An American Son: A Memoir

by Marco Rubio

  The day after the last debate, we boarded our campaign bus for the final leg of a statewide tour. The crowds were even larger now, and their excitement greater. Anything could happen, I reminded myself, but it was hard to find anything to be discouraged about. The early voting and absentee turnout figures showed clear signs of a Republican wave. Our closing ads were receiving rave reviews. Our internal polls gave me a solid and stable lead. And at every stop we made, people brought up the heckler line. Even the eternal pessimist Heath Thompson could find nothing to be pessimistic about.

  I still hadn’t won anything, but at night, after the day’s events were over, I allowed myself to reflect a little on my journey. I reflected not just on the campaign that was nearing its end, but on my entire life and the family that had made my journey possible. In moments of triumph, we are advised to find humility. All worldly success is fleeting. I needed only recall my own family’s story to be reminded.

  Five decades earlier, my parents had arrived in America with nothing. They were younger then than I was now, and had none of my advantages. They didn’t speak the language. They didn’t have a formal education. They didn’t have connections to help establish them in their strange new country.

  My grandfather had an even harder life. He struggled to the very limit of his physical ability to feed his wife and daughters, and had to leave the country he loved so much and whose history he felt so personally.

  I thought I had it rough when, early in my career, I had despaired over my finances and the fact that my family had to live month to month. For much of their lives, my parents had lived week to week. They lived with the constant worry that they would fail to give their children the chance to live better lives. My grandfather had lived day to day, uncertain he could afford his family’s next meal. They had once had dreams. All young people have dreams. But their lives weren’t the stuff of dreams. They worked to get by, and to keep their children safe and well provided for.

  What adversity had I faced? Bad polls? Lackluster fund-raising? Embarrassing questions about my finances, my credit card, the sale of my house? My father had known the humiliation of failed business ventures. He had known the fear of suddenly losing a job. He had walked a picket line while his meager savings disappeared, and gone back to work to feed his children only to have me insult him for doing it. My grandfather knew the anguish of being refused work because he was disabled, and he had suffered losses I would never experience.

  If I failed, I would lose an election. I would still earn a good living. I would still have a future. If my mother and father failed, the rent wouldn’t be paid. If my grandfather failed, his daughters wouldn’t eat. But the rent was always paid. And my mother and her sisters never went to bed hungry, even though her parents often had.

  Two generations of my family had struggled, suffered and survived. They vowed their children and grandchildren would never have to make the choices they had made and have to acquiesce to a reality that refused their dreams. My parents didn’t have any specific ambitions for me. They wanted me to be happy, and do whatever my heart was set on doing. And now I had. I had taken the chance they had given me, and was on the cusp of winning an important public office. I would receive public acclaim for my success, but I knew who truly deserved the credit. I am the son of immigrants, exiles from a troubled country. They gave me everything it was in their power to give. And I am proof their lives mattered, their existence had a purpose.

  In the last nights of a long campaign, I remembered where my journey began. It began long ago, in the hardships and struggles of ordinary people with extraordinary strength and courage and love, on an island I have never seen.

  Why had my dreams come true? Because God had blessed me with a strong and stable family and parents who cherished my dreams more than their own, and with a wise and loving wife who supported me. And He blessed me with America, the only country in the world where dreams like mine would stand a chance of coming true.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Junior Senator from Florida

  THE WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION WERE A BLUR OF FRENETIC activity. I had to close my law firm, set up my Senate offices and organize my private affairs. I needed to step off the national stage for a while. So we held a press conference the day after the election, and then we went dark. I still did occasional interviews with the Florida press, but we decided to turn down all national media requests for several months.

  Every organization I have ever been associated with develops a culture that reflects the personality and priorities of whoever is at the top of the organization. If I had started my Senate career by focusing my attention on press opportunities, my staff would conclude that our office’s highest priority was to keep me in the national spotlight. I didn’t want to make the wrong first impression on my new staff.

  I had learned as speaker that the decisions you make in the early days often haunt your entire time in an office. I took extra care to make sure I made the right decisions. Our first priority was to emphasize constituent services, which involved getting our phone and mail operations up and running, setting up casework procedures and identifying staff we would keep and new staff we would hire for our Florida offices. I wanted our constituent services to be operational on my first day on the job.

  I wanted a strong, experienced policy team in my Washington office that would help me identify emerging issues and engage in national debates in a constructive way. I also wanted to leave room for younger, less experienced but eager staffers who would be part of a strong farm team system. As senior staff moved on in the coming years, I wanted to promote from within my organization.

  The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were bittersweet that year. For almost two years, my campaign had been the central focus of our lives. Now I had an opportunity to relax and celebrate the holidays as something more than a brief distraction from the campaign. I played in two flag football tournaments, my team finishing first and second, respectively. I enjoyed the company of my family and friends, and spent more time with my kids than I had been able to in quite a while. I wasn’t the distant, preoccupied father they had become accustomed to—a blessing I was especially thankful for that holiday season.

  But they were also the first holidays without my father. Every Thanksgiving, my father would make the same comment, “A mí el pavo no me llama la atención”—or, roughly translated, “I don’t really care for turkey that much.” It had become a running joke in the family, and I had often made the same comment to poke fun at him. No one joked about it that Thanksgiving. Christmas, too, recalled happier ones, when he had been with us. I remembered a Christmas years before, when Jeanette and I had been newlyweds. We had spent much of our savings on our wedding and honeymoon. We didn’t have money our first Christmas together to spend on a tree and decorations. But to our delight, our holiday was rescued one afternoon when my father pulled into our driveway in his little Toyota Corolla with a tree tied to the roof.

  Before I knew it, it was time for us to go to Washington for my swearing in. Both Jeanette’s and my family made the trip with us the last week of December. We spent several days taking in the sights of the nation’s capital. One experience in particular stood out.

  We toured Mount Vernon the second day of the new year. It was the first visit to George Washington’s home for all of us. Somewhere along the tour, I became separated from the group. I watched them from afar for a minute, laughing and talking in Spanish and English. My first thought was how different my family was, how different I was, from the men and women who had lived in this place, and from the Americans who had founded our nation. We came to this country or were brought here by our parents from Cuba and Colombia. But on further reflection, I began to recognize the similarities in our stories.

  Our language and customs were obviously different than the language and customs of America’s founding fathers. But we were dreamers, too, just like the Americans who had dreamed of a nation where all people would be considered equal, and willed
it into existence. They had made a nation where you could be whatever your talents and industry allowed you to be, no matter the circumstances of your birth or whether or not your parents were socially and financially established. I looked at the little assembly of my family and friends, and observed there wasn’t a millionaire among them. There were no Ivy Leaguers present, no one who could trace their lineage to the Mayflower. In most societies in human history, a family like mine wouldn’t have had the opportunities we’ve had. We might have been employees at a national monument, but we wouldn’t have visited it while we were in town to see one of our own take his seat in the national legislature. But here we were. A collection of working-class immigrants from Latin America and their children, who enjoyed a standard of living our parents and grandparents had never known, with opportunities they might have dreamed of but never expected to have. We looked and sounded different from the descendants of George Washington’s generation. But we embodied everything America’s founding generation had hoped America would become.

  I had the same feeling a few days later at the Capitol. At the appointed hour, I walked down the center aisle of the Senate and made my way to where the vice president of the United States was waiting to administer my oath of office. I looked up at the gallery to see Jeanette and the kids, but I couldn’t find them. So I glanced at the Senate’s ornate ceiling for a brief moment. I wondered how my father would have felt had he sat in the Senate gallery that day. Would he have remembered the exhausting late nights in his seventies, tending bar at a banquet and bragging to anyone who would listen that his son was going to be a lawyer? Would he have remarked to himself how far he had traveled from his destitute and lonely childhood? I hope so. And I hope he would have recognized that he was responsible for the honor his son received that day.

  I wondered how my grandfather would have felt, too. Would he have felt he had helped make it possible by planting the seeds of my dreams in those long afternoons on our porch in Las Vegas? Would he have realized I had kept the promise I made to him on his deathbed?

  I looked down again and prepared to take the oath. I didn’t know whether or not my father and grandfather were watching me. Does God allow our loved ones in the afterlife to share in our successes? Can you see from heaven the triumphs and trials of the family you’ve left behind? I’ll have to wait to find out. In the meantime, I must act as if they are watching me always, and I am and always will be accountable to them.

  The rest of the day was filled with festivities and fun. We restaged my swearing in with my wife and children at my side in the old Senate chamber so we could take a picture to remember it by. We had a reception in the Hart Senate Office Building for friends and supporters who had made the trip from Florida. The next day friends and family began leaving for home, and by that night only Jeanette and the kids and I were left. It was a reminder to us that our family was embarking on a new life, with new challenges and opportunities.

  CHAPTER 39

  Life in the Senate

  THE TWO QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK ME MOST OFTEN ABOUT my job are “Was it what you expected?” and “What surprised you the most?” My answer is the same to both questions. What has surprised me the most is that life as a U. S. senator is pretty much what I expected it to be.

  My background as a state legislative leader prepared me fairly well for my experience in the Senate, although the place certainly has a few unique attributes. The U.S. Senate is one of the few legislative bodies, if not the only legislative body, where a simple majority can’t accomplish anything. Without the agreement of every single senator—what is referred to as “unanimous consent”—even basic, mundane tasks can be difficult to complete.

  In a legislative body with only a hundred members, everyone knows everyone else. It’s easier for personal animosities to flare in the House of Representatives, which has 435 members. Many of them have never met each other and have only encountered some of their colleagues in debates over legislation. Many members are strangers to each other, and it’s easier to dislike a stranger. There are no strangers in the Senate. Eventually, our paths all cross.

  When you debate with colleagues in the Senate, you’ve met them, have come to know them and, often, have worked with them on other legislation. And you’re going to need their cooperation in the future, if only to get unanimous consent for a minor request. When the lights are off and the cameras aren’t watching, senators interact and socialize with each other like people everywhere do, even if they have political differences. They talk about their families, sports and the normal stuff of life. Of course, we talk shop, too. Senators are always looking to join with one or more members of the opposite party to sponsor legislation. The rules of the Senate make it impossible for most legislation to pass without some bipartisan support.

  But there are other motivations for bipartisan cooperation as well. First, your constituents appreciate it. Most Americans want to see Republicans and Democrats working together for the good of the country. It’s refreshing, too, to be able to break free from the usual constraints of partisanship and work with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Even on issues where there isn’t bipartisan agreement, most senators respect opposing points of view, especially if those views rest on principle and not politics.

  Building good relationships with your colleagues, based on mutual respect, and working cooperatively to address the country’s challenges is an important and honorable undertaking. But that shouldn’t come at the expense of the convictions that brought you to office. Setting aside our differences cannot mean setting aside our principles. I campaigned on one central theme: the country faced immense challenges; the election should be about the direction of the country; and, if elected, I would not, in small or large ways, shrink from my responsibility to defend the principles of a free people and the great nation they built.

  In my first year, I was asked to vote against a rule banning earmarks, which are funds targeted to specific projects that aren’t meritorious or, at the least, are a very low priority to all but a relative few, and have in the past been the means of public corruption. I was asked to vote to raise the debt limit and for very short-term budgets that ignored rather than solved our problems. I refused. I promised the people of Florida I would work to find the right long-term solutions to the nation’s biggest problems, not evade them by resorting to stopgap measures and special-interest deal making. I intend to keep my promise.

  Even with all the challenges America faces, there is still no nation on earth with a brighter future. The fundamental source of our nation’s greatness remains our people. And while their government and its leaders might be languishing, the American people have not diminished one bit. We are still as creative, innovative and ambitious as ever. Even as you read these words, the next great American idea is being worked on somewhere in our country. Ultimately, America will remain great because our people are great. The job of our government is to make it easier for our people to do what they do better than any people in the history of the world.

  If there is one nagging concern I have after my first year in the Senate it is the lack of urgency in Washington to address the challenges we face. Many in Washington wrongly assume that our spiraling debt, our broken tax code and our regulatory overreach can wait until after the next election to be confronted. I believe that the longer we wait to solve these issues, the harder they will be to solve. With each passing year, the solutions to these challenges become more painful and implementing them potentially more disruptive. I had hoped that my first years in the Senate would be a historic time, a time when the urgency of the moment compelled our leaders to act in bold and decisive ways to protect our nation and its future. Instead, sometimes I feel as if I have joined a theater company where every vote and every statement is calculated for maximum political effect rather than public benefit. And yet I believe with all my heart that America will confront and solve the challenges we face in this new century. We always have and we will again. And the sooner we do
it the better.

  On an individual level, what gets you in trouble in the Senate with your colleagues is the kind of behavior that will get you in trouble in any other workplace. If you’re a showboat who pontificates on every subject the Senate debates. If you mislead or lie to people about your intentions or fail to keep promises you’ve made. If you try to make yourself look good by making a colleague look bad. Those things will get you into trouble in the Senate, just as they would anywhere else.

  That doesn’t mean the Senate is the epitome of bipartisan comity. There are plenty of partisan games played all the time there. When a senator is “in cycle”—in other words, up for reelection at the end of the Congress—the other side tries to make life as difficult as possible for him or her. As I write this in 2012, Republican senators Scott Brown and Dean Heller are running for reelection, and the Democratic leadership is constantly trying to force them into making politically difficult votes or deny them opportunities to show leadership on an issue that might help their reelection.

  However, I have had mostly positive relations with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I have found that senators with whom I disagree very strongly on issues are still hardworking, decent people who are well informed and have done their homework, even if their policy conclusions baffle me. It’s a privilege to debate them, and to work with them when we are in agreement.

  In my short time in the Senate, I’ve come to know senators from both parties who have offered me their friendship and counsel. Jim DeMint continues to be a source of sound advice and an inspiration to me. Joe Lieberman encouraged me to get involved in foreign policy issues. I’ve traveled overseas with him, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and benefited from their many years of experience in national security. Whether you agree or disagree with them, they are statesmen who put our country’s security before all else.