From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: My reaction to all this was to be inclusive, to try to learn as much about Judaism as possible. I was in Cincinnati over Rosh Hashanah and one of the oldest temples in Reform Judaism, the Plum Street Temple, is there. I had no idea that tickets were required for services, so I went up to the door and the usher asked, “What do you want?” I said, “I want to come in. I want to go to services.” They guy said okay and he walked me down the aisle and said in this huge stage whisper so the entire congregation could hear, “Here’s one that came without her boyfriend.” It was not a good moment.

  SR: We both understood that if this was going to work, we had to be supportive of each other and had to learn about each other’s background. During college Cokie once took me to visit the nuns at Newton College outside of Boston. They were from the same Sacred Heart order that taught her in grade school and high school, and seeing Cokie’s love and loyalty toward these women made a big impact on me. One of the things that I always tell people is that it can’t be one way. It has to be two ways. Often I find that Jewish partners in a mixed marriage think that the Christian should learn about the Jewish part but don’t necessarily understand that the Jew has to learn about the Christian part. It’s got to be mutual. And by going to temple—even without me there—Cokie was making an important gesture of respect that helped convince me this could work. Today everyone says that Cokie is the best Jew in the family, and it’s true. Not long ago our daughter had to bring a special dish, called haroset, to a Passover Seder, and she called her Catholic mother for the recipe. Eventually I came to realize that if you’re serious about one religion, you’re serious about all of them. The real question is whether you care about faith and ritual or not. And Cokie certainly proves that.

  CR: One year when I was dragging Steve off to temple on Rosh Hashanah, he joked, “My mother was right. I should have married a Jewish girl; she wouldn’t have made me go to services.”

  SR: Even though we were working this through, and even though Scotty was on my case, none of that could get me to pop the question. After my year in Washington, the Times moved me to New York, and we were separated again.

  CR: And I decided I was wasting the best years of my life. I was twenty-two and I was about to be an old maid! Steven began to get a sense of how fed up I was one day when we stopped at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike and decided to share a Danish pastry. I was raised to believe a woman always gave a man the best piece of everything, and Steven was raised to expect that. That day, when I ate the center out of the Danish and left him the crust, he knew I was truly ticked. I finally said, “I’m not doing this anymore, I’m going to California.” And I really meant it. To me it seemed more painful to stay together, not knowing if we would ever be married, than to just end it and hope to meet somebody else.

  SR: She did force me to make a decision. I knew that it was the right girl and the wrong time. But when I contemplated her actually leaving—that I couldn’t imagine. If it was a choice, which it clearly was, then I knew what I had to do. The joke in the family is that the way I proposed was to say, “Oh, all right, Cokie!” There’s more than a little truth to that.

  CR: I said this is the only time. If you want this girl, this is the time.

  SR: I was a little resentful, but she was right. Remember this was 1966, and we were really shaped more by the late fifties than the late sixties. Getting married was the thing to do. I’ve looked up the statistics, and that year the average age for a man to get married was 22.8 years, and I was already older than that. For women it was 20.5 years, so Cokie was right, she was well on her way to spinsterhood. Of my nine roommates who lived together senior year, seven were already married. It was almost like playing musical chairs. The music stopped on the day you graduated, and you married the person you were dating at the time. That was true for most of our friends.

  CR: We kidded that girls’ schools advertised, “A ring by spring or your money back.” I think for a lot of girls there was also an expectation that we would not have a career, even though we had equally fine educations as the men. We expected to work for a couple of years and have kids and then do something good in the community. To succeed as a young woman meant finding the right guy. Marriage became very, very important because that was pretty much it. That was your goal in life. The man you married not only determined your well-being and sense of happiness, he also determined your status. Was the person you married good enough for you? I remember my sister saying once when she was about twenty-three, “I don’t even want to be married now. I just wish I knew who I was going to marry so I could be relaxed about it.” It was such a different era. I was reading a letter recently from my roommate who moved to California, and she was writing about the Berkeley campus in October of 1963 and saying it was so intimidating, all the sorority girls were so well dressed, everybody wore pearls to class every day. A year or two later that campus was in flames. The world changed in so many ways overnight.

  SR: So Cokie reflected the era when she insisted that it was now or never if I wanted to marry her. When I finally realized that was my choice, we planned this romantic moment—we would take a carriage ride around Central Park and I would ask her to marry me. But the words snagged in my throat, just like they had three years before when I finally broke the two-date rule. The ride was practically over before I got them out, and Cokie was not pleased! Then she announced that I had to come to Washington to ask her father for her hand before the engagement could be official. She also insisted that before I came, I had to tell my parents what was going on. True to my form, I put it off and put it off. Finally, ten minutes before the plane took off, I called my mother from the airport. “Hi, how are you?” she asked, and I blurted into the phone, “Well, actually, I’m going to Washington this week and Cokie and I are getting engaged.” Mom burst into tears and I hung up the phone. The morning it came time to talk to Cokie’s dad, he had escaped to the tomato patch and I had to be pushed out the door. My future father-in-law was so nervous he handed me a watering can, and I was so nervous I started watering my shoes. I told him that Cokie and I wanted to get married and he said, “Fine.” But I didn’t take yes for an answer. I plunged ahead; I said, “Well, sir, I do know that you think Cokie and I will have problems because of religion, but we do think that we can work them out.” And he answered, “Yes, I do think you’ll have problems, but not half as many problems as I’ll have if I try to tell Cokie who to marry.”

  CR: So you came back in. We opened some champagne. Your twin brother, Marc, was here for a friend’s wedding and he said a very smart thing, which was, “Come on. Let’s get in the car and drive up and see our folks.”

  SR: Through this period my brother had played a very important role. Our parents had focused on their own fears, which was fair enough, but they were not focused on the implications of their attitude. My brother went to our parents and said, “Look, Steve and Cokie are going to get married, and if there is any sort of a breach, any sort of a problem, it’s going to be your fault. All they want is your blessing.” That shocked my parents and forced them to rethink their feelings. My father said to me later that he felt an obligation to urge caution and raise questions while it was still up in the air. But once it was settled, then it was their role to become more supportive. And that’s what happened. But my father never did get used to chicory in his coffee.

  WEDDING

  So now we were engaged, with a wedding to plan—lots of possible potholes along that road! Under the best of circumstances, weddings can drive perfectly loving caring families to the edge of violence. For us, the way we decided some aspects of the ceremony carried the weight of how we would make religious decisions for the rest of our lives. Over the years we’ve watched couples of different faiths work out their marriages and seen three essential models. In many cases, one partner converts, or steps back from any religious input, and the family practices a single faith. For other couples, religion is not important, and simply fades out of their lives. Neither of thes
e options made sense for us. We were too rooted in our own traditions, and too respectful of each other’s, to consider anything but the third version: running our family, and raising our children, with both religions as integral parts of our lives. Easy to say, not so easy to do, and our wedding became the first serious test of our theory. Could we really be both, Catholic and Jewish? Could our relations with our parents, and each other, survive the stress? The whole process, painful as it was at times, taught us a great deal about solving problems, showing patience, focusing on what was truly important. And looking back, it’s clear the wedding became a metaphor for how we would live our lives together. Or at least try.

  CR: Only a few days after that eventful carriage ride, I made an appointment with a priest in a nearby parish because I didn’t want to waste any time on my way to the aisle. My question for the priest: what was the current state of play in the Church about marrying a non-Catholic, particularly a nonbaptized person? I was twenty-two and I was pretty brave about doing this on my own, but I wanted to have all my facts down before I talked to my parents about what I wanted, which was to get married at home. The garden of our house had always been a very special place to me, and I knew it would be much easier for Steve’s family if they didn’t have to actually go into a church, even though it was extremely important to me that it be a Catholic wedding. For years the Church had been, to put it mildly, unwelcoming to non-Catholics, insisting that they marry at home or in the rectory of the church. Then they were allowed inside but on the side altar, then on the main altar but with no nuptial Mass. But, the priest told me, the Second Vatican Council, in a gesture toward other religions, had just recently changed all that—a full nuptial Mass could now be said in a mixed marriage. When I told him that not only did I not want a Mass, but that I wanted to be married at home, he said, “That’s going to be a bit of a public relations problem for us.” He knew that my father’s position as Majority Whip of the House of Representatives would mean the wedding would be in newspapers all over the country and the priest worried that people would think we weren’t allowed to marry in a church. And I remember saying, “I’m afraid that’s your problem, not mine. My problem is that my husband’s grandparents had to escape Europe, their families suffered through horrible pogroms, don’t you think it’s pretty harsh to insist that they walk into a Catholic church?” To his credit, the priest totally got it and received permission from the bishop for me to marry at home. But when I told my mother that’s what I wanted to do, she was distressed. She said to me, “That’s not a wedding, that’s a party.” She wanted the solemnity of a sanctuary. Then I said to her, “Mamma, think of it from the perspective of Grandpa Abe, Steve’s grandfather.” Given her truly kind nature, she instantly understood. So from there on out it was a question of trying to make it as comfortable for everybody as humanly possible. We had the ceremony after sundown on Saturday, so it wouldn’t be on a Sabbath day. We had a chuppah, which is a Jewish wedding canopy. My father’s brother was a priest and he would officiate, and we tried to convince a rabbi to come as well, but that was not easy.

  SR: I asked the rabbi from my old temple in Bayonne. No luck. My parents had moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, but their new rabbi wouldn’t come either. After a while it got demeaning. There was this odd underground of people who had rabbis’ names who would whisper to you, “Hey, I know one who does them….”

  CR: We were given the name of one guy who was known for performing mixed marriages. He actually had another job, working at the White House. But when I called him there and addressed him as “Rabbi” as opposed to “Mr.,” he said quickly, “I’ll call you back from a pay phone.” When he called me back he asked me all these questions about things like “vicarious atonement” and I had no idea what he was talking about. I kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to my fiancé about all of this?” Finally he agreed to marry us but he wouldn’t share the platform with a priest. So we were still left with no rabbi.

  SR: It was frustrating because both of us were trying to be attentive to everybody’s feelings. Cokie’s uncle didn’t have much choice about being part of the ceremony; he had learned that weddings of his nieces and nephews came with the territory of priesthood. I was faced with the question of having a priest sign the marriage certificate. In the end I thought, no, that didn’t bother me, that was not important. But it was important to me to have some Jewish element in the ceremony. I understand why most rabbis will not participate in mixed marriages. Their fear that Judaism will be diluted is very real. But in the end I think their stand can be counterproductive. They will not stop most mixed couples from getting married, but they will deprive those couples of a Jewish presence, and a Jewish blessing, at their wedding and in their home. If rabbis were more welcoming to mixed couples, I think they would actually strengthen Judaism, but I know most of them disagree with me.

  CR: Just that spring, the Catholic Church had officially given its blessing to a cleric of another faith joining a priest for the ceremony. In fact, the doctrine is very clear. The ministers of the sacrament of matrimony are the couple themselves. All those other people up there are merely witnessing.

  SR: It was important to Cokie to be married by a priest, and I had come to accept and respect her Catholicism. In fact, I had come to realize that many of the qualities I loved most about her came directly from her training by the nuns—her sense of charity, her consideration for others. So how could I object to a priest’s name on our marriage certificate? Too bad we couldn’t have a nun do it! But I did draw a line at signing a promise to the Church that I would raise the children Catholic. My view was, and still is, that I would promise Cokie anything, but I didn’t want any outside clergyman—Jewish or Catholic—telling us what to do. So when we decided to raise the children in both religions, we agreed that we would train them ourselves. I knew I could live with Cokie’s version of Catholicism, but I wasn’t sure I could accept what some priest I didn’t know told my children. On the promise issue, I had balked at signing something because the Catholic Church required it. But that spring, Pope Paul VI changed the rules so that only the Catholic partner was required to sign a pledge to raise the children in the faith, not the non-Catholic. Cokie teased me then that the pope had taken away my last excuse for not marrying her. It was the Jewish side that was much more difficult.

  CR: Well, it was easy for the Catholic side to be cooperative; there was never any question in my mind about having a fully church-sanctioned wedding. That’s why I felt an obligation to find a rabbi, so I made most of the phone calls looking for one. I must say I hated that. In the end it was Steve’s mother who finally said it was getting a little much. When she and Steve’s father came to meet my parents toward the end of August, she came up with the answer.

  SR: Whenever the Boggses socialized with Jewish friends, which was often, I’d make sure to tell my parents, just to reassure them that these were not strangers. And it happened that my future in-laws were friends with Arthur and Dorothy Goldberg. He had been a justice of the Supreme Court and had just left to become the UN ambassador. That spring Hale and Lindy went to the Goldbergs for their Seder, which was a famous Passover tradition in Washington. Goldberg came out of the labor movement, he had been counsel to the AFLCIO before he was secretary of labor, and they would sing old labor organizing songs. So we eagerly told my parents about this event.

  CR: Also, at Luci Johnson’s wedding, on the sixth of August, my father had read one of the lessons, and that gave Steve’s mother the idea. It didn’t have to be a cleric up on the altar. Finally, she said to me, “You know, Cokie, in Jewish tradition a rabbi is a learned man, an elder of the tribe, and all of this search for a rabbi is humiliating. So why don’t you consider a learned man like, say, Arthur Goldberg?” We asked him and thankfully he agreed.

  SR: It was funny, though. He was already contemplating a political career in New York—eventually he did run for governor—so his first reaction was to say, “Great, I’d be happy to do it.” Then he
started consulting with rabbis in New York because he was a little concerned about his political base and he came back to us and said, “I can’t pretend in any way to be a rabbi.” The rabbis’ “union” made it clear he had to play a different role, and Arthur Goldberg never bucked a union.

  CR: Actually he tried to back out with, “Can’t I just give a toast?” We said no.

  SR: In the end he hit exactly the right note—a short talk on the Jewish view of marriage, a few Hebrew prayers, the traditional breaking of the glass. And that fulfilled our main goal, making my parents and their friends feel recognized and respected. But Goldberg’s presence was important for me, too, a way of saying, very publicly, this is who I am, this is my tribe and my tradition, and that tradition will always be part of our family.

  But the other big question was who to invite. Hale was the whip of the House, the Democrats were in the White House, and this wedding was going to have a political dimension to it. So my mother-in-law kept bugging my father-in-law, “Who should we invite from the Congress?” And finally, in exasperation, he said to her, “All the Democrats from the House.”

  CR: This was after the ’64 landslide.

  SR: There were over three hundred Democrats in the House of Representatives. And a good many of them came. Years later, when we reported on the House in the eighties, people would come up to us all the time and say, “I came to your wedding!” And we had no idea who they were.