From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: We went to Puerto Rico, where we were staying at a friend’s apartment, and Steve had forgotten to bring a bathing suit. So the first day we went to a shop in a nearby hotel to buy him one.

  SR: I went to pay for it and the clerk looked at me and asked, “Just married?” And I said, “What, it shows?” He laughed and pointed: “Your ring.” I hadn’t noticed but it was so bright and shiny. Once the bathing-suit crisis was resolved, everything was going along well until my back went out—it hurt like hell.

  CR: He couldn’t move. How pleased I was!

  SR: Eventually it went away, but at certain key points in our marriage—a new child, a new job—that same muscle would start hurting again.

  CR: So I dubbed it his “newfound responsibility muscle.”

  SR: It was a warning signal, like the canary in the mine, chirping, “Stress alert, stress alert!”

  CR: Then we went to New Orleans, because my great-grandmother had not been able to come to our wedding, and we wanted to see her. Also, Steve had never been to New Orleans, so we visited relatives and ate good meals and stayed in the honeymoon suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel.

  SR: You don’t normally go see relatives on honeymoons, but that’s still our priority. If we have a free Sunday night, usually we see family rather than anybody else.

  CR: Then it was time to settle into New York. We had spent the summer apartment hunting, and at one point Steve was trying to nab a rent-controlled apartment on West Seventy-fifth Street between Broadway and West End. It had four rooms at $185 a month, and if we didn’t take it instantly it would be gone. But there was an airplane strike on, so I couldn’t get to New York from Washington fast enough to see it before Steve signed the lease. The people who lived there before us had egregious taste—purple-and-mustard walls, mirrors around the dining area, a fake marble floor which they tried to get us to buy at the incredible sum of one thousand dollars, which was much more money than we had. Also it was ugly and we didn’t want it. So in an act of true meanness, they took up the floor and took down the mirrors. When I first saw the apartment, it had a concrete floor when you walked right in the door and horrible walls in ugly colors. One look and I burst into tears.

  SR: Great! The first big decision in our marriage and she starts crying. I had already violated Arthur Goldberg’s advice—don’t cause a woman to weep.

  CR: Then, when we came back from our honeymoon, there was a sign up in the elevator that said “No Heat or Hot Water Until Further Notice.” And that became a symbol of what my life in New York was about to be like. It was not unadulterated bliss as I went around trying to find a job and figure out my role in this new place and in this new relationship. I had no identification in my new name. So I carried my marriage certificate around everywhere, just to prove to people that I was in fact this other person I had suddenly become.

  In the end it was good for us—for me—to leave Washington. But it was very hard to pick up and become another person and not have any separate identity from Steven at all. I would go job hunting and get rejected and become depressed about it. The days grew very long. It reached the point where I would say to myself, “You must do X today,” so that I’d leave the house in an effort to cheer myself up. I’d scold myself, saying things like, “You must go to the bank by three o’clock in the afternoon.” One day after Christmas I set a goal of returning a wedding present to Georg Jensen, a fancy New York store. But in my depressed state, I couldn’t quite manage to get dressed. I decided that was all right, I could do this without getting dressed. I put on a blue coat and a hat that matched it and went to the store in my nightgown! I figured it was terribly important to fulfill my pathetic goal for the day, and if I had waited and tried to get dressed, I was likely to fail. When I arrived at Jensen’s return counter, standing right there was the person who gave me the wedding present. There are eight million people in the city of New York and the friend who gave me the wedding present shows up at the same time I do at the return counter. What are the odds of that happening? I was so flustered that when the salesclerk asked, “Should I put this on your account?” I mumbled, “Yes, yes, yes,” and quickly gave her my name. I didn’t have an account, I was just trying to get out of there, but I couldn’t move fast enough, I was caught in the act. Fortunately, the friend thought it was funny and as a gesture of forgiveness invited me to come along with him to Nelson Rockefeller’s swearing-in as governor. Of course he had no notion I was in my nightgown! Like an idiot, I accepted. We got there and the room was jammed with people and TV lights, 1966 TV lights, so it was hot as it could possibly be. Everybody kept offering to take my coat. “No, no, no, I’m fine,” I insisted, “I’m just fine. I’m from the South and oh, it’s cold!” Then my friend asked me to lunch and at that point I had brains enough to go home. No lunch. I think I might have even mentioned to him that I was in my nightgown. It does show you that I was a basket case. I guess I didn’t realize how much of a basket case. And even when I told Steven that story, he just thought I was odd.

  SR: Well, I was used to your eccentricities! It didn’t strike me as at all odd that you went out in your nightgown!

  CR: I don’t think I’ve ever done it since, except to get the newspaper.

  SR: That wasn’t the only funny story about returning wedding presents. Many of the gifts from New Orleans came from one big jewelry store—Adler’s. When Cokie’s mother went to Louisiana she would pack pieces of silver in her suitcase and return them for us. To make sure that the pieces remained unscratched, she would sometimes stuff them with her underwear, but one time, when she was rather hurried, she returned several presents with her underwear still packed in them. A few days later, with this great flourish, a courier arrived at her apartment and presented her with this very carefully laundered, ironed underwear courtesy of the jewelry store!

  CR: But I’m curious about how you felt during this period when I was so unhappy and looking for a job and trying to figure out what my life was going to be.

  SR: I think I was largely oblivious. I was focused on my own job at The New York Times and I was working hard and I was enjoying myself. But it does go back to that earlier assumption, that men’s jobs were much more important and whatever women did was secondary. The fact that we never discussed whose job was more important was emblematic of that. But I do think that even women were not all that clear about what was happening.

  CR: That’s right. A lot of us, certainly including me, didn’t understand how meaningful and significant work was to us. And the experiences that many of us were having—being turned down for jobs because we were women—seemed to be happening to each of us individually. We’d make bitter jokes about a prospective boss asking how many words we typed, something they never asked our male counterparts, but as far as we were concerned, that’s just the way things were. It was only after we all started talking to each other that we realized we were being illegally discriminated against and that’s when the modern feminist movement came into flower. But the period where each of us was alone in our misery was a very difficult period. Nowhere was it written that women would feel this way. I expected to live happily ever after. It was a big shock and a sense of failure on my part to feel frustrated and depressed. In retrospect, I’m glad I learned the lesson then that I’m a person who needs to work in order to be happy. It saved me a lot of grief later in life.

  SR: The fact that I was earning the only paycheck was not an issue in my mind, but it did bother Cokie. I used to tease her that she had, after all, brought a substantial dowry into this match—a slightly used Ford Falcon and four years left on a five-year subscription to Esquire. That was about it! Plus a few hundred wedding presents of course. Anyway, she eventually got a job.

  CR: At the Insider’s Newsletter, a small weekly tip sheet on politics and the markets, sold mostly to the business community. It turned out that I found something I was good at—reporting. I could learn almost anything from almost anybody. It was a great job and I loved doing it, but the
newsletter folded after I had been there about a year. Then I went to work at Channel 5, an independent TV station. The ten o’clock news had started something called the action report, a nightly feature where the station solves viewers’ problems—run-ins with Social Security or the Housing Authority, that kind of thing. So I produced the segments and did a good bit of the reporting for them. It was a rotten job. We’d get five hundred letters a day from people in these terrible situations and we could solve hardly any of them. I felt it was phony. And I saw some of the worst things in New York. I’d go into some building that was urine-soaked, with no electricity, and I couldn’t do anything about it but rant and rave to Steven, who was covering housing for the newspaper. I discovered shortly after I took that job that I was pregnant, which I was delighted about, but that meant I couldn’t leave because nobody would hire a pregnant woman.

  SR: One of the big questions we were facing from the beginning was children. We were still pretty young. To have children was an added burden…

  CR: I was dying for children. All my life I had wanted children. I loved playing with babies. I loved dolls. I had a great time with my nieces and nephews. We took a trip to Europe after we had been married for a year—Rome, Paris, London, in that order—so we were in Rome for our first wedding anniversary. Those were the days when we had two incomes and no responsibilities, and we were young enough to enjoy low-budget trips. We went someplace for supper in Rome and then to St. Peter’s Square with a bottle of Asti Spumante to celebrate our anniversary. And I ruined the whole evening by crying and saying I wanted a baby. As I remember it, Steven’s reaction was primarily puzzlement.

  SR: But that trip provided one of the best moments in understanding each other. As any young couple comes to understand each other. We were in Florence and we were at the Uffizi Gallery. We both enjoy art but we’re not overly knowledgeable about it.

  CR: There’s an understatement. Ignorant would be a good word.

  SR: But we were determined to slog through one of the world’s most famous galleries. We felt obligated to stay until closing time. It seemed the only possible option. So we were on this forced march from room to room and at five o’clock the museum closed. We thought it closed at six, so we were prepared for another hour of feigned interest. It closed at five and each of us turned to the other and whooped, “YEAH!” It was like getting a half day off from school.

  CR: Liberation.

  SR: It was one of those perfect moments of early marriage where you say, “You, too?” We had a great trip except for Cokie’s bugging me about babies. But that soon got solved because of another big issue in our young marriage—the Vietnam War. I was prime draft material. I had gotten out of the military year by year by doing the minimum that my draft board required, taking courses in graduate school. While I worked for Scotty Reston in the Washington bureau of the Times I attended George Washington—the school where I now teach—and I’m glad that the department never looked up my record before hiring me. I don’t think it would’ve sat well. Then I enrolled at New York University but I didn’t work very hard, and occasionally I would even turn one of my Times stories into a class assignment. Eventually the university caught on that I wasn’t serious and kicked me out. I’m in no way proud of it, but I tried to stay out of the war every way I could. That was certainly one of our considerations about trying to have a baby; it would mean a fatherhood deferment from the draft. In fact, we used to joke that we would name the baby Lewis Hershey Roberts, Lewis Hershey being the head of the draft system.

  CR: Ironically, both of us had covered the new Selective Service law, and neither of us managed to notice a section in it that said fatherhood deferments would no longer be granted to anyone who had graduate-school deferments beyond a certain date. Once Steven was unceremoniously ejected from graduate school, I happily got pregnant. Then we learned he wouldn’t be eligible for the deferment and he received a notice reclassifying him 1A, meaning the military could call him at any time. He was ordered to report for a physical exam on September 11, 1968, the day after our second wedding anniversary. So a few weeks before that, we went to visit a doctor in Bayonne, a friend of Steve’s parents. The guy was a dermatologist, but still he was an M.D., and we begged, “Find something wrong with him!”

  SR: He did. He found that I had elevated blood pressure because I was scared to death. I had no history of it, no documentation or anything. The doctor wrote on a prescription pad—this was the sum total of my medical history—“Steve Roberts has elevated blood pressure.” And that was all I took into the exam. I had to bring an overnight bag with me because if there was some question about your physical condition the Selective Service could keep you overnight for tests. Of course, remember this was also 1968, a rather turbulent year. Cokie and I had just gone to the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I went out to the draft board and went through the process and realized that they had canceled all graduate-school deferments by then. For everybody. Most of us who were called in that day were already twenty-five. It was guys out of law school and they didn’t want any of us. We were just going to be too much trouble for them. At the physical, my blood pressure still registered pretty high, so they deferred me for three months, which meant I’d be almost twenty-six and out of danger when that deferment expired.

  CR: They had plenty of eighteen-year-olds, and it shows how unfair the system was. Not long after that the Selective Service changed to the lottery. In a town like Bayonne, where not many people went to college, the poor and less educated were snatched up instantly by the draft. People who had some money and the ability to get some education weren’t. The poor died—the rich didn’t. Even though I mightily disapproved of the way the draft worked, I was hypocritical enough to be incredibly relieved that Steven had at least temporarily escaped. I was terrified of losing him. Not long after we were married, he had been assigned to cover the Newark riots. At about midnight he called me from the hospital where he was getting a casualty count and told me he’d be home in about forty-five minutes. Hours later, when he finally made it past all of the police checkpoints, he found me huddled on the floor inside the door of our apartment. I was so scared that he was dead. Like so many other young wives of the time, I saw Vietnam as a threat to my whole future, to all my hopes of happiness. Even if Steven had gone and come home safe, he would have had a life-altering experience that I would not have shared. I knew that there were certain disadvantages in meeting and marrying young, but I thought one of the real advantages would be a long shared history, which has turned out to be true. I hated the thought of him doing something so significant without me.

  SR: But the Vietnam War was shadowing our lives in other ways. I was covering the student protests around the country and sympathizing with them. Cokie’s father was the third-ranking leader in the House and a strong supporter of Lyndon Johnson. Religion had never really been an issue with my in-laws, but in that period politics sure was. There was one day when Cokie and her sister had lunch with their parents at a restaurant in New York, “21.”

  CR: We got into a screaming, yelling fight about Vietnam, culminating in my sister and me walking out. Not a great display of maturity. The people in the restaurant clapped when we made our dramatic exit. I’ve been embarrassed about it ever since. It smoothed over quickly because nobody in the family was interested in having a fight last for any length of time, but it was a tense time for many families; lots of them were having those kinds of arguments.

  SR: One family I wound up writing about was the Rudds. Mark was the leader of the Columbia student uprising in the spring of 1968, and his father was a military man, so it seemed like great material for a feature piece. The Times assigned me to do it, partly because Mark Rudd was a Jewish guy from northern New Jersey, just like me. I went out to his parents’ house and rang the bell, but his mother wouldn’t let me in. I turned on every ounce of charm and pulled out the names of all of these Jewish families I knew in their town, Maple-wood. She was dying to talk to me, but Mark t
old her over and over not to dare talk to anybody in the press. Finally, she gave in and let me in, because she wanted to tell me what a good son Mark was. To prove it, she told me that on Mother’s Day, she’d made a casserole, driven to Columbia, and parked behind the building that Mark was occupying. He then snuck out the back way and ate the casserole in the car with his parents. You can imagine how humiliating that story was for this great radical when he read it in the newspaper. Then Mrs. Rudd showed me her garden, proudly telling me, “My son the revolutionary helped me plant this garden.” We spent a couple of hours talking, and finally, at the end of this interview, she looked at me and sighed: “Tell me, you seem like such a nice boy, have you ever done anything to upset your mother as much as Mark has upset me?” And I said, “Actually, Mrs. Rudd, I did. I married a shiksa” (a Yiddish word meaning a non-Jewish woman). At that point she gasped in horror: “My Markie would never do that!”

  CR: Of course her son had turned the university and the city upside down. But a shiksa? Never!