Saving Graces (33 page)

The evening was capped off by a concert by the Boston Pops with James Taylor. Once when my dad was head of the NROTC unit at Chapel Hill, he decided that we should take a space-available free military flight to Puerto Rico for Christmas. My mother packed a miniature tree in one suitcase and we went. We went to San Juan, of course, and across through the rain forest and down to Ponce. It was an extraordinary trip, but Jay was angry the whole time. He hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t want a miniature tree. And then, as the final blow, when we returned to Chapel Hill we were told by our neighbors that we’d missed joining in the caroling…with Chapel Hill native James Taylor. That was the early 1970s, and my brother is still angry about it. When you meet someone, famous or unknown, you reach for what you have in common, and being in Chapel Hill—or in this case not being in Chapel Hill—is what I reached for, but I don’t believe James Taylor heard a word over the fireworks and the aahs of the crowd. After another late-night stop, we finally crawled into bed about 3
A.M
. We were up at 5, packing and dressing for a rally that would be carried live at 7:15
A.M
. and a bus trip that would last nearly a week. It was July 30th. Our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary.

CHAPTER 13

AMERICA, THE GENERAL

The Race

J
OHN AND
I have always celebrated our wedding anniversary at Wendy’s. It started, as so many rituals do, without any thought. We were moving out of the townhouse in Virginia Beach that day, packing to move to Nashville. We were wearing cut-off jeans and we didn’t want to stop and shower, so we went to the nearest fast-food restaurant, Wendy’s. The next year, we found ourselves at Wendy’s again. The trip the third year sealed it, and it has been Wendy’s ever since. So the campaign allowed that we could stop the caravan of full-size buses, filled with families and press and Secret Service, and eat at a Pennsylvania Wendy’s.

The patrons at Wendy’s were not alerted. Not only were cameramen suddenly leaning over them, not only were Secret Service agents filling every available square inch of floor space, but even if they had been able to get up, there was no way to leave, unless they had walked to the restaurant. The parking lots were all blocked. We all ate. Teresa had chili, John Kerry a hamburger. John and I ordered our usual: number one combos. Also celebrating were Cate, the Kerry girls, the Heinz boys, and Ben Affleck, who was traveling with us for those first days. We ate and got back on our respective buses. At the next stop we were asked about the gourmet meal we had eaten. It was great. Wendy’s always is. Not Wendy’s, the reporter said. The five-star gourmet meal delivered to the bus after the Wendy’s stop, how was that meal? We had no idea what he was talking about. It sorted itself out in a day or two. It turned out that the Kerrys had never eaten at a Wendy’s, and although they were willing to go with us, they made sure they had a backup—a quite nice backup, willing to deliver to a bus—if they hated it. One side note of the Wendy’s trip: everywhere I went, in rope lines or in town halls, people would hand me Wendy’s gift certificates. We used some for our anniversary dinner the next year, in 2005. Even if the Kerrys don’t go, it is clear Wendy’s is getting plenty of business.

Early in the campaign, our family had a bus tour separate from the Kerrys, a bus tour of the South. We worked our way through Louisiana, where we tried alligator meat and Louisiana barbecue—and where the campaign decided later not to fight. We had a great rally in Arkansas on the banks of the Arkansas River, where Jack and Emma Claire stole the show by sweeping the stage during everyone’s speeches—and where, again, the campaign decided later not to fight. We had a beautiful day in Missouri, where once more the campaign withdrew, deciding not to fight. The entire experience was delightful and unbelievably frustrating.

The bus tour ended in St. Louis, where we joined the Kerrys for a train tour. And you should have seen this train. The Kerry car was the back car and more luxurious than ours, but ours was terrific. Truman, we’d heard, had ridden in the car in which we traveled, perhaps slept in the bed in which we slept, maybe written a note at the mahogany desk in the small lounge. It was like the first time stepping into the Senate chamber, rubbing your fingers over the names of senators carved there over the years. It was wonderful and inspiring and important. We left the grand Union Station and headed west.

Not every moment was a perfect moment. And there were times on this trip that were not perfect. It is a sad fact that Teresa was not permitted to be nostalgic about her first husband, Jack Heinz, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who died in an airplane crash. No one begrudged me missing Wade. And yet Teresa was not allowed to miss Jack. She and I had an awkward interview on the train with the St. Louis paper; while Teresa reminisced to the reporter about Jack, her press secretary paced, and the staff squirmed. I was supposed to be there to right a ship that wasn’t really a kilter. Then the first night out, the Kerry staff, which was supposed to share the available bunks with the Edwards staff, put Keep Out signs on all the private room doors and locked John’s staff out; John’s staff slept in the seating cars. They thought we didn’t know. A reminder, I suppose, of still-unreleased animosities that had grown during the primaries.

And then there was a worse moment. It was late one night. We’d gotten behind schedule, as the stops had lasted too long during the day. Now it was 12:30 at night, and we were making up time barreling through Kansas. John was lying on the bed, and I was sitting beside him talking to him. The door to our room was open, and I could see out the window across the narrow hall. Of course, it was night and there was nothing to see. And then, all of a sudden, there was something to see. There were hundreds of people on a train platform—where were we?—and there were signs and lights, and, saddest of all, flashbulbs going off as the train raced through what turned out to be Lawrence, Kansas. Those people came out, and we didn’t even slow down, I said. The train can’t go back tonight, John said, sensibly enough as the train barreled on. And then we looked at each other. But
we
can go back. I wrote an entry for the Kerry blog about how much John and I loved Lawrence. We’d traveled through when we were in law school, and a generous soul had fixed our ailing brakes for a more than fair price, which was pretty important to two students working their way through school. We would come back, we promised Lawrence. We went to bed unaware that later that night we would pass the Imus Ranch, where there were more people waiting, including children. We hadn’t even known it was scheduled. I only found out weeks later, listening to Don Imus one morning complain that the train had raced through there too without stopping.

All the little snags aside, Mort Engelberg, who put the train trip together, was responsible for one of the most splendid experiences a campaigner could ever have. I could have sat on the back of that train, talking to the folks who gathered along the tracks, at rallies and at train crossings, watching the country roll by for months if I had had the chance. Families gathered at the places where they knew the train would slow and waited, sitting on lawn chairs, the children playing beside them, a homemade sign ready to be hoisted when we came by. Men and women working in plants and shipping yards alongside the tracks would stop their work and wave their caps. How could you not love this? I liked walking through the press car, with papers and jackets and empty cardboard coffee cups strewn everywhere, then walking through the immaculate Secret Service car, grown men who weren’t on duty, sleeping upright in their seats in coats and ties. Although John and Cate and I each thanked Mort as we left him in Albuquerque and returned with the younger children to Lawrence, those thanks could not convey our appreciation for the gift of that incredible trip.

And then there was Lawrence. You should know we have a love affair with Lawrence. On a day’s notice, a rally was put together in a park, and then it rained and it had to be moved, and still thousands of people found us. John spoke inside and then went outside to talk to the thousands more who could not get inside after the fire marshal closed the doors, and he spoke again. When John was speaking to the crowd indoors, Jack, who was standing with me, whispered that he wanted to talk, too. Daddy’s talking. Another tug on my slacks. I want to talk. During the next round of applause in John’s speech, I went up to him and whispered that Jack wanted to talk. What’s he want to say? he asked. I shrugged. John was sure he was going to say “poopy-head” or some other phrase four-year-olds find amusing, but he gave him the microphone anyway. Jack held it close to his face and, after a long pause, he repeated a line he’d heard his father deliver dozens of time. In his unlikely deep voice came the nearly whispered words, words John had used in his convention speech and in every speech since then:
Hope is on the way
. The room erupted. That night, Jack did a reprise of sorts. As he was stepping into the bathtub, he smiled and said
Soap is on the way
.

Summer was ending. In mid-August the children’s school would start. We needed to get them back into a routine, so the children and I went back to Washington. It was from there that I was to leave for my first solo venture as the wife of the vice presidential nominee. I was going to Ohio in early August. Jennifer Palmieri was the press secretary for the Kerry-Edwards campaign there. She had called me before taking the job. Should I go? Of course, I said and then added, with no premonition whatsoever, that’s the election, right there. Go. Well, she had, and now she had put together an event in Columbus to thank a woman restaurateur who had registered hundreds of single mothers in her restaurant. I would use the opportunity to talk about why this election was so important for women. John Kerry and my husband had campaign planes. Teresa had her own plane. I was flying commercial—which would not last long—and now I wasn’t flying at all because the flight had been canceled and there was no other way to get there. Ryan’s first job as my trip director was to tell me that there was no trip. I started that day asking for a private plane.

Our new team was still feeling its way. My schedule was, at first, made up of panel discussions with women on different topics. The campaign would locate women in various towns to talk about health care or education or domestic security. The stories I heard were incredible; the women I met were strong or crumbling or fighting. But it wasn’t a format I liked much, because I was too much an emcee making sure the shy panelist spoke up and that the vociferous panelist—and there were one or two or more of those—gave others a chance. It seemed to me, too, that the women on the panels and in the crowd had already decided how to vote. I was preaching to the converted. Maybe those were the only people they could get to see the spouse of a vice presidential candidate. I could understand that. But when I read in the nightly press clips that my events were open only to Democrats, I was livid. So even if an undecided voter had wanted to hear me, I asked the staff, they couldn’t? No, the press had it wrong, they told me, but I think the press had it right and my staff, who didn’t yet know me, was trying to protect me. Maybe they were worried that if I was able to get so exercised over a briefing book, how would I respond to a heckler? It would not have been an unreasonable concern, except that, as I said, they didn’t know me yet.

I had met hecklers. When John announced his candidacy at the University of South Carolina, a half dozen boys with Bush signs had been disrupting the speakers before me with chants and shouts, so when I took the microphone, I spoke first to them. “We have press here from all over the country,” I said in my most motherly voice. “I just know you boys are going to show them some good Southern manners.” That’s all it took, and they never said another word. It’s all in the tone of voice. When protesters gathered outside a community health clinic where I was doing a town hall, I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen them until our SUVs were pulling away. I told Ryan I wanted to thank them, for no one before had ever found me important enough to bother protesting my visits. He said nope, not a good idea.

But I wanted to talk to them, to anyone who might be persuaded, even those others had written off. I had been trying in those early weeks to make a point about the closed and ticketed Bush and Cheney campaign events, and apparently—because of an excess of caution or a misunderstanding—I was having them, too. I was adamant: I wanted to speak to Republicans, I wanted to speak to independents, I wanted to speak to undecided voters. When the staff insisted the press was still getting it wrong, I was all over Karen Finney to make the openness of the events a talking point with every reporter and in every press release for my appearances. To make it clear they were complying, my staff had T-shirts made. On the front they read Elizabeth’s Staff, and on the back they read Open to the Public. It cracked me up.

Everything has a name, whether or not the name makes sense, and the handshaking that takes place after panel discussions, town halls, and speeches is called “working the rope line,” although there was rarely a rope between my stages and the audience and although the “line” was three and four deep and, like a basket of puppies, constantly in motion. And it was dear to me, for that was the place where I could really touch those who had come. Women would reach to hug me and, as they did, they would pull me close and whisper in my ear: I lost my son, too. Every day. Debbie, the waitress in Sioux City, who cried as she asked for my autograph; things were so bad for her, and it was so emotional to be with someone trying to change things. Or they would come to me, as a pretty young woman had once, crying, saying I don’t even know why I am crying. Or they would know. Her son’s National Guard unit was headed to Iraq. The county couldn’t pay for her eight-year-old’s glasses anymore and she couldn’t afford to pay for them. Her husband’s employer was closing his factory.
My parents…my daughter…my brother
. It was almost never about themselves, which just added to their sense of impotence and hopelessness. There was anger, too, and optimism often, but there was always sadness. They had been stripped of health care, jobs, eyeglasses, and hope, and most importantly of the dignity of feeling that they were self-sufficient and could weather whatever was handed to them. Now they couldn’t.
It didn’t used to be like this,
they’d say. And all I could say was I know. And then work as hard as I could.

Just as in some respects each rope line was the same, each was unique. In late August at the University of Nevada in Reno, we had a great town hall on education issues with the Wolfpack students and the public. I had practiced saying the state name all morning so I wouldn’t embarrass myself as I had during my previous visit. Apparently the rest of the country mispronounces
Nevada
. We all say “Ne-vah-dah,” when we should be saying—as I now say—“Nevadd-ah.” After the town hall, a woman in the rope line reached to hug me, and I reached back as I always did, but she grabbed my neck. You look tired, she said, and I am a massage therapist. Right there, she started to give me a massage. The Secret Service stood behind me in each rope line, one hand on my back in case they needed to pull me away. They hadn’t ever needed to before, but this time an enormous agent from Miami, pulled her fingers, one by one, from my neck.