I didn’t go far. In the daylight hours, sunny Uptown seemed safe, but at night, it became a mysterious place that I didn’t know at all. Katrina had devastated the Crescent City and many blocks were still in ruins, where the inhabitants couldn’t or wouldn’t come home.
Unlike so many neighborhoods, where ruined and uninhabited houses were spray-painted with various warnings, our neighborhood was mostly intact. The worst of the physical devastation had been removed but the psychic toll was still palpable. Nobody whined, but there was a silent residual feeling of fear. In the post-Katrina chaos, homes on our block had been looted and most of our neighbors had guns and ammo. The block had even pooled money to hire a neighborhood security patrol. As for me, I had a baseball bat and a couple of vintage army knives and bayonets that brought me little comfort. They were still in transit.
On a more primal level than personal safety, though, I really fear getting lost. My sense of direction is notoriously bad. And James, the human GPS, had been telling me for years that I couldn’t follow the normal compass directions—north, south, east, west—to find my way around New Orleans. Even street maps confused me.
The city works off the mother ship: the Mississippi River, which gives it its distinctive crescent shape and the neighborhoods and districts that flow into each other. New Orleans is ordered not so much by numbers and letters—there’s nothing like a grid system—but more by human metrics: original ethnic settlements, wards, parishes, neighborhoods and districts of certain activities, each encompassing multiple intricacies and idiosyncratic names or known by events that just stuck. Major streets and avenues are reference points rather than landmarks.
Each street name tells a story. In the French Quarter, for instance, all the streets named for royals, particularly illegitimate sons of the kings of France, are flanked and separated by streets named for saints.
And just when you think you know where you’re going, a street will arbitrarily change names when it crosses into a new ’hood. Because, well . . . just because.
For example, we live in Uptown—upriver from the French Quarter—referred to by some as the University District because it houses Tulane and Loyola universities. Our house is on Palmer Avenue, which is the “lake” side of St. Charles Avenue (named for Carlos III of Spain) and the “river” side of Freret Street, where Katrina’s floodwaters stopped. Palmer Avenue becomes Webster Street on the river side of St. Charles because Reverend Webster was run over by a streetcar there and it seemed fitting to name a street after him. And St. Charles turns into Royal Street downriver when you cross into the French Quarter, and it becomes River Road upriver above Uptown/University. The name of our church is St. Stephen, which is in the Good Shepherd parish because the Katrina devastation resulted in the conflation of three churches into one new parish. And where we live is considered “organized.”
Confused?
In our first weeks in New Orleans, it was too overwhelming to think about all this. Instead, I determined my safe zone—where I could walk safely and how far I could go without getting accosted or lost. The safe zone was to the end of our block, where I could actually see our house. I walked only that far, and then I walked back.
And I always locked our doors.
But, just a few steps away from the house, even in that short distance, not even one-eighth of a mile, I was overcome by the beauty and breadth of the junglelike foliage. I stared in wonder at the gigantic live oaks with their long arms sweeping high above the house and down to the street. I inhaled the new fragrances, so many all at once. I watched the lush fronds move in the breeze. All I could think was: Jurassic Park.
At the end of our block, I was struck by a feeling that I hadn’t had since my childhood. When I was a girl, well before I hit puberty, I had the decorating bug already and had papered the wall above my top bunk with dozens of color photographs from National Geographic. I liked to pretend I was an adventurer, and at night and in the early morning, when I awoke, my eyes traveled to exotic places I doubted that I would ever see.
And now, here I was: the adult me, on a most unexpected exploration with my menagerie of domesticated dogs and semiferal cats. I had always dreamed life would be one seamless adventure, destination unknown. And now, the journey was just beginning.
Naturally, there will always be forces that make you want to stop in your tracks. They’re not necessarily evil; they’re just obstacles. For instance, my kids weren’t sure about moving. Washington was the only home they’d known. And all their friends were there. My husband—even though James was born and raised and loved Louisiana with every cell of his being, and we’d been married in New Orleans—wasn’t totally sure it was the right thing either.
After twenty-eight years for me in Washington, and twenty years for him, it was unthinkable that we’d leave the place where we’d made our careers, had our babies, had so many friends and experiences. Who leaves Washington?
All of my friends were unified in their response.
“What? You’re doing what? You’ll be back. You’ll be back in six months.”
Right decision? Wrong decision?
How would everything turn out?
My previous operating principle in life was to figure things out as quickly as I could—check that task off my list. Make the unknown known. Get the lay of the land. I am a quick study. New Orleans taught me—demanded of me—a different way of living, the way I had always hoped to live. I learned to stop trying to have all the answers, and delight at new discoveries every day instead.
Let mysteries unravel at their own speed.
JAMES
I NEVER HATED WASHINGTON. And I didn’t move away because I wanted to run away from something. I just discovered that I didn’t want to live there anymore. People in D.C. tend to care very much about the latest political fight or the next campaign, but nobody gives a crap whether LSU wins or loses. Most people didn’t even know the line on the game. That alone was enough to make me feel like an outsider at times.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Washington. I loved being in the center of the storm all those years. I was very close to a president and the people who worked for him. A lot of good things happened during Bill Clinton’s tenure in the 1990s, things I’m very proud of. I wouldn’t trade those experiences, even the dark days, for anything.
But I never was going to be that guy in his seventies, living out his last days in some apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. I was coming home. I didn’t know when, and I didn’t know under what circumstances. I just knew it would happen at some point. It always lingered in the back of my mind.
Who am I to say whether Washington has gotten better or worse over the years? That depends on your perspective. All I knew was that it had begun to change in very tangible ways. The whole media landscape had grown so fractured; the news cycles had become constant and too often devoid of any real substance. So many people we’d known and grown to trust—in the media, in politics, in local business—began to die off or move on.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just change, and it’s inevitable. But it also forced us to think about whether we’d been there long enough.
By late 2006, I think Mary and I both were growing a little weary of D.C. Twenty years in the pressure cooker will do that to you. I’d fought and clawed to get there. I’d had a good run. I wasn’t mad at anybody. But I was kind of losing interest in the conversation.
MARY
JAMES FLEW INTO LOUIS ARMSTRONG AIRPORT the next morning and I drove to pick him up—quite proud of myself for getting there on time in spite of being directionally challenged. James got behind the wheel and I felt instantly safe again. Daddy’s home.
We were yammering away, catching up, holding hands, scared and excited to be starting yet another unexpected adventure. Of course, food being central to James, he made an immediate beeline to our neighborhood grocery store to get his favorite hom
egrown Louisiana specialties.
His cell phone started buzzing, a sound that usually sets my molars to grinding since it is the ceaseless sound that accompanies James everywhere, anytime—he jawbones on the phone way more than any girl I’ve ever known—but I was so happy to be with him and be home, I let it go.
He was all smiles. “Hey, man! Just pulled into town!”
Then silence.
“Tim Russert is dead?”
My instant and only thought: they must mean Big Russ, Tim’s daddy in Buffalo—not Tim himself. It was too much to take in. We couldn’t believe it. We didn’t believe it.
His phone buzzed again. It was Tim’s MSNBC producer, and she was weeping and weeping, barely able to get out the words. James and I couldn’t speak either. That day we fell into pieces that couldn’t be picked up.
JAMES
I REMEMBER IT LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY. June 13, 2008. Friday the thirteenth. Day one in our new home in New Orleans. I’d just gotten to town that morning. Mary had come the night before. The boxes were unpacked. The refrigerator was empty.
We had hopped in the car to pick up a few groceries at Langenstein’s, a little family store that’s been there forever down on Arabella Street. Bread, milk, eggs, coffee. The basic stuff you need just to get a house started.
That’s when my cell phone rang. It was Al Hunt, a longtime Washington reporter and an old friend.
“I’ve got the most awful news you can imagine,” he said. “I think Tim just died.”
“That can’t be true,” I said.
Another call was already coming in. I recognized the number. It was Barbara Fant, Tim’s executive producer at MSNBC. She was weeping. That’s when I knew.
Here’s the thing. I talked to Tim Russert every day, including most weekends. For years, we hardly ever missed a day. Sometimes it was about politics. But most times it was about sports, about our families, about all kinds of other stuff. He’d call me sometimes when LSU scored a touchdown, just to say congratulations.
I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’d had with him about moving back to New Orleans and what it would mean. He was a Buffalo boy at heart. He knew all about having deep roots. He understood the pull of home.
I’d been connected to Tim and Meet the Press for decades. That was one of the strongest ties I had to Washington.
And then, boom. Out of nowhere, he was gone.
It was almost like somebody slapped me and said, “All right. You want to move? You want to leave Washington after all these years? Fine, I’ll sever one of your biggest connections to it.”
In life, you sort of get over everything. My father and my mother died. I lost a brother. It’s certainly never the same after that, but you move on.
Still, Tim’s death hit me hard. Not only because he was such a dear friend, but also because in some strange and visceral way it marked an end and a beginning. The before and the after. Washington and New Orleans. We were leaving behind a world we had known for a new one filled with uncertainty.
I’ll never forget that day. Even now, I take a different route when I go to Langenstein’s. I still won’t go down Arabella Street.
MARY
I DON’T REMEMBER WHO SAID, “You have to come do the show on Sunday. Brokaw’s hosting it.” All I remember, besides an all-encompassing pain, was my aching heart for Maureen Orth and Luke Russert, Tim’s wife and son. Of course we had to do it. How could we not?
Maureen and Luke are like family to us. Maureen had long been an incredible gal pal and Luke was forever the son we didn’t have. There wasn’t any other thought but We gotta go. There isn’t anything you can really do for a grieving family. But, still, you have to try. Unfortunately, from personal experience, I knew Maureen and Luke would be deprived of the normal quiet grieving process, of somberly being surrounded by family and close friends.
Washington, D.C., culture dictated that the Russerts put on a lavish, multitiered televised event where all the D.C. Doyennes and Masters of the Universe could make an appearance and put on a good show of personal grief. I don’t mean to suggest that Tim’s passing didn’t strike deep pain and shock into the hearts of his legions of friends and colleagues. But I was also certain his funeral would be attended by far fewer who knew Timothy John Russert of Buffalo, New York, than those who simply knew of the famous man and his coveted Sunday show. And, as if they weren’t in enough pain already, dealing with the clamoring “This Town” crowd would be tough for his family.
So we got on a plane and went back to Washington—the city we’d literally just left behind. My heart was sinking. And just because God likes to rub it in sometimes, almost all my wardrobe was in transit, so I was forced to go power shopping for a suitable made-for-TV funeral outfit. Even in my pit of despair, I realized the standard moving garb of shorts and flip-flops wasn’t gonna cut it.
Appearing on Meet the Press was the last thing I wanted to do, but I consoled myself with the thought that our love for Tim would make the whole ordeal a cakewalk. I was wrong about that.
The Sunday show was horrible. James could not stop crying, so I had to keep it together and be coherent. (Please don’t remind me that I wasn’t.) The set felt foreign and soulless without Tim. For me, the whole thing was the worst kind of good-bye ever created. And I hate good-byes. I have avoided them all my life. My mom must have been the same way. She had cancer when I was young and she never told any of us, my dad or my brother or my sister or me. She just got thinner and thinner, more and more exhausted, until she left us for good.
All the new losses in our lives trigger painful memories of the old ones.
Misery upon misery, I had just been reunited with Tim—another of God’s gut shots, I guess. He and James spoke every day on the phone, usually more than once. But during the long and tortured Scooter Libby investigation and trial, a display of prosecutorial excess the likes of which I hope to never see again, but know I will—Tim and I weren’t allowed to speak because Scooter and I had worked together in the Bush/Cheney White House. Scooter had been falsely accused of leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and the case more or less turned on a long forgotten and irrelevant conversation he’d had with Tim, who had been called to testify against Scooter, and I got grilled by the FBI and called before a grand jury.
I am not going to rehash this travesty of justice here, otherwise I will get riled up again over the utter havoc wreaked upon innocent lives in a political parlor game. But the point is, while the ugly circus was going on, nobody in a massive radius of the White House was permitted to talk to most anybody in the D.C. metro area, including Tim and me.
When the trial was finally over, and we could talk again, I called Tim and we both cried and cried into the phone, because we were family, a family ripped apart through no fault of their own. Because I loved him like that.
And then he dies on our first day in New Orleans. To me, leaving God out of it, this was definitely not a good sign. This wasn’t a good omen of any kind. And it made me ask myself again: Right decision? Wrong decision? I really wanted an answer.
The funeral was at Tim’s Georgetown church, Holy Trinity. He was super Catholic. As expected, everybody who was anybody in the political and power world—and plenty of straphangers—showed up. We were aching to say good-bye to our dear friend, but it wasn’t so much Tim’s funeral as a generic Important Washington Person funeral. Non-Catholics and known atheists stood in line for Communion and somberly walked out, square in the line of the camera.
I guess if you are seen at an important Washington funeral it means you are worth something, that you matter and count. It might even determine your per-hour billing charge at a law, lobbying or PR firm. I don’t know why I was so upset by it; I had already endured the funereal extravaganza of my late boss and mentor, Lee Atwater, as well as one of my very best friends, Ann Devroy. Atwater was the RNC chairman and Ann was a White Ho
use reporter for the Washington Post, but they were first and foremost a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a beloved friend. And I hated those send-offs.
But there we were.
The church service was followed by a big to-do at the Kennedy Center, and I said, “I cannot go to that.” We had front-row seats, we were told. I said, “I’m not going.” And James was of the same sorrowful sentiment. But, of course, we did go. We sat in the back in undesignated seats and cut out early before the “after-party.” We went to the Palm and got drunk and even then we still couldn’t talk about it, but we sure could cry.
JAMES
THEY HAD CALLED AND ASKED if Mary and I would come on a special edition of Meet the Press honoring Tim that Sunday, two days after he died, so we turned around and flew back to Washington. Tom Brokaw was going to host the show. Doris Kearns Goodwin was coming, along with Mike Barnicle and a few others.
Neither of us felt much like going on national television at that moment. We both were a mess. But how could you say no? I don’t really remember what I said that day, other than talking about how Tim genuinely loved politics and how he was actually even a better guy than people imagined him to be. Mostly, I just remember trying not to cry on air.
There’s a word that’s used in Washington in a way that is seldom used in other places. And the word is relationship. The relationship-to-friendship ratio in Washington is really skewed. It would sound odd in most places if you said, “You know, I have a relationship with that guy.” People don’t blink at a sentence like that in Washington. I had a relationship with people in the press. I had a relationship with political people in Washington. I had a friendship with Tim Russert. We talked probably a dozen times a week. We had basketball tickets together, baseball tickets together. I did a radio show with his son. I did his show God-knows-how-many Sundays. Our families spent holidays together.
Love & War Page 2
