Pocket profile: Thomas Brady

Age: 36

Alma mater: University of Washington

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Washington Examiner: Tell me a little bit about what brought you to Capitol Hill.

Brady: I first came here in 1998 as an intern and I had this really kind of interesting job on the Hill for the Foreign Relations Committee. Basically there’s a role over there, like a documents clerk, that they had made during [the Sen. J. William] Fulbright chairmanship back in the ’60s. And it was for kids in school in the D.C. area, like at Georgetown or one of the local schools. I was at American University at the time. And it paid nothing, like $10,000 a year. But there had been a lot of people who had gone through that while they were in school and one of the people that had had that job a long, long time ago, according to lore, was Bill Clinton. There’s a guy, Bertie Bowman, who still works for the committee who’s been around since Fulbright was chairman, who is this institutional guy, and he knew Clinton.

Examiner: How did you end up in Sen. Cotton’s office?

Brady: I left the Hill in 2004 and ended up joining the Army, I went to Army Special Forces and was there until 2012. I had heard about [Cotton] after he was elected to Congress. I had sort of forsworn coming back to the Hill, but last year, I knew that I was going to move back to the D.C. area and a lot of folks were telling me about this guy who was running for the Senate from Arkansas. So we had mutual friends and I reached out to him, and that’s how I learned about what his stances were on national security issues and saw that we were aligned.

Examiner: You do defense policy for him. How does your time in the military influence how you do your job now? Do you think you come at it differently?

Brady: I come at it way differently than I think I did when I was first here in the late ’90s. In Army Special Forces, they say the most important terrain is human terrain. That’s really the same way in politics, it’s just another form of politics. Those engagements with people around the Hill and the policy community really matter in terms of extending your influence. He’s one member, I’m one staffer. It’s those relationships that matter as much as the bully pulpit or him giving a speech on the floor, legislation he writes. It’s about developing those relationships across the political spectrum, across the policy spectrum.

Examiner: What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

Brady: I play rugby.

Examiner: How did you get into that?

Brady: When I was in school, I went back to school as an older student after I left the Army, and I didn’t really have like a way to interact with the university community so I went and found out about rugby and started playing. And now I’m very big into it.