by John Kerry
I sat at the bar with my longtime friend Chris Greeley, who had been my driver and body man when I ran for lieutenant governor and went on to be my chief of staff in Massachusetts, always a quick wit and a die-hard hockey fan. Chris had become good friends with my dad, breaking through Pa’s reserve. Chris and I talked about the early beginnings of our political journey—and how if just a handful of votes at the state party convention in 1982 had gone a different way, we might be sitting at this bar as spectators to a presidential election, not protagonists. We enjoyed a wistful moment.
At a booth not far away, little did I know that when they weren’t enjoying a well-deserved beer of their own, Mike McCurry and company were transfixed by their BlackBerrys. The first wave of exit polls was pouring in, and the news was exhilarating: I was comfortably ahead in big battleground states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, with a 3-point cushion ahead of Bush in Ohio and Florida, which would decide the presidency. There was a debate, I was later told, about whether to pass me a cocktail napkin with the results. I’m glad they didn’t. A San Francisco Giants die-hard, McCurry compared it to the old baseball tradition: you don’t ever talk to the pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter.
Besides, we had work to do.
A large crowd had gathered outside the restaurant. I walked out to the encouraging cheers and shouts of folks who wondered like I did what history would come out of this day.
It was off to the Westin hotel complex near Copley Square, which had been transformed into a kind of political tent city: an enormous stage with massive television screens, miles of Jersey barriers to separate the citizens from the media, who were broadcasting live—a presidential Brigadoon of sorts, a spectacular site that would last for a day only to be broken down within thirty-six hours as if it had never happened.
For the next five hours, I was holed up in the Westin, confined to a chair and pouring my remaining energy—and my tired voice—into the one and only useful activity of a candidate on Election Day: I bounced from one remote satellite television interview to another, crisscrossing the nation with three- to four-minute live interviews, cajoling and exhorting the deciding voters to get to the polls.
It was a marathon sprint: a tour through the battleground states in thirty-seven different interviews, each a short, clipped message touching on key issues—jobs, health care, the war on terror, the way the middle class was getting squeezed.
We were punch-drunk by the time it was over. I wanted to go home, shower and shave, and get upstairs to my study and work on my election night speech.
By six o’clock, there was no point in anyone hiding information from me: the final exit polls were in—and they were every bit as encouraging: tied in Iowa, ahead from New Mexico to Florida and Ohio.
I flashed Stephanie Cutter a quick salute and a wink, motioned to Marvin to head downstairs, and was about to depart into the elevator when Bob Shrum uttered the words I know he immediately wished he could take back: “May I be the first to call you, Mr. President.”
I immediately replied, “No”—not just because I was superstitious, but because I knew too much could happen between the exit polls and the counting. I refused myself any premature celebration, though the polls did raise my hopes.
Shrum had heard through a press contact at the White House that President George H. W. Bush had been in the Oval Office and prepared his son for the possibility that he had lost. It was accompanied by Secret Service chatter that a presidential movement to the Reagan Building had been scheduled for not too long after the polls closed.
I wouldn’t and couldn’t invest in any of it, but it gave added urgency to the work of buttoning down a speech for the evening.
I arrived home and disappeared upstairs to finish some work on my potential victory statement. At that point, it was the only speech I was working on. The polls closed at 8:00 p.m. in most places. Of course, even as they closed on the East Coast and started to report, the heartland and the West continued to vote for one, two and three hours. During that time, states began to tally much as we had expected. I won key states I had to win—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire. I lost a couple that I had hoped to win. But not long after the polls closed my boiler-room team detected hints of trouble. The exit polls were either wildly off or something strange was happening.
I’m not sure when I realized things were not playing out as predicted, but at some point, it became clear that we needed more votes to close out Ohio and win the presidency.
It was going to come down to the wire.
I thought about some of the issues we were hearing that I feared would become the backdrop of a long night.
Election days are always chaotic. But in the first presidential campaign after the Florida recount, we were especially sensitive to protecting the vote.
Our campaign headquarters had received frantic calls from our poll watchers in Ohio that some people said they were pushing the electronic machines for Kerry, but the vote was coming up Bush. Our lawyers immediately went to work. We had machines taken out of precincts where that had been reported.
Moreover, our team on the ground in some states was reporting huge lines outside the Democratic precincts because too few machines had been allocated to those voting areas but no lines in front of Republican precinct doors. Republicans breezed through. Democrats waited for hours.
To make matters worse, Ohio suffered monumental downpours from thunderstorms. In key Kerry strongholds we heard that if the long lines didn’t drive people home, the rain might.
Some on the team were bothered by the fact that many voting machines came from a private company, Diebold, owned by two Nebraska brothers who were the chairs of the Bush campaign for president.
I wonder how many countries have elections in which the machines are privately owned and controlled, where the coding for the tallying cannot be inspected or verified because it is “proprietary information.”
It was a major problem of voting in the United States of America—and one that is rarely given enough attention except when elections are too close to call. In anticipation of problems, we had built an army of lawyers—four thousand on the ground in Ohio on Election Day, an unprecedented operation.
It was no secret that Republicans have worked hard in many states to suppress the vote. They regularly come up with legislation in states to make it harder for folks who are anticipated not to vote Republican not to be able to vote at all. The party of Abraham Lincoln is unrecognizable.
I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to think about these variables on election night. I had hoped for a clear outcome.
But in many parts of Ohio we were hearing about the difficulties people were having voting. In America, each state’s voting process is managed by the secretary of state for that state. Even the election for the president of the United States is managed by the state voting system. And so it was that in Ohio, early in the year, we began to lay the groundwork for a fair election. Alarm bells had been sounded for months because we were dealing with a highly partisan Republican secretary of state.
As the evening wore on I was receiving more calls from Mary Beth Cahill and the team working the boiler room. At 3:00 in the morning, I consulted the team in Ohio. The problems in Ohio and even elsewhere made it clear we would not really understand the situation—particularly the provisional ballots in Ohio—until some dust had settled. It meant that once again America had to go to bed not knowing for certain who the president was. I was wrestling with the reports of chicanery in several states but particularly Ohio. It was the only state still in play—the state that would decide the presidency. We sent John Edwards out to the Copley Plaza crowd to deliver a holding-action message. I decided to get a few hours of sleep before tackling the question of options.
When I woke up early, it felt like a bad dream. The evening before hadn’t really happened. I had to shake my head and register consciously that votes had been counted. The election had turned razor-thin. We we
re still waiting for word from Ohio. All the energy, all the action, had shifted to a near-slow-motion, hazy heaviness. I was now wrestling with the reality of losing. The last word from Ohio was that the provisional ballots were not of a sufficient number and representation that they would close the tallied gap between Bush and me. The problem was we didn’t know whether we could trust the count itself.
I had a new appreciation for what Al Gore must have gone through in 2000. For the duration of the morning we examined the options.
I gathered a small group in my kitchen. Ted and Vicki Kennedy were all there when I convened a conference call with our lawyers on the ground in Ohio. We sat at the kitchen table and listened to their analysis. I was furious about the voting system, the extraordinary discrepancy between the ease of Republicans voting and the purposeful hurdles placed in front of Democrats by a partisan secretary of state. I wondered if a due process or equal protection under the law constitutional challenge would be legitimate.
A challenge could tie up the country in litigation for three months.
I consulted with the team on the ground in Ohio, my brother among them. I discussed the situation with John Edwards, who thought we should challenge. But setting aside the emotion and anger over the way our voters were treated, I had to also consider how my decision would affect the country. I was deeply concerned about a nation at war, with the world looking at us, coming out of a second consecutive election where we would be sitting in limbo, wondering for the next six weeks or more who the president would be.
The concerns of others in the room and on the phone were the same. We might win in a district court, we might win on an appeal that was sure to come, but ultimately this was going to be decided the same way Bush v. Gore was. It would be a 5–4 decision in the Supreme Court.
We would lose and we would tie the country up in the spectacle of the world waiting for the United States to untangle itself from another messed-up election. No one at the table or on the phone thought we could be successful.
The decision was mine. I didn’t want to put the country through that again. It would be selfish and irresponsible. I knew some would be angry. People had a right to know that their votes were counted properly. They were correct to be incensed. But I decided I would continue that fight in a way that didn’t put our nation into banana republic status. We weren’t going to close the gap of provisional ballots and, with this court, we wouldn’t overturn the election on constitutional grounds no matter how legitimately rights had been violated.
So, with just six of us sitting in the kitchen in the early afternoon of Wednesday I decided the right thing to do was concede, no matter how much it rankled.
I instructed the campaign to place a call to President Bush, who I was told was waiting with his family in the Oval Office. A few minutes later, he came to the phone. I said, “Congratulations, Mr. President—it was a close race but now we have to put it behind us.” He said, “You’re a tough competitor. That was a hell of a race and I appreciate your comments.” I then said something to the effect of “Mr. President, this has been a really divisive period. The nation needs healing and I hope that you and I can find a way of actually working together to turn things around and show the world the best face of our country.” It was not a long call.
I was resigned—and pissed. I had given it my all but there were things that had happened and things that didn’t happen, any one of which could have changed the outcome of an election as close as this one.
There would be plenty of time for the postmortem.
Right now, I needed to go out fast and speak to our supporters and the nation. I needed to do my part to bring a divided country together. We collected our belongings and our wits as the motorcade formed up for the short journey to Faneuil Hall.
As we walked down the stairs from the kitchen, Teresa slipped on a step, taking a nasty tumble, twisting her ankle badly. We waited a few minutes for the pain to subside, got some ice and then helped her limp to the car. She had been there at the very beginning and throughout, and she was not going to not be there at the end. Teddy and Vicki rode with us. At Faneuil Hall, we met up with John and Elizabeth Edwards. Hugs and handshakes and commiserations all around, and then up the back stairs of the hall where I’d spoken at an announcement rally, now to speak at a very different conclusion.
John Edwards was given the job of introducing me. He delivered what most of us interpreted as the first campaign speech of his 2008 campaign for president. It was a sour coda to his troubled performance as the VP candidate.
When I stepped out on the stage to a prolonged standing ovation from friends who had been with me through thick and thin, people who had marched every step of this difficult, incredible journey, it hit me. The faces were drawn. Eyes were red or puffy. There were no smiles. A dour, heavy mood had settled over everyone because we had traveled up and down the full scale of the emotional ladder in just the last twenty-four hours. The stakes had been so high. The impact of the loss was weighing them down.
In the best spirit of my campaign—the campaign that was meant to lift and unite Americans, the campaign that aimed to show new respect and create new opportunity for people who had been left out and left behind, the campaign that tried to speak to the world about decency and leadership based on universal values—I tried to speak to all Americans.
I spoke about “the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity for finding the common ground, coming together,” and said, “Today I hope that we can begin the healing.”
I thought of all the work that remained to be done, and to the 59 million Americans who had voted for me I said, “Don’t lose faith; what you did made a difference. And building on itself, we go on to make a difference another day. I promise you: That time will come; the time will come; the election will come when your work and your ballots will change the world. And it’s worth fighting for.”
I ended where my campaign had begun—both literally and metaphorically. I reminded all those in Boston and all those watching at home that “in an American election, there are no losers. Because whether or not our candidates are successful, the next morning, we all wake up as Americans. And that—that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on Earth. With that gift also comes obligation. We are required now to work together for the good of our country. In the days ahead, we must find common cause. We must join in common effort without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor. America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion. . . . So here—so with a grateful heart, I leave this campaign with a prayer that has even greater meaning to me now that I have come to know our vast country so much better thanks to all of you. And what a privilege it has been to do so. And that prayer is very simple: God bless America.”
When the speech was over we descended the stairs in the back of the hall.
A different drama had been unfolding over the course of the last weekend of the campaign. Elizabeth Edwards had discovered a lump in her breast. Teresa connected her to the best diagnosticians we knew in Boston. Elizabeth had seen them, but now, right after the concession, she needed to report for tests and evaluations. It was a very difficult, personal transition from the heights of a presidential campaign to the most fundamental human frailty of facing disease. We wished them well and said goodbye at Faneuil Hall.
The motorcade dropped us off at home. It was over—just like that.
CHAPTER 13
Dusting Myself Off
I STEPPED ONTO MY front stoop in Boston on a cold gray late-November morning to pick up the morning newspaper. Tucked between two bright orange pumpkins marking the season peeked an envelope addressed to me and Teresa. I picked it up. There was no return address. Overnight, someone had quietly, anonymously stopped by and, without knocking on the door, without disturbing us, left a handwritten message: they were thinking of me and Teresa, still praying for health care for their child.
&nbs
p; The scene repeated itself more than once that fall. A note from a kid who said she was still fighting for a clean environment, or a letter from a veteran who said he still prayed for a sane foreign policy.
Not since 1972 had I been knocked on my ass in an election—and this had been no ordinary election. Sometimes amid all the cynicism about politics, most of it justified today, people and pundits forget that most of us who run for office are in it because we believe in what we’re fighting for. It’s not an act. There are exceptions; frauds and charlatans have always dotted the political landscape. But most of us who put our reputations on the line and expose our families to the ugliness of modern campaigns do it because we believe in our ability to make a difference and we believe the issues at stake are enormous.
When you believe deeply and you lose, it hurts like hell.
The first presidential candidate I ever worked for, Mo Udall, said that after his campaign ended, he “slept like a baby”—every three hours he woke up and cried. I didn’t cry. But I felt a galloping sense of frustration, disappointment, anger and sadness, often all at once.
When I least suspected it, the campaign would come rushing back to me: on my dresser in a little leather tray, I’d spy the lucky Ohio buckeye, or the four-leaf clover, or any of the talismanic objects I’d accumulated on the campaign trail and carried with me to its bitter end. Even the contents of my emptied pockets reconnected me to the extraordinary supporters who invested their hopes in the campaign. On my wrist, I’d look down and see the yellow “Livestrong” bracelet I’d received in a rope line from a man battling cancer. I wondered whether he’d made it through to the other side of his fight. Bruce Springsteen brought me the guitar picks he had used when playing my campaign appearances, and I kept them close by, a reminder of his loyalty even when the sun wasn’t shining, and of the song that had become our campaign anthem: “No Surrender.”