by John Kerry
I was amazed by the meticulous archaeological methodology of finding scraps of clothing, a tooth, a fragment of a bone, and then undertaking the extraordinary forensic investigation in our labs in Hawaii to make a positive identification. This enormous commitment to keep faith with American military values has produced a remarkable record: the remains of more than seven hundred service members, brought home to still-mourning families who all deserved answers.
This work was one of those rare chances you get in public life to actually bring people something they’d waited for, for more than two decades: peace. The peace that comes with closure. But for me, and for John McCain, that wasn’t the only reward: in our new friendship, and in the work we did, we were ending the war about the war. If a protester and a prisoner of war can find common ground on the most divisive of issues, finding common ground on almost anything else didn’t seem so hard after all.
CHAPTER 10
A Time of Transition
“SENATOR, BEFORE I got here, I never had anyone say ‘I love you.’ I never had anybody care where I was at night.” He was a big, brawny kid whose size belied the baby face beneath the hard hat. He told me he had dropped out of high school before his junior year and been in trouble with the law more than once. A judge offered him a better deal than going to jail again for a longer sentence: he could go back to school to earn his GED at night, come to this job site every day on time, learn a trade and in eighteen months he would be the proud owner of a work card to be a union electrician, coupled with a high school equivalency degree.
His words haunted me: he was seventeen or eighteen years old. Never until now had anyone looked him in the eyes and said “I love you.” He’d raised himself, or the streets had raised him, and he had been on a one-way journey to jail until someone made all the difference. That someone was Dorothy Stoneman, a natural-born evangelizer for a program she called YouthBuild. A mutual friend had urged me to visit Dorothy’s program in East Harlem the next time I was in New York, and I’d chosen this sweltering day in July. In the middle of a run-down block, vacant houses boarded up left and right, a construction crew was working to restore an old brownstone. The city had donated the condemned building, and with some funding from philanthropic foundations, union craftsmen were teaching teenagers and twentysomethings a trade. Every one of their students had been plucked out of juvenile corrections facilities or court diversion programs. A few sought entrance off the street. All of them were turning urban blight into affordable housing. They were also, for the first time, turning themselves into full citizens with a stake in the future, with an unfamiliar dignity and self-esteem in their lives.
Dorothy beamed as her army of young people shared their stories. I asked Dorothy how she had invented this effort. She told me she had once asked a group of teenagers how they would improve their community if they had some support to do it. Their answer came through fast and clear: “Rebuild houses in our neighborhoods. We’d take empty buildings back from drug dealers and fix them up and eliminate crime.” And that’s exactly what they were doing.
My political antennae went up: Why couldn’t this be a national program?
I knew what I was up against. Ronald Reagan had been elected in 1980 and again in 1984—comfortably—on the credo that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Eight years of Reagan talking government down took a hefty toll. The Republicans had played the politics of division with considerable intelligence and intensity, dog whistles and all. But cities were hurting for real reasons, not just politically contrived ones. The public had grown weary of many Great Society social spending programs. I heard from police and firefighters in Massachusetts who had moved out of the neighborhoods where they’d grown up because crime was soaring, drugs were everywhere and the public schools weren’t safe. They dutifully paid their taxes but increasingly perceived that the system was working against them.
Something wasn’t working; in fact, lots of things weren’t working. Relentless campaign promises to get tougher on crime—with minimum mandatory sentences, especially for drug crimes, being imposed—were creating a vicious cycle in the justice system. Young men were going to prison and coming out unemployable. Kids were left behind, fatherless and growing up on the streets. The death penalty was wildly popular. In 1990, Massachusetts elected a Republican governor, Bill Weld, a former prosecutor who pledged to get tough on crime and said he would restore the death penalty and put convicts in chain gangs “breaking rocks.”
The former prosecutor in me hated where the dialogue had ended up. I opposed the death penalty in large part because as a prosecutor I had seen justice delivered unevenly. In court in Middlesex County, I sometimes saw wealthy people commit crimes, lawyer up with impunity and walk out of court with a second or third chance, while poor people got caught up in a vicious cycle of drugs, crime and violence. Their lives were in the hands of overburdened legal counsel paid for by the state. George Reissfelder’s struggle to overturn the life sentence for a murder he didn’t commit reminded me that had he been wrongly convicted of a capital crime in a different state, he might well have left prison as a corpse, not a free man. I’d met a group of young men in their late teens in Roxbury. Jobs were scarce. I asked them how quickly they could find a gun, if they wanted one. Without hesitating, they answered “five seconds.” But if I turned on talk radio in my car, I heard callers describing young African American men as predators, with the familiar refrains to get tough on crime and welfare. It was a call-and-response of disgust and disapproval. A trial in New York City for the so-called Central Park Five was in the news: young men of color convicted of raping an investment banker jogging through Central Park. A millionaire real estate tycoon from New York had taken out full-page ads in all the newspapers urging New York to bring back the death penalty. His name was Donald Trump. It took a long time before we learned that the five young men were innocent.
Fear was becoming the currency of the political debate, but my hope was that YouthBuild might be a new alternative to a debate that left all of us unsatisfied.
I returned to Washington and began working on legislation to make it possible for YouthBuild to receive federal funding. In 1991, my legislation passed with broad bipartisan support, but the funding itself was held up in the appropriations process. The money might not move through the legislative pipeline, and even if it did, it would certainly not move as quickly as we’d hoped.
For these kids, an IOU from Congress wouldn’t amount to anything but a broken promise. I brought the legislation to a different committee, the subcommittee that appropriated funding for housing.
Dorothy Stoneman told me about a conversation she had with a man named Bruce Katz, the general counsel for the subcommittee we were targeting. He told her he liked YouthBuild but federal housing money wasn’t going to new federal programs. He concluded, “Unless John Kerry cares about this bill more than any senator almost ever cares about anything affecting poor people, you don’t have a chance.”
As it turned out, I did. I called him and pushed him. He realized Dorothy and I were not going away easily.
National YouthBuild funding was mandated by law, and as the money flowed, the program expanded to nearly all fifty states. Each year, I’d walk around the floor of the Senate during appropriations season and round up signatures on a letter urging the committees to increase the funding levels for the program. Democrats and Republicans bought in, and support grew in each state.
The kids themselves were their own best advocates. I met a young woman named Dorothy, who had spent more than a year in jail for selling crack and was on welfare when she found YouthBuild. Now she had a job as a construction supervisor with a major contractor. Loss had defined their lives, until now. They all craved community, and they were finding it, but they were the ones doing the hard work of rebuilding lives—their own and many others. Certainly one of the most fulfilling moments I enjoyed as a policy maker was when Dorothy Stoneman called me “the Senat
or from YouthBuild.”
We got something done the old-fashioned way—vote by vote, person by person, but to this day I wonder: in Washington’s gridlock, and in today’s polarized politics, how many good people like Dorothy Stoneman, with good ideas to save lives, are stuck on the outside looking in?
• • •
I FIRST MET Teresa in 1990, when I was briefly introduced to her by her husband, Jack Heinz, as he and I were both waiting to speak at the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in front of the Capitol. I had heard from colleagues that Jack’s wife was hugely engaging, smart and a lot of fun, but that day, other than saying hello, we barely had a chance for any conversation in the push and shove of the crowd.
The next time I was to see her was at Jack’s funeral in 1991. Well more than half the Senate flew in two Air Force planes to Pittsburgh to attend the services in the Heinz Chapel near the Carnegie Mellon campus. Buses took us right past the park near where the Monongahela River joins the Allegheny River to meld into the Ohio, the famous starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the packed chapel, I sat in the section of pews set aside for the Senate. It was a stunningly intimate space, graceful and beautiful. The music was powerful. My mind wandered to the day Jack had died, April 4. The Senate was on spring recess. I was in Massachusetts traveling around the state, staying in touch with constituents through listening tours, town halls and various meetings. I was in my car heading to another meeting in the Merrimack Valley, not far from the New Hampshire border. The news station interrupted the normal flow to announce that a senator from Pennsylvania, Jack Heinz, had been killed in a small plane crash near Philadelphia. It was stunning for many reasons—a brilliant, gifted senator, someone everyone thought might well run for president; an extraordinary storied family in Pennsylvania; three boys suddenly without a father and a state without its favorite son. I felt the loss particularly because just before the Easter break, Jack had sat in my office for an hour as we discussed how we would collaborate on banking reform. Now he was gone.
The unfairness of his death underscored the shock, and for every senator there was a huge “there but for the grace of God go I” moment, because we all flew in small planes when we “had to get there at all costs.”
When I heard the news on the radio my first impulse was to think of going straight to St. Paul’s School, which wasn’t far from our location, because I knew that Jack’s youngest son, Chris, was there, and I thought as a senator and friend of Jack’s, I might be able to offer some comfort. I quickly thought better of it since I didn’t know Chris, and I felt that my or anyone’s presence would have imposed on him in his grieving. He didn’t need to cope with an unknown senator, but I couldn’t help but think of my father and the impact the violent loss of his father had on him for a lifetime.
As I thought about what had happened, the service began. I saw Teresa come into the chapel, but in reality, I didn’t see her. I saw a bundle of four people moving in a tight huddle, each holding on to the other, their arms entangled in a gliding, slow-moving embrace. Each lost in his or her grief and holding on to each other for dear life in order to get through the next hour. I was incredibly touched by the intimacy and the total lack of self-consciousness. They were there for and lost in one another, which is how it should have been.
I saw Teresa briefly in the receiving line at her home in Washington after the memorial service at the National Cathedral, and then I didn’t see her again for more than a year, until we were both in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit in April 1992. It wasn’t until Rio that I actually had a real conversation with her and began to get to know the person I was to marry three years later.
We were seated next to each other at a dinner for the delegation to the Earth Summit. Senators Frank Lautenberg, Chris Dodd, John Warner and Larry Pressler were all part of the delegation that had joined up at a restaurant in downtown Rio, where we debated and laughed our way through a very entertaining dinner. Teresa was funny, sassy, quick-witted and engaging. She had a wonderful way of communicating with her eyes, talking with a sparkle that reflected a range of moods and emotions. We somehow wound up quietly trading observations about our companions in French. For both of us I think the evening was the opening of a door—but it was a door to a complicated journey on the other side. We didn’t see each other for quite some time after that. I think both of us were shy and both had reasons to move slowly.
With Jack’s death, Teresa had become the head of the family, and much more. Her two older sons, John and Andre, were both in college, and Chris was about to head to Yale, Jack’s alma mater. Teresa felt the need to be there for them, independent as they were. She had assumed Jack’s role as head of the Heinz philanthropies, a huge and daunting task. She was sought after for countless conferences and events, representing the family in the exercise of enormous public responsibility. There had been talk of her accepting the appointment to the Senate and then running in her own right in the subsequent special election. The seat was hers for the taking, as had happened many times in history when a widow stepped into the job. But Teresa decided that she could do more outside the Senate than within. That realization, together with her responsibilities at home, shaped her choices ahead.
For my part, as a divorced father, I was single parenting with one daughter in high school and one about to go. I was still commuting to Boston from Washington. Literally, for eighteen years as a senator, I never spent a weekend in Washington except for rare occasions when the Senate was in session. If I wasn’t fund-raising somewhere or traveling on business, I would always get back to the state, even for a day or a few hours. In fact, for the full twenty-eight years I was privileged to serve in the Senate, while I didn’t always get back to Massachusetts, it was rare that I would remain in Washington on the weekend.
When I was elected in 1984, I had found a fixer-upper on Third Street NE, one block from my office, which I loved because there was no commute. I had a lot of fun playing frustrated architect and redid the whole house. I created what I thought would be the perfect room for the girls and envisioned being in Washington with them as Julia and I shared parenting responsibility—a completely wacky miscalculation with my daughters. I think the girls made it down twice at the most! Little had I considered or understood the social schedule of teenage girls. The idea of their traveling to be with Dad without their friends was unheard of. So I sold the house to my Senate colleague Bob Graham of Florida and bought an apartment in Boston.
As a result, even as I started seeing Teresa, I was constantly returning to Boston and performing the duties of a senator. For Teresa this was something new, because Pittsburgh was closer, and since Jack’s family had been living with him in Washington, his schedule could work out more effectively. As a result, there was some initial tension in our developing relationship because it was hard to work the logistics and meet everyone’s expectations—Teresa’s, my daughters’, both families’—and my own political demands and personal wants. One thing politics does is put enormous pressure on time and therefore on families. Somehow, we all stumbled through it, but I can’t say it wasn’t without cost to almost everyone. I could never have done what I’ve been able to do in public life without the extraordinary support and understanding of every member of my family. Not only have they poured their hearts into the endeavor, but they have all patiently sacrificed some part of themselves.
It’s something that I don’t think the public knows well enough—the burdens put on the families of those who go into public life. From the unfair, unasked for criticism that comes their way, which can be cruel and scarring, to the lost time, none of us in public life could make it if our families weren’t willing to endure the hardships that come along with our public calling. Those of us who are the principals never feel it as much as our families because it is what we have chosen to do.
Only four years earlier, in 1988, I had received my final divorce decree after a tortured journey through separation, semi-reunion and another, more final sepa
ration. In the end, the guillotine descended on a marriage that at one time had seemed so natural and ordained.
Divorce is horrible, no matter how necessary or how much brighter it might one day be on the other side. I know there are people who, having come to the conclusion they made a terrible mistake, can’t wait to get divorced. Some move quickly, as if they were taking off one coat and putting on another. Even though I knew Julia’s and my marriage was troubled and we were on separate tracks, I still found divorce the most wrenching, sad and brutal emotional process I have ever gone through. When you have young children, it is even worse. When I knew the marriage was over, I was still heartbroken—partly, I’m sure, for the loss of some powerful sense of what it was meant to be, all that idealism, imagination and hope that is part of marriage. I couldn’t shake a significant sense of just plain failure.