CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
2000-2008
In 1947, shortly after Jack was sworn in to Congress for the first time, he gave me a tour of Capitol Hill. I was nearly fifteen, and right then was when I first felt a physical love of the place, the columns and corridors and canvases. At the end of our tour, Jack gave me advice that has stayed with me to this day:
"You've just seen all the buildings that symbolize what is important about this country. But remember that it isn't just the buildings. It's what happens inside the buildings that matters."
To say that I love the Senate does not begin to convey what that institution means to me. Let me put it this way: after nearly half a century, I still cannot be in a car, headed for the Capitol, especially in the evening, and glimpse it in the distance without the hair standing up on my arms. I've told Vicki: if ever that sight does not move me, I will know it is time to step aside.
That building symbolizes to me the benevolent power and the majesty of our government. It is awesome to me: not "awesome" in the reflexive way that young people use the word, but in its real sense, its older sense, as evoking reverence.
Being a senator changes a person. Something fundamental and profound happens to you when you arrive there, and it stays with you all the time that you are privileged to serve. I have seen the changes in people who have come into the Senate. It may take a year, or two years, or three years, but it always happens: it fills you with a heightened sense of purpose.
I'm not alone in those sentiments. I remember visiting Senator Russell Long in his cavernous office shortly after I heard he planned to retire. Like me, he had become a senator at age thirty, and he represented Louisiana for thirty-nine years. He told me that he had counted on his cousin Congressman Gillis Long to tell him when to quit, because he'd seen other senators who had hung on too long. But Gillis was dead, so he had decided on his own.
"Well, Russell," I said, "a few hours ago one of the real pillars that hold up that building over there disappeared from underneath the structure."
"Kennedy," he responded, "let me tell you how long it will take for another pillar to spring right up. It doesn't take long with these younger fellows." He added, "Once in a while around here, you do something that you believe in--that's right." For Long, it was supporting the Panama Canal Treaty against strong opposition.
That desire to do the right thing, to serve the national interest, is inspired by the surroundings. I've studied the great architecture of government buildings and memorials in France, in Germany, in Great Britain, and other nations. Our Capitol is unique in the world in its design. It is a presence at once historic and alive in the moment.
As a senator, you move past the impact of the building itself. But you never move very far past it. You cannot go from one room to another--and there are so many rooms--without expecting to see something new or different, even in the familiar.
Take the paintings, for example; the magnificent paintings. I paint a little myself, as I've mentioned, and so perhaps I am more moved, and humbled, by their richness. I think of those big, sweeping, elegant canvases of John Trumbull that hang in the Rotunda: Declaration of Independence, Surrender of General Burgoyne, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, and General George Washington Resigning His Commission. Trumbull was a Harvard man and an aide to Washington in the Revolutionary War; he witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill. Those oils are the most dramatic paintings in the Capitol. They have hung there since 1826. And of course there are those towering murals and frescoes and portraits by Constantino Brumidi. Brumidi was Italian, but when he arrived in the United States in 1852 at age forty-seven, he made himself one of us by declaring, "My ambition and my daily prayer is that I may live long enough to make beautiful the Capitol of the one country on earth in which there is liberty." Which he did, over twenty-seven years of constant work. His fresco Apotheosis of George Washington graces the Rotunda along with the Trumbulls, and his paintings flow through many rooms and hallways, most notably the famous "Brumidi corridor."
Even the Senate desks hold great meaning. A lot of these mahogany desks, forty-eight of them, I believe, date to 1819: the Senate bought them that year as part of the restoration after the British set the Capitol afire during the War of 1812. My desk is the one that Jack sat in when he was in the Senate. Barack Obama sat in Bobby's old desk when he was a senator. Daniel Webster's old desk is always reserved for the senior senator from New Hampshire, Webster's native state.
Then there's the tradition of scratching our names into the wood on the bottoms of our desk drawers, to chronicle which senator held which desk down through the years. This custom dates only to the early 1900s. Jack did this, and I did it, and Bobby did it.
Finally, we have the tradition of the "candy desk." In the late 1960s, Senator George Murphy of California had a desk on the back row on the Republican side of the chamber. We all knew that George had a sweet tooth and kept candy in his desk drawer. Senators had to pass by his desk to walk on and off the floor and would often reach into his desk drawer for candy. It quickly became a tradition that whoever occupied that desk inherited the responsibility of keeping its drawer well stocked with candy. As I write this, Senator Mel Martinez of Florida sits at the candy desk and maintains its supply of sweets.
Sometime later, Democratic senators began their own candy desk tradition. It's the Democratic Secretary's desk--a beautiful old rolltop desk in a corner of the Senate chamber. Senators contribute to a candy fund to keep that desk supplied, too.
I love spending time in the Russell Senate Office Building, known before 1972 as the Old Senate Office Building. It's a fine old Beaux-Arts structure that was finished in 1908. Being inside it gives you a marvelous sense of closeness to its history. You walk into that old building and it takes your breath away. You stand up straighter. The architecture is such that you can speak in its rotunda and hear your voice echoing back perfectly. In fact, in the Senate chamber, even if you haven't got a booming voice, you can still be heard just about all through that building.
Senators and their families used to have picnics on the grounds back in the 1960s and '70s. A number of us had young children at that time, and we'd sit out on the lawn with them and enjoy the evening. There's a lantern atop the dome of the Capitol that stays lit as long as either the House or Senate is in session. Also, the American flag stays raised over the Senate chamber as long as the Senate is in session. So we could always tell when the Senate was meeting. And there's a system of lights and bells throughout the Senate complex that told us what was happening on the floor at that moment. One light or one bell meant a vote was starting. Five lights or five bells told us that vote was ending soon and we'd better hurry over to cast our votes. Two lights or two bells were a "quorum call," which meant that we could safely continue picnicking with our families. We would leave the windows of the Russell Building open during our picnics so that we were sure to hear the bells and know when we needed to run off to a vote. It was a friendly, welcoming place back then, the Senate. That has not been lost: the sense that it is the people's building.
In my early years in the Senate, there were not nearly the number of votes that we have now. When the weather was good, the Old Bulls--the senior members who wielded all the power--would spend their mornings at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda playing golf. They'd return to their offices around noon, just in time for lunch in the Senate Dining Room. After that, they would sign their mail, perhaps make a speech on the Senate floor; and by then it was time to gather for a little drink in some senator's office. Then they'd spend their evenings at various social events.
The events that changed all that were the civil rights era and the Vietnam War, both in the mid-1960s. This time marked the resurgence of the filibuster, and also of the five-day workweek. The Senate was suddenly in session virtually twelve months a year, with only the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving off. I remember coming back to Washington to cast a vote between Christmas and New Year's when Bobby was in the Senate.
And yet this constant work under extreme social pressure gave the Senate a real sense of community. We were in session a good number of evenings, so everyone stayed around through the week. I can remember having my children at the office. Many senators did. In summer, the military bands used to play in front of the Senate steps on the east side of the Capitol. At intervals, senators might scurry away from outdoor family picnics and onto the floor to offer an amendment.
This camaraderie in the midst of hard work helped senators to listen to one another, and sometimes even to take action on matters they might have otherwise avoided. That's missing today. Now the Senate is basically in session from Tuesday through Thursday. Colleagues "speak" to each other via BlackBerry and telephone. This loss of face-to-face interaction certainly isn't unique to the Senate, but I do think it's a loss. I'm a big believer in going to a colleague's office if I have something I want to discuss or a request I want to make. I want to read their face, interact, laugh.
Ninety-five percent of the nitty-gritty work of drafting and even negotiating is now done by staff. That alone marks an enormous shift of responsibility over the past forty or fifty years. We have an extraordinarily capable, committed, and professional staff, themselves tremendous public servants. Most senators do. And we couldn't tackle the myriad issues without their essential work. But we walk a fine line. As senators, we need to be vigilant that we don't lose track of the whole essence of what the Senate is; of what our involvement in it signifies; of our relationship with people; and of what all of that should lead to, which is the unfettered and vital exchange of ideas.
I think of the withering away of collegiality and sense of collective mission as the corruption of the Senate. I don't mean corruption in a legal sense; rather I mean corruption in the sense that things are broken. This breakdown has been driven primarily by two factors. First, there are forces that actually do not want the Senate to meet and be active in the affairs of the nation. If the Senate is not active, legislation slows down, we don't deal with the hard issues, because dealing with them suggests change. And second is the distorted influence of money and the power of vested interests in the legislative process. I don't think any unbiased observer can deny that the way campaigns are financed has an unhealthy influence on the legislative process. I was an early supporter of public financing for House and Senate campaigns as well as presidential campaigns, but that isn't going to happen in my lifetime. Perhaps the advent of Internet fund-raising, which was so successful in President Obama's election, will undercut the disproportionate impact of money on the legislative process.
I was naturally dismayed by the ambiguities of the 2000 election, and disturbed by the Supreme Court's role and decision-making process in it. But I applauded Al Gore's grace and civility in handling the outcome, and prepared myself to deal with the realities. Alan Simpson, who'd been a political adversary and personal friend of mine when he was a Republican senator from Wyoming, assured me that George W. Bush was a fellow I could work with; his word counted; and he told the new president the same thing about me. I took Alan at his word, which I always knew I could count on.
Our first social invitation from the new president and First Lady was to a screening of Thirteen Days, the new movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis starring Kevin Costner as Jack's aide Kenny O'Donnell. The screening was held on Thursday night, February 1, 2001, the day the Senate voted to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two.
I recognized this invitation as a gesture of respect and goodwill from the president and took it as a harbinger of cooperation in the months ahead. In that spirit, Vicki and I arrived at the White House with a gift to the Bushes, a framed memento of President Kennedy's historic Resolute desk. On my first meeting with Bush in the Oval Office a week or so earlier, he'd pointed out to me that he had chosen the desk Jack used in the Oval Office.
When the president and First Lady came down the stairs, I greeted him and said, "Congratulations on your day." He shot me a cool glance. I guessed that I couldn't blame him much. I'd been vocal in my opposition to the confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general, and in the debate that preceded the vote earlier in the day I'd repeated my charge that the nominee had used litigation and legislation "in creative and inappropriate ways" to advance his ideological goals. How could we have any confidence, I'd asked, that Ashcroft wouldn't do the same thing as attorney general? I had not thought this exceeded the bounds of legitimate debate, and I'd assumed the president would not take it personally. He did not.
He introduced Vicki and me to the First Lady, and we quickly found an upbeat topic--the quality of the singing at the prayer breakfast that morning. The East Room was quickly filling up with other guests. We repaired to the buffet for a distinctive dinner of hamburgers, hot dogs, and chili, and then we filed in for the screening. Vicki and I were invited to sit in the front row next to the Bushes.
I could tell that the president loved the movie. He was amused that the film didn't show Lyndon Johnson in any of the critical meetings on the crisis, and got a great kick out of the portrayal of Bobby, who was depicted as always rasping about straightening somebody out, or kicking tail, or loyalty. We were out of there by 9:40.
President Bush had signaled a willingness to tackle education reform, and I was certainly willing to work together to find agreement on something that would make a difference. He called his effort No Child Left Behind.
Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and I was the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, of which Jim Jeffords of Vermont was the chairman. I was pleased that the president was interested in education reform and assumed that time would tell just how serious he was.
But in the meantime, I felt it imperative to keep the lines of communication with the White House open. One reason was the opportunity to keep the federal government involved in education. Abolishing the Department of Education had been a popular cause among some Republicans, who preferred to see school policy reside entirely within the individual states. But some states are wealthier than others, and some are more under the sway of extra-educational forces that can affect the quality of learning. But I believed that federal resources could be effectively used as a helping hand in areas where there is an obvious need: as a partner, not a competitor, in improving education.
The other reason is that we were elected to do something. And, politics aside, if we had a shot at education reform, especially with a Republican president and a Republican Senate and Republican House, well, I was going to try to seize it. Several months of negotiation, frustration, and compromise led at last to the passage of No Child Left Behind late in 2001. Flawed but necessary, No Child was itself a child of bipartisanship.
My faith in No Child Left Behind was bolstered by the evaluation of Bush's blueprint by my counterpart in the House, George Miller of California. Miller was the new ranking Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee. He was a powerhouse on many progressive issues, education foremost among them. He'd been impressed with Bush's grasp of educational matters. Miller and I would work closely together in crafting the "No Child" concept into legislation, along with two Republicans, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Congressman John Boehner of Ohio.
No Child Left Behind was to be the title for Bush's proposed $46.7 billion reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a leading feature of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty back in 1965. It had been set to expire in 1970, but had been reauthorized by Congress approximately every five years since. Partisan fighting in Congress had stunted the Education Act's effectiveness for many years, with Republicans demanding more emphasis on block grants and voucher programs, and Democrats pushing for reduced class size and teacher training. Its scheduled reauthorization in 1999-2000 was in fact lost in the ideological sparring of the presidential campaign.
The annual expenditure for Bush's plan was budgeted at $17.4 billion. Its tools of reform were to be standards and accountability, with a high emphasis on testing and with the federal government taking the dominant role in measuring the results. I had spent a good deal of time familiarizing myself with testing measures, and I found this approach full of promise. Accordingly, I expressed great public enthusiasm at the outset. I complimented Bush's personality and his intelligence. I emphasized to the press the areas in which Republicans and Democrats generally agreed on No Child. And I downplayed such thorny issues as the vouchers question.
By early April, things were looking rather good; enough compromise had been achieved that Senate debate on the bill could move forward. The Democrats agreed to use federal funds for private tutoring of students at failing schools and Republicans let go of the push for vouchers, at least for the time being. Our side even consented to a trial block-grant program involving seven states. To the consternation of some of my Senate colleagues, I announced "substantial progress" to the press and praised President Bush for keeping education reform as his top priority.
Full Senate debate on No Child began in May and continued for a rigorous and exhausting six weeks. Bipartisanship ruled the day in the early going; my Democratic colleagues and I were pleased to see several important agreements and concessions from the administration's side: targeting resources to children in the neediest schools, increased support for teachers, and stronger parent involvement in schools. These and other progressive measures were authorized in the bill that finally emerged. That was the good news.
But, as with all bills of this nature, we would still need the necessary appropriation of funds from the Congress. The president never fought for the funds he promised. When the Republican-controlled Congress announced its budget resolution in early May, appropriations for No Child Left Behind fell far short of what we needed. I was angry, and said so, yet my thoughts were focused not on accepting defeat but on finding ways to keep success within reach. I announced my hope of opening up funding by attacking the huge tax cuts then being debated in Congress, and by getting more money into the Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations bill that was also headed for a vote.
My party had been adapting itself to survival without institutional power since the 2000 elections, but on May 24 an act of unusual political courage abruptly ended that situation. The Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont announced that he was ending his affiliation with his party. The precipitating event was the president's and the Republican Party's lack of commitment to special education funding in the budget. Jeffords would become an independent, but would caucus from now on with the Democrats. Jeffords's decision had several immediate effects. It gave Democrats a de facto fifty-one-seat majority. It turned over committee chairmanships to Democrats, unseated Trent Lott as majority leader in favor of Tom Daschle, and on June 6 restored me to chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
On June 14, the Senate passed the bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with ninety-one senators voting in favor. I was enormously heartened; I had done everything in my power to keep people from both parties together on this. I understood the apprehension of some on my side. "What is absolutely essential," I pointedly told the press, "is having the kind of funding levels to make sure children who need extra help get it." For now, what mattered to me was that education reform was still alive. The bill now would head for a conference committee that would try to bring it and the House's bill into alignment. Improving its weaker elements and fighting for funding, I believed, could be tackled once it became law.
Bush called for Congress to send him a bill to sign before recessing in early August. Easier said than done. George Miller and I, leading the Democrats, worked hard to find common ground with the Republicans John Boehner and Judd Gregg, but we stalled on several issues. July and August passed without an agreement.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat in my Senate office with Senator Gregg, awaiting the arrival of Laura Bush, whom we were to escort across the hall to her testimony before our committee on the subject of early education. I had brought a painting of mine to give her as a memento. The First Lady's husband was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, reading to a class of young pupils as part of his tour to publicize his administration's commitment to education reform. I was waiting for Mrs. Bush when someone from my office came to tell me that Vicki had just called: an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. At this point, reports were that it was likely a small plane that veered off course, but Vicki raised the specter of terrorism.
I found the news bizarre, grotesque. Judd Gregg felt the same way. A few minutes later Vicki called again.
Aware now that something cataclysmic and deliberate had happened to the nation, we saw Mrs. Bush perhaps seventy-five yards down the corridor, walking toward me in front of her Secret Service detail. The rest of that day is part of the nation's history. Mrs. Bush, Judd Gregg, and I announced that we would postpone our hearing, but that we would not be defeated by terrorism. Senator Gregg and I then spent the next couple of hours on Capitol Hill with Mrs. Bush. We kept the television set off and simply talked for a while. I will always remember her composure and elegance, qualities that she drew upon in the hours that followed to help comfort a nation in shock.
A sense of patriotism and shared responsibility took hold in all of us. Getting the education bill enacted into law had become both an affirmation of America's values and a demonstration to all countries that this Congress would not allow terrorism to cripple its ability to continue the nation's essential work.
Huge differences remained, however, and as talks progressed through the fall, they centered more and more on the cost of the reforms. Those crafting the appropriations bill for 2002 had floated a figure of $4 billion in discretionary spending increases for education. That was far too little to do what needed to be done. I called for twice that amount. And House conservatives revealed their own preferred level of expenditure increases: none whatsoever.
Exhaustive negotiations regarding testing requirements and funding provisions (and many other issues) continued for almost two months among designated members in the House and Senate. Finally, on December 12, 2001, we agreed on the specifics of the legislation. It was the only bipartisan measure of any scope passed in that year. The following January, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law.
In several important ways, the Democrats had scored a major victory. Our negotiations had produced an appropriations agreement of $22.6 billion for education in fiscal 2002, a gigantic increase over Bush's original goal of just a $685 million increase over the previous year's $17.4 billion. And we had retained many of the policy principles that we'd considered essential from the start.
My remarks as the bill became law were conciliatory. "This is the president's signature issue," I said. "He can claim a big victory. But so can we, as well as the children." I genuinely believed this. No Child, as I saw it then, was the most significant advance in public education of the past quarter century.
In other important ways, however, our victory rested on shaky ground. Though the $22.6 billion represented a 20 percent increase over the previous education budget, Miller and I believed that it was still not enough to fulfill the standards that the act itself required.
That worry became sadly moot a few weeks later, when President Bush sent his new budget to Congress. It included none of the new money he had promised us. He blamed the costs of the military strike in Afghanistan, seeking the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, for the need to trim back.
No Child has struggled on through the ensuing years, effective in some ways, but never the transformative tool that it could have been: "underfunded, mismanaged, and poorly implemented," as I put it, "a spectacular broken promise of the Republican administration and Congress." I added that America's children deserved better.
All of America's people deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power in Iraq. As did the Iraqi people. The war's effects are still fresh as I write these words, and so I will attempt no detailed retelling of them here. Looking over my personal journals and the many speeches and briefing memos in my files, I am struck once again at how clear the march to disaster seemed to me at the time, and how brazenly the administration's justifications departed from reality.
That march began in the glow of Americans' support for President Bush immediately following the September 11 attacks by Al Qaeda, and for his sending troops to Afghanistan to hunt down the terrorists responsible. The president and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill. In what I have called an "extraordinary policy coup" led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the administration succeeded in changing the subject to Iraq.
I had met Vice President Cheney years before, when he was a congressman, through our mutual friend Alan Simpson, who like Cheney was from Wyoming. Cheney seemed agreeable to me at first, affable and smart, even though we had different political views. His votes were ultraconservative. Maybe we just didn't notice how extreme he was because his positions didn't carry the day. But when he became vice president, he had the power, but he lacked the good judgment to see beyond those extreme views.
I withheld my final judgment on the prudence of the Iraq war until I went back to the Senate in September 2002. There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace, and I wanted to understand the issue fully before reaching a final decision. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I listened carefully to the testimony of the witnesses.
I was struck by the consistent drumbeat of opposition to the rush to war by respected military leaders--General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe; marine general Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of Central Command. I will never forget what General Hoar in particular said in response to my question about urban warfare. He said that Baghdad would look like the last fifteen minutes of the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan.
My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:
· A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
· It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
· It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, selfinterested motives;
· It must be a last resort;
· It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
· It must have a reasonable chance of success.
There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.
As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.
I said that the administration had told "lie after lie after lie after lie" to trigger and perpetuate "one of the worst blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy." The war failed the "last resort" principle for reasons too obvious to dwell on here. On the question of proportionality--did the harm inflicted outweigh the good achieved?--I pointed, again, to the loss of American and Iraqi lives, the collapse of Iraqi civil society, the self-fulfilling prophecy of terrorists flooding into the ravaged country and using it as a base, the heightened tensions with the entire Islamic world, and our loss of international prestige generally. As for "a reasonable question of success," there never was a question that we would win the military phase of the Iraq war. The more significant success--ending terrorism, promoting regional stability, sustaining America's reputation as a just nation and a model for enlightenment--has yet to be achieved.
I'd first met John Kerry in the spring of 1971, when the Vietnam veterans protesting the war were bivouacked on the Mall in Washington. I was impressed by the forcefulness of this young man with the long, serious face and the great mop of dark hair as he articulated the case against the war, and also by his record of courage in combat.
I wasn't surprised when John decided to enter politics, and I campaigned for him in his first effort, a losing bid for Congress in 1972. He was elected lieutenant governor under Michael Dukakis ten years later, and in 1984 won election to the Senate, taking the seat of Paul Tsongas, who'd retired. He and I voted together on nearly all the issues.
I have enormous respect for John Kerry. He is not only my colleague; he is my friend. When John decided to run for president, I was convinced that a John Kerry presidency would be good for the country. He has courage and strength of character and a strong grasp of foreign policy. He is a certifiable, decorated war hero. I also knew that with Kerry in the White House, we would be able to advance health care for all Americans. I enthusiastically signed on to his team.
But in 2003, John's campaign was faltering. I noticed a sluggishness when I campaigned with him in Iowa. Howard Dean of Vermont was coming on strong as a fresh face. His passion and his fearless stance against the Iraq war were galvanizing Democrats, and he was amassing more money than John with his pioneering use of the Internet as a fund-raising tool. By late September, John's Boston and Washington advisers were at loggerheads, creating divisions that distracted from his campaign. My own chief of staff, the highly competent Mary Beth Cahill, joined him as campaign manager. A new energy soon swept through the Kerry ranks.
When I returned to Iowa with the candidate two weeks before the January caucuses, I saw that he had been regenerated as well. I was seeing a "new" Kerry, whose speeches were shorter and punchier, and who was making a warm personal connection to the voters.
I was having great fun too, revving up the crowd, teasing them about not voting for me in '80, but saying all would be forgiven if they just voted for John. Hello, Cedar Rapids. Are you glad to see me? Well I'm glad to see you! And around the state we went. Jim Rassmann joined John on the trail too, to testify to John's character and heroism. John had saved Rassmann's life in Vietnam and hadn't seen him since, but the veteran found him because he wanted to share his story. Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, won New Hampshire, and rang up nine victories on Super Tuesday to clinch the Democratic nomination in Boston. He picked John Edwards as his running mate. We conferred frequently through the early summer, strategizing on his approaches to the economy and the Iraq war.
In August, not long after the Democratic convention, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unleashed their $20 million television smear campaign against John, falsely impugning his stellar military record. They used gutterball tactics of the worst kind.
John had three outstanding debate performances, with the first being especially impressive. Vicki and I continued to campaign hard for him until the last moment.
On election morning, Vicki and I voted at the town hall in Hyannis. The lines were moderate, but we heard that earlier, around dawn, they'd been very long. I had a sense that the momentum was with John. We took a sail before noon, then traveled the seventy miles west to Providence to spend a little time with Patrick, who was headed toward an overwhelming victory in his reelection to Congress. Vicki and I spent the evening in Boston, where I did some television interviews and met with Democratic supporters. The news was reporting enormous turnouts, which all of us believed were to the Democrats' advantage. And the exit polls were showing big advantages for Kerry. "I've been proud to call John Kerry my friend," I told one group of boosters, "and I'm going to be even prouder to call him my president!" The crowd went wild. And then Vicki and I headed to our Boston apartment to watch the returns. Earlier in the evening, when I was doing television interviews, I learned that the networks couldn't get prominent Republicans to respond to the early trends because they were so decisively in John's favor. The White House was in hunker-down mode. Relatives and friends wandered in and out of the apartment as the evening wore on. Projections began to appear showing Bush winning the western states, but that was predictable. The producers were trying to inject drama into a race that they knew had been decided.
Not exactly. Later in the evening, we began to notice that some of the eastern states we'd expected to end up in our column were not going that way. Florida went for Bush, a disappointment but not a surprise. But the number of states showing up as red in the graphics was a surprise. The heavy Kerry votes we'd counted on--that the exit polls had told us were there--were just not coming in.
Suddenly, we noticed that Republicans were materializing onscreen for live interviews. They were no longer in the bunker. The terrible awareness of a turning tide crept in. Then Bush called reporters into the White House, where he was watching with his family. We tried to tell ourselves that this was just a bit of stagecraft, to give the illusion that he was winning.
Around 11 p.m., California came in with a big win for John, but the sea of red between California and Illinois was unbroken. And it started to become clear that the only path to a Democratic victory was through Ohio. James Carville on one of the channels was saying that John Kerry had to pull an inside straight; that it was time to recognize that this was George Bush's night, not Kerry's, unless something dramatic happened. The people in our apartment were rather distraught by James saying that. They thought perhaps it was sour grapes because he hadn't been invited to run the campaign. But I just thought he was being honest. I telephoned Tim Hagan, a friend of ours in Cleveland who said things still were fine, Cuyahoga County was looking good, we think we've got Ohio; the exit polls...
The night went on, and the numbers grew more disturbing. Vicki later said she'd felt the networks were not calling the election for Bush only for fear of repeating the Florida fiasco of four years earlier. I called Hagan again. Nick Littlefield, a top lawyer in Boston and former staff director of my committee, was there, and he talked to Hagan. Michael Myers, our friend and current committee staff director, talked to Hagan. And then I talked to Hagan again and Tim said quietly, "I think we've lost it."
Almost at the same moment, Fox News called the election for Bush.
In the silence that followed, people began to leave the apartment to go home to bed. Soon Vicki and I were alone. It was well after midnight. I made a decision. "We're going to Louisburg Square," I told my wife, "to see John and Teresa."
It was a drizzly, dreary, humid, cold night in Boston, and close to 2:30 a.m. when we arrived. Gabby, the Kerrys' household assistant, met us at the door and told us that John and Teresa had gone to bed. We offered to leave, but Gabby told us not to: "The senator will be upset if he knows you're here and he wasn't told." She went upstairs. A few minutes later, the defeated Democratic candidate for the presidency came down into the living room to greet us. Vicki spotted him first. "Gosh, Vicki, what a drag. This is a drag, isn't it?" he said as Vicki hugged him and said, "Boy, is it ever." I gave John a warm handshake and then an embrace. "My friend, how are you doing?" I asked him. He replied, "There are so many things I wanted to do for this country."
I was deeply moved by the reaction of this war hero who had fought so hard to win the election and who just hours earlier looked to all the world like he was going to be the next president of the United States. He wasn't bitter or angry. And he wasn't really focused on himself. He was down about the opportunities lost to move the country in a new, more progressive direction. I shared his disappointment. We had worked so hard, and come so close.
The reelection of President Bush meant that it would be another four years before there might be a great leader in the White House. In my nearly fifty years of public life, we have not had a president as successful as FDR. The closest we've come (family relations excluded) is Lyndon Johnson. Civil rights was the issue of our time. He picked up that unfinished work and ensured the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. If he hadn't, we certainly wouldn't be where we are today. We certainly wouldn't have the president we have today. Lyndon Johnson knew how to work Congress and move things forward to achieve his goal of a Great Society.
Tragically, the Vietnam War ended all that. Johnson got caught up in it and handled it miserably. The cold war was at its height, and we all had reasons for believing at first that our involvement was vital. But the continued escalation was a huge blunder. It needlessly took so many lives and sucked all of the air and energy out of our progressive ideals. We lost our way. It would take time for voters to endorse those values again.
I rejoice in having lived to see it happen.