It was just a few hours after the shooting, but I felt as if I already had gone through the early stages of grief—disbelief, shock—and had settled firmly into the anger stage. I didn’t know who this guy was who had shot my wife. (I wouldn’t even learn his name until days later.) I didn’t know why he had done it. But I did know that there had been an environment that encouraged hatred, a lot of it focused on my wife. I needed to talk about it.
“You know, Mr. President,” I said, “politics in Arizona has really gotten out of control.” I recounted for him my disgust over a fund-raiser held by Gabby’s opponent, Jesse Kelly, in the 2010 race for her seat. A candidate with heavy support from the Tea Party, Kelly had invited supporters to “Get on Target for Victory in November” by paying fifty dollars to shoot a fully automatic M16. His ads invited shooters to “help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.” A six-foot-eight former U.S. Marine, Kelly was featured in his ad campaign holding a gun, with the tag line “Send a Warrior to Congress.”
President Obama listened when I told him about Kelly and Palin. I don’t remember him commenting on them directly. He did ask questions about the others who were killed and injured, and about Gabby’s care. Before we hung up, he said, “You have the full resources of the United States government. Call me if you need anything. You and Gabby have a friend in the White House.” I thanked him for listening—we’d been on the phone less than ten minutes—and then an operator came on the line and gave me a direct number I could call if I needed to reach the president.
In the days that followed, Sarah Palin received a great deal of media attention about the crosshairs controversy. In response, one of her aides said that the bull’s-eyes on her website map were actually surveyor’s marks, not gun crosshairs. (The map had been taken off the site the day of the shooting.) Palin herself posted an eight-minute video online in which she said her “heart broke for the innocent victims” in Tucson. “It’s inexcusable and incomprehensible why a single evil man took the lives of peaceful citizens that day,” she said. But she also had a message for those who questioned her rhetoric, adding: “Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”
Gabby and I both were aware that there are mentally ill people who do horrible things. I don’t know if the shooter in Tucson ever looked at Sarah Palin’s website, or any others that targeted Gabby. Whether he did or he didn’t, he pulled the trigger again and again and again. He is to blame. He did it. That goes without saying.
And yet, at the same time, I agreed with what Gabby said before she was injured. All of us, especially those who want to be leaders, have a responsibility to the higher callings of democracy and civility. We need to tone it down, speak more respectfully, and fully recognize that words have consequences.
I’ve been told by John Coale, a Palin advisor, that Sarah and her husband, Todd, were “devastated” by the tragedy in Tucson. Coale, a Washington attorney and the husband of Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, was sincere when he reached out to tell me that. I don’t doubt his description.
In the early days after Gabby was shot, I thought Sarah Palin might call me to say she wished Gabby well and that she was praying for her and the other victims. We heard from many Republicans offering heart-felt messages. Given that a lot of the discussion in the wake of the shooting had singled out Palin, I expected she might also want to clear the air.
As Gabby remained in her coma, and I sat by her side, I found myself thinking about what I would say if the phone rang and it was Palin. I even ended up constructing a few precise words.
“Thank you for reaching out,” I planned to tell her. “Gabby is hanging in there. Thank you for asking.”
I would have listened to what Palin had to say, graciously accepted her words of consolation. Then it would be my turn. I vowed to myself that I would address the violence in Tucson head-on.
“You are not responsible,” I planned to tell Sarah Palin. “But you are irresponsible.”
I don’t know how she would have responded to me. She may have been insulted. She may have been open to discussion. She may have said things that would resonate with me. As it turned out, she never called.
In the years before the shooting, Gabby knew politics often required forceful language and scrappy interactions. She was a policy wonk, but she was also a woman who spoke frankly and fearlessly. Many found her refreshing. Others were put off by her.
When she got to Washington, Gabby didn’t mind taking on the federal government. She’d go on radio and TV and make pointed statements. She explained to NPR that she represents one of the longest U.S./Mexico border districts in the United States. “The federal government has essentially failed the people of Arizona,” she said. “We have over twice the number of illegal entrants as California, Texas, and New Mexico combined. Yet the federal government has not reimbursed Arizona for the costs of health care, for the costs of our schools, for the costs of first responders and law enforcement.”
She fought over issues that people outside border states didn’t even know existed. For instance, a lack of cell-phone service plagues sparsely populated areas of Gabby’s district near the border with Mexico. When a rancher went missing in 2010, poor coverage made it impossible for anyone to call law-enforcement agencies for help. The rancher was found dead, allegedly murdered by a border-crossing smuggler.
“This murder is the latest in a disturbing trend of home invasions, burglaries, assaults and other lawless activities along the international border,” Gabby wrote in a letter to Lowell McAdam, president of Verizon Wireless. Ranchers carry cell phones but have no service, she wrote, leaving them “isolated and endangered when they encounter drug- and people-smugglers on their lands . . .
“I am aware that Verizon has portable cell phone towers that can be located in areas where coverage is inadequate or unavailable. These towers were installed in Arizona to provide critical security during the most recent presidential campaign. There is a need to do so again to provide security to the families who are under fire from smugglers in Southern Arizona . . . I look forward to your earliest response and the support I am sure you will want to provide.” (McAdam promised to study Gabby’s request, as did the president of AT&T. Since the shooting, Gabby’s staffers have remained on the case.)
Gabby always had a pile of issues such as this on her plate, and she was a workaholic. I used to say if she was awake, she was working.
Each week, she was asked to make appearances at about fifty meetings or events, and she’d try to accommodate as many as she could. She had trouble saying no, especially if it involved constituents, and her schedule was overwhelming. Her staff kept track of all the numbers. In 2009, for instance, she appeared at 530 events and meetings in Washington and 216 in Arizona. On top of that, she also attended 231 “private events,” usually get-togethers with community leaders and constituents. Her staff even kept track of her days with me on their color-coded calendar. I had my own color: purple. The records show Gabby spent fewer than a hundred days with me in 2009, mostly in Arizona or Washington. She came to Houston for just a dozen of those days.
Gabby’s weekly trips back and forth between Washington and her district were not easy. She’d wake up at 5:00 a.m. in Arizona, catch a 7:00 flight to Dallas, where she’d connect to a Washington, D.C., flight. Door-to-door it took her eight to nine hours. She preferred a window seat on early morning flights so she could lean against the window and catch a few minutes of sleep. On afternoon flights, she wanted the aisle so she’d have more room to work. She could spend a whole flight composing e-mails, which would be delivered the moment she landed. Her staffers knew when she’d arrived because a flood of e-mails would fill their in-boxes, often with detailed directions on how to focus their efforts on improving constituents’ lives.
Ron Barber, Gabby’s district director, once got into a philosophical discussion
with her about the meaning of life. Why are all of us brought into the world? Why do we exist? They went back and forth on the question, and then Gabby finally said, “I think it comes down to this: We are here to care for each other.”
To that end, Gabby was also a diligent thank-you-note writer. She’d typically write or sign five hundred a week. On the plane, at the kitchen table, in the car, she’d have a giant stack of paper in front of her. Each one would have a personal note scribbled at the bottom. To me, it seemed as if she remembered something about everyone. She sent many thank-you e-mails and notes to her thirty-five staffers and interns, too. She was loyal to them and they were loyal to her.
Some staffers felt that Gabby was a perfectionist. It wasn’t easy for them when they had to wait longer than they liked for her authorization to send a press release or schedule a meeting. She also had a policy that if a constituent from Arizona was visiting Washington and stopped by the office, unless it was impossible, she wanted to see them. That included kids on school trips. She met with a couple hundred to a couple thousand constituents each month in her office, and she wasn’t good at moving on. She’d be chatting away and her staff had to point at their watches or wave their arms to let her know she was throwing off the whole day’s schedule.
Gabby’s staffers came to understand that she was motivated by an urge to do it all. And she stayed so busy in part because she had a mantra: “Nothing can replace firsthand knowledge of an issue. To understand something, you have to see it.” So, unlike a lot of Arizona politicians, she toured long stretches of the U.S.-Mexican border. She even went to places that are accessible only by mules because the terrain there is too rocky for horses. (Mules are more stable, and better at making their way through creek beds.)
A couple times, Gabby took me with her on border visits. We stayed at the home of Warner and Wendy Glenn, whom Gabby visited so often that they’d become close friends. Warner is a seventy-something rancher and mountain-lion hunter. This guy is the definition of tough; he makes Clint Eastwood look like Lady Gaga.
Warner and his daughter Kelly took Gabby and me out to the border for hours, and we’d see illegal immigrants waiting on the Mexican side to make their crossings. I waved at them and said “Hola,” but Gabby, as a representative of the U.S. government, didn’t think it appropriate to engage in conversation with people preparing to enter the country illegally.
At one point I got off my mule, tied it up, and told Gabby I was going to become an illegal immigrant to Mexico. “Don’t do that!” she said. But I went under the pathetic barbed-wire fence and strolled about a hundred yards into Mexican territory, then came back into the United States, just to test how easy it is.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Gabby told me when I returned. But I think she was glad I now had a sense of how porous our border is. In her district alone, hundreds of people a day are caught trying to cross. It’s hard to say how many get through. In some spots, the border is nothing more than a couple pieces of barbed wire.
When President Obama spoke about fixing the immigration system in 2010, Gabby issued a tough statement. “Arizonans have heard it all before,” she said. “We listen closely to speeches and then wait for Washington to act. We’re tired of waiting. The crisis on America’s borders won’t be addressed with words. . . . Today we have two border problems: security and reform of our broken immigration laws. I reject the call by some that we must focus exclusively on one without addressing the other. We are a smart country. We can multitask. We can and we must address both of these problems.”
Gabby spoke sharply on other issues, too.
She called U.S. energy policies “potentially disastrous” unless more money is invested in renewable energy. She’d point out that her district has 350 days of sunshine a year. “Every single new house constructed should have solar panels on the roof,” Gabby said.
As a member of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee, she paid attention to the issue of safety in space, and held a hearing in April 2009, after two satellites collided. She talked about the 19,000 objects in Earth’s orbit that are tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, and the 300,000 other pieces of debris—some as small as a half inch in size—that no one is tracking. Gabby wanted witnesses from the space program to address whether that satellite collision was a harbinger of life-threatening disasters to come. “What is needed and how do we go about getting it put in place?” she asked.
One thing I always loved about Gabby was the way she focused her attention on the biggest issues and the smaller ones with equal passion. In 2009, two British tourists were hit by a truck and killed while crossing State Highway 80 in Tombstone, the historic Western town in Gabby’s district. There had been three other fatalities there in recent years. Gabby wrote to Governor Jan Brewer asking her to act quickly to install a crosswalk and lighting. The Arizona Department of Transportation had conducted two studies at that location and determined a crosswalk was not justified.
“Tombstone, known internationally as ‘The Town Too Tough to Die,’ must not become known as a place where tourists and residents risk their lives when they cross the street,” Gabby argued. ADOT studied the issue again, but didn’t agree crosswalks were necessary.
Gabby knew she wouldn’t win every issue, but she woke up each morning ready to keep trying. She really did. Whether she was focusing on a vast stretch of outer space, her district’s 114-mile border with Mexico, or the few dozen yards from one side of a busy street to the other, my wife was relentless.
When it came to the biggest and toughest policy issues, I watched how carefully and thoughtfully Gabby made up her mind. TARP and the stimulus package were particularly difficult votes for her. In 2008, TARP—the Troubled Asset Relief Program—was designed to strengthen the financial sector by allowing the government to buy assets and equities from financial institutions. Given her concern that the government often does a poor job spending taxpayers’ money, and that the bill didn’t have sufficient accountability measures, Gabby initially voted no. The bill failed. Then the stock market plummeted and President Bush couldn’t get enough Republican support for a new version of the bill.
Gabby knew it was a politically unpopular thing to do, but given how critical that moment was, she felt the right decision was to support the president and the house leadership in both parties. She also felt the changes in the bill had made it a better piece of legislation. If the new bill had failed, our banking system and the entire economy may have failed, too.
As a fiscal conservative, Gabby wasn’t one to vote for new spending unless the situation was dire. That’s why President Obama’s economic stimulus package in 2009 was such a difficult vote for her. It gave her sleepless nights. She collected input, pro and con, from her constituents. Then, worried about a recession or even a depression, she voted for the plan.
Like all of us, she wanted to be liked, but she wasn’t afraid to be unpopular as long as she was given a chance to make her case. And she liked the challenge of changing people’s minds.
She was repeatedly invited to speak before the Tucson Chamber of Commerce, and even though the chamber always endorsed her Republican opponents, she appreciated the opportunity to be heard by these conservative business leaders.
At one speech, near the end of her first term, she began by covering all her bases: “I am honored to be here today as a third-generation Tucsonan, a product of our public schools, a former local small-business owner, and now as your member of the United States Congress.
“Since I was elected, people keep asking me if I’m having fun yet and I never know quite what to say. The 110th Congress’s schedule is grueling, traveling home on the weekends exhausting, and my D.C. apartment is worse than my freshman dorm room in college.”
But then she talked of racing from meeting to meeting, passing reminders—a statue, a painting—of legendary Arizona lawmakers from the past. “I aspire to live up to the legacy of those who came before me,” she said, “and to set a new stan
dard for those who will come along in the future.”
As the Chamber of Commerce audience listened, she took them on a “tour” of her district by describing people who were doing important work at places such as the VA Medical Center and Hendricks Elementary School. Gabby always had a performer’s sense of theater, and she arranged to have special people in the audience—heroes from her district she wanted to introduce. There was a third-grade teacher from Hendricks, Jay Stanforth. “Jay, will you please stand to be recognized.”
There was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Tommy Mendoza, who served on the Veterans Advisory Council, which Gabby had created. “Tommy, please stand. Thank you for your service and for your commitment to making lives better for all returning soldiers.”
Gabby talked about how Arizona is the fastest-growing state in the nation, and that some towns in her district are “exploding overnight.” She mentioned Benson, with a population of about 5,000. “Now over fifty thousand homes are slated for construction there,” Gabby said. She explained the issues of infrastructure, water conservation. “Folks, we have some choices to make,” she said. “The tension between growth and nature can be lessened through smart policies and collaboration.” Then she introduced Katharine Jacobs, a woman heading a consortium of universities and state agencies that is studying water issues. “Katharine, will you please stand and be recognized.”
Many members of the Tucson Chamber of Commerce weren’t ever going to vote for Gabby, but they had to admit she put on a good show.
In her own way, Gabby was actually a one-woman Chamber of Commerce. Her day wasn’t complete unless she had spent some time proselytizing about southern Arizona. Gabby loved the people, the land, the history, the industry, the weather, the food, the culture.
“It’s the best place in the world,” she’d always say to Pia Carusone, her chief of staff, who was raised in upstate New York. “Don’t let people tell you that Arizona is too hot! The weather here is great and people like it hot anyway. You can have a year-round tan, and use solar panels to cut your electric bills way down.”
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