From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  SR: It was the fall of ’72, right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Winnie probably had a better chance than George McGovern, the Democrat running against Richard Nixon. As the election approached, The Washington Post was beating our brains out with stories about Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein had written that many of the dirty tricksters who worked for the Nixon campaign were based in Southern California, so I had to cover that story while all the rest of this was going on.

  CR: Right before Daddy went to Alaska, my parents had been in California raising money for the Democratic congressional ticket. They were in L.A., and while Mamma was working on some other campaign event, Daddy took the kids swimming in his hotel pool. He spent a nice long day with them and me. That was the last time I ever saw him.

  SR: We learned something in this period about the importance of mourning rituals to a family and to a marriage. Because the search for Hale’s plane continued for months, Lindy was not ready to have any sort of service for a good while.

  CR: It was so strange in so many ways. For some reason, I had always had a fear about someone disappearing and never being found. I remember when a plane sank into Lake Pontchartrain and when another one crashed over the Grand Canyon and no bodies were ever recovered. I would always think, reading those stories, that would be awful, to not know with certainty that someone you loved was dead. Little did I know that I would someday be in that position myself, and I was right: it is awful. No matter how much I intellectually accept the fact that the plane must have gone to the bottom of the cold, deep Prince William Sound, emotionally I’ve always half expected my father to turn up someday. For years, after I moved into the family house, I didn’t change the kitchen wallpaper because I was afraid he might find his way home and then think strangers were there. Eventually, of course, the paper got so dirty I had no choice. But I’ve always had a tremendous amount of sympathy for the families of the missing-in-action. Some of them truly believe that their lost soldiers are still roaming the Vietnamese countryside, but most just want to claim the bodies, to know for sure what happened, and to be afforded the commonplace dignity of burying their dead.

  SR: The next year I was assigned to cover the return of the POWs, and I could share with many of their families that special pain of losing a loved one, yet being deprived of certainty, of the chance to mourn and heal. Covering that story also provided an insight into marriage: many of the young couples broke up after the men returned, because their foundation was too shaky to take the weight and pressure of such a long separation. The older couples, who had time to build a life together before the husbands became prisoners, stood a much better chance for survival.

  CR: In Daddy’s case, the fact that he was missing caused all kinds of complications. First of all, he had to get reelected to Congress. He didn’t have an opponent, but still, for various technical reasons, he had to be actually elected. So he was, even though he had been missing for weeks by then. Being away from family at that time was very hard. I was worried sick about my mother, and I was so grateful to my brother and sister-in-law, who were in Washington. I kept asking, what would we do if there weren’t three of us siblings, each with spouses who can help?

  SR: Lindy was resisting having a memorial service because it would be something final and she said many times that it would be breaking faith, that Hale might still be found. But finally, when Congress reconvened in January, his seat was declared vacant, and the next day there was a huge service in New Orleans, with massive contingents from Congress and the Nixon Administration. The Boggses’ old friends Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson also came, and President Johnson died only a couple of weeks later. The night before that service about thirty of us—including my parents and many of Lindy and Hale’s old friends—had dinner in a private room at Antoine’s around a big round table. People were uncertain about how to act. One of them asked us, very nervously, is it all right to talk about Hale? And we said, of course, that’s why we’re here. It started slowly, but gradually the evening turned into this rollicking wake of funny stories about his life. Afterward, my mother said to me, “That’s what I want you to do for me.” And in fact, we have done something similar—a night of memories and stories—for my dad and a number of others since then. It was a moment in marriage when you realize that sharing grief is part of the journey. It is part of what you do for each other.

  CR: Another thing you do is back off, don’t try to fix it. When I finally realized that I would never see my father again, I was so profoundly sad, I think it was hard for Steven. I was the youngest child and my father had always taken great delight in me. Losing him meant that never again would I be loved in quite that way. And knowing that he would never know my children broke my heart. There was nothing Steven could do about any of that, and it was tough for him to handle.

  SR: That’s true. But I also missed my father-in-law in my own way. I always dreamed that when we eventually returned to Washington, I could learn from him about the ways of Congress and politics, and I never got that chance. When we did come back, and I started covering Congress, I would search out many of Hale’s old friends, sit at their feet, and hear their stories, receiving from them what I might have gotten from my father-in-law. And I wanted to pass on to my children tales of their grandfather, to keep alive their sense of a man they would never remember.

  CR: During the search for my father, I couldn’t stay in California worrying. So I moved east with the children for a few weeks, where at least I could be somewhat helpful to my mother and we could do our worrying together. It was, fortunately, at a time of hiatus in the TV show, otherwise I guess I would have quit. The fact that the TV tapings had fallow seasons worked both for me and against me. It gave me time off, but it made me antsy. During the antsy times Steve and I started writing together.

  SR: The whole world wanted to know what was happening in California, and I had a lot of offers to do magazine pieces, but I couldn’t get to them all. So we hit on this plan—Cokie would do most of the research, I’d write the piece, she would edit it, and we’d use a double byline. She had always been my best editor, so this was simply an extension of what we’d already been doing. And a good way for her to get out of the house. We did a whole series of pieces. One was for Seventeen on teenage mothers keeping their babies, a brand-new trend. We also did some travel articles. It was fun writing together, and it added a different dimension to our relationship. I’ve always had a lot of confidence in Cokie’s ability, at times more than she had in her own.

  CR: It was also extremely useful for me. Steve had a name already. For me to have my byline with his on stories in good magazines was very important. In truth, I wasn’t writing much. He was writing, I was editing. In later years that changed. But it was important to my professional development; I learned a lot and the public recognition made a huge difference when we went abroad. It made me feel that I could do something professionally, not be lost.

  SR: She talks about going abroad. After almost five years in California, as much as we loved it, it was time to do something else. So I went to New York to talk to my bosses about our future.

  CR: It was October of ’73, and as soon as he left, another huge brushfire swept through Malibu. Rather than stay up all night monitoring how close the flames were coming, I decided to leave. I packed up the kids, and the dog, and went to Millie’s house. It was just before Halloween, and the kids insisted on wearing their full costumes. When we got to a police checkpoint on the Pacific Coast Highway, off to the left of us was a huge wall of fire; it looked like a holy card of hell. The policeman checked the car, where he beheld a little witch and a little ghost! And Freddy the dog! At least it gave him one good laugh on a terrible night. The fire passed quickly, and Steven came home from New York with wonderful news—the Times had offered to move us to Greece!

  SR: It was the perfect time for a foreign adventure. The kids were at a highly portable age—three and five. Cokie’s show had won a bunch of awards, but to her credit, she
understood—even better than I did—that the experience of living abroad would far outweigh the costs of putting her career on hold one more time. My one regret was my parents. Now I was taking their two grandchildren even farther away from New Jersey. But my twin brother and his wife did more than their share, having produced two daughters and a baby boy, to help fill the grandchild gap.

  CR: At that point I thought of California as home. I could easily imagine living there the rest of our lives. But when the offer came to move to Greece, I was ready! I think women make a mistake when they say no to a great opportunity because it doesn’t fit exactly into a career outline at the moment. First of all, even in terms of a career, the experience of living abroad can be very useful. But secondly, it’s terrific in terms of broadening life. I was terribly excited about the prospect, and right after we learned the news I went to New Orleans, where my mother, who had been elected to fill my father’s seat in Congress six months earlier, was being honored by B’nai B’rith. I unthinkingly burst into a room full of people and blurted out, “We’re moving to Greece!” Here she was, a widow of only a year, and I was moving thousands more miles away. Mamma handled it, as always, completely graciously, but it must have hurt.

  SR: We might have been the parents of two children, and recognized professionals, but we didn’t always act like grown-ups. The worst example of continuing childishness came that Christmas when we went east to see the family and to celebrate Cokie’s thirtieth birthday. This was at the height of the oil embargo and the East Coast was really suffering from shortages, much more so than in the West. For weeks before we arrived, my mother fretted, warning us that driving would be difficult, that there were long gas lines everywhere. I got very annoyed with her, which I normally did not do. I kept saying, “Look, Mom, I am the New York Times correspondent in California, I travel all over the country by myself, I can handle it!” Well, we went to Washington and borrowed a car from Cokie’s brother to drive to New Jersey and then we went into New York for a day. When we started back out to my parents’ house, we discovered there was very little gas in the car, so we got in a long line. After inching forward for blocks we finally reached the pump just as the station ran out of gas. We edged into another line, but that station ran out before we made it to the pump. Then, as we went searching for gas, the car ran out, right in the middle of an intersection. We managed to get it to the side of the street and go to the Times, where the truck dispatchers conjured up a few gallons—enough to get through the tunnel to the Jersey side. So, after snapping at my mother for weeks that I could handle this situation, I had to call my parents and say, we’ve run out of gas, please, come get us. It was one of the hardest calls I’ve ever had to make. Years later I had reason to remember it when a similar thing happened to Lee. He had had more than a few driving mishaps as a teenager and was eager to show us that those years were over. On his way home from college he had a flat tire and changed it. Then he had another flat tire and he didn’t have a second spare. It was after midnight and he had no option but to call us. I got in the car and drove two hours to pick him up. As we headed home he turned to me: “I hope you understand how hard it was for me to make that phone call.” And I answered, “I do, Lee, because I’ve been there.” When I told him the story about running out of gas, he was thrilled!

  CR: After our East Coast misadventures, we went back to California to start packing up. But before we left for Greece, I had to fulfill my TV contract to produce twenty-six episodes of Serendipity. The Times was ready for us to go and we had to stay until I was finished. That was the first time my work took precedence. Steve was great about it, saying, “If you have to stay, you have to stay. We won’t go in January, we’ll go in March.” The movers were at home packing up around me while I sat at my typewriter frantically trying to finish all the final paperwork, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the packing. Months later, when I was in Athens unpacking, I kept smelling this awful odor that got worse and worse as I dug deeper into a big box. Finally I got down to the problem: the movers had packed a full potty seat! A friend of mine had been visiting with her one-year-old right before the packing started. There was also a dead mouse, but I think he died along the way. Probably the stench from the potty seat got him. My inattention to the packing also deprived us of a moment of sentiment that it turned out we had each been anticipating. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s last act before leaving home had been to remove the mezuzah, the symbol of a Jewish household, from the door. My sister’s husband’s Irish-Catholic mother had given us a mezuzah as a wedding present (she also sent her family’s christening gown at the appropriate points), and separately, we each imagined Steven taking it down as we got in the cab to leave for the airport. But when he went to get it, he discovered the mezuzah was already packed up and on its way to mark our next doorpost, our doorpost in Greece.

  SR: As we got ready to move, we worked hard to get the kids, who were then three and five, interested and excited about their new home. Cokie put up posters all around the house of the Acropolis and the Agora, and other Greek temples and monuments. Becca kept looking at the posters and the books we showed her. Finally, she said with tears welling in her eyes, “Daddy, are we going to have to live in one of those tumbled-down houses?” She thought all the buildings in Greece were ruins. But they weren’t. In our future was a lovely house, surrounded by orange and lemon trees, in the first suburb north of Athens. The name of the street was Agias Sophias, which translates as both Saint Sophie and Holy Wisdom. And we would need plenty of the good saint’s wisdom, and protection, for our little family during our years abroad.

  GROWING UP IN GREECE

  The romantic notion of a foreign correspondent, to quote our old California friend, is of a “hard-living, hard-loving writer on the road.” No spouse or kids at home to limit options or nurture guilt. But we had learned from our days in California—a foreign country to most Americans, after all—that it was actually better to live abroad as a family. Not only did you take your best friend and lover with you, but children, more focused on circuses and cookies than parliaments and politics, provided a fresh view of the cultures you were covering. The hard-living, hard-loving types came home to empty apartments and out-of-date address books. Steve came home to the life and laughter—and yes, the stresses and strains—of St. Sophie Street. One of the stresses was Cokie’s work. She was eager to move, and give up her job, but she also knew that she needed something stimulating to do in Athens. Producing TV shows was out—they were all in Greek. Part-time reporting for American radio seemed like a good bet. But Steve’s sensitivity to the situation was not all that great, as a stopover in London on our way to Greece made clear.

  CR: Before we left for Greece, I went to talk to the networks and said, “Look, I’m learning Greek, I’ll have access to Steve’s Telex, I’ll be involved through him in all the news, can’t you use me?” CBS handed me a tape recorder and said, fine, file for radio. But I knew I couldn’t count on that; I needed to hedge my bets and talk to everyone I could. My next stop was Westinghouse, which at that time had a big radio network; there, I also got some encouragement. At NBC, which is where I’d been working, I was told to call on the London bureau chief when we stopped there on the way to Greece. I dutifully made an appointment at NBC in London, but Steve wanted to buy a Burberry’s trench coat. He couldn’t sit for the children while I went to NBC because, he insisted, he couldn’t be a foreign correspondent without the right trench coat. So I missed my appointment at NBC.

  SR: I don’t remember the story quite that way. I was all for Cokie working, and encouraged her to become a radio reporter, because I thought that medium would use her skills well. But was I also self-centered and insensitive at times? Without a doubt. And the trench coat was cool. Lots of rings and pockets and epaulets. It made me a feel a bit like Snoopy, getting off a plane in a new country, carrying my typewriter and muttering to myself, “Here’s the world-famous foreign correspondent….” Butin many ways it was the kids wh
o adjusted to their new life first. One of my earliest images of Greece is putting Lee in school and watching him disappear down the corridor with his new teacher.

  CR: It was so easy with Lee because there was an American school and he was able to start kindergarten right away. But he did have one complaint: “Didn’t The New York Times know that I just learned to read when they sent us here?” With a different alphabet he couldn’t read the billboards and street signs. Becca was much harder to find a place for. Eventually, a slot opened at the one American-style preschool and she happily went off on her own, at three and a half, to “The Early Childhood Education Center.” Just hearing her pronounce the name was worth the price of tuition.

  SR: After we’d been in Greece only a few weeks, it was time for the Orthodox Easter, their most important holiday. A military government was running the country and the foreign press corps was invited to an Easter celebration at an army base outside of Athens. The soldiers were performing all the traditional rituals, roasting a lamb and dancing, and we were sitting there and watching, still feeling a bit tentative and out of place. We looked around and Lee and Becca had dashed out onto the dance floor and were dancing with the soldiers! I turned to Cokie and said, “Well, I guess we’ve finally arrived in Greece!” Or at least two of us had. That was actually the only pleasant encounter we had with the military regime. It was a tense time, with many Greek nationalists either in jail or out of the country. I had to be very careful in talking to people about the government because I could get them in trouble with the junta. The Nixon Administration backed the regime, so it was particularly dicey for an American journalist. Fortunately, the government did not last long after we got there.