An ex-Republican senator reflects on an interesting career.

JIm Jeffords was in town March 9 on invitation from the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The independent senator from Vermont earned a standing ovation for a talk on "Rethinking Our National Priorities," a subject given serious ink in his new memoir, An Independent Man. During the Q&A, he twice rejected rumors that his new book is a campaign tract, audibly disappointing the standing-room-only crowd. But even without presidential aspirations, Jeffords remains a fascinating and important senator.

Jeffords grew up a small-town, apple-pie eating son of privilege, with a pedigree best symbolized by an offer he received as a teenager to sit for a Vermont artist named Norman Rockwell. That a young Jeffords turned down the chance to be immortalized as a caricature of youthful wartime innocence is somehow appropriate, as his career has defied stereotypes at every turn. Long before his famous bolt from the Republican Party in May of 2001, Jeffords was the GOP's blackest sheep. By the time the senator gets to explaining his decision to go independent, it's hard not to believe he hadn't been biding his time for decades, just waiting for the perfect moment to pick up a baseball bat and slam the GOP as hard as he could in its free-swinging elephant nuts.

His first mutiny came in 1967, when as a Vermont state senator he voted for a Democratic tax bill. As the state's attorney general, he championed some of America's strictest environmental regulations, including the country's second bottle bill, and battled giants like the International Paper Company and the Atomic Energy Commission. His opposition to Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War led some Vermont Republicans to accuse him of harboring McGovernicks among his staff, but he was re-elected anyway, helped by Vermont's late-60s influx of hippies.

As a Republican congressman, Jeffords backed John Anderson's third-party run for president in 1980 and fought hard against both Reagan administrations. He opposed Reagan's budgets, SDI, funding for the Contras and pushed for arms control and funding for research into alternative energy. Later, as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jeffords committed the apostasy of voting to investigate allegations that senior members of the first Reagan administration-including then-President Bush-had negotiated with Iran to delay the release of hostages. In the 90s Jeffords would fight the Contract With America and be the only Republican to cosponsor Clinton's healthcare program. These were bold stands, and Jeffords regrets nothing.

With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the iconoclast felt his remaining tethers to the Republican Party snap. The White House blacklisted him for opposing the Bush tax cut, and he felt alienated by the "lock-step" mentality of the party. It just so happened that this alienation coincided with the first evenly split Senate since the 1880s. An Independent Man shows that Jeffords' next move-the switch heard 'round the world-was nothing so much as the logical culmination of an unconventional career.

An Independent Man: Adventures of a Public Servant By James M. Jeffords (with Yvonne Daley and Howard Coffin) Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $25.00