by John Kerry
There was another reason things were not easy as Teresa and I developed our relationship. She had had a love affair of twenty-seven-plus years violently terminated by a senseless accident. By definition any accident is senseless; some are more senseless than others. When it truly comes out of the blue, is totally avoidable, it seems unthinkable, and it is even harder to come to terms with the aftermath. Even though two years had passed, I certainly felt the weight of Teresa’s loss. And I was only a few years beyond the final divorce decree, had been seeing another woman off and on, and was uncertain about a new, serious relationship.
Whatever wounds or baggage we both carried, time began to work its will. More and more we wanted to be together and made sure we were. We slipped into sharing our lives on a regular basis and, as we did, it began to change both of our outlooks. She more than me initially, but we could both feel a healing and a new set of possibilities emerge.
We began to grow closer as we shared different aspects of our lives. Teresa had boys. I had girls. We found pleasure in exploring the not-so-obvious differences. We found a common bond in our interests—appreciation for travel, for exploring different cultures; for cooking and enjoying a great meal with great wine; for architecture and music; for politics and the environment. Teresa, who was born in Mozambique of Portuguese ancestry, was Mediterranean and African at the same time—full of curiosity, passionate and caring.
One September we traveled to Europe. We stopped in London before we went to Paris, rented a car and drove to Brittany so I could introduce her to Les Essarts. It was the best of early fall, trees just beginning to color, still warm, still long evenings. On the way, I diverted to take her to the beaches of Normandy. She had never been there. I wanted her to see the staggering beauty and have her feel and share the same awe I felt every time I visited.
Because it was September, there weren’t that many people. The setting is always breathtaking. And when you are walking almost by yourselves amid the crosses and Stars of David, noting the dates of death and the names engraved on the headstones, the emotional and historical sweep of the place overwhelms you. We went all the way down to a near-deserted part of the beach where troops had broken through on D-Day. There we sat on some rocks at the edge of the beach. The tide was rising and we measured each wave as it reached closer and closer to the rocks.
The entire time we were there, mesmerized by the stillness and the beauty, an older gentleman and, we presumed, his wife were sitting together in an embrace, looking out at the water, not moving, lost in thought. I am certain he was a returned veteran, someone who survived that extraordinary landing, someone who had come back to find peace and perhaps remember the friends he had lost at that very place. Quietly, but deliberately, he stood up. He took off his clothes piece by piece. Then, completely naked, with a squeeze of his wife’s hand he walked straight out into the water. Unabashed. Unembarrassed. Without awareness of anybody watching, lost in his memories and the moment. He seemed to be performing a ritual purification, allowing the waves to carry him in and out as they had once washed soldiers’ bodies back and forth until the dead were finally recovered after the fighting on the beach.
Teresa and I, holding hands, watched in silence. We were frozen in that spot on the beach as if for an eternity. To this day it is one of the most touching, beautiful moments we have ever witnessed together. It was mystical and a gift.
Not long afterward, back home in Boston, Teresa and I started a conversation about our lives together. Without a formal proposal, it just became self-evident: this was our life—we were going to be together. There was no “if.” Over Memorial Day weekend, on May 26, 1995, with our families and friends present at her house on Nantucket, we were married. It was an outdoor ceremony on a cool, windy day. We chose Nantucket because it was a place with special meaning for both of us. Teresa and Jack had brought their kids to the island from the earliest days of their lives together. They started out as renters, then poured their hearts into the rebuilding of their own home. Their boys had grown up enjoying Nantucket long before it became more popular and populated. I had sailed in many times with my father and, through the years, had enjoyed many weekends with friends there. The Cape and islands were in my blood from my youngest days. For both of us, the day packed emotions well beyond the joy of marriage. It was a melding of past, present and future.
Johnny, Andre and Chris sang a wonderful German song in honor of their Heinz heritage. Alexandra and Vanessa read poems and Scripture. Teresa and I had written our vows, and once exchanged, we enjoyed a spectacular meal in Siasconset. The next day we took off for Napa Valley for the five days we could get away before returning to Washington.
• • •
TERESA AND I were getting settled as a newly married couple, blending our two families, learning how to split our lives between Boston, Washington and Pittsburgh.
We were working on our new home together in Massachusetts. I wanted her and her sons to feel perfectly at home in my city, and I was well aware that Boston can be a tough place for new people. Remodeling the brick town house we’d purchased together focused our energies on something we both enjoyed doing. It brought out the hidden architect in me. It was a special time, but also a period of adjustment. Teresa had a better sense of priorities than those I’d been living as a bachelor. Our early days together incorporated a new balance of expectations about work, family and time off from politics.
Through all of it, Teresa and I made sure we were preserving time for each other. Sometimes it was a weekend at her farm in Pittsburgh or a casual dinner near the Senate. On warm summer evenings, when I would be voting late into the night on Capitol Hill, Teresa would join me, and as soon as there was a window before the inevitable vote-a-rama, we’d sneak off. I’d put the top down on my well-worn silver Dodge convertible, and we’d drive over to Barracks Row for a quick dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran place that I’d discovered as a freshman senator. These simple escapes were enjoyable for both of us, but maybe especially for me since, separated and then single with my kids, closest friends and family in Boston, Washington had always felt transient. It was a headquarters city, a business place where you were always on, always subject to being lobbied when out to dinner or at a show. I found there was no off switch in Washington. Teresa managed to soften that. It became more of a home and, with her, I felt more grounded there.
But that time was cut short, with a jolt: a rumor started to spread that Governor Bill Weld might be gearing up to challenge me for reelection to the Senate in 1996.
Suddenly, talk of “work-life balance” sounded like a distant aspiration.
If I wanted to keep my job serving Massachusetts, I had my work cut out for me. It would be a very different 24/7 balance, juggling fund-raising, campaigning, work in Washington and the need to be in Massachusetts every possible moment to translate that work back home.
Politics in Massachusetts is a celebrated tradition. The Kennedy family wrote many of those chapters, but they have good company. It’s no coincidence that the state has counted among its leading exports myriad presidential candidates from both parties, Speakers of the House and cabinet secretaries; Massachusetts tests and teaches those who tackle public life.
Among the national myths about Massachusetts is that it’s the bluest of blue states, a Democratic mainstay. Many assume that the state that gave America the Kennedys and elected Michael Dukakis must be impenetrably Democratic. But seven of our last ten governors have been Republicans. We were the second state in the nation to live through the property tax revolt—Proposition 21/2—and Ronald Reagan carried the state twice.
Enter Governor Bill Weld—central casting for a Bay State Republican chief executive.
William Floyd Weld’s family pedigree preceded him. Two buildings at Harvard were named after the Welds. After an audacious race for attorney general in Massachusetts, Bill joined the Reagan administration as a tough-on-crime federal prosecutor rooting out public corruption. Reagan promoted him to
a job at the Justice Department, where, coincidentally, our careers, if not our paths, intersected.
While I was a sophomore senator pushing for the United States to sever ties with a corrupt, narcotics-tainted Manuel Noriega in Panama, it was Weld who would ultimately be charged with handling the law enforcement elements of Noriega’s prosecution. Weld later joined other senior Justice Department officials in quitting in protest of Attorney General Edwin Meese’s financial misdeeds. It was an act of political courage. The glowing headlines earned Weld a hero’s return to Massachusetts as a candidate again, this time as an outsider gunning for the governor’s office.
The irony about Weld was that for all the blue-chip pedigree, his calling card was a disarming, devil-may-care demeanor. He was quirky in ways the media and the local pols found endearing. It’s almost as if there was “William F. Weld, United States Attorney,” and his alter ego, aptly nicknamed “Pink Floyd” by one of the local columnists. That other Bill Weld listened to the Grateful Dead, wrote fiction, played poker late into the night and happily copped to smoking weed in college. He had a head of shaggy red hair that almost passed for Irish. He didn’t care if a reporter had reason to wonder if he was hungover after a night of, in a famous Weld-ism, “enjoying amber-colored liquids.” He gave off an aura of charming flakiness. In 1990, an outsider’s year, I was running for reelection and Weld was the Republican nominee for governor. Weld was disciplined and stuck to a script of tax cuts, fiscal responsibility, welfare reform and crime fighting. On election night, voters split their tickets: I won convincingly with almost 55 percent of the vote, while Weld slipped by the Democratic nominee.
Weld and I had an immediate and easy rapport. We were the same generation and both former prosecutors, and we listened to the same music and spoke the same language. Our daughters were even in the same class at college. Shortly after he was elected, I asked Weld to join me in hosting a bipartisan economic summit on the state’s fiscal crisis. We put politics aside, dug into the issues, and it helped contribute to the goodwill Bill would enjoy with the Democratic legislature.
But four years later, Bill and I would see our political careers intersect again, only this time I was in his political crosshairs. He was reelected as governor in the Republican wave of 1994 with 71 percent of the vote, even as Massachusetts split its ticket: Ted Kennedy defeated a guy named Mitt Romney that same year by almost 20 points. Bill’s landslide victory made him a big national star in the Republican constellation. The Republican takeover of the House and Senate that year put Bill’s trademark issues front and center on the congressional agenda, and he started telling people that he wanted to go to Washington and join that Republican Revolution.
We were on a collision course.
From the start, it was going to be the country’s most closely watched Senate race. The day Bill announced in November 1995, any semblance of our past cooperation was erased. He said I “couldn’t have a worse voting record” and launched into a litany of votes he said demonstrated I “disagree with the people of Massachusetts” on the “most important questions of the day.” Just listening, my competitive instincts perked up.
I had been standing up to be counted again and again on issues I knew mattered to Massachusetts, speaking out when it wasn’t easy or popular, from the first speech I gave in 1970 at Concord-Carlisle High School in opposition to the Vietnam War. As a senator for eleven years, I’d been a lonely voice standing up for my convictions. I welcomed a debate about who was really in step with the conscience of Massachusetts.
But it was guaranteed to be a slog, and Weld had a daily home-field advantage. He was in Massachusetts every day, whereas I had to spend most of my time during the week in D.C., held hostage to a voting schedule I couldn’t control and to committee hearings and legislative markups where important work was happening, but in ways that couldn’t always connect to voters. I had to remind myself that the language of the Senate—“legislate-ese”—holds little meaning to the people who send us there. Campaigns are by definition an effort to translate issues into people’s lives.
That’s part of why running against a governor is a steep climb for a legislator. He could sign legislation in the morning in front of the television cameras, give a speech or hold a fund-raiser at lunch, and meet with mayors and local elected officials in the afternoon in time for ample coverage on the 6:00 p.m. newscast. I might be slugging it out in a legislative markup on the Commerce Committee, offering amendments to bring home federal dollars for the cleanup of our polluted waterways, while, in front of the television cameras, Weld jumped into the Charles River to demonstrate that the water was now clean. You can guess which narrative the media ate up.
But my competitive instincts took over. After the last vote on a weekday, I’d race to catch the last US Airways shuttle to Logan Airport, sometimes arriving with moments to spare to drop by a union hall or walk into the Channel 5 newsroom and speak about the work I was doing in Washington and why it mattered. Then, first thing the next morning, I’d try to swing by a workplace, a jobs site, a community center or a school, before racing again for the shuttle back to Washington. After a time, the National Republican Senatorial Committee caught on to the midweek sprint between Boston and Washington, and the pressure grew on Majority Leader Trent Lott to schedule more frequent “bed-check votes” to make it harder for Democrats in competitive races to shuttle between D.C. and their home state.
In unexpected ways, running against a governor like Bill Weld turned out to be a gift. It helped me relearn some of the lessons of politics that I’d taken for granted, lessons that didn’t come as naturally to me as they did to those who worked long apprenticeships in local politics before being elected to the Senate.
Before 1996, I thought the work spoke for itself. It was an activist’s instinct; all that mattered was the issue. For too many years, I would win on an amendment, succeed in securing an appropriation, and the staff would send out a press release. I assumed people knew what I was doing for them. But a bitter lesson retaught me a corollary to Tip O’Neill’s old adage that “all politics is local.” In Massachusetts, all politics is personal.
Bill Weld had a gift for the personal. He might cut the revenue going to cities and towns, but he knew to drop by the state senator’s birthday party, to show up at the Elks Lodge for the mayor’s campaign kickoff. I’d spent years racing for that first flight home on a Friday to be there, as a single dad, for Vanessa’s and Alex’s soccer games and plays at school. My years of being a policy shark—get it done, move on to the next challenge—caught up with me when Democratic mayors from Quincy and North Adams endorsed Weld. Why? Because they could see him, he was present. It was a reminder that ten-point plans and legislation get you only so far; if people can’t feel a connection to that politician on the other end of the line, all the work in the world can too easily be forgotten. I would never again underestimate the value of personal relationships.
But not everything in the campaign was a lesson learned the hard way; in fact, a certain set of personal relationships came roaring back to remind me of the blessings of a life fought in the activist trenches. Friends started showing up by the dozens to stand with me: friends from college, from the environmental movement, from anti-war days and from the Navy.
Chris Greeley had been with me since he drove me around the state on the 1982 campaign for lieutenant governor, and he could talk hockey and politics for hours. Chris was street-smart and funny. As he had been in 1972 and all the races before, John Marttila was back and I could always turn to him for candor. There was Ray Dooley, a Pied Piper political operative and chain-smoking ball of determination who approached campaigns like a field marshal. He dropped everything and came to my defense.
Ron Rosenblith was by my side, reminding me in the shorthand we shared from so many campaigns together just exactly what the fight was about: “It’s not just policy. People want someone who will stand up and fight for what makes a difference to them. It’s the stand-up guy test
. That’s you.” Ron was the ultimate stand-up guy himself, the same guy with the same moral compass I’d known since long before anyone would have thought I’d make it to the Senate.
Tommy Vallely, the Newton-born, straight-talking Marine who had spent hours driving in the car with me in 1972, showed up again—Infantryman Thomas J. Vallely. He had been a state representative before leaving politics to start the Vietnam Program at Harvard, where he would contribute enormously to the effort to change the relationship between our countries and really make peace. But Tom was putting all that on hold for this campaign, because Marines are forever loyal.
Ted Kennedy also sent reinforcements. He had been friends with Bob Shrum since he served as his press secretary in the Senate. Ted revered Bob as a writer and debater. The former collegiate debate star from Georgetown joined the team.
This team had an ability to distill politics down to big choices. They helped me suspend some senatorial habits. In the Senate, you succeed by mastering detail. Watch a good debate on the floor of the Senate, and you’ll see seasoned legislators discussing the minutiae of an issue. It’s how you get things done in an institution that can only function with consensus: you exhaust the ability of the other side to ask questions. I’d been a legislator for more than a decade. I was more removed from my prosecutorial days than Weld, whose rapid-fire, staccato attacks left you fighting for time to respond point by point. I was reminded that voters needed a reason to understand why I would be the better senator for them than Bill Weld. Rather than a pinprick at the capillary, we had to go for the jugular.
We decided to make this a race about what a senator would do for Massachusetts. At the height of the Republican Revolution, I’d be fighting with Ted Kennedy to raise the minimum wage, while Bill Weld, who had once called Newt Gingrich his “ideological soul mate,” would be fighting against Ted. The story was the same on student loans for middle-class kids to go to college, Medicare for senior citizens and the environmental fights that defined me. Weld was a genuine environmentalist in Massachusetts, but the reality was his first vote as senator would be to elect a majority leader who was gutting the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.
