Former Senator Kit Bond '60: A veteran of Missouri politics

When former United States Senator Kit Bond ‘60 came to the University in 1956, he did not expect to pursue a career in politics.

“I thought I was going to be a world-class physicist or engineer,” Bond said.

After reluctantly completing an honors course in math, however, Bond said he quickly realized his aptitude for the social sciences. Shortly thereafter, he emerged on a path toward his 40-year political career. In 1971, Bond was elected Missouri state auditor at 31 years of age. Just two years later, Bond became the youngest governor in the history of Missouri and the state’s first Republican governor in 28 years.

Bond served four consecutive terms — almost two and a half decades — in the U.S. Senate. According to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who gave a farewell address to Bond upon his retirement, Bond has been elected to political office more times than any other person in Missouri state history. He has advocated for a variety of interests over the course of his career, from genetically modified agriculture and improved U.S. relations with Southeast Asia to public access to art.

Bond grew up in St. Louis, Mo., where he attended elementary and secondary schools. After his sophomore year of high school, Bond moved to the Northeast to attend Deerfield Academy, where his older brother had graduated three years prior. Bond later followed his brother to the University, hoping, he said, to escape some of the colder schools further north.

Despite being involved in Republican activities back in Missouri, Bond did not participate in any political organizations on campus. Rather, he was an active member of several intramural sports teams. Although never a varsity athlete, Bond played on the intramural softball, touch football, basketball, billiards, Ultimate Frisbee and rugby teams.

“My club, Cottage Club, gave me an award for the most frustrated jock in the class,” Bond said.

Bond majored in the Wilson School and graduated cum laude from the University. His senior thesis, “Missouri Farm Organizations and the Problems of Agriculture,” explored the political interests of farmers’ associations in his home state.

“I was not a farmer, but I was interested in how effective the various farm organizations were,” Bond said. “Later during my career, those organizations [and what became] the Missouri Farm Bureau turned out to be one of my best sources of information on agricultural policy.”

In 1963, Bond graduated first in his class at the University of Virginia School of Law. He went on to clerk for Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but eventually moved back home to Missouri to practice law.

“He is very smart and very able,” former Missouri Senate partner and classmate John Danforth ’58 said. Shortly after Bond’s first and unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Congress, Danforth hired Bond as assistant attorney general of Missouri. Although Bond and Danforth were at the University for two overlapping years, the two senators did not know each other during their college years, Danforth said.

Although Bond did not intend to go into politics after college, he selected a wide range of classes on political theory, history and economics during his undergraduate years. Looking back, Bond identified ties between some of his early coursework at the University and later policy issues he pursued during his career.

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“When I ran for State Auditor in 1970, somebody asked me what my background in auditing was and I said, ‘I took accounting,’ ” Bond joked.

One class that would later have a particularly strong impact during his term as governor was an American art and architecture course, a morning lecture during which he said he fought to stay awake. In 1976, when a small library in St. Louis decided to auction off a collection of drawings by George Caleb Bingham, a 19th-century genre painter and politician in Missouri, Bond led a state-wide drive to raise $1.8 million, the then-assessed value of the collection. With that money, the state was able to preserve the collection and put the drawings on display in the St. Louis and Kansas City art museums. Since then, Bond has become a collector of American genre paintings himself.

According to Danforth, Bond’s tenacious personality as a politician allowed him to have similar success in policy debates and win over crucial legislation. While running for governor at the age of 33, Bond campaigned with the slogan that reform was “best accomplished by those too young to know it can’t be done.”

Bond was first elected to the Senate in 1986. Danforth, who served there with Bond, remembers showing up to a conference committee meeting on one piece of legislation that neither he nor Bond were official members of and finding Bond already present. According to Danforth, Bond stayed at the meeting long after he did to ensure that the bill’s fate supported Missouri interests.

“That’s an example of his diligence and his persistence. If he’s interested in something and thinks that it serves the interests of the state and serves the interests of the country, he will devote total attention to that issue,” Danforth said.

In addition to his political accomplishments, Bond is recognized by his colleagues as an expert on Southeast Asia. In 2009, he published a book with Pulitzer Prizewinner Lewis Simons titled “The New Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam.”

Bond is also a strong advocate for plant biotechnology. He serves on the board of trustees of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a foundation that promotes research in biotechnology and plant science founded by Danforth’s brother, William H. Danforth ’48. While serving as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, he worked to direct more funds for basic plant research to the National Science Foundation.

Despite his affiliations with the Danforth Center, Bond has been criticized by environmental protection groups such as Republicans for Environmental Protection for supporting a variety of “anti-environmental” measures.

“I’m a conservationist,” Bond said. “Many of the so-called environmental groups — I call them modern-day Luddites — are opposed to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. If we don’t have GMOs, particularly in the developing world, there is no way we can meet the food security needs of the world.”

According to Bond, it is the “unfounded opposition” of these groups that has ruined European agriculture and poses the biggest threat to the future of biotechnology.

Today, Bond continues his career as a partner in the Public Finance and Public Law Practice Group at Thompson Coburn LLP, a Missouri law firm. After announcing his retirement from the Senate in 2010, Bond returned home to the Midwest, where he opened a business development and consulting firm called Kit Bond Strategies.