Love & War
Page 1
ALSO BY JAMES CARVILLE
It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!
Stickin: The Case for Loyalty
ALSO BY MARY MATALIN
Letters to My Daughters
All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President
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Excerpt from “Questions They Never Asked Me” from “Epilogue” from Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy. Copyright © 1991 by Mary Bernice Percy. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Confessions by Saint Augustine; translated with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick (1991) c. 144 words from page 201 by permission of Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 2013 by James Carville and Mary Matalin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carville, James.
Love & war : twenty years, three presidents, two daughters and one Louisiana home / James Carville and Mary Matalin.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-14046-2
1. Carville, James. 2. Matalin, Mary. 3. Carville, James—Marriage. 4. Matalin, Mary—Marriage. 5. Political consultants—United States—Biography. 6. Married people—United States—Biography. 7. New Orleans (La.)—Biography. 8. United States—Politics and government—1993–2001. 9. United States—Politics and government—2001–2009. 10. United States—Politics and government—2009– I. Matalin, Mary. II. Matalin, Mary. All’s fair. III. Title. IV. Title: Love and war.
E840.6.C37 2014 2013042532
324.092'2—dc23
[B]
Version_1
JAMES
For Tim Russert
MARY
To Gabriel and Michael, angels always
Contents
Also by James Carville and Mary Matalin
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
FAQ
1. You Can Always Go Home Again
2. Fame, Failure and TV
3. Mysteries of Marriage
4. How Do We Raise the Kids?
5. Sex When You’re Old
6. ADHD
7. The Dark Ages
8. Remarriage
9. Changes in Washington, and What Never Does
10. Name Dropping, D.C.-Style
11. Katrina
12. Are We Really Home?
13. BP
14. We Are Home
FAQ of the Future
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
JAMES
There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.
—Bob Dylan
MARY
I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
—Socrates
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes
FAQ
SOME PEOPLE IN POLITICS INSPIRE CONFIDENCE. We seem to inspire curiosity. And not too much concerning the field we are known for: politics.
Being asked strange and highly personal questions is normal life for us. We promise you that every single answer to the questions below can be found in vivid and occasionally lurid detail in the pages to follow. Think of this book as James and Mary for Dummies. Or, better yet, think of this book as a scavenger hunt. The only question not answered is whether James has any hobbies apart from sex.
Not that we think you are dummies, by the way—unless you don’t believe in honest politics and true love.
Is your marriage a sham?
Is your marriage a political stunt?
Are your politics a sham/stunt?
Do you have offspring, and if so, Republicans or Democrats?
What could you possibly see in each other?
Is your wife as big a bitch as she seems to be on TV?
What is Dick Cheney really like?
Is your husband weird like that at home?
He must be good in bed, otherwise why would you be with him?
Is this all about good make-up sex?
What is sex with a Republican like?
Do you have any friends in common?
What do you fight about the most?
How close to divorce have you gotten?
Do you have hobbies?
If you had hobbies, what would they be?
Why did you move to New Orleans?
1.
You Can Always Go Home Again
MARY
IT WAS A NEW ORLEANS SUMMER NIGHT IN 2007. Dusk was just ending and the air was thick, like a cocktail of air and water. I ventured outside to walk the dogs. The street was dark, weirdly quiet. I looked back at the empty house we’d just moved into, a rambling mansion by my standards, but certainly not by the standards of New Orleans, a world unto itself, a distinctly American city with a romantic European grandeur.
I wondered what the new house, and a new city, would bring us. After twenty years of holy and unholy matrimony—including storms, hurricanes, wars, disruptive house moves that James always hated, raising two daughters into teenagehood, and our own separate moments on the frontlines of political battles, presidential elections, punditry pontification and, yes, if I can go braggadocio on you, even history—we had worked out a way of living together, staying together and being happier.
There had been too many trials. Even more errors. One thing we learned: if peace could visit us, even illusively, it required well-thought-out living arrangements.
James and I needed space. Mostly from each other.
To be happy under the same roof, we required our own offices, our own bathrooms and our own closets. We needed a well-functioning kitchen with a double sink, a big icebox and enough room so our family, all of us—true foodies and amateur cooks—could concoct our meals. We needed a dining room for big gatherings, a lair for mass viewings of TV football games, and a hangout place where our daughters, Matty and Emerson, could be with their friends, inclusive of but not restricted to pajama parties.
I had my own personal requirements: windows that open for fresh air, a garden where all my animals could run. I needed bookshelves, lots and lots of shelves for my old books, loved and cared for and purchased over a lifetime, way before I had girls who grew up to be book junkies and collectors themselves. Once it had seemed like a huge luxury, but I was now dependent on a soaking tub for temporary escapes from reality. A fireplace wasn’t mandatory but greatly appreciated.
James had his own list of must-haves. He gave me explicit instructions: if we were going to move to New Orleans, we couldn’t live in the French Quarter (tough for kids), we could not be on St. Charles (too much traffic), and we had to be near his work (he was going to try teaching at Tulane) and a place for his daily jog.
But t
here was more: the house had to have super air-conditioning (Southerners are psycho about their fake chilled air), a killer shower with strong water pressure (no longer available in the era of environmental wackos and efficient toilet flushing). And most of all, he needed a private space where he could close the doors and never have to interact with any of my animals. And a special “steam” component in the shower was not mandatory but greatly appreciated.
Nobody got 100 percent of the must-haves on their list. These were the grounds for opening negotiations.
• • •
On a family visit to New Orleans, I had gone house hunting alone. This gave me a distinct advantage. But there was no other way. James hates shopping for real estate almost as much as he hates snow. He opted instead for daytime drinking and lamenting with his sisters over his wife’s out-of-control materialism. I didn’t expect to find the right house immediately—who ever does? But after viewing five or six houses that were in the realm of possibility, and thanks to the astoundingly astute Realtor queen, Carmen Duncan, I discovered the grand vintage New Orleans home of my dreams.
I was sure.
I was in love.
My father had just died and I had a feeling that the house was his parting supernatural gift to me. It happened so suddenly, so easily: it was meant to be. I’ll admit, it was a tad pricey given James’s parameters, but the house called to me. And the neighborhood called to me, and all around it, the shattered city, a place I loved.
I telephoned James, breathless with excitement and flushed with victory. “You have to come immediately and see this house!” He complied, and soon afterward he pulled up with his sisters in tow—so many Carvilles squeezed together in one vehicle that they could barely exit in a civilized manner.
JAMES
AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fragility of New Orleans. What really sets it apart from almost anywhere else in America is this: its survival isn’t guaranteed. Washington is going to be there fifty years from now. Dallas is going to be there. Nashville might get a flood or a tornado, but it’ll be there. Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, they’re not going anywhere.
In New Orleans, that’s never a given. The city’s permanent existence is never assured. It’s environmentally fragile, it’s economically fragile and it’s politically fragile. After Katrina, it really could have gone either way.
I couldn’t believe the stories I was hearing back in D.C. I understood what it meant that the levees had broken and that the water was going to go to the level of the lake. But it wasn’t only that two-thirds of the city had flooded. It was that the whole culture could go under. So many musical instruments had washed away, and the musicians who owned them were scattered all across the country. Hundreds of doctors left. Schools closed.
I started having visions that New Orleans would wind up as a little spit of land on the Mississippi, the size of Key West. I could imagine us sitting around a piano thirty years from now, playing a couple of old songs and telling the kids how it used to be.
I’d been raised sixty miles up the river in Carville, a little town named after my grandfather, who was the postmaster. I’d already witnessed pieces of old Louisiana disappear. My mother was Cajun, descended from the Acadians who settled in Louisiana, and she and my grandmother would talk to each other in French. I remember being kind of embarrassed by that as a kid. I wasn’t the only one. After World War II, everybody just wanted to be an American.
These days, there are relatively few French speakers in Louisiana, but that wasn’t the case when I was growing up. I worked offshore on a dredge boat, and I’d hear people say, “You know what, I just can’t explain it to you in English.” There were some French-language radio stations, but they’ve largely gone off the air. As I got older, I couldn’t believe that we were so stupid, as a people, to lose that part of our culture.
Culture is everything in New Orleans. If you live in Washington, you have three airports nearby. You’ve got stunning parks, breathtaking public spaces. The museums are world-class, not to mention free. You’ve got a world-class subway system. There’s a real quality of life.
But nobody does culture like New Orleans. Most people know exactly what a Mardi Gras carnival krewe looks like. You’ve probably got a pretty good idea what a New Orleans funeral looks like. Our food, our music, our architecture, our second-line parades—it’s all very distinctive. Think about it. Who ever went to an Ohio restaurant and listened to Oregon music?
After the storm, the thought kept gnawing at me: what if that culture doesn’t last? I had come to New Orleans and used it and abused it as a young man. I’d go down to the French Quarter to get drunk and stupid. Years later, Mary and I got married there. I always had a deep affection for the place. But I’d never done that much to really support it. For so long, I had taken for granted that it would always be here, all of that emotion and passion and creativity.
When it dawned on me that it might not, I went from simply missing New Orleans to feeling this gripping fear that it might fade away before I could get down there for good. As much as anything, I wanted to get back home before home disappeared.
MARY
JAMES TOOK ONE LOOK at the grand old vintage mansion that I’d found and loved, and he started laughing. Then he started crying. He refused to even come up the stairs. I should have known. When I gave him the address on the phone, he had gasped.
I had to drag him inside. He stood in the center hall and looked up the grand staircase and started crying anew. He looked to the left and right, to rooms adorned with their original Italian frieze borders, to the majestic fireplaces in every room—mantels of sculpted marble, mantels of intricately carved old wood. More tears. Almost wailing. No laughing now.
What were his first words?
“Oh, Mary, love of my life, bride of my dreams, mother of the century to my beloved children, wizard of home and hearth. Angel. Your wonders never cease to amaze and delight me!”
Guess again.
What he actually said was: “Way too expensive. Not gonna happen.”
Did I mention that it was one block from his favorite cousin, Anne Milling, and her wonderful husband, King?
Did I mention his sisters were racing around the house in all directions like screaming banshees—emitting oohs and aahs and moans of approval?
Did I mention it was twice the size and half the price of the house we would be selling?
Three months and multiple miraculous machinations and manipulations later, interspersed with several bouts of manly-man haggling over the price—three months of haggling was a blink of an eye in our household—Chester James Carville was heading home again. And loving every square inch of his house and his wife.
Did I mention his bathroom had a steam shower?
But we did find ourselves saying to each other, “Are we being stupid? Will this really work? Can we really move away from Washington like that, so easily?”
Right decision?
Wrong decision?
Only time would tell.
JAMES
I NEVER WAS NOT FROM LOUISIANA. Whenever I said “home,” everyone knew exactly what I meant. When people see George Stephanopoulos on television, they don’t think of Cleveland. When they see Wolf Blitzer, they don’t think of Buffalo. On the other hand, I reek of Louisiana. You can smell it all over me.
Truth is, I always feel slightly off anywhere other than down South. Even after two decades in Washington, I never quite felt like a citizen. I lived there, and I did the normal things people do when they live in a place. But that doesn’t make it home.
MARY
A CHURCH BELL TOLLED, and the faint sounds of other church bells farther away could be heard, tolling all across New Orleans, as they did every hour on the hour. Noise cops be damned. It was nine o’clock when I started my walk into the nighttime neighborhood.
Gorgeous and Cherrie, my
two long-haired dachshunds, ambled down the sidewalk, unaccustomed to the moist heat and fat misty air that sparkled with a weird ambient light. The dogs were doing that romping, excited, doggy-smiling thing that always attends an off-leash adventure in new terrain with fresh smells. We were sharing a moment, my precious pets and I. While they were sniffing and investigating, I took a deep breath and—for the very first time—smelled night-blooming jasmine. My senses were waking up for the first time in years, decades. A few steps down our block and suddenly I had the super-heightened sensory perception animals enjoy as a birthright.
Like so many wives and moms, I deal with the logistics of family life—getting the practical things done. I came down to New Orleans ahead of James to get things ready in the house. I was buying pots and pans and gadgets for the kitchen (not that we needed any more, but it was a mandatory part of my moving ritual). I was finding schools for Matty and Emerson, who were going into the fifth and eighth grades. I was getting the gas piped in, the electricity turned on, ordering cable and the James-mandated Direct TV (so he could have 1,001 sports channels), all the things you have to do when you move to a new place. (Did I mention that James thinks people just walk into any new home and ESPN appears by magic?)
I was still waiting for our furniture and clothes. It’s easy to forget what that’s like—to live in an empty house before your stuff comes. It’s awful but wonderful. The girls and I love camping out on the floor, but James is a good mattress and crisp, fresh bedding snob.
Thinking about all this now, I feel like launching some fireworks, a tribute to mother–movers across the land.
Behind me in the dark grass and bushes, I heard new sounds. The many cats of the neighborhood, left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, but fed and protected by everyone, were trailing the dogs and me. I could hear them skulking in the shrubs and see their moving shadows as we walked ahead.