The rhythms of political careers mean that men often seek the presidency at an age when they are grappling with the death of a parent. While Dick Gephardt should have been planning his presidential campaign in December 2002, he spent much of the month in St. Louis tending to his ailing mother, Loreen. She had lung cancer, and Gephardt faced the agonizing decision of whether an aggressive course of treatment was appropriate for a woman in her mid-nineties. During an interview in mid-March, Gephardt described in an almost inaudible voice what her doctors had recommended: "She's too old. It won't help. It will just put her through a lot of torture." Gephardt was tormented by his inability to, return to St. Louis as often as he would like. "You want to be there for your mother," he said. "It's part of life. Everybody goes through it." (Loreen Gephardt passed away two months later at ninety-five.)
Howard Dean too had gone through it. In August 2001, Dean's father, a retired stockbroker also named Howard, died at eighty. That same month, Dean chose not to seek another term as Vermont governor, a decision that soon led to his impetuous bid for the White House. Back in 1974, Howard Dean's younger brother Charlie, possibly a CIA agent, perished under mysterious circumstances in Laos. Subsequently Dean jettisoned a Wall Street career to attend medical school.
Hearing these twin stories, a Viennese analyst might run his hand over his Vandyke beard and murmur, "Interesting. Very interesting." Dean, however, denied an overt connection between these deaths and his unorthodox career moves. Admittedly, the back of a van in Iowa, surrounded by four campaign aides, was not the ideal arena for an intense round of psychological probing about hidden motivations. "I'd probably have to go into analysis to figure out why," Dean said, "but it's not something that conscious." He paused to contemplate the evidence. "Okay, this is interesting," he conceded. "My brother dies, and I switch careers and go to medical school. My father dies, and I take on the big prize. It's an interesting coincidence, worthy of discussion, but no light is likely to be shed on it in five minutes or an hour." Since we are just twenty minutes away from a rendezvous with the Washington County Democrats, the Lucy Van Pelt "Psychiatric Help 5¢" booth officially closed.
Despite incessant coverage of the presidential race, the fact that three leading Democratic contenders have lost parents in the last two years is never discussed in print, not even as a way to explain a candidate's occasional dour mood or to put the ordeal of campaigning for president in a larger human perspective. No other subject is off-limits for political reporters—not sexual escapades, youthful drug use or medical history. But parental death has long been a taboo topic. For all the keyhole coverage of the Clinton presidency, the deaths of the president's mother and Hillary's father in the mid-1990s were noted only in passing. For all the ridicule heaped on Al Gore in 2000, it was hard to find a mention that this was the first campaign that the vice president waged without his father, Albert Sr., watching from the wings.
The same November day that Rosemary Forbes Kerry's obituary ran in the Boston Globe, the major political news in the paper was the rumor (later confirmed) that Teddy Kennedy would jilt his protégé Edwards to back Kerry for president. Reporters had no problems badgering Kerry with questions about his health, both before and after his prostate surgery. But the death of the candidate's last surviving parent passed almost unnoticed. What is the explanation for this unusual degree of journalistic reticence? It's possible that mourning in America still commands the last vestige of old-fashioned privacy. But my own theory, and it is offered tentatively, is simply that most political beat reporters are still in their thirties, too young in many cases to personally understand how the mid-life loss of a parent can tilt one's inner world off its axis.
******
If I were forced to describe Kerry in a single word, it might be the soft, autumnal adjective "wistful." Traveling with Kerry, I kept picking up the sense that he is someone who constantly gazes out the window, thinking about the private might-have-beens of life and fate. At a Kerry event in New Hampshire, I found myself chatting with Herb Church, the candidate's English teacher at St. Paul's. Asked to describe his former student, Church said, "He was not the sort of a guy who had a wildly colorful [prep-school] career. He was not a hell-raiser. He was a very solemn young man."
These days, that solemnity has a musical accompaniment—the cherry and rosewood Spanish guitar that Kerry carries with him for relaxation on the campaign trail. If Bill Clinton's saxophone was a symbol of exuberance, then Kerry's mid-life fascination with mastering the classical guitar suggests a more subdued inner nature. Climbing aboard Kerry's chartered jet in Maine in the fall of 2002, the first thing that caught my eye was a book entitled Guitar for Dummies. Later Kerry explained sheepishly, "Someone just gave it to me." Listening to Kerry play—and I'm the last one to judge musical talent—I was struck by both his intense concentration and the mournful quality to the music, whether it is a melody from Segovia or a slow, sad-eyed rendition of the Beatles' "Yesterday." Kerry's fingernails are a bit elongated on his right, guitar-strumming hand, but I was surprised when he said at one point, "People think I'm weird because the nails on one hand are longer than the other." Presidential candidates are allowed to find a soothing refuge in playing the classical guitar, but they are never supposed to self-consciously muse aloud about being judged "weird."
Kerry came to Maine to campaign for doomed Democratic Senate candidate Chellie Pingree. Riding in a van somewhere near Bangor, Pingree explained that she was aided in her fund-raising by all the wealthy Democrats who once attended summer camp in the state. That prompted Kerry to recall that his parents packed him off to camps in New Hampshire and Nova Scotia. "That summer in Nova Scotia," he said, "I fell in love. I was eleven or twelve. And I still think about it. Isn't it awful?" At the end of the day, as the candidate was fixing me a Scotch on the plane (no stints in the pilot's seat this time), I asked about the mysterious girl from summer camp. Slightly embarrassed, Kerry admitted that he never mustered the courage to speak to the object of his affections—it was all rapture from afar.
There are two types of moments in politics: genuine ones and those when the cameras are rolling. Tape recorders, which candidates tend to regard as far more obtrusive than old-fashioned notebooks, also distort events even as they provide a faithful vocal souvenir. My own reporting technique in covering presidential contenders is to alternate between notebook and electronic record, since I crave the spontaneity of a conversation delineated by hastily scrawled notes and also relish the recorder's ability to reproduce long, multi-claused sentences. Although it was not my original purpose in frequently switching from nineteenth-century technology (notebook and pen) to twenty-first-century technology (an Olympus digital, downloadable recorder), I began to find it revealing how the candidates reacted to my choice of mode to replicate their words.
Howard Dean, to my surprise, often seemed uncomfortable when the recorder was off, as if my not taping (okay, digitizing) symbolized a fluid, ill-defined relationship and undermined the reality of his unorthodox campaign. Kerry, in contrast, sometimes viewed the recorder as his mortal enemy, akin to waving a cross in front of a vampire. Part of his reaction may simply have been the innate caution of a veteran politician, but my brandishing the recorder may also have said to Kerry, "The fun's over. Now I have to work at crafting my answers."
All of this is a way of saying that Kerry Unplugged comes across as a more intriguing political figure than his digitized alter ego. With little exposure to the candidate before the current campaign, I never fully understood why he is so widely perceived as haughty and distant. More than any Democratic contender, even the exuberantly outgoing Edwards, Kerry is a hands-on candidate, a toucher, who revels in the momentary tactile contact of a hand on the shoulder, a tap on the arm—and, for friends and fellow Vietnam veterans, a bear hug. In private, with the recorder off and the notebook closed, he can be surprisingly candid and astute in his analysis of his rivals for the Democratic nomination. But in a f
ormal interview session, it quickly became, "Here's the thing about John [Edwards]. John's been running around saying—no, wait, this is off the record..."
Andy Stern, the national president of the Service Employees (SEIU), encountered Kerry at that workingman's Mecca, the World Economic Forum, which was held in New York in February 2002. As they talked, Stern bluntly asked Kerry how he could get over the impression that he is too cold and too distant to win the nomination. "He had a whole I'm-not-aloof speech," Stern recalled. "He gave me his whole snowboarding, windsurfing, motorcycle-riding side." It seemed to have worked. As Stern put it a year later, "When you get to know him personally, he's a different kind of guy. You can talk to him like you're sitting in your living room."
Political reporters, like psychiatrists, cannot shrink from the age-old therapeutic question: Can people change? Both groups, bearded Freudians and bedraggled Broders alike, have a vested professional interest in answering in the affirmative. Journalism is not normally considered a "helping profession," but those of us in the press pack are as dedicated to inspiring sagas of personal growth as our couch-bound counterparts. What is the point of enduring the endless campaign season, all those bus rides and tarmacs at two in the morning, if we can't chronicle how a politician (a Bobby Kennedy, a John McCain) dramatically changes before our very eyes? Professional cynicism is momentarily put aside as we dutifully type the clichés about "maturing" candidates and presidents who "grow in office."
So what then are we to make of the new, approachable Kerry? No less an authority than Jim Jordan, Kerry's campaign manager, suggests that much of this is learned behavior. "John Kerry's improvement as a political performer in the last four years is breathtaking," Jordan said. "I recognize that people don't change in their late fifties. But Kerry has developed the political skills to connect with people and charm them quickly. A lot of it is craftsmanship: how to deliver a better speech, how to write a better speech, how to work a room."
Direct-mail consultant Ron Rosenblith, whose ties to Kerry hark back to the anti-Vietnam War movement, made an analogous point. "As a thirty-two-year friend," Rosenblith said, "there has been a process under way to make him more realistically ready to make this race. Part of it is the marriage to Teresa [in 1995]. Part of it is himself. It's been a long march for the guy who came to the Senate in 1984 as John 'Live Shot' Kerry."
But to Rosenblith, it was far more than Kerry simply learning to mask his ego-driven, publicity-hound ways. "He came back from Vietnam having seen terrible things and having watched comrades die," Rosenblith pointed out. "It was very hard for him to open up emotionally. You could be his friend, and he wouldn't open up emotionally. But time heals all wounds—and a supportive environment heals all wounds. John today isn't the person I knew thirty-two years ago." As an example of Kerry's transformation, Rosenblith pointed to his friend's recent willingness to greet him with such uncharacteristically emotional phrases as "big hug" and even "I love you." Rosenblith also stressed the reverberations from the back-to-back deaths of Kerry's parents. "He had to go through some serious emotional stuff," Rosenblith said. "Is it psycho-babble? All I know is that John's more comfortable in his own skin."
The same could be said with justice about any of the leading Democratic contenders. Lieberman, Edwards, Gephardt, Graham and probably even the tightly coiled Dean all seem to have a comfort level with who they are and who they're not. But for Kerry, unlike most of his rivals, it has taken a long pull to get there. He appears to have weathered the self-contained storms of middle age and has reached safe harbor aware that his internal ballast has shifted during the voyage.
Kerry freely admitted, "I went through a period where I wasn't very happy," referring to the tumultuous years surrounding his divorce in the mid-1980s. And he added, "Anybody who has been through a divorce and doesn't tell you it's hurtful is insensitive." But that was long ago. As the fifty-nine-year-old senator put it in a reflective voice, "Maybe you cross that great divide with being fifty years old. Suddenly you see things differently and feel things differently—and things that used to bother you don't. And life is fixed. It's all there. I like it, very much. It's a comfortable place to be emotionally."
More than his stance on the issues, more than his fund-raising, more than the imagery of his TV ads, Kerry's political fate will be dictated by his ability to communicate this new-found comfort and ease with himself. He never will be Kerry the Cuddly. And it's not that he has to bound onto every stage or warble ecstatically about the joys of finding himself amid the world-famous delights of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a cold winter's night. But on the cusp of a difficult election, Democrats crave a candidate they can, well, warm up to. It makes no difference whether the candidate's inner fires radiating external warmth were kindled at birth or whether the long smoldering embers only began to burn brightly in mid-life. What matters is the glow—and the desire of the voters to see their dreams reflected in it.
Chapter 11
Visions of the White House
No matter what the calendar says, the 2004 campaign began for me on a rainy weekend in late June 2002 as I followed John Edwards on an eastward trek across southern New Hampshire ending up on the seacoast in Portsmouth. Presidential politics proceeded at a languorous pace back then, as potential candidates like Edwards gently unfurled their sails to the wind hoping to catch the breeze on their initial voyages of discovery. Yet etched in my memory is the sheer joy that Edwards derived from the act of campaigning and his intense curiosity about how each sentence he uttered was perceived in this ultimate political test market. He brimmed with eager conviction that a presidential race would be a glorious adventure and that its presumed success, after a single term in the Senate, would represent the fulfillment of his pre-ordained fate.
Now, nearly a year later, we are back in Portsmouth on the wet, cold Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Nearly seventy Democrats—who have been waiting over half an hour for Edwards to make his belated appearance—are shoehorned into state representative Terie Norelli's living room. The crowd is so thick that an Edwards aide with an obstructed view is holding a digital camera high over her head in an effort to decipher from the resulting pictures who has turned out on this damp afternoon. As we wait for Edwards to speak, I strike up a conversation with Barclay Jackson, a telecommunications lawyer who is already restless about the many candidates and the long wait until the primary. "Why don't you get them all in a room and decide on somebody and just go after Bush?" she asks. "I do think that it's more important to get a candidate who can win than somebody who's perfect." As Edwards, dressed in a lavender sweater and black slacks, finally emerges into view, Jackson hints at her personal definition of electability as she gushes, "He's so cute."
Edwards continues to fascinate me, despite his minuscule standing in the polls. His inchoate potential suggests a dramatic denouement to his presidential ambitions—either a stunning come-from-behind triumph or one of the most precipitous flame-outs in recent political history. Edwards is a candidate still in flux, changing and developing as he races along an arc of possibility that could end in the White House or with a return to practicing law in Raleigh. Standing there poised to speak, appearing far younger than a man at mid-century should, Edwards knows how far he has traveled already. Earlier in the day, as we discussed his evolution as a candidate, he told me, "There's no question that I'm different. I've gotten better. Some of it is a comfort and ease."
Edwards has matured as a candidate. Gone is the cornpone style with its painful references to "North Carolina and New Hampshire common sense." Gone too are the complex run-on sentences that ramble through a thicket in search of a predicate. His delivery is crisp, confident and filled with passionate scorn for that Republican in the White House. "They think we're soft and nice, and we'll let them run right over and through us," Edwards begins in an effort to demonstrate that he's tough enough to play in the center ring. "And we're going to prove that they're wrong in 2004. Because we'r
e going to take this fight right at this guy."
But what remains consistent about Edwards is his soft-edged southern populism built around his autobiography and his oft stated belief "in an America where the son of a mill worker can actually beat the son of a president for the White House." That practiced line wins rousing applause from New Hampshire Democrats who cling to their own patriotic myth that the civic-minded residents of a tiny New England state can pick the next president.
Harking back to his lonely days after Christmas on the beach in North Carolina debating whether to run, Edwards says, "This is personal for me. This is not some message that some consultant came up with. This is my whole life." Win or lose, Edwards is determined to test his belief that autobiography is destiny. For all his detailed position papers, he is out there with a shoeshine and a smile peddling not his ideas but himself. At every turn, he stresses the personal nature of his crusade, sometimes overdoing the effort to prove that the words he utters are the embodiment of his own beliefs rather than the artifice of his political handlers.
A year ago, Edwards was surprised by how often New Hampshire Democrats pressed him with questions about John Ashcroft's assault on civil liberties. Now it is embedded in his stump speech. "Finally," he says, "a subject that the people in Washington tell me that you have to be careful in talking about—this could be dangerous politically." You can feel a sense of expectation in the room as Edwards continues, "As long as I am a candidate for president of the United States and when I am president of the United States, I will champion this cause. We cannot, in an effort to protect ourselves, in an effort to fight a war on terrorism, let people like John Ashcroft take away our rights."
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 21