Chicago would be the scene of the Democratic National Convention, which promised to be more harmonious than the last party confab in the Second City. Mayor Daley, who sat by his father’s side when the ’68 convention dissolved into chaos, was determined to supplant those bitter memories with happier images of his city.
In the spring of ’96, I got a call from Doug Schoen, a New York-based pollster with whom I had worked, asking me to come to Washington to meet with Dick Morris, the politically ambidextrous Svengali whom Clinton had turned to for help in salvaging his presidency after the disastrous midterms.
“Dick wants to talk to you about Chicago,” explained Schoen, who, with partner Mark Penn, had teamed up with Morris to take over the president’s polling after Clinton cashiered the team that had helped elect him.
I had mixed feelings. I wanted to help Clinton, but I had deep suspicions about Morris, who had worked for liberal Democrats but also for arch-conservatives like Jesse Helms. To me, Dick seemed like an opportunist, often pushing the envelope—and always leaving with his own nicely stuffed. Still, I liked Schoen, and decided that if Morris was Clinton’s guy, I should, at the very least, hear him out. We set up an appointment for the Jefferson Hotel, where Morris was living, just five blocks from the White House. Morris burst into the hotel lobby, forty-five minutes late, with an entourage of aides, including Penn. In his suite, he settled into a high-backed chair and summoned me over in the fashion of a Mafia don.
“I heard you were a smart guy,” he began, “but I didn’t call you, because I also heard you were a liberal. But Schoen says you’re all right.
“You see, we’re in a battle with Ickes and the liberals in the White House for the heart and soul of this administration,” Morris said, referring to Harold Ickes, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a progressive stalwart, who kept a close rein on Morris and his budget. “So you’re either with us or you’re with them.”
As Morris talked, the disheveled, wild-haired Penn paced anxiously behind him, occasionally casting a wary eye in my direction.
“Well, gee, Dick,” I replied. “I’m here because I am with the president. I just want to do what I can to help him.”
Morris pondered my answer, and tried a different approach.
“Okay, okay. Fair enough. So how do you think the president’s doing?”
“Very well,” I said. “He’s done some great things. The economy is picking up. The only thing is that there still are a lot of folks who aren’t sharing in that recovery.”
With that, Penn exploded.
“Come on, Dick, let’s get out of here,” he shouted. “He’s one of them!”
Without looking at Penn, Morris waved him off and resumed our conversation.
“Look, it would be useful to me to have someone who really gets Chicago and could help me understand where the opportunities and problems might arise there,” he said. “Let me try and get you on board with the campaign for that.”
I never heard from Morris again; maybe my liberal leanings scared him off. Nor did he get the chance to experience much of Chicago. Just as the convention opened, the story broke that Morris had been entertaining a prostitute in that same suite at the Jefferson, and that his guest had taken some positions that would prove far more distressing for Morris than mine. Morris was banished from the campaign, leaving Penn as the chief strategist.
Meanwhile, I was able to make a small contribution to the president’s effort. I had watched the Republican convention, where their nominee, Senator Robert Dole, had spoken of being a bridge to the values of the past. This struck me as off-key, particularly coming from a candidate whose age and worldview already seemed retrograde. I wrote a memo to Rahm in the White House, suggesting that the president consider inverting Dole’s reference in what would be the last acceptance speech of the twentieth century.
“The odd thing about Dole’s speech is that rather than offer a vision for the future, he served up an ode to the past,” I wrote. “Clearly, people yearn for the values and comforts—and sense of control—of an earlier time. But they also recognize that we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. They want a President who confidently meets the challenges of changing times, not one who curses and shrinks from them, or pretends they aren’t there.” So, for Clinton’s speech, I suggested a formulation: “We must build bridges to the future, not the past. Much as we might like to, we can’t go back. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, wistful reflections about simpler times won’t be enough to solve the challenges of today and tomorrow.” I also proposed that the president pivot off the rancorous tone of the other convention, and challenge the Republicans to a “contest, not of insults, but ideas.”
Michael Waldman, the president’s speechwriter, generously credited my memo in his memoirs as a spark behind the “bridge to the twenty-first century” theme Clinton embraced, and when I ran into Stephanopoulos after the president’s speech, he seemed familiar with it as well. “Ideas, not insults,” he said, with a smile. “Highest-testing line in the speech.”
The run-up to the convention presented me with another challenge.
The previous fall, I had signed on to help a spirited, young state legislator, Rod Blagojevich, who was angling to knock off the Republican who had lucked into Rostenkowski’s seat the previous election.
I liked Rod. He was fun-loving, warm, and self-effacing. The son of a Serbian immigrant—his father had been a steelworker, his mother, a ticket taker for the Chicago Transit Authority—he seemed genuinely to identify with people who, in his words, had come from the “wrong side of the tracks.” His thick helmet of black hair was an homage to Elvis Presley, his favorite working-class hero.
Rod’s story was not entirely a Horatio Alger tale, however. His political career had taken off only after he began courting the daughter of Richard Mell, an influential Chicago alderman and ward boss. Still, Rod had voted a solid independent line in Springfield, bucking party leaders on some key votes.
In the midst of the congressional race, the Tribune decided that it would commit considerable space in its convention editions to a feature the paper dubbed “Lord of His Ward.” The idea was to clue visiting delegates and media into the quaint, old ways of Chicago politics. Many of the most likely candidates to be profiled were close to reporters at the Trib, who lobbied to spare their sources the “honor” of this special recognition. So the editors chose Mell, in part because his effort to elect his son-in-law to Congress would provide a colorful backdrop for the story.
Seven months before the convention, the editors assigned a team to work on the series, including several investigative reporters. Soon they began asking unfriendly questions of Blagojevich’s colleagues and associates. Freedom of Information requests were being dropped all over town, and it became clear that the Trib’s team was intent on painting the picture of an incompetent ghost payroller—an empty suit propelled up the ladder by his powerful father-in-law.
The series was mildly threatening to Blagojevich’s chances, though it wouldn’t appear in the newspaper until after the crucial Democratic primary. To me the exercise seemed a bit like bounty hunting. Having been cut loose for months to produce this opus, the reporters understood it would be bad form to come back empty-handed.
To counter, I dusted off my old skills as an investigative reporter and began tracking their inquiries. Anticipating their charge that Blagojevich had not worked for his paycheck when he was a part-time hire on Mell’s aldermanic staff, I collected close to a hundred affidavits from people for whom Rod had been a caseworker. I looked into his law cases to rebut charges about his legal competence. As summer approached, I wrote a twelve-page memo to the Trib’s editor, rebutting the many lines of attack and arguing why the piece should not run. “Somewhere this project got off the rails,” I wrote. “Instead of an honest and balanced profile, it became, at least for some involved, a search-and-destroy mission
. And now, it seems, every negative inference is accepted as fact; every bit of positive information is deemed irrelevant.” The piece I feared did not run. Ultimately, some of the material was used, but in a less prominent form.
Rod won. In Congress, he became known more for his elaborate pranks than his body of work. Still, he took on my son Michael as an unpaid intern for three summers, and helped lift the spirits of a boy who was burdened by many challenges. For that I will always be grateful.
When Rod went on to run for governor in 2002, however, it was without my help.
“Why do you want to be governor?” I asked him when he summoned me to talk about the race.
“You can help me figure that out,” he said, an answer that was, for me, a conversation stopper.
“Look,” I said, “if you can’t tell me why you’re running, I can’t help you explain it to others.”
I left the meeting, and our seven-year relationship was over.
I believed in Rod in 1996, and in what I was doing. Later, when he went to prison for corruption as governor, I revisited ’96 in my head and wondered if, even then, he had conned me as he had so many others.
We racked up more victories in ’98 and ’99, and the firm’s national reputation continued to grow. Forrest Claypool had left our firm to serve Daley as his chief of staff and had won great notices for his tenure as the reform-minded chief of the Chicago Park District. In 2002 he beat the Democratic organization for a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. John Kupper, a skillful communications specialist with Capitol Hill experience, had now replaced Forrest, and would work at my side for two decades.
One of our most satisfying races of this period took place next door, in Iowa, familiar terrain for me after years of reporting and consulting on campaigns. We got a call from a little-known state senator, who was lagging far behind in his race for the Democratic nomination for governor in a state that hadn’t elected a Democrat governor in thirty-two years. “Right up our alley,” Kupper joked. “Buy low, sell high.”
Tom Vilsack had a story straight out of Hollywood. Left on the doorstep of an orphanage in Pittsburgh, he was adopted by a dysfunctional family. His abusive mother wrestled with alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. His father struggled financially, and secretly sold much of what the family owned to send Tom to college. There, Tom met Christie Bell of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, an aspiring schoolteacher. The two would marry, and when Tom graduated from law school, they would move back to Mount Pleasant. Tom joined Christie’s dad at his small law firm, and basked in the warm embrace of this quintessential small town, quickly becoming a pillar of the community. When Mount Pleasant’s mayor was shot to death at a City Council meeting, the slain mayor’s family and the traumatized town drafted Tom, then thirty-six, to replace him. When Tom tried to step down after two terms, 90 percent of Mount Pleasant’s voters wrote his name on the ballot to ensure he continued in office. He went on to win a seat in the state senate from a predominantly Republican district in southeast Iowa and, in 1997, was pondering a race for governor when I met with him at his modest law offices. The odds were long, but Vilsack was the real deal, and I badly wanted the race.
“There were some pretty slick guys from Washington in to see me right before you,” the slightly rumpled Vilsack would tell me later. “I hired you because your shirttail was sticking out, and I figured I could relate to you.”
It turned out that Iowans were as impressed with Vilsack and his story as I was. He would go on to win two spirited, come-from-behind victories in the primary and general election. It helped that the Republican nominee, Jim Ross Lightfoot, had been a part of the Republican majority in Congress, which in four short years had fallen into disrepute. One of our ads pictured members of a fictional Iowa family standing in front of their home and disappearing from the screen one by one as we catalogued Lightfoot’s votes for budget cuts. The ad slashed a fifteen-point lead in half, and Tom’s momentum never waned.
• • •
While the Vilsacks were celebrating their victory, Susan and I were struggling with an increasingly bleak prognosis for Lauren. She was so hobbled by seizures and drugs that she could barely speak intelligibly, and struggled just to keep her head up. We tried a vagal nerve stimulator, implanted in her chest, to combat the seizures with electrical impulses, but it didn’t help. We also tried a draconian 90 percent–fat diet, precisely measured to stimulate anti-epileptic ketones in her system. It failed. When she was fifteen, Lauren had brain surgery. A hole was drilled in her skull, and a strip of electrodes was laid on top of her brain to try to identify the source of her seizures. If the doctors could locate it, they would remove the tissue. After ten days of monitoring, though, during which her drugs were withdrawn to induce constant seizures, Lauren’s neurologist glumly shared the results: “We couldn’t find it,” he said. “The focal point is too deep in her brain. I’m so sorry.”
Delivering that news to a little girl who had eagerly submitted herself to a torturous medical hell in the hope of being freed from seizures would be one of the most painful days of our lives.
Susan could no longer contain her anger and grief. In 1998, she and two other moms of similarly impacted children founded Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, or CURE, to promote cutting-edge research into the causes of epilepsy. Existing treatments were often ineffective and punishing. The mission of these moms, and the many others who would join: “No seizures. No side effects.”
First Lady Hillary Clinton was the guest speaker at CURE’s first fund-raiser, in January 1999, and she bowled us over with the kindness she showed Lauren and the seriousness with which she plunged into the issue. Like many Americans, she told us, she, too, had a relative who had been devastated by seizures.
Our lives were still hostage to Lauren’s unpredictable episodes. Yet when Al Gore called that spring and invited me to Washington to talk about joining his upcoming presidential campaign, Susan urged me to go. “The kids are older now,” she said. “We can manage. If you miss another chance, you don’t know when, or if, the next one will come along.”
I didn’t know Gore well, but I liked him. He was a serious guy, with big ideas, and a dry sense of humor that he rarely flashed in public. He asked me about my family. We each had a sixteen-year-old son. “Interesting age,” he said, with the knowing smile of another dad who was dealing with the mercurial moods of an adolescent boy. We talked at length about the campaign, and Gore outlined the senior strategic communications role he wanted me to fill. I told him I would get back to him relatively soon.
Before I could accept, however, life dealt our family another blow. I was driving home from work when Susan called. Something clearly was wrong, and this time, it wasn’t Lauren.
“I didn’t want to tell you until I knew,” Susan said, holding back sobs. “I really thought it was nothing. But I had a lump in my breast, and went to get it tested. The test came back today. I have cancer.”
I nearly drove off the road. It was another unreal moment, like the one when I learned my dad had died, or when I witnessed my baby convulse for the first time. In such moments, you’re at first gripped by the conviction that things like this don’t happen to us, that they happen to other people. My life had already made a mockery of any such belief, and now it was doing so again.
Susan was just forty-six. She was extremely fit and seemed healthy in every way. Now she had cancer, and we wouldn’t know for weeks just how severe a case. I thought about the worst. What if we lost her? I couldn’t imagine my life without her. She was the rock of our family. She had held us together through all Lauren’s trials. How could I possibly provide our kids with the constant measure of love and support that Susan did every day? These moments have a way of putting everything in perspective. A presidential campaign was suddenly the last thing on my mind.
When Susan’s evaluation came, it was mildly encouraging. The tumor was small. Chances of surviv
al were good. Yet she would need a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation that would sap her energy and jangle her spirits. Every session was an ordeal, and the recovery time after them agonizing. Still, despite private moments in which she questioned whether she could go on, Susan maintained a brave front for our kids and did everything she could to keep our family routines normal.
Our youngest, Ethan, then eleven, had signed up for ranch camp in Wyoming. It would be his first extended stay away from home, and Susan had promised him that she would take him there to get him settled. When the time came, she insisted on keeping her word, even though she had a chemo treatment just two days before. So at 4:00 a.m., Susan and Ethan set out for the airport and their long-planned trip to Jackson Hole. She did not let on how terribly sick she felt. I often recall her silent heroics that day and marvel at just how powerful a force is a mother’s love.
Susan’s illness was a wakeup call. We were mortal; we would not live forever. We thought hard about what would become of Lauren when we were gone, and began looking for a living arrangement for our child that would allow her some independence but provide her with the structure and support she needed. We found that place in Misericordia Home, a lovely, nurturing community for people with disabilities on Chicago’s North Side, where Lauren would move in 2002. What would make that move possible would be nothing short of a miracle.
In the spring of 2000, when Lauren was hospitalized with seizures and was spiraling down, she was given an anti-epilepsy drug, Keppra, that was just emerging. Though twenty other drugs had failed her, Keppra, in concert with her other medications, shut her seizures down. The cocktail of drugs Lauren would take, probably for the rest of her life, were punishing in their own right. The brain damage brought on by constant seizures was irreversible. Still, for the first time in eighteen years, she was stable, without recurrent seizures.
Gore was gracious and understanding when I called to turn down his offer, and I was touched that he would phone occasionally in the midst of his campaign to ask about Susan’s progress. Hillary also heard about Susan’s illness and checked in. Since the benefit dinner in Chicago, she had become a critical ally in the quest for epilepsy research, and was the driving force behind the first White House conference on curing epilepsy, a watershed event in the movement to focus research on the underlying causes of epilepsy.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 14