Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571)

by Bachmann, Michele

  So Marcus and I decided we didn’t want to be pro-life in name only. We wanted to live our lives and our careers being fully and actively pro-life. So we began counseling single mothers, praying with them and helping them in any way we could. We volunteered to drive these expectant moms to crisis-pregnancy centers, where they could be offered a safe and saving alternative to abortion. I’ll add too that I never condemn any woman who has had an abortion or who has participated in one, because I know that God is always there, offering grace and mercy in such tragic situations. Yet I felt called now to do everything I could for these women in difficult situations and their babies.

  At that time, I was still a Democrat. The Democratic Party, while it was then edging toward an abortion-on-demand stance, still allowed room in its ranks for pro-life leaders. Carter himself proved to be a clever waffler on the abortion issue, suggesting that he was pro-life to the pro-lifers and prochoice to the prochoicers—and yet the media, always Carter friendly, never nailed him on his hypocrisy. So in our naïveté, we failed to realize that Carter was playing a duplicitous double game. And the Republican Party, meanwhile, still seemed at that time to be dominated by defenders of the proabortion stance. But today, thanks to the tireless efforts of conservative leaders such as Phyllis Schlafly, Father Frank Pavone, the late Henry Hyde, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has rediscovered its moral origins as a champion of human liberty and human life. Today, we have witnessed, in the party platforms, which one of the two parties stands up for life and which one doesn’t.

  Yet back in the seventies, the parties had not yet sorted themselves out on the vital issue of abortion. So in 1976, many pro-life and socially conservative Americans could be found conscientiously voting for the Carter-Mondale ticket, thinking they were voting pro-life. And Marcus and I did more than that; we helped on his campaign, handing out fliers and making phone calls.

  And of course, the Carter-Mondale ticket won the general election that November. A few weeks later, Marcus and I both received an invitation to attend the presidential inauguration in the coming January—at our own expense, of course. Marcus found me on campus one day and said he’d figured out how we could travel to D.C. and back for just a hundred dollars. Neither of us had ever been to Washington, and I wanted to go, to be a part of history. But still, mindful of the cost, I hesitated. A hundred dollars? To this working-her-way-through-college student, that was real money.

  But Marcus was persuasive. So eventually, eight politically involved Minnesotans clambered into an RV, having packed in plenty of food, and took off from Winona to Washington. It was like a scene from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, in which a group of strangers from the provinces heads off to see the bright lights of the big city. We didn’t have money for hotels along the way, so we took turns driving, making it straight through to Washington in twenty-four hours. This was no raunchy road trip; one of the passengers was a nun, and the rest of us were starry-eyed idealists. We sang sing-alongs, talked about current events, and dreamed about how America would be a better place thanks to the Carter-Mondale administration.

  Disappointment, of course, was to come in the future, but Washington, D.C., as a city did not disappoint; it far exceeded my expectations. I remember coming over a hill and seeing the horizon, and there was the capitol—and, honest to God, tears were streaming down my face. I had read all about Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, but actually seeing those places—there was nothing like it. We were admiring, up close, the three branches of government, the landmarks where our Constitution came to life each day. Or at least that was the hope.

  And we got to see the Carter-Mondale inauguration, albeit from a great distance.

  And the parties! We went to the Minnesota ball, where we got to meet two of Walter Mondale’s children, Eleanor and Ted. That was a thrill, but what left an even bigger impression was the cornucopian richness of the parties. We went from party to party to party; free food abounded everywhere in the public buildings of the Capitol complex. To the dainty eater, tasty hors d’oeuvres and cute little finger foods beckoned; to the hearty eater, big stacks of deli meats, hunks of cheese, and those delectable little pigs in blankets were shouting, “Come and get it!” Because I brought a grand total of eleven dollars with me for food, transportation, and spending money, I was myself both types of eager eater. The heaping silver platters of huge brownies were like something I had never seen before. As I said, we came from a simple background; we’d never seen so much food at so many venues and at no charge. Giving away exorbitant goodies and we didn’t have to pay for them—that was our introduction to Washington’s ways!

  But I remember thinking to myself, Washington has surely gotten big—and yet the rest of the country seemed actually to be shrinking. That is, Washington is a rich city, a permanent boomtown, while Minnesota and the rest of America had been suffering, all through the seventies, from slowing growth and rising prices; “stagflation” they called it, a wordplay on “stagnation” plus “inflation.” I remembered reading in history books that back in the nineteenth century American presidents had managed to do their jobs with the help of just a few aides. So, I wondered, what had happened since, as White House staffs had ballooned into hundreds, and then into thousands? I came to see what critics meant when they jibed about “palace guards” and “imperial presidencies.”

  On the way back home to Minnesota, I continued to wrestle with what I had seen in Washington. It was a paradox: The public “servants” seemed to have more money than the taxpayer “masters.” And yet during that same time, as I had seen in the summer of ’75, some areas of the nation—Alaska, for instance—were rich, holding great natural resources. Or, I should say, potentially rich, because most of Alaska’s wealth was locked in the ground by federal bureaucrats, functionaries obeying the “zero growth” edicts of elitist environmentalists. Yet Washington, D.C., was obviously excessively rich, grown fat on federal tax revenues. Washington thrived, after all, on its Internal Revenue Service money spigot; in those days the IRS could take as much as 70 percent of someone’s annual income. I myself was light-years from a high income, but such a confiscatory tax rate didn’t seem right to me, even if few in positions of power seemed to object.

  Then we were back home. And back to work. Marcus too was working hard, both on campus and back on the farm. In retrospect, it might have seemed like a long courtship from the time we first met, in early 1976, till the time we were married, in late 1978. But let me tell you, the time flew by, because we were both busy working and finishing our studies. During all of 1977, we were going steady, as you might say, but we didn’t have nearly as much time together as we would have liked.

  In the fall of that year, Marcus invited me to come meet his family in Wisconsin. We drove in an old Ford Pinto that he had borrowed from his brother; it featured a gaping hole in the back floor. Riding with Marcus through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, I thought to myself, How beautiful this country scenery is! Marcus was pointing out the trees that were bare and brown; the Wisconsin countryside, he said, was prettier in the winter, when all was velvety white, or else in the spring and summer, when everything was leafy green. But it was beautiful right now, I insisted. The stark trees looked like the romantic ruins of an old cathedral. And Marcus agreed. So here were two lessons for me: First, every season of nature has its own kind of beauty, and second, with the help of someone you love, you can see the world anew. Everything can be made fresh.

  Arriving in Independence, Wisconsin, I instantly bonded with Marcus’s parents. His father and I talked about cows and milk; his mother and I talked about baking bread. It was all so natural, so comfortable, so obvious.

  Next it was Marcus’s turn to meet my family. He drove up to Anoka to meet Mom and Ray. It was a Saturday, and Mom had said to come by anytime, so we did. When Marcus and I arrived, we found Mom and Ray scraping their wallpaper in the hallway. Marcus was eager to help, so
that’s what we did. Such gallantry might seem more practical than romantic, but let me tell you, it was both—practical and romantic. By pitching in so readily on a chore, Marcus made a good impression on my folks. Men, here’s a lesson for you: Flowers and candy are wonderful for a girl, but if you really want to convince her that you’re Mr. Right, it helps to be a handyman!

  A few weeks later, unbeknownst to me, Marcus asked Mom and Ray for permission to propose to me. She told him he had to promise always to take good care of me, and Marcus promised earnestly to do just that. And so Mom and Ray nodded, and that was that. Marcus also called my dad, met with him, and asked for, and received, permission to marry his daughter.

  But in the meantime, it was work, work, work. Neither of us had yet graduated from college; we were both still paying our way through school doing a variety of jobs. I was an intern at the state legislature, but my most satisfying job was as a nanny for a wonderful family. There I saw a positive vision of family life. For his part, Marcus’s job was at a day-care center in downtown Minneapolis, a place called Soul’s Harbor, where he taught employment skills to those who were down and out. But all that time turned out to be time well spent, because he enjoyed listening to people; he has always said that everyone’s story has value. And then, of course, Marcus would do his best to help and minister, sharing not only his savvy about getting a job but also his ever more mature Christian worldview.

  Marcus proposed to me on February 15, 1978. You may be thinking: Why not February 14? Well, Marcus wanted to be different. For all his Swiss precision, he can be quirky sometimes. And so he proposed at 12:01 A.M. on the fifteenth, because, as he told me, he wanted our engagement to be unique! But as a hopeless romantic, I told myself it was still the fourteenth in Mountain or Pacific time.

  We set the date for September, so that we could both graduate from Winona and then have plenty of time to prepare a grand wedding. So that May I graduated with a BA in political science with a minor in English, while Marcus earned his BA in sociology.

  The wedding was on Sunday, September 10, 1978. A beautiful Wisconsin late-summer day! Marcus, always a good workman, had built a lovely stone altar on his parents’ family farm, on top of the “horses’ hill,” surrounding it with wildflowers. The scene was breathtaking, as was the temperature—ninety degrees and full sun! I wore a simple, long, white dress that I had bought off the return rack; it was ninety dollars. I also wore a floppy white hat—those were big back then. Marcus’s mother had her silk wedding veil stored in the attic; never sentimental, she planned to rip it up into sections to tie her tomato plants. “Elma!” I said, “you can’t do that. Let me sew the holes in the fabric and I’ll use it as my veil.” And that’s what I did. I spent five dollars on a pair of shoes at Payless, and if I do say so myself, the bride looked great!

  For his part, Marcus wore a dark blue velour suit—hey, this was the seventies! I’ll admit, incidentally, that I never liked the suit; I later gave it to Goodwill during a garage-cleaning frenzy without telling him. Two pastors, Dick Alf and Bill Hagedorn, presided over the ceremony; we pledged our troth using the beautiful words of traditional wedding vows, declaring before God and these witnesses that we would remain lifelong companions. And because this was a working dairy farm, the Holstein cows joined in—they made plenty of noise. I thought of the Bible verse “Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.” I knew that God was with us on that blessed day, as He is with us every day, as His hand guides every living thing.

  Because we had some four hundred people joining us, we had to borrow chairs and benches from a local church. Marcus’s best man was his brother Peter, while my maid of honor was my college roommate and close friend Dana Primrose. My lifelong pal Barb Norbie had moved out to California by then, and sadly, she couldn’t afford to come to the wedding. After the ceremony, we drove to our reception in Winona, where we offered M&Ms as party favors and served root beer and homemade chicken, mashed potatoes, and vegetables for our wedding feast—good food, prepared by local farm women, but nothing fancy. And the price was something like $1.25 per plate. My, how times have changed!

  We spent our wedding night at the Schumacher Inn, a lovely old bed-and-breakfast in New Prague, Minnesota, which back then featured four-star Czech and German dishes.

  For our honeymoon we flew to California, the first time that either of us had ever set foot in the Golden State. We flew to San Francisco, and from SFO we flew to Monterey, where we spent two weeks in the Carmel area. For two nights we stayed at the Gosby House Inn, a beautiful old Victorian perched on Lighthouse Avenue, overlooking the ocean in Pacific Grove. Those nights were a wedding present from my best friend Barb. Then Marcus and I stayed with Barb at the home she was renting with two other women. Barb gave us her bedroom; she slept on the couch. Then we drove down the coast, zipping along the curves of the scenic Pacific Coast Highway to the Hollywood Bowl, where we caught Steve Martin and John Belushi.

  I must pause again to say how close I feel to Barb. After we came back from Israel, we promised each other not only that we would stay friends but that we would see each other at least once a year. She has lived out in California since the midseventies, but we have never missed a year. Over the decades, we have talked and prayed together about everything—from boyfriends and husbands to babies to politics. Both of us are ardently pro-life; Marcus and I focused on foster children while Barb became executive director of a pro-life center. She is godmother to one of our children, and she is Auntie Barb to all five. And I am godmother to her twins. For nearly forty years now, we have been with each other in times of joy and times of tragedy. But perhaps most of all, our friendship is built on the foundation of our faith.

  Marcus and I still didn’t have much money, of course, and so two weeks later, when we came back to Minnesota, we returned some of the duplicate wedding gifts, because we needed cash. For the next year, the new Mr. and Mrs. Bachmann stayed out on the family farm. Marcus worked the cows—what else?—while I got a job at a judge’s office in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, just across the Mississippi River from Minnesota. I answered phones and did typing for Judge Schlosstein, and along the way, in little side moments, I learned a lot of practical things about the law, courthouse life, and our legal system. The judge would always take time to explain to me the finer points of law. I knew that this was how lawyers had once been mentored and trained; that is, aspiring lawyers worked for an experienced lawyer and thus were schooled by him. It worked for Lincoln! In fact, that system still would be good today, it seems to me, because too many law schools have become overfunded hothouses for avant-garde legal theorizing, as opposed to teaching the details and practicalities of the law itself.

  Meanwhile, Marcus and I were trying to hold down our spending and build up our savings. I had zero debt when I graduated from college; Marcus owed fifteen hundred dollars. Our first paychecks went to pay off his student loan debt, and by Christmas, we were 100 percent debt free—and we liked it that way. Frugality and taking good care of the things we had—that’s all in my blood. I can remember, when I was a child, my mom and dad bringing home a brand-new dining-room table and chairs made of hard-rock maple. I was ten, and it was the first time my parents had had a stick of new furniture. He said it had cost a lot of money, nine hundred dollars, so we weren’t allowed to touch it—or even get near it! Dad made his point about the value of fine things, but in our own family, we mostly preferred secondhand furniture that the kids too could enjoy. And besides, there’s a lot of good that you can do with polish and paint!

  In that scrimping spirit, Marcus and I bought our first car, a used Datsun. Actually, it was more of a wrecked Datsun. It had been totaled and then restored—mostly. It ran, but it never quite ran right. We called it “the bomb.”

  The first year of our marriage, 1978–79, was a happy time for us newlyweds. We lived in an old red farmhouse belonging to the Bachmanns, out there with the cows in the middle of the
Midwest. In lieu of rent to Marcus’s parents, we fixed the place up and gave his labor to the farm, working the crops and the cows. I sewed new curtains, and Marcus fixed up the rooms. But the main thing was that the two of us were together. Marcus, always analytical, kept saying that our most important task as a couple was to knit together as one. And that’s what we did. We have been knitted together ever since, for thirty-three years.

  Meanwhile, the larger world was steadily, scarily unraveling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jimmy Carter and Me

  WHILE Marcus and I were gelling our relationship as a couple together, back in the late seventies, the Carter administration was coming unglued. Marcus and I had both voted for Jimmy Carter, but it didn’t take long for us to become disillusioned. I remember being appalled by Carter’s energy policy; he was going on TV, telling us to turn the thermostat down and wear sweaters, and he also wanted the government to build giant “synfuel” plants. These proposals struck me as either an unnecessary sacrifice or an unnecessary boondoggle. After all, I had seen for myself the natural abundance of Alaska—although little did I know, as yet, about the untapped energy supplies abounding also in the lower forty-eight, both underground and offshore.