by John Kerry
New Hampshire was just as much of an adventure—an active one, no matter what the polls said. I started out with a romanticized view of the primary. For me, the nostalgia of the New Hampshire primary went back to 1968. As a twenty-four-year-old, I was stationed on the other side of the Earth, where radio broadcasts and weeks-old newspapers in a mail pouch gave me my idealized introduction to the phenomenon of this primary. Just forty days after the North Vietnamese had shockingly launched the Tet Offensive and just three weeks after Persh had been killed in combat, New Hampshire was no longer just the place where I’d gone to high school, the tucked-away, quintessentially New England place where I’d first taken my cuts playing hockey on the black ice of Turkey Pond. Now, suddenly, New Hampshire was someplace else entirely, the place where legions of kids my age—the peanut butter and jelly brigade—were carrying pamphlets (while I was carrying guns thousands of miles away) and knocking on doors, proving themselves powerful enough to send a message all over the world that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t be president anymore. It was an earthquake, a palpable awakening. It was a grassroots prairie fire and a lifelong lesson for me in people-powered politics.
Thirty-six years later, New Hampshire taught me another lesson or two, and sometimes the best lessons were those learned and earned the hard way, on icy roads marked by frost heaves and at town hall meetings where the air crackled with skepticism. This time it was New Hampshire as a crucible. In the fall of 2003, I was written off as political roadkill. A reporter wrote that I looked like the Granite State’s fabled “Old Man of the Mountain,” and then that rocky edifice crumbled days later. The wise guys laughed at the metaphor.
One gray and misty day, we held an event on the banks of the Merrimack River, a short hike down through the trees off the main road, and not more than twenty feet away I could hear the Boston television wiseacre recording his promo for what would be the latest political obituary: “Live from Manchester—Howard Dean surging in the polls—and we’re lost in the woods with John Kerry.” So it was that New Hampshire taught me that no matter what polls and pundits say, no matter how often I was written off, as long as I believed in what I was doing and I just kept my formidable chin up, I could push through the noise and power through what was right in front of me and come out stronger for the experience.
There was something special about the intimate primary process that I didn’t fully realize in 1968 when New Hampshire tapped into my activist heart. Back then, it reinforced in me that people who believe in a cause, an issue—especially a single moral issue—and who act on that conviction really can move a whole country. Vietnam was just that way. Whichever side one was on, there was a right and a wrong. But in that activism, it’s the issue, always the issue first and the issue last. It’s easy to overlook the people of character who give the cause its energy. As a candidate a few decades later, I realized it wasn’t all about issues, let alone the issue. It was fiercely personal.
Truth be told, I can’t remember the finest policy distinctions between me and most of the group of Democratic rivals (opponents, not enemies) I got to know that year. Basically, we were all reliable Democrats. I remember as if it were yesterday the people I got to know, the friends I depended on because I couldn’t get wherever I was headed on my own. It’s the firefighters who opened up their firehouses for chili feed after chili feed because, no matter how low I sank in the polls, firefighters were loyal. They played those bagpipes outside every debate and stood outside in the snow holding those signs, pundits be damned. Loyalty doesn’t fit in an activist’s ten-point plan, but it turns out it’s worth a lot more than tomorrow’s white paper.
Manchester mayor Bob Baines had promised privately to endorse me months before his own reelection, keeping that promise all those months later when my campaign was lagging. “A promise is a promise,” said Bob, and he kept his.
The volunteers were awe-inspiring. The kids in wheelchairs and the woman who had just beaten breast cancer and the Vietnam veterans, some of whom had never volunteered for a campaign before, were in those headquarters night after night because some bonds are a lot stronger than the day’s headlines.
That was New Hampshire. Gene McCarthy talked in 1968 about how lonely he had been those months before the New Hampshire primary. That’s activism. You believe in the cause and you work for it. For me, this fight was activism. It was issues, for sure, but the great lesson I took away from New Hampshire was that the strangers I met who became friends and family were the ones who gave meaning to our activism. In New Hampshire, I was never alone.
But that’s not to say it was easy.
• • •
THE LATE SUMMER and fall of 2003 were filled with tough choices and two near collisions that could have altered the course of the campaign.
First, I could tell that Joe Biden was thinking of running for president. I could tell because Joe told me. He’s candid to a fault, if you consider honesty a fault. Joe had a great gift of easily connecting with people. I’d gotten to know his boys, Beau and Hunter, who would often be with him around the Senate during summer vacations or spring breaks. We had sat and talked a few times about politics and presidential fortunes, and I especially remember one conversation on Nantucket at the end of a dock where we both concluded that if either of us was ever president, he’d want the other on the team.
Now he could potentially be my rival. I didn’t particularly relish running against someone who was genuinely my friend, a colleague of twenty years, same generation, same values. I also worried that if Joe jumped in the race this late, we would lose more time overwhelmed by a big new story in the media. Every week that went by without a positive development for my campaign was great for Howard Dean. I asked Joe to come to Boston to meet and talk, just us, no staff. The meeting would stay a secret. He agreed. There was only one problem: Joe was being secretly ferried to my house by a Senate volunteer, I was running an hour behind in New Hampshire, fielding question after question from voters who had come to look me over, some of whom no doubt were there as a favor to our flailing campaign. I couldn’t rush out of there. I also couldn’t be late for Joe.
As soon as the town hall meeting ended, it was back into the minivan, where the driver and my staff had no idea about the meeting I had secretly arranged. After a white-knuckled 90 mph adventure down the Mass Pike into Boston, I raced up the steps of my house, and there in the living room sat my friend the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
We fell easily into conversation, talking about where we were in life. I shared with him what I was seeing out on the hustings, and we turned to an exchange about where my campaign stood. I sensed that he was ambivalent about the whole idea of joining the fray. Running as a late entrant no doubt would be complicated, but potentially giving up what could have been a last shot at the nomination must have also seemed difficult. Who knew if the conversation made any difference, but I was relieved when a couple of weeks later, Joe announced he wasn’t running this time. His decision avoided a collision with a friend.
Second, a near collision that wasn’t fatal occurred when General (ret.) Wes Clark jumped into the presidential campaign in late September after months of rampant rumors. My struggles and Dean’s rise had clearly created an opening for a political consultant’s dream: a decorated military leader’s biography contrasted nicely with Howard Dean’s opposition to the war. No one knew where Wes stood on many issues, or even whether he was really a Democrat, since he was known to have voted for Nixon and Reagan and had spoken at a few local Republican events. None of it mattered. His entry into the race quickly caught fire and instant polls had him overnight at the top of the heap.
We had big worries about Clark. Our campaign’s gasping hopes at this point depended on making a big splash in Iowa to alter the race’s dynamic. We needed a big bounce there. Now, suddenly, there was another Vietnam veteran with national security credentials running, a fresh new face and an outsider who wasn’t weighed down by a voting record. Clark
could suck up all the momentum there at a time when we couldn’t afford another person contesting Iowa for the unique swath of voters we were betting on converting. Luckily, Clark announced he was opting out of Iowa and rolling the dice on New Hampshire as a springboard to bring him into South Carolina strong, where presumably he would plan to finish off Howard Dean.
It was the first time in months a ball had bounced our way. With Clark out of the mix in the caucuses, we were working on a different theory—that if we could steam out of Iowa, we’d be the alternative to Dean in New Hampshire.
Next, it was tough decision time. We were big underdogs, and every day there was a drumbeat of news that only reaffirmed that Howard Dean was poised to run away with the nomination. First, it was the two biggest unions endorsing Dean just as I was hitting bottom. That these rival unions made the endorsement together underscored how the ground had shifted: people were racing to get on the Dean bandwagon. A couple of weeks later, while in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant near Stanford, my phone and all the phones around us in our cramped campaign van started to vibrate with rumors: Vice President Al Gore was poised to endorse Dean. It was a shock. We had been classmates in the Senate, he’d considered me for vice president, I’d campaigned hard for him around the country. Would he do this without even a courtesy conversation? I called Al right away and asked if it was true. I asked him whether he had made a final decision and if we could meet. Then the line went dead. I checked the battery—it was full. I had four bars on my phone, reception was fine. I called back, and it went straight to voice mail. Four consecutive times. It was too late.
I had to put this news out of my mind. It did no good to dwell on these setbacks. But each week between October and the middle of December, there seemed to be some announcement. Momentum is a hard thing to stop once it starts snowballing.
I sat down with my traveling staff—by then typically whittled down to a hearty band of three plus a local campaign volunteer picking us up when we landed somewhere—and tried to clear the air. I suppose I was really trying to reinforce the message to myself. I remember emphasizing that we couldn’t lose ourselves in the things that we couldn’t decide. Besides, we had enough hard decisions regarding actions we could control.
I had a very hard decision to make, one that was a big gamble. Howard Dean had opted to skip the public financing of his presidential campaign, to reject the public matching funds and instead raise his campaign coffers in traditional contributions. It’s what George W. Bush had done in 2000, and it was a coup at the time. Now Bush was sitting on $85 million to attack the Democrats during the primary season, but no Democratic candidate had ever gone in this direction. Dean, however, had built a grassroots fund-raising network on the internet that was awe-inspiring.
Our money was hard to come by, while Dean was taking off exponentially. We had no shot of turning anything around if we were unilaterally disarming, summarily choosing to limit how much we could spend in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the federal funding came with strict limits on television spending. No, if we couldn’t be on the air when it counted, competing with Dean dollar for dollar, we should forget the race and pack it in now. I grudgingly declared that Dean had broken the system and I would join in pursuing private funding for the primaries. I had spent so many decades defending the public finance system, but I didn’t believe in unilateral disarmament, and at this stage both Bush and Dean had doomed the system.
Even as I announced I was turning down the federal money, there was a much harder bullet I’d have to bite. We were running low on money, worrying about laying off staff at the holidays. I knew we couldn’t raise enough money to compete without some major intervening change to the dynamic. I had only one option: I had to mortgage my home to loan the campaign the money to get through Iowa. I signed the papers without flinching, but inside I wondered if I was doing the right thing for my daughters. If I lost, the debt was going to be monstrous, and some presidential campaigns went decades without ever paying off their debt. Raising money for a campaign that’s already lost is a miserable slog. If I went back to the Senate, I would have to retire that debt in thousand-dollar increments, missing family on weekends trying to raise the money. This was my kids’ inheritance, but my running for president was also about their future. Vanessa encouraged me to do it. She believed in what we were fighting for. So it was that on Christmas Eve 2003, we finally publicly put out the news I’d been keeping to myself: the stakes were high, and I was betting my house that there was still time to turn around the campaign and win Iowa.
I hoped I was betting right.
There was something liberating about being out of the national spotlight. As fall turned to winter, as the rich and colorful autumn foliage turned to bare gray and brown branches, the time we spent in New Hampshire was less and less, but I had to keep the fires alive there. We had to leave our organizers and our team with the hope that after Iowa, we really would return with a reinvigorated campaign—that if they could keep fighting there, we’d be back. Not Douglas MacArthur “I Shall Return” kind of stuff, but close enough.
I was still current on my pilot’s license, so I would take the left seat in the cockpit of a rented twin Cessna, copiloted by a friend, and we would land late at night at tiny New Hampshire airports, sometimes little more than landing strips with little picturesque shingled houses for flight facilities. I remember one late night as we headed up to the North Country, our New Hampshire political director, Theo Yedinsky, sitting in the back nervously, not entirely sold on my piloting skills. He was crammed back there, in this very small plane with a number of six-footers. A warning light and warning sound came on, requiring a simple adjustment, but to Theo it must have sounded as if we were heading into a tailspin. He turned white as a sheet. “I can see the headline: ‘Theo Yedinsky Gone at the Senseless Age of 32,’ ” he joked. The gallows humor was infectious. “You might be in the subheadline, Theo,” I shot back. “ ‘More Turbulence in the Kerry Campaign; Unknown Aides Lost in New Hampshire Snows.’ ”
I put the tiny plane down on the runway, and we hopped out into a brutal winter wind whipping across the dark tarmac. There were no airport support personnel to be seen anywhere, only my advance guy from Boston, standing at the door of the solitary building on the edge of the tarmac. He explained that the flight support manager wanted to go home and trusted him to lock up after we landed. Only in New Hampshire.
We carried on.
I loved the intimacy of the process. It wasn’t easy—in fact, it was demanding as hell—but it was genuine. Some people criticize the outsized role of the early caucus and primary states in our political system. To my core, though, I think there’s nothing like the test they provide, the close inspection of each candidate, the way they push you. They can spot a phony a mile away.
The process was making me a better candidate. My speeches were getting crisper, my answers shorter, but more than that, after a year on the trail to the presidency, the issues I’d been talking about somehow seemed to jump off the pages of a speech and become more real.
Life became more real as well, intervening from afar. I received a call from Julia, who told me she had been diagnosed with transitional cell carcinoma. Thunderclap! In the span of a few months our kids were facing the prospect of both their parents battling cancer and one running for president. The more I think about what they put up with through no choice of their own, the more in awe I am of their resilience and strength of character. Julia began treatments in Boston. The girls kept me abreast, and I visited with her and the kids when I was in town between stops on the trail. In many ways it was a sweet, soft time. The tensions of divorce and whatever issues always exist in the aftermath seemed to melt away in the face of our mutual vulnerabilities. That and the at first unspoken and then well-discussed imperative to make sure the girls were okay. Julia and I had worked incredibly hard to make sure that whatever our issues were, they would not belong to the kids. Nor would the kids be used as pawns in the process.
I am convinced we succeeded. Julia wanted me to stay focused on the campaign even as she fought her own battle.
The Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner was the seminal event of the political season and the official kickoff on the sprint to the finish line, the hardest weeks ahead, lasting from Thanksgiving through Martin Luther King Day, when the caucuses were held. Our campaign was out in force. We entered the hall with a drill and drum corps of young people—the Isiserettes—and an army of firefighters wearing their emblematic black and gold colors. There was energy in the Veterans Memorial Arena in Des Moines—the music, the air horns, the adrenaline flowing for all of us. The event also came with a built-in warning: after six minutes of a candidate speaking, the mics would be cut off, with brevity regulated and enforced. Strict time limits on speeches were a gift that forced discipline and drove me to try to crystallize my thoughts about why I was running, what the race was about, and the kind of leadership I believed the country deserved, as well as the fight it would require for the Democrats to win back the White House.
