by John Kerry
I called Vanessa, who, it turned out, had learned the news herself just a day before, ten minutes before she’d had to stand onstage and represent the campaign at a rally of energetic college students. Vanessa had kept this sad knowledge to herself until after the debate. I was both touched and pained that Vanessa and Julia had protected me at that horrible moment. They did not even tell Alex for fear that her body language would give away that something was wrong. They wanted me to be able to concentrate completely on the debate—a selfless choice. I thought of the road ahead measured against the debate of the night before and the stakes of the next few weeks.
It all seemed small and distant from the prospect that Julia was in a battle for her life and that my children could soon lose their mother. As we arrived at the airport, I didn’t want to let go of Alex. I asked her to join us, but she couldn’t. She had to get back home, she said. We stood on the tarmac and hugged a long, long time, as she tried to put on a brave face. Twice she pulled away, and I pulled her back, and ultimately walked her to the terminal, where one of the Miami staff agreed to arrange her transportation to commercial aviation. I walked back to the campaign plane completely numb. It was a gorgeous Florida morning. The sun was shining. But I felt a chill throughout my body.
As I climbed the steps of the plane and stepped inside, Stephanie Cutter handed me the printout of a magazine story and cover that would be on newsstands the next day. The story said, “Debates don’t always shake up a presidential race, but this one did.” The cover, with a smiling picture of me from the debate, simply read “Off the Ropes.” My feelings were all over the place. It was now October, and while Julia battled for her life, we were in the sprint of our political lives. Life always comes at you in ways you least predict; the challenge is to just keep going forward.
After a return to the stump, I parachuted into Denver on October 5 for a truncated version of debate camp. We headed to another out-of-season, half-empty hotel complex in Englewood, outside Denver. The solitude and the mountain air had the feel of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (filmed at the real-life Stanley Hotel in Colorado), missing of course any haunted history of mass murders. I called John Edwards to wish him luck: he was debating Vice President Cheney that night, and we were hopeful that the momentum from the first debate would keep going after what I expected would be a strong performance from John. He’d been a trial lawyer for decades, one of the most skilled in front of a jury. Cheney would be a terrific contrast for John, we suspected. But when I caught him on the phone, he sounded uneasy.
“John, what do you do about your nerves on days like these?” he asked.
I was startled. Of all the people who seemed ready for his close-up, it was Edwards. I called both Bob Shrum and Bob Barnett, who had been brought in to play Cheney in Edwards’s debate prep: Edwards would be fine, they said, but they acknowledged it had been very difficult to get him to focus on his prep materials. If they had concerns, they didn’t let on. I wondered if Edwards was more of a gut-instinct performer, but I started to worry: I knew Cheney loved to lower expectations and then come in with an avuncular but muscular performance. He’d beaten Joe Lieberman in 2000.
I settled in with the road team to watch the Edwards-Cheney debate, and I thought back to all the promises John had made in his aggressive campaign to be the vice presidential nominee. I’d been assured he’d be tough, loyal and hardworking. But he’d watered down the talking points defending me against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I’d been promised he’d be a team player. But there was a growing buzz of gossip that he was rejecting speech input from headquarters and gravitating back to the stump speech he’d delivered in the primaries when he was selling himself as a candidate. I’d been promised he’d be tough. But he’d been hesitant to take on Bush in a frontal way, and now I’d heard that he didn’t take debate prep seriously enough. It worried me. He didn’t do a bad job against Cheney that night, but he also didn’t do a great job. Some said Cheney won by a nose; others called it a draw. But what I knew was I hadn’t seen the Mr. October I’d been promised.
Days later, I’d have to meet the president again on a stage in St. Louis: another debate, another opportunity to define the differences between us. The format was a town hall debate, one many presumed was to the amiable incumbent’s advantage. The format has almost grown too predictable since the famous debate in 1992 when Bush’s father was spotted checking his watch, as if counting the minutes before he could stop taking audience questions and go home. I didn’t wear a watch to ensure I never looked down and provided pundits such an easy opportunity to write a column that could almost write itself.
This night, most of the action was between the candidates, rather than with the audience.
Bush attacked me, and I parried: “This president didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he has really turned his campaign into a weapon of mass deception.”
But I also found myself wanting a more honest interaction. As the night wound down, a question from a woman in the audience about taxpayer funding of abortion spoke to me. I told her about my thinking and my journey on an issue of conscience, about the fact that I’d decided long ago that I couldn’t “take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew or Protestant,” but that I wanted as president to help find common ground. Common ground on prevention. Common ground on adoption. Common ground on family planning. It was an honest combination of heart and head.
And standing there ready to respond to it was President Bush, whose own grandfather had been treasurer of Planned Parenthood. He jabbed back, with his smirk: “I’m trying to decipher that. My answer is, we’re not going to spend taxpayers’ money on abortion.” It struck me as a highly calculated response to an issue that deserved greater honesty, but a good reminder nonetheless of ways in which campaigns can too often be efforts merely to charge a partisan base.
Polls again showed that I got the better of Bush in the second debate, and we headed into the last twenty-five days neck and neck, but with momentum on my side. There’d be one more debate—October 13, in Tempe, Arizona. In nearby Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I put in a couple days of debate prep, I watched the Red Sox lose Game 1 of the American League Championship Series to the hated Yankees. Game 2 was the night of the debate, which made me certain that win or lose, the debate wouldn’t make a difference in the swing state of New Hampshire: every television set would be tuned to the playoffs. Politics may be a competitive sport in New England, but real sports come first.
The last debate was to be focused on domestic issues, but what became immediately evident was there’s no such thing as “foreign” policy—what happens “over there” matters here, whether it was the president’s unilateral war in Iraq that was putting us deeper in debt, or the way multiple deployments overseas were breaking our military.
I look back on that debate and what stands out is that we fought over issues, real issues, serious choices. The president argued that tomorrow’s workers should have the right to invest their Social Security in the stock market. I argued that would be a disaster, because it meant one economic downturn could destroy the retirement future of millions. I’d grown up around people who remembered the Great Depression. I knew a great recession was always a possibility and I wasn’t going to return to the days when so many senior citizens lived in poverty. It was an honest difference.
So too was our difference over the question that would drive most of the debate conversation on the news in the days that followed. The moderator, Bob Schieffer, asked us whether we believed homosexuals choose their orientation. I was surprised by President Bush’s answer: “You know, Bob, I don’t know.” I knew that he didn’t believe it. The president then pivoted into a hard-liner statement about gay marriage. He seemed determined to force a message home for his political base. “I think it’s very important that we protect marriage as an institution . . . the surest way to protect ma
rriage between a man and woman is to amend the Constitution.”
When I had my chance at the question, I wanted to restore some sense of humanity to the conversation. Marriage wasn’t under assault. That was malarkey. But real people—people’s sons and daughters—were under assault from what mere politicians were stirring up in the country. I spoke honestly. “We’re all God’s children, Bob, and I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born to be. It’s not a choice.”
Afterward, the response from the Right was furious. Lynne Cheney said I was “not a good man.” It was surreal. I’d defended the character and humanity of her daughter, who was proudly out of the closet and open about who God had made her. Yet I was branded by Mrs. Cheney as the problem, not her husband’s campaign or the politics of 2004 that had made gay Americans a political football in the first place. It was a strange exclamation point on the politics of division.
But now the debates were behind us. We were even, and our campaign’s polling showed the momentum was with us. The race would be decided by the way we ran through the tape.
Then, on October 29, news set off every pager and cell phone on the plane. We had just landed in Florida. There were rumors: Osama bin Laden’s first video appearance since 9/11 was about to shake the campaign with just four days to go.
We heard that American intelligence was poring over the tape and had asked for time to analyze it, but Al Jazeera refused. An al-Qaeda propaganda tape by the world’s most wanted terrorist was going to be wall-to-wall news the last eighty-six hours of the closest presidential election since Gore and Bush dueled in Florida. The news set the right-wing media into overdrive.
On Fox, a Republican guest said, “It looks like an endorsement by Osama bin Laden of John Kerry.”
The anchor Neil Cavuto replied, “He’s all but doing that. I thought I saw a button.”
I had a sinking feeling. We’d been cresting and climbing in the polls. We had been pummeling Bush over a mismanaged war in Iraq and leaked plans to privatize Social Security—both of which were sadly prescient. But now Bush was back on his favorite footing: 9/11.
Mark Mellman, my pollster, is a deeply religious, observant Jew. He doesn’t drive or work or use electronics on the Sabbath. Saturday morning, the overnight polls were hand-delivered to him by his assistant. We had dropped a point in every battleground state. Mark was so panicked, he walked all the way from his home in Georgetown three miles to the campaign headquarters to share the data in person.
In Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, that afternoon, President Bush said, “In less than seventy-two hours, the American people will be voting, and the decision comes down to, who do you trust? I offer leadership and results for a time of threat and a time of challenge.”
I had a more difficult challenge. I had to call for unity but remind people that President Bush’s approach to the war on terror was the reason bin Laden was still alive at all.
But momentum had shifted. I just prayed it hadn’t shifted irreparably.
Election Day was its own jolt of adrenaline, a burst of anxious energy. We had arrived in Wisconsin around 3:30 in the morning, hours after our final big event in Ohio: a raucous, hopeful concert in Cleveland where once again Bruce Springsteen lent his poetry and troubadour gifts to the campaign. Bruce was accompanied by his wife, Patti, and their kids, and I thanked him for stepping into the political fires for me, always a risk for a celebrity. He gave me a memento to keep with me: the guitar pic he had used on all our stops together, another treasured talismanic object for the pocket of my navy blazer, company for the four-leaf clover, Ohio buckeye and St. Christopher medal that I kept with me at all times. It was emotional hearing Bruce—with his harmonica, his guitar and his unique sound—play our campaign’s adopted ballad one last time, his song that had come to mean so much to me: “No Surrender.”
I believed we were going to win.
Over the last weeks I could feel the momentum growing. The bin Laden tape four days before the election had stopped our growth, panicked our pollsters and given Bush a bounce, but my gut told me we were going to make it over the finish line on Election Day.
We had one more event: a brief stop by a local polling place and a chance to cheer on our volunteers in a must-win state. My closing words in Wisconsin would be replayed over and over throughout the day on all the local networks, a reminder to everyone of the difference their vote could make in what would be one of the most fiercely contested, down-to-the-wire contests Wisconsin had ever known.
And then it was back onto the plane and home to Boston.
The emotion on the flight was palpable, from the crew and the attendants, who asked for photos, to the road team, who had racked up hundreds of thousands of miles in pursuit of this moment. They all knew that no matter what happened, this was going to be the last flight like this one: everything afterward would be different.
I gathered the team in the cabin one last time before we would all scatter into our different roles in Boston: I wanted to say thank you for all we’d gone through together. Some, like John Sasso and Mike McCurry, had walked away from lucrative businesses to be in the fight again by my side, bringing great maturity to our team. Others, like my young speechwriter Josh Gottheimer, had started out with another candidate but plunged into my campaign with zeal (and, in Josh’s case, even a grudging willingness—as the plane’s lone Yankees fan—to follow my entreaties and wear a Red Sox cap as the Sox roared all the way back from three games down to beat the Yankees, sweep the Cardinals and take their first World Series victory in eighty-six years, something I believed was an omen of another Massachusetts losing streak soon to be snapped). Stephanie Cutter was tenacious and determined, smart as hell, and she’d transferred her loyalty to Teddy Kennedy to me when she signed up in the bad old days of November 2003. David Morehouse was a former boilermaker from Pittsburgh who had become one of Al Gore’s most loyal soldiers, the man who had stopped Gore from conceding in Nashville four years earlier, and he had been just as tough and faithful on my campaign. And then there were the three amigos—body guy, trip director and traveling press secretary—who had been with me from the very start, by then as close as brothers, always my traveling companions in good times and bad.
I wanted the mood to stay light, not maudlin as sometimes can happen when the weight of a moment hits you. I look back and wish I’d said more—reminisced more, opened up more—but we had more fights ahead—and besides, we were going to win.
I handed out inscribed silver mementos to the staff and fleece jackets to the traveling press.
Our leased 757 touched down at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, just outside Boston, nestled between Concord and Lexington. For a moment, as the motorcade chugged toward the city on an overcast day about to turn rainy, I indulged my nostalgia.
Thirty-four years before, I’d given my first political speech at the citizens’ caucus at Concord-Carlisle High School, speaking from my heart and my gut in opposition to the war in which I’d fought, and one year after that while in VVAW, I’d been arrested a few miles down the road, on the town green in Lexington, in an act of civil disobedience, an act of dissent.
And now here I was in a motorcade, speeding along those same roads on my way to cast a vote for myself for president of the United States.
It hit me that I was marking the end of one of the greatest journeys anyone can take anywhere in the world—the race for the presidency of the United States.
Every nation in the world watches closely what we do. Their hopes and fears are integrally tied to ours. So many foreigners say to me, “I wish we could vote for your president—it matters as much to us what happens.”
I could feel both that weight and the excitement of the day as we climbed up the hill on Mt. Vernon Street to the Old State House, where I would finally, improbably, see my name on the ballot and cast my vote.
My polling place for Ward 5, Precinct
3, was in the basement of the building where I had been sworn in as lieutenant governor twenty-two years earlier, the golden-domed Old State House that had been pastureland where John Hancock’s cows grazed more than two hundred years before.
As she had for thirty-five years, Teresa was voting in Pittsburgh. She’d be flying home to Boston, but Alexandra and Vanessa were by my side to vote with me. Just looking at them, I could see my mom and dad in their faces, in their eyes and their expressions. For a misty moment my mind flashed back to my visit with my mom in 2002, just weeks before she passed away, to tell her about the campaign journey I was about to begin. Her four-word reminder of the one resource in public life that is never renewable sticks with me always: “Integrity, John, remember—integrity.”
I put on my reading glasses and leaned down to be sure to darken each circle of my ballot.
My moment of introspection was interrupted by the flash of the cameras and, of course, the obligatory “Who did you vote for?” question barked out by the herd of reporters waiting to see what clever or stupid answer I might give.
It was off to the Union Oyster House to continue my superstitious Election Day tradition of eating at the old counter where Daniel Webster had long, long ago devoured platefuls of oysters and countless pints of lager. I had first been introduced to the Oyster House by my father, who had sat at that same counter as a young practicing attorney, and as a kid I used to marvel at the mechanical dumbwaiter still ferrying plates of baked scrod and fried fish from the kitchen up two floors to the dining room above. Dad had taken me there many times. But ever since 1982, I came each Election Day and had the same meal: a dozen cherrystone clams, a bowl of chowder and a dark beer. Each time, it had done the trick.
