“You talk about something that turns your life completely upside down,” he recalled. “Imagine being my dad with five children — I was the youngest of five — he basically sat with us and said you know, we’ll get through this, we’ll be okay.”
He also pointed to the family’s Catholic faith as helping to recover from their loss.
“It was very important,” he said. “I found out like when I was in my 40s that [my dad] said to [one of his friends] if I didn’t have my Catholic faith I don’t know how I could have gotten through it, so that’s how important it was.”
Donnelly was born on Long Island, New York, and moved to Indiana in his teens. A job with the Yankees never did pan out: “I didn’t hit as well as I needed to and I didn’t throw as well as I needed to so it never quite worked out,” he told Flynn, laughing.
He attended the University of Notre Dame and graduated from its law school in 1981. He worked at a family printing business and practiced law before getting involved in politics, first on a local school board, then later as a U.S. Congressman from Indiana.
While in Congress, Donnelly was known as a pro-labor, pro-life moderate Democrat who changed his position on marriage in 2013, CNA reported at the time of his nomination as ambassador.