10 things about Sheldon Whitehouse
1. He was born in October 1955.
2. His father, Charles Whitehouse, was a World War II veteran, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to three countries, and the first assistant secretary of defense for special-operations command. His grandfather was also a diplomat.
3. His mother, Mary, was founder and director of the Washington Center for Attitudinal Healing, an organization that helps the mental state of ill patients. She had also been a member of the women's committee at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
4. Whitehouse is a descendent of Charles Crocker, one of the California "Big Four" who built the Central Pacific Railroad.
5 He graduated from the St. Paul's School, a boarding school in New Hampshire, before attending Yale University. He graduated from Yale in 1978 and four years later from the University of Virginia Law School.
6. He's married to Sandra Thornton Whitehouse.
7. He has two children, Molly and Alexander.
8. He was elected Rhode Island's attorney general in 1998 and has argued cases before both the Rhode Island Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
9. When Whitehouse took office in 1999, he installed a bronze plaque declaring: "I will not cease from mental fight. Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand . . . ," a quote from one of his favorite poems written by the early 19th-century English poet William Blake.
10. Tom Daschle, the former Senate Majority Leader, and film director Martin Scorsese co-hosted a fundraiser for Whitehouse's senate campaign.
advertisement
