Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  This was my dilemma: I couldn’t imagine a rivalry or a tension-filled relationship with Ted, but I also couldn’t imagine quietly waiting and waiting and waiting until I was in my sixties to have a voice in the U.S. Senate. I had arrived in the Senate among a special class, at least as we saw it. In our own way, we thought of ourselves as agents of change. We all thought we were going to change the world—Tom Harkin, Al Gore, Jay Rockefeller, Paul Simon and a lone Republican from Kentucky named Mitch McConnell, who was the first of his party elected to the Senate from that state since Reconstruction. Tom Harkin had been in the House and, before that, a Hill staffer himself. Al Gore was the son of southern political royalty. Jay Rockefeller, in addition to having served as one of the youngest governors in the country before he had turned forty, had first come to West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer and fallen in love with Appalachia. He carried all the weight of being born with the name “John D. Rockefeller IV.” None of us intended to be seen and not heard. Moreover, in an age of competitive and increasingly expensive Senate races, of special interest groups issuing more and more scorecards of votes and legislation, and with C-SPAN cameras set to be installed covering the Senate floor a year after we arrived, our constituents would not allow us the liberty of waiting as quiet understudies, deferring any effort to make a mark. There was a pressure to produce now. Somehow, I had to make my moves, to breathe fresh air into my ideas, even in a Senate that rewards longevity, not new ideas, and with Ted Kennedy as my partner, not my rival. I had to find my own way.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE first Senate road maps I was offered came amid a rookie senator rite of passage: an audience with the Democratic leader and Senate minority leader, the legendary Robert C. Byrd. I didn’t know much then about this now venerated figure from West Virginia, other than that in 1971—just a few months before I’d testified against the war—he had seemingly come out of nowhere to unseat Ted Kennedy as the Senate Democratic whip, the number two position in leadership behind then Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. He was well to the right of Kennedy and had cut a decidedly different profile on issues like civil rights that animated my generation; but the whip job was a nuts-and-bolts position requiring many hours just manning the Senate floor and the cloakroom, understanding all the nooks and crannies of Senate procedure and the sweeteners potentially required to win enough votes to turn bills and resolutions into laws.

  Robert Byrd had mastered all the institutional minutiae of the Senate—much of it no doubt learned at the right hand of two mentors: his first, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and Rayburn’s disciple, whom Byrd backed for president in 1960, then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson. Senator Byrd skillfully parlayed his tutorials into the next step up the ladder. By 1984, at sixty-seven, he was the top Democrat in the Senate and an able foil to the Republican majority leader, Bob Dole.

  We met in the leader’s ornate office in the Capitol. Still to this day, I remember Byrd well, his full head of perfectly coiffed hair, not yet completely white as it would turn over the next quarter century. He was resplendent in a robin’s-egg-blue suit and a tie a smidge wider than the narrower cut that was becoming popular at the time, as if he had no interest or intention of changing along with popular tastes. He had the big smile and courtly manner I’d expected, but I knew it belied a sophistication and a cunning that was by then already legendary among my colleagues.

  We sat facing each other in upholstered wing chairs, not far from a framed copy of an album recorded several years before, Mountain Fiddler, a collection of his favorite tunes played on a fiddle and even sung by none other than Robert C. Byrd. Leaning in, pronouncing every word with his distinct baritone, Byrd was patient and solicitous of me as a freshman senator. He told me about his friendship with Ted Kennedy and his warm relationship with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts icon preparing one final hurrah in Congress.

  From the moment we sat down, though, I sensed Byrd also had an agenda beyond the pleasantries: he was well known as a defender of the Senate’s institutions and traditions, but surely, he also understood that this class of freshman senators was determined to make a mark, and I think he wanted to meet us all halfway, to encourage us to spread our wings a bit, but to do so within the confines of the institution. He probably also wanted to ensure he had our backing in two years when he’d be running for reelection as leader—next time, perhaps, for majority and not minority leader.

  When Tom Harkin, Al Gore and I compared notes on our initial individual meetings with Byrd, we all noted that he’d sprinkled in the same piece of wisdom he no doubt had shared with incoming senators for a long time: “A big man can make a small job important.” None of us had signed up for a small job, but Byrd hadn’t just thrown out a morsel of homespun wisdom; his words meant something much more interesting, much more compelling, and they got my attention. He explained to me that if you persistently worked an issue that your colleagues knew was critical for you, particularly if it mattered to you back home, or if it reflected your expertise, that if you exhausted the remedies available to you, mastered the procedures of the Senate and really took the time to understand the Senate’s rhythms, you could achieve something beyond your own seniority. “The rhythms of the Senate” became a magical phrase to me and others. What he meant was common sense. For example: as a Thursday late afternoon turned to Thursday evening and colleagues rushed to make flights so they could get home to campaign or meet with constituents, if there was “must-pass” legislation on the calendar, then, done correctly, within the system, applying the right amount of pressure at the right time might well open up accomplishments outstripping the power that mere seniority offered.

  It was the first time I’d heard how procedure, working the process, could be the great equalizer among senators. A senator at one of these moments might call on the leader to be recognized, to offer an amendment or demand a recorded vote, to exercise a senator’s prerogatives, and that was a source of leverage. Maybe you wouldn’t get your amendment accepted right there and then, but you might unlock a guarantee of a hearing, or a vote on the next debate, or some important concession. Byrd offered a warning, though: it was a break-the-glass option to be held in reserve, after all the normal channels had been worked. It was a currency best spent cautiously and sparingly.

  The rules were open to all senators to pursue to maximum effect, but the Senate ran on relationships and on an unspoken code of conduct that frowned on show horses and shortcuts. You didn’t surprise your colleagues—at least those in your caucus—at the eleventh hour.

  I tucked these lessons away in the back of my mind. This man of the Senate, who had taught himself to read by candlelight growing up in coal country and carried a copy of the Constitution with him at all times, was sharing with me the rules that weren’t written down but were nonetheless essential to making progress in the Senate.

  Byrd also shared with me two other lessons that hit home for different reasons. Perhaps not knowing that, while not yet divorced, I remained separated from Julia, he told me that one essential building block of being a good senator was maintaining a happy home. It came from the most personal place of all for Leader Byrd: orphaned at age one after his mother died, he’d been married to Erma Byrd since 1937—six years before I’d even come into this world. Byrd could count on two hands the number of nights he’d been away from home in the Virginia (not West Virginia) suburbs, even as he had been the Democratic leader, with all the demands of fund-raising and politics. Unspoken was the fact that he’d seen colleagues come and go, many succumbing to the long hours and lost weekends, too many who had come to the Senate with families, lost that connection to their wives and kids, and ended up unhappy in life or even ineffective as senators.

  The leader couldn’t have imagined the juggling act I was engaged in, racing to be back in Massachusetts for the weekends, Julia and I trading off our time, the holidays no longer spent as a family under one roof, the lonely feelin
g when I came home to my empty Capitol Hill row house.

  Although I wasn’t about to share with Senator Byrd the challenges and complications of my life at that time, I took his words to heart, knowing they were genuine, even if they stung more than a little bit and even if I didn’t have any good answers or remedies for the difficulties of the present moment.

  The second lesson from our meeting came shortly after the now familiar buzzer sounded announcing a quorum call. As I shook Leader Byrd’s hand, preparing to let him get back to the pressing business of minority leader, he said, in his classic West Virginia drawl, “Wait. Before you go I have some pic monay for ya.” He walked over to his beautifully carved desk and reached into an elegant bowl.

  Pic monay? I thought. What on earth is pic monay?

  Byrd held an envelope toward me. “It is a crahm how expensive campaigns are getting, and I know yo’ah reelection begins faave minutes after yo’ah swoan in,” he said warmly, as he reached out and put the envelope in my hand.

  It suddenly dawned on me that he was saying “PAC money.” He was giving me a check from his political action committee to help with my reelection. Byrd had no reason to know that I had run for the Senate by refusing PAC money of any kind and trying to make campaign finance reform an issue. An awkward moment ensued, at least on my end, as I mulled my options. Did I just pocket the check? Return it to one of the leader’s aides later? The clerk for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had briefed those of us new to the committee about the best way to navigate uncomfortable situations when traveling overseas and being offered traditional gifts by foreign leaders: we could accept them graciously, bring them to the Foreign Relations Committee upon our return, along with official paperwork denoting “accepted gift to avoid diplomatic offense,” and then have the gifts whisked away to some dusty Senate archive, never to be seen again, without ever insulting a gracious foreign minister or head of state.

  There was no such office of protocol in the Senate to handle awkward moments like these between colleagues. “Mr. Leader,” I said, “that’s very generous of you, but you know I actually ran for the Senate without accepting any PAC money, and . . .” My voice trailed off a bit as I searched for an easy way to slide out of a tricky moment while still acknowledging the leader’s intended gift. I tried a smile. “Well, I don’t think the first thing I should do now that I’m elected is, um . . .” The moment felt like it lasted an eternity.

  Senator Byrd let me off the hook: he looked at me quizzically, touched me on the shoulder and walked me to the door. He insisted that he himself hoped to see real campaign finance reform in the next Congress, and sure enough, just three years later as majority leader, he would allow the Senate to be all but shut down through a fifty-three-hour filibuster that revealed the Republicans’ determination not to enact anything resembling reform.

  That day, however, my lesson had to do with the extent to which one’s best efforts to stake out a position in any campaign can look and feel quite different when faced with actual governing and the reality of relationships. I’d been sincere about refusing PAC money, and I was proud of the race I’d run and won without it. But now, here I was, face-to-face with the Senate minority leader, with whom I agreed on probably 90 percent of the issues, and I couldn’t accept his PAC check to help my reelection; but just fifteen feet outside his office, walking the halls, were paid lobbyists who could write a check to me as individuals. I wondered: Where’s the appropriate line to draw to make anything more than a rhetorical point?

  The absurdity hit me: in earnestly trying to take a stand, I’d actually created an artificial distance between me and my new colleagues over a minimal difference. I realized the Senate would never be free of the impact of money—the truly corrosive kind, the kind that disconnected people from their government—until we actually insisted on greater public financing of campaigns and made the whole system fairer. The obstacle to making that happen wasn’t a campaign contribution from the Senate leader.

  Instead we were trapped in a broken system. Ronald Reagan was president; we Democrats were in the minority; and it was time to let the distinguished minority leader get back to his real job, which didn’t include a long harangue on “pic monay.” Byrd put the envelope back in the bowl.

  “Wait, I have something else for you,” he said. Since I’d already found a way to screw up the first gesture of goodwill between me and the minority leader, I wondered what it could possibly be. He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a book. His favorite analysis of the Constitution? I wondered. A treatise on the Senate? Either of these seemed likely from a man who was the institution’s resident historian. He placed the book in my hand, its plastic binding immediately recognizable, and tapped my hand: “Something for Mrs. Kerry,” he said with a smile. It was a copy of the Robert C. Byrd West Virginia cookbook.

  My reelection might cost $10 million, but now at least I had a recipe book and a priceless tutorial on both senatorial courtesy and the Senate itself.

  • • •

  IF KENNEDY AND Byrd had helped me understand a new environment, something else was pulling me back toward the place I’d come from and probably still felt most comfortable: activism on issues of war and peace.

  On Thursday, April 18, 1985, three months after we were sworn in as freshman senators, Iowa’s Tom Harkin and I boarded a plane to Managua, Nicaragua.

  We were flying on TACA Airlines. We joked that with its safety record it probably stood for “Take A Chance Airlines,” but, politically, that’s also what we were doing. Tom and I were the most freshman of freshmen senators, but we both came to the Senate animated by our concern for American involvement in the wars in Central America. We wanted to see and understand for ourselves a Cold War proxy battle right in our own hemisphere that had echoes of the war that defined our formative years. President Reagan was seeking congressional approval to provide military assistance to the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist government. His secretary of state, George Shultz, had even written to Congress inviting all members to go to Nicaragua and see what was happening for themselves. This was invitation enough for Tom and me.

  We came from different backgrounds. Tom had grown up in a small Iowa town built by Catholic immigrants. Years later, I would travel there as a presidential candidate and see for myself that the community’s pride in Tom still ran deep. It was similar to places in Massachusetts where whole neighborhoods stay forever connected, the kind of connection I’d missed out on because of my father’s nomadic diplomatic lifestyle. Tom didn’t have it easy. He lost his mother at age ten and watched the struggles of an older brother who was deaf in the days before America fully understood its responsibility to provide equal access to those of different abilities. An ROTC scholarship sent Tom to Iowa State, and he became a skilled Navy pilot.

  In 1969, just as I was coming home from combat in Vietnam, Tom’s real confrontation with the war began. He was working for one of Iowa’s congressmen, Neal Smith. Tom traveled to Southeast Asia with other congressional staff to Con Son Island on a fact-finding mission. He was horrified to see the way our ally was brutally holding enemy prisoners captive in tiger cages. It was a moment of conscience. He saw in the South Vietnamese military a brutality not dissimilar from that of the Viet Cong. Tom took a series of photos and leaked them to Life magazine. He wanted the country to see what was happening. It could have cost Tom his job; instead, it created a groundswell of activism and helped Tom win a seat in Congress a few years later among the Watergate class of 1974. Ten years later, he was a senator.

  Given the parallel paths we’d traveled, the different journeys we’d taken to similar conclusions, it made sense for our paths to converge. We both knew from experience the importance of not automatically swallowing official Washington’s version of events. We wanted to see for ourselves what was actually happening in a conflict tearing Nicaragua apart. We needed to better understand the ways in which the United States might get involved.

  Some of t
he parallels to Vietnam were obvious. The United States had supported the Somoza government for decades as a bulwark against communism in our neighborhood. We had looked the other way as its paramilitary forces violated human rights with impunity. Within a large portion of the country, those forces were corrupt and unpopular, but so too were the insurgents who had sprung up and deposed them. Known as the Sandinistas and led by Daniel Ortega, they clearly modeled themselves on the Castros and any number of Marxist leaders of the era. As the Sandinistas forced their will on the Nicaraguan people, a counterrevolution grew in response. The opposition, known as the Contras, and including many former Somoza regime dead-enders, had launched a guerrilla war in an attempt to regain control. The Soviets, of course, were thrilled to have a client state—another one—right in our hemisphere.

  From my vantage point, it was far from a simple black-and-white battle of good versus evil. Even then it felt much more like a classic choice between shades of gray. Were the Contras fighting the communists? Yes. On the other hand, many credible reports surfaced that the Contras had been committing violent human rights abuses. I worried that they were the kind of ally that would become a real liability in the long run. President Reagan argued the case in terms that hit a little too close to home, talking of a “domino theory” in our own hemisphere. It was the same talk that had led us down a tragic path before. Both Tom and I knew too many close friends whose names were on the granite Wall in Washington as a result of that thinking. Given the road we had both traveled, it was difficult, if not impossible, to accept anyone else’s word about what was really happening. We felt compelled to engage in our own reconnaissance and due diligence.

  Our goal was not only to inform our vote, but also to explore whether there was a better policy to put in place. Rather than a false choice of either backing the Contras all out or doing nothing, there might be a different approach that could actually benefit Nicaragua and the hemisphere. Peace talks had been stalled for months. Could they resume?