When Hurricane Gustav threatened a Katrina redux soon after we arrived, stark terror gripped the city. More than one new friend told me, “That’s it. Can’t take another one. I am out of here. For good.”
That’s when any personal reservations I might have had about our move began to pale in comparison to my sudden realization that this wondrous city was heading for trouble if we didn’t get our political act together. Pronto. The city needed leadership. Even the most industrious citizens can only do so much if their government is undoing it right behind them.
I could tell James was working on a plan, but for the first time in our lives, I feared even my Superman was about to crash into a mountain of kryptonite. It was one hot mess for sure.
JAMES
ANOTHER REAL UPSIDE OF COMING HOME: the chance to teach at Tulane.
Even after the move, I still went on television plenty, and I continued to jet off to foreign campaigns. But back home, I loved being a professor at Tulane. I’ve got a great office. I’ve got great kids who teach me every bit as much as I teach them. I started teaching back in 2005 at Northern Virginia Community College, and it just grew on me. Now, when I fly overseas and they ask you on the entry form to fill out your occupation, as often as not I’ll write “professor,” because that’s how I tend to think of myself these days.
And as a professor who takes the job seriously, I get pissed off at the notion that universities are some sort of giant brainwashing factory. That’s certainly not why I came to Tulane to teach. I’m not there trying to churn out a new generation of Democrats. Ask any of my students, and they’ll tell you my mantra: “It doesn’t matter what I think; it only matters that you think.”
I tell them, I’m sixty-nine years old (as of October 2013). You are in an elite class at an elite university. Why do you need some old man telling you what to think? You don’t.
But what they can benefit from is somebody who knows people, has experience and can give them the framework to think about important things. That’s really my job—to get them to think. That’s the whole reason a university exists.
Take the Tea Party, for example, which has played an interesting role in U.S. politics in the past few years. I think it’s a cockamamie thing, but that doesn’t really matter. If you’re my student, I want you to understand it. If you think it’s a cockamamie thing, and you don’t understand it or take the time to learn about it, what good is your opinion? These are people with a grievance. If you don’t understand the nature of their grievance, then what good am I as a teacher?
In fact, one of the first things I did after the Tea Party began to gain steam was to call the office of Congressman Steve Scalise, a hard-core conservative who represents Louisiana’s 1st District, and ask them to put me in touch with the local Tea Party leaders. They referred me to these guys in Baton Rouge, who I then invited to come speak to my class. One guy was an engineer at a chemical plant. Another guy knew one of my sisters. They talked a lot about the Constitution, a lot about the deficit—the normal stuff you’d expect.
But at least the students got to hear it straight from them. Suppose I had sat there and told my class, “Here’s the deal. The Tea Party is full of shit. They don’t understand the real Constitution. They don’t understand the Articles of Confederation. They don’t understand true Hamiltonian values.” You could regurgitate all of those arguments, all of which are arguments that I would make, but you would not understand who those people are. You would understand my point of view, but you wouldn’t understand their point of view. I’d see that as a failure.
Each semester, I’ve lined up a string of guest speakers, and I’ve always had people from across the political spectrum, as well as journalists I admire. Sure, I’ve had Democrats such as Stan Greenberg and Eliot Spitzer. But I’ve also had plenty of conservatives, from Erick Erickson and Newt Gingrich to Governor Bobby Jindal. I’ve had Art Laffer. I’ve had Neil Newhouse, who was Mitt Romney’s pollster. I don’t discriminate. I want the students exposed to every imaginable viewpoint.
In fact, when I make an assignment, I don’t ask students which side of an issue they want to argue. I tell them which side they’re going to take, and you can’t swap with anybody. I say, “This half of the class is for the Keystone pipeline. This half is against.” I’ll make half of them argue for economic stimulus and the other half argue for austerity. I want them walking out of there with an understanding of the topic. You can’t really know an issue until you know both sides of it.
What they choose to believe after that is their own business. But there’s no credit for agreeing with me.
MARY
THERE IS NOTHING MORE beautiful than a person and his passion converging. James loves, loves, loves teaching; he loves, loves, loves bright young minds. And he loves, loves, loves to talk.
He knows something about everything. And on those rare occasions he doesn’t know anything, he can get smart on any topic with his truly amazing lightning quick-study capacity. The girls call him Answer Man. I could make a joke about his having an answer for everything even when he just makes it up, but the truth is he has both a strategic mind and an abnormal reservoir of disparate knowledge. That, combined with the reality that he could have done stand-up in the Catskills, makes him the teacher you wish you had in college—especially in law school.
Teaching the brightest kids in the country at an elite university is a lot of work. He puts more effort into his Tulane class than anything I’ve ever seen him do. I don’t get it because, to be honest, I don’t like to teach as much as I like to learn. And a lot of college kids opine with an authority not supported by fact or argument, which I find grating. But I do love his kids, whom he regularly has over to the house after class for jambalaya or crawfish boil. They are unfailingly earnest, polite, poised and thoughtful.
I’ve attended a few of his jam-packed classes, and he does demand the kids think, not regurgitate. And he’s especially effective with those kids you always hated because they were the smartest ones in the class and made sure you knew it. Those precocious ones are his faves. He makes them earn it big-time.
And contrary to his public persona, James is also relentlessly open to and respectful of opposing views. My all-time dream class was with Peter Berkowitz on his book, Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation. Like all visitors to Tulane classes, I am supposed to be only an observer, but I was such a guest-speaker hog, James quit calling on me.
That was fine too. Because I was just as happy to watch in silence. As beautiful as seeing a person and his passion collide is, it is even better to witness it overtaking the person you are most passionate about. I am happiest when he is.
JAMES
IN UPTOWN NEW ORLEANS, the natives don’t necessarily take too well to newcomers or strangers. It’s not exactly like the rest of the South. It’s sort of its own society, with its own traditions and its own rules. It’s hard to break through if you’re new in town; it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or famous or whatever. They take some pride in that.
One of my favorite stories, which illustrates that wrinkle of New Orleans society, happened not too long after we got to town. My youngest daughter loves tennis, and there is this private tennis club not far from our house. So I told Mary, “We ought to join the tennis club.” She went and talked to this federal judge she knew in town who was a member there, a nice fellow who’d been appointed during the Reagan administration. “Oh, that’s great!” he said, promising to put our name forward for membership.
We get this call a couple weeks later, and he says, “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s embarrassing, really, but y’all were blackballed.”
And I said, “Really? How cool is that?”
We had moved down South from Washington. I was teaching at Tulane. We were raising money for all kinds of causes and trying to help with the recovery. But apparently we weren’t good enough
for the tennis club.
I was ecstatic. For starters, it saved me thousands of dollars. Even better, I felt like I was finally a real New Orleanian. I’d now been shunned and felt the sting of discrimination. The same people who were toasting us in public were blackballing us at the tennis club. They didn’t need these uppity political types polluting their tennis club.
I never got to set foot in the place. The judge who’d put our name up was furious. He wanted to quit. I wasn’t beat up about it at all. I thought it was great.
It’s like the old Groucho Marx line: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” Or, in this case, won’t.
MARY
EMERSON WANTED TO JOIN a private tennis club in New Orleans, which I normally would have balked at, but I was thinking maybe it would make her less homesick for the swim and tennis club where she and her Virginia posse had hung out all summer. I asked one of my new girlfriends in local politics what she knew about it. Stacy Head, who is now a big-deal city councilwoman-at-large, said all the right kid-friendly things about the club and took me over to see it, showing me around and volunteering to sponsor us.
I didn’t think much about it, even though it was way pricey, but I could never put a price on my kid’s happiness. I figured I would just reduce the cost by 80 percent when I told James the price and he would be cool. I think we needed more than one sponsor, and I don’t remember who else weighed in, but they all were wonderful new pals. So I was pretty embarrassed when they had to tell us that we’d been rejected. It was a neighborhood tennis club, after all, and we only wanted to join so our fifth-grader could hit some balls and possibly make some friends.
Not that I was upset; I have had lots of practice with rejection. But I just couldn’t wrap my head around this latest one. It didn’t jibe with the enthusiastic new neighborly embrace that we had otherwise been enjoying. And even more, I felt awful for my new friends, who were mortified. They put on a big campaign to change the rules after that so new members couldn’t be anonymously blackballed—or, at least, to require more than one person to kibosh a new applicant.
JAMES
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT meant for the Saints to win the Super Bowl in 2010, you have to understand more than just Hurricane Katrina. You have to understand the whole sorry, miserable, soul-crushing history of the Saints. You have to understand how many loyal fans had waited so long to have even a decent team, much less a Super Bowl champion. The horrors of Katrina, the slow and painful rebuilding of New Orleans—all that made the Super Bowl win that much more emotional and special. But trust me, a lot of the unbridled joy that engulfed New Orleans that day in February 2010 came down to the fact that we’d gotten so used to having one of the worst teams in football, it felt awfully damn good to finally have the best.
I’d been waiting as long as anyone. I was an original Saints season-ticket holder from the very beginning in 1967, when their home field was Tulane Stadium. They played their first game ever that fall against the Los Angeles Rams, and I was in the Marine Corps, stationed at Camp Pendleton, watching on a little television in a bar near the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California. I’ll never forget John Gilliam running back the opening kickoff ninety-four yards for a touchdown. I scared the bejesus out of everyone in that bar, howling like some sort of possessed swamp creature. How could you not be hooked after a start like that?
After that first play, it was all downhill for about twenty years. Year after year, the Saints were abysmal. The absolute definition of futility. In a way, it didn’t matter. The true fans stuck with them. What else could you do? New Orleans didn’t have a pro basketball team until the Hornets arrived in 2002. You had to drive three hundred miles to Houston to find the closest major-league baseball team. LSU was right up the road in Baton Rouge, and I’m as big an LSU fan as anybody, but that’s an entirely different experience. When it came to pro sports, the Saints were the only game in town. Football is one of the five F’s of Louisiana, the other four being family, food, faith and fixing flats.
By the time 2009 rolled around, a lot of fans, including me, had been suffering with the Saints for more than four decades. Mary and I had moved back the previous summer, and being there to witness that season made being back home that much sweeter. I’d been to plenty of Redskins games during my Washington days. It’s an enormous pain in the ass to get out to the stadium in Landover, Maryland. You sit in traffic forever. You walk a country mile to get to the stadium, and another one once you’re inside the gate. You sit outside in the blazing heat, at least early in the season, and if they make the playoffs, you freeze your ass off. Now, it was maybe twenty minutes from my living room chair to my seat inside the cool comfort of the Superdome.
After all those horrid years, the Saints were finally, mercifully, amazingly good. They finished the regular season 13–3, then kept on winning right through the playoffs. They destroyed the Arizona Cardinals. They squeaked out a really tight game against the Minnesota Vikings in overtime to make it to the Super Bowl. Un-freaking-believable.
Off the Saints went to Miami. No way I wasn’t going too.
I was on pins and needles that whole night, like pretty much everybody else in New Orleans. Even when the Saints took the lead in the fourth quarter against the Indianapolis Colts, I never actually allowed myself to believe they could win the Super Bowl. So many of us had been conditioned by the years of mediocrity that we couldn’t fathom a moment like that. But when Tracy Porter intercepted Peyton Manning in the fourth quarter and ran it back seventy-four yards for a touchdown, it dawned on me. Holy shit. We’re going to win. It was a great night for the city, and a great night for that marine corporal who started pulling for the Saints forty-two years earlier in a bar in La Jolla.
Another great memory from that night: Rita Benson LeBlanc, the granddaughter of the Saints’ owner, Tom Benson, invited me up to the owner’s suite during the game. After the win, we all went down on the field, and Drew Brees was holding his little boy in one arm and the Super Bowl trophy in the other. Confetti was raining down. There was glitter everywhere. Pretty magical moment. And somebody said, “Let’s get on the team bus, and we’ll ride back to the hotel with the team and go to the after-party.”
So we got on this bus, and there sat Archbishop Philip Hannan. He’d served as a chaplain to the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II and been the archbishop of New Orleans for more than twenty years until he retired in the late 1980s. He was a legendary figure in town, and here he was at ninety-five years old, sitting on the team bus after the Super Bowl win, surrounded by a couple of other priests. About that time, here comes Kim Kardashian, who was dating Saints running back Reggie Bush back then. She’s wearing tight black jeans and a low-cut black shirt.
I should have taken a picture with my cell phone to memorialize the moment, because that bus could not have held a motlier crew—a revered Roman Catholic priest and a reality-TV star with her own sex tape. I think Kim got as far away from the archbishop as she could get. I doubt the archbishop knew who she was, anyway.
But I couldn’t help thinking that this was New Orleans in a nutshell. The holy and the unholy, together in one spot.
MARY
JAMES HAS MANY LOVE songs to New Orleans, the theme of which is usually our unique way of life. But he hits a high note when he croons his long, inspired riff on the funerals here.
Until we moved to New Orleans, funerals were no occasion for anything inspiring for me. As a society, we often claim to have planned our funerals according to what we know our departed loved ones would want. But this is rarely true, as far as I can tell. For me, the experience of attending one runs the continuum from somber dread to unendurable pain. As I think I’ve mentioned, in my youth my parents kept my sister and brother and me from all wakes and funerals, leaving me ill equipped in adulthood to fathom their main purpose, which is to be comforting or comforted.
Wailing, I literally ran from my
mother’s graveside. And silently, I sat zombied-out at my father’s, trying to comprehend being orphaned at age fifty-four. In our decades together, James and I have lost parents, many family members and a shocking number of friends. Some losses were harder than others. Some were bittersweet blessed leave-takings, like Lee Atwater’s who suffered too hard for too long. Some were breathtakingly painful, like Ann Devroy’s, also struck down in her prime, leaving a precious eleven-year-old girl and beautiful young husband. There will always be a hole in our hearts for Tim Russert, but as discordant as it was for all the many who adored him, his funeral was an unexpected gift for us. It completely eradicated whatever residual concerns we had about moving our family to New Orleans.
We may not agree on all the life issues but James and I are in aggressive agreement on the life-affirming way New Orleans deals with death.
Unlike the whispering, weepy Midwestern funeral or the Washington command performance—a New Orleans funeral is a celebration of life in every way. It echoes the way life is savored and lived fully here. With a death comes dancing and music and second lines and food and fun for days. I know that can sound disrespectful, so I should point out the prayer vigils and faith rituals preceding the festivities are plenty mournful; as deeply sad as the aftermath is riotously happy. The bereaved in New Orleans are always very comforted by the yin-yang juxtaposition. The party goes on and on. If you have lost a truly loved one, you know the pain goes on much longer. New Orleans funerals don’t stop the pain, but in that moment when your heart is shriveled up, they do foretell a future when memories of your dear lost one will put a smile on your face. And I swear, you can feel your angel hovering above the music and dancing. It’s definitely the way I want to be sent off.
Love & War Page 29
