At this time, my life outside the office, for a change, felt relatively under control. I knew I needed time and mental space to learn how to do my new job well, so Jonathan and I sprang for full-time help: first an au pair for a year, then my former nanny from New York, who came down and stayed with us Monday to Friday. We couldn’t afford this for more than two years, but those months were a godsend. I can’t tell you how huge a relief it was to know that if I had to work late or travel outside D.C., my children would still eat healthy meals, their clothes would be clean and folded, and my household wouldn’t collapse.
In the years since then, I’ve learned how to handle the pressures of my job and caring for a young family. But that took a lot of trial and error, in part because there were almost no role models for women who had babies and were hands-on parents while holding elective office. To this day, young women approach me all the time with their real and, to my mind, very valid questions about whether they can serve and grow families at once. Will they have the energy? How would a daily schedule look? How will they piece together their entire lives?
When I was newly elected, my friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman from Florida, was a terrific support to me. She understood what it felt like to juggle kids and constituents—to be dealing with permission slips, pink eye, baseball games, and national security, all at the same time. But her kids lived back in her home state. She was on the phone every night, navigating math homework, hearing about playground skirmishes, and deciding whether it was fair to have a bedtime of 7:30 P.M. when a sibling got to stay up until 8:00. Her struggles were just as hard, if not harder, than mine. But I couldn’t look to her for logistical advice. What are you supposed to do when your babysitter cancels forty-five minutes before a vote? Or how to cope when you’re about to do a national television interview and a teacher calls to say that your son doesn’t feel well and says he can’t breathe? (Answer: Drop everything and race to the school to find out he’s had too many hits on his asthma inhaler. Then speed to the emergency room, trying not to hyperventilate yourself.)
In the early days, just figuring out how to schedule myself, let alone my children, was complicated. Even the basics got overlooked. My staff and I didn’t set aside time for buying food, eating food, bathroom breaks, or traffic delays. We didn’t factor in how tired I’d be by 8:00 P.M. in California if I’d woken up at 6:00 A.M. on the East Coast. When I was seven months pregnant with Henry, my finance director, Ross, planned a trip to California. When I read the itinerary on paper, I knew it was going to be a hard trip, but I thought I could just power through. For the record, I adore Ross. He’s one of the most fun-loving, well-meaning people I know, and his warm smile and disheveled looks reel in affection. But he has a habit of doing what he wants to do and asking for forgiveness later. Given his appeal, this generally works. But on that California trip, his boyish “Sorry, boss” was not enough.
Day one in the Bay Area, we drove from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley, taking seven meetings back-to-back. I was exhausted. Every part of my pregnant body ached, so in the early evening, just before our last event, I asked if we could please stop by the hotel so I could rest for a minute, fix my makeup, and brush my teeth. The minute I entered my room, I crumpled. I was so tired, physically and emotionally, that I couldn’t stop crying for ten minutes. I honestly didn’t believe that I had the strength to pick myself up, put my game face back on, and head out the door. Fifteen minutes after I was supposed to have been downstairs at the car, Ross called me in my room.
Before he could say anything, I said, “I’m not coming down.”
Ross said, “Kirsten, you have to come down.”
I said, “Go fuck yourself.” Very professional, I know.
At that moment, I hated Ross, I hated my job, and the last thing I wanted to do was make cocktail party conversation. A few minutes later, Jess, who’d been alerted by Ross, phoned me from D.C. He managed to talk me into washing my face, redoing my makeup and heading downstairs, but I was not happy about it. I felt so angry at my team for not looking out for me, and even angrier at myself for not better knowing my limits in terms of managing my time, health, and career. Women are notoriously bad at putting their own wellbeing first. I am definitely not the mother whose first instinct in an airplane emergency is to put on her own oxygen mask before helping her kids.
As soon as I entered Ross’s car, I said bitterly, “I bet you didn’t even think to ask if they have cats.” I am extremely allergic to cats. Ross knew this. One of my office rules is that I need advance warning before walking into homes with cats, so I can take an antihistamine. Ross even has a sign to hang above his desk. Theo made it. It reads, NO CATS.
But Ross had not asked, and he started begging forgiveness. I was having none of it. The moment we entered the home, which was beautiful, I started sneezing. I summoned every ounce of energy left in my body to smile, chat, give a short speech, and answer everybody’s questions amid all my nose-blowing. I’m amazed that I managed to stay on my feet.
Since then, I’ve learned how to schedule myself. I know my limits and how to keep from reaching a place of diminishing performance. I understand that I can get depleted not just by long hours on a given day but from the cumulative effect of long hours over weeks and months. Now my staff tracks the number of hours I work each day, how many days a week I go to the gym and have dinner with the kids, how many weeknights I attend events, and how many weekends a month I travel. These metrics, printed in capital letters at the top of my daily calendar, let me know how tough a day, week, or month will be overall. That trip to California was far too much. That night, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
In my early Senate days, I also needed to get a better grip on handling the press. I thought I was a pro at this, and I prided myself on my ability to put my thoughts into clear, articulate terms. But my experience with reporters had been as a congresswoman from a rural district. Now the journalists I encountered were more skeptical. If I was long-winded, they wouldn’t stop me; they’d let me ramble into their tape recorders and nod along blankly. Worse, I was unguarded. One day I ate lunch in the Senate dining room with a reporter from a Long Island newspaper. I really liked him. We had a nice rapport and we talked for an hour about the financial collapse and various ideas for regulatory reform. When we stood up to say our goodbyes, he said nonchalantly, “You own guns, right?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Where do you keep them?” he asked.
Without pausing to think why he was asking the question or whether I should answer it, I said, “Under the bed.”
Huge mistake. Our exchange about guns became his whole story. It made the front page of Newsday, and that led to headlines across the state. I was so frustrated with myself for not answering more thoughtfully—and for answering at all. The topic was irrelevant to our interview. Besides, what was I thinking, telling the world, without any context, that I kept guns under my bed? One had been a raffle prize, the other a gift. Both were still locked up in their original cases. Neither Jonathan nor I had ever loaded either.
But along with outing some weaknesses, my first year in the Senate helped me rediscover some strengths. Those years of Bible study and teaching children in New York had been really grounding for me. I didn’t talk much about my faith in the House. But during those hard first months in the Senate, I needed every resource I had, and that included my religion. When I was invited to the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast to tell my story about how God fit into my life, I said yes.
A lot of people didn’t know the religious side of me—top among them, Glen Caplin, my beloved and straight-shooting New York communications director. His response to learning about my years of Bible study? “That’s effing weird, but okay!”
I loved speaking at the Senate prayer breakfast. Over coffee in a conference room under the Capitol dome, I talked about finding my way from corporate law into public service and the parable of the talents. For those who don’t know it,
the parable of the talents is a story from the New Testament about a landowner who gives money to each of three servants before he leaves on a long trip. Two use the money wisely—they double their wealth and are rewarded for it. The third buries the coins in the ground, gains nothing, and is punished. “God gives us certain things that we’re supposed to use to help others,” I said to my new colleagues. “As a lawyer in New York, I wasn’t using my talents. I knew I could be a great advocate and work to serve others and that I needed to make a change in my life to use those God-given qualities for the greater good. That’s what I want to do with my life and this opportunity now that I’m in the Senate. I want to be a voice for the voiceless. I want to take on lost causes.”
That prayer breakfast was such a great joy for me. It felt so good to connect the old and new parts of my life. From that point on, whenever I was asked to speak in a church, I tried to say yes.
In October 2009, Reverend Calvin Butts invited me to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. I was very nervous before the service. On the surface, I didn’t seem to have much in common with many parishioners, and I wasn’t sure how pleased they’d be to see me. But the reverend welcomed me with such warmth and grace that, the minute I walked into the sanctuary, I crossed out much of my prepared speech and decided to speak extemporaneously from the heart.
I told the assembled that I’d promised myself that as long as I had the honor of representing New York, I was going to use my seat to amplify the voices of those who needed it most. Then I started talking about Scripture from the Book of Ruth. “You know the story,” I said. “It was a time of famine in Bethlehem. Naomi and her family moved to Moab for a better opportunity. But when they arrived, terrible things happened. Her husband was killed. Then both of her sons were killed. Naomi was left with nothing.” Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem—she had nothing to stay for. She begged her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to start their lives over, somewhere hopeful and new. Orpah did, but Ruth refused. She returned with Naomi to Bethlehem and took on Naomi’s burdens as her own.
I started channeling my inner pastor, who is unexpectedly close to the surface, quoting Scripture. “ ‘Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay,’ ” I said. A part of me comes alive when speaking to a church crowd. “ ‘Your people will be my people, and your God my God.’ And just as Ruth said to Naomi, I make the same statement to you. I will stand with you. As long as I have the honor of representing New York, that will be my mission. With faith and unity, no challenge is too great that we cannot overcome it together.”
I heard a few people shout, “Amen!” and “Preach!”
When the reverend took the pulpit again, he had a wide grin. “A lot of politicians come to this church,” he said, “but they don’t all know the Word.”
About a year later, Al Sharpton invited me to his House of Justice, also in Harlem. It was the first place I went after being appointed, and this time it happened to be the reverend’s birthday. I had a great morning. Not only did the reverend welcome me back with open arms, the assembled really got behind me. The applause rose as I compared the reverend to Joshua, and President Obama and other contemporary leaders to the Joshua generation. God’s instruction to Joshua was that, in order to win the battle over his enemies, he needed to rally all the voices of his people. Together they could shout down the walls of Jericho. “So let’s shout down those walls of injustice,” I said, my voice escalating. “Shout down those walls of lack of opportunity. Shout down those walls of degradation that our communities struggle with.”
When I finished, Sharpton bellowed, “Reverend Kirsten Gillibrand!”
The most significant fight in my life against injustice and degradation was the battle to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. A few months into my first term, Kathy Baird, my old law-firm friend, asked if I would talk with one of her legal clients: a young man named Dan Choi, who had been kicked out of the military for violating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Dan was everything you’d want in a soldier. The son of a Korean American Baptist minister, raised in Southern California, he decided to serve in the military after seeing the movie Saving Private Ryan. He liked the idea of dedicating his life to serving a higher cause. After high school, he enrolled in West Point and graduated in 2003 with degrees in Arabic and environmental engineering. In 2006, he began serving in Iraq as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
Dan loved the military and its stated values. But over time, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell made his life feel untenable. He’d known he was gay when he enrolled at West Point, but he thought he could hide it. Then he fell in love—and you know how that is. Love is important and consuming. He didn’t want or believe he should have to keep his relationship secret.
“I thought the military would be a place of character, integrity, and honor, and I put everything into it,” Dan told me as we sat at a long wooden table in one of the beautiful tiled rooms just off the Senate floor. “But because I’m gay, I had to lie about who I am to everyone I care about.” When a group of gay and lesbian West Point graduates organized to fight for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Dan joined their effort and offered to be their spokesperson. As such, he appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and came out on national TV. That automatically ended his military career.
Now Dan didn’t want others to suffer in the same way he had, and as we sat together in our heavy wooden chairs, he asked for my help. Keep in mind that this was in 2009, before the national debate about gay marriage and its legalization in many states had begun. The public and my colleagues were far less comfortable with gay and lesbian rights than they are now. But fighting for justice on civil-rights issues like this was the reason I’d chosen public service. I told Dan I would wholeheartedly advocate for him and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Given my newly minted Senator status, I had to research where my colleagues stood on the issue. The primary person focused on the repeal was Senator Ted Kennedy, and, sadly, he had brain cancer and was very ill. I assumed someone must be carrying Kennedy’s work forward, but I learned this was not the case.
Arguments against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy could be found everywhere. In addition to being morally outrageous and corrosive, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell undermined military readiness. Since 1994, when the law was first implemented, approximately thirteen thousand well-trained military personnel had been discharged from the U.S. military for being gay. More than two thousand of those people were experts in mission-critical disciplines. The military lost close to 10 percent of its foreign-language speakers. The cost of implementing the policy, from 1994 to 2003—including recruitment, retraining, and separation travel—was somewhere between $190 million and $360 million. I didn’t understand how a reasonable person could think that such money would not have been much better spent on equipment, mental or physical health services … almost anything.
Moreover, the policy was counterproductive, and its enforcement was based on a lie. In discharge letters given to soldiers like Dan, authorities claimed gay soldiers “negatively affect good order and discipline” within their units. This was untrue. Opinion polls taken of military personnel stated that when soldiers were aware of their co-workers’ homosexuality, as opposed to when homosexuality was hidden, it had less impact on their service. Even high-ranking military leaders agreed. In November 2007, twenty-eight retired generals and admirals urged Congress to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, pointing out that over sixty-five thousand gay men and women were then serving in the armed forces and that over a million veterans were gay. Our military was then engaged in two wars abroad—Iraq and Afghanistan. Why would we choose to do anything to weaken our military’s strength?
But as I began talking to my colleagues about repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I felt reassured: Far more supported a repeal than one might have guessed. Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was encouraging from our first conversation
and agreed to hold the first hearing in sixteen years on the policy. Majority Leader Harry Reid also supported repeal and urged the White House and Pentagon to act. Republican women—Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Lisa Murkowski—all backed repeal, as well. President Obama mentioned repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in his State of the Union address.
For many people my age or younger, repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy was an obvious and urgent cause. Most of us wanted to fight for gay rights because we’d never considered doing otherwise. I loved Jonathan’s brother, Simon, and his now-husband, Justo, and as a young lawyer, I was very close with some of the gay men at the office. Along with my single girlfriends—including Kathy, who introduced me to Dan Choi—we often worked late nights together, rolling our eyes and laughing when our straight married male counterparts would walk out of their offices at 6:00 P.M. saying, “I have to get home or my wife will kill me!”
But before too long I hit a major roadblock in my fight to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repealed: The White House did not want me to introduce the bill. They wanted someone more senior to be in charge and responsible for passing it, someone on the Armed Services Committee, someone perceived as more conservative—specifically, Joe Lieberman. He had gravitas from years in the Senate; plus, he was an independent who could arguably bring in more Republican votes.
At first, I was disappointed. I had a bill drafted, I knew I could build support, and this was exactly the kind of work I wanted to be doing. I hoped to get started right away. But the reality was that White House support was a huge asset. If I cared about getting the policy repealed more than I cared about being in charge or getting credit, I had to acquiesce. So my mission became to convince Joe to take a strong lead. I spoke to him every other week for almost three months. Once he agreed, support cascaded. Susan Collins announced that she would be the lead Republican. I worked alongside everybody else, amplifying people’s efforts, starting an online story project, and doing anything else I could to build momentum.
Off the Sidelines Page 12