Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  When Ari met him, Lantz represented the producer of the hugely successful play Amadeus and he was trying to help Philip Roth develop a film about the Soviet gulags. The press often turned to him for comments about the state of the entertainment industry or the secrets of successful agenting. He invariably stressed loyalty and constant concern for clients. It was important to accept, he said, that for some actors “a bad haircut can be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

  As an Emanuel brother, Ari understood, instinctively, how to deal with people who were demanding, mercurial, emotional, and dramatic. Because reading remained a chore, he knew he would always struggle to evaluate book proposals or scripts for plays and movies. However, no one would work longer hours on behalf of a client than Ari, who still had trouble sleeping past sunrise, or pour more energy and activity into a single day. Also, the skills and techniques of nagging, defiance, and charm that worked so well for him in the family and allowed him to go up to the line but rarely cross it were perfectly suited to a business where relationships matter more than anything else. He liked nothing more than to be a champion for something or someone he believed in. He was a tireless advocate.

  Seeing Ari’s potential, and noting the big trends in the entertainment business, Robbie Lantz gave him some serious counsel. New York would remain a big theater town and the center of the publishing universe, but the real action for actors, screenwriters, directors, and producers was in Los Angeles. If Ari wanted to make full use of his talents, earn real money, and represent important artists, he should go west. In 1987, my brother packed and moved to Los Angeles, where, with my father’s financial backing, he bought a house in Hollywood and began working on the lowest rung of the ladder: in the mailroom/training program at Creative Artists Agency.

  Ari loved the work from the very first day and managed to perform even the most menial tasks—like washing a superior’s car—without grumbling. He was so determined to do well that despite his dyslexia, which made reading almost physically painful, he committed himself to reading as many scripts as he could get his hands on. During one family vacation in Costa Rica he actually spent part of each day plowing through a stack of bound manuscripts while the rest of us went swimming and explored the countryside.

  In the mid to late 1980s, we three brothers were all pursuing very distinct careers, as far apart as was possible. From the moment he moved west, Ari would never live anywhere else but Los Angeles. I was in the midst of my medical and bioethics training—and raising two daughters—in Boston, more than 2,600 miles away. And Rahm lived in Chicago while taking temporary assignments in Washington, D.C. We would keep in touch by phone but in the coming few years we would spend very little actual time together.

  But just as I think it was no accident that we chose three radically different career paths—academics, politics, and business—I think that there were good reasons for us to put so many miles between us. Although Rahm and Ari might disagree, I am certain we needed time and space to develop and succeed as independent adults. Each of us needed to find our own careers and not compete with the others. Rahm needed to get out of my shadow, and Ari needed to prove, to himself as much as anybody, that he could succeed despite his disability. Besides, I don’t think there’s a city big enough to accommodate more than one Emanuel at a time. Our force fields would have collided and God only knows how many casualties such an event might produce. Once we all began getting recognition in our individual spheres, we could then begin to reapproach one another as equals.

  Ever the family negotiator, Rahm possessed the skills required to succeed in politics long before he decided to make it his career. He first joined a campaign in 1980, when he volunteered in Democrat David Robinson’s campaign to oust Republican congressman Paul Findley. The district, which was in and around Springfield, Illinois, had been held by the GOP since 1959 and Findley was a powerful incumbent. He was the third-ranking Republican congressman at the time and was also a vociferous critic of Israel. Findley was known as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s man in Washington. He spoke in ominous and conspiratorial tones about Israel’s supporters in America. This posturing gave Rahm and Robinson, who was also Jewish, plenty of motivation to try to beat Findley. They came very close but lost the year Reagan beat Carter for the White House. Two years later, Rahm helped Richard Durbin finally dislodge Findley. Durbin would go on to a very successful career in the United States House of Representatives, and then the U.S. Senate, where he rose to majority whip.

  As Rahm knew, Illinois was a great place to learn politics from the ground up. His first full-time job was at the Illinois Public Action Council, which was conducting a ferocious campaign against utility rate hikes. Focused on working families in both rural and urban communities, the council had volunteers knocking on thousands of doors every day and was raising a war chest worth millions on the basis of ten- and twenty-dollar donations. Already credited with helping to elect several members of Congress in 1982, the council’s leaders, including field director Michael McGann, intended to fight the rate hikes and energize the party around issues related to the economy and the environment.

  McGann was a skilled and experienced grassroots organizer. He taught Rahm volumes about organizing, fund-raising, and coalition-building and helped him meet the key people in Illinois politics. In 1984 Rahm worked on the campaign of Congressman Paul Simon, who challenged the incumbent Republican senator Chuck Percy. This was the same Percy who had won my mother’s vote in 1966. When he challenged Percy the pundits considered Simon’s chances to be slim, but he wound up winning with a campaign that showed Percy was out of touch with his constituents and an organization that got Democrats to the polls in droves. As a senator, Simon—who always wore a bow tie—was the exemplar of integrity. He would become one of the main proponents of election finance reform and a staunch advocate for humanitarian intervention in conflict zones such as Rwanda.

  In 1985, Rahm became a regional field director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the “D triple C” to insiders), the national organization charged with helping the party’s candidates get elected to the House of Representatives. In the one newspaper article that mentioned him during this time, Rahm was described as an “intense, high-strung” guy embarked on a “hectic” mission.

  Given a territory that included much of the Midwest, Rahm was supposed to help candidates develop into winners. Simultaneously, he advised the DCCC on which ones had a true chance of success and deserved to receive money and electoral support. Then, as now, money played a huge role in elections, and the committee had to be careful about where it sent checks. Candidates were given target fund-raising figures, say, one hundred thousand dollars, and told that if they could raise that amount by a certain date they would be likely to get a share of the committee’s funds. Most people are shy about asking for money. To help them, the DCCC provided lists of potential donors with the means and the desire to help Democrats. Rahm would often sit with a candidate, dial a potential donor’s number, and hand the candidate the receiver when the line began ringing.

  Clayton Lewis, who was the DCCC’s man in the Northeast when Rahm worked the Midwest, considered my brother to be a seasoned veteran because he had signed on four months earlier. Throughout the 1986 election season, the two were best friends, often talking strategy late into the night while they ate takeout food inside budget motels like Super 8 and Motel 6. Ever the cheapskate, Rahm could not have cared less about the thread count of the sheets or the number of channels on the TV, as long as he could watch the news. He loved the strategic challenge and he worked with the spirit of a military commander.

  When we were growing up, no one would have guessed that Rahm, shy outside the house and reluctant to study for any length of time, would ever be drawn into this kind of fast-paced, detail-oriented life. Maybe we underestimated the effect of growing up in a home where the dinner hour was like the Prime Minister’s Question Time in Parliament. Maybe we underestimated Rahm’s competit
ive spirit. Rahm was a natural talent. An eager student of the game, who learned from more experienced players, he also developed his own style. Every bit an Emanuel, he showed emotions openly, spoke bluntly, and frequently raised his voice. Like my father, he was very pragmatic and focused on the essentials, emphasizing problem-solving and winning over intellectual purity. And he vigorously deployed my father’s Napoleonic dictum: Offense is the best defense.

  For Rahm, it was necessary to balance the passion he felt for candidates who were brilliant and deserved to be in Congress with the practicalities of winning elections. Sometimes the candidates you love face too many obstacles to win. At other times candidates you do not like very much have what it takes to seize a seat for the party. Since the party’s goal is to win control of the House, you have to back anyone who can win and cut loose the ones who can’t, all without sentimentality.

  In 1986, the Democrats added five seats to their House majority and took over the Senate from the Republicans. After the dust settled, analysts noted that it was the most expensive congressional election season in history and that money played a big role in many individual contests. In the five districts where the Democrats picked up new seats, the DCCC had concentrated its efforts and outspent the opposition. The result seemed to affirm the wisdom of selectively funding candidates who had both a fighting chance and the stomach for fund-raising.

  Promoted to political director of the DCCC for the 1988 election cycle, Rahm tried to focus workers and spending on efforts that produced measurable results. He tested policy messages to see which ones might move voters to vote for a Democrat and devoted dollars to those activities, such as turning out voters, with obvious rewards at the polls. These methods helped the party gain two House seats during the 1988 election, which saw Republican George H. W. Bush take the White House.

  Rahm loved politics and campaigns so much that he stayed in the business during the off years, when most professionals take a break. In 1989 he helped Richard M. Daley Jr., son of the Mayor Daley my mother loathed, win his first mayoral campaign. The younger Daley was a liberal when it came to issues like gun control, the environment, and civil rights but he was no enemy of free enterprise or big business. Indeed, he planned to help those that wanted to expand and bring jobs to the city and he wasn’t against borrowing an idea from the Republicans if he thought it made sense. In this way, Daley was the kind of pragmatic liberal Rahm favored.

  It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when a young southern governor who called himself a centrist “New Democrat” came to ask Rahm to help him become president. It was late November 1991. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary were just weeks away and Bill Clinton was in trouble. He was down in the polls and, more crucially, had almost no money. He needed someone like Rahm who had the energy, contacts, and know-how to be his finance director and raise the cash he needed to keep going.

  Our father was dead set against Rahm signing up with Clinton. “How can this guy from Arkansas who nobody knows get elected president?” he asked. Of course, my father had not been the most reliable person for career advice. Like most parents he was conservative when it came to his children’s careers—he wanted them to pursue tried-and-true paths to success. Fortunately, he raised his children to question authority and received wisdom, and they rarely listened to his cautious advice.

  Rahm wasn’t so sure that signing on with Clinton was a bad idea. Despite the poll numbers, he knew that Clinton was by far the most charismatic of the candidates. He was a southerner who could appeal to northern liberals and a policy expert who played hardball politics. And anyway, getting high-level leadership experience in a presidential race was worth the gamble.

  When Rahm called me we talked about Clinton’s overall appeal, which was substantial, and his money woes, which were also substantial. With roughly $200,000 in the bank he was far behind the leading money-raiser, Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, who had almost $800,000 in the bank.

  By chance Rahm’s schedule and Clinton’s brought them together at the home of a wealthy Democratic donor in Brookline, a suburb of Boston that was two miles from where Linda and I then lived. We had both had jobs at Harvard Medical School—affiliated hospitals after finishing our training. For some inexplicable reason Rahm asked me to attend the meeting with him.

  Throwing in with Clinton would mean Rahm would have to close off the chance to work with other, more plausible candidates, including Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas. Both would have welcomed him, and other Democratic operatives were picking them to win. Making the right choice at this moment was especially important given the likelihood of a Democrat actually winning the general election. In President Bush the opposition would field one of the weakest incumbents in history, a man who had alienated his base by reneging on his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge and energized the opposition with his inability to connect with the American people. The right Democrat could well defeat him, and anyone who was involved in the effort from the start, and at a high level, would be guaranteed a role in the new administration.

  Before I met Rahm and Clinton in that Brookline living room I reflected on how far we had all come. At his most recent birthday Ari had turned thirty, which meant that none of us could claim, anymore, to be “young.” He had risen quickly in the entertainment business and was already a full-fledged agent, representing movie stars, writers, and directors. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, he was already a pioneer in the practice of “packaging,” which shifted the balance of power in TV and film away from studios and networks and toward the big agencies. He accomplished this with a combination of aggression, humor, profanity, and impulsivity that would have been ruinous in most other realms but was completely acceptable, and effective, in the realm of egos and make-believe that is Hollywood.

  Both Rahm and Ari had decided to wait for career success before committing to marriage and family. By 1991, I was father to three daughters, who were mainly my responsibility during their early years. I was able to function as Mr. Mom because Harvard had let me suspend my medical education to get a doctorate from the Harvard Department of Government, where, thanks to professors Michael Sandel and Dennis Thompson, I was able to focus on the one area where my interest in science and the humanities intersected: bioethics. Although I studied, wrote, and taught, my schedule was flexible in ways that Linda’s was not. She was doing her internship and residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital, and writing in the area of medical ethics. In time we would publish many papers and become well-known as the authors “Emanuel and Emanuel.” But at the time, my interest in pursuing bioethics struck many at Harvard Medical School as foolish, if not an act of career suicide.

  In those days, bioethics was considered a dead-end field and from the start I ran into trouble. One problem arose when a Boston Globe reporter did a Sunday magazine feature article on the living will template that Linda and I had created—the Medical Directive. Our view was that patients seemed to want more information and control over end-of-life care decisions. And our Medical Directive was a way to facilitate discussions between patients and their family and patients and their physicians. The reporter interviewed me while I was still a resident at the Beth Israel Hospital, but the article came out while I was training to be a cancer doctor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s, cancer institutes were not ready to acknowledge that people with cancer often died and needed help dying well, without pain and with family. They considered themselves cancer fighters, not attendants to the dying. On the Monday after the article appeared I was summoned to the office of the president of Dana-Farber. He was mainly a researcher and he informed me in no uncertain terms to keep my big mouth shut. To be more precise, he said that I could speak to the press and be quoted as a Harvard fellow but not as a physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

  The president was the type of Harvard character I came to call “bow-tie Jews.” These are guys who come from lower-class stock similar to m
ine but do everything they can to appear more Brahmin than the Cabots and the Lodges. We were oil and water, and after that first encounter I was almost certain that we would clash again, and often, because I was not about to be silenced. Fortunately, I was saved by a couple of other Dana-Farber cancer specialists, Bob Mayer and Craig Henderson, who volunteered to review my work and public statements to be sure they were well supported. Henderson would welcome me to work in the breast cancer clinic, which he directed. In the late 1990s Mayer would become president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, where he made end-of-life care his major focus and helped change for the better how cancer centers and doctors across the country treated terminally ill patients. At last the medical system would allow people to talk in depth about one of the most important decisions of their life: how to die.

  With the support of colleagues like Henderson and Mayer, and with Linda as a collaborator, I got to work in an important new field, while also enjoying the experience of being a very hands-on father. It turned out that like my father, I loved being with babies and little children. I always found playing and talking with them much easier than making cocktail chitchat with adults. After thousands of mornings, afternoons, and evenings soloing with my daughters I got pretty good at reading, games, crafts, and cooking, especially baking. Along the way I finally learned to be more patient and empathetic. Kids will do that to you.

  I received a little more smoothing out courtesy of colleagues, students, and friends in the Harvard community. Greg Keating, an Amherst classmate who wound up studying at Harvard Law School, would talk to me for hours about how I needed to make peace with the fact that I was an insider at the type of elite institutions that once barred Jews. He also begged me to put a governor on my sense of outrage, which could emerge at the slightest provocation. During one of these tirades Greg laughed at me and said, for the umpteenth time, “Damn it, Zeke, you don’t have to confront everyone, all the time.”