By the time he delivered his second farewell speech from the Senate floor—which he sheepishly guaranteed, to his family sitting in the gallery, would be his last—he was speaking of his “bright hopes” for the nation.

After all, it had been a good month. His beloved Chicago Cubs had finally won the World Series for the first time in his lifetime. Republicans had not only taken the presidency but had kept Congress. There was a fellow Hoosier, the former Indiana governor turned vice president Mike Pence, in the White House. Coats hadn’t decided exactly what he was going to do yet, but he was pretty clear it was going to be in Indiana. He and his wife had bought a house in Indianapolis.

It’s not clear that he was eager to take the job. It wasn’t just the prospect of giving up retirement. The position of director of national intelligence was created in the years after the September 11 attacks, when the 9/11 Commission faulted different agencies for failing to share with one another information that could have helped stop the attacks. The role is more coordinator than boss of America’s 16 other intelligence agencies; Coats has likened it to putting puzzle pieces together to get a picture of what the agencies know. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, once called it “a job with far more responsibility than authority.”

Nor was Coats an obvious choice. He had served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he was not a lifelong intelligence professional like his predecessor, James Clapper. He was a retired politician headed to an avowedly apolitical workforce. There was, according to Coats’s former colleague, who served as an intelligence official, some internal skepticism, and perhaps even concern that he’d turn out to be more loyal to his boss than to his workforce.

Read: Are all the adults leaving the room?

There was also some relief. Even before his inauguration, Trump had set a hostile tone with the intelligence community, greeting intelligence leaks with tweeted fury: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” Other appointees, like Rex Tillerson at the State Department, were coming to office with no government experience and no understanding of the agencies they would run. According to Nicholas Rasmussen, who reported to Coats for about a year as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center before leaving government, Coats was seen as someone who knew the intelligence community and respected the work of intelligence professionals. “And of course,” Rasmussen says, “that was not a given on the front end.”

Coats later explained, to Mitchell at Aspen, that he felt compelled to take the job, that giving something back to your country was reward beyond anything you could find in an easier or more lucrative job. But it was not fun. He said that he starts the day asking what went wrong while he was asleep. “I don't get to read about what went right,” he told Mitchell. “That's why I grab the sports page from The Washington Post hoping the Chicago Cubs had won last night. And then the day goes down from there.” He was chuckling as he said this, but it didn’t seem like he was totally kidding.