From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: My mother could not have been more accommodating. She threw us a big welcome-home party with Greek food and decorations on what turned out to be our eleventh wedding anniversary. She turned over her room to Steve and me and moved into my old bedroom with Becca. She gave us her closets and dresser, and put all her stuff under the bed she and Becca shared. It was more than a little strange for me, with Becca in my old room, Lee in my sister Barbara’s old room, and Steve and me in my parents’ room. The house had not changed since my father had died; some of his things were still in their bedroom, even though it was almost five years since his plane had disappeared. My mother’s mother had been living there, with a full-time housekeeper to help look after her, so Mamma had not even thought about leaving the big house in the suburbs for something more convenient downtown. But the previous April my grandmother had died, and Mamma was reaching a point of decision about the house. She knew that I loved the house, had always wanted to live in it, had in fact picked it out when I was eight years old, but she didn’t want us to feel pressured to move in. She encouraged us to look at other houses, and we did.

  SR: We had so many things to do and buy. We needed two cars! We bought one real jalopy, which lasted about three weeks. I needed new clothes because I hadn’t gone into an office regularly for nine years. Fortunately, the neighborhood public school was a good one, so the kids’ situation was easy to settle, and we had waited until almost the first day of school to arrive in Washington so they could plunge right in.

  CR: House hunting was a real shock. When we had left the area, many people who worked in the New York Times bureau lived in my family’s neighborhood, and usually on only one salary. By the time we got back, there was no way on earth anyone could do that. The growth of the government during the sixties and seventies had drawn all these well-paid lawyers and lobbyists and consultants to town and they had driven real estate prices through the roof and interest rates were at an all-time high. It became clear that to live in what was just a regular house, we had to have more money and that meant I had to find a decent job, not something to occupy and amuse me. The obvious place to start was CBS, since I had worked for them in Greece, but the bureau chief crisply told me that foreign stringer was one thing, Washington staffer quite another. I made the rounds of the networks soon after we arrived in town, but it was Steven who found me a job.

  SR: I had worked in the Times bureau thirteen years before, but there were many new faces, including the one at the desk next to mine. I introduced myself and she said her name was Judy Miller and that she had just started working at the newspaper. I asked where she came from, and when she said National Public Radio, my reaction was “What’s that?” Public radio was then about five years old, but for four of those years we’d been in Europe and I had no idea what she was talking about. When Judy described public radio, I said, “I’ve got a wife crying herself to sleep every night. I’m desperate about finding her a job and that sounds like the perfect place. What do I do?” Judy said, “I know they’re hiring because they are replacing me. Call Nina Totenberg.” Nina knew friends of ours and had heard we were coming to town and agreed to help, at least partly because she wanted to make sure NPR hired more women. It was the first time I’d seen the old-girl network in action, but not the last. So the next morning I brought Cokie’s résumé downtown with me so she didn’t have to make a special trip, and Nina came downstairs and met me outside the NPR offices. Since then, she’s become one of our dearest friends. A few years later, in another gesture of female solidarity, Cokie was an usher—an usher, not a bridesmaid—in Nina’s wedding.

  CR: Nina got me in the door. But NPR still didn’t hire me. For a while I was on a weekly retainer. None of it was certain. In fact, even though I was filing stories almost daily, I wasn’t hired for a long time. I remember Steve’s sister got married in October, and when we flew up to Boston, I cried the whole way. I couldn’t see how any of this was ever going to get resolved. Nobody was hiring me, we couldn’t afford to live anywhere, I felt like I was a child in my mother’s house. It was all a mess, though I loved the work itself. When I was finally brought on staff in February 1978, it was at the lowest-level reporter’s salary. That made it tough in terms of buying a house, but we were eager anyway to get that settled. By that time we had been living with my mother for six months. Her things were still under Becca’s bed, ours were still in storage, and the situation was unnerving for everyone.

  SR: At first we didn’t think we’d move into the family house, but soon we realized that it made the most sense. It was in a good school district and the kids loved it. In fact, they told us that they had always seen that house as their home base as we traveled around the world—something we had not fully understood. Also, of course, there were many fond memories and a few ghosts—most of them friendly, Casper-like.

  CR: And it was a very special place to Daddy, so it was hard for Mamma to give it up. But it was also time for me to be mistress of my own house, with my own things around me. No matter how generous and wonderful my mother was, and she was incredibly generous, we didn’t want to be camping out. If this was going to be our house, it had to be our house.

  SR: Something had to give. And finally, our sister-in-law Barbara intervened just the way my brother had intervened years before and helped my parents accept our determination to get married. She went out and found Lindy an apartment.

  CR: Which my mother never liked.

  SR: And basically handed her the keys and said, “You’re moving!”

  CR: It wasn’t quite that bad, but almost.

  SR: Almost. For us, though, it was a great relief to finally be settled, particularly in a place that meant so much to us. It was springtime, and I realized there was an unwritten clause in the deed of sale that I would take over the gardens. Hale had focused on the vegetables, while Lindy had put in lovely perennial beds. The vegetable gardens had not been planted for years and I felt a powerful obligation, and even more a desire, to revive them. But I didn’t have a clue about how to start, and I remember that first spring walking out and looking at the bare ground and thinking, “What the heck do I do now?” Fortunately, there was a man named William Barnes who had worked for my in-laws for many years, and essentially I apprenticed myself to him. Slowly and patiently he would teach me about this piece of land, and that gave me a great sense of continuity. He had worked with my father-inlaw, he knew and loved the place, and we still had a lot of my father-in-law’s tools, which had rested idle in the shed for years. I learned from William, but in many ways I was also learning from Hale. I felt a very strong connection to him when I worked in the garden, and I still feel that way all these years later. That’s where his spirit is most alive, and in a way I feel that it’s still his land. I’m just a caretaker.

  CR: Well, I think you qualify! You’ve been at it twenty-two years.

  SR: Some of my fondest memories of Bradley Boulevard involve Hale and his garden. I asked him for Cokie’s hand in the tomato patch. Many of the earliest dinners I had there were in the summer and included his vegetables. Half the talk was about politics, the other half about vegetables, and that’s still true. That first spring I planted tomatoes for the first time but I had no idea how big they would grow. Like a pupil seeking approval from the teacher, I went running over to William: “Come look, come look.” One glance and he burst out laughing: “You’ve got to take every other one and dig them up because they get much bigger than you think. You’ve got to plant them much farther apart.” Every Saturday, William and I had our rituals. During the morning we’d work together, and he would teach me things, and then we’d come in for lunch. Every Saturday I would offer him a beer and every Saturday he would say no. But I offered him one every week. He died much too young. But he stayed alive long enough to pass on his wisdom to me. I even have a few, just a few, of my father-in-law’s tools. There are two old watering cans of his that I still use. Galvanized steel, they’ll last forever.

  CR: The kids were
delighted that we had finally settled in and they had their things around them again, though Becca missed snuggling at night with her MawMaw. Lee had been sleeping in an antique four-poster with brocade spread and dust ruffle. He couldn’t wait for his bunk beds to arrive, and for me to cover the brocade valances with NFL football fabric. Aside from missing their stuff, though, the kids had had a good adjustment to America. Since they didn’t know anybody, I thought it was important to send them to the same school, one in the neighborhood where they could meet other kids. At the time we had no decent child care. A high-school boy named Anthony came for a few hours in the afternoon until we got home. But he needed to leave at a certain hour and I was always frantically trying to cover in case we were late, which we often were. Fortunately, my niece and nephew, Tee and Hale, were in high school and able to drive, so they were a big help. But sometimes everybody’s signals got crossed, and the changing of the guard that was supposed to happen didn’t happen. Lee once ended up standing on the curb for hours waiting for Hale to pick him up from soccer. At one point we were broadcasting the Senate debate on the Panama Treaty live on NPR, where I was still very much proving myself. I asked Steve, who was also working on the Hill, “Could you please call Tee and ask her to get over to the house and relieve Anthony.” Steve said he’d do it but he didn’t. He was working and just forgot. I was furious. Anthony stayed but was all bent out of shape. The hassle was constant. Finally, after about a year, Rosie Nowak, a Scottish woman who had been the kids’ last baby-sitter in Greece, came over from Europe and saved my life.

  SR: It was taking me some time to realize that for the first time in our marriage our jobs were comparable. We had moved three times for my work, really four times. To New York in the beginning when Cokie gave up her TV show. Then of course to California and Greece and then back to Washington, with my work dictating every decision. Through those years Cokie always worked, but we were not equal. Now that was changing. It was changing because we needed her income. It was changing because she was working full-time. It was changing because she had responsibilities. That caused a big adjustment.

  CR: Huge adjustment, for the whole family. And the whole family also had to adjust to the fact that Steve was now home, not traveling a sizable percentage of his time. I was used to making very simple meals when he was away. The kids loved Spaghetti-Os. I would sit down and visit with them and pick at something to eat and then get everybody to bed early. It was a much more organized life when Steve wasn’t there. His coming home was almost a holiday. So it was a big change to have a full-time man in the house. It meant a big meal on the table every night. I was incapable of doing something really simple with Steven home.

  SR: Which was partly your problem. Often you’d insist on doing something complicated when I wasn’t expecting it.

  CR: I would come in from work and start making these time-consuming dinners and we’d finally all sit down exhausted at the dinner table at eight-thirty or nine o’clock. The kids were pretty good about it. When they got older they told us that they hated it when we’d call assuring them, “We’ll be home in a half an hour,” and then call back: “Actually, it will be an hour.” They were expected to adjust their schedules to us. They thought that wasn’t fair and they were right.

  SR: Yes, they were right. We didn’t mean to be negligent or thoughtless, but we were both covering news stories and couldn’t always predict what was going to happen.

  CR: And we wanted to be with them, we wanted our family dinner, so we’d ask them to wait for us to get home rather than eat early without us. Years later they told us that they sometimes shared an early meal at a friend’s house and then had another dinner with us. Our motives were good, but we sometimes made their lives more difficult.

  SR: Often we were commuting together and that meant operating on the latest common denominator. If one of us was done early, often the other was not. And it got worse when NPR started Morning Edition, which meant that after Cokie filed for the evening show, All Things Considered, she had to start all over again for the morning. Even so, we enjoyed commuting together, and it helped our relationship. On the ride to work in the mornings we’d make plans and coordinate schedules. On the way home at night we’d have half an hour in the car to catch up on the day before we walked in the door.

  CR: A couple does that anyway even with the kids around; I’ve watched it with other people, too. At the end of the day the husband and wife catch up with each other. If the kids are there, they want to be part of the conversation, but the couple tends to exclude the children until they’ve finished exchanging the news of the day. By the time we finally got home, the kids had our undivided attention.

  SR: Fortunately, I was fairly well established at The New York Times by this point. So while Cokie was in a position of proving herself, I had a little more security and a little more control. I wasn’t great about it, Lord knows, but being at different stages in our careers helped a bit, I think.

  CR: Well, it helped and it hurt. As you started to see how hard the home/work juggling act was for me, you started picking up more of the balls. On the other hand, I was in the uncomfortable position of being a junior employee, which meant I only had a two-week vacation and I sometimes had to work on weekends, which was terribly disruptive to the family.

  SR: The best example of my increased flexibility came when the accident happened at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. It was in early 1979, a little over a year after Cokie had been hired onto the NPR staff. There was a threat of an enormous nuclear disaster. That morning Cokie’s editor sent her to Pennsylvania to cover the story and she was eager to go; it was one of her first really big stories. Just a few hours later my desk told me to go, too, and I said no. It might have been the only time that I ever said no to The New York Times. But I had no expertise, they were just looking for a warm body, and I didn’t think it was fair for the kids to have both parents away, particularly when they were worried we might be in danger.

  CR: And they were scared. It was big news here and they were old enough to understand.

  SR: That was the first time in our marriage where your work took precedence over mine. Don’t you think?

  CR: Other than finishing up the paperwork for Serendipity back in California, yes. I had been away on stories before that and you had helped some at home. I traveled some during the ’78 campaign, doing stories on gubernatorial and congressional elections. I had been determined not to cover politics and Congress. I thought that would mean totally enmeshing myself in my childhood. Not only was I back in my house, but I’d also be back in my second childhood home, the Capitol. NO! In truth, because of the stage of life I was in, I was more interested in stories about school and children. But when the ’78 campaign heated up, my good friend Linda Wertheimer said to the editors at NPR, “Don’t you think that Cokie, who was raised in a political boiler room, should do some of these stories?” So I did cover the campaign and liked it. I went out and talked to voters and found out what was important to people. In my view, that still didn’t make me a full-time Washington type. I would help Linda out on Capitol Hill from time to time, but I was not assigned there. That happened after the ’80 campaign. That year Linda and I divided up the coverage: she reported on candidates and I wrote about voters. After the election, public television started a program on Congress called The Lawmakers, and Linda, Paul Duke, and I were the anchors. In order to do that program well, I really did have to be on the Hill full-time.

  SR: It was the same for me. I had been covering politics and the Hill part-time and I was having fun doing stories about other things. I had spent nine years running my own bureau, and one of the great things about covering a region of America or a foreign country is that you can write about anything. Culture, economics, sports, family life. To do your job right you had to cover the whole society, not just the government. As much as I wanted to come back to Washington, it was hard to shift gears and write about a very small slice of the world, politics, and publi
c policy.

  But we learned something important during the ’80 campaign, something many families with two working parents come to realize. What’s important is not just the number of hours worked, but who decides the hours. I learned that controlling my schedule could make the difference between chaos and sanity. During the ’80 campaign we both came to understand that if we were covering voters as opposed to politicians, it was a lot easier on the family. If a kid had a soccer game and I was covering Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Carter was in Iowa, I’d have to be in Iowa with him and miss the soccer game. But if I had to do a story on farmers in Iowa, I could stay for the game and then go to Iowa the next day. It was a small compromise but a critical one, and it gave me a measure of control over my life.

  CR: We also preferred covering voters to candidates. The stories were more varied and it didn’t involve sitting through the same speech six times a day, but occasionally we paid a price, in the sense that we saw each other less. There were times we traveled together, but obviously it was better for the kids if one parent was at home.

  SR: Most of the time we would leapfrog. Cokie might do a story on Southern whites in Birmingham early in the week, then after she got home I’d go write about rubber workers in Akron. At other times we met up with each other on the road. We spent our fourteenth wedding anniversary together in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, covering George McGovern’s 1980 Senate campaign.