“You talk about something that completely turns your life upside down,” he recalled. “Imagine being my dad with five kids, I was the youngest of five, he basically sat down with us and said you know, we’re going to get through this, we’re going to be fine.”
He also noted that the family’s Catholic faith helped them recover from their loss.
“It was very important,” he said. “I knew it when I was 40 [my dad] said to [one of his friends] if I didn’t have my Catholic faith, I don’t know how I would have gotten through it, so that’s how important it was.”
Donnelly was born in Long Island, New York, and moved to Indiana as a teenager. A job with the Yankees never worked out: “I didn’t hit as well as I needed to and I didn’t pitch 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 in a family printing business and practiced law before becoming involved in politics, first on a local school board, later as a US representative from Indiana.
While in Congress, Donnelly was known as a moderate pro-labor, pro-life Democrat who changed his position on marriage in 2013, CNA reported at the time of his ambassador nomination.
