Love & War

by James Carville

  Every morning I cried in the predawn dark while I drove on the deserted highway into the city from our home in Old Town Alexandria. I cried while I hung my wet head of hair out the window to dry. I cried while I tried to put on makeup at the stoplights. I cried at the reflection of my exhausted, conflicted face in the rearview mirror. My unhappiness was exasperated by James’s refusal to be even fleetingly happy for me—or remotely proud. Not even close. He was, in fact and in every deed, unsupportive and often downright unpleasant, when he wasn’t totally ignoring me. So I decided to pump up myself instead, hence all the weeping, which was all I could come up with.

  I’d finish blow-drying my hair inside my West Wing office, unsmear my mascara, buck up and head to the daily seven a.m. senior staff meeting, which was originally scheduled at six-thirty a.m. until President Bush pushed back the time of the meeting in the first week of the administration after Karen Hughes, on behalf of the informally organized women of the West Wing, appealed to his abundant common sense, and possibly compassionate conservatism. Working parents and all. Bush 43 wanted a family-friendly White House. They all did. We all did. And we meant it.

  James came to my swearing in. It’s a big deal to be an assistant to the president, a certified commissioned officer. We were all assembled in the front of the yellow-gold, magnificently appointed East Room—a handful of fellow travelers (in the good way) receiving that historic and coveted honorific, the Honorable, under the proud and awestruck gazes of our beaming families. The photo dogs were snapping away, chronicling our crowning achievement.

  I didn’t ask the perpetually pissed-off James if he’d like to come to the swearing in. I told him he had to come. I said, “This is the one thing that I want.” I didn’t throw it in his face how much I had suffered after Poppy’s loss in 1992 and didn’t bring up all the accolades and official events and award ceremonies that I had soldiered through for him, while adoring liberal sycophants cooed over him and elbowed each other out of the way just to be in the presence of the Ragin’ Cajun, the political strategist and, in their estimation, possibly the Second Coming.

  I just stated in that way that precludes negotiation: “You’re coming.” But then, as I raised my hand to take the oath, I looked out at his miserable mug and saw him completely unable to share in the enthusiasm of my day and surrounded on all sides by a sea of uberconservatives, and I wished he hadn’t come. Instead of reveling in the special day, I hated myself for being such a cruel and selfish psycho wife.

  JAMES

  I DID DRAG MYSELF over to the White House when Mary was sworn in as an assistant to the president. I knew it meant a lot to her and, frankly, it was just easier to shut up and go than to try to get out of it. So I went.

  The truth is, George W. Bush is a personable guy. He knew that I was suffering. He could tell how miserable I was about the whole deal. So at one point during the swearing-in ceremony, he went out of his way to come over and greet me and talk for a few minutes. I’ll give him credit for the kindness and compassion he showed that day. He tried to make a miserable situation a little less miserable.

  MARY

  I COULDN’T WAIT TO start working.

  Six months. That’s all. Trying to adhere to our messy marriage compromise, I had assured him it would be only six months. One football season. Heck, he could wait years for a good Rhône red to open up. Even though we both knew that was pure fiction, that was my story and I almost believed it myself.

  So from the minute I started, the clock in his mind started running too. The countdown was on, and James is nothing if not a numbers junkie, which he learned from his legendary card-counting bridge-champion mother—and which accounted for his endless show-off victories at gin rummy, so much so that I considered it cheating.

  And day in and day out, James was so unhappy, so distant, so downright self-righteous that it was soul-sappingly god-awful for me. The only available recourse was to go into “partner mode,” where the glue of love and affection is unnecessary to fulfilling daily obligations and duties—dealing with the kids, paying bills, attending to the shared-life stuff. It was the only way to continue. James had shifted into partner mode the day of W’s election.

  So we put love and affection away on the bottom shelf, and never let my job enter the house. There was never any mention of my jam-packed, stressful, mind-sapping days. What little physical and mental energy I could reserve was channeled into devotion to family and him. Which was doubly hard since he didn’t want to have anything to do with his selfish psycho wife and the kids were mostly sound asleep by the time I got home.

  I pleaded with him to stop sulking. “Look, just give me six months.” And in an occasional nod to reality, I’d try to slip in a provision—“At the worst it will be until the midterms.”

  And I (sort of) meant it—about the six months—or I really meant to try to work toward it. The plan was to help the new incoming crew get settled, get organized, integrate the VP and West Wing offices and then Mama would be coming home. He knew I had no interest in working those kinds of hours, enduring that kind of relentless stress, earning those meager wages (which meant no retail therapy for me). He knew I wasn’t tempted by the perks of the White House. Years before, I had even turned down an offer from my beloved Bush 41 to work there.

  But there was nothing I could say, no deals I could strike, nothing in my bag of wifely tricks that would assuage his anger and his concerns. So, we just coasted along in partner mode and tried to stay in neutral gear, not talking for about eighteen hours of my day and pretending it wasn’t happening. I like a good fantasy as much as the next guy, but he remained a hothead and I was one hot mess.

  Mothers of kids that age—five and two—may be the only ones who really know what it means to leave your nest in the dark before dawn and not return until long after the dinner hour every night. Those are babies at home. Those are potty-training years, nursery school, preschool, Play-Doh, Teletubbies, Scooby-Doo. I took to sleeping with the girls every night, just to get a chance to breathe their sweet air in the same room.

  And the normally insatiable James didn’t even care. That hurt. That man can really put on some pain. When he decides on a strategy, he is nothing but discipline, a proud marine. His battle plan in this case: inflict maximum pain, grief and guilt, and exacerbate these with frequent really cool foreign campaign trips, like the ones that I had previously accompanied him on. He actually deserves his reputation as a kick-ass, take-no-mercy, in-it-to-win-it fighter. Semper fi, Corporal.

  JAMES

  HOW ELSE COULD SHE have expected me to act at the time? Should I have packed her a brown-bag lunch each morning and wished her good luck on cutting taxes for rich people on her way out the door? Should I have baked cookies when she came home and asked whether they made any progress drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

  I was trying to remain civil and generally composed, and some days that was enough of a challenge by itself.

  Mary would get up before dawn to head to work at the White House, and as often as not she’d come home well after dark. It wasn’t like I was a single father or anything. She rushed home as soon as she could in the evenings, and when she had to work weekends, she’d usually take the girls to the White House with her. We had Geneva, who came during the day and helped out tremendously, especially when I was away giving speeches or working on foreign campaigns.

  But a lot of times it was the girls and I at home together, which turned out to be a blessing of sorts. I’ve never exactly been Mr. Mom. Mary always changed most of the diapers. I would do it; it never bothered me. But if there were a hundred diapers, I might have done two. Mary didn’t really trust me to do it right, so she’d say, “It’s easier for me to do it.” It never was that big of an issue.

  So maybe it wasn’t ideal for Mary to be away so much during the White House stint, but I don’t remember it being a particularly stressful time with the kids. I might not h
ave been the textbook stay-at-home dad, but we made it work. Often, I’d put the girls in one of those yuppie carts you see everywhere and take off running all over town. They liked it, and so did I. A lot of times, we’d walk down and get ice cream in Old Town Alexandria. You can never go wrong with ice cream. For some reason, I remember watching a lot of Scooby-Doo episodes with them. Always Scooby-Doo.

  I loved taking the girls to school. We’d sing songs in the car, most of them stupid little tunes like the Barney theme song. “I love you, you love me . . .” But we’d also play a lot of old New Orleans music. We listened to a lot of Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans.” I taught them to appreciate that stuff from an early age.

  As much as I wasn’t thrilled about Mary working in the White House, I looked forward to that time together with the girls. It was our time. I’m not sure we would have had that if Mary had a more normal job.

  MARY

  AT LEAST I HAD the good sense to craft a rewarding job and a big dual title for myself at the White House. As anyone who’s spent any time in Washington, D.C., knows, there are two basic kinds of people at the White House. There are the ones who don’t care what job they have, but they want a big title just for vanity—and then sport their White House badges in restaurants. And there are people who have been around the block or were blessed with wise advisers, who knew they needed a big title to get anything done.

  A big title was the ticket to the meetings where the action took place or where you could force action, where you got the information you needed to figure out action. At the White House, information and access are the only coins of the realm.

  The first-class, full-fare ticket title was Assistant to the President, which designated positions entitling the bearer to unqualified access to all meetings. I knew I would have to attach that one to my already august title, Counselor to the Vice President, which would give me a dual-title, full-fare status as an Ambassador Without Portfolio, allowing me to stick my nose into any and all issues, whatever the VP was into.

  To facilitate the White House model George W. Bush had requested, each presidential West Wing position had a commensurately skilled and titled counterpart in the Office of the Vice President (OVP). We had domestic-policy counterparts, legislative counterparts, national-security counterparts, administrative counterparts, etc. We all operated together, merging our work products and skill sets to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Sure there were some distractions caused by mattress mice—what Cheney always called the people nipping at the crumbs of power, the people he was good at ignoring—but mostly, it really, really worked. And that was a good thing, because we hit the ground running.

  JAMES

  THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY was shaping up to be a bitch.

  Mary and I had endured a long, angry month during the recount. And things hadn’t gotten much better after the whole debacle had ended. It’s always tough in our house when one person’s candidate wins and the other’s loses. If you’ve won, you feel simultaneously elated by the victory and sympathetic to your spouse’s heartbreak. If you lose, you feel a sliver of happiness for your spouse along with overwhelming personal disappointment.

  This was different. I was still pissed off and in a dark place. It’s one thing to lose. It’s another to feel wronged. I believed Gore had won, and so did most of the rest of the country. And now she was marching each morning to work in the Bush White House. I could have puked.

  Needless to say, I didn’t go to the Bush inauguration in January 2001. That would have been the last place I wanted to be that day. I don’t even remember what I did instead. I could have been writing a speech. I might have gone to a movie. I could have been doing any number of things. But showing up at the Capitol wasn’t going to be one of them.

  It was a celebration for Republicans, which is all well and good. But I didn’t feel much like celebrating. I felt about as miserable as the weather that day. It was hard enough to see Bill Clinton’s time as president draw to a close after all the good he’d done for the country and all the hot coals we’d walked over together. On top of that, a guy I was pretty certain had lost the election was on the podium getting sworn in. I didn’t need to be there to witness it.

  In addition, my mother had been slipping away for the last several years, deeper and deeper into dementia, and by the time Bush took office, she was in awful shape. I was out in California giving a speech at the Hillcrest Country Club when my sister called to say my mother had died. It was a Thursday, February 15.

  We all knew that day was coming, though that didn’t do much to soften the blow. My sisters, saints that they are, had done an unbelievable job caring for her, especially my sister Mary Anne, who’s an expert in home health care. The last four years, my mother couldn’t leave the house and basically was bedridden, and never once did she have a bedsore. And neither did she have to go to a nursing home.

  Ms. Nippy, as everybody called her, was quite a woman. While my dad ran the general store back in Carville, she went door-to-door selling encyclopedias. Together, they managed to send eight children to college. She wrote a popular cookbook full of Louisiana recipes. She didn’t believe in calling people names or using racial slurs. She read her daily prayers. She had a wicked sense of humor, and she was a hell of a bridge player.

  She also was an old-school Democrat. She was always pro-life, but she looked at life as a “seamless garment.” She would say, “We are pro-life, but because we are, we have a heightened responsibility to the poor and less fortunate.” She believed that if you were insisting children be brought into the world, society had a real responsibility to help any way it could once they arrived.

  My mother had always been an ever-present force in my life. Whenever I worked on a campaign, she’d find a way to come visit. When I was working for Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, she’d show up and play cards and answer phones. During the Clinton campaign in 1992, she’d sit there and knit in the war room along with Virginia Kelley, Clinton’s mother. She’d always been there cheering me on, and it was tough to imagine that she no longer would be.

  I was saying good-bye to a lot of things in early 2001. Good-bye to the woman who never ceased being my biggest fan. Good-bye to the president I’d help to put in office. Good-bye in a sense to my wife, who I thought I would see very little of once she went to work in the White House. I’d had better years.

  MARY

  THOSE FIRST MONTHS WERE a blur of long hours. As the weeks passed, and the months unfolded, I noticed that our beloved Nee Nee wasn’t her old self. Over the summer, she was getting thinner and thinner. Her skin began to have the awful pallor I’d seen too often before on sick people. She had always been right out of central casting—a big robust nanny, a big woman with a big hug. Now the weight was falling off of her.

  I asked her if she was all right, and she said she was. I asked her again and again, and she insisted again and again she was fine.

  I still worried, but I couldn’t deploy my usual medical buttinski persona (“Mary Matalin, M.D.,” as the kids call it) into the situation. Nee Nee wanted peace and privacy. And to be honest, my emotional tank was running on empty after that long cold winter. I was trying to enjoy what little passed for a stress-free life in those days.

  I had adjusted to four or five hours of sleep a night and battering-ram days at the White House. The system we all worked out to coordinate the president’s and vice president’s offices was starting to work smoothly, or what passes for smooth in a roller-coaster world.

  Things with the hubby were better. Everything is relative in a marriage, and in contrast to the first couple of White House months, his diminished pouting and the occasional conversation felt like a honeymoon to me. I’d like to think he might have come around to thinking I had done the right thing by taking the job, but his improved attitude was likely more attributable to anticipating that my tenure at the White House would be ending soon. Also, his
forced Mr. Mom tenure wasn’t as bad as he thought it was going to be; in fact, he was so good with the kids and having so much fun, I was jealous. By the end of the summer of 2001, everything seemed, if not totally right with the world and our marriage, at least not the pit of doom it had been.

  One of the president’s first executive orders called for the development of a modernized, comprehensive energy policy—which he assigned to the OVP. What did I know about energy?

  I knew that James was always crabbing about my wasting it by opening all the windows when the air conditioner was on (I prefer fresh temperate air to his Southern obsession for recycled ice air). But I was determined to learn everything I could. I did my grind thing, became a student and fell in love with the subject. Energy became my obsession. While the whole Carville clan was clowning around at our Easter festivities, I was holed up with a white paper on pebble-bed reactors, then the latest in nuclear energy, which seemed not to be everyone’s cup of tea. But I was in heaven. (It is a good thing I was so into the topic, because when it came time for the big public rollout event in Pennsylvania, the VP lost his voice and at the last minute it was decided I would have to make the presentation. I remember hoping my enthusiasm for energy reform would make up for my knowledge deficit.)

  Today, the public—badly informed—associates Dick Cheney exclusively with foreign policy, but at the outset of the administration his tasks were on the domestic front. While the OVP hunkered down to develop a new energy policy to update our antiquated energy infrastructure, which was plaguing huge swaths of the country with rolling black- and brownouts, we were equally wrapped up in the president’s economic reform policies, which were just as pressing since we had entered the White House on the front end of a recession (which everyone forgets). Like everything else he was assigned, the VP was an instant whiz kid at economic policy and enjoyed it.