Saving Graces (29 page)

Exams at Princeton were now over and Cate was campaigning with her father and on her own. Her roommates and a dozen more of her friends from Princeton—Sun Jung, Adrienne, Courtney, Hayden, Erica, Jenna, Catesby, George, Steve, and others—had come up to New Hampshire to canvass in the record low temperatures, joining their friend Pauly, who had been there for six months. John had a rally in a church in Portsmouth, and Cate’s friends, who were volunteering all over the state, all came. And listened, most for the first time, to what their friend’s father was saying. They heard him talk of Two Americas and say it didn’t have to be this way, and many were moved to tears. I’d seen it happen over and over—the effect of hope, but it was different to see these young people—clearly on the soft side of the Two Americas—take hold of John’s message.

Months before Laurie McCray had told me that she had narrowed it down to three candidates and John was in those three. She was smiling, as if that was good news. Not good enough, I told her. She would come to town halls and ask about nursing, the profession she loved but had left. And maybe then it was down to two. And finally Laurie came on board. She and her son Michael, who is now a happy, handsome teenager, had a pleasant, organized, busy life, and she was managing a lot—including Michael’s extra chromosome—to make that so. But when Michael, seeing John again at another town hall, would reach to hug him and John would grab him and give him a bear hug back, I could see the beginnings of tears in Laurie’s eyes. Life was harder than it should be, and it didn’t have to be this way.

We still weren’t polling, but we knew we hadn’t cracked the Kerry-Dean juggernaut in New Hampshire. The night before the primary, the entire traveling entourage—Sam and Jennifer, Miles and Colin, Hunter, Jay Heidbrink, Meghan and John and I—worked until there was no one left to talk to, and then we started looking for dinner. John wanted to go to Outback Steakhouse and a bookstore. It is nearly eleven, Hunter said. Okay, just an Outback. They were closing the restaurant when we arrived, but they kept it open and cooked for John—and, since we were there, the rest of us. In the nearly empty restaurant we sang and laughed as if we had reason to celebrate early. Which we didn’t.

Though room after room would be closed by the fire marshal because the crowds at John’s rallies had gotten so large, though at event after event crowds of people had to be turned away, there was no bump from Iowa. Kerry finished first again, then Dean. Clark, who had skipped Iowa and concentrated on New Hampshire, beat John by less than eight hundred votes. It was January 27, 2004, and we were headed South and West with no momentum. A week later there were primaries in five states and caucuses in two. People and organizations that had endorsed Dean when he was on top were bailing out, but it wasn’t helping us, as they were signing on with Kerry, who was now on top.

So it was on to South Carolina, and John Moylan or Robert Ford or Bill Clyburn taking one or the other of us to beauty shops and university campuses, farmer’s markets and diners. And then I was on a plane to Oklahoma and then, nearly as soon, to Missouri and then New Mexico. There was less than a week before the primaries, and there was too much ground to cover. I knew it almost didn’t matter how well I did. I watched the Super Bowl between the Patriots and the Panthers in New Mexico, and first thing in the morning, I flew to South Carolina. I arrived in time to watch the clock wind down in Columbia. John won in South Carolina and gave one of the best campaign speeches of the year that night. But, except for Oklahoma, Kerry won elsewhere. It was going to be hard to derail that train.

There were primaries in Tennessee and Virginia the next week. Again, I campaigned on my own, in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. My cousin Robert and his wife, Rachelle, helped with a women’s luncheon attended by one of Cate’s first-grade teachers. I left energized; we might be down, but we could still do this. The volunteer driver, a handsome college boy, dropped me at the airport so I could fly to Richmond for a Democratic event that night at which all the candidates would speak. I was still feeling great, until my flight was canceled. I called the office.
Any other flights
? No, but just wait, they’d said; they would figure it out.
That’s fine, but I’m not waiting. It’s not far, I’ll rent a car
. And I hung up. By the time the office reached me I was on I-64 headed west. Before the event in Richmond, the Governor, Mark Warner, endorsed John Kerry. And again in Virginia and Tennessee we finished second. Now we were headed to Wisconsin.

We headed to Wisconsin a little earlier than John Kerry expected. When the first numbers from Tennessee and Virginia started coming in, we flew to Milwaukee. We were at a rally at the Slavic Center when John called to congratulate Kerry. Kerry was floored. “You’re in Wisconsin? The primary was today. What are you, the Energizer bunny?”

Wisconsin wasn’t a last stand, though it came close. The primary was two weeks away, and unlike the previous weeks, we could concentrate on one state. Home base would be the Pfister, a refurbished hotel with a large lobby that served as the meeting place for press and children and staff. And best of all, our niece Jordan, my sister’s youngest, was the staff person in charge at the hotel.

I spent two weeks driving around Wisconsin, talking to as many people as I could. Donsia Strong Hill helped set up meetings, and Brian Brooks drove me—using Mapquest directions faxed to him from Raleigh, which often left us on the wrong side of lakes.
Um, Oshkosh is right over there
, he said, pointing west over Lake Winnebago. When Meghan and Jennifer joined us, it became the girl-mobile. We sang—without the benefit of the songbooks—and Brian was a good enough sport to join in.

When we were near Milwaukee, I would try to stay at the Pfister so I could see the children. But the children were being well cared for without me. I came in and dropped my suitcases one time, and Jordan pointed to the nearby couches. I walked over and there they were, Emma Claire and Jack, one on either side of Nick Anderson, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter. He was reading them a book. He looked up and said, “Miss my own kids. You don’t mind?” Of course not, and sat with them.

“So,” he asked, “what would be a victory in Wisconsin? A thirty-point loss?”

“I’m an optimist.”

“A twenty-point loss?”

“I’m an optimist.”

“You surely don’t think he’ll win.”

“I’m an optimist.”

John was getting good crowds, and he had positive interviews with several newspaper editorial boards. I felt good. The
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
debate went well. After the debate John was still standing onstage, cameras still running, when Howard Dean came over and said, “We’ve got to get together.” John asked when, and Howard said, “Whenever you want.” “How about tonight, then?” Howard agreed. He said he wanted me to be there. I think Howard might have been skeptical the first time I told him I had known his brother, who had been killed in Laos, when we were both at UNC, but Gerry Cohen, whom we had both known, had made a scrapbook of Charlie’s time at UNC and sent it to Howard, who was no longer skeptical—I’d been friends with his brother, and that was good enough for him. I understood completely.

That night we went out to dinner with the children and Chris Downey, a good friend from Washington. Our table was on a platform with curtains around it that the children were enjoying closing and opening. We knew Howard would come shortly. But before he did, four journalists, E. J. Dionne, Dotty Lynch, Walter Shapiro, and Meryl Gordon, came in and were seated at the table next to ours. I got up and told Sam that Howard couldn’t come into the dining room unless he didn’t mind this being public. Sam found another space, and when Howard arrived, we drew the curtains on the table, and John and I slipped out. We went up a darkened staircase to a private party room. It was empty except for chairs stacked on tops of tables, a bar, and Howard. We took chairs from the tables and sat. It’s hard to explain the rawness unless you have been in the center of the storm, but there is nothing subtle at this point. We all knew why we were there.

John said, “Thank you for coming. When are you going to do something?”

“Well, you know, I don’t know.”

“It looks like you’re going to finish third here, Howard. You know you’ll have to get out of the race.” Silence. Howard was grappling with all that was inside him, all that had been inside him since the extraordinary tower he had built started collapsing.

Howard did not think John Kerry should be the nominee. I don’t know whether that was political calculation talking or the residual effect of the nasty campaign between them. But he believed that John, not Kerry, could beat Bush. Everyone was focused on Ohio being the big swing state. “The shop foreman in Ohio, those people will vote for you. They will not vote for Kerry,” he said, “because they feel a connection to you and they don’t feel any connection to him.”

“But the way things are going, he will be the nominee, Howard. You have to do something. You can’t just stand by and watch.”

Howard paused. “When,” he asked, “are you going to get traction? You beat me, but you lose here by about twenty-five or thirty points, it’s over.” Why should he go out on a limb for somebody who was not going anywhere? It was a perfectly reasonable question. What we didn’t know—and he didn’t know—is that it wouldn’t be twenty-five or thirty points. It would be six. And Howard took eighteen percent of the Wisconsin vote.

We didn’t push him. This was a deeply personal decision. Howard and I hugged, and the men shook hands warmly. Howard left, and John and I waited upstairs so that no one would see us leave with him. Howard was trying to talk himself into doing something. That’s why he was there. But, John said, he’s not going to do anything, and I agreed. He’s grieving, I said. It was natural. Everyone assumed he had a completely clear path to the nomination. When we’d go back to Washington,
The Washingtonian
would have big articles about what a Dean administration would look like and who would be doing what. He’d been on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
. And then, in what seemed like an instant to all of us, it was over. And Howard knew that, but it was just too hard to let go.

What we didn’t know was that around the corner, on Monday morning, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
would endorse John. Unlike the
Des Moines Register,
which endorsed eight days before the caucuses, this endorsement was the day before the primaries, too late for us to add that endorsement to television commercials and signs. The public polling at that point—and we had no money for private polls—said that John was anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five points behind.

By the afternoon of the Wisconsin primary, John had already started doing satellite television into the Super Tuesday states. He was in his chair in front of the camera when he saw the staff buzzing around whispering to one another.

“What are you all talking about?” he asked.

“We’ve gotten the first exit polls,” Miles said.

“Don’t tell me. We’ll go to the room. You can tell Elizabeth and me both.”

I was getting ready to go down to the coffee shop to have lunch with Meryl Gordon when they came in. The early exit polls were showing a virtual tie. John had won the expectations game. The press was stunned by this comeback, but again in the end, it was second. It was Kerry’s face, not John’s on television screens above the words Wisconsin Winner.

That night we didn’t fly out at midnight.

Wisconsin, we knew, had been our best chance to turn the tide in the race for the nomination. It wasn’t just Howard, we all played what-if games. What if the endorsement had come earlier? What if Howard had pulled out before Wisconsin, or Clark before Oklahoma or Tennessee? But those are parlor games. The real contest is out there, in America, and there, we knew, it was nearly hopeless. There were two more weeks until Super Tuesday on March 2nd, when California, New York, Ohio, Georgia, and six other states would go to the polls. I talked to Amy, the pretty, bright, and endlessly energetic woman who had been a leader in the Dean campaign in Minnesota, and John talked to their group; John might get their endorsement when Dean withdrew. I went to Maryland to campaign—like so many other states, I was able to say I’d lived here, my brother and sister were born here—but Maryland would go to Kerry. The point was to stay alive, and staying alive meant winning somewhere. The next week would be Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and the public polling there still showed John with a significant lead. It was two weeks of insanity, really—stay afloat, stay afloat.

Larry King conducted a debate in Los Angeles with John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, and John. Before the debate, I went to a forum of students, professors, and consultants and press run by Geoff Cowan of the USC Annenberg School of Communications. Geoff had been head of Voice of America when, three weeks before he died, Wade was one of the national winners of the contest VOA had sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Holding those little pieces together, as if my life made sense, as if Wade was still a living, changing part of it—
see, here he is in California
—filled me up and emptied me out at once. I’d always choose to have those moments, as when Wade’s friends would drop by to tell me about a job or show me a picture of the girl they were planning to marry, but each time they took away a little of the conceit that Wade was just away somewhere, at school maybe.

We did these things in the last two weeks before Super Tuesday with the knowledge that this was Everest and we hadn’t the right gear. The last debate, hosted by CBS in New York, was on Sunday morning. Again it was Kerry, Dennis, Al, and John. There was no audience; each candidate could have one person in the studio. I sent Cate. John was splendid. The last question was asked by Elizabeth Bumiller of the
New York Times:
“Is God on America’s side?” Kerry answered, “Well, God will—look, I think—I believe in God, but I don’t believe, the way President Bush does, in invoking it all the time in that way. I think it is—we pray that God is on our side, and we pray hard. And God has been on our side through most of our existence.” Elizabeth turned to John, “Senator?” And John answered: “Well, there’s a wonderful story about Abraham Lincoln during the middle of the Civil War bringing in a group of leaders, and at the end of the meeting one of the leaders said, ‘Mr. President, can we pray, can we please join in prayer that God is on our side?’ And Abraham Lincoln’s response was, ‘I won’t join you in that prayer, but I’ll join you in a prayer that we’re on God’s side.’”