Saving Graces (35 page)

Five days later we had the plane we would have for the rest of the campaign. The crew rotated every few days, but after the first few rotations, Brett Karpy, a blonde, outgoing thirty-something pilot, asked to stay on with us. It was Brett who made sure we had meatloaf for dinner, and Brett who handed out campaign buttons to the curious who approached the plane surrounded by Secret Service and police cars. We never got on or off the plane without a big smile and his shouted “Good Luck!” When we got on the plane for the last time, the trip from Des Moines to Boston, he had heard news of the good exit polling and had bought champagne. I wouldn’t miss sitting knee to knee with Hargrave for hours on end, with all of our belongings stuffed around us or on the floor behind our legs. Poor tall Karen and maybe poor Ryan, whose seat faced hers, certainly wouldn’t miss the cramped accommodations. I wouldn’t miss crawling over suitcases and briefcases and passing meals back and trash up on every leg. But I would miss Brett. We all would. On December 28, 2005, Brett Karpy died. He and another pilot were on their way to pick up another customer, to flash that great smile at them and make them comfortable, when their plane crashed in California and they were both killed instantly. He had just turned thirty-four.

There are people, like Brett, open and warm, whom I won’t ever forget. I won’t forget Brett, and I won’t forget Hope Walz. We had a house party in Mankato, Minnesota, at the Walz home. It was a bright house and someone had stenciled a saying on the wall:
Fear less, hope more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours
. You could tell that was the way this family lived. Tim had been in the National Guard in a support role near Iraq, and Gwen was left home with a daughter too young to understand why he was gone or how long he was gone. So Gwen filled a candy bowl with jelly beans. Every day Hope could eat one, but only one, and when the bowl was empty, her father would be home. I guess I needed a kid fix, so when Hope took my hand to show me her precious bedroom, the house party was put on hold for a few minutes. We sat on her bed and talked; she asked if I would read her a book, and I did, then I wrote a note to her in it. You can tell a lot about people by watching the way they interact with their children. Hope’s warmth was a product of Gwen and Tim’s warmth. I would see them several more times during my campaigning. Gwen came to New Hampshire, bringing Hope’s hello and a bracelet for me. And I saw them all again at Minnesota State University, back in my hold room, where I greeted all my friends.

Not everything was rosy and perfect, including me. At the Walz house party, one of the mothers was trying to buy body armor for her son who was headed to Iraq. She was trying so to hold in her fear and her grief. Was this what being a mother now meant, looking for body armor? Her fragility haunted me that day and the next, and when another mother sending a son to Iraq approached me after a town hall, instead of conveying the hope and strength I wanted to convey, all of the previous mother’s anxiety came out. I left that second mother in worse shape than I’d found her. I turned to Hargrave,
What have I done?
I didn’t make that mistake again, and I didn’t forget that I had made it once. It wasn’t the only mistake I made, but I hope it was the only one where someone other than me was hurt by it.

Not every event was a success. John had visited the Page Belting Company in New Hampshire during the primaries, and his visit was what one political commentator called “A Moment”—people shouting out, “You understand us. I’ve been waiting for someone like you.” All magic. Campaigns being imperfect, we tried what Hollywood tries all the time, the sequel. During the general election I was doing Page Belting 3 or maybe even Page Belting 4, and the topic was to be health insurance. Here was the problem: Mark Coen, the president of Page Belting, made sure his employees had good health insurance. I was talking to a well-covered, well-satisfied audience who had no questions on health care for me. Sylvia Larson, a state senator who was wonderfully supportive during the general election and who appeared with me at every New Hampshire event, just shrugged.

I made another group of friends who also appeared with me at many events: the Military Moms with a Mission. I first met Lisa at a panel discussion in Pensacola, Florida. Her husband, like my father and grandfather, was a naval aviator, and when she spoke so eloquently about her disappointment with the way the military was treating her family and others, I knew she should be included in the Military Moms tour that was starting. At least twenty-five years my junior and with the long, straight hair of a college girl like my daughter, she would have been one of my closest friends if she lived next door. Gentle, polite Lara, well-spoken Pat, angry and inspiring Nita—our converted Republican—and Maura, full of enough life to motivate the rest of us, filled out the troop. We kept coming together, then splitting apart, coming together, then splitting. Youngstown, Ohio, Morgantown, West Virginia, Laconia, New Hampshire. Nita came to Philadelphia to be in the crowd for one of my events. What I remember most of these women—who were from all parts of the country, from all sorts of lives—is that though their only connection was that they were mothers and wives of men in the military, that was enough to transcend their differences. They were united in a cause, and they had obvious affection for one another. I honestly hated it when they piled into their van headed to the next event without me, laughing and waving goodbye.

There is a familial culture in campaigning, the sense that you can argue among yourselves but no one outside can say anything bad about my brother, my sister, my friend. It was the collective sense of being a part of something, the shared experience of bad food, no sleep, and, for months at a time, the same history. It is easiest to see with the traveling crew. Think about this. You know everything about this person. You know when they’re sick. You know when they’re tired. You know how they’re feeling. You’ve been there with ups and downs. You eat every meal with them. You spend every hour of the day with them. You’re on the plane flying back and forth across the country, sitting there playing Boggle, singing, laughing, and running through the earlier events. When Ryan’s pants ripped, Hargrave and I each offered to sew them for him. We were mothers, and we didn’t stop because we were a candidate’s spouse and her companion.

I know it happens at the staff level, and I have seen the affection these people who meet and work together, campaign after campaign, develop for one another. I am certain it happens in Republican campaigns, just as I saw it happen in Democratic campaigns. In between campaigns they go to each other’s weddings, they send baby presents, they meet for weekend vacations. The question for some candidates, though John and I never stopped to pose it ourselves, is whether to be a part of this extended family, and if we became a part of it, how deep that connection would go. We just joined in, and our naiveté really paid off. We didn’t know during the Senate campaign that the candidate didn’t usually get Christmas gifts for his staff. So we bought them, well, suitcases. A gift and a joke at once. If we didn’t join in, they’d be a family and we’d be on the outside. What fun would that be?

At the beginning of October, our family—our big family—moved to Chautauqua, New York, where John prepared for the vice presidential debate. Because it was past the regular season for vacationers, we had this extraordinary place almost to ourselves. Between debate preparation sessions, we would sit on the porches of the Athenaeum, a grand Victorian-era hotel, and look across the expanse of grass, across Lake Chautauqua, looking across to where Grant or Roosevelt might have looked—so long had the resort been a refuge from politics. And a place of politics, too. And it was both for us. In the morning we would eat breakfast with the children, then head to an auditorium where for hours a mock vice presidential debate would take place, John being John, of course, and Bob Barnett playing Dick Cheney, thick notebooks of Cheney’s positions and statements in front of him. As many a consultant suspected, I would undo some of their work during breaks. John would say, “What they are suggesting doesn’t feel right to me,” and I would support him,
Do what feels right
.

During one of the breaks, several of us remained in the auditorium to talk about the possibility of a question asking John to name three political mistakes he had made. Not a question any politician, any job applicant, anyone for that matter wants to answer. Before the break John had come up with two, but he hadn’t come up with a third. When he and Mark Kornblau got up to get some of the lunch laid out in the next room, Ron Klain, Bob Shrum, David Ginsberg, and I stayed on the sofas talking. I had an idea. What about his vote confirming education secretary Rod Paige? John had been really unhappy with Paige’s performance, as well as the revelations that had emerged about the Houston school district Paige had headed before his cabinet job. Well, maybe, said Klain. In a minute or two, he and Bob got up to get sandwiches, too. David and I talked until John came bounding back in the auditorium. “Shrum’s got a great idea for the third mistake,” he said. “Voting for Rod Paige!” David and I looked at each other and laughed. It is, you should know, campaign practice to take credit for other people’s ideas. But this, perhaps, was a first: taking credit for an idea of the candidate’s spouse. We have ribbed Bob mercilessly since.

It was a good time, a break before the last push, a time to watch football games on television—the area the staff had commandeered had a big TV and tables filled with food. I got a few of them to play Boggle with me, but it was really a young person’s space, and I had my own young people to tend to. After the afternoon debate preparations, we would go back to the porches and watch the children play football on the lawn—Emma mostly speeding away from whomever was trying to catch her, whether she had the ball or not, and Jack wanting to be the quarterback and finally losing the job when he threw the football from four feet away directly into Matthew Nelson’s groin. But soon the halcyon days were over, and the whole troop packed for Cleveland.

When I traveled with John, we traveled in his larger plane, John and most of his staff at the front, the Secret Service in between, and the press in the rear, everyone a little territorial—this had been their seat for weeks, “See that bag of chips on the floor? That’s my bag.” So the plane was crowded on the Monday afternoon we left for Cleveland, crowded and giddy with anticipation. The debate was seventeen hours away. Sam, Mary, Marcus, Lexi, Linda, Derek, Mark, Robert, everyone tense and excited and no one in a mood to fight about seats. We got to Cleveland and saw the familiar face of Al Rutherford, who looks more like a diplomat than an advance man. We had worked with Al in the primaries, and Sam knew that John would be completely at ease knowing Al was in charge in Cleveland. Another hotel—entered through the service bays—so I couldn’t say which one. Cate arrived, and the next day so did the children, after a couple of days back home at school. John’s parents were there somewhere, but I didn’t see them until after the debate. There was this sense that there was a tornado all around us, and yet Al created this serene island so John could focus. And then time sped up and suddenly Cate and I were being seated next to Kristen Breitweiser, the beautiful and courageous September 11th widow who traveled with John in much the way the Military Moms with a Mission traveled with me. Cate and I were holding hands, we were in what would be John’s line of vision, and Gwen Ifill, the moderator, was giving the audience instructions on clapping, which they usually ignore, although that would not be the case tonight. Tonight all was serious. It was as if there were two Titans clashing. We’d read the press analysis. Experience and judgment on one side of the table and humanity and intelligence on the other. And then the debate began, and John immediately started dismantling the notion that he was looking at a man of judgment.

I watched Dick Cheney’s hands. I had taken enough depositions as a lawyer to know to watch his hands, and they were in motion. The man I had seen on television, sitting completely still in a meeting with the President or speaking as his flat hand punctuated his sentences in the air, this man was now holding one hand down with the other. I could have told Dick Cheney that I had been in many an argument with John and that he could, if he chose to, shake you. Cheney made his points about John, undoubtedly scored some points, but he never had what he clearly had expected to have: the upper hand with this whippersnapper. Finally, I think in desperation, though I am certain I will never know—Cheney said something he thought sounded dismissive of John and which was patently false: “The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” I turned to Cate, for I had sat for what seemed like hours next to Lynne Cheney while John sat two seats away next to Dick Cheney at the National Prayer Breakfast. It was untrue. When the debate was over, the families—as they always do—go up to the stage, hug their family, and exchange civilities with the opposition. John picked up Jack, who had run out to him, wanting to know, insisting to know in his deepest, most threatening, four-year-voice,
Which one is Cheney
? I had made my way to Cheney and, poking a finger at his lapel, I said, “You have too met John. We were all together at the National Prayer Breakfast.” In the Kerry staff room they were watching on monitors; they couldn’t hear me, they could only see me poking my finger. What, they wondered, was she doing now? “Oh, yes,” he smiled, “we were.”

Within minutes, of course, the entire press corps was poking their fingers in his lapel. Immediately on networks and blogs, the footage and the photographs went up. It was gratifying in one sense, but it changed what people were talking about. They weren’t talking about the focus groups who had watched the debate and decided, without knowing about the misstatement, that John had won the debate. Instead they were talking about John and Cheney previously backstage at
Meet the Press,
or John and Cheney at the swearing in of Senator Elizabeth Dole, or…. The next day Cate was on CNN’s
American Morning
with Bill Hemmer. Liz Cheney, Dick and Lynne’s thirty-something daughter, was participating by remote and still backing the line that her father had never met John before. She explained that thousands of people attend the Prayer Breakfast, which they do, but she was looking at the remote camera, not the television monitor, so she could not see that as she spoke these words, CNN was showing John and Dick seated right next to one another on the dais, the “thousands of people” below and in front of them. Cate, who always was composed, was thinking to herself:
Okay, finally a softball
.