are, it is here in the mind’s basement that we face this white ghost,” Pascrell wrote.

The past few years haven’t been kind to men from “The Corner.”

Former congressman Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), a 20-year incumbent, lost to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) in a stunning upset six years ago, followed two months later by Capuano losing to Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) retired from the House to run a long-shot Senate race, performing valiantly but still losing.

Rep. Emilia Strong Sykes (D-Ohio), one of the youngest CBC members, replaced Ryan. After 28 years of representing the Pittsburgh area, Doyle decided to retire two years ago ahead of what would have been a primary challenge from Rep. Summer Lee (D), who narrowly defeated Doyle’s preferred successor.

“Change doesn’t bother me,” said Capuano.

He and Doyle work for law firms now, tending to clients and occasionally coming to Washington. When they did, they made sure to schedule time to see Pascrell at their regular table at the Democratic Club.

“They don’t make them like Billy Pascrell anymore,” Doyle said. “God, I’m gonna miss him.”

As he suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked at length about the “many key issues” on which he claims that he and Trump are aligned. What he did not explain were their profound disagreements in the area that for many years was central to Kennedy’s career and public image: environmental protection.

Kennedy had promised to be “the best environmental president in American history.” For decades, as an attorney and celebrity activist, he urged more vigorous enforcement of federal regulations guaranteeing clean air and water.

Now he joins a campaign whose policies, according to critics, would scale back those regulations and weaken the agencies that uphold them.

His decision has left many of Kennedy’s former allies on environmental causes in shock, even those who had already broken with him over his anti-vaccine views or quixotic presidential bid. Some said the move undid any legacy Kennedy — named one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the planet” in 1999 — could still claim to have in the nation’s environmental movement.

“It’s sad and surreal,” said Michael Brune, a former executive director of the Sierra Club who was arrested alongside Kennedy at the White House in 2013 for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. “It’s a betrayal of his values and the work that he’s done for most of his career. He’s supporting someone who’s been the most aggressive in terms of trying to undermine our bedrock environmental laws.”

Unlike Republicans who have criticized Trump only to later bend the knee to him, Brune said, Kennedy is — or at least was — separated from him by seemingly insurmountable policy differences.

“In terms of policy issues that people hold dear, I can’t think of another example where a prominent political figure with such a strong record on one issue can go so dramatically and rapidly in the other direction,” Brune said.

In a speech in Phoenix on Friday announcing the suspension of his campaign in battleground states and his endorsement of Trump, Kennedy seemed to anticipate such criticism, acknowledging that he still had important policy differences with the Republican presidential nominee.

But he said any differences are outweighed by what he called “existential” issues on which he and Trump agree, such as opposing America’s current policy of supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion and “ending the childhood disease epidemic.” Kennedy has for years sown doubts about the safety of childhood vaccines and has promoted debunked theories that link some of those medicines to autism.

“I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration. There are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences,” Kennedy said. “But we are aligned with each other on other key issues.”

Just this month, Kennedy was still trying to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the possibility of working in her administration if he endorsed her. Unlike Trump, she declined to talk with him.

When it comes to environmental principles, Kennedy’s past rhetoric and activism would seem to align more closely with the Harris-Walz campaign, said Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a partner at Agency, an environmental justice nonprofit and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She said Harris has been a key figure over the past four years in efforts to extend environmental protections to marginalized people.

“Vice President Harris has been the face of environmental justice for the Biden administration, and we would expect those policies to continue” if she is elected, Lopez-Nuñez said. “Especially when we’re talking about pollution and climate change, I think she’s the only candidate that’s been explicit about that.”

For large portions of his 49-minute speech on Friday, Kennedy — who began running last year as a Democrat — lashed out at the Democratic Party, saying it had prevented him from competing on a level playing field in the primary and criticizing its legal challenges to his independent candidacy in various states.

In a brief phone interview Friday night before he appeared onstage at a rally with Trump, Kennedy said he was “not enthralled with the Democrats’ performance” on environmental issues. Although he had hinted in his speech that his portfolio in a Trump White House could focus on public health, he said that he believed he could also sway environmental policies.

“I would hope to have an influence on how the environment is treated under his administration,” Kennedy said.

During his first term, Trump dramatically rolled back the protections of the Clean Water Act — the landmark 1972 law whose importance Kennedy has emphasized countless times and around which much of his legal work revolved — and sought to slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which Kennedy has frequently assailed for failing to adequately safeguard the American public. Kennedy, who has denounced the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and repeatedly stood among protesters seeking to block construction on oil pipelines, is now part of a campaign that counts “Drill, baby, drill” among its slogans.

Trump apparently overcame some of his own past qualms about his new surrogate’s environmental views. In May, Trump called Kennedy “the dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan” in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying, “He’s a Radical Left Lunatic whose crazy Climate Change views make the Democrat’s Green New Scam look Conservative.”

But for Kennedy — who, unlike Trump, has made environmental issues central to his life’s work — Trump’s past and present policies offer an especially jarring contrast with his own views.

Kennedy starred in a 2011 documentary exposing the ravages of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia; during his first year in office, Trump halted research on the risks such mining posed to nearby residents. Kennedy often laments regulated industries’ influence over government and attacked former president George W. Bush for appointing men and women who “seem to have entered government service with the express purpose of subverting the agencies they now command.” Trump’s EPA became notorious for politically driven weakening of environmental rules.

“In the Trump administration, among the appointees, they didn’t have anyone who cared about what the science said,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and former director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists who has tracked environmental policy across presidential administrations. “To a large extent, it was what powerful business interests wanted.”

Rosenberg said Project 2025, a detailed plan for a potential future Republican administration led by the Heritage Foundation, envisions further reductions to the powers of environmental regulators and cooperation with polluting businesses. (Trump has recently distanced himself from the plan, though some of his former advisers were involved in it.)

Kennedy’s desire to join such an administration, Rosenberg said, is hard to square with his avowed environmental convictions.

“I’m trying to understand the logic,” Rosenberg said. “And I can’t.”