Saving Graces (21 page)

The next months were hard. We had a taste of what to expect when Lauch Faircloth, who was the incumbent Republican senator, ran a commercial against John the week before the seven-person Democratic primary, before John was even the nominee. It wasn’t that the commercial was so bad; it was silly, really, attacking John for the legal work he had done, of which I was very proud. And we were prepared for the possibility of attack and had a response on the air right away. But it was a shot across the bow, a warning of what we could expect in the weeks and months to come. Wade’s nineteenth birthday came, reminding us what real hurt was, providing us that shield against the foolish barbs headed our way and reminding us of what a wonderful community we had. Ellan and Sally and Hargrave came by. Glenn Bergenfield, Wade’s godfather, would call. Erin Maness, one of Wade’s favorite friends, a beautiful girl, talked with me for the longest time, sitting in Wade’s room, both of us fragile, both of us lonely. Jim Jenkins, his gravelly low voice warming his words until they were melted butter: “Knew it was his birthday. Went to the cemetery today.” He says it every year, same thing, and it is always music.

In the summer, John had a decision to make. President Clinton, whose wife had been the subject of relentless attacks by Senator Faircloth, wanted to come down to North Carolina to campaign. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was in the news, but there were still denials from the White House. John’s staff was against a Clinton visit, but John said he wanted him to come, to talk about the accomplishments of a successful Democratic administration. He planned to come July 30th. It was, it turned out, the week before Lewinsky’s blue dress turned up. Cate and I were planning to be in Rhode Island that day, looking at colleges. We had flown up to Pennsylvania and rented a car, and we were driving from one college campus in which she had an interest to the next, with a little sightseeing in between. I figured it was better to go before her junior year, when her excitement about colleges could be translated into a good performance in her important junior-year grades. We were in Maine when Clinton’s visit to Raleigh was confirmed. Cate and I parked the rented car, left our suitcases in the trunk, and flew home. It was exciting. Air Force One taxied up to the UPS terminal where we were all waiting on the tarmac; we met the President, and then we were shuttled to the fairgrounds in black SUVs, traffic stopped along the way for the motorcade, John with the President in one car, Cate and Emma Claire—then only three months old—and I in another.

It was wickedly hot, and the fans in the tent where people had gathered to meet the President might as well have been props, they did so little good. Inside the arena where Clinton and John would speak, it was certainly warmer, but you didn’t feel it because there was such a sense of excitement. We all entered the arena together, and after John and the President spoke, we left together. But there was an overflow crowd of thousands in nearby Dorton Arena, so the men headed over there to speak again. We sent Emma Claire, who was hungry and tired, home in another car headed directly to our house, and Cate and I went to our assigned motorcade vehicle and waited. Our driver didn’t really know where he was supposed to be or where my husband was. That should have been our first hint. We waited as the crowd dispersed, and then he drove around to the arena. No one was there. He apologized and drove out to the UPS terminal, where John had left the car, where Air Force One was sitting. Only by the time we got there, Air Force One was no longer there, and neither was our car. Only the UPS workers were there. The driver dropped us at the terminal nonetheless, and Cate and I stood by the gate to the UPS parking lot, waiting—for John, for another SUV, just waiting to go home. We tired of standing, so we sat on the curb by the gate. And then there was a shift change, so we moved away from the gate and sat farther away on the curb, still dressed in the outfits we had worn to meet the President, as fifty cars and trucks of UPS employees left and fifty more came into the parking lot. And then it started to rain. We had no coats, we had no umbrellas, we had no place to get out of the rain. Cate turned to me and said, “In the President’s motorcade one minute, in the rain on the curb outside UPS the next. Not much of a chance to get big-headed.” Whenever we are given a dose of humbling reality, we always say, “Just like UPS.” We were still laughing when a UPS worker came out to tell us that John, who thought he was meeting us at home, was on the phone. He came to get us, we went home and changed, and then we went out for our usual anniversary dinner—this was our anniversary, too—at Wendy’s.

My sister, Nancy, came to help with the campaign. She lived in Florida, and she did the books for a dental practice over her computer. So her office moved when her computer moved, and she moved it all to Raleigh to help with the campaign. It was not a little thing. She stayed in a hotel for months. She knew no one other than us and a few of our closest friends. And she had no experience in campaigns. She had never done anything like this before, and she was given no model from which to work, but she created a volunteer campaign in our biggest counties. Of the three children in our family, she is my father’s daughter. Once when we were all in Washington, she arranged a trip to Annapolis, her family and mine and Jay’s and my parents. It was after my father’s stroke, and Dad didn’t walk well, so we insisted he use his wheelchair, as we were going to be covering long distances. He was in the wheelchair when we visited the Hall of Fame. We found Dad’s picture as an All-American lacrosse player, and we showed Ty and Louis, Jay’s boys. There was a guided tour nearby of Japanese tourists. Nancy brought them over and pointed to the picture and then to my father. “That is this man,” she said. And they applauded him. We all pushed back tears, including my father, and I was so grateful for my sister, for the gift of her ability to reach out to strangers. It was a gift she put to great use in the campaign. If you didn’t want to work and work hard, you had better hope Nancy didn’t have your home number.

As the campaign moved into the fall, the Faircloth campaign used that Clinton visit. There were relentless attacks on John and his character, played over the radio and on television, including the televisions in the lunchroom at the high school Cate attended. When one commercial called John and Bill Clinton lying lawyers, with caricatures of both of them growing Pinocchio noses, all the students sitting around Cate turned to look for her reaction. Her reaction was that she had had enough.

“Can they just make anything up,” she asked us that night. “Yes,” we told her, “it doesn’t seem right, but they actually can make just about anything up. We just have to trust that people will see it for what it is.” We hoped we were right, but right or wrong, it didn’t make it any easier for a sixteen-year-old girl who had already lived through an assault on her family. But this was Cate, and she just dug in and started putting in even more hours at the campaign headquarters.

I’d like to think that the negative advertising failed. I’d like to think that John’s refusal to take the bait, that his running a positive campaign, worked. But the truth is, I don’t know why John won. I only know he should have won and did. The excitement of that evening, sitting in the hotel room of the Hilton where the post-election festivities were planned, was unlike anything I had ever experienced. We sat on the two beds, baby Emma Claire propped in the middle of one, surrounded by our dearest friends, and watched as John’s picture flashed up on the networks. Winner. And then it was a flurry. We were taken on the kind of circuitous route to the ballroom victory party that you see in the movies, and which seemed hardly necessary. Down service hallways, through the hotel kitchen, along the corridor to the laundry. Finally we emerged into a room that sounded like it was full of people, but the lights were so bright in our faces that I couldn’t see a single one. John spoke, and we finally got to hug all those young people who had worked so hard.

The next day John was headed to television interviews, and Kym Spell, the press secretary, knew that some of the younger staff were eating at IHOP. So John stopped there on his way to the interviews to thank them. The real thank-yous came that night when we gathered at the P.R., the Players Retreat, a Raleigh institution, if a pool hall and bar can be an institution, and John sat with a group—David Ginsberg, Christina Reynolds, Brad Anderson, John Dervin, Jessica Wintringham, and Josh Stein, who had probably been the youngest statewide campaign manager in the country that year—none of whom was over thirty. Toward the end of the night, a customer from across the room offered to buy John a beer, and John said, “Thanks, but we should probably go.” “We’ve got a sitter,” I told him, “and you only win your first election to the Senate once; I think we can stay a little longer.” We talked on, and one of the young people at the table—who had talked to John for months as they traveled the state—said, “It is so weird to be sitting here talking like this to a United States senator.”

“No weirder than being one,” John replied.

CHAPTER 9

WASHINGTON

The Senate

W
HEN
C
ATE GRADUATED
from high school, she gave her six closest friends blankets embroidered with all of their names and the years they graduated together from Root Elementary School, from Daniels Middle School, and finally from Broughton High School. The blankets marked a span of their history together that easily could have been broken when John was elected to the United States Senate and—during Cate’s junior year in high school—his job moved from Raleigh to Washington, D.C.

Except for one thing. I myself had moved to Washington, or more precisely to Alexandria, Virginia, for my senior year of high school. All the activities that had made up the tapestry of my high school experience, all the friends I had known, who had known me as I was becoming me, were gone, and—with the exception of my brother and sister and one friend, Barbara Bradford—I’d had to make a start from scratch. Of course I couldn’t run for class office, though I had been class president at Zama. I couldn’t be a cheerleader again; the Hammond cheerleaders had been chosen the year before. I wasn’t going to be editor of the yearbook as I had planned, either, for that position had also been long decided. I managed, of course. I joined the debate team—that was still open—but my senior year of high school should have been more than that. And I wasn’t going to let it happen to Cate. She had lived in the same house since she was born and had the same neighbors and the same friends for her whole life.

We had talked about Cate leaving Raleigh for high school, going to a school where she wouldn’t place out of all the math classes sophomore year, where she would be challenged in a way that our public schools—as good as they were—were not equipped to do. But that proposed move, which didn’t happen after Wade died, would have been a move for her and for all four years of high school, not a move for John that stripped her of her last year and a half. We promised her that when Dad won—the optimistic way we always phrased it—she and I, and now Emma Claire, too, would stay in Raleigh until she graduated with her class.

So we stayed put. We went up in January when he was sworn in, a swirl of festive activities and deferential treatment to which we were not accustomed. We had a lovely dinner at the Naval Observatory grounds with Vice President and Mrs. Gore, and after dinner we—along with the other new Democratic senators and their spouses—walked through the warm January night from the house to the observatory and looked through its great telescope at the rings of Saturn. Except for seeing Saturn, it was more like the evenings to which we were accustomed: a pleasant dinner with pleasant people.

The Senate spouses were very organized about welcoming new families to the Senate. There were sessions to explain the location and furnishing of offices, the role of the Capitol Police, where to get your ID card. And they gave each new spouse a “big sister” to show you around. Mine was Linda Bird Johnson Robb—no one could have a better big sister. The wife of the senator from Virginia, and of course the daughter of Lyndon Johnson, she had been in this Capitol since she was a child, and she knew every nook and cranny. With a constant flow of stories about what happened here or there, or when this or that painting had been hung, she marched me from one place to another.

Now, there are places in the Capitol that only senators can go—unless you are with someone like Linda Bird, who has been there longer than almost anyone. I saw much I would never have seen without her, such as the corridor behind the Senate president’s desk, but I also got shooed out of more places than any other new Senate spouse. I was constantly apologizing—“Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m leaving”—but that wasn’t Linda. “Yes, yes,” she would say, “but first I want to show her this desk.” I wouldn’t have traded her for the world.

Washington life didn’t feel like real life, not like we knew it. Certainly walking around with Linda Bird did not resemble any part of life as I had known it. And it wasn’t just seeing the flesh-and-blood faces that I had watched in the news; it was also the news itself. Reporters were everywhere, many trying to figure out who we were. I was talking to a reporter I did know when another new Senate wife, whose husband had been in politics for a while, intervened. “Don’t talk to them,” she warned, standing between us. I was shuttled back into an extraordinarily decorated Senate office and away from a perfectly nice conversation. Was life going to be like this? I wondered. Guarded conversations, perfect clothes? “People,” she told me, “will befriend you in order to use you, and the press are the very worst.” I decided that when we did move to Washington, I wasn’t going to live that way; I wasn’t going to assume that everyone was out to get me, out to use me. I couldn’t be looking at what everyone’s motives were. If I enjoyed them and they appeared to enjoy me, I was determined simply to accept that. I sure didn’t want to spend my time looking under everybody’s skirts, as my grandmother used to say. Being hustled away from a single conversation proved to me that it was a lousy way to live.

The flip side of being used, of course, is using—using every person or event as a political opportunity. Who is the most important or influential or visible or rich person in the room? Where is the camera? I don’t want to mislead here. Sometimes in political life you—the politician and the spouse—are looking for political opportunity, for press coverage, for financial support. But not every minute. We had dinner with Howard Fineman, the reporter, and our friend Harrison Hickman, who was John’s pollster in the Senate campaign. During the meal, Howard told me that a certain wife was the best political spouse he’d ever seen. Why? Because she took his business card and entered it into her Palm Pilot right at a dinner just like this one. For me, this was a conversation stopper. It sounded rude, not splendid; I thought, perhaps naively, that we were getting to know each other. I had nowhere to go in this line, so I just asked Howard about Pittsburgh, his—and my dad’s—hometown. Sometimes, it seems to me, you have to turn that “political wife” thing off and enjoy the moment without thinking about any gain from this person or that place. Sometimes you have to let out that part of you that gets excited walking around with Linda Bird Johnson Robb and not worry whether or not you are impressing her. John and I saw plenty of symptoms of political opportunism all around us, and we soon promised each other that if we stopped enjoying each minute for what it was, we were going back to North Carolina.

And then Cate and Emma Claire and I went back to North Carolina so Cate could finish her junior year of high school.

While we were in Raleigh, John lived in a little apartment in Alexandria and came home every weekend. When he was home we’d sometimes lose him to meetings with constituents, a trip to Fort Bragg, a rally, or an opening now and again, but the truth was I had grown up this way, and Cate and I, and Wade in those days, had lived this way before, when John would try cases for weeks on end and come home Friday in time to coach a soccer practice. In those days, he would come home for the weekend, but he would work on Saturday, except for coaching the games, and on Sunday he would prepare for trial the next week and then he’d be gone again, for another week. We accepted it then, because we knew how important the work he was doing was to the people he was representing, usually parents who cared for a brain-injured child. Who could complain? Who would? And this wasn’t that much different. He was off doing what needed to be done, and we would see him when he wasn’t needed there.

The truth was that with a “family-friendly” Senate schedule—that’s what they actually called it—we saw him more often than we had when he’d been practicing law. I had been warned by Bubby Smith, who went to high school with me in Japan and was then a lobbyist in Washington, that a senator’s schedule was very hard on wives and on marriages. This is going to be very different, he said. I told him, and it turned out to be true, that I didn’t think it would be any harder than the life we were leaving. In fact, I think military wives and trial lawyers’ wives might be the best-prepared wives in the Senate. And when John was gone to the Senate, it was in some ways better than it had been before. During trials, on our nightly phone call, I’d get the five-minute version of what had happened during his eight-hour day. He wanted to talk about the family and what we’d done, not the trial. But now we had C-SPAN2.

I had watched C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 for years, watched the empty Senate floor while a single senator gave an impassioned speech to just the clerks and the presiding officer, watched the well fill up with loitering senators as votes took place. I used to watch the way they moved in relation to one another, who turned his head away as he passed a colleague, who spoke intimately and wrapped an arm around a confederate. To a family of huggers and touchers, it said a lot. But now we weren’t watching for that, we were just watching for Daddy. And now there were no empty seats, no impassioned speeches, no votes. There were no committee meetings, no time for constituent visits. John stepped into the Senate and was immediately sworn in as a juror in the impeachment trial of the President of the United States.

In the wide shots from the gallery, we could pick John out, leaning over his desk, his chin in his hands, watching the proceedings below him, and watching, frankly, in some horror. The founding fathers had not anticipated that Congress, once filled with orators and writers and thinkers, would be filled with politicians with no skill whatever in making a clear point or in eliciting a pertinent piece of evidence in a proceeding that resembled a trial. John and I did not talk, and frankly we should not have talked, about the substance of the case he was hearing, so our nightly conversations usually involved Cate’s activities, Emma Claire’s achievements of the day, and the House managers’ procedural incompetence. It wasn’t partisan. We had the same conversations later as we watched Democratic lawyers argue in Florida state courts in
Gore v. Bush
. It was professional, or at least it was the profession he was leaving, the profession I had left the day Wade died.

If you think about the impeachment process in a way that would make sense, the House of Representatives was like a grand jury. The articles of impeachment were like a criminal indictment. The indictment is sent to the Senate for trial, but now the grand jurors—or their representatives, the House managers—are the prosecutors and the senators are the jury. The House managers were apparently not chosen because of their skill in presenting a case; they were partisans, making political speeches, inside and outside the chamber. The President, on the other hand, had real defense lawyers, and the Clinton defense team was good at what they did. The evidence would be the sworn statements the President had given special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and the evidence of three key witnesses—Vernon Jordan, Monica Lewinsky, and Sidney Blumenthal. The House managers and the Senate wanted—rightly, I think—to avoid the spectacle of Monica Lewinsky in the well of the United States Senate, so it was agreed that the three witnesses’ testimony would be taken by videotaped depositions. The House managers and the Clinton defense team would do the questioning, and representatives of the jurors—six senators—would preside over the depositions.

In his first weeks as a senator, John was chosen to be one of the six presiding officers. It made sense; he had more trial experience, and more recent trial experience, than anyone else in the Senate. In a place where seniority means everything, it was an extraordinary opportunity to participate in this moment of history. Extraordinary, too, was the fact that John’s first speech on the floor of the Senate would be given from the well of the Senate to ninety-nine other senators and to the Chief Justice of the United States. Most senators speak for the first time on the floor of the Senate from their desks to a nearly-empty chamber, and they wait months to do even that. This was very different.

John called me from the Democratic cloakroom, which is just off the floor of the Senate. His Senate staff had written a speech that tried to bridge his displeasure with the President’s conduct—horror really—and his conclusion that the House managers had not proven an impeachable offense. So couched was every phrase that the draft, which tried to disparage the President’s conduct while exonerating it, managed to say nothing at all. John called me to say he didn’t like it. “Write your own speech,” I told him. “It’s what you should have done in the first place.” John always had this management style: he would let younger lawyers make the opening argument in a trial; he would let them question key witnesses. It was training, and it was opportunity. I always complained about it, because I thought the client always deserved him. He was doing it again, and I said what I had always said—no one can say it like you can say it.

The speech wasn’t hard for him. John wanted to do the right thing and be responsible. He had said to me many times that if he thought Clinton was guilty, politics would not have kept him from voting to impeach. But it was never an issue. The House had miscalculated on the charges in order to get the most political effect, but in doing so had charged him with offenses on which no jury would have convicted him if they were following the law. The best proof of this was in a question that John and Herb Kohl, senator from Wisconsin, asked the House managers, the prosecutors: “Would you agree that whether President Clinton is guilty or not is an issue about which reasonable people could disagree?” If the answer is yes, that means it is reasonable to have doubt and he’s not guilty as a matter of law. There was always a rush among the House managers to see who would get to answer a question, who would have the nation’s attention for the next thirty seconds. On John’s question, Lindsey Graham, now a senator from South Carolina, won. Or maybe he lost, for he answered, “Well, of course I would agree that’s true.” That’s the equivalent of saying there was reasonable doubt and as a matter of law the President was not guilty.

The entire experience was an object lesson in so many ways. The obvious ones are the ones wives liked to cite about fidelity and basic respect for your spouse. But the other lessons, about hubris and hatred as motivators, were there for anyone to see.