Off the Sidelines

by Kirsten Gillibrand

  One Republican I was never able to convince was John McCain, though not for lack of trying. In November 2010, just after the election, Senators McCain and Lieberman invited me to join them and Senator Lindsey Graham on a congressional delegation trip to Afghanistan, Israel, and Pakistan. The point of the trip was to meet the troops and gain understanding of the war and regional security issues. My side project was to win McCain over to our side on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. McCain’s wife had recently released a video supporting the repeal, so I figured we had a shot.

  Visiting troops with McCain was like traveling with Bruce Springsteen. Everyone wanted a picture; supporters lined up to shake his hand. I knew if McCain joined our side, we’d be golden, so in quiet moments, I tried gently floating arguments like how great it would be for him to return from this trip and announce his support for gay troops.

  He laughed, in a lighthearted way.

  I tried direct tactics, too: “John, if you come out for repeal, then it’s done. You’re the maverick, you’re the leader, you’re the one people respect when it comes to military issues. Why not?”

  Neither Joe nor I managed to change his mind.

  A second roadblock came back home, on December 9, 2010, my forty-fourth birthday. Majority Leader Reid had promised us a vote on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal by the end of that Congress. But when that date rolled around, the Republicans had gridlocked the Congress, filibustering all legislation and blocking all votes, until they had the vote they wanted on taxes. I felt crushed and extremely worried. This meant we had to go back to Harry Reid and ask for another vote the following week. The hoops inside hoops that you have to jump through in the Senate can be maddening. What if there wasn’t time for another vote before the end of the congressional session? That was my worst birthday ever.

  Carl Levin, Susan Collins, Mark Udall, Joe Lieberman, and I all huddled off the Senate floor. We decided to introduce the repeal again as a stand-alone bill and call the vote up or down. This was a dicey move, but we were close to the sixty votes required, and we needed a moment of truth. Harry was our champion, and he gave us the second vote.

  The next week, standing in the well of the Senate, I watched the votes come in. Eight Republicans supported us—our three Republican stalwart women plus Mark Kirk, Scott Brown, George Voinovich, Mike Ensign, and Richard Burr. We won, and I was ecstatic. I have the vote count sheet from that day framed and resting on my mantel. I knew that moment would have a profound impact on civil rights for millions of Americans and would propel forward our future fights for equality.

  At the same time that I was working to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I was fighting to get the 9/11 healthcare bill passed. Throughout my first year in the Senate, men and women who’d been first responders at the World Trade Center had been coming to Washington to tell their stories. Many should have been in the primes of their lives, but instead they were sick and burdened with oxygen tanks and painful limps.

  One of the first men I met was Ken George, a New Jersey firefighter who was dispatched to Ground Zero, or “the pile,” as he called it, at 6:00 P.M. on September 11, 2001. His story was searing. As he walked down to the rescue site from Canal Street through the thick, burned-smelling air, a man handed him a photograph of a young woman and said, “I hope you can find my daughter. She’s in one of the buildings.” Not knowing quite how to respond, Ken put the picture of the young woman inside his helmet for safekeeping and said he’d do his best. Then he walked a few more yards, until another terrified person held out another picture of a missing loved one. Ken put the photograph in his helmet, too, and said again that he’d do his best. As the minutes passed, Ken began to notice pictures of missing people everywhere—on lampposts, mailboxes, sides of buildings. By the time he reached Ground Zero, he was already thinking, “My God, where do I begin?” Then he began his work on the search-and-rescue team, sifting through the pile that used to be the World Trade Center for remains. He never found a whole person, just body parts. Each time he found a body part, he raised his hand, and a police officer from the canine unit walked over with a dog. The dog sniffed the area for other remains. The officer put the body parts in a bag and took them away.

  On that first night of search and rescue, while Ken and a team of policemen and firefighters were moving debris, green smoke started coming out of the pile. Ken began coughing uncontrollably and fell to his knees, as did the men around him. He got a terrible headache, then his airways got constricted and he could barely breathe. Nobody knew what the green smoke was—maybe Freon? Still, Ken kept working sixteen to eighteen hours a day in a job so dangerous that, during his first week, his superiors gave him a backpack filled with food and water to last a few days, in case the pile became unstable and trapped him inside. They also gave him a face mask, but the air was so thick with soot and debris that it clogged after a few hours. He tried to shake it out, but it was so hard to breathe in the mask while shoveling through rubble on hands and knees that he and the other first responders just took them off. As Ken worked, his eyes burned. Ash fell through the air like snow.

  When I met Ken in 2009, he still suffered from PTSD. He’d had a heart attack four years prior, at age forty-two. “Can you imagine us turning around and saying on September eleventh, ‘We’re not going into the pile’?” he asked rhetorically, sitting across my desk from me in my office. Of course not. “They just told us to go out there, and we all did the best we could. Honest to God, I did the best I could as a person.” Ken performed a horrible, solemn, necessary duty for our country, and our country was stiffing him on medical care.

  John Feal didn’t get sick after September 11; he got hurt. John, a construction demolition expert, worked as part of the cleanup and recovery effort, and on September 17, roughly eight thousand pounds of steel landed on his foot. John spent ten days in Bellevue Hospital, where he developed gangrene. Then he spent ten weeks in North Shore University Hospital, on Long Island, where he continued to fight the gangrene and lost half his foot. Over the next five years, John had multiple surgeries on both of his feet, and four doctors diagnosed him with PTSD.

  In 2007, tired of being sick, John donated a kidney to a complete stranger. He also started becoming known in the first-responder community as the guy to talk to if you were sick. He attended all the workers’ compensation meetings, Social Security hearings, and trials of his colleagues who sued the city to get benefits for injuries or illnesses they suffered from in the aftermath of 9/11. To help others more formally, he started the FealGood Foundation, dedicated to assisting first responders and other individuals injured physically or mentally as a direct result of their rescue, recovery, and cleanup efforts at Ground Zero. “There was more than frustration,” he says of his community’s experience. “There was disappointment and desperation. You name it, it was there.” But he found fighting for his fellow responders healing. “I have yet to take a pill for my posttraumatic stress disorder,” he recently told me. “Running my foundation and helping people is my therapy.”

  John is about as humble a man as I’ve ever known. “Listen, I’m never the smartest man in the room,” he said with excessive self-deprecation the first time we met. “I have a high school education, military background, and then construction.” But he was streetsmart and had a natural instinct for how Washington worked. Long before the 9/11 healthcare bill landed on my desk, he’d been walking the halls of Congress, meeting with people, trying to get them behind his cause. Over time, he and I developed a slow, steady rapport. I knew he liked that I looked him in the eye when we spoke and that I insisted we call each other by our first names, even though he made fun of me for it. One time I called him on the phone and said, “Hey, John, it’s Kirsten.”

  He said, “Kirsten who?”

  I said, “Kirsten Gillibrand.”

  He said, “Senator, when you call, you have to introduce yourself! You just say Kirsten, then I don’t think you’re a senator. I just think, ‘Who the hell is this?’ ”


  But I still wasn’t doing a good enough job for him.

  I realized this for the first time in June 2009, right after I held a press conference on the issue with Senator Chuck Schumer, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, and Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Peter King, among other elected officials. During that conference I swore to the public that I’d never stop fighting, because of our country’s “undeniable moral obligation to provide the healthcare and treatment these men and women deserve.” Afterward, John turned to me and said, “Now we’re yours.”

  Now we’re yours. I felt humbled, inspired, and, I have to admit, intimidated. My commitment to the cause was rock solid, but many others, Jess among them, had been so skeptical about my ability to get anything done. So far I had my 10-point list, and I was working my way down it. I’d asked Senator Tom Harkin for a hearing (number 3). We’d held the hearing (number 4), though nobody besides Harkin and me attended. Now Feal was putting his fate, and the fate of his fellow responders, in my hands. I had to do better.

  One afternoon, in the Senate chamber, I asked Senator Patty Murray if she had time to chat. I can always count on her for excellent advice. So I told her what was going on, how I was flailing.

  “How do I convince our colleagues to care?” I asked. “They seem to think it’s only about New York.”

  Patty understood the problem and directed me to Senator Mary Landrieu. Mary had been very successful advocating for families in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She’d made a national issue out of one that many in Congress would have preferred to keep local. That’s what I needed to do now.

  So the next day on the Senate floor, I approached Mary. Her advice was brilliant. “No one is going to care about New York if you don’t tell them why they should care,” she said. “You have to explain to people why this is horrible and why it affects them, too.” This was such a simple, effective way of thinking about advocacy. You have to impact people’s hearts and minds. I knew that I hadn’t done this yet. Yes, I cared about John Feal and the others, but I hadn’t made it my mission to explain to others why they should care, too. I hadn’t been emotionally persuasive. Here I was, holding all of their frustrations, fears, suffering, and anger, and then failing to broadcast those feelings to the world.

  Toward the end of 2010, Congress entered a lame-duck session (the window of time between the election and the new term starting). I knew that if I ever hoped to pass a 9/11 healthcare bill, this was my only chance. If we waited until after the Christmas break, the new Congress would be in session and the Republicans would control the House. So, armed with Mary’s advice, I began an intensive push to help people understand why they should care about the first responders. My mission was to tell the stories—their narratives of heroism, sacrifice, ongoing suffering, even death. I wanted my colleagues to feel the weight of what the Senate’s indifference was doing to them. We’d called these people to serve, they’d become sick from toxins encountered in the line of duty—and we were refusing to care.

  Heeding Mary’s lesson, in the weeks leading up to the holiday break, we displayed in one of the Senate office buildings the badges of New York City Police Department officers who had worked at Ground Zero and later died from 9/11-related illnesses. Twenty-nine badges in all. The average age of the men who died was forty-six. So many young families destroyed, young families just like mine.

  In my final push, I gave a speech on the Senate floor.

  “I wish to make it crystal clear what this bill is about,” I said to my colleagues. “This bill is about our first responders. This bill is about our heroes and their families.” I spoke about Joseph Picurro, a steelworker, who for twenty-eight days helped cut beams in the pile in order to clear debris and find survivors. Years later, he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that affects the lungs and other organs. He had seizures, blackouts, and constant joint pain. He died at age thirty-four, in October 2010, leaving behind a wife and daughter.

  I also read a letter written by Robert Helmke, a police officer who worked at Ground Zero after the attacks. Shortly after his time there, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. “ ‘Talk about crushing news,’ ” I read from his letter. “ ‘My wife and I sat in the car and cried as I asked her, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” ’ ”

  At this point, I nearly lost my composure in a way I never had before as a public servant. Just as with the line Now we’re yours, the question What did I ever do to deserve this? really got to me. I had to pause to keep my breathing even and hold back my tears. I really didn’t want to cry on the Senate floor; that seemed like a total breach in decorum. I contained it, sort of, and continued reading.

  “ ‘On July 11, 2006, I had major surgery to remove two tumorous parts from my small colon and have radiation on the large tumor in my liver. Before my surgery, I had four chemotherapy treatments and was in an emergency room three times to be treated for dehydration before finally having to go on an all liquid diet and intravenous feeding. I have a wife, Greta, and two young children, Garrett and Amelia, who have seen my health worsen since participating in the World Trade Center recovery. My favorite things in life are slowly being taken away from me—my work, food, helping others, and caring for my family.’ ” Officer Helmke died in 2007.

  “These are the stories that tell us what this bill is about,” I concluded in my own words. “Men and women who are suffering, men and women who have died because they did the right thing. What message are we sending here from this esteemed body if we cannot help those who came to our rescue, who were there to find survivors, who were there to find remains, who were there to do the cleanup when our government asked them to help?”

  I left the podium feeling pretty insecure. Mary had given me great advice about why I needed to explain to people why they should care. But to show so much emotion? It seemed like stepping over the line.

  Then a Senate page, a high school student, approached me and said, “Thank you so much; that was such a powerful speech.” No one had done this to me before, nor has anyone since. Then another staffer walked up. “I’ve worked here for a long time, and that was the best speech I have ever heard.” To be clear: I did nothing brilliant. I didn’t deliver my address with great oratorical style. I didn’t even speak in my own words. I just read a letter and allowed myself to feel the pain contained in it and show that pain to the world.

  In my mind, that will always be the moment I learned my most powerful lesson about advocacy. I’d spent a long time making very little progress, but with Mary’s advice I learned how to make a difference, and my confidence grew. Just as with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, shortly before Congress adjourned for the holiday, we won our vote to provide healthcare for first responders and community members around Ground Zero. During the vote, John Feal sat in my office. He’d come down to D.C. with three buses full of men, women, and families. They spent the last few days walking the Senate office halls, saying to any senator they could find, “This is your last chance to be an American!”

  Feal told me that he broke down and cried when he heard the good news. The bill passed unanimously. I’ll be forever indebted to him for trusting me with his fight before I had yet to find my own way. We’re all shaped by the challenges we work through. Those fights for justice and basic fairness taught me the single most important lesson in politics: To be an effective voice for the voiceless, you have to speak and fight from your heart.

  Chapter 8

  “You Need to Be Beautiful Again,” and Other Unwanted Advice

  Weight has always been an issue for me. I find this frustrating because I don’t like being judged on my looks and, frankly, I’d like to spend less time thinking about my appearance, but there it is. I suspect the same is true for nearly every woman in America, especially those in the public eye. People—voters, clients, co-workers, everybody—will give you a limited amount of time and attention. Do you really want them focused on your hair, waistline, or shoes?

  We may wish the wor
ld were different, and I truly hope it is someday, but we aren’t there yet. So, until then, let’s be realistic. As Daphne Merkin wrote about Hillary Clinton in The New York Times, “So shoot me: at the end of the day (and the beginning, if it comes to that), in the high-definition show business of politics—as in everything else—looks matter.”

  I’m sure you have a story. Here’s mine:

  When I was a girl, I was super-athletic and didn’t spend a minute worrying about how much I weighed or what I ate. I just wanted to be fast, flexible, and capable on the soccer field, tennis court, or ski slope. In high school, I took up running with my dad. I especially loved our annual Thanksgiving jogs: We had short talks about nothing in particular, and the exercise made the day feel healthy.

  The end of my dieting innocence came right before my high school graduation, when I went on a five-day liquid fast. (Nobody called a diet a “cleanse” back then.) Some of my girlfriends had come up with the plan in order to look as thin as possible for all our graduation pictures, so I followed along, stupidly. I had never restricted my food intake before and had a positive body image going in, but the fast planted a sliver of doubt in me. Plus, I was drawn to the challenge of it. Did I really have the willpower to forgo eating solid food for five days?

  The first day I was starving. The second I was exhausted, dragging through my ninety-minute tennis practice. On the third through fifth days, I did feel a certain clarity about life, and determination filled my thoughts, but I felt no monklike purity. Sitting at our kitchen table, lying to my mother by saying I’d already eaten dinner at school, felt horrible. I knew she wouldn’t approve of my fast (or my lying), but I didn’t want to be told no.