Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Our freshman year, the Harvard-Yale football game was in Cambridge. I drove up in the Bug, got outrageously inebriated in the stands of the stadium, somehow found my way to campus, where at some point in the evening I passed out. When I came to I figured it was time to go home. I got in the Bug and started to drive, when I at least had the presence of mind to know that this was not a good idea. I was not going to make it home. So I somehow parked the car and made my way back to my cousin’s room in Eliot House, where I fell asleep among the many making a regular parade to throw up in the bathroom.

  When I woke up in the morning, I smelled bad enough to scare myself. I drove home to Groton, where I worked through a three-day hangover. I am happy to say that only once since then—in Vietnam—did I ever pass out from drinking again, and I have never had even a sip of the same hard liquor since 1962. The aroma alone is enough to bring back bad memories.

  Sometime in that first fall at Yale, I met David Thorne. We were walking on the Old Campus near our rooms. The conversation quickly focused on his attendance at Groton School and his family’s life in Rome, Italy, where his dad was the publisher of the Rome Daily American. David was the first person I met at Yale who shared the experience of going to school in Switzerland while his family was overseas. We quickly compared notes only to find we had remarkably similar reactions to being sent to boarding school abroad at a very young age. Given the commonalities in our backgrounds—the European connection, our passion for soccer, our high school experiences and a similar view of the world—we struck up a fast and close friendship.

  Over spring vacation of freshman year, David and I decided to make the first of what would become many trips together. The civil rights movement was increasingly grabbing our attention as marches or sit-ins challenged the shame of segregation. It was hard to believe that we lived in a country that asked a black man to go fight for his country but wouldn’t allow that same person to vote, or go to a certain school, or use a bathroom or lunch counter the same way whites did. I still find it hard to digest that in my lifetime we were a segregated nation.

  David and I decided to take a spring break trip through the segregated South to Florida and then race back to Vermont for a few days of skiing. It was more than slightly crazy, but many of us enjoying the first freedoms of college wore that label proudly.

  We crossed the line between North and South, where we both saw “White Only” and “No Colored” signs for the first time in our lives. It was incredibly jarring. At St. Paul’s, in the Senior Year Speaking Contest, I had delivered the winning speech in a hard-hitting summary of events in the South. I had talked about the “revolution” in our own country, but now, a year later, here I was walking into a building where a “White Only” sign was prominently displayed, seeing human beings actually forced to separate on the basis of skin color, taking in the expressionless look on the faces of the African Americans I saw go into “their” facilities—it all turned my stomach and made me wonder even more how this could be the United States of America in 1963.

  Through North Carolina and Georgia and into Florida this scene repeated itself. It seemed impossible to me that anyone thought they could prevent the inexorable yearning of people to be free, to enjoy the same full rights as others in the same country living under the same Constitution. Little did I know what I would witness in the turbulent and violent next years. The screaming, mad-dog looks of white students shouting insults at young black women trying to walk into school, protected by state troopers or federal troops, infuriated me. And when Bull Connor unleashed the dogs and billy clubs, I felt ashamed for all of us.

  • • •

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1963, right after my freshman year, I came mighty close to being killed. It was luck that I wasn’t. Harvey and I had flown to London to pick up the Austin-Healey 3000 his father had given him in recognition of his successful transition from Groton to Yale and the completion of his freshman year. We planned to drive through England and France—and who knows where else. We picked up the car and drove 45 mph for five hundred miles, because in those days cars needed to be broken in. We had the car serviced after the break-in period and then departed for the ferry in Portsmouth. From Le Havre we drove to Paris for Bastille Day and then on to Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria, driving through the night to arrive in the morning in Lech, where I had learned to ski. I wanted to surprise my boyhood ski instructor, Othmar Strolz, but we arrived so early that we had several hours to kill.

  Instead, as dawn lit up the mountains, we decided to climb one. For several hours we struggled up a steep and unbeaten path. When we seemed to have gone high enough and killed enough time, and could see the car as a miniature in the road below, we turned around and plunged downhill, jumping and leaping from foothold to foothold. It was exhilarating and exhausting.

  We then paid a wonderful early-morning visit to Othmar, an extraordinary man who had become far more than a ski instructor. He was a philosopher of the mountains and life. He loved the fun that came with skiing, but he taught me to respect the power and majesty of the mountains. He would tweak me when I got tired, saying, “Johnny, life is hard in the mountains,” goading me on to find more reserves in my body. I owe Othmar a lot for the joy of climbing well above the lifts to find pure, virgin, granular spring snow and then the rush of swooping down from one gully to another and winding up breathless on the valley floor, exhilarated by the vertical descent.

  Othmar gave me one other memorable, precious moment, which I have passed on to my children. Climb to the top of a mountain and just sit there. When the heaving of your breath has calmed down, stop and listen carefully to the silence. He is the only person who taught me to listen to silence.

  From there we went to Monte Carlo and then drove up to Brittany to spend time at Les Essarts. One night I had driven to Dinan, a beautiful, historic town twenty miles from the family house. I was accompanied by Peter Kornbluh, a classmate of Harvey’s and mine who was staying with us briefly at Les Essarts. We were driving back from a nightclub and were almost home, perhaps three miles from the house. As we approached a relatively pronounced left curve in the road that I knew pretty well, a car came from the other direction somewhat jutting into our lane. I moved over slightly to the right, and before I knew it my right wheels were trapped in the hedgerow ditch that ran alongside the road. The dirt began to pile up in front of the car, and suddenly I felt the back of the car lift up and move end over end to the front. We were flipping over. I felt the centrifugal force push against the seat belts with the dreadful realization that we were crashing and were about to be upside down. I have no recollection of how we landed or what happened as we hit the ground. I do think I heard a massive scraping sound and then a skid along the road for a few yards, followed by total silence.

  When I came to, I heard people yelling that the car might blow up. I reached for Peter but didn’t feel him next to me. I undid my seat belt, felt my body drop to the ground and crawled out of the car. I walked a few yards away and lay down on the ground. I heard people again talking about how the car might catch on fire. I got up and walked back to the car to take the keys out of the ignition. I checked on Peter, who was sitting on the ground too but seemed to be okay. He was incredibly calm and collected. Then I lay down again and waited for an ambulance to come.

  I never feared that I was so wounded I was in jeopardy, but I was furious at the oncoming car, horrified for Harvey at what had happened to his beautiful Austin-Healey. It was totaled. We were quickly transported to the hospital. Peter was released almost immediately, but the doctors kept me for an extra day, during which a regular parade of my cousins marched through the Dinard hospital to inspect the example of what not to do.

  A few weeks later I returned to the States to start fall term. I have never stopped thinking how lucky I was to be alive. I had flipped over and landed upside down in a convertible. If my head had been in the wrong place as we went over the front end, it would have been crushed in the landing. Or Peter o
r I could have been thrown out of the car and been killed or paralyzed. For years, because of this or Vietnam or any number of other close calls, I have never stopped being grateful for the grace of God that spared me. It was the first time I became aware I was lucky to be living extra days.

  Freshman year I had avoided soccer in order to focus on ice hockey. I made the freshman hockey team, played center on the second line, got my numerals at the end of the season, but in the end, I decided I missed playing soccer. So in the fall of sophomore year, I tried out for varsity soccer. David Thorne and I had missed connecting during the summer, but he invited me to his family’s place on Long Island before reporting to practice in New Haven, where he was pretty much assured a place on the team, having played as a freshman.

  In late August I rolled up to the Thorne house in my borrowed family VW bus. I had so much junk I was taking to Yale that it could only fit in the bus—plus my faithful friend Faustus the parakeet, who lived with us freshman year. I was a little embarrassed by my traveling circus—but not that much. David walked out of the house to greet me, but my eyes were on a dark-haired girl in a small bikini who walked out behind him. “John, this is my sister Judy—Judy, my friend John Kerry.” I was instantly intrigued. More powerfully so when we cruised around the property with Judy hanging on to the roof rack while standing on the rear bumper of the moon-equipped VW David and I had driven down south, all the while singing “500 Miles” at the top of her lungs. I was impressed and curious about this woman who lived in New York and Italy.

  This was my first encounter with Julia Thorne. We saw each other a few times in the course of sophomore year. I grew more interested, but our lives were on totally different schedules, she working in Italy for RAI, the Italian TV station, and me stuck at Yale, three years from even beginning a life beyond school. She was jetting back and forth to Rome. I was living in New Haven, making friends of a lifetime in a small universe. Sophomore year was punctuated with sporadic Julia sightings and brief rendezvous that just whetted my appetite.

  At Yale, the tryouts for the soccer team were brutal. We were doing double practices, meaning two sessions a day. Between the morning and afternoon sessions my muscles would tighten up, and by the time evening rolled around, I could barely walk. It was even worse the next morning, in part because I had shown up in the worst shape I’d ever been in as a result of my accident in France just a month before returning to school. Somehow, I made the team.

  One of the unexpected benefits of playing soccer was reuniting with Dick Pershing. We had last seen each other at Fessenden School. Dick had gone on to Phillips Exeter Academy and then a postgraduate year at Lawrenceville. Dick shared with David Thorne and me the experience of a too-young exposure to boarding school in Switzerland. All of us had been introduced to soccer there—football, as they called it, the Beautiful Game. I didn’t have much interaction with him freshman year, but now that we were playing on the same team, we began to hang out. “Persh,” as we called him, was an incredibly gifted, natural athlete. He was also something of an iron man, capable of drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, staying up late and partying and yet never giving out on the playing field, always running as hard and playing as energetically as anyone. None of us knew how he did it. He was also a great prankster, livening up practice with antics that kept even our taciturn Scottish coach smiling. One day, we memorably stuffed Persh into a laundry hamper, carried him out to the field on our shoulders while chanting some absurd made-up war chant on the way and deposited the basket in the middle of the field to watch the top slowly open and Persh rise to cheers and jeers. The moment was pure nonsense, but the smiles and laughter were worth the absurdity.

  Friday, November 22, marked the beginning of Harvard-Yale weekend. It began innocently enough. A headline in the Yale Daily News was calculated to get your attention: “Miss USA to Smooch Smoochers When ‘News’ [the Yale Daily] Beats Harvard.” A picture of Miss USA made sure you at least glanced at the story.

  Sometime in the midmorning, I took the athletic department bus out to the Yale Bowl to change into my soccer uniform and warm up for the game against Harvard—the most important game for either team. Beat Harvard and you ended the season on the right note.

  Autumn was at its New England best, boasting a clear, bright, crisp fall day. I was excited to be playing my first varsity matchup with Harvard. A dynamic Nigerian named Chris Ohiri played for Harvard. He was a formidable player, the high scorer of the Ivy League, reputed to have knocked out a goalie with the force of one of his kicks.

  Sometime after 1:30, I was substituted and returned to the bench. We were about twenty-five minutes into the game when a murmur went through the crowd. It built to a crescendo that ended with voices calling out, “The president’s been shot!” The words struck like a shot itself. No one seemed to believe it at first, even as the words were repeated endlessly.

  At 1:36, ABC Radio issued a national bulletin: President Kennedy had been seriously wounded when shots had been fired at his motorcade. Four minutes later, CBS TV followed with the first nationally televised report of an assassination attempt. Before long there was complete consternation in the stands, a kind of controlled chaos, with stunned faces looking around blankly, clearly not knowing what to do next. It was impossible to focus on the game or even imagine that we were going to play on.

  President Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, at 1:00 p.m., Central Standard Time—2:00 p.m. our time. The news was incomprehensible, and we all looked at each other for answers and consolation.

  Until I sat down to write this account I did not remember who won the game. I didn’t even remember if we finished the game. I looked in the Yale Daily News archives and learned that we lost 3–2. The story said, “The game was not cancelled because it had been in progress for 25 minutes when President Kennedy’s assassination first became known.”

  From the minute we returned to our room after the game, Danny, Harvey and I spent the next three or four days hardly moving away from the small black-and-white TV in the living room of our suite. We were transfixed. Each image from those sorrowful days was indelibly imprinted in our minds forever—the live shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby; the president’s coffin lying in state in the White House and the Capitol; the Kennedy family and world leaders marching behind the caisson; John Jr. saluting his father from the steps of the cathedral.

  My cousin Serita Winthrop, who was attending college nearby, knew I had met the president and worked for Ted Kennedy, so she jumped in her car and came to Yale to share in the shock of what had happened. We walked around and around the immediate streets surrounding the college, talking into the wee hours of the morning, trying to understand what had happened. I remember saying to her that no matter what, we all had an obligation to work to make this right—whatever it took. That is the night I made a commitment to myself that I would pursue a life in public affairs. I didn’t know what I would do or how I would make a difference, but I vowed I would.

  • • •

  AS THE SUMMER of 1965 approached, I was already thinking about graduation one year away. While I didn’t know specifically what I wanted to do afterward, I was pretty certain this would be my last “free” summer, a time when I could indulge my thirst for the “freedom of the road”—an instinct I first enjoyed riding my bike in Berlin and later through England and France.

  I had worked my tail off the previous summer, selling Collier’s Encyclopedia door-to-door in Massachusetts. It was tedious, even hard work, walking a neighborhood in the dead of summer with dogs and kids nipping at your heels, carrying a briefcase filled with demo books and performing the carefully choreographed presentation Collier’s field office taught its salespeople to employ.

  There I was, decked out in jacket and tie, briefcase and all, walking door-to-door in unfamiliar neighborhoods. I felt there were two worlds: the one where they were enjoying a warm summer’s night at the drive-in and the one where I was knocking like crazy
on doors, waiting to see whether an unfriendly oddity answered and rudely sent me packing.

  As tedious and challenging as it was, selling encyclopedias was a wonderful “people” education. We salesmen would each develop our own style, plugging in variations on the rote sales pitch we had been taught. We would do everything possible to convince Mom or Dad that these reservoirs of knowledge were going to empower their kids to do anything they wanted. It’s hard even to imagine this in the current world of the internet, but without the modern-day availability of unlimited information, having your own encyclopedia was a gold mine. I was able to spice up my presentation by talking about my own experience with our encyclopedia at home in Washington. I did love it and used it all the time. The reality is, without the internet or a trip to the library, it provided an instantaneous journey to far-off places. My conviction was genuine.

  I learned a lot from this job. Walking into someone’s home unannounced—if they let me in—was an amazing inside view of a daily, completely impromptu slice of life. In fact, just getting into a house required establishing some measure of trust. The presentation—depending on how far you got—took from forty-five minutes to an hour. During this time, there were usually a dozen interruptions for dogs, children, friends and personal stories. Sometimes people wanted to unload about their lives or life itself. Later, when I was running for office, I thought about the lessons I learned on this job. It taught me a lot about listening, watching body language, understanding someone’s realities and knowing when to fold, pack up my bags and leave. It was good training for anyone.