by John Kerry
I especially derived disappointment and determination from the young people who came up to me and said they’d cast their first presidential vote for me. I hated to feel as though I’d let them down. They’d yell, “Keep fighting!” and all I could say was “We all need to keep fighting.”
The campaign’s abrupt end was at odds with what I felt inside. I had to figure out how to keep acting on my beliefs, even as I tried to process the loss itself.
Friends were putting on a brave face. Often after expressing their sorrow or shock about the end of it all, or when they didn’t know what to say, they’d blurt out, “But you look good!” They sounded just a little too much like they were standing a few feet away from the casket at an Irish wake.
I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me or pull their punches, and I worked hard at not feeling sorry for myself. I’d gather friends for dinner or the New England Patriots game, and I’d eventually push them to open up about the campaign. What mistakes did I make? How could it have worked out differently? Where do we go from here?
I relied on a close group of friends who weren’t afraid to be candid: Tommy and Tory Vallely were especially direct, and David Thorne unflinchingly honest but protective. David McKean, who had been staffing the potential transition for a Kerry administration just a month before, faithfully continued as chief of staff.
By contrast, it was hard not to miss media commentary by those who positioned themselves as wise, even prescient, as they looked forward to a future political landscape that didn’t include me. Initial exit polls had chalked up the outcome to cultural issues like guns and gay marriage, on which I was supposedly on the wrong side. Not coincidentally, a story appeared in which it was revealed that John Edwards regretted that the campaign didn’t allow him to talk more about his personal values. Funny, I had never heard John say that in the campaign. Another analysis suggested I’d failed to heed President Clinton’s advice to take gay marriage off the table by endorsing state ballot initiatives that were discriminatory. Candidates already jockeying for 2008 suggested I need to “go away.” That’s politics: after a tough loss, you have to move forward, trust your own compass and separate constructive advice from expedient positioning.
Teresa and I went to London over Thanksgiving just to be together and escape cable television, to again walk down a street without a press pool or Secret Service for the first time in almost a year. It marked our first holiday in a long time where the destination wasn’t dictated by the campaign, and we looked back nostalgically at New Year’s Eve 2003, which we had spent together in Sioux City, Iowa—dinner with our adopted family of reporters and campaign staff, including a magnum of red wine that Teresa had brought as a surprise for all of them. Dinner had been followed by dancing at a community center with a hundred volunteers and guests. I give Teresa enormous credit: she had an instinctive wariness of politics and the bruising nature of campaigns, but she’d committed. She had been “all in” all the way through. Now our memories flashed back to the parts of the campaign that were filled with good humor and even better friends.
In London, after dinner one night, we stepped outside onto the cobblestone sidewalk and, as snowflakes fell against the darkness, noticed a crowd had gathered. They burst into applause. We hadn’t escaped the remnants of a campaign the world had followed closely, but it buoyed our spirits, even as we pondered what could have been.
Senate votes called me back to Washington briefly before the holidays. It was wind-down time, a lame-duck session of little consequence. The Republicans would have a bigger majority in the next Congress to work their advantage, so the votes would be predictable and perfunctory.
Despite that, I never thought about skipping out on the votes. It just wasn’t who I was. I was determined not to skulk off, retire from the Senate or just sit on a beach somewhere. The fight still animated me, as it had defined me since I left the Navy. Massachusetts had given me a job to do in the Senate, even if I’d fallen short in reaching for a promotion to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
I came back quietly, voted, but I found out quickly that there’s a certain kind of ritualistic damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t melodrama to the year after you lose a presidential election. If I attended the Democratic caucus meeting, I was written about anonymously as a “distraction” to those looking toward the future. If I didn’t attend, apparently it was evidence that I thought I was still the nominee for president and not just one of a hundred.
At lunchtime, I would still pop down from my office in the Russell Building and head for the Dirksen cafeteria, as I had for nineteen years as a senator. Pundits wrote that it was awkward for onlookers to see me filling my tray at the salad bar or standing in line just like everyone else. What would they have preferred I do? Sequester myself in my office wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot, waiting for a valet to lay out my lunch on a white tablecloth with cloth napkins? Marvin Nicholson, who had graciously come back to the Senate staff, joked, “We should’ve brought the press here when you were running if that’s all it takes to show you’re such a man of the people.” The Marv had a gift for lightening the mood.
There was nothing I could do about gossipy news stories except press onward. Al Gore had been a target after the 2000 election for going away, and I was a target for sticking around, but both of us had something in common. We had a lot of political life left in us, and I had a job to do for my state.
On Thursday, December 2, I headed to Arlington National Cemetery for the graveside service for a young Marine from Haverhill, Massachusetts, Lance Corporal Dimitrios Gavriel.
The date was exactly one month after the presidential election and two years to the day that I’d announced for president on Meet the Press, but amid the headstones, I could not have felt further from those milestones.
The day was bitter and cold, with gun-barrel-gray skies overhead and a strong wind blowing. Gavriel was a Marine—I should say “is” because in life or death, you’re forever a Marine. He had graduated from Brown University the same year as Alex. A high school wrestler, after 9/11 Gavriel walked away from Wall Street and signed up for the Marines. Before his thirtieth birthday, an insurgent’s grenade ended his life in Anbar Province. His parents were stoic, holding on to each other with all they had, holding on as a close-knit Greek family doing all they could not to be devoured by grief for the young man they loved so deeply.
Someone passed me a prayer card. On it were words pulled not from the Bible but from a poem written by the fallen Marine himself:
Hope lives among so few,
Yet strong it is I know,
For I am still a dreamer,
Along the track I go.
Finding peace and understanding in good men dying young remains a question that only God can answer, as I’d felt since Vietnam shook my faith. Thirty-five years later, the familiar feeling of premature loss surrounded me again. Gavriel was a young man I’d never met, but I felt I knew him because I’d known so many good, young idealists, all gone too soon.
Taps blew hauntingly, and a three-volley salute pierced the dry late autumn air. I knew the ritual too well.
After the funeral ended, I drove over to Persh’s grave. Thirty-six years had passed since he’d been stolen from us at Tet, at just twenty-five years old. He’d never gotten to marry his fiancée or have children, let alone grandchildren, or see his hair turn gray. I have lived all those gifts, which had been taken now from the young Marine America had just buried. I was alive and healthy with a voice I could use any way I wanted. I had nothing to wallow about. I had a battle to rejoin. Wallowing now would have been an insult to the memory of all those whose graves surrounded me.
Yes, I’d lost an election I should have won. Others lose far more and summon incredible dignity. I didn’t need to take a poll or hire a bunch of consultants to reevaluate my life or my next steps. I was who I was. I needed to use all my extra days in a way that valued the gift they really were.
To my surprise, in a S
enate that at times had seemed foreign to me—clubby in ways where I’d once been more reserved; competitive when I’d wished it could be more collegial—I was reminded that there are extraordinary friends you can count on when you need them, even when you least expect it.
Senator Tom Harkin asked to see me one-on-one. Some on the staff were skeptical. They predicted that Tom planned to ask me to donate my remaining campaign account to fund the Iowa Democratic Party. They were still bitter that Tom had endorsed Howard Dean one week before the Iowa caucuses. But Tom was my classmate in the Senate’s class of 1984. We’d traveled together to Central America as freshmen. We respected and liked each other. Of course, I’d meet him.
Tom walked straight into my personal office. We sprawled out in two big wing chairs. After exchanging pleasantries, Tom cut to the chase. “John, this will just take a minute,” he said, and leaned in to look me straight in the eye. “I just want you to know how proud I am that you were our nominee and you did a hell of a job.” I choked up. We talked for a bit, then in a flash he was gone, off to a hearing. I will never forget it. It was the nicest meeting I’d experienced in nineteen years in the Senate. Tom’s simple act of going out of his way—privately, quietly, and without fanfare—meant everything. One of my aides popped his head into my office.
“How much did you commit to the Iowa Democratic Party?” he asked.
“Go away,” I said, and smiled.
Teddy Kennedy, of course, had a sixth sense for moments like these. Joe Biden told me about a saying in his family: “If you have to ask, it’s too late.” Teddy never had to ask if you needed company, he just showed up. I wasn’t especially looking forward to President Bush’s inauguration ceremony and the prospect of sitting there wondering (and knowing I wasn’t alone in wondering) what it would have been like if sixty-five thousand votes had switched sides in Ohio. Not attending wasn’t ever an option. I managed a big smile when the jumbotron exposed me to a crowd of Republicans stretching down the Mall, who booed and jeered in unison. To the victors go the spoils.
Shortly after the ceremony, Ted came up to me and all but announced that he and Vicki were coming over to our house for dinner that evening. Oh, and Chris Dodd was coming with his wife, Jackie, as well. It was a transparent but endearing conspiracy Teddy had probably hatched with Vicki long in advance. He’d kept the plan a secret because he knew neither Teresa nor I wanted a pity party on a night that could have been very, very different. He probably suspected we might try to wriggle out of it if he gave us much advance notice.
That night, we cooked a feast of spaghetti and meatballs, drank far too much red wine and listened as Teddy shared outrageous stories about colleagues past and present. It was all the more entertaining thanks to Ted’s gift of mimicry, and even funnier when he’d break character and, in an instant, his best Strom Thurmond impression would be punctuated by that unmistakable Boston accent.
As the night faded and not long before Teresa and I walked everyone to the door, we were reminded of a different time in our history together.
In 1995, after the 1994 Republican Revolution cost us control of the Senate, I was thrown into a tense choice I hadn’t seen coming. We knew a full year before that there would be a contest for Senate Democratic leader. Tennessee’s Jim Sasser was likely to win, but Tom Daschle, a sophomore senator, was poised to give Sasser a run for his money. Tom was appealing to senators like me who weren’t committee chairmen but hoped for a greater voice in the caucus. It was old bulls on one side, young bucks on the other. I signed up to help Tom. Teddy was signed up with Sasser, and Sasser was a strong favorite.
On election night, though, Sasser was unexpectedly defeated. The race for Democratic leader was wide open. In jumped Ted’s best friend, Connecticut’s Chris Dodd. Chris was my friend too, but to Teddy he was the younger brother Ted had never had. Uncomfortably, I was committed to Chris’s opponent. I couldn’t switch sides. If I did, my word wouldn’t have meant anything. It was awkward on the Senate floor, in the cloakroom, even in my hideaway when I explained to both Chris and Ted that I couldn’t abandon Tom. It grew ever more awkward after Tom beat Chris by a single vote. A frosty time followed. I’d see Ted and Chris sitting together at their desks on the Senate floor, laughing, and I knew it was better not to wander over and intrude. Now, Tom Daschle didn’t have a Senate job to return to the way I had. On election night, he’d lost in South Dakota, and suddenly he’d gone from being the Democratic leader to needing to start over after a lifetime on Capitol Hill. His Republican successor had been sworn in earlier that day.
Ten years later, we were together on a tough night, as if the vote that had divided us in 1995 had never happened. Now we were just three friends, three senators, three guys leaning on one another on a night that hadn’t turned out the way any of us had hoped for. Teddy was that galvanizing force making sure no one spent the evening alone. It was a great quality of Ted’s, but a bigger reminder that the Senate runs on relationships, without which it can’t run at all. I emailed Tom Daschle to get together for dinner, and I was reminded that I was lucky to have a role to return to, while Tom had to start life all over again.
I threw myself back into the work of the Senate. It wasn’t always easy. I was in the minority, and the only committee on which I was even the senior Democrat was the Small Business Committee. It’s culture shock to go from being introduced everywhere as “the next president of the United States” to speaking to half-empty hearing rooms about legislation to reduce paperwork at the Small Business Administration.
I felt most empowered and most at home on the Foreign Relations Committee. Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Nebraska Republican and fellow veteran Chuck Hagel and I were all good friends who cared about America’s role in the world. We were joined by a new member, one whose arrival on the committee brought with it a trail of television cameras: Illinois’s junior senator, Barack Obama. Barack had an automatic platform in the Senate thanks to his performance at the convention in Boston, a freshman celebrity like none we’d witnessed since Hillary Clinton had come to the Senate after eight years as First Lady.
Every one of us was consumed by what we were watching unfold in Iraq. As a candidate, I’d described Iraq as “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” It had been a controversial statement back then. In the eyes of many, the war was going pretty well, even though all the ingredients were in place for full-blown disaster: a slow-growing insurgency, sectarian division and a weak government in Baghdad. Now, as President Bush began his second term, it was as if lighter fluid had been poured on those glowing embers. The insurgency became a full-fledged civil war. Anbar Province was exploding in violence.
Reading the comments of the Bush administration and listening to their witnesses testifying in front of the Foreign Relations Committee, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu. It could have been 1971. The hearing room hadn’t changed in thirty-four years, and neither had the arguments. Another administration was in denial. Their witnesses would say we were three months or six months away from compromises among Iraqis that would alleviate the sectarian tensions. I asked my staff to check and, sure enough, those same witnesses had made those same predictions three or six months before. Once again, there was always “light at the end of the tunnel.” Once again, we were being told that America was about to turn the page.
The Bush administration’s policies had made Iraq into what it wasn’t before the war: a breeding ground for jihadis—sixteen to twenty thousand jihadis and growing. Someone had to tell the truth to the American people. Happy talk about the insurgency being in its “last throes” led to frustrated expectations at home. Every day that we stumbled along, our troops were at greater risk, casualties were rising, costs were going up, the patience of the American people wore thin, and the specter of a quagmire stared us in the face.
I felt compelled to speak out. We couldn’t turn back the clock and reverse the decisions that had brought us to this point in Iraq. Neither could we achieve the clear and s
imple victory the administration promised so often even as the conditions in Iraq grew worse and worse.
I wanted Congress at least to force the Bush administration to stop denying reality and together find an exit strategy that preserved our core interests in Iraq, in the region and throughout the world.
I believed I had a particular responsibility to push the policy in a realistic direction. As someone who made the mistake of voting for the resolution that gave the president the authority to go to war, I also felt a personal responsibility to act and to help create political cover for others who had made the same error. It was okay to admit you’d made a mistake. If Vietnam taught us anything, it was that for too long, too many stayed silent for fear of admitting they’d been wrong. Half the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall represent young Americans killed after our leaders realized the policy was doomed to failure.
I began sitting down one by one with colleagues and talking about Iraq.
Some, like Chuck Hagel, were as disturbed as I was. Others, like John McCain, were deeply angry about the Bush policy but believed the answer was more American troops and infinite presence.
But there was also a mood among many in the Democratic caucus to hang back and let the president own the mess he had made in the Middle East, to continue with calls for Bush to find a strategy but never to offer one of our own. This would have been politically palatable if it weren’t morally wrong.
Americans were dying. This was, by definition, America’s problem, no matter who had created it.
In the late summer, I headed to the Middle East with a number of senators. I needed to go to Iraq again and evaluate for myself the situation on the ground. After a day and a half on the ground for round after round of meetings and briefings, I departed from Mosul.
