Like many Iowa Republican politicos, Zach Nunn cut his teeth as a staffer to longtime Sen. Charles E. Grassley.
After graduating from college in 2002, Nunn joined the senator’s office. He quickly learned Grassley’s quirks, including his famed jogging habit, which sometimes leaves reporters in his dust.
“I was just watching the reporters be like, ‘Do we chase a senior senator down the hallway?’” Nunn recalled.
Another lesson, he said, came from watching his boss, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, work closely with Democratic counterpart Max Baucus, so much so that the former Montana senator took the unusual step of endorsing Grassley in his 2022 campaign.
“If we’re ever not in the majority, I want to make sure we have that long-term relationship,” Nunn said of reaching across the aisle now that he’s a member of Congress himself. “And I learned that from watching Chuck do that for many decades.”
That attitude has helped Nunn navigate his state’s most competitive House district, which includes most of Des Moines. He narrowly flipped the seat in 2022 by less than a point, ousting Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne, and won reelection two years later by 4 points. Now he’s once again a target of House Democrats.
Nunn sat down with Roll Call last month to talk about his path to Congress, including a stint in college working for a British parliamentarian.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: What is your first memory of politics?
A: I remember waking up at my grandparents’ farmhouse and seeing the Berlin Wall fall down. I was like, “Why is everybody celebrating this? They’re tearing things down.” And my grandpa said, “For a generation, all they’ve known is not being able to tear things down.”
It was on a tiny TV set up in the kitchen, and my grandmother, who was German, her family, they’re all crying and so happy. It got me aware of what was happening in the world, and after that, I started following international politics more.
Q: You’ve talked about traveling to the United Kingdom in college and working for Conservative Member of Parliament Peter Bottomley.
A: He was the Tory basically in charge of Northern Ireland affairs, and I worked for him as his research assistant in Whitehall. In the UK at the time, they had a research assistant and they had a private secretary, and that was the entire staff for members of Parliament. It would be like an entire policy shop on the Hill distilled down to one individual. That was the part that blew me away. Effectively, it’s like a very large state legislature that just happens to run all of Great Britain.
It provided really intimate access to foreign statecraft. The Troubles had just finished off in Northern Ireland, and it was a great opportunity to learn from a guy who had seen everything, from the Falklands War to the transition into modern Britain and, at the time at least, what the relationship with Europe and the United States was gonna look like post-Cold War.
Q: Do you still pay attention to the UK Parliament?
A: I do. In fact, I was with Peter Bottomley for the king’s coronation. I went over and checked on him. He was the “father of the House,” the most senior member of Parliament, and he continues to be kind of an old-school Tory. And then, most recently, we were there for a financial summit on security for crypto, and so I checked in again.
Q: You briefly worked for Grassley in the early 2000s before going into the Air Force.
A: If you’ve ever worked in Iowa politics as a Republican, then you’ve at some point worked for Sen. Grassley. I mean, this is the gloriousness of a man who has really cultivated young people to come learn about politics, and to this day he’s a fantastic mentor.
It was after 9/11, and so I wanted to serve in a way that I felt like would be helpful. He was chairman of the Finance Committee, and I helped him with his defense portfolio.
He knows Iowa better than probably just about anybody, other than former Gov. Terry Branstad. We had one of the longest-serving governors. We have one of the longest-serving senators, but again, where Peter Bottomley was the father of the House, you could say Chuck Grassley is the father of the Senate. He just instills some great perspective, as the Senate’s supposed to, on how policy should work over the long haul, not the hustle and bustle of daily politics.
Q: What from your staffer days stands out the most to you?
A: Just how much of a family the Grassley staff is. You’d be jogging in the morning with Chuck, a 3-mile run, and then his wonderful wife would cook breakfast for the staff.
I remember one instance of him coming out of a meeting, and he basically looks at these reporters like, “I’ll answer any question you have for me if you can beat me back to the office.” And he takes off in his wing tips and runs from Dirksen all the way to his office in Hart. I was just watching the reporters be like, “Do we chase a senior senator down the hallway?” And sure enough, maybe six of them took off after him. God bless Chuck, he beat them all back to the office.
Q: That was when Max Baucus was the top Democrat on the Finance Committee. What did you learn from watching that relationship?
A: That was pivotal. I saw the way that he worked with Sen. Baucus, but I also saw the way he worked with Tom Harkin, another long-serving Democrat in Iowa. Being able to have that across-the-aisle relationship was important to him because he knew that Iowa needed to have somebody, whenever Republicans were not in the majority, who was still going to be a champion for them.
It’s candidly been one of the things that has made me very aggressive in saying, “How do we find good partnerships?” So guys like Don Davis or Nikki Budzinski — Don because he was in the military, Nikki because she’s also from an ag state — they’re Democrats, but we have shared values, shared interests.
Q: Do you see Grassley regularly now that you’re in the House?
A: He came to my promotion ceremony to colonel last year, and just seeing him in the crowd, it’s like having your favorite grandfather. And he’d probably kill me if I said that, but it meant something special to my family. It shows that all the things he had going on, he still takes the time to check in on his staff.
I think he’s now had more Grassley alumni married than any other member of Congress in history, including one of our staff members. So he’s also doing his part to keep Iowans married and making new Iowans.
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