Both Bill Frist and Dr. Speir were reassuring. Frist called over the weekend to check in. “You have a long career ahead of you, Mitch,” he said. “It’s a good thing this was found before you had a heart attack. Follow the recuperative protocols and you’ll be just fine.”
Elaine and I arrived at Bethesda hospital on Sunday night, and shortly after five o’clock the next morning, I was taken into surgery. It lasted a few hours, and went off without complications. After one night in intensive care, I was moved to a private room, and a few days later, I could feel my strength returning. Elaine went home for the afternoon to try to get some work done, and as soon as she left, I called Dr. Speir with a very pressing question.
“Am I able to eat whatever I want?”
“Do you mean right now?” he asked.
“Yes, tonight, for dinner.”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Just take it easy.”
“What about chicken enchiladas?”
“Chicken enchiladas?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is there any problem with eating chicken enchiladas?”
In the ensuing silence, I thought he had likely begun to worry if he’d overprescribed my dosage of pain medication. “No,” he said. “I think a chicken enchilada should be fine.”
I hung up and immediately called BJ Stieglitz. BJ had been working as my body man since I’d become whip, helping me to stay on schedule and get where I needed to be.
“I have a favor to ask,” I said. “Will you go to La Loma on the Hill and get two orders of chicken enchiladas and bring them here this evening? I need them before five o’clock.”
BJ agreed, and when he arrived later that evening, the enchiladas still hot in their aluminum containers, I asked if he wouldn’t mind pulling over the rolling cart, setting out napkins, and trying to find some proper flatware. Not long after, I heard Elaine in the hall, speaking to the nurses, asking how I was feeling. When she walked into the room, her worried expression turned to one of confusion as she took in the sight: the rolling cart set beside my bed was laden with fresh flowers (the get-well cards removed), two plastic cups of ice water, each with its own bendy straw, and our favorite meal—chicken enchiladas from La Loma.
“Happy anniversary, honey,” I said. “It’s been a truly wonderful ten years.”
While patience has been an integral part of why I’d been able to reach the goals I’d set throughout my life, one thing I have no patience for is sitting still. Whether it’s a weakness or a virtue, I haven’t really caught on to the value of a vacation. I enjoy my work too much to have ever felt the need to develop outside hobbies, and the busier I’m kept, the happier I feel. Which is why my recovery from this surgery was so difficult.
I was told I’d be out of work at least one month. The idea was painful, but I remembered what Bill Frist had told me: follow the recuperative protocols. So I resigned myself to the fact that the best thing I could do was to rest. A nurse came every morning to monitor my progress and make sure I was moving around to help rebuild my strength, and Elaine was sure to be home every day by six o’clock. We spent our evenings watching television—a far departure from our normal lives—and enjoying each other’s company. I began to catch some of the nighttime talk shows, which I rarely did, and turned on the set one night to hear Jay Leno speaking about me. “The number two Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, underwent heart surgery last week,” he said. “He’s doing fine. Nothing was actually wrong with his heart; it’s just whenever a Republican is elected to a leadership position, they have to have their heart bypassed.” It hurt my entire body to do so, but I couldn’t help but laugh.
The following week, Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life sat on the table unopened, as I was simply too tired to read. Instead, I watched U of L basketball, and more movies than I usually see in a year, turning to AMC and Turner Classic Movies, hoping for a good western. I must have seen Red River and Stagecoach a couple of times each. Though this might sound easy, if not enjoyable, for me it was not. I longed to be back at the Capitol, engaging in the important work of the Senate. Now the highlight of my week was picking up TV Guide to see if a John Wayne movie might be playing.
It was also hard on my staff. Kyle was working overtime to keep the office moving. He frequently stopped by the house to discuss what had happened that day. Stef, who had just recently started working for me, came with newspaper clips and memos. Nan Mosher, who was my office manager in the Russell building and had come with me to the whip office, brought swatches of fabric for the drapes we were installing or the carpet we had to choose for the new office. I received regular calls from my good friend Lamar Alexander. I’d first met Lamar in 1969 when I worked for Marlow Cook and Lamar was serving in the Nixon White House. Lamar would go on to become one of my closest confidantes and a very good friend and I was happy to be working with him in the Senate. Alan Speir also frequently came over to check on me.
“Why do you have your pajamas on?” he asked one day, as soon as he walked in. “You ought to get those off, and put on some real clothes.” He was right, and while I was loath to admit this to him, I had begun to feel a little depressed. My life had been reduced to the basics—when I’d sleep, what I would eat, how far I’d attempt to walk that day—and I worried I wasn’t making progress. Dr. Speir told me this was common. The surgery is very invasive, and it’s often followed by a feeling that you’re not getting better fast enough. When he told me, about four weeks after the surgery, that I could return to the office for a few hours a day, I felt the depression lift. On my first day back, I was touched when Congressman John Shadegg from Arizona went out of his way to see me.
“I just thought you might need to talk to me,” he said.
“Why is that?”
“I had the same operation you did last March,” he said. He told me of his experience, including his own feelings of gloominess afterward. It was helpful to understand that, like everything else, recovery is a process. And it was reassuring to see how fit and healthy he was now.
I was happy to be back at work, but I quickly realized my limitations. My first day back, I stayed until about five-thirty in the afternoon, but that night, I knew I’d overdone it. I was almost too tired to sleep. The feeling was deeply unsettling.
I waited another week before trying it again, and at about five weeks out, I felt strong enough to spend a few hours at work each day. Nan had set up my hideaway office near the Senate Chamber with a comfortable couch. Elaine sent over large pillows and a blanket, and I’d often go down to the hideaway between meetings and votes to nap.
It would take several more weeks, but I finally felt able to put in full days. In mid-May, the Senate was tasked with dealing with the Medicare Part D proposal, which would add a prescription drug benefit for seniors. It turned into a very late night session, as happens from time to time. I had been on the floor since 9:00 a.m. At one point, I looked up at the clock to see it was one-thirty the next morning. I’d barely even noticed.
Finally, my life had returned to normal.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Frogs in a Wheelbarrow
There are a hundred senators serving at any one time in the US Senate, and of those hundred, ninety-six sit in offices in three buildings across Constitution Avenue, in offices of varying appeal. I once had an office in the Russell building at subterranean level. The only windows it had were near the ceiling. We all had to crane our neck to see outside, and there was very little reason to do that, because the only thing to see out those windows was a mound of dirt. I then had an office once used by both Nixon and Goldwater. The door to the hallway was pocked with holes, because Goldwater would shoot his BB gun at a bull’s-eye he’d hung on the door.
The other four senators—the two leaders and whips from each party—have an additional office under the dome of the US Capitol for their leadership staffs. In January 2003, I had moved int
o this rarefied real estate, just steps away from the Senate Chamber: the suite of the majority whip. I’d worked in the Capitol for nearly twenty years, but I was reminded in a new way how extraordinary it is. The suite I was given was the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Room, which had been used by Kennedy beginning the summer of 1960 after he won the Democratic nomination for president, and his increased responsibilities required an office close to the Senate Chamber. He used the space until his inauguration in 1961. It was a room unlike any other I’d ever inhabited.
The term “whip” comes from the sport of foxhunting. In a foxhunt, the “whipper in” is the assistant to the huntsman and it’s his job to keep the hounds from straying away from the pack. As party whip, I now had the same responsibility: to encourage party discipline while making sure we had the votes required to enact the party’s agenda. I would always need to know how my colleagues planned to vote because Frist, as party leader, would not bring a bill to the floor if he didn’t have the votes to get it passed.
But I also knew that my job was not only to count votes, but to grow them. I didn’t want to go to Frist and say we’re three votes short on a bill we wanted to pass. Instead, I saw my role as saying we are three votes short, and this is what I’m going to do to get those three votes—by figuring out what policy change that required, or convincing those three people to vote our way. Having to understand where senators fall in the political spectrum, where allegiances exist, where political vulnerabilities lie, whipping votes is politics at its most visceral.
One of my predecessors in the whip office, my friend Trent Lott, once said the job of trying to wrangle the support of colleagues, and keep everyone satisfied, is like trying to keep frogs in a wheelbarrow. There’s not a lot you can do to force them to stay there—so you have to persuade them. While I didn’t have a lot of carrots and sticks to offer, what I did have was an ability to listen, an acute sense of my members’ needs based on decades of close observation and study, and an instinct for timing. In important moments, that was all part of the sale. The job, and the new challenges it presented, required a lot of equanimity on my part, which, as those around me know, I have in no small measure. My longtime friends, with whom I’ve been tailgating before University of Louisville football games for many years, like to joke that they know I’m thrilled by a play or big win because I use both my hands to high-five. Once, a staffer told President George W. Bush that I was particularly excited about our winning a certain vote. “Really?” Bush replied. “How can you tell?”
It’s true. I’m not one to get riled up very often. But I think that my tendency to remain measured, even at times of extreme pressure, or when others show great emotion, has served me well in the Senate, and particularly during my tenure as whip. My goal was not to express my emotions, but to make sure we got the votes we needed, and to make things happen.
Nothing proved this more than one particularly nerve-racking vote, which was coming to the Senate floor in 2005, just before Christmas. We were all eager for the holiday, but we were down to the wire on an important vote—the passage of $39.7 billion in deficit cuts.
The vote was very, very close. The bill was also quite significant. Not only was cutting the deficit a major goal of President Bush, it was also a difficult vote to get support for, as it was the first effort in eight years to restrain spending in programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and farm subsidies. While there was a lot of big talk about cutting the deficit in general, it’s not an easy vote to cast, and we were losing five of our fifty-five-member Republican conference, who refused to support the bill.
Going into the vote, it was absolutely necessary that we got this vote count right. Howard Baker, the senator from Tennessee who served as Republican majority leader in the 1980s, and later as Reagan’s chief of staff, once summed up the job of the whip like this: “Count carefully and often. The essential training of a Senate majority leader perhaps ends in the third grade, when he learns to count reliably. But, fifty-one today may be forty-nine tomorrow, so keep on counting.”
Following this advice, I counted. And then I counted a few more times. With each count, I was feeling as sure as I could be that on the deficit reduction bill, we were split exactly at fifty-fifty. This was not news that I wanted to bring to Frist, or the president.
The only way to break a fifty-fifty tie is by using the vote of the vice president, who serves as president of the Senate. I asked Kyle to look into where Vice President Cheney was, should we need him to come to the Senate to vote. It wasn’t good.
“He’s in Afghanistan,” Kyle said. “And before you think about asking him to come back, I have to remind you that that’s nine and a half time zones away.”
“Try to get a phone number for him.”
Later that day, as I dialed the vice president’s number, I felt the weight of this decision. I was as confident as I could be in my vote count. I had to be, because when you’re about to ask the vice president of the United States to get on a plane from Afghanistan, where he was doing important work, and fly back to Washington to break a fifty-fifty tie, you better be sure your count is accurate.
Thankfully mine was, and with Cheney’s vote, the bill passed 51–50. Although my staff likes to say that my heart rate never gets beyond eighty-five, I might allow that, during this experience, it got to at least eighty-six.
In October of 2003, eight months after my surgery, I led a delegation of senators on a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. It was important to show my support to the American troops who were putting their lives on the line for our freedom, and I knew there was no better way of getting a sense of what was really happening in the war on terror than by putting my own boots on the ground. The trip lasted eight days, and we covered a lot of ground: Baghdad, Mosul in northern Iraq, Islamabad in Pakistan, and Bagram Air Base and Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. I met with General David Petraeus, then the division commander of the 101st Airborne; Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan; and, the high point for me, many of the brave men and women of the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army, who are headquartered at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. What I saw here was different from the almost exclusively negative press coverage offered by an awful lot of reporters who never liked this idea in the first place. Morale was very high—among both our troops and the citizens of Iraq. Our delegation was met by youngsters on the streets, who waved American flags and gave us the thumbs-up sign.
Not long after I returned from this trip, Saddam Hussein was captured, found hiding in a hole. This self-proclaimed great warrior and supposed descendant of Mohammed was shown on television with a doctor combing his hair for lice. Not quite the blaze of glory Hussein may have expected he’d go out in.
Saddam was no longer in power, and our policy of preemption was producing exactly what we wanted in the neighborhood. In December of 2003, Vice President Cheney called me at home.
“I want to give you a heads-up,” he said. “The president’s about to announce that Gaddafi has given up weapons of mass destruction.” Talk about a vindication of Bush’s policy of preemption. Plus, having gone on this trip with no health problems, I knew I was going to be all right. Which was good, because I was once again about to take on the issue of campaign finance reform, this time all the way to the US Supreme Court. And for this, I’d certainly need a strong heart.
After nearly two decades in the Senate, and countless fights against campaign finance reform, I had earned not just the official title of whip but also the unofficial title of spear-catcher on the issue. But in March of 2002, the final spear had been thrown, and this time I was unable to catch it when the Senate passed, by a vote of 60–40, John McCain and Russ Feingold’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. I simply didn’t have the votes to stop it, and despite my best efforts to convince Bush to veto the bill, he signed it into law that same month. The outcome of this bill was clear. It was going to hurt both parties. What it wouldn’t do was what its supporters said it w
ould: reduce the amount of money spent in politics. In fact, a good deal more would be spent, just not by the parties. I was, and am, all for outside groups doing whatever they want. What I’m not for is a decision to shackle political parties, making it harder for them to compete with outside groups, which was just what this bill did. As I told my colleagues on the Senate floor, in the moments before our vote, the bill would be a stunningly stupid thing to support.
But my fight wasn’t over. The day after McCain-Feingold passed the Senate, I announced that I had put together a powerful coalition—including groups as varied as the NRA and the ACLU—and a top-notch legal team, who’d be taking the case to court. My team included Ken Starr, the former solicitor general and member of the DC circuit court who’d become a household name as the independent counsel during the Clinton impeachment and an investigator in the Whitewater controversy. Ken is not only a very likable guy, he’s also an extremely skilled litigator, and one of a few dozen DC-based lawyers whose specialty is to argue in front of the US Supreme Court. I also tapped Floyd Abrams, the most prominent—and probably the most liberal—First Amendment lawyer in America. He had represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, and wasn’t exactly accustomed to representing conservatives. As I liked to say, the New York Times editorial page may be with McCain, but I’ve got their lawyer. (Floyd would later tell me how flummoxed his liberal friends were to learn he had joined my team. Mitch McConnell? You like that guy?)
We were prepared to take our case all the way to the Supreme Court, and in fact, I had been ready with a legal team since the early 1990s, when I faced the possibility that a bill might make it to Bill Clinton’s desk. I became the lead plaintiff in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, challenging the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold in US district court in the District of Columbia. Some pundits called this the most significant political speech case in over a quarter of a century, while other pundits continued to slam me for it. Common Cause had called me the Darth Vader of Reform, a comparison I had a bit of fun with. One morning, walking up to dozens of reporters, their microphones ready to capture my words, which they’d likely twist the next day in papers across the country, I welcomed them by announcing: “Darth Vader has arrived.”
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