Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  • • •

  SOON IT WAS my turn to get home to my own party.

  “Ker-ry!”

  “Ker-ry!”

  “Ker-ry!”

  The sounds echoed in my hold room, and I thought just how different it was from the usual chants in Boston Garden of “De-fense! De-fense!” I’d been stowed away in a converted executive office usually filled with Celtics or Bruins season ticket holders devouring hot dogs between periods. The new “Boston Garden,” initially named the Fleet Center and today called TD Garden, was teeming to the rafters with delegates, donors, organizers, foreign dignitaries anxious to view the American political process, everyone waiting to participate in one of the great pageants of American life. How many times had I been there for a Bruins game or Bean Pot Tournament? Never had I imagined I’d be there for this occasion: not many nominees for president get to accept the nomination in their home city.

  In my lap was the acceptance speech I was about to deliver, long before loaded into the teleprompter—there was no more time for edits. I tried to stay focused on the task ahead but couldn’t help but reflect on the long road from cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins to the acceptance of the nomination of my party to be president. On the television set anchored to the wall, my entire focus was suddenly consumed not by the long journey of a campaign, but by the journey of life itself: Vanessa and Alex came out onstage to begin the introductions. I was proud beyond words. They were two incredibly articulate, accomplished young women talking about their dad. Tears came to my eyes, and the only thing that kept them there was knowing they would ruin the makeup plastered on my face for the television cameras. It was time to go out. I walked through a sea of people up to the stage, greeting so many who had been part of my life. The emotions were overwhelming until I got to the podium and it was time to speak.

  But for a moment, all I could think was just how improbable it was that a kid who had stood outside the old Boston Garden hoping to catch a glimpse of soon-to-be president Kennedy would, forty-four years later, be at the new arena following his own path to the same goal.

  How improbable. How lucky. How rare.

  It was a joyful moment, a feeling so few ever experience. As I stood on the stage after the speech and the balloons slowly dropped, my arms were filled with family—with Teresa, Vanessa, Alex and the Heinz boys—and with political family—the Kennedys, the Edwardses and Michelle and Barack Obama. For one night in July, it all seemed to be on the right track.

  Little did I know the guns of August were about to be trained on me and the men I’d risked my life with thirty-five years before.

  CHAPTER 12

  Within a Whisper

  “WAREIUHSSS.”

  I summoned my best internal Rosetta Stone to translate what the Ragin’ Cajun James Carville had just said, but it failed me. My perplexed stare might have been revealing, so he said it again, the intonation slightly different this time.

  “Weshissuhs.”

  “Wedge issues,” Paul Begala translated, and only then did it click. I was having dinner at the Palm with the two veteran political strategists. They were describing the holy trinity of how Republicans usually won the presidency: “guns, gays and God.”

  I thought I had the credentials to insulate me from the social issues the Republicans used to drive a wedge between Democrats and the voters whose economic interests—jobs, affordable health care, a fair tax code, sensible trade deals—were exactly what I’d always fought for in public life. I wanted to make sure voters saw me for who I was.

  Guns? I’d fired more guns in my life—in the Navy and as a hunter from a young age on Uncle Fred’s farm—than George W. Bush ever had. As a kid, I had even been a junior member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) long before it became a right-wing cult. I was a gun owner. I just didn’t believe that weapons of war belonged on American streets, so I’d voted for the assault weapons ban. Law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear from a background check. Neither one threatened the Second Amendment, and the police agreed.

  Gay rights? I hate discrimination. I believed that even on then-divisive issues such as gay marriage, leadership meant finding common ground, and presidential leadership meant reminding people that we were all Americans, not trying to divide us. A church shouldn’t and wouldn’t ever be forced to violate its tenets and perform a gay marriage, but surely we could find civil legal protections so that people who loved each other could be together. Even Dick Cheney seemed to favor the civil unions I supported.

  And God? I had been an altar boy. As a senator, I had spoken in churches and humbly taken my seat at the Senate Prayer Breakfast. In 1993, after I was invited to address the National Prayer Breakfast, Charles Colson, who had tried to destroy me on behalf of Richard Nixon in 1971, wrote me a moving letter. He had found God after going to prison for Watergate-related crimes and began a prison ministry that would define real service to Christ. In the letter, he wrote, “Some years ago, you and I were on opposite sides . . . but I must tell you we certainly are not today. In the twenty or so years that I have been attending the National Prayer Breakfast, I have never heard a more articulate, unequivocal presentation of the Gospel than your scripture reading. . . . I suppose we all have to live with our stereotypes; I certainly have. But whatever stereotype I have of you is totally changed. I write this letter asking your forgiveness for any ways in which I hurt you in the past.”

  I was deeply touched. I wasn’t ready yet to forgive everything that happened in 1971, when I was a twenty-seven-year-old veteran being spied on by the same government that had sent me to war, but I thanked Colson, and I thought hard about what he’d written. Politics did create destructive stereotypes, but it could also break them down. I thought I had learned an important lesson: by giving people (even those on the opposite side) a chance to know the real me, I might defy the caricature adversaries had concocted. I thought of my personal journey as private, but I wasn’t going to allow any politician to belittle my devotion. I didn’t think that was the turf on which the first presidential campaign after 9/11 should or would be fought.

  Paul and James warned that the Republican playbook had nothing to do with reality and reminded me that Karl Rove’s political roots were in the direct-mail business, scaring people with stereotypes.

  As a presidential candidate, I would see firsthand that the stereotypes the other side used to divide America remained potent. They’d get plenty of help from some powerful interests anxious to promote their false choices. We would have to fight back.

  When it came to guns, I knew the GOP believed it had a surefire winner. In 2000, George W. Bush said he supported the gun control laws that were on the books, so it was hard for the Republicans to run against the reality of what the Clinton administration had done.

  Instead, the NRA announced that if Al Gore were elected president, he would lead “a war on guns.” They painted him as an elitist who didn’t believe in the Second Amendment. The gun issue cut strongly against Gore in a down-to-the-wire election. Michael Whouley called me and asked if I could go to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to speak to union voters about guns on Al’s behalf. I headed immediately to a union hall in Eau Claire.

  These voters, who probably just wanted to relax over a beer at the end of their shifts, had been subjected to a barrage of television ads and leaflets eviscerating Gore’s fidelity to the Second Amendment. It was deer hunting country. I talked about hunting, but I also asked how many of them had ever killed a deer with an AK-47? They laughed. The phoniness of the NRA’s appeals could be punctured by a lifelong hunter. Al would hold on to Wisconsin narrowly, but Bush pulled a couple of hunting states into the Republican column, including New Hampshire. I applied those lessons to my own campaign. I was determined to show up often and just be myself.

  I didn’t think any candidate could win by ignoring an issue like guns or by trying to be Republican-lite and pandering to the NRA. Some argued that Democrats had to take this issue off the table. That view was rooted in t
he scar tissue left not just from Gore’s loss, but from the memory of dozens of incumbent Democrats losing their seats in 1994 over the gun issue. I just didn’t buy it. I’d tangled with Howard Dean in the primaries over guns when he touted his A rating from the NRA as governor of Vermont. I didn’t want to be the candidate of the NRA then, and I didn’t think the NRA would sit out an election cycle if we abandoned our principles.

  The NRA did nothing to disabuse me of my suspicions and had plenty of help from Republican leadership in Congress willing to use the Senate floor as a stage for election-year theater. Just as I was squaring up against Bush, the Republicans suddenly scheduled a series of gun control votes on an otherwise unrelated piece of legislation. The Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist from Tennessee, was a friend of mine and had been a legislative partner. Bill was a genteel medical doctor who ran for the Senate, a scion of a respected Nashville family and a humanitarian who traveled to Africa over Senate recesses to care for those living in extreme poverty. Bill and I had joined together in 1999 to write landmark legislation to make medicines available to combat AIDS and malaria in Africa. It was the foundation of U.S. efforts on AIDS and ultimately was wrapped into a program that has helped roll back the pandemic of AIDS once ravaging sub-Saharan Africa. I liked Bill. He’d been willing to work on an issue that was, at the time, still controversial in his party.

  As majority leader, however, Bill crossed some lines that hadn’t been crossed before. That surprised me. Years before, back in the Senate of Byrd and Dole, the majority leader and minority leader refused to campaign against each other, but Bill was already working this year to defeat his Democratic counterpart, Tom Daschle. Bringing the 2004 presidential race to the Senate floor would be no different: Bill seemed compelled, I assume, to march in lockstep with the Bush White House.

  With the 1994 military assault weapons ban expiring in September, after Bush and his Republican Congress had done nothing to reauthorize it in four years, suddenly we were going to have a vote. There was no chance the House could pass it even if the Senate did. It was a transparent trick to put guns front and center in the presidential campaign.

  Some on the campaign argued I should skip the vote. “It’s theatrics, it’s politics,” one person argued. “You’re giving them what they want by going back to Washington to vote.” But we’d probably give them more by not going back. Everyone could have attacked a candidate’s failure to take a position. Several of my senior campaign teammates were haunted by memories of the way Vice President Gore’s tie-breaking Senate vote in favor of gun background checks had been weaponized against him in the presidential race. “Win the race and then you can do something about guns,” said one of those who had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles with Gore and knew the price he had paid on guns.

  It wasn’t crazy political analysis. But I was convinced you pay a bigger price for hiding from your own position on an issue.

  “We’re going back to Washington,” I announced. “If you can’t defend keeping the weapons of war off the streets of America, you don’t deserve to be president.”

  I had voted thousands of times in the Senate. But this was my first time back there as a presidential candidate. The motorcade pulled up under the covered area in front of the Capitol. Dozens of reporters swarmed toward us, cameras flashing. It was chaotic. The elevator doors opened to shouted questions from gaggles of reporters five people deep. I was glad to make it to the cloakroom and onto the Senate floor—away from the crush of the crowd. My Secret Service detail remained in the cloakroom: the only attacks on the Senate floor would be partisan.

  Looking up, I saw the gallery was filled with both reporters and activists, an unusual sight usually reserved for swearing-in ceremonies or impeachment. “Aye,” I told the clerk at the desk with a big thumbs-up. I cast my vote to extend the assault weapons ban. After the vote was tallied, I sought recognition to speak on the Senate floor, as was my right. I said the Second Amendment protected rights, but “there is no right to place military-style assault weapons into the hands of terrorists and/or criminals who wish to cause American families harm. There is no right to have access to the weapons of war in the streets of America. For those who want to wield those weapons, we have a place for them. It is the U.S. military. And we welcome them.”

  I pointed to the assault weapons ban’s accomplishments over ten years, and I repeated a story I heard while hunting the previous fall in Iowa with a local sheriff and his deputies. “As we walked through a field with the dogs, hunting pheasant, he pointed out a house behind me, a house they had raided only a few weeks earlier, where meth and crack were being sold. On the morning when they went in to arrest this alleged criminal, there was an assault weapon on the floor lying beside that individual. That sheriff and others across this country do not believe we should be selling these weapons or allowing them to be more easily available to criminals in our country.”

  I also felt compelled to call attention to the Republican ploy in staging the vote in the first place. I continued: “Let’s be honest about what we are facing today. The opposition to this commonsense gun safety law is being driven by the powerful NRA special interest leadership and by lobbyists in Washington. I don’t believe this is the voice of responsible gun owners across America. Gun owners in America want to defend their families, while the NRA leadership is defending the indefensible. There is a gap between America’s Field & Stream gun owners and the NRA’s Soldier of Fortune leaders.”

  This is a fight worth having, I thought as I walked back into the Democratic cloakroom. I ran into Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip. “It’s going to be a long campaign, John,” he said warily. “I don’t know where the Bush campaign ends and the Senate begins.”

  Dick had a good nose for politics.

  After the vote, I walked off the Senate floor with Ted Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California. Dianne had been the first senator besides Teddy to back my campaign. She was a trailblazer who had helped break the glass ceiling in California Democratic politics.

  The click-click-click of the cameras almost drowned out what Dianne was saying to us as we walked along. I got back into the motorcade to head to the airport, so we could get back to the campaign trail.

  I turned to my traveling chief of staff, David Morehouse, who was next to me in the car, and asked him what he was hearing. “Ron Fournier [of the Associated Press] says the Republicans are giddy. They got the photo they wanted.”

  “The photo?”

  “Yeah,” Morehouse replied, “liberal John Kerry, gooey Californian Dianne Feinstein, and their bogeyman Ted Kennedy huddling about guns. A gift to the NRA.”

  I stared ahead as the cars pulled into Dulles Airport. I thought about the meaning of a single photograph and the craven politics being played in the world’s greatest deliberative body. I still believed this was a fight we needed to have.

  Ted Kennedy had thirteen nieces and nephews without fathers because twice guns had been used to murder his brothers. He had been there at Andrews Air Force Base in 1963 to embrace Jackie when she was still covered in President Kennedy’s blood. Five years later he had rushed to Los Angeles as his lone surviving brother lay dying, shot at point-blank range. In 1978, Dianne Feinstein was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors when a deranged colleague assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the gay rights leader elected to the board. Dianne heard the gunshots and found Milk’s body lying lifeless in his office. With Milk’s blood on her clothes, in the lobby of city hall, Dianne had to announce to her city and the world that her colleagues had been gunned down.

  To me, the alleged Republican giddiness was a sign of how insulting our politics had become and how empty the new Republican Party was becoming. Power rather than good governance. A surrender to the lowest common denominator. I thought, I’m happy to be counted with Ted and Dianne on that issue. I’ll debate that vote anywhere in America.

  The NRA and the GOP ran that photo
in flyers and pamphlets and television ads. The media, which too often covers the political horse race and not the substance, never seemed to point out that Ted and Dianne had seen the cost of gun violence up close in ways that the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, never had. Most revealing, no one seemed to point out how the NRA’s attack was all propaganda. No serious person in either party ever talks about taking away people’s guns. They talk about responsible ownership and keeping guns of war in the hands of uniformed warriors in the military or law enforcement.

  The NRA put its public campaign, totaling $20 million, squarely behind George Bush’s candidacy. I saw the ridiculous ads in newspapers across the Midwest: “If John Kerry wins, hunters lose.” They had their fun too. President Bush even mocked my hunting, saying of my F rating from the NRA, “He can run—he can even run in camo—but he cannot hide.” I didn’t need hunting lessons from a president whose running mate accidentally shot his hunting partner, and my history in camo dated back before my campaign.

  It was an authentic American hero, John Glenn, who reminded me of the disconnect between the symbolism of NRA politics and reality. One day we joined Congressman Ted Strickland and went trapshooting in Ohio, not far from where John had grown up. The photos would be a nice counterpoint to the Republican mythology that we were taking away anyone’s guns. John blasted the clay traps out of the sky. On the bus afterward, I asked him how often he still fired a gun. “Not since Korea.”

  When you stop and think about the priorities in communities across America—dealing with the opioid crisis, making our schools safe, building our infrastructure—it is deeply disturbing that increasingly our choices are defined by images alone. In a firefight of any kind—political or real—I’d want John Glenn to have my back, even at eighty-three, not some baby-faced NRA lobbyist. I spent the campaign comfortable with who I was: a hunter who knew no one needs an AK-47 to hunt geese, a believer in the Second Amendment who knew that weapons of war are for hunting people. Reinforced by events of the last several years, I can look back and know I was right to call out the NRA for its ugly, corrosive politics. We carried Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota and brought New Hampshire back into the Democratic column despite the NRA’s lies. Most important, I didn’t lie awake wondering how I’d justify my voting record to a mother whose child was killed by an automatic weapon.