Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  When I got my chance, I took direct aim at President Bush in a shot that implicitly underscored the national security credentials that separated me from some of the other candidates in the field: “I know something about aircraft carriers for real, and I have three words for George W. Bush that I know he understands: Bring. It. On.”

  The crowd’s response that night was raucous, and not just because our campaign had packed our section of the arena to the rafters. No, something was happening. For all the talk about the race being over, or even for the pundits’ obsession with the idea of some white knight swooping in and rescuing the Democratic Party from Howard Dean, this felt like a horse race. The Des Moines Register poll showed the numbers: Gephardt—27 percent; Dean—20 percent; me at 15 percent; and John Edwards not far behind, inching up toward 10 percent.

  The next morning, I ran into my friend and long-ago campaign traveling partner the Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. “Great speech,” he said. “But it’s too late, it’s just too late.” I pushed onward.

  The weeks before the caucus, it was lock and load time. It was also a time for loyalty. My traveling press secretary kept a mental list of who was there when you needed them and who wasn’t. He was frighteningly Irish in that respect. There were certainly a few people who starred on the “not being there” list, such as the much-courted congressman who had signed on with an honorific title when I was the supposed front-runner in January 2003, then professed to have a terrible cold in January 2004 when we needed him in Iowa, and then made a miraculous recovery before the ink was dry on the headlines of our comeback. Funny how that works, but I always took the long view—never burn bridges, because tomorrow is always a new day.

  So much about Iowa was about new friends and old friends coming through in ways that were extraordinary.

  Max Cleland became the patron saint of our campaign—a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran and former senator from Georgia who had been drummed out of the Senate when Republicans questioned his commitment to the war on terror, showing him in the same frame as bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Max, a hero who endured hours of a grueling routine each morning just getting ready to go out of the house, had voted with Bush in line with Georgia. Max found a new lease on life in the campaign, though. He went everywhere to talk to anyone he possibly could. Every time I saw him, he said the same thing: “Brother, give me a hug.” I still choke up to this day thinking of how hard he worked for us and how badly I wanted to win for Max.

  Ted Kennedy was omnipresent. Despite his aching back, he traveled the state with me from rally to rally, up and down the Mississippi River. He packed the crowds. Just two weeks before the caucuses, his voice boomed out to the overflow crowd in Davenport: “You voted for my brother! You voted for my other brother! You didn’t vote for me!” As the crowd roared with laughter, Ted bellowed, “But we’re back here for John Kerry. And if you vote for John Kerry, I’ll forgive you! You can have three out of four . . . and I’m going to love Iowa. I’m going to love you.” And they loved him!

  Teddy’s wit was always sharp. He’d open an event saying, “I will never forget 1971 and walking down to meet the Vietnam Veterans Against the War camped down on the Mall. There stood a bold, handsome, intelligent leader, a man who should not only be president, but should end up on Mount Rushmore, tall, thin, handsome. But enough talk about me. Let’s talk about John.” The crowds ate it up, and I did too: when Teddy was laughing, no hill felt too steep. Our campaign bus—dubbed the Real Deal Express—was a rolling petri dish of every manner of germ imaginable. But it came with a Pied Piper whose name was Peter Yarrow. Life was coming full circle. I’d first heard Peter, Paul and Mary sing at Woolsey Hall when I was at Yale, then I’d actually met them and we became great friends in those long-ago days of the peace movement. Peter was older and grayer now, more than three decades on from 1971, his once-thinning dark hair gone on top but still boyishly long on the sides and back, and he remained a liberal to the core. He showed up with his guitar case and offered to pack any living room in Iowa as my opening act. One January night, late on the road, rolling down dark highways set against frozen, barren fields that just months before had been green and alive with rows of corn, the Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly convinced Peter to come to the far reaches of the creaky old tour bus and play a song or two for the reporters. I came back with him. After serenading them with a couple of everyone’s favorites, including “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which always brought back those memories of arrivals and departures and young people who didn’t always make it home, Peter dedicated a song to me, “Sweet Survivor.” The words, sung quietly and caringly by an old friend who had been through the same struggles, hit home:

  Carry on my sweet survivor, carry on my lonely friend

  Don’t give up on the dream, and don’t you let it end.

  I’D FOUND MY voice again in the people I’d met and the adversity we’d faced, and in the simple act of getting written off and writing myself back in because I believed I was fighting for something much bigger than me. I didn’t want Iowa to end, and I was determined not to let my campaign end there either. The lump in my throat grew increasingly large as I hung on the refrain’s last line: “For everything that matters carry on.”

  If Peter Yarrow brought with him old-fashioned inspiration, Michael Whouley was a jolt of black coffee. “Where can we find a fuckin’ helicopta?” he’d bark. The Dorchester accent was unmistakable, a discordant note in a symphony of flat midwestern niceties. Whouley always got straight to the point. We were surging in Iowa, especially in the Catholic communities along the Mississippi River, but there weren’t enough hours in the day to catch Howard Dean unless we could add more events to the calendar. But how? Michael had an idea he had first pioneered in the final days of my 1984 showdown Senate primary: charter a helicopter to get me around Iowa faster and cover more ground. An added bonus was that the helicopter landing in each little town was a media event in itself, something that grabbed people’s attention and underscored just how much we were fighting for every single vote. As a pilot, I liked it, and as a candidate, I loved it. It captured the fun, the energy, the excitement of the closing days of a campaign—that amazing sound of the helicopter rotor blades spinning, watching from the sky as we popped down over a little field or ballpark, the wind from the rotors blowing grass and debris everywhere. Then down, out we’d jump, into the van, and head off to an exhilarating event.

  Two days before the Iowa caucuses, fate seemed to intervene in a way I never could have predicted—and it came in the form of a voice mail left at our headquarters in Washington, D.C., from a far-away voice in California. He said I had saved his life on the Mekong Delta.

  A volunteer jotted it down and linked the man up with our veterans’ coordinator, John Hurley, who immediately called him in California to check out his story.

  His name was Jim Rassmann.

  Thirty-five years before, I never knew how to spell his last name, nor had I even known his first name—and when a historian had searched for him, he’d assumed his last name was spelled “Rassman.” But the story made sense.

  Jim was now a retired Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy living in Florence, Oregon. He was earnest, sober, determined—a registered Republican. He just wanted to do his part and suggested he might volunteer in Oregon. John Hurley had other ideas: How soon can you be in Iowa? he asked.

  Jim was outward bound on the next flight.

  Without my knowledge, a press conference was hastily arranged in Des Moines, where every bigfoot media personality in American politics was camping out to cover the caucuses.

  There was only one problem: I was supposed to be in Dubuque for a rally.

  With a series of phone calls, the schedule was shifted. I finished the event in Dubuque, got on the bus, and shortly after we started rolling, a staffer crouched down by my seat and explained to me that there had been a change: we were heading to Des Moines. Something was clearly afoot.

  Partly to pressure test t
he authenticity of Rassmann’s story, he asked me what I remembered about the man I had pulled from the Bay Hap River in 1969. I told him about a tall, rail-thin Green Beret with reddish hair. The aide swallowed hard, looked at me and said, “Well, he’s on his way to Iowa and he wants to endorse you. We’re about to have a reunion.”

  There are few truly spontaneous moments left in American politics, let alone those that happen in front of a mass of television cameras, beamed live into living rooms around the country.

  This was one of them.

  I walked into the event, and already standing there near a podium was Jim Rassmann. Neither of us could speak. I just walked up to him and we hugged. Words wouldn’t have done it any justice anyway. It was the best of a brotherhood and a bond that had endured—without mention—for thirty-five years.

  Jim said I had saved his life once—and, hell, maybe now he was back to save my political life. Politics, not unlike sports or life or combat, can be a series of near misses, with its moments that look insignificant but end up monumental.

  What if the volunteer in Washington had deleted Jim Rassmann’s voice mail? But he had done his job, and Jim Rassmann had given me an extraordinary gift. We headed into the final forty-eight hours of the campaign with a story about real life, not politics.

  On caucus day, I finished an eight-event sprint, visiting caucus sites to shake hands, go inside and make my final pitch to the crowd before the voting began. When the doors shut, I was back outside standing on the asphalt, and I realized it was all now completely out of my hands. Thirteen months of all-out work—$20 million raised, fifty counties visited, thousands of miles traveled by bus—plus cancer surgery, bouts of laryngitis, holes in my shoes, a ballooning mortgage on my house, but there were no more hands to shake, no more questions to answer, no more Iowans to ask for their trust. All I could do was wait.

  Just as you’re firing on all cylinders, just as you’re going a million miles an hour, flat out, full bore—all adrenaline and aspiration—it stops. Just like that.

  The Real Deal Express headed to Des Moines. In the back of the bus, in the area the embeds had nicknamed the “Champagne Lounge,” my spokesperson was talking with the reporters. As the lights of Des Moines showed on the horizon, with about twenty minutes left in our ride, I could hear some rumbling back there. The press secretary handed Bob Shrum someone’s BlackBerry, and even Shrum, about as superstitious as I was, chastened by the memory of unpredictable election nights (including Florida in 2000), broke into a roar, declaring, “The exit polls look good!” Being superstitious and full well knowing the importance of that old adage of not counting any chickens before they’ve hatched, I didn’t want to hear it.

  Up in the presidential suite of the historic Hotel Fort Des Moines, which the ever-competitive John Norris had booked months ago less out of optimism and more out of a determination not to let a different campaign secure the reservation, the scene quickly became a family reunion as we waited for official results. In the big suite, Teresa, my daughters, Alex and Vanessa, and soon Chris and Andre Heinz joined my political family. There was the predictable pacing, the hovering around television sets, cable news blaring everywhere. I decided to take a shower, and through the steam, as I shaved, I heard Teresa announcing the words that prognosticators had once said were a pipe dream: “John, hurry. CNN says you’ve won!”

  What startled even us was that it wasn’t even close. I carried Iowa with almost 38 percent of the vote, about 20 points in front of Howard Dean. John Edwards had a late surge himself and trailed me by only 7 points. The media reaction was hysterical, with everyone digging in, trying to explain what had happened to the front-runner who had been on the cover of every magazine, who had secured so many powerful endorsements. To this day, I can only tell you that we’d believed in ourselves. I’d put my campaign of loyal operatives, veterans and firefighters, and faithful friends from Massachusetts up against anyone anywhere. A week later, we won in New Hampshire by a whopping 12 points. The race was effectively over. Everything afterward became a sprint to the finish line of the nominating process, through fun and fatigue, through pain and promise. The energy and expectations after Iowa reset the entire campaign: in the rest of the primaries we amassed a win-loss record of 46–4.

  On March 2, I carried nine out of ten states on Super Tuesday, and President Bush called me with his congratulations: I was the presumptive Democratic nominee.

  My call that evening with the president was short and cordial, but it belied the long slog to come that would be anything but gentlemanly. The incumbent wartime president was sitting on $85 million to spend that spring through the summer. Before we could catch our breath, the fight was coming at us.

  • • •

  I NEEDED TO get on the road and raise money to fund our first television advertising blitz. We needed to introduce me to a swath of voters who hadn’t been tuned in during the primaries, but even as I traveled to fund-raise, we also needed to make news and remind voters what the race was about. On April 9, the morning after the Illinois primary, both of those goals brought me to Chicago, for an economic event at the Greater West Town Training Partnership. It was a chance to talk about investing in workers, cutting taxes for the middle class and restoring fiscal sanity. I was to be joined at the event by the newly minted Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate from Illinois, a tall, lanky, young state senator whom my finance chairman, Lou Sussman, gushed about. His name was Barack Hussein Obama.

  I met Barack offstage in a little holding area as the two of us were mic’d up for the event. The first thing I noticed was one of the best smiles I’d ever seen in politics. Joking with his staff, his whole face lit up. His eyes sparkled. But more than that, he also exuded confidence. Sometimes, when you’re the nominee for president, down-ballot candidates show up with their families and ask for photos. Or they come overly prepared with well-rehearsed lines to try to steal the show. Not Obama. There was no effort to impress with something witty or political or catchy. Onstage together, he stood back and relied on “less is more,” a tactic that a lot of folks in public life would do well to adopt. He was clearly taking me in, deciding what kind of person I was and what kind of nominee I was going to be. We have never talked about that moment. But I liked him instantly. He had a future, I could feel it. Lou said the same and wondered whether he’d be doing something nationally in ten years. I suggested we find a way for him to shine in this campaign. I never suspected how fast that moment would come.

  A couple weeks later, Mary Beth Cahill and my convention manager, Jack Corrigan, gave me a list of potential keynote speakers for my convention. One of the names was Barack Obama. We quickly settled on him. It was an easy decision—a clean slate, someone fresh who could articulate a new vision, someone who was unexpected. I wouldn’t see him again until the night I was formally nominated in Boston.

  Before you’re even officially the nominee, choosing a vice president is the first significant, always fraught presidential decision you make. It’s an inherently subjective decision, influenced by myriad intangibles. Who would make a good partner in the campaign? In the West Wing? Who would complement your strengths and help fill out the profile of the ticket? Most of all, who would be a good president of the United States if you weren’t able to fill out the term the voters had granted you?

  I asked my friend Jim Johnson to manage the process while I campaigned. Jim had worked for Vice President Walter Mondale. He had experience and savvy. He assembled an extremely qualified team of lawyers to help with vetting, including Jeff Liss, who had vetted me four years before. Jim was discreet and careful and preferred to operate out of the limelight. So discreet was Jim that we even managed a couple of times to sneak him on the campaign plane without the press knowing, so the two of us could confer during long flights. But beneath Jim’s businesslike approach was a progressive, passionate, committed citizen; we had both come of age in the activism surrounding the peace movement. I knew Jim would have my best interests at heart thro
ughout the process.

  After 2000, when he looked back at Vice President Gore’s selection, my friend Michael Whouley told me, “We ended up with Mr. August, not Mr. October.” It was Michael’s view that Gore had made an excellent choice to help with the campaign’s narrative at the convention and in the weeks that followed. But, he thought, in the fall, in the course of the debates and the final, definitional skirmishes between the two campaigns, Lieberman had not been as effective in prosecuting the case for Gore and defending the nominee.

  I thought hard about Michael’s colorful formulation: Mr. August, Mr. October. The perfect candidate for vice president probably doesn’t exist. You have to make a bet on who can fill the different roles best. But I did want to try to find someone who would be the “Mr.” or “Ms.” not just for two seasons, but three: August, October and January, when governing would become issue number one.

  The list quickly narrows when you’re thinking hard about the vice presidency. You might think that there’s a big universe to consider. But you realize what a distinct slot you’re trying to fill. Who meets the threshold qualification? Who can survive the scrutiny? Who can perform on day one? Who is actually comfortable dealing with the media glare? Who fills gaps and brings additive qualities to the ticket? Who is really willing to play a number two role not just for four months, but for eight years? There are candidates with great profiles who don’t pass a vetting. There are people you admire and like who don’t have the comfort level with campaigning and politics, which is a different beast from success in the world of business or the military, for example. There are people who might make good presidents but wouldn’t ever feel comfortable wearing the mantle of vice president. It is a unique formula.