For as many enemies as the superhero fends off, Batman has a formidable team of supporters, starting with his sidekick Robin, Gotham City Commissioner James Gordon and his ever-loyal butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
But one of the most ardent supporters of the Caped Crusader is not in a comic book, but in the United States Senate, and he has known the Bat for over 80 years.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont and the longest-serving member of the current Senate, is a Batman enthusiast who has turned his fandom into philanthropy. He’s even used the comics to pass on his legislative agenda.
Leahy is now president pro tempore of the senate and is third in the presidential line of succession. While unlikely to ever serve as president, his high-profile position sheds brighter light on his colorful resume – including multiple appearances in the “Batman” films.
When not working in Washington’s Senate chambers, Leahy retreats to Gotham, where Batman fights cartoonish villains and mans the Batmobile. It’s a consolation he took in when he was 4 years old.
“If you live in the real world all the time, it can be pretty boring,” the senator told Vermont’s alt-weekly Seven Days newspaper in 2008.
THEN LEAHY BATMAN
Leahy declined an interview for this story through his spokesperson, but his affinity for all things Batman is well documented. As he wrote in the foreword to “Detective Comics: 80 Years of Batman,” he was born just a year after the publication of Batman’s first comic in 1939.
He first discovered Batman at the age of 4, when he received his first library card. He visited the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, where he spent many afternoons reading comics. While his school friends raved about Superman, Leahy found a “related bond” 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 foreword.
Until his adulthood, he continued to spend hours in the library every day, and even after moving to Washington, he made time to stop by. He is an outspoken advocate for literacy and the preservation of libraries so that children can have similar formative experiences with books.
“Some of my fondest memories as a child were in the library, where everyone fitted and the possibilities were limitless,” he writes on his Senate website.
LEAHY’S APPEARANCES FROM PAGE TO SCREEN
Leahy was elected to the Senate in 1974, and until the mid-1990s, his affinity with Batman didn’t have much to do with his Capitol Hill duties.
That all changed in 1996, when Leahy teamed up with DC Comics to create Batman: Death of Innocents: The Horror of Landmines, a graphic novel that warns of the dangers of landmines. Leahy has long advocated ending the use of landmines, and he told Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call that he had put copies of the strip on every senator’s desk that year.
Leahy’s first foray into onscreen acting – something he does strict when Batman is involved – came in 1995, when he appeared in the critically maligned “Batman Forever”. The same year he voiced a character billed as “Territorial Governor” in “Batman: The Animated Series”.
Since then, Leahy has appeared in almost as many Batman movies as the Caped Crusader himself. He usually acts as a frowning politician (although in “Batman & Robin,” where his son Mark also had a cameo, he got to enjoy a raucous party). He even met an explosive ending as the curiously named Senator Purrington in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
“I explain to everyone that getting blown up was okay because my wife is a registered nurse,” he joked to Roll Call in 2016. “She brought me back together and I have never missed a vote.”
His most notable cameo, however, came in 2008’s ‘The Dark Knight’, when he confronts Heath Ledger’s Joker and famously tells the villain that he is ‘not intimidated by crooks’. The Joker, as formed, responds by grabbing Leahy’s character and threatening him with a knife.
Ledger, who died before the movie came out, is Leahy’s favorite Joker.
“He scared me to death when he came at me with the knife,” he told Roll Call. “I didn’t have to act.”
He will be absent from the upcoming reboot “The Batman”, starring Robert Pattinson in the lead role. He mentioned a busy schedule and told the Burlington Free Press that he “wasn’t even looking for it.”
“I have too many other things with Covid, with credit accounts,” he told the paper in August.
While his movie roles have certainly satisfied his inner fanboy, Leahy does it for the library where his love of reading blossomed. He donates every fee for his performances and royalty checks from remaining screenings to his beloved Kellogg-Hubbard Library, where he helped fund a children’s section named after him. From his roles in the “The Dark Knight” trilogy alone, Leahy has donated more than US $ 150,000 to the library in his hometown, said Carolyn Brennan, co-director of the library.
In 2012, the library put up a plaque in honor of Leahy, who was dubbed their ‘superhero’ by staff.
WHY LEAHY LOVES BATMAN
Leahy found Batman when he was 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 penchant for reading and promoting literacy and for delivering justice (though as a public servant, not as a vigilante).
Leahy preferred Batman to other characters because unlike the divine Superman or the super-powered Spider-Man, Batman was just a man, albeit an extraordinarily wealthy one, with “human strengths and human weaknesses.” The danger Batman faced was unlike that of other heroes – he felt real, Leahy wrote in the foreword to the DC collection.
“The Batman triumphed through superior intellect and detective skills, through the freedoms afforded by great wealth and sheer will,” wrote Leahy in his foreword. “No superpowers, but skill, science and rationality.”
Like Bruce Wayne, Leahy is just a man, albeit with more power than most and the chance to make real, tangible changes in his own Gotham. Following the example of Batman, he has vowed to use that power wisely.