Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Our first night in Managua, we attended a working dinner at Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto’s home. We suspected he was launching a charm offensive. As we discussed steps that could be taken to lay the groundwork for negotiation, I couldn’t help but notice the opulence with which the minister surrounded himself. I remember thinking, This guy is supposed to be leading a people’s revolution?

  The next day we asked to meet with as many people as possible on both sides of the conflict. We engaged in dozens of conversations, many of which seemed to confirm our suspicion that the Contras had committed shocking atrocities. I will never forget meeting with a woman named Zoila Rosa Domínguez Espinoza. She was probably in her early fifties, I doubt even ten years older than I was. Fighting tears, she described how, three months earlier, the Contras had ambushed a civilian Jeep, murdering her daughter and three other young professors. She carried her daughter’s graduation picture in her hand, begging us to do anything we could to make the war stop. It reinforced the sense that Washington and Moscow were seeing this civil war purely through an ideological lens. It was just another proxy fight. Instead of listening to people on the ground who, first and foremost, wanted to live their lives without violence, both capitals were content to “proxy” onward.

  The night before we returned to Washington, we had a five-hour dinner meeting with senior Sandinista officials, including, finally, President Daniel Ortega. He outlined his theory of a potential peace. For several hours, we kicked ideas back and forth, with Tom and me listening carefully for any hint of an approach that could actually fly in the United States. Late at night, Ortega determined he wanted us to take an idea back to President Reagan.

  The next morning before we boarded our flight, we were handed a document at the airport that represented his formal proposal for negotiations. I was comfortable taking it to the administration. It was two and a half pages and basically boiled down to this: Ortega said he was prepared to enter into a cease-fire with the Contras, rein in his police state and kick out the Soviet and Cuban military advisors working with his military, hold elections and embrace a peace agreement, if, in return, the United States would drop its matériel support for the rebels.

  I couldn’t vouch for the Sandinistas’ readiness to live by their own proposal, but given the steady descent of the region into greater violence, I thought the United States had a responsibility to test whether they were serious. I believed that unless you want to go to war, you don’t lose by trying for peace. If it leads to progress, that’s terrific, and if it doesn’t, then you’ve earned greater credibility with allies and neighbors. I thought the Reagan administration should treat this proposal as a first volley and at least make a counterproposal. But Tom and I weren’t negotiators. All we could do was convey Ortega’s message. Little did we know there was no appetite for that kind of diplomacy in the White House. Before Tom and I were even back in Washington, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the region, Elliott Abrams, was already calling around to Capitol Hill to pour cold water on the entire idea.

  The day after we got back, the White House convened a meeting with Senate leaders to discuss the issue. Tom and I were told only one of us could have a spot in the meeting, so we flipped a coin. I won the coin toss, or maybe I lost, depending on what was to follow.

  Sitting at the White House as a freshman senator was one of those moments you imagine will be important. I argued the case for exploring renewed peace talks. The Reagan administration officials followed with their case, which boiled down to one argument: it was naive to believe anything Ortega said. They saw no reason to talk to the regime at all. This was my introduction to some of the neoconservatives who would bring us the war in Iraq. They refused to accept what I believed, that negotiation isn’t based on trust; it’s a way of probing to find out if advances can be made. They didn’t want to stop the war; they wanted to widen it. The meeting was just window dressing. Minds were already made up. We were a couple of years away from President Reagan making “trust but verify” his mantra in dealing with the Soviets; but I wondered why on earth the United States could negotiate with the Soviet Union, the same power that had invaded Afghanistan and had nuclear warheads pointed at us, but couldn’t even explore talks with a tiny country in our neighborhood.

  Days later, Speaker Tip O’Neill and the House of Representatives voted down a Reagan Contra aid proposal. I hoped that that vote might mean the administration would come back to the Senate with a new approach on peace talks and put Ortega to the test.

  Instead, I learned a very different Washington lesson, a lesson about bare-knuckle politics in our nation’s capital. It was also a harbinger of a different kind of politics that would break the city itself as the years went by.

  It started with Senator Barry Goldwater—someone I knew mainly by historical reputation for his 1964 hostile takeover of the Republican Party, which began the exile of the moderate Rockefeller Republicans. Goldwater had been my colleague for just a handful of months. We exchanged pleasantries but had never had a real conversation. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him.

  Ted Kennedy had schooled me in Senate norms of civility, in which colleagues spoke privately to each other before they took aim at each other in the media. Two words I heard often from Leader Byrd were “senatorial courtesy.”

  Clearly there was another rule book with which I wasn’t familiar. Without warning, Senator Goldwater blasted Tom Harkin and me to the media, accusing us of violating the Logan Act, an obscure federal law from the late eighteenth century that makes it a crime to negotiate with a foreign government without prior authorization.

  Goldwater didn’t know us, but that didn’t stop him from employing an often-used tactic of the Far Right, accusing us of being traitors. We were two senators who had traveled through the auspices of the Foreign Relations Committee, abiding by all the regular protocols and procedures, doing what senators are supposed to do before they vote on issues of national security: we were gathering facts. The legislative branch is a coequal branch of government to the executive—something I’d have thought a veteran U.S. senator like Goldwater would have wanted to protect as an institutional prerogative.

  The accusation was ludicrous. We had never entered into any negotiation, and Goldwater knew it. Leader Byrd told me not to take it seriously. The intention wasn’t to engage the legal system but to silence us. It was the political equivalent of a brushback. It created a media firestorm. Conservative pundits pounced. Washington had two newspapers—the Washington Post, which was serious and fair, and the Washington Times, a right-wing broadsheet not known for being “fair and balanced.” The Times wasn’t what we call a “paper of record,” but it could drive television coverage with its exaggerated headlines, and it surely did this time.

  Tom and I were on the defensive. We huddled with Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd on the Senate floor. Chris slapped me on the back, smiling as he said, “Looks like you scared somebody.” Teddy was his usual upbeat self. “Never explain,” he warned us, repeating his mantra that in politics if you’re explaining, you’re losing. He didn’t believe in getting into a defensive crouch, and his own thick skin, developed over years of being a punching bag for the Right, had numbed him to their theatrics. There wasn’t a Republican flyer or direct-mail fund-raising letter in conservative politics that didn’t mention Ted. He had come to revel in being their bête noire. I wasn’t there yet.

  In fact, I was seething. It felt as though facts didn’t matter. Senators who had taken dozens of overseas trips just like mine didn’t say a word in defense of the Senate’s prerogatives, let alone of two of their colleagues. The media reaction was just as Ted had predicted: rather than focusing on the absurdity of Goldwater’s attack, rather than noting its lack of substance, the reporting was about the political process and the atmospherics. The story was “Kerry on the Defensive.”

  I kept asking myself: If this was all it took in Washington to torpedo debate about a serious issue, how were we ever g
oing to get anything done? The right wing had a narrative and a playbook, and they were effective. We had facts and logic, and those two assets didn’t feed the political beast.

  Within a couple of days, the right wing was handed a new talking point, courtesy of Ortega himself, who boarded a plane to Moscow to collect another $200 million from his Soviet sponsors. Ortega’s dance with the Soviets didn’t surprise me that much. He was a Marxist, and the Reagan administration hadn’t been interested in talking with him. But it was another kick in the teeth for Tom Harkin and me. The right wing could argue Ortega had proven that we were naive.

  It was clear to me that the Senate was not going to break new ground on the war in Nicaragua. Most Democrats were content opposing a growing role for America in the war, and most Republicans were content doing the opposite. A diplomatic third way wasn’t going to be embraced in Washington. Other countries in the hemisphere were still looking for diplomacy, so I sent my foreign policy staffer, Dick McCall, to meet with Costa Rica’s president, Oscar Arias Sánchez, and advise him on the conversations Tom Harkin and I had shared on our trip. I wound up lending Dick to President Arias to work on the peace process. I suspected that in the right hands—not American or Russian—a peace plan that put hemispheric negotiations at the local level had a real chance for success. Arias was the right person for the job—so much so that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for being the principal force behind a regional peace plan signed by five Central American countries. Meanwhile, Washington was headed for an entirely different drama when it came to the Contras.

  • • •

  IF MY EXPERIENCE on the receiving end of a Washington partisan attack had chastened me about the limits of Senate collegiality, an unexpected experience renewed my faith that the institution really was special. Orientation for freshman senators teaches you the basics—how to hire a staff, how to manage an office budget, the parliamentary fundamentals—but just as Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy had shown me in the lessons and reflections they shared, the really important rules aren’t written down, nor do the most meaningful locations necessarily show up on a map.

  As it turned out, there were two places in the Senate where politics really was put aside: the Senate gym and the private, weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast.

  The gym was a place for senators to get away from the phones, the confrontational debates on the floor, the deluge of meetings and fund-raisers. Former senators had privileges at the gym for life, and some who had stayed in Washington after defeat or retirement would still come back, ostensibly to work out but more likely because they missed the camaraderie and sense of purpose. The man who had held my Senate seat before Paul Tsongas, Ed Brooke, was one of them. When we ended up together in the gym, he always asked how I was enjoying the Senate. He was wistful about a career interrupted by defeat in 1978. But by 1985, he was a man without a party and a senator without a seat. The gym was his refuge, much as it was for those still serving. Some senators chatted away an hour each day while restoring flexibility to tired old legs in the Jacuzzi; others went for a massage to stretch out muscles sore from long flights and long days. Some, like Ted Kennedy, who was haunted by a broken back from a 1965 plane crash, depended on those massages just to stand straight, although Teddy never complained. A few hit the showers to wash away hangovers from the night before. Some even exercised.

  The weekly prayer breakfast, on the other hand, was a chance to exercise different muscles. At 7:00 a.m. every Wednesday, senators put aside policy and party and gathered in Room S-15 in the Capitol, under the quiet guidance of the Senate chaplain, to reflect on their journeys of faith.

  I had grown up with the Latin Mass and the formality of the Catholic Church in the days before Vatican II aimed to create a more personal relationship between Catholics and their God. I spent a lot of time mastering my Latin responses and becoming the fastest reciter of the Our Father (Paternoster) in my class, but no one encouraged us to analyze the Bible. There was no wrestling with doctrinal texts.

  So the prayer breakfast was new and different, and I began with a bit of reserve. It certainly wasn’t like anything I had experienced at home. Neither my Protestant mother nor my Catholic father was demonstrative about faith. They were believers, but they shared an abundance of New England restraint—private in their religious views. My mother dutifully accepted that her children would be raised Catholic and made sure we attended catechism class regularly, even as we shuttled between boarding schools. But we never had dinnertime conversations about the Bible, and the churches where I served as an altar boy were formal. No after-hours Bible study awaited adults, just children receiving Sunday school lessons—and I do mean “receiving.” These teachings were always one-way, with no back-and-forth, no examination of our hopes, fears and beliefs.

  The Senate Prayer Breakfast gently challenged those traditions. It was focused on Scripture and charged senators with exploring the Bible itself to find meaning. The Senate chaplain was present, but the group was really led by two senators, one Democrat and one Republican, acting as conveners. Each week we would hear from senators or former senators, usually describing how a relationship with God helped them navigate the trials life had thrown their way. It was a view of my new colleagues that defied stereotypes, caricatures and the straitjacket of party labels. It was where I heard the Republican leader, Bob Dole, describe the ways in which his family’s church in Russell, Kansas, rallied around him after he came home from World War II in a full body cast with a withered arm, underscoring the virtue of Christian charity. I heard my classmate Mitch McConnell, 1984’s lone Republican freshman senator, talk about how his Baptist faith helped him overcome childhood polio and how he had come to believe that God had a plan for him. It was where I first heard from senators about missions they’d taken to Africa and Central America to share their faith and serve the poor.

  It was, I realize now, the first and only place where I heard Ted Kennedy speak to the way faith had helped him overcome the death of his beloved family members. The world knew Ted as a keeper of Camelot and the champion of liberal ideals. I had gotten to know him as a colleague and a mentor, but until that moment I’d never known him as a quiet devotee of his Catholic faith who had found solace in our religion at his lowest moments.

  Those of my generation remembered where we were the day President Kennedy was killed, and we remembered Ted’s eulogy to Bobby in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. Those memories represented indelible tragic tributes to icons lost rather than empathy with the brother who remained. Never had I heard Teddy talk in personal terms about the two brothers stolen from him by assassins’ bullets, or about his eldest brother, Joe, lost in a war, or his beloved sister, Kathleen, who died in a plane crash in her twenties.

  Here in the privacy of a quiet room in the Capitol, as the sun came up slowly over Washington, I heard Ted talk about a knock on the door from a Navy chaplain with news that Joe’s plane had exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, and the way his mother poured her pain into the recitation of the Rosary. He talked about finding grace in the teachings of the Church. After that day, I thought differently about the pain Teddy carried with him, the suffering hidden behind that twinkle in his eyes.

  For a long time, I felt far from ready to speak up much at the prayer breakfast. I had come to the Senate “in a hurry” in many ways. Whereas Ted Kennedy had waited more than a year to give his first Senate floor speech, just a couple of months into my tenure, I used my maiden speech to address military spending and the MX missile. I approached the prayer breakfast the opposite way. I was immediately fascinated by the Scripture lessons, intellectually engaged, but I wasn’t ready to use the Bible as a vehicle to talk about my own journey. In fact, in a room where many colleagues seemed to have such certainty about their faith, such deep conviction, I began to wrestle privately with nagging doubts that had followed me ever since the Navy.

  My faith had experienced highs and lows, times of engagement and times when I pulled back or seemed to l
et it all go on autopilot. I’d felt deeply connected to the Church as an altar boy and even in high school at St. Paul’s, where through my relationship with Reverend Walker I felt a connection to the values side of religion, to the lessons of living out the Golden Rule.

  By the time I went to Vietnam, though, I was the average parishioner, showing up for major days of obligation but going to church when it suited me. In between, especially in college, there had been a lot of Sundays when I slept in after a Saturday night spent chasing a different kind of salvation. The most urgent prayer usually was for God to make my head stop pounding.

  I would rise and fall in my zeal—faithful, but not “faith full.” In combat, I wore a St. Christopher medal around my neck and asked God to protect me, but some of that was transactional and superficial. It translated to a plea of “Please, God, get me through this, and I promise I’ll be good.” But it wasn’t long before doubt crept in and I got angry at what I was seeing and doing. All the questions asked a million times by millions of people before came to mind—none brilliant or original, but all earnest, heartfelt and genuine. Some words of chaplains and priests rang hollow, especially when they were applied to the loss of my close friends. How can there be a merciful God who allows this carnage to take place? How does God choose between one child and the other as to who lives or dies or is maimed? Did they not pray enough? Did only the good die young? Were they heathens? Were they godless communists? Did they somehow deserve to die? The questions and the doubts became pointed and personal. I refused to believe that it was God’s will that Dick Pershing never made it home alive from the war to marry or that it was God’s will that Don Droz would never see his infant daughter grow up.