by John Kerry
Late one morning, I spotted a ten-year-old reporter for a school newspaper eagerly waiting for me as I was leaving a campaign event to race for my flight. I stopped and bent down to say hello.
“Why should my parents vote for you and not Mr. Weld?” he asked earnestly, a tiny spiral notebook and pencil at the ready to record my answer. I told him, “Well, I’m fighting in Washington to pay for schools, and Bill Weld’s cutting schools in Massachusetts, and I’m fighting to raise the minimum wage so when you are in high school, you can make more money to save for college. My opponent is against those things. And I’m fighting for student loans so you won’t come out of college with too much debt. And that’s what this is about.”
I was locked in the conversation with the kid, as if it were just the two of us. I didn’t notice the swarm of cameras that had gathered around us. You didn’t have to be Robert Byrd to understand what a senator’s job was; you just had to remind yourself that the common denominator is people. Weld and I had our similarities and our differences, but at the end of the day, we had completely different philosophies about how you fight for a kid like the one who asked me the bedrock question. I’d found my footing.
It’s a funny thing in politics. When you get that rush of adrenaline, when it makes sense, you see straight ahead. The next event, the next fight, the next moment—there’s a clarity.
The clarity had arrived just in time. Billy Bulger’s St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast in South Boston is the Madison Square Garden of Massachusetts political theater, and Bill Weld and I had a date there on March 14, 1996. The breakfast in its heyday was less of a roast and more of a bonfire upon which plenty of political carcasses were thrown over the years. Florian Hall in Dorchester was the location, a command performance if you’re on the ballot—and especially if you don’t want to be on the menu.
Weld had an advantage. As a Republican making the pilgrimage to Dorchester among the Democrats, he got points just for showing up. For me, the bar would be set higher.
Politics in Boston is not for the faint of heart. I have had colleagues from many states where politics isn’t part of the culture; instead, their campaigns are mostly television ads and a few weeks of politicking after Labor Day.
Not so in Massachusetts.
No ritual was more iconic than Billy Bulger’s St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast at its peak. Bulger defined the breakfast’s place in political folklore. Bulger was fascinating. He was a self-made scholar—a “Triple Eagle” graduate of Boston College High, Boston College and Boston College Law School. He’d grown up in South Boston during the Depression and ruled as state senate president for nearly twenty years, a record which will never be broken.
Bulger’s wit was a powerful weapon. He could cut you to pieces with a one-liner, and he had a gift for limericks crafted for the occasion. Many of his best lines still left a mark.
“John F. Kerry. JFK. It stands for ‘Just. For. Kerry.’ ”
“The junior senator arrived late. But it wasn’t his fault. He got stuck on his way—in front of a mirror.”
“John Kerry was campaigning in the other part of his district—the Philippines.”
The crowd ate it up. Ridicule could be a great tool in American politics, and nowhere was it more skillfully deployed than in Florian Hall.
But it was an unusual event, quirky and tribal. There’s a great scene in The Departed where Frank Costello’s enforcer announces, “I’m the guy who tells you there are guys you can hit, and there’s guys you can’t hit.” It was that way at the Bulger Breakfast too. There were unwritten rules: there were things you could joke about and things that were off-limits.
Billy Bulger’s brother was one of the taboo subjects. James “Whitey” Bulger was the unrecognized elephant in the room of Billy’s life and political career. Whitey Bulger had done time in Alcatraz, come home to Southie and picked up where he had left off. He and his crew terrorized Boston. I had prosecuted members of the Winter Hill Gang and put Whitey’s cohort, Howie Winter, behind bars. In 1994, after he got a tip that he was about to be arrested, Whitey fled Boston. He would be on the lam for sixteen years.
There would be no jokes about South Boston’s most wanted fugitive as long as Billy ran the breakfast.
But in a business of big personalities and often even bigger egos, you could win over Billy’s crowd if you were willing to laugh the hardest at one person above all: yourself.
This time, however, I needed a partner.
The glare of the Senate campaign had been tough on Teresa, in part because it was so different from the kind of politics she’d known in Pittsburgh. In Pennsylvania, the Heinz name was synonymous with philanthropy and service. During Jack Heinz’s first reelection, when a broken leg kept him off the campaign trail, Teresa filled in for him and found people thoughtful and engaging. She was revered in Pittsburgh. In her life, she’d never experienced skeptical, let alone critical, press.
Not so in Boston, where gossip columns fixated on everything—her wealth, her accent, her last name, her partisan affiliation, our courtship.
I had a thick skin when it came to the little potshots. After all, I was the one who had chosen a life in politics. But I hated seeing Teresa receive the digs from the tabloids just because she had fallen in love with a senator from Massachusetts.
Some of it was astonishing. Boston was a city built by immigrants, yet the tabloids loved to poke fun at Teresa’s Portuguese accent. It was a state where women’s rights had long been championed, and yet the gossip columns obsessed over Teresa’s decision not to change her last name, the name that she had used for a quarter century since she was twenty-eight, the last name of her three sons. Wealthy lineages from Lodges to Kennedys were accepted without dwelling on their bank accounts, but somehow there was never a column that didn’t conspicuously describe Teresa as a “ketchup heiress” instead of portraying a person, let alone a warm, nurturing wife and mother. She could walk into a Portuguese bakery in Taunton and greet the cook behind the counter in their mutual language or talk fluently in wonkish detail with environmentalists and health care advocates, but somehow that never seemed to be the story.
A bruising Senate race is no way to introduce someone to a new state, let alone a marriage.
I was reminded that in campaigns, small things become big things. Teresa and I had moved to our new neighborhood on Beacon Hill and realized that with the occasional news trucks parked out front, we would soon be driving our neighbors crazy on a parking-deprived cobbled street. A fire hydrant smack in front of our house blocked a logical parking spot, so we decided to go through the city process to relocate the hydrant several feet away to the corner. Given the choice between annoying the neighbors and enduring the bureaucratic process, we opted for the latter. But someone immediately called the tabloids. It became a front-page story and a round of television coverage followed, with live shots filmed right in front of the house. So much for preserving peace in the neighborhood.
The St. Patrick’s Day breakfast was our chance to turn the tables.
When my turn came to speak, I wasn’t alone. Out from behind the curtain came Teresa—a surprise guest walking into Billy Bulger’s lion’s den. Under her arm, Teresa carried a big plastic fire hydrant.
The crowd was laughing and clapping in spite of themselves.
When the laughter died down, I turned to Teresa and, in our best George Burns and Gracie Allen imitation, I asked her whether she was happy to be living in Massachusetts.
“Oh yes, I love Massachusetts,” she deadpanned to the audience. “How much is it?”
The crowd exploded in laughter.
That was the morning Teresa won over the doubters. A laugh can go a long, long way.
But I still had miles to go in the Senate race.
Both Bill Weld and I had reasons to be worried about the potential impact of money in the race. Our race would be one of the most watched in the nation, with every expectation that it would be decided in the closing weeks. That would ma
ke it a magnet for donors and outside interest group spending. I was concerned that outside Republican groups might perceive a rare opportunity to defeat an incumbent Democrat in Massachusetts. Bill Weld, on the other hand, worried my campaign would spend Teresa’s money.
Weld and I were both independent-minded enough to wonder whether there might be a way to protect our interests and ensure that, even in a contentious, high-profile race, money didn’t win. We could keep circling each other warily—Bill challenging me to keep the Heinz family money off-limits, me challenging Bill to eschew third-party advertising. Could we do something really radical and reason together?
That’s exactly what we did. I don’t remember who called whom first, but soon we started to talk, and after a few conversations, I invited him to our home in Beacon Hill. Together, in my living room, we hammered out a deal on campaign spending. We agreed to cap our total spending at $6.9 million each, with no more than $5 million going toward TV and newspaper ad buys. Importantly, we both agreed to refrain from using third-party money. We asked the press not to carry campaign ads on our behalf from outside groups. If, notwithstanding our request, an independent organization put out a negative ad, we pledged that the candidate whom the ad supported would deduct the cost of that ad from our agreed-upon budget; this served as incentive for us to do all we could to prevent outside parties from jumping into the fight.
It was the first time in modern political history that two candidates for statewide office voluntarily came to such an arrangement—and, for the most part, it worked. Sure, we traded combative press releases at various points and fought over the fine print. But at the end of the day, it made our race different.
Of course, our agreement didn’t cover the quality or content of the advertising. We reached the spending agreement in early August. Bill started bulking up his TV ad buys shortly thereafter, filling the airwaves with blistering attacks on me. I remember that they always seemed to picture me with a five o’clock shadow, a little seedy. By mid-August, Bill was ahead in a public poll for the first time.
Nowhere else in the country that year was there a Senate race pitting two well-known, popular and politically capable candidates against each other—candidates with similar strengths and unusual backgrounds.
Both of our campaigns believed we had an interest in getting in front of as many statewide audiences as possible and slugging it out. It was a contrast to many campaigns today, where candidates let the ads speak for them.
Not us.
I needed to puncture the bubble of personality around Bill that insulated him from the baggage of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party nationally.
Weld clearly believed that he could corner me—relentlessly—on issues like the death penalty, welfare reform and taxes. He thought that if he did that, then his likability would give voters license to continue to forget that he was a Republican.
The battlefield we agreed upon would be unlike any in the thirty-four Senate races held that year. We shook hands on a series of eight statewide televised Lincoln-Douglas-style debates, where the moderators would actually encourage us to engage each other directly.
I tried to carve out time to prepare for the debates, but it was a daily struggle between campaigning around the state, working in Washington and traveling to fund-raise. Debate prep became a series of phone calls, falling asleep with a briefing book on my chest. Bob Shrum and I found we often got the most done away from the noise, including one memorable Sunday boat ride, after I’d put in a full morning of campaigning on the Cape.
But in the end, no matter how you prepare, when the bell rings, it’s two competitors facing off, and you have to trust your head and your heart to execute.
Debates rise and fall on big moments. But it’s the unexpected ones that can make the difference. For a debate’s moderator, it is a chance to put him- or herself at the center of the story.
A debate question from left field caught both Weld and me by surprise. It wasn’t about a political issue at all. It struck at the heart of the kind of question someone watching at home must have thought plenty of times: How can these two guys relate to me? The moderator summarized our uncannily similar résumés—the boarding schools, the Ivy League educations, law school, prosecutors, elected office—and added a twist: So what would you say was your greatest failure?
Bill chose to answer with a joke and then bounced around through a series of bills the state house refused to pass.
I saw Alexandra and Vanessa sitting right in the front row, next to Teresa. I was proud of who they were growing up to be, Vanessa with her fascination with science and medicine, Alex always gravitating toward the arts and drama. I felt lucky that they were smart, determined, good people. Both Julia and I had worked very hard to give them the kind of childhood we had both missed in different ways. Julia wanted to raise strong, independent women with lives of their own, a contrast to the expectation of her parents’ generation that young women’s identity would be found solely in marriage and their husbands. Mission accomplished—both of our girls had dreams and destinies of their own. I wanted them to feel rooted, with the security that comes from knowing where home is and growing up with a set of friends from elementary school through high school. I had been determined to be a connected dad, without the formality or distance I’d sometimes struggled with in my childhood relationship with Pa. When my daughters and I were together, we made the most of our time. We crammed a lot in. I had a closeness and a candor with them that my parents could never have imagined.
But I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt about the way they’d grown up, shuttling between homes, a dad back from Washington on the weekends, a mom who ultimately found peace in the West, away from the politics of Boston. It was a long distance from the life either of us had imagined when we held them as babies in our arms those first times in 1973 and 1976.
Even after our divorce, Julia and I always made parenting the priority. Still, I hated that in any divorce, the kids pay the real price for the failings of the adults.
That thought brought me full circle to the moderator’s question. I spoke from the heart. I said that I had a marriage that failed, and it was as personal a setback as I’d ever known—harder to lose a relationship than to lose any campaign. I said it was hard because the children paid the price, and that Julia and I worried about making sure they always knew that both their parents loved them and that, despite the breakup of the marriage, Mom and Dad were always going to be there.
After the words escaped my mouth, I hoped for a minute that it didn’t sound as if I was on Oprah. But suddenly the slow-building crescendo of applause took over. Something had struck a nerve. On the car ride back home after the debate, Teresa summed it up: “Honesty. It’s real, people can touch it. They know when it’s not there too.” She was right. I’d come to the debate to contrast my positions with Bill, but ended up revealing something that’s not contained in briefing books.
But the race wasn’t just a clash of personalities. Issues were at the heart of our eight debates. The differences that emerged scraped away the veneer of surface similarities between us, exposing different beliefs about issues and values.
The tension was high at Faneuil Hall as we faced off in front of a packed house. Despite the moderator’s insistence that our supporters and cheering sections should hold their applause, the give-and-take elicited competing cheers and groans.
Bill Weld scripted a dramatic moment designed to catch me flat-footed and separate me from the voters I relied on to get reelected.
The death penalty was a definitive wedge issue. It was probably 80 percent for, 20 percent against at that time. Weld had hammered at it over and over again. It was pure bread and butter for him.
My convictions on the death penalty run deep, going back to George Reissfelder and connecting to my faith and a plain old sense of right and wrong. I’d also studied the issue from a public policy standpoint. It wasn’t a deterrent to crime. The death penalty was even one of the rea
sons the United States had a difficult time winning the extradition of criminals and killers to the United States from other countries.
But Weld knew the issue was emotionally powerful. His team believed they had a winning issue and a debate ambush from a familiar playbook.
Any Democrat who watched the 1988 presidential debate between Vice President George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis knew we would lose in November. It was the iconic moment when CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis, a death penalty opponent, whether he would still oppose the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. Mike Dukakis is one of the most decent men I’ve ever known. He loves Kitty with every fiber of his being. After fifty-five years of marriage, Michael still calls Kitty “my bride.” Together, they waged her battles with depression and addiction, and through it all they loved each other more and more. You’d think Mike would have reacted passionately to Shaw’s question. Instead, he gave an intellectual, policy response, a cold answer on an emotionally hot issue. I have no doubt the Weld folks thought I’d do the same when they hatched a scheme to hold my position on capital punishment up to the light of public passion.
The moment unfolded in an instant. Weld banged away on my votes against expanding the federal death penalty. Then he gestured toward a woman in the audience. Her son was a police officer killed in the line of duty. Bill said I had to defend my position not to him or to the voters, but to her. “Tell her why the life of the man who murdered her son is worth more than the life of a police officer,” he said.
