The Long Game

by Mitch McConnell

  The resolution passed with only twenty-three no votes, sending our nation into war. Of course, this war would become a matter of great controversy over the next several years, and there are a lot of questions surrounding the wisdom of the decision to invade Iraq. But at the time, everyone made the best decisions based on what we knew then, and what we knew—what the intelligence was saying—was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Given Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical and biological weapons against his own people and his neighbors, it would have been reckless to dismiss that intelligence and the immediacy of the threats posed by his regime to the United States. We already knew he was a mass murderer and that he was armed and dangerous—to treat him otherwise would have been very dangerous indeed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Practicing Patience

  Given the state of the world, it was not easy to focus on reelection in my race for a fourth term against Lois Combs Weinberg in 2002. I carried 113 of the state’s 120 counties and was reelected with 64.7 percent of the vote, the largest majority by a Republican in Kentucky in history—beating the margin by which John Sherman Cooper beat John Y. Brown in 1966. Going back to my days of following baseball as a kid, I’ve never given up an interest in statistics, and since my first campaign, I had a clear—though, it seemed at the time, highly unlikely—goal that I would one day surpass that margin. This was, therefore, quite an exhilarating moment for an old intern of Senator Cooper’s and even earned me one of the nicknames President Bush was famous for bestowing: Landslide McConnell.

  On the night of my swearing-in, Elaine arranged a private dinner for me in the Presidential Room at the Occidental. Nearly fifty people attended, including Elaine’s parents and members of my senior staff. It was a very special evening because it celebrated not only my reelection but also something else, something that I had been hoping for and working toward for many years: my election as whip, the second-ranking leadership position in the new Republican Senate majority. It had taken much patient work for me to reach that position. Little did I know how much patience I would have to exercise in it—or how much patience I would need as I considered my next goal.

  In early 2002, several months before my reelection, Senator Larry Craig from Idaho, then policy chairman, had come to my office in the Russell building to tell me he was thinking about running for whip. But what he didn’t know was that I had already secured the votes myself.

  In 1996, our conference had voted to impose term limits on every leadership position other than majority leader. With a six-year term limit for whip, Don Nickles’s term would expire in 2002, leaving the position open. Once again applying the maxim that you can start too late but never too soon, I had begun, as early as May of 2001, one and a half years prior to the leadership vote, to roll up enough support to get me elected. Larry never saw it coming.

  I was not coy about my desire to work my way up the leadership ladder in the party. I had been around long enough to know that the members helping to call the plays were the ones who had the most significant influence over setting the agenda and, thus, enacting policy. I had approached my goal of becoming whip with a great deal of planning and preparation, using the same strategy I had used four decades earlier to become the president of the Manual High School student council—quietly whipping votes and wrapping up early support. Meeting with my Senate colleagues one by one, and urging confidentiality around each meeting, I expressed my intention to run for the position when it opened in 2002, and asked for their vote. Inside my suit jacket pocket was the whip card I carried with everybody’s name on it. I’d been carrying it every day over that nearly two-year period, and on it, I had meticulously recorded a “yes” with each promise of support. Just as I’d learned that the best contests are those with no opponent, I’d also learned that when asking for someone’s vote, a yes was the only thing that meant yes. Everything else—“You’d make a great whip,” or “I’m confident you would handle the job well”—was not a vote I could count on. If that was the response I heard, I’d thank my colleague for the compliment, and then ask again: “Do I have your vote?” It’s a binary question that has just one of two responses: yes or no, and in many ways, this was good practice for the job. Party whips can whip up scores of votes each session, and the same rule would apply then; after all, when it comes to votes on the Senate floor, there are no votes for “This would make a fine bill.” By the time that Larry sat across from me a few months before the leadership vote, expressing his intention to run, the card in my pocket was filled with enough “yes” marks to know I already had it.

  Leadership votes always hold a special air about them, none more so than the vote held in the Mansfield Room on November 13, 2002. After being nominated for the position of whip by my friend Senator Bob Bennett, I spoke, pledging my support to the Republican conference and Trent Lott, elected that day for his third term as majority leader. By this time Larry Craig had figured out he couldn’t beat me. He’d withdrawn from the race, and I was chosen unanimously.

  I felt a quiet elation in my election. It was a vote of confidence from my driven, ambitious, and incredibly smart fellow senators. I consider every vote I get, in any election, a gift and a victory, and these votes were particularly rewarding. It was also the culmination of a long campaign, one that took me an important step closer to what had, by this time, become my ultimate goal: to assume the number one spot in my party, and in the Senate, majority leader.

  After the dinner Elaine hosted for me at the Occidental, we were both looking forward to returning home to Kentucky for a quiet holiday. When we arrived at the airport to fly home, my bag was laden with my holiday reading: The Junction Boys by Jim Dent, the story of Bear Bryant’s implausible efforts to turn around the Texas A&M football program, and biographies of James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. I was also eager to spend time at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. With Gary Gregg, the center’s director, we’d been hard at work lining up a roster of great speakers for the following spring, like Senators Patrick Leahy and Elizabeth Dole. But as soon as I walked into my house, my phone started ringing, and it wouldn’t stop for several days, as I became embroiled in my first job as whip: to secure the votes of support needed to keep Trent Lott from being ousted as majority leader.

  On December 5, 2002, just a few weeks after Lott had been reelected majority leader, a large crowd gathered in the Dirksen Senate Office Building to pay tribute to Senator Strom Thurmond on his hundredth birthday. Thurmond, who was first elected to the Senate from South Carolina in 1954, was set to retire in January, and friends and colleagues joined members of his family to wish him well. Lott was one of the afternoon’s speakers, and just a few minutes after taking the podium, he spoke these words: “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

  His comments sparked a media firestorm, and the long knives came out. People claimed that Lott’s statement was an implicit endorsement of segregation. He issued multiple apologies, calling his statement a poor choice of words made in the spirit of a lighthearted celebration. But nothing he did could alleviate the wrath. The longer the issue remained on the public’s radar, the more nervousness there was in the conference. While I couldn’t defend what Lott had said, I felt that what we clearly had here was a case of selective outrage. The year before, Democratic senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, had used the N-word on national television and nobody clamored for his resignation; in 1995, Democratic senator Wendell Ford from Kentucky, then minority whip, used the same term during a radio interview, and the Courier-Journal had defended him. Why did they get away with saying these things, when Lott did not? Because as a Republican from Mississippi, Lott fit the stereotype often advanced by the media. His critics were unrelenting and unforgiving. And, surprisi
ngly, it wasn’t the liberal press leading the revolt, but the conservatives. George Will, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal lambasted Lott, essentially demanding he step down.

  So much for my plans for a quiet holiday. Instead, I was back at my office, calling my colleagues, trying to get a feel for the dimensions of the damage. I urged people to remain loyal to Lott. It was my hope the situation would resolve itself quickly, but those hopes were dashed in mid-December, when I arrived at ABC’s studio for an appearance on This Week, hosted by George Stephanopoulos. Right before I went on, to talk about the situation with Trent Lott, Stephanopoulos informed me that he’d received confirmation that Don Nickles, the Republican senator from Oklahoma and outgoing whip, had said Lott ought to step down. This was the first significant break in the dike. When I later heard Nickles’s statement—“Lott has been weakened to the point that it may jeopardize his ability to enact our agenda and speak to all Americans”—I knew the tide had turned too far. It was not an easy call to make, but by the end of the week, I knew what I had to do. I picked up the phone and made the difficult call to my friend.

  “I think it’s been unfair,” I said. “But I also think it’s over. We can’t fix the damage.”

  As far as my colleagues understood it, three people were thinking about putting their names in the ring to replace Lott as leader after he resigned: Don Nickles, Rick Santorum, and Bill Frist. But what they didn’t know was that there was a fourth. Me. Though I wasn’t public about it, I was strongly considering the possibility, knowing that this opportunity might very well be my last shot at becoming majority leader. After all, I was now sixty years old. Younger, ambitious guys were coming up all the time. I also knew this could not be a rash decision. Above all else, I did not want to try and fail.

  When it came to summing up the competition, I was most concerned with Bill Frist. He’s like the guy from that beer ad: the most interesting man in the world. A former lung and heart transplant surgeon, he flies his own planes, runs marathons, and travels to Africa to volunteer his time caring for people in medical need. He’d also done a superb job as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2002 cycle. Under his chairmanship, the Senate went from 51–49 Democrat to 51–49 Republican. You’d have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency to find the last time the party of the president regained the majority two years into his first term.

  I called Kyle Simmons into my office. Kyle was one of the people I trusted most in the world, and I knew I could trust him with this. When I told him what I was thinking, his face registered nothing but concern.

  “The party is looking for a change right now,” Kyle said. “I know you’ve wanted to be the leader of this party for a long time, but your path to this position will be a promotion you have earned. This election is about change. The conference wants to go in another direction. They want someone like Frist. I think you have to wait it out, practicing what got you elected whip and what you’re best at. Patience. And if the opportunity comes again, you’ll be ready. But that time is not today.” That was easy for a guy in his thirties to say, but it was harder for me to accept.

  But hard or not, Kyle was right. It was not my time and the best I could hope for was that my patience would eventually be rewarded. I threw my support behind Bill Frist, and on December 23, 2002, after we elected him majority leader, I pledged my support for his leadership the same way, just four weeks earlier, I’d pledged the same to Trent Lott. The experience was once again proof that careers in politics can rise and fall with great speed. I did not want that to be my fate. My climb had been slow and steady, and that climb would continue.

  In the meantime, with the leadership elections behind us, it was time to get down to business. On January 25, a few weeks into the session, Elaine and I decided to stay in Washington for the weekend. I’d been invited to appear on Meet the Press on Sunday, and Elaine and I were also planning to attend the annual gathering of the Alfalfa Club. If you’ve never heard of the Alfalfa Club, you’re certainly not alone. It’s an odd organization that was started in 1913. Its origins were to celebrate the birthday of Robert E. Lee, if for no other reason than it offered an excuse to get together for an evening of frivolity during the dead of the winter. (I’m sure Lee himself would have been surprised to learn that ninety years later Vernon Jordan, once the president of the Urban League, would serve as the club’s president.) It meets just once a year, on the last Saturday in January, and has no purpose whatsoever. And yet, in a town composed of exclusive clubs, it might just be the most exclusive yet. Its nearly two hundred members come from all sectors and include politicians from both sides of the aisle. The annual dinner is typically attended by the president, vice president, the entire cabinet, corporate CEOs, and assorted self-important people. I’d attended as a guest of Senator John Sherman Cooper early in my Senate career, and in 2000, I had been selected as a member myself. While I typically find these tuxedo and gown events to be a chore, this dinner is nothing if not a lot of fun. Each year there is a mock candidate for president of the United States, running on the Alfalfa ticket. These “candidates” make (or attempt to make) funny speeches, poking fun at ourselves and each other. I was asked to give one of these speeches years later, and I was so nervous about bombing, I nearly declined.

  As I left the office on Friday evening, I was in a jovial mood. I stopped by the desk of my scheduler to wish her a good weekend. She handed me my schedule and on the way home, I skimmed it. It included information about who would be my security detail for the event—a new part of life now that I was whip. There was also a note, highlighted in a bold font, not to drink any caffeine or eat after midnight on Sunday, in preparation for my annual physical, and a stress test, that Monday. I paid little attention because I had no reason to believe this appointment would be anything other than completely uneventful.

  My doctor walked into the small examining room at the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center, a look of concern shadowing her face. “I don’t have great news, Senator,” she said. “You failed the stress test.”

  I was stunned into silence. I have always enjoyed good health. I’ve never smoked cigarettes, I exercise fairly often, and other than an occasional cheeseburger from Good Stuff on the Hill, I eat as best I can. Hell, I even bypassed the so-called candy desk most days. It’s been a tradition since 1965, when Senator George Murphy of California began the practice of keeping a supply of candy in his desk for all senators to enjoy. Since then, the candy desk has been located in the back row of the Republican side, closest to the Senate Chamber’s most heavily trafficked entrance.

  “It could be a fluke and mean nothing,” the doctor continued. “But we have to take precautions. I’m going to schedule you for a cardiac catheterization. That’ll allow us to take pictures of your heart and see if there’s any reason for concern.”

  “When will we do that?”

  “Right now.”

  It’s probably not a common excuse offered to put off a pressing medical procedure, but Bush’s State of the Union address was the following day, and I wasn’t going to miss it. The doctor agreed I could postpone the test until that Friday, and throughout the week I did my best, with limited success, to put it out of my mind. I was also careful not to worry my staff. Everyone was arriving back in the office with a new spring in their step, elated to finally be sitting in the whip’s office. Kyle was the only one I told, and I instructed him to tell the others I was taking that Friday as a vacation day. Not one person bought it. I’d missed one day of work in the thirty-five years since I’d gotten out of law school and nobody thought that now, just a few weeks into my first term as whip, I had decided it was a good time to treat myself to a matinee and an afternoon nap.

  The doctors at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center performed the catheterization on Friday morning. Afterward, I was sitting in a chilly recovery room, still in my hospital gown, wait
ing for the results. Kyle had sent me a few e-mails about the upcoming votes on judicial nominations, including the status of the Democrats’ filibuster on Miguel Estrada’s nomination to the DC circuit court. When the doctor walked back into the room, I put my BlackBerry down. I was feeling impatient to hear that everything was fine so I could return to the office and deal with these matters.

  But he didn’t tell me everything was fine. What he told me was that he had very bad news. I needed a triple bypass.

  I took a moment to collect myself and then called Elaine and Kyle. In a gesture of kindness I’ll never forget, Bill Frist came to the hospital that day after hearing the news from Kyle. This was his area of expertise—he’d performed plenty of these procedures himself as a successful heart surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Elaine had arrived by this time, and after reviewing the results of my test, Frist told us he agreed with the doctor: I had no choice but to undergo surgery. He recommended a surgeon named Alan Speir, who that very day was performing a double bypass on Florida senator Bob Graham. Dr. Speir came in the afternoon, to explain the procedure to Elaine and me.

  “When do you want to do it?” Dr. Speir asked.

  “How about Monday?”

  Elaine looked at me, startled. “Are you sure? You want to do it that soon?”

  “I want to get it over with,” I said. In fact, if I had to make this choice again, I would have chosen to have the surgery the next morning, because it ended up being an extremely anxious weekend. My mind was filled with questions. Would I survive the surgery? Would I feel like myself again? Would I be able to do the job I’d just been elected to do? I wasn’t used to having health problems, and I had no symptoms whatsoever. And yet here I was, wondering if the position I had worked so hard to attain was about to slip away.