by John Kerry
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Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 Childhood
Chapter 2 Bright College Years
Chapter 3 Raising My Right Hand
Chapter 4 War
Chapter 5 The War at Home
Chapter 6 Finding My Way
Chapter 7 The Old Senate
Chapter 8 Holding Washington Accountable
Chapter 9 Making Peace
Chapter 10 A Time of Transition
Chapter 11 Cancer and Comebacks
Chapter 12 Within a Whisper
Chapter 13 Dusting Myself Off
Chapter 14 New President, Broken Senate
Chapter 15 Mr. Chairman
Chapter 16 Diplomacy in a Dangerous World
Chapter 17 Getting Caught Trying
Chapter 18 Preventing a War 485
Chapter 19 The Open Wound
Chapter 20 Protecting the Planet
Afterword
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
Image Credits
To my grandchildren—Alexander, Allegra, Astrid, Isabelle, Jack, Livia and Sloan—to their parents, to my wife, Teresa, and to the future
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
—Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”
Author’s Note
Every Day Is Extra is not just a statement of fact; it’s an attitude about life. It is an expression that summarizes how a bunch of the guys I served with in Vietnam felt about coming home alive. It is the recognition of a gift and a mystery. It is a philosophy lived by people who could have died on any given day but didn’t when far too many good men did. It is an expression of gratitude for survival where others did not make it. It is a pledge accepting responsibility to live a life of purpose. And it is the recognition that those of us who survived when so many others didn’t had better live our extra days in ways that keep faith with the memory of brothers whose days were cut tragically short. Finally, “every day is extra” means living with the liberating truth of knowing there are worse things than losing an argument or even an election—the worst thing of all would be to waste the gift of an extra day by sitting on the sidelines indifferent to a problem.
This book is the story of my journey trying to keep faith with the gift of my extra days.
CHAPTER 1
Childhood
“WONDERFUL,” MY FATHER said in a soft, hoarse but somehow satisfied whisper, his eyes closed, savoring a bite of the Swiss chocolate he and I both loved since we—decades apart—were young boys in Swiss boarding schools under very different circumstances, young boys who found that rich and sinful indulgence helped fill a void.
It was the last mouthful of chocolate Pa would ever taste.
For nine years, the cancer had been a constant aggressor, but now, in late July 2000, after doctors promised him he would die of something else and advised a “watch and wait” response to his prostate cancer, it had relentlessly, cruelly found its way into his bones. The pain was agonizing. All we could do was liberally pump palliative morphine into his body to bring some measure of comfort—or the next best thing: numbness.
My brother, Cameron, and my sisters, Peggy and Diana, and I were wandering through our childhoods as our father was slipping away, high in a tower of Massachusetts General Hospital, facing the Charles River and the playing fields of the park below. It was a warm, blue-sky July day. I could see a light breeze rippling the trees, while small sailboats dotted the Charles River basin in front of MIT. There was a part of me that yearned to be outdoors, feeling the summer warmth, far away from the reality that my father was about to die. But of course, reality has its harsh way of dragging you back to earth. Coincidentally, just days before, President Clinton had landed his helicopter in the fields below us during a visit to Boston. I had watched from the twenty-first floor while the world of the living, which had no inkling of the personal drama playing out in our lives, went on below. I was one of three finalists under consideration to be Al Gore’s running mate. It hit me that my father would never know the outcome of that decision. It was strange to juxtapose what I thought was important with the intimacy and finality of our world in that room.
Pa slipped deeper and deeper into sleep. His breathing became heavier and labored. Now we were just waiting—my sisters, brother and I sitting vigil at his bedside, the day after his eighty-fifth birthday. His breaths grew increasingly shallow. While we were cloistered, quietly and somberly, at Massachusetts General Hospital, our eighty-seven-year-old mother, his wife of more than sixty years, was resting at home, unable to wait with us the long hours for the inevitable. She had said her goodbye a day earlier—a painful bedside farewell in which her last words to him were “I’ll see you tomorrow.” All of us in the room knew she wouldn’t, and the tears in her eyes told us she knew it too. I wondered how you say goodbye like that to someone you’ve lived with for more than six decades, and I felt enormous pain for my mother, who was clearly overwhelmed by the moment.
I know I was lucky to have parents who lived as long as mine did, and grateful too for all of us to be able to be present to say our goodbyes, but I’ve learned over time that no matter how old one is, no matter how much longevity there is to celebrate, when a parent dies, we are all of us, no matter what age, still children. Mothers and fathers fall into different categories altogether. Age and illness reverse the role of caretaker. And so it was with us. It fell to the four of us—Richard and Rosemary’s adult children—to helplessly wait for our father to die. At one point, we asked one another: Were we really certain he wanted to go? Did he want us to do something, anything—take extra and more extreme steps, however futile they might be—to give him a few more days? Was he really ready to take his leave?
Suddenly, so uncertain were we about Pa’s wishes, we went to considerable lengths to wake him to ask what he wanted. “Pa, is there anything we can do? What do you want?” His eyes grew wide and clear. He abruptly sat up in bed and forcefully announced, “I want to die.” Those were the last words Pa ever spoke. He lay back on the pillow, closed his eyes once more, and with all of us surrounding him, holding his hands, touching his arms, we watched him slip away.
I suppose for us children trying hard to divine our father’s last wish, the certainty of that announcement lifted a burden. It was a relief, a comfort, but it was jarring nonetheless.
Now he was gone. Even after my last-ditch efforts to pull out of him some answers, not just about life’s mysteries but about the mysteries of his life, I realized the brief accounts that he had given left me full of more questions than Pa was ever able—or willing—to answer, not just so late in the day but also throughout his life. Some of his reticence to share more, I chalk up to the stoicism of those of the Greatest Generation. Even by that measure, however, Pa or Pop or “Popsicle,” as I sometimes teasingly called him, was still a complicated and perplexing man. What I hadn’t fully realized as I was growing up was any of the reasons for his emotional reserve.
I wonder to this day what a six-year-old Richard Kerry was
like on Wednesday, November 23, 1921. Did he wake up at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, eat his breakfast, hug his parents goodbye, and innocently head off to school carrying a lunch pail? Was he looking forward to Thanksgiving the next day? Did he rush out the schoolhouse doors onto the playground after lunch, chase a ball or find friends to play boyish games, completely unaware that less than five miles away at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, his father, having filed a will eight days earlier leaving everything to my grandmother, was walking straight into the lavatory, pulling out a handgun and shooting himself in the head?
Before the school bell would have rung to call Richard Kerry and the other students back inside, this forty-eight-year-old man, my (unknown to me) grandfather, had died instantly, violently and horrifically.
When did my father learn this? Who told him? What did they tell him? Did someone pull him out of class and rush him home early to be with his mother and older brother in shock and sorrow? Was there a knock at the front door, a policeman and a priest standing stone-faced on the porch to break the bad news to my grandmother?
For years, I had no idea how my grandfather had died. My father had little to say about it. Whenever I asked about my grandfather—when he had died, where he had come from, what he did for a living—all the questions one could imagine—my father was a combination of tight-lipped and seemingly unknowing about his own father.
For a long time, I was simply told my grandfather had been ill. Later I would hear stories of depression, or a business downturn, or womanizing—and God knows it may have been a combination of many things. I think I was sixteen, certainly after my grandmother had died, when someone shared with me that his death had been a suicide, but that was all—no details, no circumstances, just a distant tragedy that was better left in the past. As I grew older I asked my parents and cousins what they knew of his suicide. No one seemed to know any of the details. It was a mystery and seemed destined to stay so. But one thing I do know with certainty: whatever Pa knew and felt, it was a source of pain and some bitterness that he carried with him every day of his life.
Sometime after the suicide my grandmother packed up my father and his older sister, Mildred, and departed for Vienna, where some Kerry family members lived. My father’s much older brother stayed behind to continue his own career. No doubt Granny, as we called her, wanted to get away from the swirl of mystery surrounding my grandfather’s death. However, as if the burden of the suicide and sudden transformation of life were not already enough, within a year of the trauma, when my father had turned seven, his sister, Auntie Milly, as I came to know her, was stricken with polio.
As my father wrote many years later: “In 1922, when I was 7 years old, my 13-year-old sister came down with a devastating case of infantile paralysis. She was flat on her back for six months and was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. We were in Europe at the time and spent the best part of the 1920s there.”
On top of my grandfather’s death, my aunt’s sickness was a monumental blow. It consumed my grandmother and clearly left my father grasping for meaning. As I explored my father’s beliefs about religion in many later conversations, I learned that his bitterness and profound sadness over the loss of his father and his sister’s sudden crippling by a terrible disease crushed whatever faith he had once had.
Though raised Catholic by a mother more than zealous in her faith, my father could never reconcile the tragedies that befell his family with the concept of a merciful God. It was my mother, the Brahmin Protestant, who actually tended to our religious upbringing as Catholics and made certain we learned our catechism, received First Communion, were confirmed, and attended Mass regularly.
Auntie Milly’s illness became the focus of all my grandmother’s energy. She embarked on a broad search for a cure (or at least improvement) that centered on spas in Europe, and when the family returned from Europe in 1930, their quest ultimately included a stay in the spa town of Warm Springs, Georgia.
It was there that the family met another polio patient by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was sworn in as president, my father was invited to the White House with other families of Warm Springs residents. He told me that after the inauguration ceremony, the first group the president met with was his fellow travelers from Warm Springs. My father, then seventeen, recalled with awe the image of curtains being pulled back and Roosevelt standing there in his braces, talking with his friends who shared the same understanding of a life changed instantly by a silent stalker.
Fortunately, first in Chicago and then in Boston, my grandfather had been a successful retail businessman—at least until the moment of his demise. He left enough money to enable my grandmother to live comfortably for the rest of her life. While the crash of ’29 had enough impact to curtail the European meanderings and bring the family back to the States, it did not destroy my grandmother’s ability to live a good life. She bought a home in Sarasota, Florida, where the weather helped provide comfort for Auntie Milly. She spent summers on Piney Point in Marion, Massachusetts, looking across Buzzards Bay to Naushon Island, which, thanks to my mother’s family, would play a large part in my life. She continued occasional travel to Europe and took advantage of her ability to send my father to schools in Switzerland and then Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University and Harvard Law School.
They were not wealthy, but they were certainly always comfortable. When my grandmother died, she provided enough money for my father to pursue his dream of building a sailboat and sailing across the ocean.
My father’s passions were introduced to me, his elder son, from the earliest age. He took me skiing for the first time in Davos, Switzerland, when I was eleven or twelve—a place that would become a frequent destination for me as the host city of the World Economic Forum. On my very first day on skis—the old wooden-tipped kind that strapped my cold leather lace-up boots into bear-trap bindings in which there was no margin of safety (fall, and your knee or leg took all the pressure of being locked into the binding)—up we went to the top of the mountain with my father casually saying, “No sweat. Just point your skis forward and down and off you go!”
What my father was thinking I will never know—I asked him many times—but on day one on skis he took me down the Davos Parsenn, not the hardest run but the longest on the mountain. I literally did it mostly on my rear end. My father was an avid fan of the eight-millimeter home movie camera, so I now have reels of humiliation for my grandchildren to laugh at. Despite the embarrassing evidence of my early adventures on the slopes, I remain eternally grateful for his introducing me to mountains and a soaring sport, both of which I love with an exuberance that to this day exhilarates and revitalizes me every time I’m on a snowy mountain.
I can say the same for sailing. For my father, being on the sea became an obsession; for me, sailing was the beginning of a special, unbreakable bond with the ocean.
I vividly recall my early introduction to the magic of wind and sail. It was my baptism of a different kind—holding the tiller and learning the rhythm of the waves, the prance of the bow with a gust of wind, the dipping of the gunwale into the water just enough to challenge gravity but never enough to capsize, the bob of the boat with the swirl of the ocean—feeling the wind and spray in my face. Sailing became a significant part of my life, but not with the same intensity as for my father. Indeed, from college on, there were often large gaps between my time on the water—time spent on one campaign trail or another, or traveling as secretary of state. Despite the intervals between times under sail, I always yearned for the freedom and tranquillity of being at sea. It pulled at me. Even the brief moments when I could get out on the water were peaceful and restorative. Just the memories would feel good.
• • •
PERHAPS THE SEA was in our blood—in the DNA of both Kerry and Forbes families. Not only did our passions always stay connected to the ocean, but the original journey by which we came to America by sea, nearly 250 years apart. My Kerry grandparents arrived
at Ellis Island aboard the SS Königin Luise on May 18, 1905. The “Manifest of Alien Passengers for the U.S. Immigration Officer at the Port of Arrival” lists Frederick Kerry, thirty-two years old, male, married, merchant from Austria, last known address Vienna, destination unknown, passage paid by himself, in possession of more than $50, never before in the United States. Below his name was Ida Kerry, 28, female, married, and below hers, Erich Kerry, 4, male, single—single and noted at age 4, imagine that.
Frederick Kerry’s “destination unknown” quickly became Chicago, the first place he chose to make the new beginning. For whatever reasons, that did not last and he moved to Massachusetts, where he ran a shoe manufacturing business. He did very well, settling his family in a comfortable home at 10 Downing Road, Brookline. By all the normal measurements, this immigrant family appeared to be living the American dream. This is the world my father entered.
Ten years after they had docked in New York Harbor, on July 28, 1915, the family welcomed Richard John Kerry’s arrival. Sadly, because of my father’s distance, both in time and emotion, from his father’s experience, my brother and sisters and I—indeed our mother and extended family—never grew up with the narrative of this journey across the ocean to America. It was in every respect the great American narrative—coming to the New World for a new life, experiencing the glorious welcome of the Statue of Liberty, landing at Ellis Island, starting over—but it was lost in the gunshot to the head in the Copley Plaza and, I assume, in other parts of the past that I was not to learn of until I was running for president in 2003.
Later in life I learned the full story of my grandparents’ journey to America, and I have often wondered whether my father had inklings of more to their odyssey than met the eye. The line from the musical Hamilton comes to mind: “In New York you can be a new man,” except maybe you can’t completely. Something caught up to my grandfather—what it may have been I will never know for sure. I can only imagine the questions my father must have asked—certainly of himself, if not his brother or his mother—and I can only imagine if he did know more of the story, how that likely would have affected his life choices and outlook. What was clear to me, which became evident in my father’s parenting, was that not having a father role model himself had a profound impact on me and my siblings. Basically on his own, his life was privileged and somewhat lonely. His sister was paralyzed, demanding huge attention from my grandmother. His brother was absent, away pursuing his own career. His father had abandoned him in a selfish, violent moment that must have been incomprehensible to this young boy.