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Hundreds of people, including several political luminaries, honored former East Bay Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher at a memorial service Thursday at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who Tauscher served under as an undersecretary in charge of nuclear negotiations, remembered the former congresswoman’s “irrepressible passion” for life, work and her daughter Katherine in a video message.
“I was always a little in awe of Ellen, not only because of her big brain and her amazing personality but because she was game for anything,” Clinton said. “A successful businesswoman, an accomplished politician, an effective diplomat and public servant, no project was too big or too small.”
East Bay Reps. Mark DeSaulnier and Eric Swalwell — who once interned for Tauscher in D.C. — delivered tributes, as did University of California president Janet Napolitano. The service also included performances of an Irish lullaby and a Sarah McLachlan song, remarks by family members, and a video of Tauscher’s last speech on the House floor.
Tauscher died in April at age 67 after a four-month battle with pneumonia. She represented the East Bay from 1997 to 2009, becoming a leader in moderate Democratic politics. She also led the Strategic Forces subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, which oversees nuclear weapons, missile defense and the national labs. She left office to join the State Department under the Obama administration, and helped lead negotiations with Russia over the 2010 New START treaty, which cut U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. It was the first major arms control agreement between the powers in almost two decades.
More recently, Tauscher served as a University of California regent, chaired the governing boards for the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national labs, and sat on the boards of companies like SpaceX. She also helped lead a political action committee that supported California Democratic congressional candidates in last year’s midterm elections, when the party flipped seven GOP-held House seats in the state.
Tauscher grew up in Harrison, New Jersey, the daughter of a United Food and Commercial Workers Union representative and a secretary. She graduated from Seton Hall University in New Jersey — the first in her family to go to college — and became the youngest woman to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at age 25.
