We began to spend time together, choosing to largely forgo the typical DC social events for late, quiet dinners at one of our favorite casual restaurants in Georgetown or on Capitol Hill. I was impressed by her intelligence and confidence, and how close she was to her parents and five sisters, whom she spoke of fondly. During our courtship, over chicken enchiladas at La Loma or shared platters of hummus and Greek salad at Taverna, I learned the story of her upbringing.
Elaine’s parents, James and Ruth Chao, were born in China and married in Taiwan, where they’d both relocated amid the political turmoil of the Chinese civil war. James had been born in a small farming village in Jiading District outside Shanghai. He studied maritime navigation and quickly rose through the ranks. In an effort to advance his schooling, James took a national examination, and not only did he score number one in the nation, he scored higher than any other student had ever scored. He was written up in the newspapers, which helped him gain a visa to go abroad. Given the choice to go anywhere in the world, he and Ruth chose the United States, knowing the great opportunity that exists here.
In 1958, with two children under five and a wife seven months pregnant, James left for New York, uncertain of when he’d next see his family. He worked his way across the ocean, piloting a ship from Taiwan to Portland, Oregon. He then flew to New York City, arriving in the middle of the night with two suitcases carrying everything he owned. He rented a small room from an elderly woman who offered space in her Upper West Side apartment to Chinese exchange students. But things did not pan out as he’d expected.
“All the universities he applied to required his transcript,” Elaine told me. “But it was locked away in China, which had been closed to the Western world since 1949.” James was despondent and worried that nothing would come of this opportunity. His supervisor at the shipping company where he worked referred him to the dean of the Asian Center at St. John’s University, who would lead him to Dr. John Clark, dean of the business school at St. John’s University. Clark saw a lot of promise in James, and offered him admittance to St. John’s.
“But in order to stay,” Dr. Clark told him, “you have to maintain an A average.”
For the next three years, James worked part-time toward his MBA while working various jobs, including one at the shipping company. In 1961, he sent word to Ruth back in Taiwan that he’d finally saved enough to bring them to America. Right before leaving, Elaine—whose Chinese name was Xiao Lan—was given her American name by a missionary couple, Gardner and Ruth Tewksbury, who had taught her father English.
After thirty-seven long days crossing the Pacific and traveling through the Panama Canal aboard the Hai Ming ocean cargo carrier, my wife, then eight years old, arrived with her mother and two sisters in New York harbor on July 17, 1961. James was there waiting. After three years of separation, her family was finally reunited.
Elaine described to me the first American home she had—a one-bedroom rental apartment in Jamaica, Queens. Just as my mother had been to me, Ruth was her children’s cornerstone. Elaine related how her mother transformed their drab apartment, which overlooked the entrance to the local elementary school, into a home, arranging the living room furniture to create a small, private space behind a sofa for Elaine, equipped with her very own desk.
When Elaine’s father brought her to her first day of third grade at PS 117, she didn’t know one word of English. She was the only non-English speaker. Walking into her classroom and seeing her teacher, Elaine bowed deeply from the waist, as is Chinese tradition when meeting a revered elder. Her classmates erupted in laughter. Later they laughed at her again when, during roll call, she stood to be marked for attendance when the teacher called another student, named Eli. Elaine had trouble telling the difference between her name and his. For weeks she would stand to be counted when his name was called. Her classmates mocked her every time.
From the beginning, Elaine worked hard to learn American ways and to fit in. At school, she carefully copied every word as it was written on the blackboard. Then later at home, after returning from work and before he’d begin his own studies, her father would sit with Elaine, in her small quiet nook behind the sofa, and patiently teach her the pronunciation and meaning of each word.
Within a year she was fluent, but it takes more than language to feel fully assimilated. Elaine wore hand-me-down clothes, donated by a family at the local church, and loved the Barbie doll her mom had bought, as much as she loved Barbie’s house, made of cardboard, her bed an upside-down tissue box. And Elaine, like her mom and sisters, struggled to understand American culture.
One thing I love about Elaine is the way she helps me understand how certain American customs look from the outside. I’ll never forget one early experience she conveyed to me. Not long after arriving in New York, as the weather turned chilly, Elaine and her sisters were doing their schoolwork when they heard a knock on their apartment door. Not expecting anyone, and not knowing any of their neighbors, Elaine’s mother ignored it, thinking someone had made a mistake. But then there was another knock, followed by loud chants. Frightened, Elaine and her sisters followed their mother to the door. Opening it slowly, they found a crowd of people; the children were dressed in strange hats, some with paint marks on their faces, others with masks covering their eyes. The children thrust large sacks toward Elaine’s mother. Terrified, and sure they were being robbed, Ruth went to the cupboard to find something to give them and grabbed the first thing on hand: a loaf of bread. She offered a slice to each person holding a bag, but they were not interested. Eventually they left. Ruth locked the door, turned off the lights, and she and her daughters spent the remainder of the evening—their first Halloween in America—uneasily ignoring the knocks and chants.
In 1964, Elaine’s father received the MBA from St. John’s that he’d been working toward for so long. In him, I saw the result of a principle I’ve always held dear: we work hard so our kids can have better lives and more opportunities than we do. Four years later, as Elaine was starting junior high school, the family moved into a four-bedroom split-level house in Syosset, New York, on Long Island. Over time, Elaine would overcome the challenges of understanding the American educational system: She went on to graduate from Mount Holyoke College and then earned an MBA from Harvard University. She went on to work in the banking industry and be selected as a White House Fellow. During the four years we dated, Elaine would serve as US deputy secretary of transportation and then the director of the Peace Corps. Her father’s success was equally impressive: James eventually became highly successful as the founder of his own shipping and finance company.
From the beginning, even though we grew up in different worlds, I could relate to her experience. I moved twice at the same ages she had—eight and fourteen. My moves were nothing compared with hers. I did not have to negotiate a new country, culture, or language. But when I told her the stories of my own moves at these young ages, of leaving Big Dad and Mamie and having to start over again in a place where people made fun of my strange southern accent, I knew she understood in a way that few others had before. We both knew the feeling of not fitting in and had worked long and hard in order to prove ourselves, sharing the conviction that the only way to fail in America is to give up or die. In that way, we were kindred spirits.
I’ve come to understand that there is a part of being raised in a traditional Chinese culture that has remained with Elaine: She is not always forthcoming with her emotions. She’s more comfortable keeping things to herself and leaving others to guess at what she is thinking. But in 1992, after we’d been dating for three years, Elaine broke with this tradition and made her feelings very clearly known: it was time to get married or move on.
We were married on February 6, 1993, which, fittingly enough given our political leanings, also happens to be Reagan’s birthday. It was a small ceremony in the historic chapel in the US Capitol, attended by Elaine’s family, my daughters, and Stuart and J
ulia Bloch. Afterward, we celebrated with our wedding guests over dinner in the Grant Room at the Willard Hotel. It was an exceedingly joyful day. After fifty years on this planet, and thirteen years as a bachelor, I felt as if I had finally gotten something very, very right.
Newlywed life was exactly as we wanted it: happy, easy, and unglamorous. While many in Washington like to spend their weekends attending Georgetown cocktail parties or an event at the Kennedy Center, Elaine and I spent most of ours at home in Kentucky. In our town house in the Highlands section of Louisville, I did most of the cooking, grilling steaks on the back patio or making Elaine one of my favorite southern dishes, like scalloped oysters. Then as now, Saturday afternoons in the fall were reserved exclusively for University of Louisville football games and tailgating. In the last twenty years, I’ve missed few home games and there’s absolutely nothing about the college football experience I don’t enjoy. I gather with my football buddies around an RV in the parking lot of Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, and we make a day of it. We meet before the game to talk about what might happen and then again after the game to talk about what had. Our biggest concerns are how the Cardinals will do that season, and what we’ll eat each week; such are the serious considerations of the tailgaters of America.
While I’d never argue that my wife is the world’s most zealous football fan, she put up with this tradition, and even joined us on occasion, her schedule permitting. At this time, Elaine was the CEO of United Way, America’s biggest charitable organization. She had been tapped for this position, chosen out of a nationwide search of well over six hundred candidates, at a difficult time in United Way’s hundred-year history. Its previous CEO, William Aramony, was accused of using the organization’s money to fund his extramarital affairs, among other immoral and illegal practices. In 1995, he was convicted of twenty-three felony charges and would spend the next six years in prison. Naturally, news of the scandal had shaken public trust in the organization, and Elaine had her job cut out for her. A few days into it, we planned to have a quiet, late dinner. When she arrived at the restaurant, she looked a little weary. The waiter sat us at a back table, and after ordering our drinks, Elaine rested her forehead in her hand. “The situation is really challenging,” she said.
I didn’t doubt it. I took her hand in mine. “Well, look at it this way,” I offered. “There’s nothing tougher than following somebody who did a great job, and nothing that makes it possible for success better than following somebody who made a mess of things.”
“You think I’ll be able to restore public trust to the institution?”
“I do. If anybody can do it, you can.”
Well, Elaine certainly did a great job. Over four years, she led the organization to once again become solvent, steady, and respected.
She had the same effect on me. Elaine never tires, and she certainly never tires of speaking to people. When she accompanied me to political events across the state, I could see how taken people were with her warmth and ability to connect in a way that is sometimes more difficult for me. Where I’m reserved, she’s only too willing to sit and chat forever. Of course, as an Asian American, Elaine was at first considered a bit unusual in Kentucky. As I like to say, my wonderful state is many things, but diverse is not one of them. We’re 92 percent white, 7 percent African American, and, on the weekends Elaine is home, 1 percent other.
Another tradition of our weekends in Kentucky was Sunday lunch with my mom in Shelbyville. I had been quite concerned about how my mother would fare after my father’s death three years earlier, but she handled his absence with quiet grace, the same way she had handled the one other time they were ever apart: fifty years earlier, during his time serving in World War II. Elaine and I would pick her up at her house and take her out for a good southern meal at the Science Hill Inn or to Claudia Sanders Dinner House, a restaurant owned by the wife of Colonel Sanders. Over biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, and fried okra, she’d tell me of the events of her week. Her days were spent tending to her yard and reading, and painting, a hobby she’d developed years earlier, creating still lifes and landscapes, some of which now hang in our home. Friends from the Baptist church my parents attended, or old political acquaintances of my dad’s, would stop by to make sure she had everything she needed, and each week, a woman from the local hair salon arrived to take my mother to her standing appointment.
Since my dad’s death, I had been calling my mom every day at 5:30 p.m. to check in. It didn’t matter if I was in the middle of a meeting or at an event; everyone on my staff knew that promptly at five-thirty I would break away to make this call, even if it lasted no longer than a few minutes. I could usually tell from her hello how my mom was feeling that day. Her health had been failing for some time—she’d fallen while at home a few months before our wedding, and had since been under the care of a home-based nurse—but even so, I was wholly unprepared for the call I received from a Shelbyville hospital room in late October 1993. When the nurse arrived at my mother’s house that day, she’d found that my mom had suffered a massive stroke, and had fallen into a coma. Hearing this news, I immediately left for the airport, where I took the next direct flight to Louisville. When I arrived in Shelbyville, I found my mom in a hospital bed, hooked up to life support. Her doctor explained that my mother had suffered serious brain damage, and there was no hope she’d recover.
I asked the doctor and nurses to leave the room, and I climbed onto the bed, sitting close beside her. I stayed with her until night fell, thinking of all the days five decades earlier that she and I lay together on a different bed, this one in Five Points, Alabama. Then, as she fought for my future, helping me to recover from polio, she had transformed that small bed into a nearly limitless world, helping me to erect towns made of toys on my blankets, and reminding me of my own unlimited possibility, despite the odds that were fairly stacked against me. Those days, and all of the days that had followed—in the way she made me feel as if I belonged when I clearly didn’t, in her belief in me when my own faltered, in her deep devotion to me—she taught me that if nothing else, I was very deeply loved. Now, as she prepared to die, sitting in bed beside her, holding her hand, I told her again and again that the same was true for her.
She died the next day.
CHAPTER NINE
Standing My Ground
In between these highs and lows of my personal life, I also faced many challenges in the Senate as I finished up my second term. And I knew that what I needed most when it came to confronting them was something that I had learned many years earlier from Bernie Ward, the principal of my elementary school in Augusta, Georgia, who had a big impact on my success at baseball. When it came to settling fights between boys at school, Bernie had what in today’s world might be considered an old-fashioned (if not also illegal) tactic. Inside his principal’s office at Wheeless Road Elementary School, he kept two sets of soft, oversize boxing gloves. When boys got into a dispute, as often happened in those days, he’d call them to his office, give them each a pair of gloves, and send them outside.
Though I didn’t get into many of these fights myself, I did observe more than a few of them. And what I saw was that the kid who typically won these fights was not the one who swung the most or hit the hardest, but rather, the one who stood the firmest. With legs securely planted, and arms raised to ward off the punches, the victor would stand his ground as long as it took for the other boy to wear himself out from the work it took to swing those heavy gloves, throwing fruitless punches.
The same approach was helpful in the Senate, where being effective, and staying around for a while, requires a penchant for standing firm. And as I had learned during my first term, sitting in that back-row seat, ranking last among my colleagues, in order to stand firm in the Senate one must understand how Senate procedure works, have a solid understanding of the principles of the Constitution, and be willing to make tough decisions that your friends don’t like.
&nb
sp; It was an understanding of the importance of procedure that led to some of my proudest early legislative accomplishments, especially my efforts to raise the alarm on assaults against the First Amendment. In my view, it is absolutely essential for the integrity of our politics and the health of our democracy that we not grow complacent in the face of attacks on free speech. Our Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment because they believed that even with all the excesses and offenses that freedom of speech would undoubtedly allow, truth and reason would triumph in the end. I therefore felt it was my job to recognize them when I saw them, which I did in September 1994, during the 103rd Congress, with the final stages of the Democrats’ campaign finance reform bill debate.
While I might rank this as being right up there with static cling as an issue that most Americans care about, campaign finance reform is one about which I’ve become very passionate. It’s also one on which my thinking has evolved quite significantly.
Early in my career, before I ever ran for elected office, I argued in favor of campaign finance reform measures such as creating a ceiling on campaign spending. But in 1974, I taught a course called American Political Parties and Elections at the University of Louisville. I had a two-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife, and we were struggling to get by on the salary I earned practicing law, and I took this position to help supplement our income. It was in the course of this work, and my deeper study of the issue of campaign finance, that I began to understand the issue for what it truly is: one of First Amendment rights, particularly the right to free speech.
The Founders had a lively fear that with the passage of time, the Constitution they labored to create would be distorted by the enemies of freedom or the ambitions of the powerful, which is exactly what I came to realize was at play in campaign finance reform initiatives. I was particularly influenced by the seminal 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. In this decision, which struck down limits on campaign spending, the court wrote that the “concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment,” which, the court wrote, was designed “to secure the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources,” and “to ensure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.”
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