Off the Sidelines

by Kirsten Gillibrand

  Our first practice took place in a small park for dog walkers, nicknamed “X Park” because the sidewalks cross in the middle. At that point, just swinging the bat and bending down to field a ball without pulling a muscle presented a major challenge for nearly all of us. But if there’s one thing all members of Congress have in common, it’s that we’re competitive and willful. We wanted to win. So we practiced hard, learned the game, and took the field for our one matchup of the season with the gusto of Little Leaguers. I played shortstop and pitched a few innings and had one big hit. Our other pitcher was Grace Napolitano—age seventy-two and one of our ringers, because she’d played in high school. We were trounced by the young staffers from the Democratic and Republican National Committees, 15–8. But I was hooked.

  I’ve played every season since, and over the past two I’ve started running early in the morning before practice with our coach, as well as Senator Kelly Ayotte and Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito. They are all much faster than I am, but they’re kind enough to slow down so we can chat about Shelley’s son’s wedding and Kelly’s weekends with her kids. We all have distinct policy ideas and commitments to different causes, but none of that matters while running. Over three miles and an hour-long practice, we connect just as people. The first question I ask when a new female colleague joins the House or Senate is, “Do you want to play softball?” (I recruited Senator Heidi Heitkamp based on her campaign ads alone—she knocked several pitches out of the park.) The team binds us together in a way that is hard for many to fathom in political life.

  The women in the Senate make time for one another off the field, as well. In 1988, Senator Barbara Mikulski initiated quarterly dinners. (At that point, the only attendees were Barbara and Nancy Kassebaum, from Kansas.) Her goal was to create a neutral space for female senators to talk and connect. The dinners have grown quite a bit since then, but we still uphold the three original rules: no staff, no leaks, no memos. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to create a space in which we think of one another not as potential votes or allies but as daughters, wives, mothers, and friends. None of us thinks of each other as cooks—my female colleagues are some of the most accomplished and effective leaders in the world. But recently we’ve started taking turns hosting those dinners, and at risk of sounding like I’m trying to sell you a Junior League cookbook, Susan Collins makes an amazing sweet potato salad, Amy Klobuchar makes the best wild-rice salad I’ve ever eaten (she wins all sorts of Minnesota recipe contests), Claire McCaskill makes a delicious low-sugar berry cobbler, Lisa Murkowski cooks the salmon her husband catches in Alaska and stores in their freezer, and Barbara Mikulski knows exactly where to buy the best Maryland crab cakes.

  We even once had a women’s dinner in the Blue Room in the White House. One day I suggested to President Obama that he host a dinner; he said yes; and then, just as I had years earlier when Hillary asked me to host a fundraiser, I refused to let staffers back out of the idea and insisted we set a date. Lisa had been planning to host that quarter, so the White House chef served Alaskan halibut in her honor. That dinner was a little more formal than our usual get-togethers. We sat at a long table and President Obama listened as we each presented our ideas and raised issues. It was a great chance for the women in the Senate to amplify one another’s voices. We are stronger when we can work together. More gets done.

  I’ve also been lucky enough to form friendships with a few truly extraordinary women who have lived public lives. One is the actor Connie Britton. She and I went to college together, and the summer after my sophomore year we traveled to China. From the moment we stepped off the plane in Beijing, the experience was so overwhelming that a small group of us (Connie, myself, and two other friends, Amy and Dana) bonded. The coal dust in the air burned our eyes and left a film of soot on our skin by the end of each day. Our dorms were cement boxes with straw mats to sleep on, a hole in the floor for a toilet, and cold-water showers. The first night, at a ceremonial dinner, our hosts served a crispy whole fish, his big eyes staring up at us from the table like no Chinese food any of us had ever seen.

  We fused as a group immediately, out of emotional need and a desire to help one another process what we were seeing—the poverty, the exotic (to us) culture. We also worked through the mundane stuff, too, like why it took my boyfriend so long to write. After about a month, Connie, Amy, Dana, and I found our bravery, taking trains to explore the country every weekend. We even geared up to lip-synch to Madonna at the American Embassy on the Fourth of July. Without one another, that trip would not have been nearly as rich. As a foursome, we were fearless—not that we realized it at the time.

  After college, Connie and I lost track of each other. Years later, when she was back at Dartmouth for a reunion, another friend asked if she wanted to come hear me give a talk. Connie’s reaction was: “Kirsten Gillibrand? Who the hell is that?” (She’d only ever known me as Tina Rutnik.) But we reconnected and have stayed in loose touch since. A few years ago, she called me when she was adopting her son, Eyob. Foreign adoptions can be slow and byzantine. Eyob needed treatment before he turned one year old, and the bureaucracy was churning so slowly that Connie worried he wouldn’t get the care he needed in time. I told her I’d help in any way. I understood panic and urgency. Her son needed help. She was going to do everything possible for him.

  Obviously, Connie’s work is very different from mine (hers is far more glamorous). But it’s been interesting to talk to her about the characters she’s created, and there’s a synergy in what we’re both trying to do: make women’s voices heard. In the movie version of Friday Night Lights, Connie played Tami Taylor, the football coach’s wife. It was just an ornamental part, not exactly fulfilling, so when the executive producer, Peter Berg, asked Connie to play Tami Taylor again for the TV show, she hesitated. She’d grown tired of playing women who rarely spoke. After much begging on Peter’s part, she agreed to the role—but with a serious caveat: Tami Taylor would have the strong voice of a strong woman. Connie would make sure of it.

  As Connie tells the story, she was a bulldozer on the set, holding Peter to his promise every step of the way. She did it in her graceful Southern way, but she was unstoppable, calling him every week when she got her script, pushing him to let her character go deeper. “I got into this thing and moved to Austin, Texas, and it was like, ‘What the heck, and what was I thinking? Football and all these dudes?’ ” she told me recently. “But I knew it was time to step up and have the guts to find my voice. As a female actor, you bring your whole self to the job, and a big part of what you have to offer is your experience as a woman. You have to take risks. You have to go for it. If you wait to feel safe, if you stay on the sidelines, the big thing will never happen.” Amen.

  And then, of course, there’s Gabby Giffords.

  I felt bonded with Gabby even before we met, right after that first congressional election when I saw her on TV. We met that fall in Washington, and she’s the closest thing I have had to a sister in Congress. We started at the same time, both of us in our mid-thirties (I’m a few years older), both from historically Republican districts. We grew together and pushed each other to build normal and intimate lives, which is not easy to do in Washington. Just after New Year’s in 2011, Jonathan and I and Gabby and her husband, Mark Kelly, double-dated at Matchbox on 8th Street on Capitol Hill; it’s their favorite spot. Gabby and I talked about tough campaigns and complained about harsh opponents. Gabby and Mark told us about their recent trip to Rome, where they’d attended midnight mass at the Vatican and spent countless hours enjoying the art and architecture.

  A week later, on January 8, while Gabby was holding a Congress on Your Corner event at a Safeway near Tucson, Arizona, she and eighteen others were shot, six killed.

  When Congressman Heath Shuler, a mutual friend, called to tell me the news, I was standing in a model home, looking at tiles and finishes. Jonathan saw my face crumple from across the room. We left immediately and started driving toward home. H
alfway there, we stopped at a restaurant because I didn’t want Theo and Henry, who were home with a sitter, to see me so upset. While we sat at the restaurant’s bar, Debbie Wasserman Schultz called. She was in Florida, driving her seven-year-old to a soccer tournament. She said she’d heard that Gabby’s shot was fatal.

  “We just don’t know that yet. We don’t know for sure,” I said, refusing to believe it was true and making Debbie promise that we’d both keep scanning reports until the facts became clear.

  For what felt like an hour, I sat there in shock, shaking and crying. Jonathan wrapped his arm around me to try to calm me down. The world felt like it had telescoped to just the two of us and our thoughts and prayers about Gabby. Jonathan kept refreshing the news reports on his iPhone, and we finally learned that the reports of Gabby’s death were false. I called Debbie immediately—she was still driving. Then Jonathan and I drove home, hoping we could keep it together in front of the kids.

  For days, cable news reported on the shooting around the clock, interviewing any member of Congress they could get in front of a camera, many of whom didn’t know Gabby at all. One colleague called her “perky,” which would have annoyed her for sure. I wanted to be left alone in a dark room to worry and grieve. Six people had died. My communications team had been getting dozens of requests for me to do interviews and had been turning down all of them. But when Pia Carusone, Gabby’s chief of staff, contacted Jess to ask if I would please speak about Gabby on TV, I felt I had to say yes. Shining a light on her true character was one thing I could do for her in such a horrible time of need.

  Four days later, on January 12, when I was trying to pick myself up and return to doing the work that Gabby and I shared, I received an invitation to join President Obama for a trip to Arizona. He also invited Debbie, Nancy Pelosi, and the whole Arizona delegation for a day of remembrance to honor the victims of the shooting. I raced home to change and was on Air Force One within three hours. I was so grateful to the president for including me. Tragedy makes a person feel powerless and alone. That invitation helped ease my sense of isolation.

  That day in Arizona was one of the most emotional of my life. Just after we touched down in Tucson, Speaker Pelosi, Debbie, and I all visited Gabby in the hospital. Mark had warned us that Gabby’s face was expressionless and her eyes were closed. Seeing her was not easy—bandages all over her head, a tube coming out of her mouth.

  I stood at her side and held her hand. She’d been my partner in public service since before we met. I didn’t know how much hope was reasonable to have. She was so strong and surrounded by so much love, but her injuries were so grave. But as Debbie and I stood there, talking about the future we prayed we would have together, we saw Gabby struggle to open her one unbandaged eye. Mark grabbed her hand, leaned in toward her, and said, “Gabby, can you see me?” The room became silent and still.

  “Gabby, can you see?” Mark said. “Show me a sign!”

  Slowly, she lifted her right hand a few inches off the bed and struggled to raise her thumb. We all started to sob. In that moment, Gabby showed Mark and the rest of us that she was with us 100 percent and understood what we were saying. I stood there in awe of her will and determination in the face of evil.

  The president’s speech later that afternoon was so powerful. He honored all those who had been murdered: Judge John Roll, who’d dropped by the Safeway to say hello to Gabby on his way home from church; Phyllis Schneck, who had three children, seven grandchildren, and a two-year-old great-granddaughter; Dorothy Morris, whose husband, George Morris, was shot while trying to save Dorothy’s life; Gabe Zimmerman, Gabby’s outreach director, who was engaged to be married the following year; Dorwan Stoddard, who also took a bullet for his wife, and was killed; and nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, the only girl on her Little League team. She’d been born on September 11, 2001, and she planned to be the first woman to play Major League baseball.

  “Imagine—imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy, just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship, just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future,” President Obama said, calling on all of us to honor Christina’s life. “She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

  “I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us—we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”

  Over the next year, I continued to visit Gabby in various hospitals and at home. One night, I slept in her hospital room so I could be there when she woke at 6:00 A.M. Each time I saw Gabby, her positive spirit and progress amazed me. In January 2012, just a year after the shooting, Gabby flew back to D.C. to attend the president’s State of the Union address. Before the event, we did a little shopping at Forecast, my favorite clothing store on Capitol Hill. Gabby still had a gift certificate from the store that she’d received as a wedding gift. That day we both tried on a few things, and Gabby chose a bright-red top that looked beautiful on her. For a moment I felt like nothing had changed, that we were back to being freshman congresswomen, our lives on a shared course. But of course everything had changed. Gabby had survived such a dark passage. She battled her way through a year of speech and physical therapy, fed by her own spirit and her husband’s love. She had shown the country what resilience looks like.

  That evening, when she walked onto the House floor for President Obama’s State of the Union address, the nation’s eyes were on her. Our friends are our foils and our confidants, the people we seek out to make us feel whole in a way that sometimes not even family can. When Gabby waved to the nation, unbowed, I felt so proud to call her my friend. She radiated a triumph of sorts, a refusal to surrender to hate. I felt so moved. I knew she’d be back, fighting to make life better for all Americans, and she is.

  Chapter 11

  A Time Such as This

  Sometimes in life you get a sense of meaning and mission from chasing your dreams; other times, the meaning and mission find you. A problem surfaces, a need appears, and whether you intended it or not, you happen to be the right person in the right place and at the right time to lead the fight. Undoubtedly, you had other plans: a soccer team you wanted to coach, a used-book drive you wanted to start, or a half marathon you wanted to train for. But it’s important to stop and listen when something of real consequence inserts itself into your life, tugs on your conscience, and won’t let go.

  That’s how I began my battle against the Department of Defense on how the military handles sexual assault within its ranks. I had not planned to take on this issue. To be honest, for my first four years as a public servant, I had no idea how bad it was. But then I started hearing stories of men and women who’d suffered the worst things imaginable while serving our country. Compounding the problem, commanders failed to prosecute the perpetrators of terrible crimes. These men and women needed a voice. They needed a champion with a megaphone, and I happened to have one. Fighting for them has become one of the most important things I’ve done in my career.

  Full disclosure: I had to be asked twice to learn about the problem before I adopted it as a cause. In 2012, a good friend who was working on a documentary about sexual assault in the military asked me to take some time to understand the issue. I said, “Of course I will!” But I said it in the same casual spirit that I say, “Of course I will!” to a lot of requests. What I meant was, I’ll keep an eye open, and when a bill or hearing comes along, I’ll pay attention and report back. That year, during our debate of the annual defense bill (where the Armed Services Committee works on the mil
itary’s budget for the year), the issue arose in the context of women not wanting to have to disclose a rape in order to have access to healthcare and abortion services while serving abroad as well as the fact that there were convicted rapists still serving in the military. Senator Jeanne Shaheen and I worked on and passed amendments to fix both, but we had only scratched the surface of the problem.

  Then another friend, Maria Cuomo Cole, called my attention to the issue. She was one of the executive producers of that same documentary, called The Invisible War. Directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Amy Ziering, it was now finished, and Maria asked me to take a look at the issue again. I said, “Of course I will,” but this time with a little more commitment. I figured that spending ninety minutes watching the film would help me broaden my understanding of an issue. I cared about the military, particularly the military personnel. Yet I certainly didn’t imagine that their struggles would define mine.

  I scheduled a viewing of The Invisible War with my senior staff. When the hour arrived, Brooke Jamison, my legislative director; Anne Bradley, my deputy chief of staff; Bethany Lesser, my D.C. communications director; three women on my military staff—Elana Broitman, Brook Gesser, and Katie Parker—and several other women in my office all showed up punctually in the conference room. Who was missing? Both the men.