. . . And His Lovely Wife

by Connie Schultz

  I still remember the postelection bumper sticker we spotted in New York City: “Have you mugged an Ohioan lately?”

  National leaders, though, were prodding Sherrod to run for the Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid courted him—and wanted an answer by July 2005.

  “If you need the answer now, it has to be no,” Sherrod told them. When Schumer kept pressing with continued calls, Sherrod told him that he was concerned about the impact such a race would have on our marriage and my career.

  “She just won the Pulitzer this year, Chuck,” Sherrod said. “She’d probably have to leave the paper, and she’s worried about what that could do to her career.”

  Sherrod was reluctant to tell me Schumer’s response, but I pushed.

  “You aren’t going to like it,” he said.

  “I want to know.”

  Sherrod sighed. “He said, ‘Well, Connie had her chance at the brass ring. Now it’s time for her to support you.’”

  I wanted to ask Schumer what exactly Sherrod had sacrificed for me to win a journalism prize, but I’d never met the man. Later, much later, I got to know Schumer, and I came to appreciate his willful disregard for perceived obstacles. No one championed Sherrod more than Chuck Schumer.

  One of the most moving pleas came from a friend of Sherrod’s, Dr. Jim Kim, the director general’s top deputy at the World Health Organization and a close associate of Dr. Paul Farmer, a pioneer of AIDS treatment in Haiti. Sherrod and Jim became friends after they traveled together to a TB prison in Siberia in 2002. The prison’s success rate in treating prisoners with tuberculosis provided a benchmark for Sherrod in his tireless quest to fund public health programs around the world for infectious diseases, such as TB, malaria, and HIV. He saw with his own eyes how the right drugs, strictly administered at relatively little cost, could save the lives of thousands of people who had surrendered all hope.

  That trip to Siberia also forged a deep bond with Jim Kim. Sherrod admired his selfless commitment, frequently recounting how Jim had insisted that Sherrod wear a surgical mask but refused to wear one himself when meeting with the prisoners. Jim didn’t want to do anything that might suggest he thought he was different from the patients he was helping. To him, the risk of appearing distant or arrogant was greater than any risk of infection.

  In September 2005, Jim was on the faculty of Harvard University’s medical school when he asked to meet Sherrod for dinner to talk about the Senate race. Sherrod assured him that he wasn’t running, but agreed to meet with him. Immediately after their three-hour talk at a restaurant on Capitol Hill, Sherrod called me, and I will never forget the excitement in his voice or the weight of his words.

  “Jim said, ‘You could make such a difference in the world.’ He really thinks my being in the Senate could save lives.”

  Another relentless tug at Sherrod’s sleeve came from one of his closest friends in Congress, Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Bernie is a socialist who ran as an independent, but he and Sherrod have a lot in common, from the unruly hair on their heads and the rumpled shirts on their backs to the passion for social and economic justice that united them in battle day in and day out on the House floor. Both opposed the war in Iraq, free trade agreements, and any attempt to privatize Social Security and Medicare. They championed universal health care, an increase in the minimum wage, and countless other measures designed to bolster the poor and the middle class. They had fought together side by side throughout Sherrod’s fourteen years in Congress, and now Bernie was moving on. He was running for the Senate—and he didn’t plan to go it alone.

  “Think about what we could do together,” he said to Sherrod, night after night. “You and me, in the Senate.”

  Sherrod respected Bernie as a mentor and loved him like a brother, and Bernie’s relentless whispers in the Brooklyn accent of his youth followed Sherrod home every weekend. Months later, Bernie told me that the only reason Sherrod gave him for hesitating was me.

  “He kept talking about this wife he loved,” Bernie said, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “This marriage he had, how much he cared about his wife. Uhh, on and on.”

  And then there were the journalists. Political reporters and columnists were forever asking Sherrod if he was running, but their interest wasn’t always driven by a passion for change. Some were political junkies looking for reasons to get out of bed, and nothing tugged on the bedclothes like the promise of a partisan slugfest. When word first got out—and word always gets out—that Sherrod was thinking of running for the Senate, reporters across the state started calling even as they let out a collective groan of “There he goes again.” Some of them were sure Sherrod was only toying with them, their same accusation when he decided not to run for governor.

  Sherrod was also feeling pressure from his colleague and dear friend Ted Strickland, who had decided to run for governor. Strickland was telling everyone, including any reporter within spitting distance, that Sherrod should run for the Senate. Ted told Sherrod that running together would help them both in different parts of the state.

  The greatest pressure to run came from Sherrod’s family. His mother, Emily Campbell Brown, and his brothers, Bob and Charlie, wanted him to run. (Sherrod’s father, Charles, a family doctor, died in 2000.) They are a political family, driven by their desire to change the world and energized by the rough-and-tumble of a campaign. Sherrod’s mother was a civil rights activist in Mansfield, Ohio, and she raised her three boys to serve. All of them went to Ivy League colleges, and all have been involved in politics their entire adult lives.

  Charlie, a lawyer, was West Virginia’s attorney general in the 1980s and is now a public-interest lobbyist in Washington. Bob, also a lawyer, had worked for President Jimmy Carter and on Capitol Hill. Sherrod, the baby of the family, was not a lawyer. He majored in Russian studies at Yale, and then won his first election in 1974, the year he graduated from college. Sherrod was a senior when the Richland County Democratic Party chair at the time, Don Kindt, asked him to run for Ohio tate representative. Kindt expected for Sherrod to run and lose, and then later win a seat on the city council in Sherrod’s hometown of Mansfield. Sherrod had other plans. He campaigned hard, knocking on more than twenty thousand doors before defeating the incumbent state rep.

  Sherrod served four terms in the statehouse, then ran successfully for two terms as secretary of state before Bob Taft beat him in 1990. Two years later, Sherrod became the congressman for Ohio’s 13th District, replacing the retiring Don Pease. After fourteen years in the House, most of it spent in the minority, Sherrod was feeling restless.

  While Sherrod’s brother Bob wanted Sherrod to run, he didn’t push. “I’m not the one whose life will be hell for a year,” he said. “I’m not the one whose marriage will be tested.”

  Charlie, though, did push, and hard. In September, when it was clear he had yet to convince his younger brother that he should run, he sent an e-mail to me titled “Sherrod championing your career”:

  “It’s great to see Sherrod…continuing to champion your career,” he wrote, “as in fact all we Browns have tried to do for you. Certainly I have.”

  He continued, “Now is the time for all of [us] to champion Sherrod’s career…. The issue is not whether he has a 51 percent chance to win; he chose a career in politics, and who ever knows that answer. What should be clear is that running alone will open up fantastic career options, which he can’t get in the House.”

  Charlie went on to insist that it was Sherrod’s “duty” to “live his potential rather than ducking it.”

  He ended with this: “I ask you, Connie, to urge Sherrod to run for the Senate.”

  The constant drumbeat was beginning to take a toll on me, and on our marriage. I was starting to shut down, avoiding the topic whenever possible. Sherrod was feeling pulled in a direction that would take him away from me, from us. That was my fear, anyway, and for a while, fear reigned.
/>   “Can’t we just talk about it?” Sherrod asked in mid-September.

  “Which part of ‘it’ do you want to talk about?” I said. “How we’ll be apart for an entire year? How I will lose my job and have to give up my career? How you could lose your job? Or how our entire lives will be splayed for public consumption and the Republican attack machine?”

  Sherrod never yelled, never got angry. He was trying to figure this out, and I was responding only with my fears. I was tired of change, and the stress that came with it. I wanted to settle down into a normal life, or at least our version of normal. We had finally started living like a real married couple—one set of house keys, one house. We had one master bedroom, and his-and-her sinks in our new bathroom. We called the same front door home, and for the second time in less than two years we were giddy newlyweds. I was scared of losing what two longtime single parents had managed to find together in middle age.

  Then one afternoon, for no reason I can remember, I stood in the middle of our high-ceilinged family room and thought, “This place is nicer than my parents’ wildest dream for their own lives.”

  And that is when I started to change my mind.

  Sherrod and I fell in love not because of shared space, but, in part, because of our shared vision for the world. We earned our living in very different ways, but we fought for the same people, the same ideals. We met right after he voted against the war in Iraq and I had been writing columns to oppose it. When we first started dating, one of our rituals was to compare ugly mail on Fridays. For the first time in our lives, we had strong partners in each other to lean on, which lightened the load for both of us. Now we risked getting too comfortable, too steeped in home and hearth, instead of using that support to embolden us for the world out there, where it mattered.

  Sherrod was torn about running. I knew that. But I watched as he encouraged others to run for office. I listened as he told them this was the time and Ohio was the place. And I studied his face whenever he talked to Strickland on the phone. I knew that if Sherrod didn’t run, he would always wonder what might have been. I didn’t want that weight tied around our marriage, or my own heart.

  I talked to one of my most trusted advisers, my direct editor, Stuart Warner. Stuart edited my narrative series that was a Pulitzer finalist in 2003, and he was the editor of my columns when I won in 2005. Nobody believed more in my abilities or worked harder to drill them from the rock than Stuart. He also shared my passion for the profession, believing as I did that it was still a crucial component of democracy. I thought he’d wince when I told him that Sherrod was thinking of running. Instead, he motioned to an empty meeting room where we could talk privately.

  He closed the door and said, “You aren’t going to want to hear this.”

  I stared at him and waited.

  “Sherrod should run. This country needs him to run, and he needs you by his side to do it. You’ll be a tremendous asset. Look at what you believe in. Look who you’ve been fighting for your entire career. That’s who he’ll be running for, and they will vote for him and he can win. You can always come back to this work if you want. Or you can move on to something bigger. You have nothing but options, but this is the right time, maybe the only time, for him to run.”

  I was stunned, but I was also listening.

  I needed to talk to Jackie.

  Jackie Cassara is one of my closest friends. She is Ethel to my Lucy when she isn’t being Auntie Mame, which is most of the time. She once stitched and framed for me Rosalind Russell’s best line from that play: “Life is a banquet—and most of you poor suckers are starving to death.”

  Nobody looked out for me more than Jackie. It was Jackie who read Sherrod’s first e-mail to me and immediately announced that he was the man I would marry. On our way to my low-key wedding, she blasted the CD she’d burned for me consisting entirely of wedding show tunes, including “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” from Annie Get Your Gun. Merrily, we belted out Ethel Merman’s lines:

  I wanna wedding in a BIIIIIG church

  With BRIIIIIIDES-maids and FLOWWW-er girls.

  A lot of ushers in TAAAAIL coats,

  Re-PORRRRR-ters and pho-TOG-raphers.

  A ceremony by a bishop who will tie the knot and say:

  “Do you agree to love and honor?”

  Love and honor, yes, but not obey!

  One of my favorite photos, taken right before our wedding, shows Jackie walking next to me in the church hallway with a clipboard in her hand, issuing orders to the very end.

  The day we met to talk about the Senate race, though, started out a bit more somber.

  “So, he’s going to do it?” she said, her dark brown eyes burrowing into me as I stirred my coffee.

  “I think he’s waiting for me,” I said.

  “And what are you waiting for?”

  I shook my head, unable to speak, and she reached across the table, grabbed my hand, and smiled.

  “Honey, you’re bigger than all of this,” she said. “Bigger than your job, bigger than your fears, bigger than any attack those nuts out there want to fire at you and Sherrod.”

  “I’m worried about my career.”

  “You’re always going to write.”

  “I’m worried about our marriage.”

  “You two are so in love it makes me sick, makes all of us sick. I’m not kidding, we look at you and we throw up.”

  At that, I laughed.

  “Besides,” she said, “I’m friends with a Pulitzer Prize winner, and that’s been nice. Really. But now I want to be friends with a United States senator. Could you make that happen, please?”

  One person not thrilled at all with Sherrod’s renewed contemplation was Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran and a lawyer who nearly won the 2nd Congressional District seat in a special election after Rob Portman resigned to become U.S. trade representative in late summer of 2005. Sherrod had given Hackett money and lent him a campaign staff member. When Sherrod thought he wasn’t running for the Senate, Democratic Party leaders started courting Hackett. He was telegenic and outspoken, a newcomer who attracted a lot of attention for his off-the-cuff swipes at Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular, calling him a “son of a bitch” in one interview and a “chicken hawk” in another.

  Hackett was unpredictable, which made him the darling of the media and lefty bloggers. The New York Times’s James Dao described him as “garrulous, profane, and quick with a barked retort or a mischievous joke.”

  Sherrod had initially encouraged him to run, but pulled back when he became concerned about Hackett’s viability as a candidate. By September, Sherrod was sure Hackett could not beat DeWine. Hackett had not announced his candidacy for the Senate, but he had made it clear that he was seriously considering it—and he was in no mood for Sherrod Brown’s change of heart. Sherrod could get in if he wanted, Hackett told reporters, but it wouldn’t change his mind about his own race.

  On the first Saturday in October, I did something that makes Sherrod and me laugh now, but it really mattered at the time. I was a big fan of the television series The West Wing, and I owned the first six seasons on DVD. Sherrod had never been a fan of the show, complaining that the characters talked too fast and that he was distracted by the “errors in fact.” He also didn’t have a TV set in his Washington apartment, which further diminished his chances of becoming a West Wing groupie.

  I pulled out Season Two, slid the first disc into the DVD player, and asked Sherrod to watch the first two episodes with me.

  The first scene opens on mayhem as several in the presidential party are shot. It’s dramatic, but it’s not why I wanted Sherrod to watch. The first two episodes are full of flashbacks that explain how Jed Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, finally decides to work up the nerve to run for president. And he decides to run for all the right reasons, none of which have to do with his comfort level or whether he can win.

  It takes him a while to get there, and at one point his wife, played by Stockard Ch
anning, lectures a campaign staffer that the reason her husband is so irritable with everyone is because he’s scared.

  “He’s not ready yet,” she tells him. “He’ll get there, but he’s not ready yet.”

  In the final scene, we see how Jed Bartlett gets there, and maybe Sherrod and I were just too old to be watching a middle-aged actor have an on-screen epiphany, but we both teared up at the end.

  I flicked off the TV and took Sherrod’s hand.

  “You have to run, don’t you?”

  “I really do, don’t I?”

  I nodded, and we held each other for a while. Then we laid down our ground rules for the grueling year ahead:

  • Sherrod would run as an unapologetic progressive. No tiptoeing to the middle of the road, no caving to consultants who wanted to remake him into what Sherrod called “Republican Lite.” His message, not polls, would drive his campaign. Sherrod was going to take to the voters his fight for the working men and women of Ohio.

  • We would learn from the mistakes of the Kerry campaign. Sherrod would run in all eighty-eight counties of Ohio, which included some of the most conservative pockets in the Midwest. And whenever the Republican attack machine opened fire, we would fight back—hard. No lying down for the kind of vicious Swift Boat ads that had challenged John Kerry’s war service and his patriotism.

  • Our marriage would remain a top priority. We would be apart during most weeks, especially for as long as I could stay at The Plain Dealer, but on weekends we would travel together. And whenever possible, Sherrod would sleep in our home.

  He also promised to keep making my coffee in the morning, but I didn’t consider that a deal breaker.

  Sherrod made a few calls to family and supporters before announcing his race the following week. Reaction was swift, and devastating.

  Shirley Fair, a longtime constituent who adored Sherrod, summed it up best. She walked up to me at a pancake breakfast and started to cry.

  “Shirley, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed hard. “Why is he doing this?” she said, nodding toward Sherrod. “Why is he leaving us? Why is he running?”