by John Kerry
The first days of the new calendar year—those days when everyone is still saying “Happy New Year”—made me impatient and anxious. I just wanted to get on with it. But I had to get back to Washington, back to share the news with a newly hired campaign team that had never contemplated a campaign punctuated in its earliest days by the word no one is ever ready to hear: “cancer.”
Then I had to tell the press. We went to the Senate radio and television gallery for a hastily arranged appearance that, fittingly, my communications director warned would be a “proctologic” experience, as it indeed was. I made the announcement, encouraged men to get tested because it had saved my life and joked that I’d soon have my “aloof” gland removed. The Band-Aid had been ripped off.
Over Presidents’ Day weekend 2003, at the crack of dawn, wearing my talismanic St. Christopher medal, I headed to Johns Hopkins to go under the knife. Teresa squeezed my hand and said goodbye as they wheeled me on a gurney into the operating room, where they put me under.
When I woke from the anesthesia, groggy and disoriented, I didn’t feel much. As the room came into focus, I saw Dr. Walsh and Teresa together. Their caring smiles said it all; they gave me the best news imaginable: everything looked great, we were “clean at the margins,” and I would need no further treatment. I started to feel like I’d been hit by a train, but at least I hadn’t been derailed. The campaign would continue and, most important, I was going to be healthy. Teresa, who had lost a husband in an instant once before, had tears in her eyes knowing that this time, at least, good luck had arrived.
“Go slow, don’t rush,” Dr. Walsh urged me. Teresa’s instincts as the daughter of a doctor—Dr. T, some called her—all kicked in, but I didn’t have the luxury of going slow. A presidential campaign waits for nobody. Someone who might have erred on the wrong side of omission let me know that as I lay in the hospital, the governor from Vermont, Howard Dean, was holding a fund-raiser for his presidential campaign in my hometown of Boston. My campaign aides thought it was insulting. Dick Gephardt had sent our staff pizza; other candidates had called with well wishes, but here was a candidate on my home turf, raking in contributions before the anesthesia had even worn off. The chutzpah of life—and certainly of a presidential campaign—made me smile. Politics wasn’t a genteel game for the weak and the faint of heart. You have to put the personal aside, focus intensely on your goal—care about what you can control and learn how to control what you care about. What I could control at that particular moment was getting out of the hospital, getting home and getting my strength back.
Two days later, two of my close communications aides, on this day a not-so-dynamic duo, stood outside my hospital room as I prepared to go home. The color was completely gone from their faces. After encountering patients walking the halls carrying catheter bags, they had almost passed out. “I can’t make a fist,” said one. “I see stars and spots,” said the other, as he sweated through his suit. I couldn’t help but laugh, even though laughing hurt like hell. This was the rescue committee?
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to the two of them. The Baltimore air was crisp and cold as they escorted me to a waiting van, which I hoped was blocking any television cameras across from the protected pickup area for patient discharge. The cold air had deflated the foil balloons the campaign had sent as a get-well gift. Gallows humor abounded. “Don’t even go there, guys,” I said with a smile, relatively jocular with the gift of pain medication and freedom from the hospital.
At home resting and recovering, I was frustrated being off the campaign trail. All my synapses were firing, every instinct told me I should be out there fighting for votes, talking to the activists who in less than a year would vote in Iowa and New Hampshire and set the course of the Democratic race. In politics, a lot of people think the finite resource is money. It’s not. Momentum can create money overnight. Time is the one resource that’s never renewable. Every minute, every hour, every day, it’s the one thing you never get back, and I was losing days flat on my back because sitting up hurt too much.
Teresa was incredible, doting on me, pushing back against my determination to pick up the pace and instead telling me to focus on feeling strong again. My doctor gave me every warning about the importance of giving myself time to heal so that when I got back out there I’d feel like myself. I was completely cured, but I’d been through a brutal surgery. Even the anesthesia itself took a while to work its way out of my body.
About a week after I got out of the hospital, what would have been a big command performance in Washington was the talk of the town and a magnet for the political media: the Democratic National Committee’s winter weekend cattle call—a big gathering where every presidential candidate would be granted seven minutes to introduce himself. Rumors spread that I’d make a surprise appearance. I think some on my campaign team may have inadvertently fanned the rumors. I was soon getting texts and emails from friends who had heard I’d be “the Democratic Willis Reed,” an allusion to the unforgettable Game 7 of the 1970 NBA finals when the gutsy, gritty Knick, down and out with a torn muscle from Game 6, surprised everyone by walking onto the floor of Madison Square Garden, limping but lethal. The Knicks went on to beat the Los Angeles Lakers for the championship. But my doctors—both actual and those vicarious doctors like Teresa—were adamant: I couldn’t go. Getting out of bed to deliver a stem-winder of a speech was the last thing my recovery needed. This time, despite every other instinct, I couldn’t head out to the floor to join my team. The news from the DNC meeting in Washington didn’t take long to make its way to me. Governor Dean had dispensed with the usual niceties and fired up the crowd with a barn burner of a speech, opening by saying, “What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq.” Jill Alper, my deputy campaign manager, told me the crowd had eaten it up.
I can’t say that I didn’t see it coming. I did. In fact, as someone who had been a full-time activist before a full-time politician, my antennae had always been tuned to understand just how quickly a grassroots prairie fire could spread around an issue like Iraq.
Looking back, I know I was not yet properly calibrated regarding the disconnect between a senator’s head and an activist’s heart. I was still seeing Iraq as a policy issue, an intellectual issue, not a “feeling” issue, which required gut reaction. I remember reading the Dean speech and thinking, There is no unilateral attack on Iraq—the Democratic Party leadership isn’t advocating that there be one. Indeed, here we were, February 21, 2003, and no bombs had been dropped on Iraq. There was no war. No one I knew in the Democratic caucus, except for possibly Joe Lieberman, wanted there to be a unilateral attack if there was going to be a war at all. What was Dean talking about? I thought.
That, of course, was exactly the problem. Where you sit is where you stand—and I’d been sitting in the Senate, not in Iowa. I wasn’t looking at Iraq through the same lens as Howard Dean or the activists in Washington.
That was ironic given the road I’d traveled. On December 2, 2002, the Meet the Press studio was cold as a meat locker. No bunting, no band, no crowd. I was there to announce my campaign for president of the United States. When I had first appeared on the show, I was wearing fatigues, not a suit. I was twenty-seven, a shaggy-haired leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War—and the idea that I’d ever be back would have been laughed at, most of all by me. American politics had never been kind to war protesters. But there I was. The studio was hushed, then the familiar theme song played, the camera light switched to red and we went live. In response to Tim Russert’s very first question, I leaned forward and made the news he was waiting to hear: I announced that I intended to run for president.
I never had the chance to exhale. Now, two months and one major surgery later, my campaign was on the defensive, because life had come full circle: I’d gotten into public life to end a war, and now I was being accused of helping George W. Bush prepare to start a new
one. Worse, I was lying in bed at home, unable to do anything about it. I knew there was an opening for Dean to get a jump attacking other Democrats for a war that had not yet begun, a war we only contemplated as a last resort, not a first one. My friend the columnist Joe Klein said to me that Dean “got Iraq right” because he was the one guy running who had never had an intelligence briefing. That may be correct, and it’s possible that some of us had spent too much time in the weeds over too many years on the issue. We might have come to different conclusions if we too didn’t have to cast a vote or answer all the follow-up questions that come with being a policy maker. It was a reminder of the burden of being a senator who has to vote yes or no on complicated issues when you have next to no control over the outcome. My brother, Cam, called them “yes-but” and “no-but” votes. They were another reason to want to be commander in chief: not just to vote based on a prediction of a president’s behavior, but to be able to shape the decision from the Situation Room, to turn sound judgment into appropriate action. But the life lesson is simple: When you vote, you own it. There are no asterisks in the Congressional Record.
In March, President Bush defied the promises he and his administration made to many of us about giving diplomacy time and building a big coalition: bombs began dropping on Iraq, and quickly Saddam Hussein was vanquished, as all of us knew he would be if it ever came to war. The progressive base was enraged. I was naive and overly optimistic to think that the activists would judge my record since 1971—including the peace movement, the nuclear freeze, work to try to stop Reagan’s illegal war in Central America—and stick by me rather than get behind someone who had never bled with them. Iraq was suddenly the issue underlying every other issue. It was the litmus test of whether you had stood up to President Bush, and the formerly centrist governor of Vermont was the poster boy. I needed to get back on the campaign trail—pain or no pain.
The spring and summer of 2003 were a slog. There were votes in the Senate tying me up in Washington while some of the other candidates were practically living in Iowa and New Hampshire. My hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, more than surprised me with two pieces of news presented to me in an interview. Not only had reporters discovered the gruesome story (which I’d never heard) of the circumstances of my grandfather’s suicide in the Copley Plaza, a hotel where I’d attended hundreds of events, but they’d also meticulously researched long-lost genealogy and discovered that both my grandparents Frederic and Ida Kerry had been Jewish, that my grandfather had changed the family name from Kohn to Kerry and had immigrated, inventing a new life in America. It was a strange feeling to learn such intimate information from a reporter, with a handheld tape recorder running. To have it all happen in the heat of a presidential campaign was a doubly disturbing way to process information. However, in this age well before Ancestry.com, it made my family more like millions of other families with immigrant stories and all kinds of gaps in the past, histories sometimes hinted at and others hidden away. But in a campaign, there’s never a moment to process any of that, and talking about it risked seeming exploitative.
Of course, to the wise guys of Boston, it was a buffet of new material, just in time for the annual South Boston St. Patrick’s Day political rite of passage.
This year, I’d be on the menu—not boiled, but roasted Kerry.
My phone rang.
The voice was unmistakably Boston and Irish: Chuck Campion, a political operative and beloved longtime friend. “Hey, buddy, how you feeling? You going to South Boston for the St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast?”
“Chuck, I just had my prostate removed. I’m in bed. I think they’ll understand that I’m not there.”
Indeed, many of my national campaign staffers who were not steeped in Massachusetts political lore had turned down the invitation when we announced my surgery. They were putting doctor’s orders ahead of the order of the local chapter of Hibernians.
But Chuck knew better. There was a long pause on the other end of the telephone. “Buddy, they’re gonna kill you there. If you don’t show up, you’re gonna feel like somebody just put your prostate back in.”
Chuck, as always, had a point. But, fortunately, he also had a plan. He negotiated my secret, surprise appearance. The morning of the breakfast, I covertly sat in the parking lot outside Florian Hall—“Halitosis Hall,” as the right-wing Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr called it—listening to the breakfast program over the car radio. The state’s new Republican governor, Mitt Romney, quickly pounced on my absence. “If he were here, he’d be eating his corned beef on a bagel,” said the governor.
“Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day . . . except for John Kerry,” guffawed the event’s emcee.
Chuck snuck me in the back. I came in through the green curtains. The crowd was surprised. I got to the microphone and delivered a knockout punch: “Who said I didn’t have the matzo balls to be here?”
We had turned the tables on Romney and the Republicans.
I counterpunched once more. “You might’ve heard I recently had some work done on my shillelagh.”
Again, a hit. And that was that. It reaffirmed two lessons that you learn in politics only by experience: you won’t get far if you can’t laugh at yourself, and part of winning means learning how to take a punch and keep jabbing.
We would have plenty of cause for both in the period ahead.
In late March, we went to California for the state party convention—an important cattle call for all the Democratic candidates. The flight to San Francisco was long and painful. Every part of me still ached from the surgery. I ran into the veteran Washington Post political reporter David Broder shortly after I got on the ground. He could see that I was dragging a little. He pulled me close and asked me if I was pushing too hard. He confided that years before he’d gone through the same surgery and didn’t feel like himself for a year. It was a completely genuine, kind moment from a reporter who was speaking not to a candidate he was covering, but to another human being he was concerned about. I assured him I was just fine. Meanwhile, after slogging through the receptions and the photo lines and the events, on my feet for hours and hours after sitting uncomfortably for the five-hour commercial flight, I was wrecked. I gave my speech, went back to the hold room and stretched out on a long conference table, my hands clasped together on my chest, my eyes closed. I looked like I was lying in state. It was the strangest damn thing. I was just fifty-nine, fit, a clean bill of health from my doctors, strong from head to toe, in better shape than most of my campaign team, and I still felt the fatigue pulling at me. Getting rest wasn’t an option. I was heading off for Easter with my wife and I had a lot to be thankful for. I was cancer-free. I had great health care. I was running for president and I was in the thick of the hunt, but damn, I was tired. This wasn’t going to be easy. But at least I was alive.
By the late summer, I was feeling like myself again, but the campaign wasn’t feeling like the campaign I’d envisioned. There were too many disconnects. The summer had belonged to Howard Dean. He was raising money on the internet in ways that were exciting and that motivated traditional fund-raisers to want to be a part of his movement. I still remember reading a story about a Dean rally in Bryant Park in New York, with thousands of people in attendance. The organizers brought in Wi-Fi (in 2003 an innovation itself) so that people could contribute $10, $15, $25 online—right there and then. Some on my staff sort of sneered at it. One even used to imitate the Dean staffers as shut-ins pecking away on a keyboard to the tune from the famous Star Wars bar scene. But it struck me as the kind of campaign I’d envisioned running—a big grassroots campaign of movement politics, the kind where I’d cut my teeth as a twenty-seven-year-old kid. Bryant Park to me was the place where I’d introduced John Lennon in 1971 to an anti-war crowd of thousands and had seen people my age or younger passing the hat and pitching in to fund the Vietnam Moratorium and end a war. It bothered me just how much I had lost control of the narrative and how hard it was to seize it back.
We were yesterday’s story. But I felt that people had turned the page on us too quickly.
There really were two campaigns. There was the national campaign, in which day by day, week by week, I was less and less of a factor. All the big endorsements were flowing to the Dean campaign, from unions to elected officials to activists. It was a self-sustaining, momentum-creating, ever-unfolding event.
That was the national campaign. But ignored was the fact that (if I wasn’t deluding myself) something very different was happening on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states where a universe of 280,000 citizens would cast the first votes of 2004 on January 19 and on January 27, respectively.
Make no mistake, in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Howard Dean was becoming the dominant front-runner. He was sucking up significant oxygen. As August turned into September and into October, his campaign was soaring in the polls in both states, racing past me in New Hampshire and blowing past Dick Gephardt in Iowa (the formerly prohibitive front-runner had won the caucuses in 1988).
But people in Iowa and New Hampshire were courting, not committing. There was a lot of runway left before those two states decided which candidate they wanted to send flying out into the next round of states with a head of steam. Iowans were taking their time to get to know me, not a caricature. John Norris, my Iowa campaign manager, was a great student of the caucuses. He had gotten to know one of my crewmates from Vietnam, Gene Thorson, who lived in Ames, and John pretty quickly figured out that Gene—shy, earnest, unassuming—was a secret weapon. If Gene liked me and I liked Gene, then maybe Iowans could connect with a guy from Massachusetts after all. John was also quick to understand that actually organizing veterans might be the best secret weapon our campaign could imagine. Veterans had never been a force in the Iowa caucuses on the Democratic side before, but every four years, the single biggest difference a campaign could make was to change the profile of the caucus turnout. In some of the tiny towns in rural parts of the state, bringing five or ten or fifteen new voters to a caucus could turn that entire precinct. Long before our campaign began to slide, John Norris had made a brilliant investment: he bought the registrar of voters’ complete list of ninety thousand Iowa veterans. If we could reach even one in ten of those ninety thousand vets and bring them to the caucuses, we could change the contours of the electorate. Seemingly everywhere, there was a veteran who welcomed us into his home or his VFW hall. Life felt like it was coming full circle: here I was thirty-three years after I left the Navy, back in the company of those who served.
