Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  I won’t put myself in front of them again. I will talk to any other media in America, but not the ones from Minnesota. When I go on tour for this book, it won’t happen in my home state. I’m not going to put them in a position to make money off me anymore. When I give a quote, they’re going to have to give credit to someone else that I said it to. It’s the only way I can strike back at them.

  I’d made my definitive decision not to seek reelection before I went on the trade mission to China that summer of 2002. But I wasn’t going to go over there as a lame duck—then why would the Chinese bother to listen to me? So the timing of my announcement, right after I returned, happened to coincide with the Minnesota media breaking the story about my son’s alleged “abuse” of the governor’s mansion.

  I went on Midday with Gary Eichten on Minnesota Public Radio, a show where I was a frequent guest, and made this statement on June 18: “I will always protect my family first. You have to have your heart and soul into these types of jobs. I feel that it is time to go back to the private sector.”

  Beyond that, I felt it was nobody else’s business, and I didn’t want the media twisting it. But the foremost reason was Terry. She means more to me than holding any office does. And her health was deteriorating. It had been going on for my entire term. She’d contracted Epstein-Barr mono just as I was elected.

  TERRY: I’d broken my ankle during the last phases of the campaign. I was cleaning barns and giving riding lessons with my leg in a cast. Then at the end, when I went along on that big trip, I kept feeling worse and worse. It seemed like a cold that never went away, and by March of his first year in office, I was really sick. I went in to see the doctor many times and said, “I have swollen glands, I’m so tired I can hardly move, what’s wrong with me?” He always said, “You’re stressed.” Finally, when a state trooper physically had to help me in and out of the car and into the doctor’s, I sat there and said, “If you don’t do a blood test and assure me that I’m not dying, I’m not leaving your office.” He did, came back, and said, “You have mono.” I said, “Whaaaat? Why didn’t you tell me that two months ago?” By then, I’d had the disease for a while and was still maintaining a grueling schedule every single day. The doctor told me if I didn’t stop doing anything for the next month, I’d end up in the hospital and in a bad way. So for all of March, I sat in the house and did nothing.

  About a year went by, and I still felt like I constantly had the flu. I never seemed able to get enough sleep. I’d sleep in the car on the way to events, and again when I got back. I’d take naps. I was on huge doses of vitamins. I tried everything. It was just a horrible feeling like you’re constantly walking through deep water. And no one could tell me what was wrong with me. I thought I might have cancer. My white blood cell count was so high and I was anemic. The doctors even sent me to the AIDS Clinic at the University of Minnesota, to see if it might somehow be that. It wasn’t, of course, but they had no clue either what it might be.

  Terry first became ill just at the time we were thrust into a life that I’ve described like this: You’re standing next to a treadmill that’s already on seven. You jump on, and you’re at a full dead sprint—for the next four years. So Terry’s disease began at the very moment of all the tension and pace of living in this limelight.

  I didn’t know what it was like. I sat her down one day and said, “This is alien to me. Please tell me what this does.” She said, “It’s like when I’m shopping, all of a sudden I feel it coming on and my purse now weighs fifty pounds. I don’t even know if I can carry it to the car. I feel like I’m going to collapse.”

  Her Epstein-Barr mono had gone untreated long enough that it turned into chronic fatigue syndrome. Except doctors didn’t then know what it was. They didn’t believe it was real, and it wasn’t being diagnosed until a few years ago.

  TERRY: The terrible thing about chronic fatigue, too, is that it wipes out your short-term memory. Our whole marriage, whenever we went anywhere, I always remembered everyone’s names and faces. Jesse was never good at that, and I was like an encyclopedia. Now all of a sudden I would meet someone and an hour later, have no idea who they were.

  When the two of us reached the decision that he wasn’t going to run again, I just disappeared from public view.

  His last year in office, Jesse then had to be hospitalized, and things seemed like they were going from bad to worse.

  Three times in my life, I’ve had to be hospitalized because of a blood clot on my lungs. The last time it happened was on the return trip from my trade mission to China, after taking that thirteen-hour plane ride. Today, I’ve learned some people who fly a lot are susceptible to this. Now I get up every hour and walk around the plane, so my blood isn’t allowed to pool down in my feet.

  After getting home from China, I noticed I had some pain whenever I took a deep breath, so I went to the hospital and they discovered the clot with an MRI. After I was admitted, I didn’t want this getting out to the media, because it’s frankly none of their business. The hospital was tremendous. They kept me in an isolated ward and, the day I left, the reporters were all out front where my limousine was, while they snuck me out the back door. The state troopers put me in an unmarked squad car, and I left the media sitting there. I never did speak to them about it.

  I then went to the Mayo Clinic and they found out that something in my immune system is messed up that causes my blood to clot when it shouldn’t. I’ll need to take Coumadin, a blood thinner, for life now.

  TERRY: Finally, almost a year after Jesse was out of office, I went to a great clinic that works with cancer patients. That’s still what I was afraid I had. A group of doctors were treating the patients holistically, metabolically, not just with all these heavy drugs. My girlfriend had gone there when doctors kept telling her the same thing—“you’re just stressed”—and it turned out she had Crohn’s disease. Now she’s a whole new person because she’s been treated for it. All this time, I’d been treating myself the wrong way for the chronic fatigue syndrome that I really had. I remember a doctor at the clinic saying, “I can’t believe no one has told you this before.” I sat there thinking, “Oh my God, I’m not going to die.”

  The only thing you can do when it comes over you is rest. All I wanted was for Terry to regain her health. I knew that if I became governor for another four years, God knows where it would have put her.

  Terry had the highest approval rating that any First Lady in Minnesota has ever achieved—76 percent. Even when I would make these huge faux pas, stick my foot right in the shit bucket with something I said, it didn’t affect her popularity. The people adored her, because she was so honest in everything she did. She handled everything with grace and beauty.

  TERRY: But—and it’s a big but—I never had to stand up for anything that was unpopular. I always felt that my job as First Lady was to create a feeling of positiveness towards whatever he was trying to do. And if I did my job correctly, the people wouldn’t remember me for anything other than—“Oh, I think she was pretty nice.” He was struggling so hard with everything of that, for me to start opening my yap and being controversial could have really destroyed it all.

  And there are many good things I remember. I know a lot of the First Ladies say this, but I loved visiting schools and reading to the kids. I would always ask teachers about their biggest concerns and then I’d go back to Jesse and say, “This is what I’m learning.” One of the commissions I set up was to help him with education. I would often meet with special-ed teachers, because I knew about these very effective public education programs through the experience with our daughter, Jade.

  Jade had had a series of seizures soon after she was born, and for a while we’d been afraid we’d lose her. But she made a miraculous recovery, and was seizure-free until the age of two. I remember I was wrestling in Pittsburgh that night. I was sound asleep when, about two in the morning, I suddenly came wide awake and looked at the telephone. Within ten or fifteen seconds, the phone ra
ng. It was Terry rushing out the door, headed to the hospital because Jade was in the middle of a grand mal seizure.

  Not long before this, Jade had been inoculated with the DPT vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. The government makes these shots mandatory for kids at age two, in order for them to later go to school. It’s my understanding that any child susceptible to seizures should not have to get a DPT shot. I went to a convention in Chicago, concerning kids who’d been normal before the shots and were now drooling in wheelchairs. A state patrolman friend of mine attempted to sue the government over this tragedy, but it got nowhere, because no doctor will go on the witness stand and explicitly state that the shots cause this.

  After Jade’s grand mal seizure, she had to go on a number of heavy drugs for several years, which set her back tremendously. I feel very fortunate, because today Jade is only mildly handicapped. That isn’t true for those couple-dozen children I saw in Chicago. Yes, these shots are important and have eliminated terrible diseases. But what are these other kids, collateral damage?

  I talked to President Clinton about this right before he left office. He described a recent breakthrough in genetics, making it possible to determine whether a child has a certain gene that the DPT shot would affect. Then that child would be exempt from getting it. So far, though, nothing has changed.

  I strongly considered resigning early to allow my lieutenant governor, Mae Schunk, to become governor. Mae had been an award-winning elementary school teacher, and this was her first foray into politics. She was gray-haired, grandmotherly, and the sweetest lady you’d ever want to meet. When we’d been campaigning together in the RV, talking “what-ifs,” like who might play at the inauguration, somebody had suggested bringing in Barenaked Ladies. Mae heard that and spun around and scolded me: “You can’t have that at an inauguration!” She had no idea this was the name of a band.

  So, with a month to go in office, the legislature not in session, and nothing much going on, I thought, why not make some more history? I’d already done that by appointing an independent, Dean Barkley, to fill Paul Wellstone’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Now this was an opportunity for another independent, Mae Schunk, to become the first female governor of Minnesota. She’d only serve for thirty days, but the Democrats and Republicans would never be able to claim that distinction. And you’d see Mae’s portrait hanging in the statehouse alongside all the other governors!

  I also thought this would be another way to endear myself to the Minnesota media. At that point, to borrow a phrase from Rhett Butler in Gone with the wind, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”

  In the end, I decided against it, because I didn’t want it on my record that I’d resigned from office. Also, although I never broached the idea to Mae, I have tremendous respect for her and I don’t think she would have liked it.

  We still correspond on e-mail and send each other birthday cards. When somebody once mentioned to Mae that my spoken English was pretty atrocious, she got a little ruffled. “You understood what he said, didn’t you?” she said. They said, “Yeah.” She said, “Well then, his English isn’t that bad, is it?” I really enjoyed that, coming from an educator of thirty-six years!

  As indescribable as it is in many ways when you come into office, it’s just as strange when you leave. Especially at the level of being a governor. As president, you’re always going to have the Secret Service for the rest of your life, because you’re privy to national security secrets. But that’s not true at a state level. Suddenly, you’re all alone. When you jump off that treadmill, it’s back at zero. It’s just as hard to adjust as when you hopped on at a full sprint.

  During my four years, one of the big issues that mostly the Republicans kept bringing up to the media—and trying to destroy me with—was the amount of protection I had to have. The simple fact was, I had celebrity status. My security guys would call places where I was to appear and say, “We need ‘rock star security’ when Governor Ventura comes.” It was crazy. I was under scrutiny unlike any other governor. Everything I did was covered and watched. Yet it was portrayed to the public that I was out cavorting around, spending all this money for “rock star security” and wasting the taxpayer’s dollars. Well, the law says a governor is to be protected 24/7, and in reality my security budget was no higher than the current governor’s.

  Still, it was a bizarre feeling to leave it all behind. The first week of January 2003, I sat in the audience as Governor Pawlenty was sworn in, and at that point I was officially done.

  TERRY: When the ceremony ended, he was supposed to go shake hands with the governor, but there was a huge line. And I said, “You know what, we’re just distracting everybody, let’s just go.”

  But when we went outside, all the media left the new governor and made a complete circle around my vehicle. I looked at them and said, “I’m not the governor now—he is! He’s in there! Go bother him!” I actually felt embarrassed for him.

  It’s Minnesota tradition that your same security men and drivers give you one last ride home, with full sirens and lights. In my case, in a Lincoln Navigator, back to my ranch. That day, you say your goodbyes. It was pretty gut-wrenching between me and Ron and Tony, my two main security guys. These two gentlemen were with me every step of the way for four years, in Cuba, in China, everywhere. They probably spent as much time with me as the First Lady did, because for eight hours of the day, they’d be with me and she wasn’t. Of course now they were moving on, to protect the new governor.

  It was so strange the next morning, when they removed the trailer, and all security was gone from the house. For lack of a better way to say it, you’re naked. There’s an emptiness you feel. Because, all of a sudden, you’re not the focus of the state of Minnesota anymore. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s very addictive to be the most powerful person in a state. There’s no doubt in my mind why people do it.

  TERRY: I remember when I first walked into the Capitol, looking at all the inscriptions and the paintings, how proud I was of our country and all the hope I had for the four years to come. That was equal to how very sad I was, the last day I was ever there in an official position. I thought, my husband could have done so much more if people would have truly considered what’s good for the state. But I still think he did a great job, did everything he possibly could do, considering that he was not just fighting the Democrats and the Republicans, but all the media of Minnesota.

  So I became kind of a recluse. Part of me wanted that. Another part of me missed being at the center of attention—even of criticism—even though I detested the media “jackals.”

  I started falling into a bit of a depression. What happened next, when I got hired by MSNBC, didn’t make the situation any easier.

  CHAPTER 13

  Reflections on TV and Teaching

  “One of the first things I noticed in MSNBC’s newsroom: No one listens. The visual is everything. On every producer’s desk, TV sets were usually tuned to MSNBC . . . but virtually no one paid attention to the substance of what we were transmitting. I fantasized about interrupting one of my debates to announce that U.S. troops had invaded France—just to see if any of the overworked, deadlined producers would notice.”

  —Cable News Confidential, by Jeff Cohen

  Our second day at Conception Bay, we drive to a place called Ecomundo to rent a kayak. It is only twenty-five bucks for the whole day. Since the bay is protected on three sides by land, the winds are minimal and this is one of Baja’s ideal places for kayaking.

  We head out across the blue-green waters of the marine reserve, the light flap-flap of our paddles the only sound for miles. The water is still so crystal-clear that sometimes we can see schools of fish passing by underneath us—long, skinny sierras, little lisas, even an occasional lone barracuda. “Should’ve brought at least one fishing rod,” Terry mentions at one point. Paddling on past more inlets and coves and cone-shaped islands, we say little. There is no need for words.

  Only a sin
gle permanent settlement has been built along the seashore, though we do see quite a few motor homes like ours, as well as pitched tents and some palapa huts. For the most part, though, we must feel a lot like the Indians who used to trace this same path in their canoes. It feels great to be this far from “civilization.”

  I look at Terry as the day begins to wane and say, “You know, honey, being here isn’t making my decision any easier.”

  “What decision is that?” she asked.

  “The future. What I’m going to do now.”

  “You never can just let it all go, can you,” she says, a statement rather than a question.

  She’s right. I can’t. Not entirely. It doesn’t seem to be in my makeup. At least not yet.

  Headline: JESSE VENTURA REACHES DEAL FOR TALK SHOW AT MSNBC

  Cable news in the new millennium has often been described as an arena where brass-knuckle politics are presented with the showmanship of professional wrestling.

  Embracing the times, MSNBC announced yesterday that it had completed a deal to hire Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler and recently departed Minnesota governor, as a network talk show host.

  The terms were not disclosed, but executives at the network said his annual salary would be in the neighborhood of $2 million.

  —The New York Times, February 7, 2003

  Coming out of office, I’d been a hot commodity. My agents had talks with CNN, Fox, and MSNBC about my coming on board to host a cable network talk show. Finally, MSNBC won out and I signed a lucrative three-year contract. I made the announcement on The Tonight Show. Originally, the show was supposed to be an hour a night, four nights a week.