On My Watch

by Virginia Buckingham

  Part IV

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Twenty Seconds and the Thirty-Minute Rule

  You have to be your own hero.

  —Andrea Bredbeck

  January 2005—En route by air to Washington, DC

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now thirty minutes outside of Washington, DC. Federal rules require that you stay in your seats for the duration of the flight.” The FAA had settled on the so-called thirty-minute rule after finally reopening Reagan National Airport some weeks after 9/11.

  I stared at the frayed cloth above the latched tray table on the seat back in front of me and tried to ignore the anger mixed with despair that the announcement of the rule gave rise to—as if that will stop terrorists, I thought. Focus on what you will say to him, I chastised myself.

  When I told Jack I was going to meet with President Bush for an editorial-board meeting after his reelection, my five-year-old said confidently, “He’ll remember me.” His certainty was adorable—and understandable. Each morning he’d seen the picture on my bureau with me holding him at seven weeks old, flanked on one side by Texas governor George W. Bush and on the other by Weld and Cellucci.

  I felt the plane begin to descend. I knew I would get, at most, twenty seconds or so to speak privately to the president before or after the interview.

  “Please make sure your seat backs are upright, tray tables secured, and seat belts securely tightened,” the flight attendant intoned through the intercom.

  What did I want to say to him?

  Minutes from touchdown, I tried to dismiss the familiar feeling of longing that inevitably arose when I thought about how things might have been different if President Bush had known about the intensity of the blame aimed at me and Logan Airport and said something, anything, to condemn it at the time. Andrea had tried to probe my feelings about that, but I dismissed her questions out of hand. “He was protecting the country,” I told her. The Logan controversy wasn’t on his radar screen nor should it have been, I felt, but still, over the years I’d watched enviously as the president vigorously defended members of his administration from assertions they’d missed signs of the impending attacks.

  Why didn’t you defend me? I pushed the thought from my head, embarrassed to even think it. He was a bit busy, you loser, I chastised myself. If he even knew.

  Did he know?

  Stop it, Virginia.

  I was ashamed to admit how much I wanted him to know, to acknowledge what happened to me, to express his sorrow, his understanding. To figuratively hold me in the crook of his arm like he had held Ashley Faulkner, to keep me safe. The implicit exoneration of The 9/11 Commission Report hadn’t lessened my ache for something more, something I hadn’t learned yet wasn’t possible, to not just move on but to return to who I was.

  Twenty seconds. That’s all I had.

  The White House

  The Herald team stood around quietly, a little awkwardly, awed by simply being in the waiting area of the West Wing. A military guard stood near the door, and a young aide offered to take our coats and briefcases.

  Pat Purcell and I stood near a glass-front wooden bookcase. It contained bound volumes of the collected speeches of recent presidents. We shared a laugh that Bill Clinton, renowned for his long oratory, had twice as many volumes as Ronald Reagan.

  Framed artwork of what looked like historic battle scenes graced the dark-red walls. Combined with the low ceilings, a church-like aura caused us to keep our voices low.

  Another aide told us we’d be meeting with the president in the Roosevelt Room. I hid my disappointment. We had hoped to see the Oval Office. Karl Rove, the president’s chief adviser, who had helped me arrange the interview, walked through the waiting area. He and another campaign aide paused to say hello. “You guys were great during the campaign,” he said. The other aide commented that one of her favorite media moments had been the Herald’s depiction of Senator John Kerry touring a NASA site while clothed in what looked like a surgical gown and a cap. In the picture, he was emerging from a structure resembling a space capsule. “Bubble Boy!” the Herald dubbed him in a front-page splash.

  Another young press aide said, “It’s time to go.” She asked if I’d like her to hold my purse and reporter’s notebook.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You’ll want your hands free to shake hands with him,” she answered.

  The aide led us down a warren of small dark hallways. She paused at a large heavy-looking door.

  “Are you ready?” she asked me since I was right behind her.

  I answered, “Yes, sure.”

  She pushed open the door. Instead of the Roosevelt Room, beyond the open door was the Oval Office.

  My mental image, like most people’s, of the Oval Office came from photo opportunities on the evening news. The two chairs in front of the fireplace. The president sitting behind a stately wooden desk flanked by flags. But when you enter it from the darkened narrow hallways of the West Wing, the contrast with the soaring ceilings and bright light streaming through enormous windows makes what’s been dubbed the “world’s greatest home-court advantage” even more extraordinary. I tried to take in the impressiveness of the room, when I saw, straight ahead, standing in front of his desk, President Bush and White House chief of staff Andy Card. The president walked briskly toward us.

  “Hello,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Hello, Mr. President, Ginny Buckingham,” I said, reintroducing myself. “It’s really nice to see you again.”

  The president paused, and seemed to remember. “You look good,” he said warmly. As he moved on to greet the rest of the Herald team, Andy Card and I exchanged a quick hug.

  “Thank you for doing this,” I said.

  The president gestured us toward the two cream-and-rose-striped couches facing each other in front of the fireplace and took his seat on one of the chairs.

  I was seated closest to him on the couch to his right. An official photo we later published in the paper showed everyone leaning forward on the edge of their seats, except me. All you could see was the tip of my boot on my crossed leg because I was comfortably leaning back. Why was I so comfortable? I’ve wondered since, despite the importance of the moment to me. I still don’t know for sure, but it may have been this simple: I liked President Bush immensely and had always felt comfortable with him. Despite the august setting, with his manner so reminiscent of Paul Cellucci’s warmth, I felt like I was about to have a conversation with an old friend.

  Herald editor Ken Chandler sat next to me and Greg Rush, head of the company’s string of smaller community papers, was next to him. Across from me on the other couch were Purcell, then Shelly next to Herald Washington, DC, bureau chief Andrew Miga.

  A few hours before, the Herald team had met for lunch at the National Press Club. There we planned out the questions we would ask the president. We assumed that only two of us, at most, would get to pose a question, so we wanted to be sure the questions we asked had the greatest chance to “make news.” Miga would ask about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, we’d decided. Shelly wanted to get a sense of his thinking on Supreme Court appointments.

  To our surprise, the president solicited a question from each and every one of us, starting with Purcell. Shelly asked, as planned, about the courts, Miga about Bin Laden.

  Chandler and Rush had their own relevant, current-events-oriented questions.

  I was last. I sensed we were running over time as some of the aides standing nearby had started to shuffle nervously on their feet. I saw one looking at his watch as if wondering whether to interrupt. But the president seemed to be having fun sparring with a friendly media audience and indicated he was in no hurry.

  “Mr. President,” I said, finally leaning forward. “I told my son Jack, who’s five now, that I was going to see you. I asked him what he would want me to ask you.” I looked ove
r at the opposite couch and I saw Miga looking nervously at Purcell. What is she doing? his facial expression seemed to be asking.

  The president looked amused. “He knows that you used to own the Texas Rangers,” I continued. “He wants to know how you could have traded A-Rod to the Yankees.”

  The president chuckled. “Well,” he answered, “we were trying to give you a little help.”

  I smiled in return and the rest of the group laughed, relaxing a bit. Without waiting to see whether I’d be given an opportunity, I immediately turned to a more serious question.

  “You said earlier that for people to follow, a leader needs to know where he wants to go. Do you think people get it? Do they keep 9/11 present like you obviously do and many others do?”

  My words came out in an earnest rush. By “many others,” I was referring to myself, too. Watching his features soften, I thought it was possible the president understood the answer was as much for me personally as it was for the benefit of the Herald.

  “You know, after 9/11,” he answered, “I made some statements that I knew there would be a natural tendency for people to kind of settle in and forget the moment, and that’s natural. Who wants to relive the . . .” His voice trailed off. “No one wants to relive that horrific day on a regular basis. And that it would be my duty to remind people of the nature of this war we’re in and that it’s a different kind of war, the enemy is different, they are not nation-states that we’re dealing with.

  “I think most Americans, however, do understand and get glimpses into the real world, based upon certain things that take place,” the president continued.

  Andy Card came back into the room. “Mr. President, you have another appointment.”

  There was so much more I wanted to ask him. Do you ever doubt yourself? Do you lie awake in the dead of night, like I do, wondering what more you could have done? Has your faith in God changed at all?

  We all stood up as the president did, and Purcell and Shelly shook his hand and thanked him for his time. He turned toward me and wrapped me in a warm embrace.

  Twenty seconds. I couldn’t control what he would or wouldn’t say to me, what he did or didn’t know about Logan four years earlier. I could only control what I would say to him.

  “I just want to thank you for all you’ve done since 9/11,” I whispered so only he could hear. “It’s given me a lot of strength.”

  I stepped back. President Bush looked me directly in the eye.

  “You’re a good person,” he said. “You’re a good person.”

  A “good person.” His words were kind, though not what I had longed to hear for all these years. He didn’t say, “It’s not your fault.” Or “You did nothing wrong.”

  But, I appreciated it because I had been defined so harshly as the opposite of a good person. It would have to be enough, even as I knew, achingly, in the deepest part of myself that it wasn’t, and I didn’t yet know what would be.

  ***

  A more normal rhythm moved me through the rest of 2005. I continued to see Andrea but not as regularly. Shelly gave me the opportunity to write a twice-weekly bylined column. I tried to include references to true accountability versus blame whenever I could and also threw myself into covering the budget tussles and other debates at the State House and in Washington, DC.

  Despite my Republican roots, I was a frequent critic of then governor Mitt Romney, who seemed to choose policy positions based on his national ambitions, not Massachusetts’s best interest. When Pat Purcell told me that Romney personally complained to him about my coverage, I grinned with pride. I relished the role I was playing again shaping the public-policy debate in Boston.

  Jack entered kindergarten in September, and his young life’s passage seemed a moment of passage for me, too. A line from Springsteen’s “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” popped into my head as I watched him follow the line of new classmates into school, proudly shouldering his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack. Yes, everything would be okay; just like those lyrics promised, we’d survive the devastation of 9/11.

  I marked the fourth 9/11 anniversary by attending the small ceremony held by our town’s firefighters and police in a local park. I stood alone, grieving just like all of those around me, as taps was played by a local firefighter and the American flag was lowered.

  I began to believe what Andrea had once told me. “Think of your life as a tapestry,” she’d said. “One day, 9/11 will be a thread in that tapestry, brighter perhaps than all the rest, but one thread.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A Swim on New Year’s Day

  December 28, 2005—Marblehead

  “Neil,” I said, leaving a message on the copy editor’s voice mail. “I just sent my column in. Let me know if you didn’t get it.”

  I took one last look to double-check that the email to him was in my sent folder before shutting down the computer. I hope Shelly doesn’t mind, I thought as I started rummaging through the refrigerator to figure out a dinner plan. In that quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, I’d decided to take a break from writing about politics. Instead, I penned a column about my fourth annual polar bear swim that upcoming New Year’s Day.

  There was no exact count that I knew of, but each year hundreds of New Englanders from Maine to Rhode Island start the New Year with a swim in the frosty Atlantic Ocean.

  The most famous of these in the Boston area were the L Street Brownies, so named for the well-known bathhouse on Carson Beach, at the end of L Street in South Boston. The tradition of this hardy group started in 1904. Now, each year hundreds of honorary Brownies joined them for the jump into Boston Harbor. Screaming and preening, the Brownies’ swim was faithfully captured by local TV stations for the evening news and featured in front-page photos in the city’s two dailies. Seeing the spectacle, Bostonians shake their heads in wry bemusement at a tradition that was as much a part of Boston’s celebration of the New Year as the ball dropping in Times Square was New York’s.

  A few friends and I had decided to copy the tradition in January 2003. We each gathered a couple of other people, and that first year we met at Devereux Beach in Marblehead. Instinctively, we agreed our impromptu group didn’t want to garner any publicity like other polar bear clubs in nearby towns. Kate, her husband, Alex, and the others surely had their own reasons for participating. For me, the appeal was ingrained in my Catholic upbringing: water and renewal.

  The column ran on Thursday, December 29:

  Cold Comfort on New Year’s Morn

  On New Year’s Day, otherwise sane humans along the frigid coastline of New England will take a swim. I will be one of them. I’m still trying to figure out why.

  This will be our fourth consecutive year of voluntarily freezing our tokhes off. We have few rules. We do the deed in the morning, the better not to dread it all day. We have to wear a bathing suit (a wet suit being so beside the point). We run into the water together. We must dunk our heads. Oh yes, video and still photographs are freely taken—I wish I had thought at the beginning to impose a waist-up rule—the better to use for blackmail later on.

  The night before my first dip, I asked a cardiologist-neighbor if it was dangerous. “It won’t kill you,” he said, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  This column, actually, isn’t meant to recommend it either. I have no profound message, or discovery of deeper meaning, to impart. Interestingly, our group hasn’t even discussed amongst ourselves why we do it. We all agree, usually with some measure of wonderment, that, post-dip, we feel extraordinarily good. For some, I suppose, the decision to dip started much like Sir Edmund Hillary’s timeless explanation for summiting Everest—“because it’s there.”

  I bought a refrigerator magnet recently which summed up, as only refrigerator magnets can, the philosophy of life as I aspire to (not as I do) live it. “Dance as though no one is watching you, love as though you have ne
ver been hurt before, sing as though no one can hear you, live as though heaven is on earth.”

  To this, I would add “jump in the ocean on New Year’s Day” if you want to. Happy New Year.

  I usually received a few emails from readers in response to my columns, sometimes agreeing with an opinion on one political issue or other, but often not. I liked best the responses from readers who disagreed, as part of the fun of the column was provoking a passionate reaction. Given the nonpolitical nature of that column, though, I didn’t expect much of one that time.

  It was evening before I had a chance to sit at my computer in the kitchen and open my Herald email. I had seven new messages, but from their subject lines, only three or four looked like they might be from readers.

  I clicked on one. It was from Michael Welsch, a friend I’d once worked with. Welsch, an amputee, was a regular competitor in marathons and triathlons. He was amazing.

  “I know you will do fine,” he wrote. “Just think, you can do anything for a minute. Go for it!”