When I came back to the States, a week or so later I had a two o’clock meeting penciled in on my schedule—but who I was supposed to meet with was blank. That’s very unusual for a governor’s public schedule. So I asked my chief of staff, “What’s the deal with the two o’clock meeting?” He rolled his eyes and said, “CIA.”
I expected it, because they have their jobs to do. I had been with Castro and why wouldn’t they want to debrief me? And that’s precisely what it was. The two agents from the CIA came into my office—one of them I’d already met, shortly after I became governor—and they very respectfully gave me the old Twenty Questions routine. They went through their litany, and I answered them as honestly as I could. Typical intelligence questions: What did Castro’s health appear to be like? Was he in control of all his faculties? Did he seem bright for his age?
I said I felt that he was very much in control. His mental capacity seemed to be right-on. I even opinioned a little bit. I told them, “I know his mom lived to be a hundred, so it’s in his genes, and looks to me like he just might make it. Do I think this guy is gonna die within the next couple of years? I’d have to tell you no, he looks fit as a fiddle for his age.”
Their faces were expressionless. They said they were finished, and thanked me. I looked coldly at them and said, “You’re done. You’re all done?”
They said yes.
I said, “You’re sure? There’s no other question you want to ask me, there’s nothing you want to tell me, anything like that?”
“No, sir, we’re all done.”
In that case, I wanted to send them back with something to think about. “Well,” I said, “I have something that I want to tell you, and I’ll leave it up to your discretion who should hear this. You take it to whoever you think is appropriate. A need-to-know basis.”
They feigned being very surprised and said, “Governor, we don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
I said, “Well, here’s what I’m talking about. If you or your people ever put a tail on me again, and don’t tell me beforehand, and I discover it—you’re gonna find the tail floating in the river.”
They looked at me in seeming astonishment. They looked at each other and pretended they didn’t have a clue as to what I was talking about.
I said, “That’s fine. If you don’t get it, you can take it and tell it to somebody who does. I’m sure somebody upstairs, above you, knows exactly what I’m talking about—if you don’t. So you be the judge. Like I say, take it to where it needs to go.”
I’ve often wondered how far it went. Did it get to George Tenet, who was director of CIA at the time? To George Bush? Dick Cheney? Or maybe it didn’t even leave the room. Maybe they didn’t even bother with passing along my little message, I don’t know. But at least I got it off my chest, and let them know that the next time they try to fool me, they ought to do a better job.
One other unique thing happened out of my trip to Cuba. At the turn of the year that Christmas, a FedEx messenger came and delivered a calendar. In it were twelve beautiful photos of Cuba—and it was autographed by Fidel Castro. How the Cubans managed to get this to me at my home address, I have no clue, but apparently their intelligence network within the U.S. must be fairly good. Since Fidel is not allowed to use our mail system, he had to send it by private courier.
Then, shortly before I was to leave office, Castro sent an emissary to the governor’s residence. He wanted to reassure me about something. “Always remember, governor,” the man said, “a friend to Cuba will always remain a friend to Cuba.”
When I was there, Fidel himself had been very strong in inviting me back. He’d said, “The next time you come, you come as my guest and you bring your family and your children.” I bet I’d have a pretty nice place at the beach if I went on vacation! It’s just strange to me that I’m not able to do that, not legally.
I don’t look forward to Castro’s death, because I fear there will be a massive amount of turmoil in Cuba, and the Cuban people have suffered enough. But they have the strength to face it, I believe.
I was appalled that President Bush and our government turned down Castro’s offer of sending doctors, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. I thought that was one of the most arrogant, stupid decisions that I’ve seen this president make. When your enemy holds out an olive branch, it takes a far better statesman to accept it than to reject it. Had I been president, those doctors would have been warmly received. And a personal letter of thank you would have gone to Castro and the Cuban government. Have we ever helped them when they’ve been hit by a hurricane? I don’t think so.
The man is brilliant. Was Fidel doing that for political reasons, or as an act of kindness? That’s the question we’ll never know the answer to. But you know what? Having met Castro, I’d give it 50-50. I think it was both kindness to the people of New Orleans, because he has personally lived through something similar in Cuba, and it was also a brilliant strategic political move on his part. A way of showing “I’m a dictator with a heart.”
CHAPTER 7
Transitions: Down Mexico Highway 5
“It was mid-February and U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Minnesota Republican, was among 24 members of the House and Senate accompanying President Clinton on a state visit to Mexico. Shortly after he stepped off the plane and moved down the receiving line, the Minnesotan got a surprise that interrupted the formality of the situation.
“The congressman recalls: ‘We had just gotten off Air Force One, and President Clinton introduced me to President Ernesto Zedillo as a congressman from Minnesota.’ Zedillo’s eyes ‘got big as saucers, and he said, “You know Jesse?” Later on, Zedillo asked me six or seven times if I would arrange a trade mission to bring Ventura to Mexico.... The same thing happened with cab drivers—they wanted to know about Jesse.’ ”
—Alternative Journalism Review, September 1999
Somewhere on the outskirts of Mexicali, we pass a marker noting that Ernesto Zedillo, President of Mexico from 1994 until 2000, spent most of his youth here. Terry and I had been in Mexico City on official business when Zedillo was still president, after Vicente Fox had just been elected. (By law, presidents in Mexico only serve a single six-year term.) It was the transition period, so I met with both men. I looked at Zedillo as a true statesman. Fox was the first man elected in ninety-some years who wasn’t part of the PRI party, and Zedillo could have made it very difficult for him. But he didn’t. He helped Fox completely, even though he took a lot of heat from his party for making the transition so smooth. Zedillo showed that the country of Mexico came first, before politics.
As Terry and I reminisced about Zedillo, it brought an incident from my own transition to mind. Arne Carlson, a moderate Republican, was the outgoing governor when I came into office. Four years earlier, when I’d ended my term as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Carlson had decided to honor me at his annual State of the State Address. While mayor, I’d managed to implement policies that helped a very high crime rate in Brooklyn Park drop dramatically. Carlson had personally taken me aside at his residence for a chat.
“Remember what he said to me that night, Terry? ‘We need people like you.’ He was practically begging me to reconsider and run again for mayor. I said, ‘Well, governor, I did my four years, and now I’m going back to the private sector.’”
“Well, in hindsight, I think that’s where he would have preferred you stayed,” Terry says.
“Yeah, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him. When I met with him the morning after I won governor, I said, ‘Well, governor, you know you’re responsible for this.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, back in ’94 you took me aside after I stepped down as mayor and said government needed me and I shouldn’t be leaving. And I took that to heart!’ You’d have thought I said the worst thing in the world! His face flushed red with anger, and he totally ignored me!”
“Gee, I can’t understand why,” Terry says.
“It was sort of like my re
lationship with the Minnesota media. I always used to have to tell them—‘That’s a joke—joke—joke.’ I can’t help it if people don’t appreciate my humor!”
“Well, what Governor Carlson did to you after that wasn’t so funny.”
It was sad, but true. It used to be that, as a matter of courtesy, governors didn’t speak publicly about their successors. That unspoken rule was broken by Governor Carlson. He would never come out to support me, but was constantly going to the media with his criticisms. Since I left, I haven’t said one word about the current governor. I consider that part of the dignity of having held the office.
You think about transitions when you’re in a new one. The day after the election in 1998, when it had dawned on my “kitchen cabinet” and me that we were completely clueless as to what to do next, I can’t remember who broke the ice first. Our entire focus had been on winning the election and, by necessity, we couldn’t look beyond that. But nobody in the Independence Party had ever held a statelevel job. If anybody had held one locally, it was as a councilperson in a rural suburb somewhere. And here we were: in a matter of two months we needed to be up-to-speed and running the state of Minnesota. And not embarrass ourselves in the process—because the people had entrusted me with this responsibility.
By late afternoon, we’d all been sitting there for about three hours without getting anything much accomplished. We did go and get doughnuts and coffee. We were able to figure that out! Terry’s best friend, an attorney named Shirley, had run private sector companies, but even she said, “This is bigger than what I know. I have no experience at this level.”
Fortunately, Shirley was very good friends with Tim Penny, a former Minnesota Congressman. Tim was a rogue moderate Democrat, cosponsor of the famous Penny-Kasich bill to balance the budget in Washington. He’d resigned from the House out of his disgust with what the political process was becoming. I’ll never forget the phone call Shirley made to the Congressman that day. She found out that my election had been his son’s first opportunity to vote. He’d pulled the lever for this ex-wrestler third-party maniac, or whatever else I’d been labeled, and he’d come home and told his father.
I whispered, “Shirley, tell him we always have a twelve-step program for all recovering Democrats and Republicans.”
Tim was ready to help us regardless. “There’s only one guy I know who has the ability to step in and organize at this level,” he said. That was his former chief of staff in Washington, Steven Bosacker. Steven now held a similar position with the Board of Regents at the University of Minnesota. Tim called Steven who, that Saturday night, came out to my house. We hadn’t talked long before I knew I had my chief of staff. Not only could I see that he was immensely qualified, but when we talked politics, Steven informed me that back in the eighties he had voted for John Anderson for President. A third-party candidate. So had I. He wouldn’t feel that only a Democrat or Republican could get the job done.
To give you an idea of how good Steven was: We were in the transition period and all putting in long hours; twelve-hour days down in the bowels of the Capitol. One Sunday morning, something came into my head that I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. So I called Steven’s office, just to put my thought onto his answering machine. After one ring, he picked up the phone. I said, “Steven, it’s Sunday, what are you doing there?” He said, “Oh, I had some loose ends to tie up. I’ll probably be here until two or three in the afternoon.” That showed me a man who goes above and beyond the call of duty. I need him—the man behind the scenes. Today, Steven runs the city of Minneapolis for the current Democratic mayor.
I took heat because a great many people who’d worked on my campaign did not receive jobs at the Capitol. Even from the grass roots, the rumbles reached me that people had expected that. I countered by saying, “If we’re not going to be something different, why did I run? Which means, get rid of the nepotism and the cronyism. We’re going to hire the best people for the job based on their ability, not simply because they were there.”
As I started putting my team together, I told the media, “I feel like Rodney Dangerfield. It’s time to go ‘Back to School.’” A number of people came forward who wanted to contribute, like my commissioner of finance, Pam Wheelock. She had worked for my Republican opponent, Norm Coleman, who was then Mayor of St. Paul. During transition, I borrowed Pam to help put together my first budget, and she stayed on. Mayor Coleman was extremely gracious, saying, “I won’t stand in the way.”
I teased Pam about coming along to Washington, in case I someday ran for President. She paused a moment and said, “Gee, I don’t know if I could handle that.” I said, “But Pam, you’re just dealing with a different set of numbers, changing from millions to trillions.” She laughed and said, “You’re right, sure I’d go.”
TERRY: I assumed that the attention from Minnesotans would be intense. I had no clue—and why would you?—that the entire world would be constantly knocking at your door. That really amazed me. We received articles from Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Japan, everywhere.
The swearing-in ceremony we did very traditionally, in the rotunda of the Capitol. In my speech, I talked about how I would certainly make mistakes, but would do the best job I possibly could. I spoke of what I told the kids at Champlin Park High School, where I was a volunteer assistant football coach: “I will never, ever, punish you for losing. But God help you if you quit on me.”
And they never did. A few days after the election, we played a game against a rival high school. Nobody had given my team a chance. Crouched down in the middle of the huddle with New York columnist Jimmy Breslin before the kickoff, I said to the kids: “Every play tonight you play it like your last play. We don’t have to fear these guys. I shocked the world on Tuesday. Nobody gave me a chance. Nobody’s giving us a chance tonight. We prove ’em wrong! Let’s do it!”
On their final fourth quarter drive, Champlin Park scored the winning touchdown on a fourth and fifteen from the sixteen-yard line. Pulled the game out of the hat, so to speak, not unlike their volunteer coach.
I wanted the inauguration party to be a “People’s Celebration.” We held it at the Target Center. All 13,000 seats were sold out, and it was carried on live TV. I went from a black suit at the swearing-in to dressing Jesse “The Body” that night. I wore a wild Jimi Hendrix T-shirt under a buckskin jacket, sunglasses, a bandana, and three earrings. When I ran into Warren Zevon backstage—he’d agreed to be one of our featured performers—he had on a sports jacket and a turtleneck. “I thought I’m supposed to be the rock-and-roll guy,” he said.
“The Body’s back for tonight!” I told the crowd. “Let’s party, MINnehSOHdah!” I got up on stage with Warren to do a duet on “Werewolves of London.” That was a huge thrill for me, because I’d been listening to his music religiously since the late seventies. Warren didn’t have to worry about my not knowing the lyrics, but he was kind enough not to mention that I could barely carry a tune.
Earlier that night, Warren had said, “I have something I’ve been asked to bring to you.” It was a tape cassette of music from Hunter S. Thompson, of “gonzo journalism” fame. There was also a piece of advice that Warren had been entrusted to give me verbally, eyeto-eye. “In the position you are in today,” Hunter said, “never—I repeat never—answer the phone after midnight.”
When you think about it, that message is extremely profound. If the phone rings after midnight, it’s not going to be news you want to hear. Turn the phone off so you can sleep, and deal with it in the morning.
TERRY: It was like you were on a tightrope all the time. I was so careful. I took all my girlfriends aside and I said, “Wherever we go in public, you must remember that everything we say and do will be watched and recorded. We can’t just go somewhere and be silly and clink our martini glasses. If you want to do that, come over to my house or the governor’s residence—we’ll kick everybody out and be as crazy as we want. But for four years, I walk the line.”
I set up what I called the “Spouses Commiseration Luncheon,” for all the new people. Both men and women. I told everybody when they came to the door, there is no press here and no one is allowed to speak outside this room of anything we talk about. If you have anything you want to get off your chest, let me know.
All the First Ladies have something like this. When you’re in trouble or just unsure about something, you can call any First Lady for advice—and the code is, nothing gets said about it. I always held up my end of the bargain. At my luncheons, we had such a good time together. But it only lasted a short while before we didn’t know who to trust anymore. We didn’t want to have anybody coming over who might not hold to the code.
The friends we stopped to see in Phoenix told us that Mexico Highway 5 was in great shape from Mexicali all the way to the beach community of San Felipe, but they couldn’t vouch for what happens after that. It’s two lanes, flat, and paved—in some parts even extending out to four lanes. (Keep in mind that any paved road in Baja is considered a good road. That in itself is a big change from the United States.)
We are cruising right along when I say, “Remember when I floated the idea that you should be paid at least $25,000 a year for being First Lady?”
“Agggghhhhhh!” is Terry’s first response, but then she starts to laugh. “But you know, in private, when we’d go to the governors’ conferences, the other first ladies were like—yes!”
“Not just them, either. I probably received a half dozen communications, from other governors in both parties, saying thanks for having the courage to say that. Well, when I saw what your job required—basically as the building manager working on behalf of the state—how come everybody else who does that kind of thing draws a salary? In fact, a Republican from Rochester in our legislature stood up and said I was exactly correct: it’s in the law that anyone working at the behest of Minnesota must be paid!”
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 13