by John Kerry
In a tradition that’s both quaint and grand, Ted Kennedy—now my senior senator, but long ago the thirty-year-old candidate I’d interned for in 1962 and spent time with on the Mall in Washington in 1971 with the veterans—walked me down the aisle of the Senate like the father of a bride. In the well of the Senate I was ceremoniously sworn in as the twenty-eighth man to hold my seat, just the sixty-fifth citizen overall to hold the title “United States Senator from Massachusetts.”
The person dutifully performing the honors of swearing me in was the vice president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, Yale class of 1948. His father, Prescott Bush, was serving as the Republican senator from Connecticut the day I walked onto campus in New Haven. I shook Vice President Bush’s hand, reminded him of the kindness he had shown my eight-year-old daughter, Vanessa, that past July, sharing his popcorn with her at Harvard Stadium during the Chile versus Norway Olympic qualifying soccer game. Back then Vice President Bush had not allowed the politics of the Massachusetts Senate race to get in the way of relating to my family; little did either of us know then that a political collision awaited us.
I liked Bush very much. Aside from the ugly nature of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, I always found him decent and thoughtful, straight dealing in his interactions. I never doubted whether he was in politics for the right reasons. He loved the Navy as I did, and we talked about that at the soccer game at some length.
Minutes after I was sworn in, Teddy steered me around the Senate floor to meet my new colleagues. It was as we approached a huddle of veteran senators that I heard Alabama’s senior senator, Howell Heflin, cast the Republican vice president in a decidedly colorful light. So much for Senate formality. I can still hear Heflin’s courtly accent emphasizing each and every word before the group broke out in laughter. And so it was that I met my new colleagues. Senator Heflin was then the chairman of the Ethics Committee, a Marine awarded the Silver Star for service in the thick of the fighting in the Pacific in World War II, the onetime chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Back then the Senate was stocked with memorable characters. Majority Whip Alan Simpson from Wyoming was an Army veteran with a quick wit, a great debater who could cut you to pieces when he wasn’t promising to “stick it right in the old bazoo.” Russell Long from Louisiana, the Senate’s leading expert on the tax code, bore a striking resemblance to his famous father, the legendary Kingfish, Huey Long, who had inspired Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece All the King’s Men. I’d read that book by flashlight under the covers at St. Paul’s, when I was only vaguely aware of the icon on whom the book was based, the real-life, flesh-and-blood Huey Long, who was assassinated when Russell was just sixteen. What I knew of Huey Long came from black-and-white newsreel footage that occasionally flashed across a television screen. By the time I met Russell, the senator was, amazingly, in his final term, winding down thirty-eight years in the Senate. It was the only job he’d ever had since being elected at age twenty-nine, two days and two months before he met the thirty-year-old eligibility requirement of the Constitution. He’d outlasted Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, both of whom came to the Senate the same year—1948. Now he was enjoying his last years, still pulling the strings back home in Louisiana.
Another larger-than-life senator was Fritz Hollings, the former governor of South Carolina who courageously presided over the integration of the University of South Carolina. He had served in the Senate since 1966, the most senior junior senator in history, paired with the nonagenarian Strom Thurmond.
Fritz was a hoot. “I don’t want to rust out, I’d rather wear out,” he used to say. He possessed one of the great repertoires of colorful phrases. Diplomats, for example, were “striped-pants cookie pushers.” I never knew him to hold back, even when talking in less appetizing terms: “Letting y’all regulate yourselves is like delivering lettuce by way of a rabbit.” Fritz was a longtime friend of the Kennedys going back to President Kennedy’s campaign. Teddy once described Fritz as “the first non-English-speaking candidate for President,” but once I figured out how to translate Hollings’s deep, rich Charleston accent, we became close friends. He became a great mentor to me on the Commerce Committee and in the Senate. On one occasion he shared a surprisingly personal but invaluable piece of advice. It benefited me in those early days: when I was in hot pursuit of appropriations to bring home some money to Massachusetts and needed to make the case in person—to kiss some rings, in other words—Fritz was pretty clear to me which senators I shouldn’t go see after about 4:30 in the afternoon. His comment needed little explanation but nonetheless he added one with a sly smile: “Either the meetin’ won’t go well or, hell, he won’t remember it the next day. Either way, I’d go ask to see Orrin Hatch at that hour instead. Orrin’s a teetotaler and a deacon in the Mormon Temple.”
I had arrived at a Senate in transition, much as I had arrived twenty-three years earlier on a campus in transition.
Howell Heflin’s off-color language with his colleagues wasn’t unusual back in 1985. The Senate then was an institution that at times sounded a lot more like a bar or a locker room. There was a fair amount of drinking, and the aroma of cigars crept out of many of the senior members’ hideaway offices in the Capitol.
You didn’t have to look far to understand why that might have been the case: I had as many daughters as there were women in the U.S. Senate. Only two of my colleagues were women, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the junior senator from Kansas, and Paula Hawkins, a Republican from Florida who would soon be defeated by my friend Bob Graham in 1986. We were working in what at times felt like a hermetically sealed vault—a time capsule that had not kept up with social progress.
Years later, Teresa would tell me about her experience as the wife of a Republican senator, hosting a gathering for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which her husband, Jack Heinz, a senator from Pennsylvania, was chairing. As the evening wound down, she spotted Strom Thurmond charmingly filling his pockets with chicken wings and cookies to take home with him. She laughed and made him a little plate to take on his way. Strom then was a mere eighty-three. He was dapper in his own peculiar, very senior way: his orange hair was not a color found in nature, and he wore the heavy scent of his favorite cologne, which he stockpiled when he learned the company was going out of business. He thanked Teresa for the goody bag and gave her a hug. She suddenly found ol’ Strom’s hands digging into her sides: “Still maaghty firm, my dear, maaghty firm!” he bellowed. Some old dogs were not changing with the times. He was to cause some consternation a few years later when he similarly greeted Senator Patty Murray of Washington in an elevator and tried to excuse his behavior by explaining that he thought she was an intern.
It was a Senate overwhelmingly old and white and male, something I was reminded of on days when the eighty-four-year-old senior senator from Mississippi, the legendary John C. Stennis, who the year before had a leg amputated due to cancer, rolled by me in his wheelchair. Here he was, a man who had come to the Senate in 1947 when I was not quite four years old. When I was raising money at Yale to help support the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, Stennis had two good strong legs under him as he joined the Southern Caucus’s filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But you learn in the Senate that no matter the history, every vote still counts, and as long as people in a state have sent their choice to the Senate, you have to work together to get anything accomplished.
And Stennis had changed with the times, supporting voting rights legislation a couple years before I showed up in the Senate, a vote he once told Joe Biden had “cleansed his soul.” A year after that he’d campaigned for Mike Espy, the Mississippi Democrat who would become the first African American to represent the Magnolia State in Congress since Reconstruction. Stennis was nonetheless a voice from a distant era, a name I had probably first heard in 1971 when he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a pro–Vietnam War southern stalwart whom angry anti-war activists made a target of their anger. Now
he was my colleague, an old man who had lived almost immeasurable amounts of American history, who described his legislative motto as “stay flexible” and who now surely knew, as Bob Dylan would write (an artist Stennis most likely had never listened to), “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” He was hanging on for dear life—literally.
Stennis wasn’t alone. The Arizona icon Barry Goldwater was in his last term in the Senate, the father of modern conservatism whose libertarian ways were chafing against the rising social conservatism of a new Republican Party, a sea change fast transforming his movement. Tom Eagleton of Missouri was in his last term as well. He was a gentle soul whom I had gotten to know in those intense days of the anti-war movement, a proudly liberal colleague who always looked out for me as a freshman senator. Tom took me under his wing and graciously ceded his seniority to me on the Foreign Relations Committee so I could lead a subcommittee, moving up one place from dead last on the dais. He personified collegiality.
For all the ways the Senate I entered was too homogeneous, it did have a certain, wonderful heterogeneity that has, tragically, been lost in recent decades in ways that have made governing in the United States infinitely more difficult. There was ideological diversity within the parties. Liberal Republicans who cared about the environment as passionately as many of us on the other side of the aisle still existed and still had clout: Jack Heinz from Pennsylvania, John Chafee from Rhode Island and Lowell Weicker from Connecticut were prime examples. There was also geographic diversity among the parties: two Democrats from Alabama, one from Mississippi, one from South Carolina, one from Arizona and two from Georgia. On the other side were two moderate Republicans from Pennsylvania, one from California and several from the Pacific Northwest. There were liberal Republicans further to the left of conservative Democrats, and vice versa.
The rightward turn of the Republican Party and the way in which the Deep South would become almost a wall of near-automatic Republican Senate seats pressured Democrats to do all we could to make sure that reliably blue states elected Democratic senators. Never recognized in the battle for Senate control was the downside of Democrats having to win Senate seats in places like Connecticut and Rhode Island: liberal Republicans were gone forever from those states and, with them, their often constructive voices in their caucus.
I lived through plenty of those early moments Harry Truman talked about: “How did I get here?” I was tempted to pinch myself when I looked to my right and realized that the soft-spoken, unassuming man sitting next to me in our weekly Democratic caucus luncheon was none other than John Glenn of Ohio, the legendary astronaut I had watched on a tiny black-and-white television set at St. Paul’s as America welcomed him home with a ticker tape parade in New York City after orbiting Earth three times. “Godspeed, John Glenn.” The words still gave me goose bumps, the memory was so indelible. Yet here he was. I knew little about him then beyond the heroism and plainspoken determination he had shown the world at NASA. The love of John’s life was his wife, Annie, as kind a person as I had ever met. She was quiet, almost shy, something that stemmed from her battle to conquer a lifelong stutter, but she was inseparable from John and lit up when you asked her a question. We often sat next to each other at Senate functions. She was especially nice—without even having to say a word—about pulling me into a conversation, since she realized I was in a slightly awkward position: separated from Julia, I didn’t have a spouse with me, where most senators did. My friendship with John Glenn deepened. He was my colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee, and as he opened up, we talked about everything from John’s enduring friendship with his wingman from Korea, the baseball legend Ted Williams, to family and kids and our shared love of flying. Imagine, me, a private pilot, talking flying with John Glenn.
John let me in on a little secret he counted on for good luck: he told me that before every mission, in the Marines and at NASA, before he’d go into harm’s way, he relied on a good luck charm he had picked up in Korea, a wooden “fat” Buddha. He’d give its round belly a rub for good luck before flying. It had never let him down. One day, after we made a journey to Vietnam together on the POW/MIA Committee, a gift from John arrived unexpectedly in my office: a wooden Buddha of my own, a gift from one pilot, one veteran, to another. I wasn’t going into space, but I rubbed that Buddha’s belly before a heavy or hard decision in the Senate.
Surrounded by these men who seemed like giants, many of them legends of a great generation, a nagging question kept recurring for me and my generation of senators: How would we make our mark in the Senate? Where did we fit?
The Senate runs on seniority. At number ninety-nine, I didn’t have to excel at math to know that I wasn’t going to be a committee chairman anytime soon. I had asked Minority Leader Robert Byrd for that seat on the Foreign Relations Committee and Byrd hadn’t hesitated; but in front of me in seniority were twenty senators. The same was true on the Commerce Committee. The only committee I might chair within a decade was the Senate Small Business Committee, which sounded more comprehensive than it was. Its jurisdiction was limited to oversight of the Small Business Administration, and it specifically was prohibited from touching the issue small business owners cared about most—taxes.
There were a handful of senators in their prime years who had the blessing of seniority. Joe Biden, having been elected at twenty-nine, was in his early forties wielding the gavel of the powerful Judiciary Committee, and he was right behind the aging Claiborne Pell on the Foreign Relations Committee. Ted Kennedy, just fifty-three, was the most senior Democrat on the Armed Services, the Judiciary and the Labor and Health committees.
Of course, both of my predecessors, Paul Tsongas and Ed Brooke, had gently warned me about Teddy. He was a subject they tap-danced around carefully. He was fun, charming, engaging, but he cast a big shadow. I never really worried about that because I grew up admiring the Kennedys enormously, from my speech at St. Paul’s on behalf of JFK, to my internship with Teddy’s Senate campaign, to the sad, wistful, shock-filled weekend in Long Beach knowing we had lost Robert Kennedy to yet another assassin’s bullet. But Ted was the Kennedy I had known in a different way—more personal and immediate and even intimate. He was the senator who campaigned for me in 1972 in Lowell and Lawrence, touching the heartstrings of the blue-collar Democratic voters who didn’t know me in the district where I’d planted my flag. I liked him. I imagined a big brother and mentor would await me in the Senate. Shortly after I was sworn in, Teddy sent me a black-and-white photo of the two of us at the corner of Constitution and Delaware Avenues on my first day as a senator headed to my first vote. On it, he had scribbled, “Like Humphrey Bogart said, here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Teddy was the master of the personal gesture, acts that came to him instinctively. He knew I was running back and forth on weekends to Boston, trying to be there for soccer games and time with my daughters, and that I was doing all I could to be in the places I wanted to be as well as the places I had to be. He could see it all took a toll, and one day that fall Ted noticed a hacking, deep, rattling cough was getting the best of me. The girls were away with their mom for the upcoming weekend. “John, you’re going down to Palm Beach this weekend to get well,” Teddy ordered. It wasn’t an invitation; it was a command. So I found myself for a Friday through Sunday not freezing up in Boston alone, but in the warmth and sun of Florida, staying in what had been President Kennedy’s Winter White House, which was a special home for the Kennedy family. It was a generous, personal gesture.
Ted was also great fun to be around. In the cloakroom sometimes, the roars of laughter were so loud they could be heard out on the Senate floor. One night, Teddy was holding forth behind the doors in the cloakroom and the presiding officer in the Senate chamber pounded the gavel and demanded, “There will be order in the Senate—and in the cloakroom.” Even his pranks were works of art and brilliant calculation. After a long series of night votes had pushed senators past time to catch commercial f
lights home to the Northeast, our colleague from New Jersey Frank Lautenberg, another World War II veteran and a self-made millionaire, arranged for a private plane to get to Massachusetts. It turned out that a number of senators needed to travel in that direction, and when Frank learned of it, he kindly offered a ride to Claiborne Pell, Ted and me. There was no discussion of sharing the cost. Everyone thought Frank was being very generous, but the next week, all of us were on the Senate floor for a vote when official-looking envelopes were delivered to us under Lautenberg’s signature, with exorbitant bills for the flight. Claiborne was a soft-spoken, genteel, flinty New Englander, as Brahmin as they came with his Newport accent and his sometimes threadbare, timeless suits; Claiborne never threw anything away. This evening, though, Clairborne Pell absolutely roared down the aisle, brandishing the bill. The sight of Claiborne roaring anywhere was itself notable. Back in Rhode Island when he first ran for office, the press nicknamed him “Stillborn Pell.” But this was the scene; something was afoot. Senator Lautenberg was red-faced, protesting he knew nothing about it, when out of the corner of my eye I spied Ted by his desk—Cheshire Cat grin—so pleased with himself. Mystery solved: Ted had commandeered a few sheets of Lautenberg’s stationery and sent false bills to each of us. I give him credit: he knew how to make even the monotony of a late-night Senate vote-a-rama a hell of a lot of fun.