Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  The night before, I’d been honored for making peace. This morning, we were at war. The Capitol was being evacuated. I was filled with anger. I wanted to go fight someone. I certainly didn’t want to be driven out of my own workplace by terrorists. I hated that they were interrupting the work of America.

  I hustled back to the Russell Building to make sure everyone was getting out of the office as ordered. Capitol Police instructed us to leave our computers on, to just get out. I stood in my empty office seething as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in Manhattan. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I was sick thinking of the people trapped inside, let alone those who had been trapped in those planes.

  Amid the rush of hundreds of staff and senators, I headed down the stairwell leading toward Delaware Avenue, where my Dodge was parked. On the second-floor landing, I ran into Joe Biden. We talked for a few seconds. “They think there’s a plane headed for the Capitol,” Joe said. He was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and as a result was receiving information from the FBI in real time. “This has to be some form of Islamic jihad,” he said. We were both furious.

  I had to get home. Cell phones across the city were jammed. It took me ninety minutes to get back to Georgetown. When I got there, Teresa was upset, sitting in front of the television. Plane crashes of any kind brought back the hardest memories; 9/11 evoked a different kind of horror. “John, the planes were from Boston,” she said. I called my state director in Boston. Washington was in chaos, but Boston was numb. “Sonia Puopolo was on Flight 11,” he said solemnly. Sonia was a beloved philanthropist and die-hard Democrat. We’d often see her and her husband on Nantucket. She was flying to Los Angeles to visit her son when terror and tragedy intervened. Recovery workers would find her hand amid the rubble, her wedding band returned to her grieving family.

  I wanted to be in New York helping in some way. Firefighters, cops and rescue workers were caravanning to New York to pitch in, but the People’s House was closed for business. Flights were still grounded, so I couldn’t even get home to Boston to comfort those who had lost loved ones. The country had come to a halt. I hated the feeling of helplessness, shut out of our offices, stuck at home to do little but follow the news and work the phones. Members of Congress gathered on the steps of a deserted Capitol to sing “God Bless America.” It was a moment of unity, but I hoped we were about to summon a moment of action.

  In the days and weeks ahead, there was a burst of long overdue legislative activity. The events of 9/11 brought progress on decisions Congress had previously found reasons to defer or delay. We passed new tools for the FBI, the intelligence community and law enforcement to prosecute the fight against al-Qaeda. In the Patriot Act, Congress finally passed anti–money laundering legislation I’d written and been urging since my investigation of BCCI. Banking interests had stood in the way. They couldn’t any longer. I knew too well that it was too easy for terrorists and global criminals to move illegal money through legal means, and now at last we were clamping down. When my investigation and Robert Mueller’s prosecution shut down BCCI, it cut off Osama bin Laden’s foothold in Sudan; now we needed to go after the entire dirty financial network that operated in the shadows.

  We also had to take the fight to al-Qaeda directly, on the battlefield. I supported military action to take out the Taliban in Afghanistan, the government that had harbored bin Laden and offered him a staging ground. A broad NATO coalition joined us. It was the right way to go to war.

  But something soon changed in the way the Bush administration argued its foreign policy case. Bush’s campaign against Vice President Gore had focused almost exclusively on domestic issues. In years of peace and prosperity, that’s to be expected. I don’t think Bush came to the job with much of a foreign policy philosophy. He had not been focused on terrorism. In the summer weeks before 9/11, I appeared on Meet the Press opposite Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to debate the administration’s number one national security priority: billions of dollars to expand missile defense installations in Europe. After 9/11, the world was united by our side to fight extremism. Even the streets of Iran had been filled with young people marching in solidarity with the United States; it was moving to see Iranians waving our flag instead of burning it. I thought Bush could seize this moment to galvanize our allies and create new ones. Bush’s one major foreign policy speech of the 2000 campaign had intriguingly promised a “humble” foreign policy. It reflected his father’s sensibilities. Now was a time for that kind of diplomatic outreach.

  But in the months after 9/11, the White House approach to the world was anything but humble. On January 29, 2002, the president used his first State of the Union address to excoriate an “axis of evil” linking three dangerous regimes that hardly behaved as an axis: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. It was strange. Those countries were vastly different. The rhetoric hinted at regime change in all three countries. Afghanistan and the immediate war against al-Qaeda seemed downgraded as priorities.

  The next month, as I was coming out of the Russell Building, I bumped into a four-star general whose expertise I respected. I knew him from his private briefings to Congress. He was assigned to the Pentagon. We struck up a brief conversation. Newspaper reports had suggested that, months earlier, at the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, the United States’ intelligence community had radio intercepts providing certainty that Osama bin Laden was pinned down and could be captured. Somehow, he had gotten away. I asked the general what had happened. “Senator,” he said, “we are fighting a risk-averse operation in Afghanistan.” The world’s most wanted terrorist had escaped because we had relied on Afghan warlords, who months before had been fighting on the other side, rather than rely on U.S. Special Forces. We were screwing up the war we had to win, as Washington’s gaze drifted elsewhere.

  Later that year, the administration began to ramp up its arguments against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. There were plenty of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Hussein. Hindsight sometimes obscures that reality. Ever since the Gulf War, Hussein had remained a challenge. He’d obstructed the international arms inspections that had been the condition by which the coalition left him in power after his invasion of Kuwait. He had promised unfettered access to inspectors, but had kept them out since the late 1990s. He had a history of using chemical weapons against his own people and a documented history of pursuing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. He had been a master of miscalculation, especially miscalculating what turned out to be a seven-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which almost bankrupted his country, and underestimating the effects of the invasion of Kuwait and the world’s response. The intelligence community believed Hussein had kicked out international arms inspectors to pursue a weapons program. All his history would suggest this was the case. I thought Saddam Hussein was betting that the United Nations wouldn’t do a damn thing to enforce its own restrictions on his regime. On the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and I, along with Dick Lugar, spent years digging into Iraq and concluded that the Clinton administration didn’t have the leverage it needed to press the United Nations to get the inspectors back in Iraq. We passed committee resolutions. We ratcheted up pressure as the Clinton administration reached its end.

  Now we had a new president, and 9/11 changed the national security debate in the United States. Saddam Hussein still wasn’t cooperating with inspectors. The Bush administration seemed determined to deal with Hussein unilaterally. I feared it was a dangerous miscalculation. It was the wrong way to deal with the right question.

  I never doubted that Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. That had been his history. I went to the Pentagon and saw the photos and maps indicating the regime’s latest efforts. Had I known that a dubious source like Ahmed Chalabi was behind much of the new “evidence,” I would have seen what they were showing us in a very different light. But the lion’s share of my time was spent worrying not about whether Hussein was a threat, but about how we
would address it.

  A Washington parlor game ensued, one I ultimately learned a lesson from. Friends inside the administration like Colin Powell believed unilateral action would be a disaster. Washington was filled with whispers that wise voices around former president George H. W. Bush were campaigning to set the policy right. Brent Scowcroft and James Baker wrote brilliant analysis columns aimed at an audience of one: the forty-third president of the United States. I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that if we ever had to take military action, it was imperative to exhaust the UN process, build legitimacy and a coalition and isolate Hussein instead of letting him isolate us. By the fall of 2002, it seemed that the more moderate and deliberate school of thought was winning. President Bush in Cincinnati gave a speech laying out a multilateral case to disarm Hussein with allies by our side and to go to war only as a last resort.

  The United Nations, however, remained skeptical. Pressure built in Congress for some mechanism to demonstrate that the United States was united and that the United Nations could no longer ignore the issue. The White House wanted Congress to vote on an authorization of military force to back up our policy.

  I went to New York and met privately with the permanent representatives of the UN Security Council. I wanted to hear from them whether it would be possible to build consensus about arms inspectors, or whether the United States was off on its own. What I heard from them confirmed that if the United States worked the multilateral process and exhausted it to build legitimacy, we could either unite the Security Council to force arms inspectors back into Iraq and avoid war, or as a last resort build a broad coalition to disarm Hussein militarily. Either option would take time. The ambassadors were skeptical whether the United States was serious. I came to believe that we needed a credible threat of force to get our allies moving.

  Several senators—Biden, Dodd, Bob Kerrey and me—were uncertain whether we could trust President Bush to approach the process the way he had pledged in Cincinnati. Colin Powell reassured us that we could. Colin had lived the Vietnam War from the perspective of an infantryman. He wasn’t Dick Cheney with his five deferments. Colin knew what happened to a country when troops die for a policy that’s ill-conceived.

  I was persuaded that the reasonable foreign policy crowd was winning the internal White House struggle for an Iraq policy. Maybe I was convincing myself of what I wanted to be true.

  Joe Biden and Dick Lugar were negotiating a bipartisan resolution that could unite the Senate. It would give President Bush the authority to use force—the key to unlocking leverage at the UN—but required a second vote before Bush took military action. It gave Bush the tools he needed for effective diplomacy while leaving Congress ways to hold Bush accountable if he went off the rails.

  Administration officials didn’t like it. We might have been able to force them to live with it, but the Democratic minority leader in the House announced he supported the White House’s request for broad authority to use force. I was surprised by his unilateral announcement, which eviscerated our leverage to negotiate with the White House.

  There was nothing left to negotiate. In the Senate, we had to either vote yes and hope Bush was telling us the truth about how he would proceed or vote no.

  I thought of it as the first presidential decision I would make as a likely candidate. If I were president, I would have wanted that authority. If I were commander in chief one day, how could I ask Congress to grant me the same authority I’d refused to give another president who was promising to behave responsibly?

  On October 2, I went to the floor of the Senate and announced that I would be voting yes, based on the steps the president had promised he would take before going to war. I read that speech today, and I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, “Change your vote; the administration isn’t going to do what they promised.” I used my speech that day to lay out the right way to deal with Iraq; looking back, we now know the administration was intent on going to war in Iraq in the worst way imaginable: alone, based on a lie. I’ve said it many times: My vote was the single biggest mistake I made in twenty-eight years as a senator. It wasn’t rash. It wasn’t political. It wasn’t for lack of doing my homework. But it was a mistake nonetheless.

  That October day before history took its course, after my long speech on the Senate floor, I rode the Senate subway back to the Russell Building with the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. She was sympathetic to the difficulties of being a legislator having to vote based on a prediction of how the executive branch would behave. She had seen both sides of that equation. She kidded me about my speech, saying it reminded her of that oft-quoted saying “If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter.” Iraq didn’t lend itself to short, simple explanations.

  We spent the next months hoping the president meant what he said and praying Colin Powell was right. But he wasn’t. And I wasn’t.

  In the short term, our vote had exactly the effect I’d hoped for: less than a month later, the UN Security Council voted unanimously on Resolution 1441 to give Saddam Hussein a final opportunity to disarm. Even countries like Syria voted in favor. It was precisely the outcome we had hoped for. But that moment of unity was short-lived.

  I bet wrong on who would win the struggle for President Bush’s heart and mind, if he had ever been undecided at all. It wasn’t my friends Scowcroft, Baker or Powell. It was the neocons. President Bush seemed determined to go forward with military action by whatever means necessary. I’d never thought harder about the policy implications of a vote and the diplomatic leverage it presented, only to get it wrong because I’d failed to adequately measure the most important variable of all: the president of the United States. Bush was going to do what he wanted to do. He had abandoned his “humble” foreign policy. It was a humbling lesson for me, and it would become a core issue at the center of the 2004 campaign for the presidency.

  CHAPTER 11

  Cancer and Comebacks

  I WAS FINISHING MY Christmas shopping, felt the phone vibrating in my pocket, and I picked up as soon as I saw the caller ID flash “Massachusetts General Hospital.” I assumed it was the nurse calling to relay routine results. When I heard Dr. Doyle’s voice, I knew immediately that something was wrong.

  “The results came back positive.”

  It was prostate cancer, the kind that had killed my father. Six of the twelve plugs extracted for a biopsy were positive.

  Not just cancer at Christmas, but cancer sixteen days after I’d announced I was running for president of the United States.

  My head was spinning. It had begun with the usually uneventful annual blood test. Teresa had noticed a jump in my PSA levels, nothing I would have thought twice about—all still within the range of normal, but a jump nonetheless. She had pushed me to get tested.

  It turned out her cause for concern was justified.

  Every possible feeling imaginable now raced through me—shock, disbelief, numbness, a sense of dread as I realized I would soon have to share the diagnosis over Christmas with Teresa, Vanessa, Alex and the family.

  I needed to digest the news. I sat on it for a couple of days and planned to keep it to myself until after Christmas, but Teresa sensed something was going on. I told only her at first. She wrote me a beautiful note and placed it in my Christmas stocking. Her support was selfless and more than reassuring, a reminder that, after I’d fought a number of life’s battles in a solitary way, I wasn’t alone anymore. We agreed we’d get through it together.

  First, though, I had to get through the holidays. Our annual New Year’s Eve open house was surreal. It should have been a high point. Friends rushed up to me to share their excitement about the nascent campaign, pulled Teresa and me aside to talk about people they knew in California or New York who wanted to host a fund-raiser or to engage in impassioned buttonholing about issues they hoped I’d raise on the campaign trail. All the while, as I tried to stay focused on the conversation, I knew that I had this secret hidden d
eep inside, always lurking in the background.

  A couple of days later, I woke up mad, not at the unfairness or the unfortunate timing, but at the cancer itself. I was determined to stay on course with the campaign and to fight to get this invader out of my body. I wanted to find the closest thing to a guarantee and know that the disease was gone. I also knew that to be elected president, the press, the public and the process wouldn’t let me up for air. If, as the doctors suspected, it was at the earliest stage, then I’d be able to press forward with my life. I was not going to be deterred.

  Each day, I was doing homework on surgeons and statistics. Friends led me to the best surgeon in the business—Dr. Patrick Walsh of Johns Hopkins Hospital. After a long talk with him, with a plan to meet as soon as I was back in Washington, the doctor penciled in a date for surgery. This next phase was becoming real. He asked me to talk with his secretary, who would take some insurance information for routine paperwork. It struck me how for so many would-be patients, this would have been the least routine part of all. Members of Congress have the best health care, and I was additionally blessed that paying extra for extraordinary care at Johns Hopkins wouldn’t be a question either. For all the moments of frustration I was feeling, there was absolutely no reason for self-pity. How many thousands of men each year got the same diagnosis but didn’t have the option of searching for the best surgeon at one of the best hospitals in the world? How many died because they never got the diagnosis early enough or couldn’t afford to see a doctor at all?