Saving Graces (30 page)

That night Cate, Colin, now heading our press operation in New York, and I went out to dinner. We asked at the hotel where we should go, and they directed us through a garage door, down two blocks to an Italian place. Good, we thought—comfort food. So we sloshed through the cold rain and landed at a diner with a drag queen pianist dressed—honestly—like a clown, singing the songs from
The Sound of Music
. The food was dreadful, and the place was smoky, and Cate and I just looked at one another. Back at UPS!

It wasn’t the only misstep that week. I had campaigned in Ohio with Chris Redfern, the state legislative leader who, like John, will not age, and Matthew Nelson and I were scheduled to take a flight back to Washington from Cincinnati. I had promised the children that I would take them to school in the morning. We boarded the plane, but the doors wouldn’t close properly, so the flight was canceled. There were no other flights. I could go straight to New York, the office told me, but I had promised the children. Passengers from the flight were still standing around the counter, so I walked around saying, “We are renting a car; we’d love to have additional drivers if you want to drive to Washington.” We only had one taker, a fellow named Dean who worked for the Republican National Committee, so Matthew, Dean, and I drove and talked and sang for the next ten hours. Ask me anything you want about Matthew’s very large family; I now know all there is to know. When Nick Baldick found out I had ridden and spoken for ten hours with someone from the RNC, he grilled me for nearly as long. No, we hadn’t said anything at all about the campaign, the candidates. Nothing. It was the forbidden subject. Most importantly, I got there to keep my promise: I took the children to school. And I paid for it the next day when I tried to do four or five events in New York, the last starting at 11
P.M
.

The last days of the primary campaign were spent in Georgia. On primary day there was, as usual, little to do to influence the voting. Midday, Cate and I were looking out the hotel window when Jenni Engebretsen and Jennifer Palmieri came in to get us for lunch.
Look,
we said,
there’s an Eatzi’s
. Instead of getting bad food in Styrofoam containers, we could get good food in Styrofoam containers. How far is it?
Well, it looks like a couple of blocks,
I said. And it did look like a couple of blocks when viewed from the fortieth floor. Cate said,
You can come if you want, but we are definitely going. That’s what we’d do if Dad wasn’t running; that’s what we’re doing now
. The walk there wasn’t too bad. But then we bought lunch, or over-bought, and four overdressed women had to haul bags of food along a broad thoroughfare back to the hotel.

The distance to Eatzi’s was like the campaign: everything seemed closer; everything seemed within grasp when it really wasn’t. On Super Tuesday, when the exit poll numbers from the various states started coming in, John and I were standing in a room at Georgia State University. John turned to me and said,
It’s over
. I didn’t say anything. He said again,
It’s over
, making sure that I was getting the message.
This is over.
I didn’t say no, but I couldn’t say yes. It was his decision to run, it was his decision to stop running. I just wasn’t very good at giving up hope. Having said the words aloud to me, he came close to saying them when he took the stage that night. And his near-concession went out to Minnesota shortly before the Minnesota caucuses began. John finished second there, too, and we got on a plane and flew back to Raleigh.

The plane ride back to Raleigh—David, Jennifer, Hunter, Miles, Jim Andrews, John, Cate, and I—was, oddly, magic. The campaign was over, we all knew, but it didn’t matter. We were together, we were laughing; it was as if a weight had been lifted. We had had fun, we’d given it our best, we had made a difference, really. It didn’t seem like we had just lost a presidential primary. That came two days later, that came in the quiet of the aftermath.

The next morning we spoke to the staff, first me, then John, and when his voice cracked, so did the room. And then we all went to Broughton High School, Wade and Cate’s school, for the last rally. Here we were in front of all our friends, people who had stood with us through so very much for so very long. We tried to make it a celebration, and I think for some it was, but it was hard to look across that room, peppered with young people, their heads down, their cheeks streaked, and not wonder what if. All the near misses, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wisconsin…what if?

After we left Raleigh, the campaign office was cleared. Nick went home to Liz and his children. JRob to a new job. Rebecca, Sharon, Skye, Georgie, off to the next war. Boxes of memories were packed and posters came down, and the young people who had powered that engine went home or went on vacation. All of the people who had gotten strength from one another, working beside one another when it looked bad—and it looked bad much longer than it looked good—were scattered, and they couldn’t lean on one another now. And those, I think, were the worst times. Because we weren’t together.

But it wasn’t long until we were together again. John started calling supporters right away, thanking them for coming with him and for staying with him. The magic returned when once again we had meetings at the house on P Street. If you can imagine family meetings at the dinner table, that is what they were. Sometimes contentious, always lively, but most importantly there was—and is—a circle of trust and comfort. We may have been talking about big issues and big things, but we were just people—friends—sitting around talking about how to move forward together. After a little talking about what if.

CHAPTER 12

AMERICA, THE GENERAL ELECTION

In the Starting Blocks

W
HEN
J
OHN
K
ERRY
called my husband in Washington to ask him to be on the Democratic ticket with him, I was in Raleigh, in my doctor’s office, lying on an examination table, dressed in a lovely blue cotton backless robe. It was 8:20
A.M
. My doctor had agreed to see me earlier than the office usually opened, and my friend Ellan had gone with me to the appointment—we were planning to go out to breakfast afterward. I expected to take a late-morning flight back to Washington. As I was lying there, looking at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, I heard my cell phone ring in my purse across the room. At the same moment I heard Ellan scream from the waiting room, where she had been watching television.

The nurse handed me the phone. It was Emma Claire. Fifteen words: “Kerry picked Daddy, he just called Daddy. Here’s Jack. He wants to tell you, too.” Now it was Jack’s improbably deep voice. Mom. Yes, Jack. I swam all the way across the pool with my head out of the water. That’s what he wanted to tell me. To him, these two pieces of news were roughly equivalent.

There is prelude, of course. Aside from the eighteen months of prelude that were the primaries. The previous week we had been to Disney World with Cate, Emma Claire, and Jack. It had been like hundreds of thousands of Disney World trips taken by families before us. Although John was recognized every once in a while—once as we were celebrating my birthday early at Cinderella’s Royal Table—vacationers were mostly, and rightly, concerned with their children. It was relaxing. And then Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry’s campaign manager, called. Could John meet Kerry in Washington the next day? I’m with my family in Orlando, John said, I’ll be back on the next day, on the second; how about that? No, it had to be July 1st. They would send a plane to get him; he could leave Orlando after lunch, meet with Kerry in the early evening, and return late that night. Of course John said yes. He’d said yes to an earlier Kerry request to meet with John’s top financial supporters—a meeting where John Kerry was peppered with questions about whether he would choose John as his running mate. He’d said yes to a Kerry invitation to dinner at his lovely Georgetown home—fortunately before the press started staking out the house—where he and Kerry had excused themselves from Teresa and me at the table to talk privately about the vice presidential slot. He’d said yes to the vetting process, in which we had opened our tax returns, our records, our histories—again—to a team of lawyers and investigators. And so he said yes, he would go to Washington on July 1st. Cate and I would take the children to Toontown and Frontierland without him.

Thursday night when John came back from D.C., he was tired, but I was too curious to let him go to sleep before telling me what had happened. He related a positive but guarded meeting at Madeleine Albright’s house. There was no ask, there was no commitment, but John felt good about the meeting. We woke the next morning to our last day in Disney World—with our four- and six-year-olds, with Cate, and also with Andrew and Cheri Young from Raleigh, who had come with us to Orlando with their own two young children. Four children under six will take your mind off almost everything. But not everything.

The evening of July 2nd we were back in Washington, and Cate began packing to move to New York and a new job. The children were slowly coming down from a week of character breakfasts and amusement rides. And John and I were reading in the paper that Kerry had met with “his choice” at Madeleine Albright’s house Thursday night—and that the choice was Dick Gephardt, the only name in the perceived pool in town that night. Now, I could pretend that I was agnostic about this, that I did not care whether John was chosen, but I was not. I am like most wives: I believe in my husband. And this election was a fight for which we didn’t want to be on the sidelines, as we had been in 2000, when there was very little role for the almost-chosen. As interested as I was, there was still life to manage. So Sunday night, Cate flew to New York to meet a moving van at her new apartment. And Monday morning John flew to Boston to give a long-planned speech, and, when he returned Monday night, we did our usual tag team with the children. I left them in his care, and that night I flew to Raleigh for a doctor’s appointment Tuesday morning.

As I said, I was not agnostic. Monday night wore on as I restlessly padded around the Raleigh house. The Kerry campaign said that the selection would be announced by e-mail to supporters on Tuesday morning. The next eight hours could change the course of my life; I figured I could sleep tomorrow. So I walked into the family room to watch cable news, then back to the computer to press Search on Google News. Would the choice be leaked anywhere? Well, it was leaked, but in an unlikely place, an airplane mechanic’s blog. Didn’t know there were such things? The Internet is the most democratic medium we’ve ever known. A mechanic posted he had been in the secret hangar where the plane with the new Kerry-Edwards logo was hidden. But I didn’t see the blog.

What I did see was a
New York Post
online article that came up about 2:30
A.M
. It said Kerry had chosen Gephardt. I might have just gone to sleep then, assuming that once again John had been the nearly chosen, except…the
New York Post
article was oddly worded. There was no reference to a source for the information, and the byline said that it was from
Post
wire reports. The
New York Post
has a wire service? I didn’t think so. So I stayed online for an hour or two longer, still re-pressing Search. No other news media picked up the article. Nothing on the Internet. Nothing on CNN. Nothing on MSNBC. Finally, I went to bed as the sky was beginning to get light, figuring that whichever way this played out, a little rest would be good.

After learning from Jack that he could cross the pool with his head above water and from Emma Claire that Kerry had picked Daddy, I begged off breakfast, and Ellan took me to the airport instead. I was back in my D.C. house before lunch. Or at least it might have been my house. It was now filled with people I knew—our family and John’s staff from the Senate office and from the primary campaign, all family, too—as well as with people I did not know, the people the Kerry campaign sent as John’s first skeletal staff. Peter Scher, the new chief of staff, had gathered Mark Kornblau, who would be John’s press secretary, and—happily—Sam Myers, who would be John’s trip director again. They’d arrived at the house on P Street within a half hour of the Kerry phone call. There were six hundred cameras on the street, Peter said, though certainly there were fewer. Peter rang the buzzer. Nothing. He rang again. Nothing. John was upstairs showering; the children had left for summer camp for the morning. So with six hundred—or fewer—cameras clicking away, they’d finally had to step into the house shouting
Anyone here?

There were Secret Service agents already gathering outside, neighbors slowing their walk to wish John well. A woman from whom I had bought some suits during the primaries was on the doorstep with garment bags of clothes in case I needed anything else…and in case I wanted to buy them from her. Kevin, who cut our hair—and colored mine—came in case any of us needed him before heading out on the road for—well, we didn’t know how long. Cate, who had spent the previous day unpacking her suitcase in New York, packed it again and headed back to Washington. Televisions were on in every room, with constant replays of Kerry’s announcement of his choice at a rally. Dahling, who took care of the house, was laying out every snack food we had, and Matthew went out to get more. Lexi Bar and Miles were glued to John’s side. Jonathan Prince and Ed Turlington, who weren’t in Washington, were on the phone. Elizabeth Nicholas was answering the door and attempting to slow, if that was possible, the flow of people into our bedroom. It was loud and chaotic, and there wasn’t anytime in the foreseeable future when it would be any different. By midafternoon, we had met John’s new staff, gotten instructions from the Secret Service, talked to our parents, packed—without any real notion where we were going or for how long—and dressed the children.

John’s chief of staff for the general election would be Peter Scher, a handsome, open-faced man with an easy smile. When his cell phone had rung the previous week, Peter had been driving to a Baltimore Orioles game with his wife, Kim, and two boys. He didn’t recognize the number, but he answered anyway, and the first thing he heard was “This is John Kerry.” A robo-call! Peter figured he had just gotten one of the automated calls with taped messages from candidates that campaigns everywhere use. “Oh, cripes!” Peter said to Kim. Then, from the other end of the line, “Is that the way you answer your phone?” Oops. It wasn’t a robo-call. It was actually John Kerry, asking Peter if he would be chief of staff to the vice presidential nominee. Kim busied herself bribing the boys to silence, while Peter pulled over and talked about the offer. Would Kerry tell him who it was? No, he wouldn’t. Peter thought about it, and, it is our good fortune, agreed to do it, blind.

The next days were so terrifically public that it hardly seems I could tell anyone anything that they didn’t watch on television. We left our house about 3:30 in the afternoon. As we moved the children toward the door, I heard the television still on in the study. I went in to turn it off, but before I did I called to John to come look at the image on the screen. It was our front door, live on CNN. Just as we were to walk out that door, however, Jack, who is a congenitally cheerful child, tripped. He started crying and saying he wasn’t going. John picked him up and told him he was going. More tears. We’re going, son. And then John opened the front door. Jack, the natural politician in the family, took one look at the assembled cameras and the gathered crowd and instantly became again an engaging four-year-old. We came out of our house to a street full of black SUVs, television cameras from one end of the block to the other, and the spaces in between filled by our neighbors—neighbors who knew that they would be inconvenienced by the Secret Service in the months to follow—applauding and wishing us well.

The Pittsburgh to which we flew was not the Pittsburgh I remembered as a girl. I remembered working-class neighborhoods and soot from the factories that clung to your hair and the folds in your knuckles when you played outside. We were headed to the incredibly lovely Heinz farm, pristine and gracious. There was not a single thing not to like about this home. We stayed in a cottage next to the main house, and the children were in a perfect bunk room downstairs. Teresa played effortlessly with the younger children as they swam, and John Kerry and John had their first few minutes to talk alone as a team. Except for Teresa’s eldest son, all the children were there. A few of Teresa’s friends were there, including the lovely photographer Diana Walker. A person’s friends can say very nice things about them, and having Diana Walker as a friend said a lot of nice things about Teresa.

The next morning—a truly glorious day—was the formal announcement. Both families, rows of children of all ages, gathered with the Pennsylvania hills as backdrop. If you judge a photograph in a campaign by how much pain it gives the other side, and many do, this was a painful tableau. Myself aside—I don’t think I looked particularly good in a new suit that didn’t quite fit me (could I possibly have gained weight since I tried it on the day before?)—this was an extraordinarily good-looking group. That didn’t stop the criticism, of course. Later, when I got on the Internet, I read complaints that John and I were somehow using the younger children by bringing them to the formal announcement. This is one of the problems, of course, with the devolution of political campaigns into waves of assaults. Who, I had to wonder, would not bring their children to the announcement that their father was the vice presidential candidate? I imagined the conversation as years later the children looked at pictures of the event. “Where am I, Mom? Was I alive then?” “Yes, you were alive, but it was a little too important an event for you, so you were home with a babysitter.” A lot of people I met in the following months would reassure me about the children, but they needn’t have. The complaints rolled right off my back. Just like they did when there was a flap because Teresa tried to get Jack to take his thumb out of his mouth. He’d never done it before, but we were all doing things we had never done before. I didn’t notice the thumb go in, and I didn’t notice Teresa pull on his hand to get it out, but for goodness’ sake, if someone I know wants to wipe one of my children’s noses or tuck in a shirt or pull out a thumb, I am completely fine with that.

There were less happy times, of course, when we didn’t bring the children. They did not, for example, come with us to Faneuil Hall for the concession speech four months later. I did not think they would one day look back and say, “So why didn’t you bring us?”

I promise not to use the word whirlwind about shopping in twenty stores or spending two weeks touring Italy, but the next days campaigning were a whirlwind. Imagine that we had the national press corps and the international press corps traveling with us. The local press corps joined in wherever we landed. There were two families of children, young and not as young, and one of them, Alex Kerry, had her own film crew with her all the time. There were staff—John Kerry’s and Teresa’s established staffs plus John’s nascent staff and not really enough seats in the staff section of the Kerry plane for all of them. And then there were Secret Service details, and details, and details. Getting us anywhere was like tying a bow around Jell-O. And so it was to Cleveland, and Dayton, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

And then it was New York. There was a fund-raiser scheduled for Radio City Music Hall. We had been told that at the end of the event the families would come on stage to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with the entertainers John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and Jon Bon Jovi. Everyone knows the first verse, but we were going to sing four verses. So that afternoon, as we sat in the hotel room, Cate and I pulled out the songbook and started to memorize the verses. After we had learned them, we dressed for the evening. We got in the elevator with John and the Kerrys, and Cate and I remarked how hard it was to learn all the verses quickly. Everyone looked at us blankly. You didn’t learn them? No, they hadn’t. Cate and I gave sidelong glances to each other. They were going to sing at Radio City Music Hall? And they hadn’t learned the words? Boy, were they going to be embarrassed. What dopes. I was going to have only one chance in my lifetime to do this, and I did not want to be stumbling over the words.