A Mind Unraveled

by Kurt Eichenwald

  My article chronicled these events as they’d played out over more than a decade, casting the undertaking as a relentless, biased pursuit of AAA primarily because it had insulted Nader personally. In the last paragraphs, I disclosed that this was my final day working for Nader and that I had been hired as a speech writer for Mondale’s presidential campaign. I included my new office phone number, where they could reach me for questions.

  Once I finished the final draft, I slid the article into an envelope labeled for John Richard, dropped it at the front desk, and walked out the door for the last time.

  A few weeks later, a thousand-dollar check from the Nader group arrived at my home, twice the amount the group had offered. By paying that money, the Center for Study of Responsive Law had purchased the rights to my article, meaning I was not allowed to sell it anywhere else.

  The story was never published.

  A written letter from

  ELVA EICHENWALD, 1983

  Delivered weeks after I was ordered to leave the Nader office

  If you can, let all of the pain of the last few weeks go. Try to start over. Evaluate for yourself, take your destiny in your own hands. Without risk, we cannot live life, only exist. We all must accept that, and then you get on with living your life to the fullest of your potential. You could have chosen the easiest way out by choosing to live here at home, a non-productive human being. I could have tried to force you to stay—wrapped you in cotton batting—and kept you safe. However, we both chose the risk of your living a full and productive life. Was there a choice? Again, Kurt, I am sorry for all the confusion and hurt. Now get on with it! I love you always.

  An audio letter from

  FRANZ PAASCHE, 1986

  I remember my personal compassion and anger at what had happened with your health and I remember the pain that comes from that. Then I watched a whole other thing, which is this whole other pain that can come from people that don’t understand. You were such a bright, capable person going through those problems, problems with insurance and people screwing around with you. It just made me angry. It was just incredibly ironic that these liberal institutions—and you were working for solidly liberal, politically correct institutions with politically correct people. In the abstract they could be compassionate about minorities, and the oppressed, and the handicapped, but when they were faced with you straight on, with somebody who had a problem, and it wasn’t so much an abstract societal responsibility but their responsibility to do something to make it livable for you at their job, to ensure you some kind of security through insurance, people just didn’t measure up. It’s very ironic that people who say one thing politically can’t deliver.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The streets of Washington around Union Station bustled with pedestrians and traffic. I watched the commotion through a window at a table in The Dubliner, an Irish pub favored by lobbyists, politicians, and journalists. When I arrived, the greeter urged me to sit at the bar; during busy lunchtimes, they likely preferred holding tables for parties of two or more. But I declined. Barstools scared me—collapsing in a seizure from that height could cause a serious injury when I hit the floor.

  A waiter placed my hamburger and fries in front of me, and although I was hungry, I felt in no mood to eat. My job at the Mondale campaign started the following week, and I had decided to spend the day sightseeing. I’d passed men and women dashing about in power clothes, rushing to important jobs or critical meetings. After hours of meandering, I realized something was wrong—I was incomplete. I had wandered into The Dubliner not so much for a meal as to think.

  I sipped my diet soda. Suddenly, that night at Northwestern when I had planned my life flashed into my mind, accompanied by an unformed sense that I had lost my focus.

  As my food cooled, I revisited the questions I had contemplated during those hours. What did I want from life? What was I fighting for? I watched people walk by a window near me, many of them probably so caught up in work that they barely noticed the world around them. Any of us could be dead by morning. If this was our last day, would we have fully lived our lives? Or would we all have frittered our time away focused on the inconsequential?

  Working at a newspaper isn’t enough. That was just a job. It was important, but it didn’t matter. We live, we die, and somebody else takes over our spot at the office. I accomplished my goal of graduating with my class, but building a life based on employment seemed a shallow self-betrayal. I had envisioned so much more at Northwestern but had since ignored most of it. If I became a newspaper reporter, would I feel complete? If I still had seizures, would I have nothing else of value, no objective to pursue to prevent my epilepsy from assuming a vast role in my day-to-day existence?

  I needed a more important purpose. I stared at the empty seat across the table. Then he appeared in my imagination. A young man, healthy and strong, happy with life. He was my someday son, a child from my marriage to a woman I’d never met.

  A new touchstone emerged, one within my control. I made my plans, establishing a new goal to take the place of my obsession about graduating with my class. In a few decades, I decided, I would return to The Dubliner with my oldest child. My wife and I would have dedicated ourselves to raising our children to be good people. That would be the most important thing in my life: my family, not my job. And if I managed to reach that future, if I never gave up, I would be at this same table, in the same chair, and he would sit directly across from me.

  And then I would tell him I was proud of him.

  * * *

  —

  At the Mondale campaign, I specialized in sermons. Otherwise, as the junior-most of three speech writers, I just helped out the others and was lucky if I wrote a sentence or two for Mondale’s important appearances. But his talks at church services somehow fell to me.

  Speech writing is nothing like what people imagine. We were no Svengalis, spinning words that Mondale slavishly recited. We wrote, then listened to tapes of his appearances to learn which phrases he liked. But the stump speech rarely changed; mostly we put new powder on the same old face.

  I was appointed liaison to the travel and schedule meetings, putting me at the heart of the operation. I was a nobody, the cat watching the queen, but from my perch against the wall, I saw the inner workings of a presidential campaign. I listened as officials planned articles for the next day’s newspapers based on leaks and “exclusives” that were actually just strategic manipulations by the staff. Without fail, newspapers carried stories planned at that meeting, including “dirt” whispered to reporters about fictitious infighting, fed to provide the designated leakers with future credibility.

  Anything could be faked, and reporters often fell for it. Mondale gave a speech where he claimed to be so mad about a development that he was tossing aside his prepared remarks. The news reported Mondale’s angry action. In fact, the statement that he was no longer going to use his prewritten speech was part of the prewritten speech.

  The most bizarre part of the job, though, was joke meetings where we crafted humorous lines for Mondale. From those, I learned how history can be manipulated. I was on a joke-meeting conference call when someone came up with a hilarious zinger. Mondale recited the line that day to wide acclaim. (That was the first time I realized that reporters cared more about good jokes than about important policy speeches.) Later, a campaign official who had not participated in the call took credit for the joke, a false claim that was reported as fact in a history of the 1984 election.

  The staff in my section of the headquarters knew about my seizures. One day I woke up on the floor of the research room after a convulsion. I feared this would be the day I was fired, but nothing changed. It was a relief to discover that the reaction resembled the one I had seen at the Washington Monthly and not what I had experienced at Nader’s group.

  For the most part, though, I never discussed my history with colleagues.
If I wanted to avoid being considered “the epileptic” rather than a worker with epilepsy, I had to treat my condition with the same nonchalance I sought from my coworkers.

  I broke that rule for the first time with a young staffer assigned to women’s issues, who had been talking to me about the emotional impact on an individual from discrimination. I described my belief that, while people should fight bias they face in their lives, they must avoid letting it dominate them. She responded with annoyance, saying that, as a white male, I could never understand the corrosive pain inflicted by prejudice. Without a word, I stood up and shut the door.

  “Let me tell you why I understand discrimination,” I began.

  I spoke for twenty minutes—I’d been thrown out of school, lost a job, lost friends, known I could be fired and blackballed from future employment if I fought back. By the time I finished, the certainty in her expression gave way to a look of embarrassment.

  She apologized. “I made assumptions I shouldn’t have.”

  “That’s okay,” I replied. But now, I said, she should reconsider my point: If people subjected to discrimination allowed it to consume them, they had surrendered control of their lives. Fight back, sure, but never forget to move forward.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon at about three o’clock, Franz flagged down a cab on Capitol Hill. Both of us had ended up in Washington, both in political jobs. He worked on the staff of New York’s senior senator, Patrick Moynihan, and remained on my medical-alert card as a contact. He’d received a phone call a few minutes earlier from someone at the Mondale campaign who sounded terrified. I had gone into convulsions, and the person on the line wanted to know if Franz could come to the campaign’s Georgetown office to help.

  The cab dropped Franz off at the headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue. He had been told to head to the back, and as he walked, he was surprised to see every office was empty. Finally, he saw me asleep on the floor, partly under a table, surrounded by my frightened coworkers. He noticed some nickels, dimes, and quarters lying beside me; he figured they fell out of my pocket during the seizure. He moved the table away, but even with him taking charge, the fear in everyone’s face had not eased. Time for a joke to help everybody calm down. He started scooping the coins off the floor.

  “You know,” he said. “We have a free change rule: Anything that falls out of his pockets, you get to keep.”

  Everyone laughed and seemed to relax. As always, humor defused the tense situation.

  “It’s all right,” Franz said. “There’s no problem, he’s fine.”

  Thanks to the joke, everyone believed him.

  * * *

  —

  By spring 1984, my interest in speech writing had waned. I made a terrible advocate, often finding myself typing things I didn’t believe. Once I played what I assumed was a recording of Mondale and thought he made a lot of strong points. Later, I read the cassette label—I had been listening to Senator John Glenn, one of my boss’s opponents for the nomination.

  Then there was health insurance. The campaign provided me with none. While I had two years left before I would age out of my parents’ policy, the fear of losing coverage continued to weigh on me. I often awoke in emergency rooms where I had racked up huge bills. Uninsured, I could be bankrupt in months; even if I later found group insurance, I would be unable to obtain a mortgage because of a history of bad credit. If I didn’t solve this problem by June 1986, I might never own a house.

  I announced my plans to leave the campaign and asked a few friends for leads on journalism jobs. A man on the scheduling desk told me that television networks were hiring for the elections, and he gave me contact information for a producer at the CBS News Washington bureau.

  I telephoned the next day, but the producer told me she had nothing available. She suggested that instead I should contact Wally Chalmers, the political editor at the CBS Election and Survey Unit in New York, to find out if there were jobs there.

  When I reached Chalmers, I told him that the producer I just contacted had recommended I call him. I purposely used the producer’s prominent name and the word “recommended.” I hoped Chalmers wouldn’t ask me if the producer was actually recommending me or if she even knew who I was.

  Chalmers also told me he had no jobs available. Still, he offered to meet with me at the CBS offices at West Fifty-seventh Street the next time I was in New York.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m going to be there the day after tomorrow.”

  “Don’t make a special trip. Like I said, I don’t have anything available.”

  “No, seriously, I’m scheduled to be in New York then,” I replied. “Do you have time to get together?”

  “Sure.” We scheduled a meeting in his office.

  After hanging up, I called Amtrak. I had lied—I had no travel plans. But Chalmers was a good contact. I needed to figure out how to get to New York with the little money I had.

  * * *

  —

  The political unit was housed in a basement across from the flagship CBS News headquarters. I liked Chalmers right away. A longtime political operative, he had the smarts of a tough journalist but the demeanor of a good boss.

  After about twenty minutes, he told me a job might open soon and invited me to stay in touch. I walked the mile and a half to Penn Station, where I caught a train back to Washington. I planned to call Chalmers every ten days—enough to make sure he didn’t forget me, not so much that I would be annoying.

  * * *

  —

  For the second time since graduation, I took several days off. One afternoon, I became aware I was sitting on my couch. MTV blared on a television in the corner. Time had passed, and I didn’t know how much. But there had been no seizure. I had just been drifting, disconnected from everything around me. No one else was in the small house. My thoughts were blank.

  Without warning, I burst into tears, and my weeping rapidly escalated into a wail. Despondency overwhelmed me, despondency over all my struggles, my concerns about being uninsured, the ever-present fear of injury, the barriers I faced because of my epilepsy that others might never imagine.

  I want to shop in a grocery store by myself, I thought. I ached to shop for food by myself. The nearest store was more than a mile away. I had tried walking there a few times, but after one trip, I regained consciousness in an emergency room. I found my grocery receipt in my pocket; the food had been left wherever I had fallen. My meal budget was gone. I can’t even go grocery shopping, and I want to be a journalist?

  And I could die. What if I died? Weeks before, I’d awoken in a hospital, feeling weak and lost. A nurse told me I was in an Arlington orthopedic facility, which confused me more.* A doctor explained I had been found seizing and the convulsions wouldn’t stop. An emergency crew had loaded me with IV Valium. He asked if I knew the meaning of status epilepticus. I did—a severe, long seizure that can end in death. He questioned whether I had been drinking or using drugs; I never did. Then he asked if I had missed my medicine. I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

  I rocked on my couch, covering my eyes with my palms as I sobbed. “Why did this happen to me?” I gasped. “Why me? Why me?”

  This was the first time in my memory that I experienced unprovoked self-pity. I realized I was losing control. I stood.

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “You’re better! Get over it!”

  I dug through my wallet and found the number for Talbot, my old rehabilitative psychologist. I had maintained contact with him for years, and I needed him now. He called back that same day. I explained that I had experienced an emotional breakdown without warning, over events that were months and years old. Okay, status epilepticus was a big deal. But losing my groceries?

  “I’m so much better than I was when we met,” I said. “Why am I falling apart now?”

  “Because now yo
u can,” he replied. “You finally have a chance to take off your armor. And there are a lot of scars underneath you’re only now beginning to face.”

  We spoke for an hour. By the end of our call, I understood that emotional pain I had buried for years was finally beginning to surface. That infuriated me; I didn’t want that.

  * * *

  —

  After four weeks of pestering, Chalmers called to let me know there was a one-month position available in the polling unit. I accepted the job before he told me the pay.

  This was real journalism. I just had to accept every assignment, every chore, leave the office last, and get there first. I knew people in Manhattan who would rent me an inexpensive room in a brownstone. There were dangers—the bedroom was on the fourth floor of the walk-up—but I couldn’t let fear dictate my life.

  I moved to New York in June. During my orientation, I was thrilled when a security officer handed me an identification card. For the first time, my name and photograph appeared on a record for a major national news organization. Then Chalmers escorted me to a dreary area that handled polling. Before he left, I asked if I could speak with him in his office.

  He sat at his desk and put his arms behind his head. “What’s up?”

  I glanced at the desktop computer to his right, embarrassed. I felt like I had deceived him.

  “Listen, if you want me to leave, it’s okay,” I said.

  “Why would I want you to leave?”

  “Well,” I replied, “I have epilepsy, and my convulsions are not under control. There’s a chance I could have one in the office, and maybe people won’t be comfortable with that.”