“The political stupidity of this is just unbelievable,” I told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. “It just looks like [Obama] is not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We’re about to die down here.”
I kept the drumbeat going on any show that would have me.
“I think the administration has done some good things. [But] they are risking everything by this go-along-with-BP strategy they have,” I said on CNN. “They seem like they’re inconvenienced by this, [like] this is some kind of giant thing getting in their way, and, somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it will all go away. It’s not going away. It’s growing out there. It’s a disaster of the first magnitude . . . I think that the government thinks they’re partnering with BP. I think they actually believe that BP had some kind of a good motivation here . . . They’re naive.”
I was pretty emotionally raw at the time. But I meant what I said. For numerous reasons—the potential environmental damage, the economic interest along the Gulf of Mexico, the public perception—it was dumb for the administration not to be more forceful and proactive from the start.
My rants got a lot of media attention, which was the point. I wanted to help keep as much pressure as possible on the White House and BP. Even after President Obama visited the region and promised to remain committed to the cleanup—which I saw as a very positive step—I kept making a ruckus, letting Washington know that it couldn’t forget about Louisiana.
“We’re not going away,” I told Anderson Cooper one evening on CNN. “Every time somebody comes, if it’s Katrina, if it’s offshore drilling, if it’s the canals, we lose our coastline; people are just sick of it. If this would have happened in Nantucket, happened in San Francisco Bay, if this would have happened in the Chesapeake Bay, if this would have happened in Lake Michigan, the response would have been entirely different.”
• • •
It’s not that I thought Obama or other people in Washington didn’t care. I’m not that cynical. But I have a theory on why certain things too often fall through the cracks in Washington, and I think it applied in the BP situation. In my experience, people who go to work in the White House—whether it’s the Clinton White House or the Bush White House or the Obama White House—generally come in wanting and expecting to do important things. They want to change the world in big ways, and that’s a very valid motivation. No one says, “I want to go into government and clean up fucking crude oil on the Louisiana coast in the middle of the summer.”
So a disaster like the BP oil spill happens, and the people back in Washington are busy working on health care implementation or saving the financial and auto industries from themselves or fighting terrorism. All these great, noble causes. Then this giant turd gets dumped right in their laps. It’s complicated, and you’ve got to deal with the Coast Guard, you’ve got to deal with the Energy Department, you’ve got to deal with a global oil company. Louisiana’s not a swing state. All these factors come into play.
The tendency is to hope that it takes care of itself, that it works itself out. It’s not “Fuck those people in Louisiana, we don’t care about them. We’re going to screw them because they voted for McCain.” It’s nothing like that. It’s just that a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not what they came to Washington to spend their time doing. There’s no upside; there’s no glamour in it. Even if you do an amazing job, it’s just a less shitty ending than it could have been otherwise, and the world will forget about it either way.
MARY
I WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN, pretty settled in my new home, thinking it was all going to work out, when blam. Oil well explosion in the Gulf. At first, I wasn’t too concerned, as it is a big gulf with hundreds of rigs. It’s literally a floating city down here. Also, I had some expertise in hydrocarbons and knew they were no match for Mother Nature’s curative powers.
But the oil flowed and flowed, actually gushed. Without end. It is not an exaggeration to say I saw my life flashing before my eyes. What fragile progress we had made in New Orleans getting out of the water was about to be swept away in a flood of goo.
I got even more scared when James went into his dog-with-a-bone focus mode. Without end.
JAMES
VERY MUCH ON PURPOSE, I’d been a scourge to BP officials week after week during the oil spill. I went on television calling for criminal investigations because of their negligence. I pointed out how they had lied about the resources and manpower they were pouring into the cleanup effort, about how they cared more about their shareholders than about the small towns and the fishermen affected by the spill. I kept saying they would abandon Louisiana in a heartbeat if they could get away with it, and I believed it.
“Justice has to be done here. BP and its senior officers have to be subject to a grand jury investigation. If they’re guilty of something, they’ve got to be brought to the bar of justice,” I said on CNN one day in late May 2010. “And then if you give them the choice between going to jail or paying the claims in a fair way, they’re going to pay claims in a fair way. Because I’m going to tell you what, [BP chief executive] Tony Hayward—he would not fare well in a Louisiana prison. I promise you that. It would not be a good place for him to be.”
As luck would have it, several nights later I wandered into Eleven 79, one of my favorite hangouts in New Orleans. Sitting there at a table off to the side was Admiral Thad Allen, who’d done a great job running search-and-rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina and now was overseeing the federal government’s response to the BP oil spill. He was having dinner with Tony Hayward.
Allen motioned me over to his table and introduced me to Tony. We all shared a little small talk. I’d just been down to Colombia, and Allen had done work for the Coast Guard down there. As I recall, one of Tony’s kids was born down there when he worked in Colombia for BP. So we talked about that.
But it was awkward, even a little icy. I’d been railing on these guys and the job they were doing for days. I’d basically been calling Hayward a criminal. So, yeah, the conversation was a little uncomfortable. I was trying to be cordial, but I wasn’t about to apologize.
Finally, Hayward said something like “Look, Jim, I have to tell you that some of the things that you have said lately have not been helpful.”
“Well, they really weren’t meant to be helpful,” I shot back. “I wasn’t really trying to help you.”
He assured me that the company wasn’t going anywhere, that BP had every intention of sticking around to clean up its mess. He asked me to give the company a chance to prove it would do the right thing. I told him I was skeptical of such promises. It was a polite enough conversation, and he’s a charming enough guy, but we clearly weren’t going to agree on much. So I said good night and went on my way.
I’m glad I at least got the chance to talk with him face-to-face. At the time, he was a true villain in my life. I’m sure I wasn’t exactly his favorite guy either.
14.
We Are Home
JAMES
EVENTUALLY, THINGS GOT BETTER FOR THE GIRLS. They brought more and more friends around. They’d scamper off to hang out in the French Quarter. They’d settled in and become New Orleanians. I think they understand that they live in a unique place, a place unlike any other in America. They realize that they’re part of something other people view as exotic and cool.
MARY
TIME HEALS ALL. New Orleans became home for all of us. Moving to a new place turns out to be a little like marriage. You take a vow of sorts, a promise to make it work, for better or worse. (Except, sometimes, when you really miss your old home and old life, you can fly back and visit—kind of like the residential equivalent of drunk-dialing an old flame.)
How we adjusted, how we dealt with the changes, and adapted and thrived was different for each of us. James reached a
state of residential happiness and pride. I was having more fun than I’d had since I was really young and irresponsible. The girls had roots, a neighborhood, a community where politics didn’t dominate their lives or overshadow them. Living with James and me is bad enough.
In time, the girls will be able to tell their own stories, and funny ones too—since, besides their love for each other and us, they seem to have two things in common, a wacky sense of humor and writing ability.
That is not just puffed-up mother-speak because, as they say, It ain’t bragging if it’s true. In her senior year at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Matty won the alumni essay contest, which I was told afterward was awarded by a unanimous decision on the part of the judges, the first time ever.
If you are a Sacred Heart girl, and they are global, you probably saw it, as it was posted around the world—people actually stopped me in Italy, France and Ireland last summer to comment on it. (Are these women quietly taking over the Earth? I hope so.) Suffice to say, it was so good that when she read it aloud at the chapel ceremony the whole assembly laughed and cried. It was better that Cats, as they say.
Matty also wrote political pieces for PolicyMic, a respected millennial site when she was a high school sophomore, which caused some awkward moments, not because her views are annoyingly divergent from my own but because she articulates them so much better than I do my own.
As for Emerson, here is a typical random text, sent while she was on an East Coast trip with her girlfriends. It was to her sister in New Orleans:
MATTY- I am going to need all hands on deck for mission “Save Private Emma.” I can’t find my wallet and Dad only gave me 90 dollars to last me for 5 days. I have officially gone from Princess Diana to a Real Housewife. Most probably Theresa. As I am now poor, I plan on learning how to save my soap bars in little shavings in a sock like they do in prison. Please look for my wallet while I’m away. It’s scared and alone. Until I am reunited with my baby I will take on the identity “Barbra Q” like BBQ. Get it? Anyway, wish me luck and bring my wallet back to safety. Over and out—Barbra Q
JAMES
LOOKING BACK, it was a damn near irresponsible gamble for us to uproot our family and move to New Orleans. The New Orleans of early 2008 was not anything like the New Orleans of today. The city still hadn’t really come back. You could see remnants of Katrina almost everywhere you looked. It was in rough shape.
We’ve turned a corner now. The city’s moving in the right direction. My family is happy. It turned out to be a good move in so many ways, but it could have gone another direction entirely.
I don’t think we realized at the time what a gamble it was. Maybe we don’t really even grasp it now. It’s like if you were to walk up to a roulette wheel and put $1,000 on black. Well, the New Orleans experience came up black for us. But it just as easily could have hit red.
MARY
WE RAISED OUR DAUGHTERS to think for themselves and make their own decisions. We wanted to teach them how to make a case—plead their case—and convince us. We trusted them to make wise decisions, until proven otherwise, and they never failed us.
In 2011, after four years of bouncing around various New Orleans schools, making good grades and friends, Emerson felt like she fit into what was a loving but somewhat insular culture, but she never stopped missing her familiar posse and former life in D.C. She never complained, but mothers don’t need words to get the drift.
One day, in a totally confident and clearly thought-out announcement, she told me that she wanted to go to boarding school.
Boarding school?
Leave us?
Aren’t you still a preteen?
Do you know how hard boarding school is?
Do you know how hard it is to get into boarding school?
Do you know how expensive boarding school is?
You do know your father will spontaneously combust?
She had a quick and irrefutable answer to all my questions, including the lucid declarations that she would be leaving someday, no matter what, that she preferred hard work, she would take an SSAS course to fulfill the rigid entrance requirements, and, finally, that she would swap out the cost of boarding school for her college fund and attend a cheaper state university. As far as Daddy went, he was never far from a meltdown no matter what and that was my problem, not hers.
Her closing argument, as I remember it, was “Mother, you just don’t provide the structure I require.”
She had me. What could I say? My stalling tactic was “If you do well on the test, I will talk to your father.”
Damn, if that girl didn’t research all the boarding schools, providing the pros and cons for herself and me; she researched and found the best exam tutor; she studied the practice tests like each and every one was a career-determining LSAT; she got up early Saturday mornings and took all the simulated SSAS exams.
She was one smart cookie, but a tepid test taker, so I held out hope, as the SSAS exams were every bit as rigorous as college entrance exams.
Damn, if that girl didn’t get a near perfect score.
I was so impressed and proud of her, I became her number one advocate and was certain James would see it the same way.
What was I thinking?
Suffice to say, talking him into letting his precious baby “abandon” him was harder than any house purchase or animal acquisition. Long experience—and Godfather reruns—taught me how to deal with the “implacable” James. And it wasn’t with rational argument. You just had to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse and convince him it was his idea.
Emerson’s ace in the hole was reminding me that her daddy and I had survived her monolingual, quasihomebody sister Matty’s decision to take an Oxbridge program and study expat literature and European history in Paris, alone, when she was Emerson’s age. At least, Emerson argued, she knew the language of the country where she planned to study. Matty left home with some spotty Spanish and came back a fluent Left Banker, a top award–winning, exponentially confident and cool kid. Emerson calmly reminded me how adamantly opposed we were to that decision and how well it turned out.
But Emerson was wrong about how her daddy and I would survive. When Matty went off to France, it was hit or miss for us on the Champs-Élysées.
Anticipating I might not make it out in one piece, I begged our great New Orleans friends, the Hebees and the Fayards, and their kids to come with us when we took Matty a week early to her Oxbridge program.
Jennifer Hebee is a lay preacher and one of those special beings with the gift to heal all. Over our years here, despite having her own mothering handful—twin girls Sarah and Anna—she has walked me back from the edge too many times to count. I love that woman and knew if she was tootling around the city with me, getting the lay of the land and being there with her unusually strong hand to hold, I might be able to leave Matty thousands of miles away. Alone. Without me. For a month.
Jennifer kept a close eye on me while we ran around getting Matty more than she would ever need. Jenny never said what I am sure she was thinking: Girl, this is more stuff than Matty could use for a decade in Paris. And I have to admit that even I was not sure how useful all those stuffed animals would be.
We dragged a truck full of mostly useless stuff to the campus, which was supersafe and beautiful. The instructors were top-notch, and Matty’s fellow students were wonderful. I started breathing, or at least stopped hyperventilating. Then it was time to leave.
Matty walked into her dorm without a look back down the long tree-lined walk where I stood on the curb. Good thing, because standing quickly became not an option.
Matty called me that night and said, “You are never going to believe what happened. Right after you left, some girls got on the elevator with me and said some crazy woman had a seizure on the sidewalk in front of the dorm! She was on her hands and knees, wailing and thrashing! Were you still there?
I hope you were able to help her.”
I think you know who the crazy woman was.
JAMES
I ALWAYS LIKED EVERYBODY at CNN just fine. I think Mary did too. I’ve got nothing but mostly good memories of my tenure there.
But what always seemed a little odd to me—maybe because I’m just used to the tight-knit nature of campaigns—was that there didn’t seem to be much camaraderie, at least that I could see. I never really felt like I was part of a team. If one person had a show, he or she had his own little empire. Another person with another show had her little empire, and so on. There didn’t seem to be much overlap or collaboration between all the fiefdoms. It was sort of every man for himself.
At the same time, I never really understood the charge that CNN was a liberal network. They always struck me as being more corporate and structured. They seemed to have a formula for how they wanted to do the news and do their talk shows, and they stuck to it. There was no underlying ideology that I ever saw.
When Mary and I ended our contracts with CNN in early 2013, we walked away on good terms. It was a pretty simple equation: they wanted their contributors closer to Washington. They wanted us available at a moment’s notice. I totally get that. I understood. We’re not always available. And we no longer live in Washington. So we called it a day. I think it made sense for us, and it made sense for them. I wasn’t mad at anyone. I wasn’t upset by anything. If they ever needed me to help out or sit in for someone, I’d still gladly help out.
The truth of it is, I’ve been on television plenty, and I still show up on TV several times a week. Being on another show is not something to which I aspire. In a way, leaving CNN felt like one more link we severed to our old Washington lives, one more affirmation that New Orleans is now truly home.
Love & War Page 33
