by John Kerry
• • •
IT WAS CRUSHING. We’d been way ahead in the polls and had missed an undercurrent pulling me away from the voters. As a candidate, I was left with a lot of scar tissue.
It was over. The world moved on, but it took me a little longer. I didn’t have a job, let alone a profession. I was unsure of what I would do—unsure by that time of what I even wanted to do. Public service seemed out of reach. I felt more than a little sorry for myself. If VVAW had been a balm for my pain about the war, this personal rejection opened up every wound. Nixon had carried forty-nine states—and it seemed as if the worst kind of politics was being rewarded.
Thanksgiving and the late fall of 1972 were dreary. I lost myself for hours in making a model ship and helicopter that could actually fly. Nixon was still there, lying to the American people and manipulating Vietnam. That Christmas he unleashed a massive bombing attack on North Vietnam, “to force the North Vietnamese to accept the concessions we had made,” according to veteran diplomat John Negroponte. Nixon was trying to surrender without saying it, to bring the troops home, and hoping there would be enough of an interval between their return and the fall of South Vietnam that Americans wouldn’t notice or care. In early January 1973, talks resumed. Within a few weeks, the Paris Peace Accords were signed. The end of the war as we knew it had arrived.
I took a small measure of pride in the fact that those of us who put our reputations on the line had helped force Nixon to bring the war to a close. But we’d paid a price for our activism. Nixon had manipulated divisions skillfully: he and his vice president wanted the country divided, wanted veterans divided, and wanted to reap the political dividends of the culture war they abetted.
I felt like political roadkill myself, but for others the wounds were immeasurable. The warriors of this war had been confused with the war. Many veterans melted into the background. Too many were lost to the streets, abused their bodies with drugs and alcohol, or never quite got back on track. Some slipped quietly into careers, others became hugely successful, but almost none talked about the war. The nation as a whole consigned Vietnam to the recesses of memory. I felt the awful weight of this era.
The only good news that could snap me out of my funk was the best news of all. In January, life changed for us on the home front: Julia told me she was pregnant. We rejoiced in the news. It was a new beginning that brought the joy of our first addition to the family and brought me instant clarity about the future. There was no time to feel sorry for myself. I resolved then and there that never again would I get sidetracked by self-pity. I was the luckiest guy in the world. I was alive. Unlike Dick Pershing and so many others, I was about to be blessed with fatherhood. My sense of gratitude was profound.
This jolt of renewed purpose restored my confidence about other things in life. I had plenty of time to do the things I wanted to do. I suddenly saw the campaign in a more positive light. We had tried. We had given it our all. We had fought for the right things, and while it didn’t work out, it also hadn’t brought the end of the world. Sometimes you have to pick yourself up off the mat and just keep moving ahead. But most of all, I was going to be a father, and I was determined to live fully in every minute of that fatherhood.
Julia and I bought a house in Lowell. We wanted to stay there and prove the skeptics wrong. I wanted to buckle down and go to law school, to give myself income-earning capacity so that never again would I be adrift even if I wasn’t in public service.
Sometime in the late spring, Paul Tsongas, a former Lowell city councilor, visited me. Paul had supported me in my race for Congress. It was an unselfish thing for him to do. He was a lifelong resident of Lowell who had every reason to see me as an interloper and competitor, but he went all out and even said that if I decided to run again in two years, he would support me. But I was educated by my loss. I thought another round against Paul Cronin would just be the same race all over again. I thought Paul Tsongas had a better chance of winning. It was perhaps the demarcation of a new maturity. I told Paul he should run and urged all my supporters to vote for him.
By the time I had settled with certainty on law school, as Julia felt ever more pregnant by the day, it was summer. I had to move fast. I hadn’t even applied to law school. I visited the deans at Harvard, Boston University and Boston College to ask if I could apply late. Harvard and BU gave me the same answer: “We can’t open it up now. Why don’t you take the year and apply next fall?” BC alone at least asked to look at my transcript. Within days the admissions office called to say I had been accepted.
The night before my first law school class, as Julia and I sat at home enjoying the stillness before the push and pull of studying began, the tranquillity was interrupted. Julia’s water broke. It was surreal. We had read all the popular books about childbirth. None prepared us for the suddenness of the moment: after nine months of waiting, just like that, the baby was actually coming. I packed a suitcase, searched for the car keys, nursed Julia into the car, wondering if our child would be introduced to life in the back seat of an automobile. We rushed to Emerson Hospital in Concord, where my fears of imminent birth were immediately dispelled. Julia began a long labor.
We had been through all the Lamaze lessons. I dutifully breathed away with her as the contractions increased in force and tempo. It dawned on me just how ancillary fathers are to this miraculous process. I was there to hold a hand, bring Dixie cups filled with ice chips and call our parents with the news that we were at the hospital. But as every dad learns watching his wife in pain, pushing away, nothing prepares anyone for the full awareness of motherhood that comes with labor. Eventually, Julia was wheeled into the delivery room. I stood by in my surgical gown, trying to be of some use. Twenty minutes ticked by. And then, finally, a baby appeared: long, dark-haired, wet and limp, held up by the doctor. Adrenaline coursed through my body: I thought for a moment she was dead, but suddenly she jerked to life and began a healthy wail. “You have a baby girl,” said the doctor, amid the tears flowing from Julia and me. It was surreal that one moment ago, we were a family of two, and suddenly and forever we had this new light in our life—Alexandra Forbes Kerry. It was a miracle. I had never in my life felt such pure joy and amazement.
Later that day, after basking in the afterglow of new fatherhood, Julia reminded me: you have to be at law school. It hit me: I was a new father—and if I didn’t hurry up, I was about to be a prodigal law student. I drove to Chestnut Hill. It was a dizzying and auspicious day.
The next months were all like Groundhog Day with the same routine—changing diapers, feeding in the night, studying law wherever I could and fighting the traffic commuting from Lowell to Chestnut Hill and back every day. We were at the height of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, and I read contract, property and tort law in long lines just waiting to get gas. The next three years were a blur spent in the law library, in the Middlesex district attorney’s office, where I was a student intern, and at home loving the baby who had entered our lives, watching her turn into a little girl who could walk and talk and bedazzle her parents.
I threw myself into law school in a way I never had in my undergraduate years. Together with my superb partner Ronna Schneider, I took on the moot court event. We won the school competition, went on to win the regionals and then went to New York City for the national finals. There we thought we clobbered the Duke Law School team in oral argument. We waited hours for the decision. The judges had wanted to award the victory to us, but the Duke team had slightly bested us in the brief, which counted for more than 50 percent. The judges were locked in battle trying to find a way to award us the victory. They couldn’t bend the rule, so we lost. It was the last time in the National Moot Court Competition that the brief outweighed the oral argument. The rule was subsequently changed.
I credit law school with teaching me how to think. I enjoyed the give-and-take of Socratic dialogue at a Jesuit law school. I was part of a terrific study group, five classmates who met frequently to dissect the cases we had
been assigned. The fights we had over the meaning of one word taught me to be far more critical, far more demanding, in my own thinking.
As a student, I was permitted under Massachusetts law to try misdemeanor cases. I could even appear before a six-person jury. I was mesmerized by the art of trying a jury trial and spent hours upon hours watching the full-fledged assistant district attorneys prosecute rape, armed robbery or murder cases. I couldn’t wait to get a real felony trial.
On the first day that I reported for duty as a student prosecutor, I walked into the District Court of Cambridge and was assigned a drunk driving case. The assistant DA handed me the papers twenty minutes before the trial, saying, “There’s no better way to start than to start.” He disappeared and left me alone to face the judge. “All rise”—I stood up. I stumbled through the story, which was set out in the police report, and called the officer and put him on the stand. I asked far more questions than necessary. I could see the judge was half-amused, half-annoyed, tolerating my rookie performance. I actually placed into evidence the empty bottles the police had collected in the car. The judge was almost audibly chuckling. I didn’t know that these cases were typically concluded in rapid-fire fashion. There were too many not to. I was treating this one like a murder trial. But I got the conviction and, stupid as I felt, I had tried a case.
In the spring of 1976 I graduated and prepared to take the bar exam with a heightened sense of urgency: I was promised a job as an assistant district attorney as soon as I passed the bar. I was excited about the chance to become a full-time prosecutor, but I was also eager to get the job for another reason: I needed the income. Julia and I had stumbled across a perfect home for our family on Chestnut Hill, near Boston College. We had stayed in Lowell for three years. But with a baby at home and a job in Cambridge, the commute didn’t make sense anymore. The distance from friends and work had also taken a toll on Julia. It was important to both of us to try to lead a more normal life.
The house, with its slight Italian flavor, appealed to our romantic impulses and Julia’s nostalgia for Italy. Perhaps the stucco with the terra-cotta tile roof drew us in. A wonderful brick wall enveloped a garden—our own secret garden. Ample bedrooms were ready for a larger family, and the closing on the house came just in time: Julia was pregnant with our second child, due sometime in late December or early January. It was a great feeling to think of this new home, to know I had a job I wanted, to have the dreaded bar exam behind me. We were at peace as we moved in and were greeted by the most thoughtful of surprises: a friend left a lobster and champagne dinner in the front hall on our first night in our new home.
Happily, in the late fall, we learned that each member of our study group had passed the bar exam. The same day I was sworn into the bar, I took on my responsibilities as an assistant district attorney. I was immediately assigned to prosecute a rape case, squaring off against a well-known defense attorney, Bill Homans. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment putting a rapist behind bars. Shortly thereafter, on New Year’s Eve, before the page turned to 1977, we returned to Emerson Hospital as seasoned veterans for the arrival of our second daughter, Vanessa Bradford Kerry. The beginning of the new year was a good time. We were blessed—new house, new job, healthy newborn.
I buckled down to work in the office of the Middlesex district attorney. John Droney, the boss, was an old-school, crafty politician. He had followed my ill-fated run for Congress and respected my service in the military. We spent a fair amount of time talking politics. He would also regale me with stories of some of his great prosecutions. He had put a number of infamous criminals behind bars, including the Boston Strangler. Sadly, John had fallen ill with a nerve or motor disease, which he tried to keep out of the public eye. He would allow no discussion of how he was doing or any other deviation from the work of the office and the certainty of his reelection.
The problem, of course, was that his reelection wasn’t certain at all. John thought he could run an old-fashioned race, stay under the radar, rely on name recognition and let city and ethnic politics do the rest—but politics was changing. A very capable former assistant attorney general, Scott Harshbarger, was planning to run against John as a reform candidate. He represented a formidable challenge in the new environment. Moreover, the office had fallen behind the times. In New York, District Attorney Robert “Bob” Morgenthau was setting new standards for prosecutors. In Massachusetts, Bill Delahunt was doing the same in Norfolk County. Washington was making grant money available to prosecutors to modernize. John Droney didn’t have one grant, let alone any plan for modernization. There was a backlog of thousands of pending cases, each on an index card in a floating file box. There was no computerized system. Crime was rising. Justice was delayed. John one day asked me what I would do to change the office. I told him. The next day, he shocked me: he appointed me first assistant district attorney, reporting only to him and with full authority to get done what needed to be done. He called a meeting of all the office. People jammed into his office to hear what he had to say. He announced my new role.
I was both dumbfounded and excited: never in my wildest imagination did I expect to be running one of the largest district attorney offices in the country only months out of law school. I knew that knives would be out. Change doesn’t come easily anywhere. But I had a chance to turn the office around, and I was eager and anxious to earn my spurs.
With young reformers recruited for the effort, we established accountability in the assignment and flow of cases, created a Victim Witness Assistance Program, set up a rape counseling unit and a white-collar crime unit to specialize in complicated financial crimes and installed a new computer system.
By the time John Droney’s 1978 election came around, the office was humming, but John was reticent about advertising our accomplishments in a modern campaign style. I was finally able to persuade him to let us run one full-page advertisement in the Boston Globe: ten reasons John Droney should be reelected—a stark, quick narrative of each brutal crime he had cracked that made the county safer. John won the election, and I went back to trying cases.
One case in particular stands out. Austen Griffin, a decorated veteran and a member of one of the local American Legion posts, walked into my office on the second floor of the courthouse. He told me he was being strong-armed by Howie Winter, the number two organized crime figure in New England, who was pushing to force slot machines into the post. Austen wanted none of it. He was outraged by Howie’s tactics and wasn’t going to be bullied. Howie and his Winter Hill Gang had earned their reputation as head-smashers the hard way: in blood. Bodies piled up wherever they went. There were dead bookies washing up on the shores of the Mystic River. There were small-time thugs who regularly disappeared. Winter was in cahoots with James “Whitey” Bulger and some of the most notorious killers of their time. None of it could scare Austen Griffin.
Going after Howie Winter was a challenge. But here was this citizen whose credibility was beyond reproach, expecting us to take action. I called the state police, who worked with us day to day. We provided protection to the witnesses. Austen never wavered. We won a grand jury indictment, and I asked the brilliant prosecutor Bill Codinha to take the case on full-time. He was our best trial attorney and there was no way I could run the office and take on a case of that length and importance. In a superb prosecutorial coup, Bill brought home a conviction. For the first time, a huge dent was put in the Winter Hill Gang and organized crime. We had done at the county level what neither state nor federal government had been able to do—and all because of a gutsy citizen with values and nerves of steel who was willing to stand up for his rights and unwilling to bend to evil.
I stayed with the office until 1980, when I felt my presence was cramping John Droney. He never said anything to me, but he did begin to reassert himself on a few personnel decisions, and I sensed that it was time for me to move on. Droney had been a mentor, something I’d lacked in Massachusetts. His personal example battling a terrible afflictio
n, which turned out to be Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the opportunity he gave me were both life-shaping.
But it was now time for me to start a new chapter.
It was 1980. Ronald Reagan had swept the country, including Massachusetts. I began practicing law privately in a boutique law firm I had set up with another assistant district attorney from Middlesex County, Roanne Sragow. We were working on medical malpractice cases that were eye-opening. A local doctor had become mixed up with a company that provided hair transplants using rug fibers as plugs—the ultimate harebrained scheme. The photos of heads infected by these carcinogenic fibers would make any stomach turn. Roanne and I just needed to find the right jury to nauseate! The insurance companies were unwilling to settle. Accordingly, we went to trial. We succeeded in getting the carcinogenic qualities of the rug fibers entered into evidence. Winning that trial convinced the insurance companies we knew how to try a case and uncorked a flow of settlements.
Taking on these cases was interesting, but I found the practice too predictable. From the moment a client walked in, I could guesstimate fairly quickly what the outcome would be. But one case was an exception. Roanne had taken on a court appointment to represent an indigent prison inmate, George Reissfelder, who insisted that he was innocent of murder. Both Roanne and I initially took his claim with a grain of salt because we had learned as prosecutors that “they’re all innocent,” as the saying goes. Prosecuting can breed some measure of cynicism into the practice of criminal law, but having represented one court appointment for a defendant in a murder, I knew that so can defending.
George Reissfelder confounded our cynicism. Roanne first, and then I, came to believe he really was innocent. He was in prison for a murder he hadn’t committed—he was a criminal, yes, but not a killer. Roanne put extraordinary hours and sweat equity into the case, and I undertook specific assignments on her behalf to ease the load. We thought we could prove it, but there were key hurdles we had to get over, including getting a priest released from his vows of confidentiality in order to help exonerate George. We also needed to secure a release from lawyer-client protection to make admissible exonerating information from George’s codefendant, who was now deceased. Unbelievably, George’s accomplice told his own lawyer George didn’t kill anyone, but the lawyer, in protecting his client, allowed George to be convicted. Finally the truth could come out, provided the lawyer was free to testify. Long before the days of DNA testing, the case was a reminder that it was possible for someone who wasn’t guilty to end up behind bars, and it hardened my opposition to the death penalty.