Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Chapters were closing and others beginning at the same time. None of us knew quite where the stories would end up. There was a bittersweet sense of comings and goings—big changes in Washington, some hopeful and others much less encouraging—as I was about to begin another term in the U.S. Senate. Once again in my life, I felt as though I was standing in a moment of multiple transitions, some literal, some figurative.

  Today, though, wasn’t a day to dwell on the changes. We had work to do, and I had a couple hundred friends from Massachusetts and beyond in town to celebrate my swearing-in. The crowd in the Dirksen Building was boisterous and full of fun. Gathered together were the stalwarts, friends from the campaigns in Massachusetts from 1972 on, people who had stuck it out in Iowa and New Hampshire when things didn’t look so promising, alumni and friends and family. At the center of it all was Max Cleland, ever the happy warrior, his special loyalty on display. Max faced a daily barrage of medical hurdles—it’s rare that triple amputees from the Vietnam era live well into their sixties as Max so bravely had. Never did he let on to anyone that he faced such a daily struggle. That wasn’t Max. He kept it all inside. He just showed up for his band of brothers. I asked Max and Ted to say a few words, and what a pair they made at the podium. The room was still and quiet as everyone leaned in to listen to these two men who had been central figures in so many of the political battles we’d fought together over the last years.

  Max was excited. “And John Kerry is still my commander in chief!” he yelled, as the crowd applauded.

  And then, to even more clapping, Teddy shouted out, “And he’s my secretary of state!”

  “Ted,” I said as I touched his arm, trying to stop him.

  “No, no, noooo,” Teddy bellowed with his signature laugh and a theatrical line: “I can say it!”

  More applause followed his emphatic rejoinder. It was classic Max and even more classic Teddy, a remark of unspoken solidarity that broke the ice in a room where the subject was taboo, a subject about which there was no doubt some chatter in the perpetual conversation of who’s up, who’s down, who’s coming, and who’s going in Washington parlor games.

  The unspoken elephant in the room, which only Ted was plucky and audacious enough to mention, was a swirl of media speculation about the president-elect’s pick to head the State Department, which had peaked before Thanksgiving. Unbeknownst to anyone in that room besides Ted and Vicki, just a few days after the election, the president-elect had flown me out to Chicago to meet one-on-one and talk about the possibility of a role in his cabinet. Alyssa Mastromonaco, who had headed the scheduling operation for my campaign in 2004, was by now a trusted jack-of-all-trades for Barack Obama, and she worked with my team to make sure the meeting stayed a secret to protect the equities of everyone involved.

  As the private plane touched down in Chicago, I was reminded just how quickly the days grow shorter in November, the midwestern air crisp but not yet cold. With the skies darkening, we drove into Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders.” The incredible skyline approached as the sun set softly and swiftly.

  Chicago had always been one of those cities that marked memorable milestones on my journey, from Harvey Bundy’s wedding on the eve of Officer Candidate School, to the newsreel footage of violence in the streets at the bloody convention in 1968, to all the stops in the decades to come for one political event or another. Little could I have ever predicted just how much my future would intersect with the Senate candidate I’d met on the South Side of Chicago in the spring of 2004, a man whose campaign I’d endorsed during a tough primary season and who was now the president-elect of the United States.

  An office building in Chicago had been transformed overnight into a temporary transition headquarters until the president-elect and his team picked up stakes and moved the whole operation to Washington, D.C. There was a buzz on the streets around the site of so much planning for a new administration in which many had invested such extraordinary hope for renewal. As the office building approached, and we spotted the steel Jersey barriers assembled to keep the gathered press at bay, I ducked down and pressed myself flat on the seat so no reporter would see me entering the garage. I wanted to avoid press speculation. Having once planned for a transition of my own, I knew how unhelpful leaks and leakers were, and I didn’t want to take any risk of contributing to a swirl.

  Fittingly, the first face to greet me upstairs was Marvin Nicholson, a familiar and friendly presence, self-effacing as ever. Marvin had by now traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on back-to-back presidential campaigns, one ending in disappointment, one ending in a remarkable victory that, at least for now, had created a sense of unity and purpose in the country unlike anything I’d seen in my political lifetime. We hugged. I’d kept up with Marvin through texts and emails during this last campaign and we’d remained close friends. He’d been a confidant, a mischief-maker and a mood-lightener extraordinaire during the highs, lows and in-betweens of the race in 2004, and I couldn’t have been happier for him that all those weeks and months spent cramming his six-foot-seven frame into tiny vans and little planes had landed him here where he belonged, next to a president-elect.

  Barack Obama came out of his office and welcomed me inside. A nondescript General Services Administration suite of offices had been whipped into a working transition space, and in the office reserved for the president-elect there was a small couch, a couple of chairs and, on a wall, a television set tuned to a football game in action on the screen. The look and feel of the office was utilitarian, temporary and efficient.

  One of Obama’s great gifts is his calm demeanor, always perfectly self-contained. We sat down and began to talk informally. When I referred to him as “Mr. President-elect,” he stopped me and said that when we were in private I should call him Barack. He asked about Teresa and reminded me that so much of my political family had helped form his earliest staff, from the speechwriter Jon Favreau to Alyssa, Marvin and his heads of domestic policy. He was chewing what by now I knew was Nicorette gum, a valiant effort to keep his smoking habit at bay, but he was loose and relaxed for a man who now had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He thanked me for my contributions to the campaign and began talking about all the work that lay ahead, starting with the economy. He’d had his first briefings on the economy, all of which had confirmed for him that things weren’t as bad as he’d argued during the campaign—they were actually a whole lot worse—but he was moving quickly and efficiently to build a government. He’d immediately announced Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, and Rahm popped his head into the meeting to say hello. I’d known Rahm going all the way back to his staff job running point on NAFTA for President Clinton. He was certainly a good choice.

  Our meeting was friendly and polite. Obama asked me about my interest in serving as secretary of state. I told him that I knew from having run in 2004 that these are personal decisions that only the principal can make, but that I believed in the promise of his administration and wanted to be helpful in whatever way I could. I’d just been reelected and wasn’t grasping for an exit strategy from the Senate. We talked a bit about the job itself, a handful of big challenges from Iran to Afghanistan, and he emphasized how much the years ahead would be consumed with domestic challenges as the first order of business. He said he would come back to me, that he had some politics to figure out, chairs to arrange, and that perhaps we should talk more soon.

  I walked out with a clear feeling that he had a very specific person in mind for the State Department and that it wasn’t me. Soon we would learn that it was my colleague Senator Clinton, a bold decision to bring inside the administration his chief political rival. Many wondered whether it could work, remembering what a friction point foreign policy had been during the primary season and how much they’d clashed. Some of the bad blood between the Obama team and the Clinton team had no doubt lingered, something I knew from my own experience in 2008 dealing with the hurt feelings of Massachusetts’s Clinton backers who wer
e angry that I’d backed Obama. For the activists and insiders, whichever side you were on in this campaign had become a dividing line, not as indelible as Carter/Kennedy in 1980, but sometimes not far off either.

  Stepping back, however, and taking in the view from a higher elevation, I knew it could work if the two principals wanted to try. On Obama’s part, I thought it was a bold move, one that reinforced his campaign’s narrative about bringing people together and one that also conveniently ensured that if the first couple years of the administration went poorly, he wouldn’t have a chief Democratic rival waiting in the Senate. When I met with my own transition team in 2004, we’d actually talked very specifically about uniting the party that way, finding ways to bring not just allies but former opponents into an administration. I believed that Hillary and Barack could make it work, and I thought it would be well received globally, a message about unity and governance.

  While it would have been great to start out as President Obama’s first secretary of state, the quick resolution of whether I was staying inside the Senate or being drafted into the administration gave me certainty about my role in the Senate and my focus. Certainly, when friends had laid out the case—doing foreign policy full-time in an administration I believed in, surrounded by friends—it had been attractive. I’d always said, even when I was running for president, that secretary of state seemed like the best job in the world—no fund-raising, no politics, just focusing every day on making the world a better place. It would have been an extraordinary opportunity—but there was also an element of relief about the choice I wasn’t facing. I’d just been reelected with 66 percent of the vote in Massachusetts. I’d worked for years to earn that trust. I’d gone through very tough campaigns to get to the Senate and to stay there, including running against America’s most popular governor in 1996, William Weld. Now I had a big mandate from Massachusetts, and Teddy was sick, which meant, inevitably, that Massachusetts would be contemplating life without a giant who had been a rock of responsive government since 1962. This was not the ideal time for me to be leaving Massachusetts or the institution.

  Stepping back, I felt as if I was in a new and different space and place than any in my Senate career, with seniority I’d never dreamed of in 1985 when I was number ninety-nine out of one hundred. Now I had a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, where senators like Russell Long and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had passed some of the most important legislation in generations, shaping social policy through the tax code, and I knew we would be working to pass health care reform, which I’d always hoped would become a reality. My perch on three different committees—Finance, Commerce and Foreign Relations—gave me a chance to help shape policy in a whole array of issues I cared about, from technology, trade and globalization to climate change. There was a lot to do, and I was especially excited about what we might be able to get done in the first years of this administration, with a big majority in the House of Representatives and fifty-nine—soon to be sixty—Democratic seats in the Senate. I’d never been around (with seniority) for a moment like this, and neither had most of my colleagues. For someone like me, who had read about the New Deal, the Lyndon Johnson–era Senate, and then the Great Society, but had never witnessed an era of extraordinary progressive legislating, it promised to be a great time to be a U.S. senator.

  Everything on Inauguration Day 2009 only bolstered that sense of possibility and that burst of idealism. History seemed to be shining its brightest light on Washington that day, the inauguration of our first African American president serendipitously falling the day after Martin Luther King Day. It was bitter cold but the sun was shining. Our children and their families gathered at home early that morning and bundled up together, along with my sisters and Cam, for the trek to the Capitol through the toughest traffic and largest crowds I’d ever seen in Washington (and, yes, larger by far than the Trump inaugural). Teresa particularly had been captivated by the presidential campaign. She’d even headed home to campaign in Pittsburgh with Michelle Obama, introducing the future First Lady at a boisterous rally at Carnegie Mellon. Teresa and Michelle, of course, were filled with an idealism that was infectious.

  It’s hard to adequately describe the excitement of the moment. I’d been to many inaugurations, from Eisenhower’s, sitting on my dad’s shoulders, trying to sneak a peek at the far-off scene playing out on the east steps of the Capitol, to those I’d attended closer up as a senator for four other presidents, three Republicans and just one Democrat. This was different. It must have felt the way it did when President Kennedy was inaugurated, the palpable sense of energy and purpose.

  Down the length of the Mall, the mass of people stretched on and on, and the signs and the faces in the crowd spoke to the powerful connection so many African Americans were sharing in this moment. For me, who had been inspired in college by Allard Lowenstein’s exhortation to march for civil rights, and then that next spring had been horrified by the “White Only” and “Colored” signs David Thorne and I had seen in rest stops when we drove through the South, this moment was a long time coming in America. President Obama’s inauguration proved more powerfully than any speech or piece of legislation ever could that we really could be the country we aspired to be.

  The inauguration was also personally touching. These were two colleagues of mine being sworn in as president and vice president. I’d sat on the Foreign Relations Committee for twenty-four years with Joe and for four with Barack. Our staffs, advisors and political families intersected in so many ways, and both Teddy and I had thrown ourselves into the campaign with gusto. Now, up here on the steps of the west front of the Capitol, we felt that hope had found a home in this sea of human hearts.

  The transformative power of an inauguration is remarkable. I watched as Joe Biden became Vice President Biden and as Senator Barack Obama became simply “the President.” Together with their families, they moved from the crisp air of the steps of the Capitol into the rotunda. They accepted congratulations and warm wishes from all gathered inside. When I stood there with the new president and offered my best, and said the words “Mr. President,” he arched his eyebrows slightly, as if to say, “What a crazy world this is.” The president scribbled a note on the program I intended to keep as a souvenir: “I’m here because of you.” Of course, I didn’t think that was true. Barack Obama was president because of his skill and determination, and because with remarkable confidence he had judged the political moment correctly and zigged when others zagged. Nonetheless, his note was a reminder of the funny way our lives and careers had intersected. What if . . . ? I had to wonder—life is full of so many what-ifs. What if we hadn’t tacked on a jobs event on the South Side of Chicago in 2004 and I hadn’t met him again in the campaign? What if a different name had risen to the top of the list as Mary Beth Cahill, Jack Corrigan and I mulled our options for the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention later that summer? What if? History is history when it happens, but there are so many little moments along the way that could have altered its course, but here we were in this present moment that would be ensconced in future history books, and it all felt real and right.

  For me, however, the excitement and anticipation of that moment weren’t to be savored much longer. At the traditional, bipartisan celebratory luncheon after the ceremony in the beautiful rooms of the Capitol, as the new president mingled with the group, a murmur and a gasp rippled through the crowd: Ted Kennedy had collapsed. Ted had no doubt saved up a lot of strength for this day he had worked so hard to see, but the room was hot after so much time out in the cold earlier. A seizure had interrupted the day that was so important to this seventy-six-year-old man who was loved by so many of us in that room. Oh God, don’t let this happen today, I prayed, as a rush of adrenaline raced through my body. I stood by Teddy, trying to block the view from the cameras as we worked through the beginning of the seizure. Chris Dodd, Orrin Hatch and I helped get Ted out of the luncheon into an adjoining room. There we stretched him out on the carpet as th
e seizure continued to lock his body. A doctor appeared, but both Vicki and I were struck by how little he contributed to resolving the episode. Then Capitol medical technicians arrived, and after they got things stabilized a bit, we accompanied Ted to a waiting ambulance. Not wanting to distract from the festive day, he urged us to go back inside. By the time I did get back, I learned that shortly after Ted’s medical episode, Robert Byrd, my first Senate Democratic leader, now a white-haired, wheelchair-bound ninety-one-year-old, had also become ill and disoriented, upset by what he’d seen happen to the man he had defeated for whip in 1979.

  Later that day, I headed over to the hospital to see Teddy. He was laughing, feeling much better, mad as hell about what had happened. Vicki was a rock through it all, a protector and a comforter, but it was a crystallizing moment, a reminder for all of us that even lives lived at the center of history don’t last forever. The clock was ticking.

  I tried to apply that lesson quietly to my work in the Senate. Early in the year, I sat down with my senior Senate team. I wanted to talk about the next two years, and I wanted to set the tone right from the start. “Everyone may expect us to carry the load on foreign policy, but I want each of you to hear and know this from me: I care about a whole lot more than that and I’ve waited for a moment like this a long time, with a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress and a chance to get a lot done, and we’re going to do more than foreign policy.”

  The domestic policy staff was thrilled. I’d seen in the Senate how too often assumptions can become reality if you let them. I cared deeply about foreign policy, but it wasn’t all I cared about, not by a long shot, and it wasn’t all I was now well positioned to help shape. I’d seen Ted step out from his core issues to be an important voice on issues like Iraq and seen the great appropriator Robert Byrd do the same. Foreign policy was an asset for us, but I wanted to be a senator who made a difference on more than one issue, and I knew we could. We were going to have a very full agenda. At the top of the list were three causes that had animated me for a long time: providing affordable health care for everybody, protecting the environment and preventing war.