RICHMOND — The unlikely friendship started with a chance encounter in a train station. It went on to demonstrate that Republicans and Democrats can still find civility and common purpose, with the evidence to be on display in the ceremony this Saturday as Virginia installs its next governor.
It was June of 2018. Abigail Spanberger, who just a week before had won the Democratic primary for Congress in Virginia’s 7th District, was waiting in the Richmond Staples Mill station to take the Amtrak north.
A white-haired man returning from a Washington Nationals game recognized the newly minted nominee and walked over to say hello. He said that he lived in the 7th District and that he was “impressed with her message,” then he moved along.
Months later, after Spanberger had won an upset election over heavily favored incumbent Republican Rep. Dave Brat, she got a handwritten letter from the man at the train station. He turned out to be William C. Mims, at the time a justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia and a former Republican member of the General Assembly.
Spanberger — now Virginia’s governor-elect — would refer to that letter and its impact over the years, but only ever identified the sender as a Republican former elected official. She cited him in a 2020 victory speech after winning her second term in Congress: “He wrote that humility and empathy are the keys to meaningful public service. These words resonated with me just as much when I first read them as they do today.”
Mims, now 68 and semi-retired from the bench, has carefully avoided partisan politics since being elevated to the state’s high court in 2010. He had spent 14 years before that as a Republican delegate and state senator from Loudoun County and was appointed to finish a term as state attorney general.
He teaches about law, leadership and the Constitution at Christopher Newport University and writes essays in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the importance of civility and morality in public affairs. Much of his own thinking about those topics was heavily influenced by the essay he sent to Spanberger along with his letter in 2018: “Politics, Morality, and Civility” by the late Czech poet and president Vaclav Havel.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Mims said he had an idea that Spanberger, as she began her political career, would be receptive to Havel’s thinking. With President Donald Trump in the White House and partisan rancor heavy, Mims said, Spanberger stood out during her first election season as a candidate who spoke about serving the public without resorting to insults or opponent-bashing.
Havel’s essay — taken from his book “Summer Meditations” — lays out the Czech statesman’s case for being a leader whose first impulse is to serve, whose conduct is based on a sense of morality and whose policies are rooted in empathy for others. Mims first encountered the essay 30 years ago when he was a young lawmaker visiting officials from post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Ever since, he said, “it has been almost a manifesto to me.”
In a handwritten reply to Mims in 2018, Spanberger said she read the essay on a train ride and was particularly moved by sections that differentiated politics from the superficial distractions of “political intrigue” and that made a case for civility as “foundational to all things, including economic growth.”
Spanberger and Mims kept in touch, met occasionally and shared details about their careers and families (both have three daughters). She spoke to his university classes; he supplied her with copies of Havel’s essay to hand out to staffers.
As he followed her career, Mims said, he has been impressed by Spanberger’s seeming ability to keep her focus on constituents and resist the extremes of political name-calling that mark this divided era. She famously scolded fellow Democrats in 2020 for using polarizing terms such as “socialism” and “defund the police,” and was rated the most bipartisan member of Virginia’s congressional delegation.
Mims has not offered a political endorsement of Spanberger. He noted that her opponent in the governor’s race last year — Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears — was once his colleague in the legislature and is someone whose life and service he admires.
But he counts himself a fan of the incoming governor, with hope that she’ll take to heart the idea of being a “servant leader.”
Last month, Spanberger connected again with the man from the train station, whose original letter she keeps on her desk at home. She asked him to administer the oath on Saturday that will make her the first woman to serve as governor of Virginia.
“That was a total shock,” Mims said. And for once in his long career of words and debate, “I was somewhat speechless.”
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