Anne Roth, 25, was recently hired by Sen. Charles Grassley as the finance director for his 2016 campaign. It’s a lot of responsibility for someone so young, but as Grassley said, “I knew she had the right genes.” 

Anne’s father, the late Luke Roth, was just 22 when John Maxwell recruited him to work for Grassley in 1977. Three years later, during Grassley’s first Senate campaign Luke met Anne’s mother, Katie Busch, who was the scheduler for Grassley’s primary opponent, Des Moines businessman Tom Stoner. When Stoner lost, Luke persuaded Grassley to hire Katie.

Maxwell said that the eventual wedding helped merge two feuding wings of the Iowa Republican Party. “The joke at their wedding,” he said, “was that instead of asking ‘bride or groom,’ the ushers seated guests as either moderates or conservatives.”

Luke went on to work for several successful Republicans, including Cooper Evans, Greg Ganske and George W. Bush, organizing Bush’s successful Iowa caucus campaign in 1999-2000. He was also executive director of the Iowa Republican Party for a time.

During much of that time, Luke and Katie and their three young children lived less than a block away from me. They were token Republicans in a largely Democratic south-of-Grand area, but Luke and Katie were everyone’s favorite neighbors. Luke was large and gregarious and a genuinely fun person. He was a died-in-the-wool fiscal conservative with whom my wife and other Democrats loved to argue. 

Luke was smart, Princeton educated and always gracious. I recall that a lot of political arguments ended with Luke having the last word, and not in a mean way. He was just such a good arguer and so darned smart that opponents would either concede or say, “Let me think more about that and get back to you.”

In late 2000, Luke left politics and took a job with Medicap Pharmacies as manager of franchise development director. But it didn’t last long. The following summer Luke got sick. It was lung cancer, which stunned everyone, because he never smoked. However during college, Luke had worked in a mine that extracted vermiculite, a mineral that contains asbestos. 

He was diagnosed that fall and died Feb. 26, 2002. 

The day of Luke’s funeral, President Bush was in Iowa for a Tom Latham fundraiser. He called Katie from Air Force One and said he wanted to come to the funeral but wouldn’t because of the disruption it would cause. Instead, Bush had Katie and her three children brought directly from the cemetery to his suite at the Marriott hotel, where they reminisced in private. 

After Luke died, Katie went on to run two successful recruiting businesses. Her children are also successful. Son Luke went into financial services and works at American Equity Investment Life Insurance Co. in West Des Moines. Younger daughter Clare is now a producer for Iowa Public Radio. 

Anne, the middle child with her mother’s dark hair and joyful face and her father’s free spirit, inherited the political gene. She graduated from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., with degrees in Spanish and political science. In college, she interned with Grassley, and after graduating, she worked for former Iowan Tom Synhorst’s Washington consulting firm DCI.  

“Before we hired her, she was involved in fundraising and organization for Tom Synhorst,” Grassley said. “Anne impresses the people she meets, and she seems to have boundless energy, good work principles and dedication to work.” 

“And a political drive that’s motivated by love of country,” Grassley added.

Just like her father.