Bush called for Congress to send him a bill to sign before recessing in early August. Easier said than done. George Miller and I, leading the Democrats, worked hard to find common ground with the Republicans John Boehner and Judd Gregg, but we stalled on several issues. July and August passed without an agreement.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat in my Senate office with Senator Gregg, awaiting the arrival of Laura Bush, whom we were to escort across the hall to her testimony before our committee on the subject of early education. I had brought a painting of mine to give her as a memento. The First Lady's husband was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, reading to a class of young pupils as part of his tour to publicize his administration's commitment to education reform. I was waiting for Mrs. Bush when someone from my office came to tell me that Vicki had just called: an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. At this point, reports were that it was likely a small plane that veered off course, but Vicki raised the specter of terrorism.
I found the news bizarre, grotesque. Judd Gregg felt the same way. A few minutes later Vicki called again.
Aware now that something cataclysmic and deliberate had happened to the nation, we saw Mrs. Bush perhaps seventy-five yards down the corridor, walking toward me in front of her Secret Service detail. The rest of that day is part of the nation's history. Mrs. Bush, Judd Gregg, and I announced that we would postpone our hearing, but that we would not be defeated by terrorism. Senator Gregg and I then spent the next couple of hours on Capitol Hill with Mrs. Bush. We kept the television set off and simply talked for a while. I will always remember her composure and elegance, qualities that she drew upon in the hours that followed to help comfort a nation in shock.
A sense of patriotism and shared responsibility took hold in all of us. Getting the education bill enacted into law had become both an affirmation of America's values and a demonstration to all countries that this Congress would not allow terrorism to cripple its ability to continue the nation's essential work.
Huge differences remained, however, and as talks progressed through the fall, they centered more and more on the cost of the reforms. Those crafting the appropriations bill for 2002 had floated a figure of $4 billion in discretionary spending increases for education. That was far too little to do what needed to be done. I called for twice that amount. And House conservatives revealed their own preferred level of expenditure increases: none whatsoever.
Exhaustive negotiations regarding testing requirements and funding provisions (and many other issues) continued for almost two months among designated members in the House and Senate. Finally, on December 12, 2001, we agreed on the specifics of the legislation. It was the only bipartisan measure of any scope passed in that year. The following January, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law.
In several important ways, the Democrats had scored a major victory. Our negotiations had produced an appropriations agreement of $22.6 billion for education in fiscal 2002, a gigantic increase over Bush's original goal of just a $685 million increase over the previous year's $17.4 billion. And we had retained many of the policy principles that we'd considered essential from the start.
My remarks as the bill became law were conciliatory. "This is the president's signature issue," I said. "He can claim a big victory. But so can we, as well as the children." I genuinely believed this. No Child, as I saw it then, was the most significant advance in public education of the past quarter century.
In other important ways, however, our victory rested on shaky ground. Though the $22.6 billion represented a 20 percent increase over the previous education budget, Miller and I believed that it was still not enough to fulfill the standards that the act itself required.
That worry became sadly moot a few weeks later, when President Bush sent his new budget to Congress. It included none of the new money he had promised us. He blamed the costs of the military strike in Afghanistan, seeking the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, for the need to trim back.
No Child has struggled on through the ensuing years, effective in some ways, but never the transformative tool that it could have been: "underfunded, mismanaged, and poorly implemented," as I put it, "a spectacular broken promise of the Republican administration and Congress." I added that America's children deserved better.
All of America's people deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power in Iraq. As did the Iraqi people. The war's effects are still fresh as I write these words, and so I will attempt no detailed retelling of them here. Looking over my personal journals and the many speeches and briefing memos in my files, I am struck once again at how clear the march to disaster seemed to me at the time, and how brazenly the administration's justifications departed from reality.
That march began in the glow of Americans' support for President Bush immediately following the September 11 attacks by Al Qaeda, and for his sending troops to Afghanistan to hunt down the terrorists responsible. The president and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill. In what I have called an "extraordinary policy coup" led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the administration succeeded in changing the subject to Iraq.
I had met Vice President Cheney years before, when he was a congressman, through our mutual friend Alan Simpson, who like Cheney was from Wyoming. Cheney seemed agreeable to me at first, affable and smart, even though we had different political views. His votes were ultraconservative. Maybe we just didn't notice how extreme he was because his positions didn't carry the day. But when he became vice president, he had the power, but he lacked the good judgment to see beyond those extreme views.
I withheld my final judgment on the prudence of the Iraq war until I went back to the Senate in September 2002. There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace, and I wanted to understand the issue fully before reaching a final decision. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I listened carefully to the testimony of the witnesses.
I was struck by the consistent drumbeat of opposition to the rush to war by respected military leaders--General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe; marine general Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of Central Command. I will never forget what General Hoar in particular said in response to my question about urban warfare. He said that Baghdad would look like the last fifteen minutes of the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan.
My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:
A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, selfinterested motives;
It must be a last resort;
It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
It must have a reasonable chance of success.
There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.
As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take
preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.
I said that the administration had told "lie after lie after lie after lie" to trigger and perpetuate "one of the worst blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy." The war failed the "last resort" principle for reasons too obvious to dwell on here. On the question of proportionality--did the harm inflicted outweigh the good achieved?--I pointed, again, to the loss of American and Iraqi lives, the collapse of Iraqi civil society, the self-fulfilling prophecy of terrorists flooding into the ravaged country and using it as a base, the heightened tensions with the entire Islamic world, and our loss of international prestige generally. As for "a reasonable question of success," there never was a question that we would win the military phase of the Iraq war. The more significant success--ending terrorism, promoting regional stability, sustaining America's reputation as a just nation and a model for enlightenment--has yet to be achieved.
I'd first met John Kerry in the spring of 1971, when the Vietnam veterans protesting the war were bivouacked on the Mall in Washington. I was impressed by the forcefulness of this young man with the long, serious face and the great mop of dark hair as he articulated the case against the war, and also by his record of courage in combat.
I wasn't surprised when John decided to enter politics, and I campaigned for him in his first effort, a losing bid for Congress in 1972. He was elected lieutenant governor under Michael Dukakis ten years later, and in 1984 won election to the Senate, taking the seat of Paul Tsongas, who'd retired. He and I voted together on nearly all the issues.
I have enormous respect for John Kerry. He is not only my colleague; he is my friend. When John decided to run for president, I was convinced that a John Kerry presidency would be good for the country. He has courage and strength of character and a strong grasp of foreign policy. He is a certifiable, decorated war hero. I also knew that with Kerry in the White House, we would be able to advance health care for all Americans. I enthusiastically signed on to his team.
But in 2003, John's campaign was faltering. I noticed a sluggishness when I campaigned with him in Iowa. Howard Dean of Vermont was coming on strong as a fresh face. His passion and his fearless stance against the Iraq war were galvanizing Democrats, and he was amassing more money than John with his pioneering use of the Internet as a fund-raising tool. By late September, John's Boston and Washington advisers were at loggerheads, creating divisions that distracted from his campaign. My own chief of staff, the highly competent Mary Beth Cahill, joined him as campaign manager. A new energy soon swept through the Kerry ranks.
When I returned to Iowa with the candidate two weeks before the January caucuses, I saw that he had been regenerated as well. I was seeing a "new" Kerry, whose speeches were shorter and punchier, and who was making a warm personal connection to the voters.
I was having great fun too, revving up the crowd, teasing them about not voting for me in '80, but saying all would be forgiven if they just voted for John. Hello, Cedar Rapids. Are you glad to see me? Well I'm glad to see you! And around the state we went. Jim Rassmann joined John on the trail too, to testify to John's character and heroism. John had saved Rassmann's life in Vietnam and hadn't seen him since, but the veteran found him because he wanted to share his story. Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, won New Hampshire, and rang up nine victories on Super Tuesday to clinch the Democratic nomination in Boston. He picked John Edwards as his running mate. We conferred frequently through the early summer, strategizing on his approaches to the economy and the Iraq war.
In August, not long after the Democratic convention, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unleashed their $20 million television smear campaign against John, falsely impugning his stellar military record. They used gutterball tactics of the worst kind.
John had three outstanding debate performances, with the first being especially impressive. Vicki and I continued to campaign hard for him until the last moment.
On election morning, Vicki and I voted at the town hall in Hyannis. The lines were moderate, but we heard that earlier, around dawn, they'd been very long. I had a sense that the momentum was with John. We took a sail before noon, then traveled the seventy miles west to Providence to spend a little time with Patrick, who was headed toward an overwhelming victory in his reelection to Congress. Vicki and I spent the evening in Boston, where I did some television interviews and met with Democratic supporters. The news was reporting enormous turnouts, which all of us believed were to the Democrats' advantage. And the exit polls were showing big advantages for Kerry. "I've been proud to call John Kerry my friend," I told one group of boosters, "and I'm going to be even prouder to call him my president!" The crowd went wild. And then Vicki and I headed to our Boston apartment to watch the returns. Earlier in the evening, when I was doing television interviews, I learned that the networks couldn't get prominent Republicans to respond to the early trends because they were so decisively in John's favor. The White House was in hunker-down mode. Relatives and friends wandered in and out of the apartment as the evening wore on. Projections began to appear showing Bush winning the western states, but that was predictable. The producers were trying to inject drama into a race that they knew had been decided.
Not exactly. Later in the evening, we began to notice that some of the eastern states we'd expected to end up in our column were not going that way. Florida went for Bush, a disappointment but not a surprise. But the number of states showing up as red in the graphics was a surprise. The heavy Kerry votes we'd counted on--that the exit polls had told us were there--were just not coming in.
Suddenly, we noticed that Republicans were materializing onscreen for live interviews. They were no longer in the bunker. The terrible awareness of a turning tide crept in. Then Bush called reporters into the White House, where he was watching with his family. We tried to tell ourselves that this was just a bit of stagecraft, to give the illusion that he was winning.
Around 11 p.m., California came in with a big win for John, but the sea of red between California and Illinois was unbroken. And it started to become clear that the only path to a Democratic victory was through Ohio. James Carville on one of the channels was saying that John Kerry had to pull an inside straight; that it was time to recognize that this was George Bush's night, not Kerry's, unless something dramatic happened. The people in our apartment were rather distraught by James saying that. They thought perhaps it was sour grapes because he hadn't been invited to run the campaign. But I just thought he was being honest. I telephoned Tim Hagan, a friend of ours in Cleveland who said things still were fine, Cuyahoga County was looking good, we think we've got Ohio; the exit polls...
The night went on, and the numbers grew more disturbing. Vicki later said she'd felt the networks were not calling the election for Bush only for fear of repeating the Florida fiasco of four years earlier. I called Hagan again. Nick Littlefield, a top lawyer in Boston and former staff director of my committee, was there, and he talked to Hagan. Michael Myers, our friend and current committee staff director, talked to Hagan. And then I talked to Hagan again and Tim said quietly, "I think we've lost it."
Almost at the same moment, Fox News called the election for Bush.
In the silence that followed, people began to leave the apartment to go home to bed. Soon Vicki and I were alone. It was well after midnight. I made a decision. "We're going to Louisburg Square," I told my wife, "to see John and Teresa."
It was a drizzly, dreary, humid, cold night in Boston, and close to 2:30 a.m. when we arrived. Gabby, the Kerrys' household assistant, met us at the door and told us that John and Teres
a had gone to bed. We offered to leave, but Gabby told us not to: "The senator will be upset if he knows you're here and he wasn't told." She went upstairs. A few minutes later, the defeated Democratic candidate for the presidency came down into the living room to greet us. Vicki spotted him first. "Gosh, Vicki, what a drag. This is a drag, isn't it?" he said as Vicki hugged him and said, "Boy, is it ever." I gave John a warm handshake and then an embrace. "My friend, how are you doing?" I asked him. He replied, "There are so many things I wanted to do for this country."
I was deeply moved by the reaction of this war hero who had fought so hard to win the election and who just hours earlier looked to all the world like he was going to be the next president of the United States. He wasn't bitter or angry. And he wasn't really focused on himself. He was down about the opportunities lost to move the country in a new, more progressive direction. I shared his disappointment. We had worked so hard, and come so close.
The reelection of President Bush meant that it would be another four years before there might be a great leader in the White House. In my nearly fifty years of public life, we have not had a president as successful as FDR. The closest we've come (family relations excluded) is Lyndon Johnson. Civil rights was the issue of our time. He picked up that unfinished work and ensured the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. If he hadn't, we certainly wouldn't be where we are today. We certainly wouldn't have the president we have today. Lyndon Johnson knew how to work Congress and move things forward to achieve his goal of a Great Society.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 51
