Saving Graces (23 page)

Well, vetting, which started right away but for me was just background noise—or among the background noises—involves turning your life inside out for someone to see. Professional, financial, social, academic, everything. All of our income tax returns, all of John’s medical records, every legal case he’d ever done. A campaign finance expert went through John’s contributions. Everything was scrutinized. John met with the whole team once, in a small office used by Senator Ted Kennedy and once used by John Kennedy. The vetting by an entire team of investigators was secret, since John’s place on the list was secret, and the small office tucked into the Capitol was away from all possible press scrutiny. Eventually I was quizzed for an afternoon by Bill Taylor, an affable Washington, D.C., lawyer. All this time, we told no one.

Of course, a select group of people in the office knew, people who had to pull together John’s votes and speeches. And a select group from the Senate campaign was particularly useful. In political campaigns, you investigate the other candidate’s records, of course, but you also investigate your own, put yourselves in your opponent’s shoes and see what would turn up in an investigation of you. Although it was not as intensive as the vice presidential vetting process, the campaign research staff, David Ginsberg, Christina Reynolds, and John Dervin, were invaluable. John and I could talk to them about it, but to no one else. The talk everywhere in Washington was all about who the vice presidential nominees would be, on both sides. Everyone assumed that the reason I never said anything in these conversations was that, since I had just moved up there, I knew nothing. No one suspected that the real reason I was quiet was because I knew something. This went on for weeks.

I said nothing when Bill Taylor came to the house. I said nothing as we turned over our financial records to a stranger. And I said nothing when a car with tinted windows picked John up at our house—within walking distance of the Gore residence—and drove him to his interview with the Vice President. We weren’t tense. It was, we knew, an extremely long shot. Our first clue to that, of course, was that no pundit, no gossip hound, no insider ever even whispered John’s name. And the second clue was that the names that were mentioned in the press—John Kerry, who had been in the Senate for twenty years, Evan Bayh, who had been a two-term governor, Joe Lieberman, the longtime senator, George Mitchell, former majority leader of the Senate, Bob Graham, the Florida senator, Jeanne Shaheen, the personable governor of New Hampshire—were, well, all more likely choices. John thought he was there as a fallback. In the post-Lewinsky world, Al Gore was understandably intent on finding a running mate who was not vulnerable. So John was the untarnished choice, we figured, in case other candidates collapsed under the vetting. Apparently we were wrong.

John jogged with Evan Bayh regularly. They are about the same age, both easygoing, and both were new to the Senate in 1999. And now both were on Al Gore’s short list. When John left the Senate gym to run with Evan one Monday, he and Evan—in private—could talk about what they hadn’t mentioned in public. They talked about Gore’s selection process. Evan had had his interview with Gore the preceding Friday, and John’s was scheduled for the next day. Evan, who could have resisted giving John any advantage and so could have stayed quiet, instead told him about his interview as they ran. It had been very low-key, he said, very friendly. They’d just talked about family and history they shared. He’d thought Gore would be tougher, but the Vice President hadn’t asked him anything hard. So that’s what John expected when he went for his interview.

When John arrived at the Vice President’s residence on Tuesday morning, he was taken to a pleasant sitting room. John waited there for Gore, looking at the paintings and the photographs. Sarah Gore, one of Al and Tipper’s daughters, came in, and then the Vice President, and John engaged in the same idle chatter Evan had described. But then Sarah left, and the room went quiet. John broke the silence, pointing to one of the photographs: “Is that your dad?” Gore glanced at the photograph and in one breath said, “Yeah-now-can-you-answer-a-question-for-me?” “Sure,” John said, a little taken aback by the shift in tone. And it was about to get worse. The Vice President asked him how he would explain to the world that he had picked somebody who’d been in office for a year and a half to be a heartbeat from the presidency. The first question out of the box. John talked about the attributes of leadership as he saw them—honesty, steadfastness, strength in times of adversity. He’d survived that question, but the whole interview was like that—hostile, difficult. Gore asked about everything, policy, family, politics, how to distance himself from Clinton’s conduct. On his lap there was a notebook—of the vetting material, John assumed—and he flipped through the pages and peppered John with questions. The tone never changed, and John only knew it was over when the Vice President stood up. They walked to the car, Gore thanked him for coming, and then he surprised John by adding, “You should feel very good about this interview.” Did he mean that, or was he trying to cheer up the new kid? We didn’t know.

That afternoon John ran with Evan again, and Evan asked how the interview had gone. They were very close, and John told him the truth: It was really tough. Evan listened thoughtfully as John related the questions, and then he said, “That’s bad news for me. He’s serious about you, and he wasn’t serious about me. That’s what that means.” Until Evan perceptively said this, neither John nor I knew how to read the interview. But Evan knew how to read Al Gore. John was still thinking that he was probably last out of those in the running, unless Evan was right and Evan was last. We were still not arranging our lives around this. A few weeks later, on a Friday, everything changed. The
New York Times
reported that Gore had his list down to three people—John, Lieberman, and Kerry. It was the first time John’s name had been mentioned at all, and now it was mentioned as one of three.

The press, in a swarm, started staking out our house. Cameras lined the sidewalk across the street, and if we walked to the car, they would come up alongside us, snapping away, and we would have to close the door on a camera lens. But it wasn’t going to last long, we knew, because Gore announced that he would make his choice on Monday. On Friday, John went to North Carolina for Senate business for the day, and while he was being mobbed there, the children and I were stalked at the D.C. house. Mary Louise Oates and Ellen Bennett, two veterans of these kinds of things—and good company besides—came over to see about me and to see if I was ready. I had been out of maternity clothes for less than two months. I was not ready.

They took my closet apart. I had just had a baby, and at my age, I was not bouncing back into shape, yet here I was, standing in my underwear in front of women I had known for only a month, while they had me try on what they thought might be suitable, which, frankly, was not that much of my wardrobe. So distressed were they with my clothes that Ellen took off her designer jacket and gave it to me. “Try this,” she said. I declined. “I really can’t take your clothes.” She changed her tack. “Wear this,” she ordered. When they left, they had a small—very small—pile of what they thought might be acceptable, and they promised to be back. When John came back from North Carolina to my clothes thrown all over our bedroom, I didn’t even try to explain. Despite the cameras and the Attack of the Clothes Police, we still thought that John was the last choice, third now of three, but still last. After the day we had had, sleep came easily.

Saturday mornings were like Saturdays mornings in every house with a new baby and a two-year-old. Jack was crying, Emma Claire wanted breakfast, and—our new twist—there were seventy-five members of the press corps camped out in front of our house. About 9:30
A.M
., the phone rang, John was changing Jack, and Emma Claire and I were eating breakfast. It was Bill Daly, Al Gore’s campaign manager. He told John that he had just had breakfast with the Vice President. And then he said it was between John and one other person. Oh, my gosh. He may have said more, but who heard anything for a minute? Then he said to John, “Now, I don’t know you, and I feel like I should know you because I’m going to have to help advise the Vice President, so I need to meet with you.” John asked where, and Daly suggested his apartment. John said, “That’s fine, but there are TV cameras out here, and they’re following me everywhere I go.” So they arranged a cloak-and-dagger drive-into-the-underground-Senate-parking-garage-and-change-carsand-drive-to-Daly’s-apartment plan. Which worked. John met with him for about an hour. Daly was very friendly and open. Everyone liked John, he said. Everyone was impressed. But he was still worried about the fact that John had not been in office long. They talked about it, and at the end, Daly told him that his family needed to be in place on Monday, all of us, because if John was chosen, the campaign would be sending a plane to take us all to Nashville, where Gore’s campaign headquarters were.

I don’t know whether Mary Louise was being careful, whether she was perceptive, or whether she had inside information from her husband, Bob Shrum, who was a top consultant in the Gore campaign. Whatever it was, she was back at the house that morning to dress me. Mary Louise didn’t hand me any of her clothes—she is a good six inches taller than I am. Instead she made plans for us to go shopping. When she picked me up, I was dressed in comfortable North Carolina clothes, and four hours later she dropped me—now dressed in smart slacks and a leather jacket—back at the house. With all the press camped out at the front door, we decided—actually, Mary Louise decided—to leave all the shopping bags in the car trunk, and I retrieved them after dark, after the last of the press had gone home for the night. The attempt to avoid press coverage of my shopping trip was apparently unsuccessful, though, as the shopping trip showed up in David Broder’s column in the
Washington Post
—and syndicated around the country. Not exactly the national introduction I would have hoped for, had I ever hoped for a national introduction.

I got home from shopping just before Cate and her friends arrived in the airport shuttle van from Baltimore. The girls—and there were about six of them, all of whom John had coached in soccer or basketball—were coming for four days. They had graduated from high school together and within weeks they would be headed off to different colleges, so this was a farewell fling for them, one they had been planning for weeks. When the van stopped in our driveway, the press leaped up and ran across the street, leaving spraying soda cans and pizza boxes in their wake. The girls sat paralyzed in the van for a minute, and then, unable to contain girlish giggles, they fell all over each other and finally out of the van. The press figured that one of these was our daughter, but which one? Did anyone know what she looked like? I don’t know who looked more confused, the press or the girls. The press was snapping and filming them all, asking which one of these girls was Cate Edwards. For a few minutes, all the girls had cameras in their faces. They were all Cate Edwards. From that point on, the girls never left the house without looking terrific.

The next morning we watched the hosts of the Sunday talk shows eviscerate John. It was, “These are hard times. We need a president with experience, and this guy’s been in office for a year and a half. How can you even be seriously considering him?” Representatives of the Gore campaign were countering with things like, well, Abraham Lincoln had been in office for two years when he was elected president of the United States, and George Bush had been governor for four years in a state where the governor didn’t have much authority. The best defense of John was, oddly enough, given by John McCain, who was on
Meet the Press
; he said he’d worked with John and John Edwards was really talented and smart.

We lived in a residential area, so I went out in the early afternoon on Sunday and asked the press if anyone needed to use a bathroom. We had a first-floor bathroom they were welcome to use. Of course they did. They all poured in. And while they were waiting, they pored over the mail that had collected on the front hall bureau. Bad boys, I said, retrieving the mail. They were not asked back.

We spent the rest of the day talking to the girls when they were home, playing with the children, and talking about the news shows and my new clothes. Sunday night we went to dinner with Julianna Smoot, who had been working for John since the Senate campaign. In every campaign, you get to do exciting things and you have to do boring, menial things. I got such a kick out of Julianna because when she was tired of doing the menial jobs, she would complain in frustration, “But I went to Smith College!” Even when she was complaining, she was good company.

We went to bed Sunday night believing that in the morning Al Gore would pick John Kerry as his running mate. Joe Lieberman went to bed believing that Al Gore would choose John Edwards. In the morning, the television news and the ringing phone simultaneously announced that we were all wrong. He had chosen Joe Lieberman. John talked to whomever it was on the phone, and I got up and walked downstairs to Cate and all her friends. They were still sleeping and spread all over her room. I stepped over legs and luggage until I could lean over Cate and whisper, “He picked Lieberman.” She didn’t open her eyes, just “Uh-huh.” “You can sleep in.” As I walked back upstairs, I looked across the street and nothing remained of the seventy-five people who had clicked their cameras every time we opened the door. Nothing but a line of trash.

It was as if Cate and I were once again sitting on the curb at UPS in the rain long after Air Force One had left Raleigh. But I didn’t despair then, and I didn’t despair now. I had Cate and all those precious girls sleeping in her room, I had a little girl covered in a mop of yellow curls, I had a new baby boy with a freckle in his palm, and I had John. Instead of getting on that plane to Nashville, we made reservations at the children’s favorite restaurant for dinner. And John took a trash bag and picked up the remains of this adventure from the sidewalk across the street. Having these girls there—although they were just eighteen at the time—made it so much better. We had known them so long, coached them and watched them grow, and now, without knowing it, they were there, a soft, embracing pillow that—with our own children—broke what might have been a fall. We went out to dinner with the girls and the younger children, everyone laughing, the children misbehaving, everything back to normal.