From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: Also during that trip, we went to visit my brother Tommy and sister-in-law Barbara’s house. They were only twenty-two and twenty-three but they already had two children. Elizabeth was six months old and Hale was one and a half. We walked in and I said, “Hale, this is my friend Steve.” Hale immediately started chanting, “Bite, dump, bite, dump.” Steve was totally mystified and somewhat miffed because he didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. Well, Hale had a Little Golden Book called Steve the Steam Shovel, and the steam shovel spent all day going, “Bite, dump, bite, dump.” You learned quickly that if you were going to have a relationship with me, you were going to have a relationship with all these other people.

  SR: That’s true. That first weekend certainly set a tone—meeting Cokie’s mother, meeting Barbara and Tommy and those tykes who are now the parents of our grand-nieces and-nephews. And that was very much the way life was and continued to be; family always comes first.

  CR: Then we drove home and we smooched all the way back even though there were other people in the car—but that part was embarrassing.

  SR: That was embarrassing. But fun.

  CR: So we had had this whole long night of talking, we had our embarrassing ride home, then we went out on a date and had a good time. Then you didn’t call again.

  SR: True enough—it took some sherry to push me over the edge. I lived in Eliot House, and our master, John Finley, regularly invited interesting people over for dinner. The guest one evening was a visiting professor of English named Mark Van Doren, and since I was taking his wonderful course that spring, I was the first one to sign up. Those dinners were among the few times that serving alcohol was officially sanctioned—we always heard that some rich alum had given a grant to supply the house with sherry. I had several drinks and was getting a buzz going and Van Doren was a marvelous speaker and the whole evening was just terrific. And I had to talk to somebody about it. I went back to my dorm room and I was bouncing off the walls and I called Cokie and started babbling.

  Luckily I was supposed to speak on a panel at Radcliffe the next weekend. Harvard was a very sexist place—Master Finley used to say that his job was to keep his young men thinking about women 60 percent of the time instead of 80 percent—and girls were thought of as weekend dates, period. This never struck me as right, and I had been writing some articles in the Crimson, the student newspaper, about how women were not taken seriously enough in the community. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, was thrilled to discover this odd Harvard man who actually thought that women had brains. So she would trot me out at various events, and in my inebriated excitement, I told Cokie about my speech. And she said, “Well gee, I’d like to come hear it.”

  CR: No dummy I!

  SR: I started to say, “Great, come to the speech Saturday afternoon and we’ll go out that night.” Somewhere in my deepest male soul I knew that I was crossing a line that I had never crossed before. This was breaking my rule of only dating a girl twice. It was so traumatic.

  CR: Terrifying.

  SR: So terrifying that I choked on the words. I actually had trouble getting them out, but eventually did. So she came to that event and we did go out that night.

  CR: And then we went out all that spring. It was one of those years where the weather was gorgeous during the week and poured every weekend and our dating was pretty much confined to weekends because there were all these college rules. I had to be in the dorm at ten o’clock on a weeknight. Despite the rain, we had a very nice spring. We knew our religious differences could block any long-term relationship, so we kept saying, “Well, this is just because it’s spring.”

  SR: It later became something of a joke, as the seasons changed and we were still together, so we engraved “forever spring” into our wedding rings. But that spring did have a magic quality to it. I had always been uncomfortable and uptight on dates, but at some point I realized I could be at ease with this girl. That I could be myself with this girl. That I didn’t have to worry about going to exactly the right restaurant or making sure we had the right movie tickets. If one thing didn’t work out, something else would. It was the first time in my life I felt that way in the presence of a girl.

  CR: On spring break we went to New York for the weekend. Steve was staying at home in New Jersey and I was staying at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We went for a walk through Central Park, then to a movie, then to the Russian Tea Room. We had apricots and plums and Steve said he liked those colors together, and from there on out I kept desperately trying to find apricot-and-plum combinations.

  SR: I still plant flowerpots with those colors.

  CR: And then we went back to my friend’s and sat up all night talking and reading poetry, if you can believe it! Early Sunday morning I went to church and Steve got on a bus and went back to Bayonne.

  SR: I walked into the house and my grandfather, who lived with us, was up already. He looked at me sternly because I had been out all night. He didn’t say anything; he was a rather mild-mannered man. But I remember thinking, “Pop, if you knew the half of it. The girl I just left went straight to Mass.”

  CR: We still told each other it was just a spring romance. And I certainly thought that was the safest thing to say. Anything more would have scared him off. But we were very happy and clearly in love. Then came summer and I went home to work for the government and Steve stayed in Cambridge to edit the student newspaper. But we did spend a few weekends in Washington together, and I went to visit Steve’s parents in Bayonne for the first time.

  SR: That was important because my parents were very uneasy about this relationship and we knew instinctively that the best way to deal with it was for them to get to know Cokie in a way that the Boggses were getting to know me. As a real person, not just a stereotype.

  CR: But that summer Steve dated somebody else, which I found out about and didn’t like a bit.

  SR: I was still struggling with the whole commitment thing, and there were a lot of girls around who thought that the editors of the Harvard Crimson were pretty neat. At the end of that summer we went to another student political meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. I was flat-out mean to Cokie; that’s the closest we ever came to breaking up.

  CR: When we went back to school, it was tense.

  SR: Slowly we started seeing each other again and we rediscovered there was something special between us. But it took a while to get over the resentments of the summer, and at one point she agreed to go to the Harvard–Yale game with somebody else.

  CR: But I broke that date, and then the day before the game Jack Kennedy was killed. Steve and I decided to go away for that weekend because I was too upset to stay in the dorm with everybody watching TV and crying. We stayed at a friend’s house in New Hampshire and I remember driving to church that Sunday. By this time Steve’s parents had given him a car for senior year, so that made a big difference, but it was a miserable car which did not have a heater. This was Boston. Trying to get to church that Sunday was terrifying because the weather was bad and the car didn’t have a defroster. This little tiny church in this little town in New Hampshire had a catafalque in the middle of the aisle to represent Kennedy. It was so strange.

  SR: But that was an important weekend. We decided that we wanted to be together. Our college careers were defined by Kennedy’s presidency—he was elected in the fall of our freshman year—and killed in the fall of our senior year. He gave young people a sense that we could participate and make a difference, and we fully shared that belief. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other.

  CR: In some ways we missed a huge American pageant that weekend because we didn’t have a TV. All of America was experiencing the same thing and we weren’t.

  SR: We were learning a lot about each other. But I was starting to write a senior thesis and working very hard and continuing to act out these silly male attitudes toward dates.

  CR: He would call me on Saturday morning and break a date for that night, saying he had to
work too hard. So I finally caught on and started going in to Cambridge early on Saturdays and studying in the stacks at the Harvard library so he couldn’t reach me to break the date. I would just show up at the appointed hour.

  SR: Many of our dates followed the same pattern. I was working for The New York Times as their campus correspondent. It was a great job because I got a chance to write stories for the paper and establish a relationship with them and make a few dollars as well. My typical Saturday assignment was to cover some Harvard sporting event, like a track meet, then write a brief story. I would have to send it to New York and I had two choices. One was a really old-fashioned Western Union office, where I would peck out a cable on a totally dilapidated typewriter. Or I would call a recording room at the Times and dictate the story and spell all the names, to make sure there were no mistakes. To this day Cokie remembers the spelling of the star sprinter, Chris Ohiri, who was Nigerian. I repeated his name so often because I was convinced the desk would put in an apostrophe and try to make him Irish. I would make a swift $5.00 for this effort, but there was a restaurant in Harvard Square named Cronin’s that had a dinner special for $1.98, so the $5.00 covered dinner for two, plus tip. After dinner, Cokie often sang with her a cappella group, the Wellesley Widows. On many Saturday evenings they would perform around Boston, at different clubs or events, and I would sit in the audience with the other groupies. As the head of the group, Cokie was the emcee, so not only did I learn the words to every one of their songs, I heard her jokes over and over again. I guess not much has changed.

  CR: Then your thesis was done. It was spring break and you decided to break up with me.

  SR: I did? What happened?

  CR: I went to Jamaica to sing and I came back really tan, which was a good thing because you met me at the airport determined to break up with me. But I looked great. Thank goodness I wasn’t worried about skin cancer and wrinkles in those days. You had been home seeing your parents and they were quizzing you because we were getting close to graduation and the real world was about to happen. You had essentially said to them, “Not to worry, this relationship is not going anywhere.” And then you met the tan me and we went to Princeton to see my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Paul, and had a really nice time. So you went back home the next day and said, “Well, actually, maybe it is going somewhere.” And that was the beginning of the conversations with your folks and what it meant for the future.

  SR: They were very uneasy. Bayonne was a strange place; the Jewish community was completely self-contained. I had friends outside of the Jewish community because I played sports around town. And occasionally there were non-Jewish girls in my high-school class who I got to know. I went to a sweet-sixteen party at a Polish-American home and it was like going to another country, because hardly any Jews dated non-Jews. Also many of the brightest Catholic kids went to Catholic high schools, so I had had a very unfortunate experience in high school—I knew relatively few smart Catholic kids. It was easy to absorb the prejudice that most smart people were Jewish. In Bayonne, the first question anyone asked was “What’s your religion?” At Harvard it was the fifth or sixth question. It was a thoroughly different environment. But my parents still lived in a world where it was the first question you asked. I remember my father saying, “If you marry this girl, we’ll be strangers in your house, and we won’t know our grandchildren.” That understandably frightened him terribly. But that’s why the time we spent getting to know each other’s parents was very well invested. At some point my father admitted to me, “Well, it would be a lot easier to oppose this match if it weren’t so obvious that she’s the perfect girl for you.” When I counsel young people these days who are in a mixed religious relationship, I always tell them, the more time you spend with each other’s families, the better.

  CR: My mother actually thought I might be taking up with Steven in order to show the world that my parents weren’t prejudiced. My sister, Barbara, had been engaged to Allard Lowenstein and my parents opposed the match. Barbara and I believed they objected because Al was Jewish, and we were hurt and upset because we thought they had raised us not to have any prejudices at all, except, as Barbara used to say, against “Republicans and senators.” This was flying in the face of everything they had taught us, and I told Daddy that when he was driving me to work one day. He said, “Cokie, I’ve gone around and around in my own mind about this and I swear to you that is not it.” If it were Hermie Kohlmeyer, he insisted, the son of a Jewish friend in New Orleans, he would be giving his blessing. But Al scared him. “I just don’t think this guy will ever be there for her,” he said, which was fair enough. He had really thought about it a long time, grappled with it in his own mind, and that conversation convinced me that it was not prejudice that caused their opposition. But a lot of other people thought it was.

  SR: I think it made a big difference that Cokie’s parents had fought through this issue before I came along and had confronted their own feelings. It also helped that many of Hale and Lindy’s strongest political supporters and good friends in New Orleans were Jewish, so they had had a different life experience from my parents.

  CR: But none of this was easy. We graduated from college in an era when everyone got married right out of college. We were going to a wedding a week. So that began a period of angst, not knowing if we could ever work it out.

  SR: One of Cokie’s roommates got married in the summer after junior year and moved to California, taking her wardrobe with her. Suddenly many of Cokie’s best outfits disappeared. There was one in particular, a beige corduroy number, that I missed for years.

  CR: So while many of our friends were getting married, we were still dating. But we both ended up in Washington after graduation, so that meant we continued to see each other often. I got a job through the college placement office, of all things, working for a television production company here.

  SR: During the fall of senior year I had heard about an internship offered by James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, and after I wrote to him, he invited me to Washington for an interview. I came down on November 1, 1963—I remember the date because it was the day the Diem government fell in Vietnam, a huge news story. Still, Reston spent hours with me. Then of course the Kennedy assassination happened three weeks later, and yet, when I was home for Christmas, Reston sent me a handwritten letter saying, “Here’s another Christmas present, you have the job!”

  CR: My mother wrote you a letter of recommendation.

  SR: Is that right? I had forgotten that.

  CR: He said you were recommended by everybody but Charles de Gaulle.

  SR: It was a very good thing that I came to Washington. Cokie was living at home and I was living downtown, but I was at the Boggs house—now our house—all the time. I even got used to Tabasco sauce on my eggs and chicory in the coffee, a New Orleans specialty that is definitely not for everybody. The other thing that really made a difference that year was the example of Scotty Reston. When I worked for him he was the most influential person in American journalism. His column set the tone and rhythm of the city. Yet he cared very much about helping me and developing my writing and he always made time to answer questions. But he was even more important as a personal role model. He had a long wonderful marriage to his college sweetheart, Sally—“my gal Sal,” he called her—and his wife and three sons were absolutely central to his life. Just by living that way and setting those priorities, he communicated to me that being married and having a family were completely compatible with reaching the top of your profession. In addition, he was a relentless advocate for marriage. He knew Cokie. He liked Cokie. He knew her parents. He would storm into my office, trailing pipe ashes, and say, “When are you going to marry that girl?” It made a big difference.

  CR: But they were agonizing years, they really were. Oh, I don’t mean we didn’t have fun. Of course we did, a lot of fun. I particularly loved a trip to Coney Island where you won a stuffed animal for me by shooting basketb
alls, and then I made you go on the parachute jump. After showing off with the baskets, you were so terrified on the parachute ride—I can still see that look of sheer horror on your face.

  SR: I’ve never quite forgiven you for that.

  CR: Too late for that. It was because we liked being together so much that we agonized. There were times when we absolutely thought that this was not going to work, because of religion. I remember at some point that you thought your parents would cut you off if we got married, and I thought that we could not live like that. Your family meant much too much to you. I was traveling a lot, producing TV shows in different cities, and I remember miserable phone conversations late at night in hotel rooms.

  SR: In one sense caring so much about family and tradition made it all harder. We could not ignore who we were or what we’d been taught. Converting was never a possibility for either one of us and abandoning religion was also out of the question. But gradually we came to realize how much we shared. The labels were different but the values were the same. And since then, we’ve often reflected that Catholics and Jews make good matches. We’re both really good at loyalty and guilt.