Saving Graces (31 page)

At the end of the entertainment, John Kerry got up and spoke. He asked Teresa to speak, and then John. By this time, I was pretty sure what was coming, and I was racking my brain about what to say. Usually I just introduced Teresa, but this was out of order. And, though I knew the words to “This Land Is My Land,” I had no speech prepared. So when John handed me the microphone, I didn’t give a speech. I just said thank you to the people who had given money to attend, and I said, maybe impolitely, that the election wasn’t about them. It was about the young boys from Harlem who had sung for us earlier. It was about the people who would come in after we were gone and clean up the hall. It was about the mothers who that night could not find sleep because of a son or daughter in Iraq. Less than a minute, I figured. When you are unprepared, I recommend sincerity and brevity. Within minutes after that, the stage had filled up—Meryl Streep and Chevy Chase, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Newman. The music for “This Land Is Your Land” started, and Cate and I smiled at each other. For this, we were prepared. But just as it started, a light came on above the audience, a big square of light, and the lyrics we had so diligently learned scrolled across, big enough for everyone on the stage to read. Diana Walker took a photograph that night of Cate and me. We are standing face-to-face, our arms on each other’s shoulders, and though the photograph cannot capture it, we are telling each other that we were the dopes, and we are laughing at our too-serious, overprepared selves. Once a square, always a square.

We continued to travel with the Kerrys for four days, ending with the largest and maybe warmest rally in North Carolina history in our home town of Raleigh. As we had stayed with the Kerrys at the Heinz farm at the beginning of this trip, we asked them to stay with us in our considerably more modest Raleigh home. My friends, if you haven’t figured it out already, are spectacular. Bonnie, Ellan, and Gwynn, Tricia and Sally, with muscle from Andrew Young and Ellan’s son, Joel, cleaned and rearranged, changed lightbulbs, and swept sidewalks. This was a house in which we lived only a few weeks a year now, and there were cobwebs in the corners, linens that could stand freshening, and more than a plant or two that needed replacing. They did it all. Our guest room, on the third floor with two single beds angled in the small room, would not be satisfactory for the Kerrys. Cate had a nice room with a large bed, so the Kerrys, my friends decided, could stay there. But it was a college girl’s room, with homemade posters and funny advertisements pasted to the walls. So they took down and threw out, they bought and moved things around. Bonnie bought new linens for Cate’s bed, and Sally made her take them back. No, that’s too expensive, she said, Elizabeth would never buy those. Go to Tuesday Morning; she shops there. Bonnie found something less expensive. And they absolutely transformed our house. It was like coming home and finding that Martha Stewart had been there: it looked great. It turned out the Kerrys used Cate’s room to change clothes and rest, but they didn’t spend the night. But now Cate has nice new bed linens. And we had an evening free to take those fantastic friends to dinner.

One night off and then John started campaigning again, nearly full time, and I went to Washington to start thinking about the next months, for me and for the children. The Kerry campaign assigned a sweet young woman, Laura Efurd, as my temporary chief of staff to put together a full staff for me; what they may not have told her was that there was no budget for the vice presidential candidate’s spouse. I was, rightfully, low man on the totem pole, although I had been campaigning on my own, doing town halls and televisions and even a little fund-raising for the past year. I sure didn’t want to start being window-dressing. Laura had some friends volunteer to help in the beginning, women as young as my daughter, who treated me as window-dressing, talking about me in the third person when I was standing in front of them. We should have Mrs. Edwards call….
Wait! I’m standing right here. Speak to me
. It didn’t stop. After a few frustrating days, I chased them away to other parts of the campaign. Despite that, a staff was built. Petite and blonde, a gentle powerhouse, Lori Denham became my permanent chief of staff. Pretty Kathleen McGlynn, who was working on the Democratic convention, promised to join after it was over, but—having heard that I had chased two volunteers away—told no one about the job. If she was only going to have the job for a few days, why talk about it? She stayed for the whole campaign; I couldn’t have done it without her, she is unmatched in thoroughness, innate good sense, and good humor, and when John needed a scheduler for his poverty and political work after the Senate, Kathleen signed on with us again. Now, I needed a crew who would travel with me: a trip director, a press secretary, and an assistant.

I have known Hargrave McElroy since the summer of 1981, when we both moved into the same apartment building in Raleigh. In her self-effacing way, I suspect she would describe herself as medium. Medium height, medium brown hair, a medium to slight build. That would only describe her when she is still, and she is never still. She has life and joy about her; she’s the kind of friend who, when you are in your fifties, will still get tickled at the prospect of the two of you buying matching pajamas in Target, which we did late one night when I had left my pajamas in the previous night’s hotel. Only she looked prettier in them than I ever could.

Twenty-five years ago, when John and I came from Nashville to John’s new job at Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove, we lived across the hall from one another in the same apartment building. Hargrave and her husband, Rick, had come from Buies Creek, North Carolina. She was a lawyer for the Army Corps of Engineers. The complex in which we lived was in the process of turning leased units into residential hotel apartments, and not only were our apartments not yet renovated, they were in terrible condition. The air-conditioning was unreliable, the pipes would back up, bugs were a constant problem. I had been there alone with Wade, who turned two that summer, while John worked. When the McElroys pulled up and started unloading little boys’ toys into the apartment across the hall from ours, I was—it is not overstating it—euphoric. And a little pathetic. As they unpacked, I quizzed them.

Where are you from? Originally South Carolina. Oh, my husband was born there.

What do you do? We are both lawyers. So are we!

You must have children with all these toys. Twin boys.

How old? Almost a year and a half. We have a two-year-old!

I don’t think I actually said
Please be our friends,
but I honestly might have. We had a lot of friends in Raleigh, but they had jobs that kept them busy the same hours that John was busy.

Whether I asked or not, we did become friends. Our boys carved pumpkins together, shopped for Christmas trees together, bathed together while we made popcorn and watched a movie in the next room. Hargrave’s husband and I, now pregnant with Cate, were looking for jobs, and both families were trying to save money for a house. It was like living in a dorm, no money and hand-me-down furniture, except in our version, there were children. We became so close that when, after my water broke at the Ringling Brothers circus and I went to the hospital to deliver Cate, Wade spent the night with the McElroys. Naturally we asked Hargrave to be Cate’s godmother. And naturally I wanted Hargrave’s sensible, wise, and patient presence with me for the campaign.

We picked up the second member of our troop when I was in New York looking for something to wear to the convention. In between shopping, Laura Efurd scheduled an interview for me with an extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily tall young woman. She had spectacular credentials, but that’s not what I was looking at. It was someone else’s job to make sure she had the skills to be my press secretary. I needed to find out if I could spend four months in close quarters with her. The interview lasted as long as a cup of coffee, but if she would take the job, I knew immediately I wanted Karen Finney with me. Even if she seemed a full foot taller than I.

The final slot was not filled until the campaign train trip in August. I was introduced to Ryan Montoya, who had coordinated the train stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico—he even had a building repainted that would be the backdrop for the stop. Nick Baldick called me from Washington. Ryan’s the best, he said; the only question was whether I would like him. It was a five-minute interview. I said,
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
He did. Thinking of the campaign songbooks, I asked,
Can you sing?
He was hesitant, but he said
Yes
. So I said,
Great! See you next week
.

Ryan had a lot of experience. He knew that the A-teams on these staffs are with the presidential and vice presidential candidates and that he would be forced to make do with less staff and less money, and he’d heard, despite the puffball interview, that I expected a lot. But he took the job anyway, thinking wrongly that the job couldn’t possibly entail that much. As my schedule became more and more complicated, so did Ryan’s life; he was driven to mailing his dirty laundry to Washington so that it could be cleaned and sent to him at a later stop. Although I didn’t know it until much later, he, like Kathleen, didn’t tell anyone that he had taken the job. When he was asked what he was doing for me, he would say he was just filling in temporarily.

The rest of the staff was collected by Lori Denham while I was on the road. Rebecca Werbel signed on to help Kathleen with scheduling. Courtney O’Donnell would help Karen Finney. Puja Pathak and Susan Ochs put the briefing books together that I got every night. Briefing books are notebooks with the positions of the campaign and the information about the places we went. If I was going to Buffalo, essentially this notebook would say,
Here’s the deal on Buffalo
.
Here are your talking points
. I remember when Cate looked at her first briefing book during John’s primary campaign.
Where are the facts?
she asked.
I don’t need to be briefed on rhetoric
. Well, I had the same problem with the Kerry campaign briefing books. They were written like arguments for a position. I could do the arguing in my own words better than I could do it in someone else’s, but in order to make the argument, I needed the facts, good or bad. I didn’t want to be surprised. I didn’t want fluff, and I sure didn’t want spin. Except when I was keeping the breast cancer a secret, I never pretended to be anything other than what I was, and I didn’t hide that I was upset that the campaign was spinning me instead of informing me. At first, I filled in the facts myself, going online after nearly everyone else had gone to sleep. When we finally got the briefing books right, I also got a little more sleep. And then Ryan devised a system of cards so that I had information about every state, every place we went, every issue I talked about. The average income in West Virginia, the percentage tuition increase in Pennsylvania colleges, jobs, wages, health care costs, Medicare premium increases. I would have all the pieces, so I could give people the right information. I wanted to convince audiences, and to do so, I had to be candid and honest. The facts gave me the ability to do that. Poor Puja and Susan, and Michelle Jolin and Lisa Ellman, who handled policy on my team; I don’t think any team worked as hard. And every day, I went to two or three or four more places, and they had to do it all over again for each one. Each night I would update the cards with the briefing book they sent for the next day, and before each town hall or interview, I would look over the cards,
Do I know this well enough to talk about it?

I will admit here that I was tough on these people. I didn’t think of it as being tough, at the time, and I don’t think of it as unfair now. I don’t think I asked any more of anyone else than I asked of myself. But looking back, I know I asked a lot of all of us. The election was important, and I didn’t want to make or hear excuses. I called from Cincinnati once. I was about to have an event at the new Freedom Center. What, I needed to know, had John Kerry done on African American issues while he was in the Senate? It wasn’t in the briefing book. Well, he’s going to…No, no, I stopped them. Not what he’s “going” to do, I want to know what he “has” done. There’d been a lot of civil rights legislation in the past twenty years; had he cosponsored any of it? How had he voted on it? Silence on the other end. Let me know when you find out, and then I will go to this event. It wasn’t their fault, they had gotten the “He’s going to…” answer from the Kerry policy desk. But wherever the problem, my team was taking the heat.

As long as I am being candid, I admit I had a lot of eccentricities that were not likely to make my traveling team more comfortable. I didn’t want to stay in grand hotels, and the first hotels in which we stayed were nicer than I would have chosen. Some people who had contributed to the campaign would never miss the $2,000 they sent in, but some supporters who gave $25 or $50 could have used that money for something they really needed, and for them, I didn’t feel right staying in a nicer hotel room than I really needed. As a consequence we stayed in some pretty lousy places. Ryan remembers coming into a room in Iron Mountain, Michigan, so late that he didn’t even turn on the light, he just fell into bed. When he got up in the morning, he was horrified that his room was covered with cat hair. Remembering that I am allergic to cat hair, he rushed to my room to find out that my only problem was no hot water. After Iron Mountain, Ryan intervened to make certain that frugality was not being taken too far.

We ate pretty much only on planes or in our hotel rooms. At first, the meals we were brought were from the nicest restaurants in town, beautifully served and exquisite. It was lovely at first, but it soon became too much, at least for me. Can I just get salads, I asked. So salads it was, for all of us, and always the same, always chicken Caesar salad, lunch and dinner, day after day, until I finally cried uncle and banned chicken Caesar salads from the menu. How about meatloaf? From then on, it was meatloaf or chicken, occasionally steak—sensible food I might have made at home.