Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  By 2009, I thought we could turn those years of working on climate change into an effort that might finally break the gridlock of Congress on one of the truly existential issues for our planet.

  I’d spent a lot of years stopping bad things from happening on the environment—filibustering Bob Dole’s efforts to gut the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the 1990s and leading filibusters again and again to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I loved those fights. But as I began my fifth term, with President Obama in the White House and sixty Democrats in the Senate, I thought we finally had a chance to do more than stop bad things from happening. I thought we could actually make climate change a governing issue. I thought that the legislative environment might be right.

  President Obama had campaigned with a promise to address climate change. He now had the big working majorities needed to advance an agenda. Plenty of Republicans had voted in the past in support of legislation acknowledging that climate change is real. They had embraced market-based solutions to address it. Now, with the choice of either passing legislation that included incentives to help businesses pay the costs of cutting carbon pollution, or just having the executive branch institute regulations, I thought senators would feel empowered to legislate.

  We needed to “put a price on carbon,” which is to say, make it in the interests of the market to pursue low-carbon energy solutions, and create millions of jobs in the process.

  But the Senate is a tough place for climate change legislation. You can’t just look at a list of Democrats and Republicans. You have a lot of senators from the Midwest who represent heavy industrial manufacturing counties. You had to help them persuade their states that this legislation wouldn’t be a job-killer, that in fact the turbines and rotors necessary for low-carbon energy could be manufactured in Ohio and Missouri too. You had to be able to speak to an audience that wasn’t already converted.

  A couple years before, after we’d seen the environmental movement demoralized and caricatured as “elitist,” Teresa and I had written a book called This Moment on Earth. We’d talked to ranchers, farmers and union laborers who didn’t think of themselves as environmentalists but who depended on clean air and clean water for their livelihoods. These folks were losing out because climate change was bringing droughts to the West. Some farmers had even made money turning their fields into solar installations providing electricity. I was convinced climate change was—and should be marketed as—a kitchen-table, middle-class issue. I believed that was the case that had to be made in the Senate, and I thought we could do it.

  The House passed a climate change bill but the Senate was a different story. We needed sixty votes. That meant we needed to think about everything that might be problematic for senators serving in states like West Virginia and Ohio and Pennsylvania and, yes, Michigan.

  We had to address up front the full array of concerns about cost to the taxpayers in those states and how all their industries might be impacted. It was imperative we do whatever we could to get not just Democrats but also Republicans on board.

  I needed a Republican as my partner.

  Enter Lindsey Olin Graham, Republican from South Carolina. Lindsey is out of central casting for the old Senate I’d known in 1985: he’s smart as they come, funny, always a great conversationalist, strong-willed and opinionated, but always determined to find a way to achieve something. Our voting scorecards do not match. Lindsey is a very proud conservative. But we had gotten to know each other well during the 2008 election, when he and I were often booked together as surrogates for John McCain and Barack Obama, respectively. Lindsey joked that we faced off on every television station except the Food Channel. After our appearances, when we’d be wiping off the pancake makeup from the television studio, Lindsey would, always smiling, lament my full-throated defense of the Democratic nominee, as he opened what would often be his second or third bottle of Coke Zero. He had grown very close to John McCain, and we had in common our affection for John, even if we were on opposite sides of the campaign that year.

  I had had Lindsey over a few times with other colleagues and guests for dinners centered on a certain topic. One night, Lindsey discovered Teresa’s schnauzer Clousseau under his chair. Fortunately, Lindsey is both a dog lover and a big fan of Peter Sellers. He and Teresa bonded quickly. Lindsey also came to a dinner on climate change and national security, and the gears in both our heads started spinning. We had a few conversations about a market-based climate plan that might entice Republicans to sign on to legislation.

  In October 2009, Lindsey came to my office and told me he had thought about it, and he was in. I was thrilled. Fifteen minutes later, we were pecking away on my computer, writing a joint op-ed for the weekend’s papers to frame a new approach to a persistent issue.

  I felt like the Senate was working the way it was supposed to. You studied an issue, you did your homework, you took the time to invest in personal relationships and to listen to other perspectives, and you learned to see an issue through other people’s eyes. That’s what Lindsey and I had done, and we thought we might just have a formula that could attract people from both parties who wanted to be part of the Congress that addressed climate change and started an energy transformation.

  Our bipartisan effort became tripartisan when independent Joe Lieberman, who was a veteran of climate change policy for as long as I had been, joined us.

  Joe had been a friend for a long time. He had been a young, progressive state senator from New Haven—a Yale law school student named Bill Clinton volunteered on Joe’s first race in 1970—before serving as state attorney general. In 1987, I had helped recruit Joe to challenge Lowell Weicker for U.S. Senate. Later, he got crosswise with our party over the Iraq War and ran for reelection as an independent in 2006. It had been a very difficult time for him and hard for many of us who didn’t like Joe’s position on the war but liked him personally. I was looking forward to working with him again, to rekindling our friendship in the context of an issue where the two of us had always stood shoulder to shoulder.

  Lindsey, Joe and I had hopes of adding John McCain to our merry band. John had earned some of his old maverick bona fides on climate change years ago, working with Joe on a bill. When he saw the opportunity to be the Republican nominee in 2008, he stopped emphasizing that environmental credential, but even during the campaign, he continued to acknowledge that climate change was real.

  When I flew to Bali for the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2007, I’d told the crowds there that with McCain, Obama or Clinton atop the tickets in 2008, we would have consensus on doing something about climate change.

  But John’s running mate in 2008, Governor Sarah Palin, had been ahead of her time: the Tea Party was coming. In 2009, John McCain was a marked man—marked for a primary challenge. He avoided working with Democrats, even Joe Lieberman and me, his longtime friends. We understood. But we still held out hope that John would dodge a primary challenge and come join our effort. We would talk to him about it on the Senate floor. It wasn’t a happy time for John, but Lindsey could always make him smile. Joe started calling our recruitment campaign Operation Sidney, a tip of the hat to John’s middle name. I even had T-shirts printed. Sadly, they’re still in a box somewhere in storage—the pressure on John, a proud and principled man, that entire election cycle of 2010 was too immense.

  John McCain’s primary wasn’t the only issue getting in our way.

  For one thing, we were still knee-deep in the health care debate. Not only was that taking up all the oxygen in the Capitol, but a number of moderate Democrats made it clear there were only so many difficult votes they could bear. When I heard the news that a midwestern Democrat wasn’t running again for reelection, I thought we had a good chance to get him more engaged in a climate bill. The prospect of not having his name on the ballot might be liberating.

  I asked my team to go meet with his team. The response was jarring “The senator will want a poll done to know if he will want
to play a role.” He became a lobbyist and a cable pundit after he left the Senate—interesting choices for someone who said he was leaving government because politics was broken.

  We were also finding ourselves far down the pecking order of White House priorities, and Lindsey Graham knew it. The White House was focused on health care and did not seem prepared to help us whip up the votes. They leaned on Lindsey to help them with another issue, immigration. Lindsey started to believe he was more committed to climate legislation than the White House was, and he got discouraged.

  But we thought we had one winning argument for the insiders of the Capitol: the House had cast a risky vote in vain if we didn’t get our act together.

  Barbara Boxer, who held the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and I had been allies on climate issues for years. We started convening a group of senators for lunch on Tuesdays in the Capitol’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee conference room to strategize on climate change. Our staffers called it our “climate club.” Every week, we’d bring in a guest speaker to talk about how climate change affected his or her line of work and what solutions might make a difference. We didn’t just invite the traditional climate crowd to meet with us; we’d also bring in CEOs like Jeff Immelt from GE, who had real concerns about the impact of climate change on their businesses, and military brass like Admiral Michael Mullen, who worried about the national security implications of climate change. Barbara and I believed that the only way cap-and-trade legislation would make it through the Senate would be with significant support from all the sectors and stakeholders we had been talking to and more.

  Even with health care on the front burner and immigration taking up attention as well, Lindsey, Joe and I were meeting with folks one-on-one to try to convince them we had a plan worth getting behind.

  We also spent ample time trying to get industry support. We met with the CEOs of the big oil companies, including the man who would later succeed me at the State Department, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson.

  At one point, Joe Lieberman’s staff mentioned how valuable the support of Texas oil baron T. Boone Pickens could be. Almost as soon as they’d said it, they remembered that Pickens had bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against me to the tune of millions of dollars out of his own pocket.

  I broke the ice. It was worth reaching out to an old adversary.

  “Get him on the line,” I said. In minutes, I was talking to the man who had helped put those ads on television. The next week Pickens flew in from Oklahoma. We talked about what it would take for him to publicly embrace the bill. We shook hands and agreed to continue working together. He would endorse our approach.

  We were weeks away from a historic announcement: for the first time ever, we had lined up major oil companies to endorse a cap-and-trade bill. Shell was in the vanguard, but most enthusiastic was British Petroleum (BP), who penciled in a date in the calendar to join us for a press conference and endorse the bill. Three days before the announcement, which would have been attended by all the major oil companies, a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing ten people and releasing millions of barrels of oil into the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi. Because of the BP disaster, the press conference had to be postponed. Timing is everything in politics—and life.

  But the biggest blow was still to come.

  It became clear that the Senate would vote on immigration before climate change. It put Lindsey Graham, an immigration moderate, in the crosshairs of the Right. The Tea Party had emerged as a real threat to “establishment” Republicans like him, and he was facing the prospect of a tough primary challenge. The pressure was intense. I remembered something Lindsey’s chief of staff had once told me about his boss: “Lindsey sometimes gets ahead of his supply lines.”

  I know Lindsey wanted to work on immigration and climate change, and on issues like the detainees in Guantánamo, which spoke to him as a military lawyer. But all those IOUs were coming due. On a Friday afternoon, a call came in. Lindsey asked to speak to me and Joe. We had scheduled a press conference for the following Monday to unveil our planned legislation, with all the stakeholders slated to join us.

  In almost thirty years in the Senate, I had never heard one of my colleagues as distraught as Lindsey was that day on the phone. He was back in South Carolina and realized how bad the political backlash had become. Local Tea Party members were calling in to talk radio and savaging him. Coal companies were spending huge sums to tarnish Lindsey’s reputation at home.

  “They’re all calling it ‘Grahamnesty’ for illegals,” I remember him shouting to us, breathless. “This is too much. I just can’t do this too. It’s too much.”

  Joe and I tried to break in and reassure him about how much support we had.

  “You don’t understand! This is it.”

  The line went dead.

  The best we could do was convince Lindsey not to poison the effort with a public statement pulling back, so that the two of us could try to pass something without him, and maybe if things cooled off at home, he could rejoin us.

  But the next day, Lindsey put out a statement blaming immigration for cratering climate and energy legislation. He was in a tough spot. It was a Saturday, and I had to call Joe on Shabbat to break the news to him, interrupting a day he observed faithfully.

  Joe and I kept the event on the books, even without Lindsey. We tried to soldier on with what we both viewed as a necessary and innovative piece of legislation, but the effort slowly died.

  When Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterms—and about two dozen members who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill were replaced with Republicans—we knew it would be a long time before we could attempt to pass anything similar.

  It was the beginning of climate change denial going mainstream. Primaries were used to torture good people and hold them hostage to ideology and special interests.

  Working across the aisle was becoming apostasy.

  As Mitch McConnell famously said at the time, the Republican caucus’s top priority was “to make sure Obama was a one-term president.”

  The Senate wasn’t the Senate anymore—and that was a sad reality for capable people like Lindsey Graham. The Senate now seemed paralyzed by the politics of gridlock and empty division. Solving problems would have to wait. I started to believe that for the sake of the issues I cared about most, the most important thing any of us could do was help reelect Barack Obama. Otherwise, Washington was going to destroy itself—and take the planet down with it.

  • • •

  IF THE SENATE was broken, there were at least other parts of life that we could make right. Several months before Julia had passed away in 2006, blessedly, she met Vanessa’s boyfriend, Brian. She told me she knew they were going to get married and it gave her enormous pleasure to know that she had met the husband-to-be of one of her daughters, knowing that she would not be at the wedding herself. Her knowledge of this and her ability to talk about it, despite the obvious pain, was striking.

  Indeed, a year later Brian called to make an appointment to meet me at my house in Boston. When you get a call from your daughter’s boyfriend asking to meet, it is kind of a tip-off. I already liked him, and knowing that Julia had approved, the visit was easy. I was excited to hear the words “I’d like to marry Vanessa,” and with tears in my eyes I gave Brian a big hug.

  Brian and Vanessa finally set a date: October 10, 2009. Planning the wedding was one of my great parenting experiences. I was the wedding planner. As a veteran of many campaigns and many fund-raising concerts through the years, I was confident I could produce a pretty good checklist, particularly if I used Steve Martin’s example from Father of the Bride.

  Together, Vanessa, Brian and I did it all until essentially “the day of.” I even booked the band and thought about critical decisions like whether to have a parquet floor to keep women’s heels from being destroyed by the grass at the outdoor wedding. I assessed flowers, booked security and
, in a completely new experience, helped design lighting. At the last minute, I arranged for heaters to stave off an October chill we hadn’t anticipated. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, the sun sank slowly behind the trees and a cold fall night descended on the guests. Everyone except my strapless-gowned daughter and the groom, who were lost in their moment, was shivering in the rapidly dropping temperature. There was a scurry to the tent the instant the ceremony ended.

  It was a memorable event that many of Vanessa’s friends labeled the best wedding they had been to—the ultimate compliment, whether it was sincere or not, for a part-time wedding planner who was doing his best to make up for his daughter’s lack of her mom. It was a reminder of how blessed we all were with family, those present and those present only in our hearts.

  CHAPTER 15

  Mr. Chairman

  IN 2009, A synergy I had never experienced in the Senate finally materialized: a partnership with a president and vice president whom I knew well and, in Joe Biden’s case, had worked with closely for years; the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, a critical committee with impact; and a role and relationships in my caucus and across the aisle that allowed me to engage meaningfully on a whole set of issues that had long animated me.