For as many enemies as the superhero defends himself, Batman has a formidable team of fans starting with his companion Robin, Gotham City Commissioner James Gordon and his ever-faithful butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
But one of the most ardent supporters of the Caped Crusader resides not in a comic, but in the U.S. Senate, and the bat has been known for more than 80 years.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and longest-serving member of the current Senate, is a Batman fan who has turned his hobby into philanthropy. He has even used comics to convey his legislative agenda.
Now pro tempore president of the Senate, Leahy is the third in line of presidential succession. While he is unlikely to ever serve as president, his high-profile position shines most clearly in his colorful resume, which includes multiple appearances in “Batman” movies.
When not working in the Senate chambers of Washington, Leahy retires to Gotham, where Batman fights cartoon villains and homicides 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 a little boring,” the senator told the Vermont weekly Seven Days in 2008.
WHEN LEAHY reunited with BATMAN
Leahy turned down an interview for this story through her spokesperson, but her affinity for all things Batman is well documented. As he wrote in the prologue to “Detective Comics: 80 Years of Batman,” he was born just one 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 attended the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, where he spent many afternoons studying comics. While her school friends were having fun with Superman, Leahy found an “affine bond” with the bat.
“Entering the world of Batman through my imagination opened a first door to a lifelong love of reading,” he wrote in his prologue.
He would continue to spend hours in the library every day until adulthood, and even after moving to Washington, he would devote himself to entering. He is a vocal advocate of literacy and library preservation so that children can have similar formative experiences with books.
“Some of my fondest childhood memories were in the library, where everyone could fit in 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, her affinity for Batman had little to do with her duties on Capitol Hill.
That changed in 1996, when Leahy collaborated with DC Comics to create “Batman: Death of Innocents: The Horror of Landmines,” a graphic novel that warned of the dangers of landmines. Leahy has long advocated ending landmines and told Capitol Hill’s Roll Call newspaper that year she placed copies of the comic on the table of all senators.
Leahy’s first foray into screen acting, which she does strictly when Batman is involved, he arrived in 1995, when he appeared in the evil “Batman Forever”. The same year, he gave voice to 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”, where his son Mark also had a cameo, he was allowed to enjoy a fleshy party). He even met an explosive ending like the curious Senator Purrington in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
“I tell everyone that exploding was okay because my wife is a registered nurse,” she joked on Roll Call in 2016. “She put me back together and I never failed to vote.”
His most notable cameo, however, appeared in “The Dark Knight” of 2008, when he confronts Heath Ledger’s Joker and famously tells the villain that “he’s not intimidated by thugs.” The Joker, true to his form, 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.
“The devil scared me 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 title role. Citing a busy schedule, he told the Burlington Free Press that he “didn’t even intend to be there.”
“I have many other things with Covid, with the appropriation bills,” he told the newspaper in August.
While her roles in film have certainly satisfied her inner fan, Leahy does so for the library where her love of reading flourished. She donated all fees for her appearances and royalty checks from the residual samples to her beloved Kellogg-Hubbard Library, where she helped fund a so-called children’s wing. Of her roles in the “The Dark Knight” trilogy, Leahy has donated more than $ 150,000 to the library in her hometown, said Carolyn Brennan, the library’s co-director.
In 2012, the library hung a plaque in honor of Leahy, whom staff called her “superhero.”
WHY LEAHY LOVES BATMAN
Leahy met Batman as a child, but her love for the fictional hero is fundamental to who she is and the legislator she became. Batman instilled in Leahy a fondness for reading and promoting literacy and for doing justice (though as a government official, not as a head watchman).
Leahy preferred Batman to the other characters because, unlike the divine Superman or the superpowered Spider-Man, Batman was only a man, though extremely rich, with “human strengths and weaknesses.” The danger facing Batman was different from that of other heroes: his real feeling, Leahy wrote in the prologue to the DC collection.
“Batman prevailed through superior intelligence and detective skills, through the freedoms offered by great wealth and pure will,” Leahy wrote in her prologue. “Not superpowers, but skill, science and rationality.”
Like Bruce Wayne, Leahy is just a man, albeit with more power than most and with the ability to make real, tangible changes to his own Gotham. Following the example of Batman, he has pledged to use this power wisely.