“ARE YOU THE one who testified against the war?”
It was an innocent question, but when strangers approached me with a glint in their eyes, I never knew what to expect. I learned quickly to steel myself for the possibility of what might come next.
It was strange to walk down the street, get on a plane or sit down at a restaurant and be recognized. Generally, people were nice, often emotional: the veteran who said he wished he could have been there in Washington for the protests, or the sister of a fallen soldier, or, especially, the African Americans I met who put it right out there that the war was still going on because they were the ones being drafted, while the sons of the “elected and connected” found a way out.
Occasionally someone would unleash a torrent of abuse. Didn’t I know good men were fighting in Vietnam? Well, yes, I sure did, sir. That’s why I was protesting, so they’d come home alive sooner, instead of letting Nixon keep sending young men to die for his still unrevealed secret plan for peace. The people who would sometimes shout “support the troops” as we vets walked by were the most vexing: We were the troops. We had done our duty and earned the right to speak our minds. When I was on the receiving end of a tirade, I realized the critics didn’t distinguish between us and the hordes of hippies piled into VW buses headed for the Haight. But whatever the reaction, it was clear that our week in Washington in April 1971 had struck a chord. My testimony had received three or four minutes of direct coverage on the evening news of all three television networks. It was a different era in media. Morley Safer interviewed me soon after for 60 Minutes. He even asked a question that seemed preposterously removed from the activism that had motivated me: he asked whether I would run for president someday. Black-and-white posters with my photo appeared—origins unknown—and I was asked for autographs. We didn’t have this word then, but Dewey Canyon had gone viral and I’d gone viral with it. Seemingly without warning, at twenty-seven, I was a public figure with a public purpose but without a public position from which to lead.
For a number of months after the Washington protests, I gave speeches around the country, drawing a small salary and donating money raised from the speeches to VVAW. I was booked for speaking engagements as far from home as Norman, Oklahoma, to standing-room-only crowds. As the fall of 1971 turned toward the winter, I began to pull back a bit. I had been going nonstop since I had come home from the war. VVAW had become more fractious. I was inspired by all the men and women who had poured their pain into our movement, many of whom became friends for a lifetime, brothers and sisters I know would be at my front door in ten minutes tomorrow if I asked them. But within VVAW, there were suddenly too many different agendas competing for priority—some of them controversial. Mirroring the national mind-set of the times, VVAW was divided over issues of class, between those doing drugs and those who weren’t, between opposition to the war in Vietnam and opposition to all wars, between those who believed America could be put back together and those who thought the whole system was rotten to the core. I was decidedly in the camp that wanted to set the country right.
Julia and I sought a measure of peace and refuge at our home in Waltham. We settled down for a tranquil Christmas in a rented cottage on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, together with Julia’s brother David and his wife, Rosie. George and Victoria Butler were nearby at George’s family property, True Farm. It was a cozy time, with long snowshoe and cross-country ski expeditions across the frozen lake, incredible silence, gray skies and early dark, warm fires and hearty meals. Nearly a half century later I can still feel the peacefulness. Then, in early 1972, word leaked out that Congressman Brad Morse, who represented my hometown of Groton, together with a large swath of Middlesex County, was leaving Congress.
I was nearly two years out from the Concord-Carlisle citizens’ caucus. Father Drinan had gone to the House, and the war was still raging. Nixon was still president. I wanted to go to Washington, to join Drinan and do all I could to end the war. And I believed I could do far more as a member of Congress than as a professional activist.
I knew I would be criticized for jumping into the race. But the district included my hometown where we had lived since my father returned from the Foreign Service in 1962.
I decided to go for it. We campaigned our hearts out. It was exciting, fun and brutally hard work. First, I had to contend with a crowded Democratic primary against nine other candidates. Conventional wisdom argued that the winner would have the wind at his or her back for the general election. Coming out of movement, activist politics, I had strengths and weaknesses.
The strengths were clear. I had a singular passion to end the war. I had a national fund-raising base that set me apart from the other candidates, whose base of support was entirely local. I brought home with me a group of the most creative and talented political organizers who were changing the way campaigns were run in the early 1970s, guys like the strategist John Marttila, the pollster Tom Kiley, Frank O’Brien, and David Thorne, who was now a budding political consultant.
We had idealism on our side. The campaign was a family affair. Peggy was calling every friend she’d ever met as an activist, begging for help for her kid brother. Cam took off time from Harvard to be my loyal lieutenant. My mother became the biggest and best booster of all. She proudly wore a button that proclaimed “I’m John’s Mom,” a button I have to this day, tucked away in a safe place. Despite her formal upbringing, my mother discovered her activist genes and never looked back. I still double over in laughter remembering the lengths to which she went to see me speak at an anti-war rally at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., during Dewey Canyon. She drove down from Massachusetts and found herself a place on the Mall to watch the speeches. As the crowd filled in, her view of the far-off podium became obstructed by the sea of onlookers. Near some picnicking hippies, Mom climbed a tree and watched the rally from her own personal balcony. That evening, Julia, David, Peggy, Cam and I went out for dinner. My mother was supposed to meet us there. She was late. Finally, we saw her car pull up. She parked it in the middle of the street with the lights on and the engine running, hopped out and came into the restaurant. “Mama—are you okay?” I asked. Her pupils were enormous. It turned out that for hours as Mom sat in the tree watching the speeches, the hippies sitting below her were smoking joint upon joint. To our amazement and eternal amusement, Rosemary Forbes Kerry had showed up to dinner secondhand stoned.
Collectively, our campaign was like nothing the district had experienced before. That was precisely part of the problem that we didn’t realize was developing. To many in the district, I was appearing out of nowhere, crushing the ambitions of favorite sons, without local ties that mattered to most of the district. Despite what I told myself, my roots were not tangible to voters who lived there. I didn’t have a mentor who advised me to tread lightly or think harder about the local sensitivities. There were culturally conservative neighborhoods in the district, people who had voted Democratic for decades but were feeling unsettled by the cultural changes of the era—including the anti-war movement. Furthermore, the most powerful news outlet in the district, the Lowell Sun, boasted an editorial page run by a famously colorful, eccentric John Birch Society zealot, Clem Costello, who set out to turn me into a caricature.
Sunday night before the primary, around one in the morning, Cam and my field director, Tom Vallely, were in our headquarters. They were planning the details of a massive primary day operation. Tom had received a warning that people might mess with our phone lines in order to disrupt our activities on primary day. We had developed a state-of-the-art political operation to turn out the vote. It depended on more than one hundred phone lines to turn out record numbers of voters. Cam and Tommy were spooked. Everything Tommy had seen in VVAW taught him, and me, that dirty tricks actually happened in politics.
They went downstairs to check the phone trunks terminating in the vacant building between our office and that of a primary rival, Tony DiFruscia. Tommy kicked open the door, walked down to the basement, and within minutes, they were met by the Lowell police force, which appeared on cue to arrest them for breaking and entering. I was awoken by my first-ever 3:00 a.m. phone call in politics: Cam and Tommy were in jail. The next afternoon, the Sun’s blaring headline announced “Kerry Brother Arrested in Lowell ‘Watergate,’ Breaking into the Headquarters of an Opponent.”
I won the primary anyway, but it was an omen of things to come, including a persistent barrage by the Sun. I started the general election considerably ahead of my relatively unknown and underfunded Republican opponent, Paul Cronin. But what Cronin was unable to do for himself, the Lowell Sun did for him.
Rumors swirled that the Nixon White House—en route to a landslide reelection—was fixated on my campaign. Years later, the Nixon tapes would reveal the president himself had talked to his closest aides about me when I was protesting in Washington. But in 1972, even absent audio evidence, we feared he and his henchmen would do everything they could to deny me a seat in Congress. The race was tightening. Suddenly, a week before the election, the third candidate in the race, an independent named Roger Durkin, pulled out, threw his support to my opponent and then disappeared, mysteriously unavailable to answer questions about his withdrawal. We suspected the fix was in.
I could feel the race slipping away. It wasn’t Kerry versus Cronin. It was the Lowell Sun versus Kerry, and the Sun made it Kerry versus Kerry—their distortions and my war. On election night, I lost convincingly.
I stood at the podium in a subdued hotel ballroom for a painful concession speech and, gritting my teeth, made one thing clear to the Lowell Sun and challenged the newspaper to print it: if I had to do it all over again, I would still stand with the veterans in Washington, D.C.
I learned decades later that even after his landslide reelection was secured, Richard Nixon waited to go to bed until he got confirmation of my defeat.
• • •
IT WAS CRUSHING. We’d been way ahead in the polls and had missed an undercurrent pulling me away from the voters. As a candidate, I was left with a lot of scar tissue.
It was over. The world moved on, but it took me a little longer. I didn’t have a job, let alone a profession. I was unsure of what I would do—unsure by that time of what I even wanted to do. Public service seemed out of reach. I felt more than a little sorry for myself. If VVAW had been a balm for my pain about the war, this personal rejection opened up every wound. Nixon had carried forty-nine states—and it seemed as if the worst kind of politics was being rewarded.
Thanksgiving and the late fall of 1972 were dreary. I lost myself for hours in making a model ship and helicopter that could actually fly. Nixon was still there, lying to the American people and manipulating Vietnam. That Christmas he unleashed a massive bombing attack on North Vietnam, “to force the North Vietnamese to accept the concessions we had made,” according to veteran diplomat John Negroponte. Nixon was trying to surrender without saying it, to bring the troops home, and hoping there would be enough of an interval between their return and the fall of South Vietnam that Americans wouldn’t notice or care. In early January 1973, talks resumed. Within a few weeks, the Paris Peace Accords were signed. The end of the war as we knew it had arrived.
I took a small measure of pride in the fact that those of us who put our reputations on the line had helped force Nixon to bring the war to a close. But we’d paid a price for our activism. Nixon had manipulated divisions skillfully: he and his vice president wanted the country divided, wanted veterans divided, and wanted to reap the political dividends of the culture war they abetted.
I felt like political roadkill myself, but for others the wounds were immeasurable. The warriors of this war had been confused with the war. Many veterans melted into the background. Too many were lost to the streets, abused their bodies with drugs and alcohol, or never quite got back on track. Some slipped quietly into careers, others became hugely successful, but almost none talked about the war. The nation as a whole consigned Vietnam to the recesses of memory. I felt the awful weight of this era.
The only good news that could snap me out of my funk was the best news of all. In January, life changed for us on the home front: Julia told me she was pregnant. We rejoiced in the news. It was a new beginning that brought the joy of our first addition to the family and brought me instant clarity about the future. There was no time to feel sorry for myself. I resolved then and there that never again would I get sidetracked by self-pity. I was the luckiest guy in the world. I was alive. Unlike Dick Pershing and so many others, I was about to be blessed with fatherhood. My sense of gratitude was profound.
This jolt of renewed purpose restored my confidence about other things in life. I had plenty of time to do the things I wanted to do. I suddenly saw the campaign in a more positive light. We had tried. We had given it our all. We had fought for the right things, and while it didn’t work out, it also hadn’t brought the end of the world. Sometimes you have to pick yourself up off the mat and just keep moving ahead. But most of all, I was going to be a father, and I was determined to live fully in every minute of that fatherhood.
Julia and I bought a house in Lowell. We wanted to stay there and prove the skeptics wrong. I wanted to buckle down and go to law school, to give myself income-earning capacity so that never again would I be adrift even if I wasn’t in public service.
Sometime in the late spring, Paul Tsongas, a former Lowell city councilor, visited me. Paul had supported me in my race for Congress. It was an unselfish thing for him to do. He was a lifelong resident of Lowell who had every reason to see me as an interloper and competitor, but he went all out and even said that if I decided to run again in two years, he would support me. But I was educated by my loss. I thought another round against Paul Cronin would just be the same race all over again. I thought Paul Tsongas had a better chance of winning. It was perhaps the demarcation of a new maturity. I told Paul he should run and urged all my supporters to vote for him.
By the time I had settled with certainty on law school, as Julia felt ever more pregnant by the day, it was summer. I had to move fast. I hadn’t even applied to law school. I visited the deans at Harvard, Boston University and Boston College to ask if I could apply late. Harvard and BU gave me the same answer: “We can’t open it up now. Why don’t you take the year and apply next fall?” BC alone at least asked to look at my transcript. Within days the admissions office called to say I had been accepted.
The night before my first law school class, as Julia and I sat at home enjoying the stillness before the push and pull of studying began, the tranquillity was interrupted. Julia’s water broke. It was surreal. We had read all the popular books about childbirth. None prepared us for the suddenness of the moment: after nine months of waiting, just like that, the baby was actually coming. I packed a suitcase, searched for the car keys, nursed Julia into the car, wondering if our child would be introduced to life in the back seat of an automobile. We rushed to Emerson Hospital in Concord, where my fears of imminent birth were immediately dispelled. Julia began a long labor.
We had been through all the Lamaze lessons. I dutifully breathed away with her as the contractions increased in force and tempo. It dawned on me just how ancillary fathers are to this miraculous process. I was there to hold a hand, bring Dixie cups filled with ice chips and call our parents with the news that we were at the hospital. But as every dad learns watching his wife in pain, pushing away, nothing prepares anyone for the full awareness of motherhood that comes with labor. Eventually, Julia was wheeled into the delivery room. I stood by in my surgical gown, trying to be of some use. Twenty minutes ticked by. And then, finally, a baby appeared: long, dark-haired, wet and limp, held up by the doctor. Adrenaline coursed through my body: I thought for a moment she was dead, but suddenly she jerked to life and began a healthy wail. “You have a baby girl,” said the doctor, amid the tears flowing from Julia and me. It was surreal that one moment ago, we were a family of two, and suddenly and forever we had this new light in our life—Alexandra Forbes Kerry. It was a miracle. I had never in my life felt such pure joy and amazement.
Later that day, after basking in the afterglow of new fatherhood, Julia reminded me: you have to be at law school. It hit me: I was a new father—and if I didn’t hurry up, I was about to be a prodigal law student. I drove to Chestnut Hill. It was a dizzying and auspicious day.
The next months were all like Groundhog Day with the same routine—changing diapers, feeding in the night, studying law wherever I could and fighting the traffic commuting from Lowell to Chestnut Hill and back every day. We were at the height of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, and I read contract, property and tort law in long lines just waiting to get gas. The next three years were a blur spent in the law library, in the Middlesex district attorney’s office, where I was a student intern, and at home loving the baby who had entered our lives, watching her turn into a little girl who could walk and talk and bedazzle her parents.
I threw myself into law school in a way I never had in my undergraduate years. Together with my superb partner Ronna Schneider, I took on the moot court event. We won the school competition, went on to win the regionals and then went to New York City for the national finals. There we thought we clobbered the Duke Law School team in oral argument. We waited hours for the decision. The judges had wanted to award the victory to us, but the Duke team had slightly bested us in the brief, which counted for more than 50 percent. The judges were locked in battle trying to find a way to award us the victory. They couldn’t bend the rule, so we lost. It was the last time in the National Moot Court Competition that the brief outweighed the oral argument. The rule was subsequently changed.
I credit law school with teaching me how to think. I enjoyed the give-and-take of Socratic dialogue at a Jesuit law school. I was part of a terrific study group, five classmates who met frequently to dissect the cases we had been assigned. The fights we had over the meaning of one word taught me to be far more critical, far more demanding, in my own thinking.
As a student, I was permitted under Massachusetts law to try misdemeanor cases. I could even appear before a six-person jury. I was mesmerized by the art of trying a jury trial and spent hours upon hours watching the full-fledged assistant district attorneys prosecute rape, armed robbery or murder cases. I couldn’t wait to get a real felony trial.
On the first day that I reported for duty as a student prosecutor, I walked into the District Court of Cambridge and was assigned a drunk driving case. The assistant DA handed me the papers twenty minutes before the trial, saying, “There’s no better way to start than to start.” He disappeared and left me alone to face the judge. “All rise”—I stood up. I stumbled through the story, which was set out in the police report, and called the officer and put him on the stand. I asked far more questions than necessary. I could see the judge was half-amused, half-annoyed, tolerating my rookie performance. I actually placed into evidence the empty bottles the police had collected in the car. The judge was almost audibly chuckling. I didn’t know that these cases were typically concluded in rapid-fire fashion. There were too many not to. I was treating this one like a murder trial. But I got the conviction and, stupid as I felt, I had tried a case.
In the spring of 1976 I graduated and prepared to take the bar exam with a heightened sense of urgency: I was promised a job as an assistant district attorney as soon as I passed the bar. I was excited about the chance to become a full-time prosecutor, but I was also eager to get the job for another reason: I needed the income. Julia and I had stumbled across a perfect home for our family on Chestnut Hill, near Boston College. We had stayed in Lowell for three years. But with a baby at home and a job in Cambridge, the commute didn’t make sense anymore. The distance from friends and work had also taken a toll on Julia. It was important to both of us to try to lead a more normal life.
The house, with its slight Italian flavor, appealed to our romantic impulses and Julia’s nostalgia for Italy. Perhaps the stucco with the terra-cotta tile roof drew us in. A wonderful brick wall enveloped a garden—our own secret garden. Ample bedrooms were ready for a larger family, and the closing on the house came just in time: Julia was pregnant with our second child, due sometime in late December or early January. It was a great feeling to think of this new home, to know I had a job I wanted, to have the dreaded bar exam behind me. We were at peace as we moved in and were greeted by the most thoughtful of surprises: a friend left a lobster and champagne dinner in the front hall on our first night in our new home.
Happily, in the late fall, we learned that each member of our study group had passed the bar exam. The same day I was sworn into the bar, I took on my responsibilities as an assistant district attorney. I was immediately assigned to prosecute a rape case, squaring off against a well-known defense attorney, Bill Homans. I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment putting a rapist behind bars. Shortly thereafter, on New Year’s Eve, before the page turned to 1977, we returned to Emerson Hospital as seasoned veterans for the arrival of our second daughter, Vanessa Bradford Kerry. The beginning of the new year was a good time. We were blessed—new house, new job, healthy newborn.
I buckled down to work in the office of the Middlesex district attorney. John Droney, the boss, was an old-school, crafty politician. He had followed my ill-fated run for Congress and respected my service in the military. We spent a fair amount of time talking politics. He would also regale me with stories of some of his great prosecutions. He had put a number of infamous criminals behind bars, including the Boston Strangler. Sadly, John had fallen ill with a nerve or motor disease, which he tried to keep out of the public eye. He would allow no discussion of how he was doing or any other deviation from the work of the office and the certainty of his reelection.
The problem, of course, was that his reelection wasn’t certain at all. John thought he could run an old-fashioned race, stay under the radar, rely on name recognition and let city and ethnic politics do the rest—but politics was changing. A very capable former assistant attorney general, Scott Harshbarger, was planning to run against John as a reform candidate. He represented a formidable challenge in the new environment. Moreover, the office had fallen behind the times. In New York, District Attorney Robert “Bob” Morgenthau was setting new standards for prosecutors. In Massachusetts, Bill Delahunt was doing the same in Norfolk County. Washington was making grant money available to prosecutors to modernize. John Droney didn’t have one grant, let alone any plan for modernization. There was a backlog of thousands of pending cases, each on an index card in a floating file box. There was no computerized system. Crime was rising. Justice was delayed. John one day asked me what I would do to change the office. I told him. The next day, he shocked me: he appointed me first assistant district attorney, reporting only to him and with full authority to get done what needed to be done. He called a meeting of all the office. People jammed into his office to hear what he had to say. He announced my new role.
I was both dumbfounded and excited: never in my wildest imagination did I expect to be running one of the largest district attorney offices in the country only months out of law school. I knew that knives would be out. Change doesn’t come easily anywhere. But I had a chance to turn the office around, and I was eager and anxious to earn my spurs.
With young reformers recruited for the effort, we established accountability in the assignment and flow of cases, created a Victim Witness Assistance Program, set up a rape counseling unit and a white-collar crime unit to specialize in complicated financial crimes and installed a new computer system.
By the time John Droney’s 1978 election came around, the office was humming, but John was reticent about advertising our accomplishments in a modern campaign style. I was finally able to persuade him to let us run one full-page advertisement in the Boston Globe: ten reasons John Droney should be reelected—a stark, quick narrative of each brutal crime he had cracked that made the county safer. John won the election, and I went back to trying cases.
One case in particular stands out. Austen Griffin, a decorated veteran and a member of one of the local American Legion posts, walked into my office on the second floor of the courthouse. He told me he was being strong-armed by Howie Winter, the number two organized crime figure in New England, who was pushing to force slot machines into the post. Austen wanted none of it. He was outraged by Howie’s tactics and wasn’t going to be bullied. Howie and his Winter Hill Gang had earned their reputation as head-smashers the hard way: in blood. Bodies piled up wherever they went. There were dead bookies washing up on the shores of the Mystic River. There were small-time thugs who regularly disappeared. Winter was in cahoots with James “Whitey” Bulger and some of the most notorious killers of their time. None of it could scare Austen Griffin.
Going after Howie Winter was a challenge. But here was this citizen whose credibility was beyond reproach, expecting us to take action. I called the state police, who worked with us day to day. We provided protection to the witnesses. Austen never wavered. We won a grand jury indictment, and I asked the brilliant prosecutor Bill Codinha to take the case on full-time. He was our best trial attorney and there was no way I could run the office and take on a case of that length and importance. In a superb prosecutorial coup, Bill brought home a conviction. For the first time, a huge dent was put in the Winter Hill Gang and organized crime. We had done at the county level what neither state nor federal government had been able to do—and all because of a gutsy citizen with values and nerves of steel who was willing to stand up for his rights and unwilling to bend to evil.
I stayed with the office until 1980, when I felt my presence was cramping John Droney. He never said anything to me, but he did begin to reassert himself on a few personnel decisions, and I sensed that it was time for me to move on. Droney had been a mentor, something I’d lacked in Massachusetts. His personal example battling a terrible affliction, which turned out to be Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the opportunity he gave me were both life-shaping.
But it was now time for me to start a new chapter.
It was 1980. Ronald Reagan had swept the country, including Massachusetts. I began practicing law privately in a boutique law firm I had set up with another assistant district attorney from Middlesex County, Roanne Sragow. We were working on medical malpractice cases that were eye-opening. A local doctor had become mixed up with a company that provided hair transplants using rug fibers as plugs—the ultimate harebrained scheme. The photos of heads infected by these carcinogenic fibers would make any stomach turn. Roanne and I just needed to find the right jury to nauseate! The insurance companies were unwilling to settle. Accordingly, we went to trial. We succeeded in getting the carcinogenic qualities of the rug fibers entered into evidence. Winning that trial convinced the insurance companies we knew how to try a case and uncorked a flow of settlements.
Taking on these cases was interesting, but I found the practice too predictable. From the moment a client walked in, I could guesstimate fairly quickly what the outcome would be. But one case was an exception. Roanne had taken on a court appointment to represent an indigent prison inmate, George Reissfelder, who insisted that he was innocent of murder. Both Roanne and I initially took his claim with a grain of salt because we had learned as prosecutors that “they’re all innocent,” as the saying goes. Prosecuting can breed some measure of cynicism into the practice of criminal law, but having represented one court appointment for a defendant in a murder, I knew that so can defending.
George Reissfelder confounded our cynicism. Roanne first, and then I, came to believe he really was innocent. He was in prison for a murder he hadn’t committed—he was a criminal, yes, but not a killer. Roanne put extraordinary hours and sweat equity into the case, and I undertook specific assignments on her behalf to ease the load. We thought we could prove it, but there were key hurdles we had to get over, including getting a priest released from his vows of confidentiality in order to help exonerate George. We also needed to secure a release from lawyer-client protection to make admissible exonerating information from George’s codefendant, who was now deceased. Unbelievably, George’s accomplice told his own lawyer George didn’t kill anyone, but the lawyer, in protecting his client, allowed George to be convicted. Finally the truth could come out, provided the lawyer was free to testify. Long before the days of DNA testing, the case was a reminder that it was possible for someone who wasn’t guilty to end up behind bars, and it hardened my opposition to the death penalty.
By 1981, I had been back in Massachusetts for almost ten years, ever since the loss in the Fifth Congressional District. I was starting to miss politics again. Michael Dukakis was gearing up to run for governor—but he first had to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Ed King. It seemed like a good time to try to reenter electoral politics. I thought serving as lieutenant governor would be a good way to contribute and also to learn the ropes the right way—paying dues, not rushing in as I had before.
Shortly after I started to nose around, using the law office as my base of operations, a red-haired young kid from Dorchester walked into my office and told me he wanted to work for me. This young self-starter, who knew exactly what he wanted to do, when and for whom, was named Michael Whouley. Little did I know that politics would bring us back together over a lifetime, and that he would become one of the great organizers of a generation.
The race for lieutenant governor shaped up to be a tough, hard-fought primary with several candidates. Normally, the job of lieutenant governor could be written off. I sometimes told the story of Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States, who had earlier been the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He was at a dinner party when the woman sitting next to him asked what he did. “I’m lieutenant governor of the state,” he said in the dry clip that characterized his speech. She responded, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Tell me all about the job.” He didn’t miss a beat and replied, “I just did.” But to be number two in Massachusetts was still enticing, especially under Dukakis.
In Massachusetts, politics is a passion fed by ideology and idealism. It’s serious business: intense, demanding and nonstop. Each of the candidates in the donnybrook for lieutenant governor went all out. I barely made the 15 percent at the state convention required to get my name on the primary ballot, but once I did, it was a sprint to primary day in September.
The year 1981 was consumed by the campaign. It was also consumed by a growing tension in my marriage. Julia and I had been on cruise control for a while. The experience of total immersion in the anti-war effort, then the race for Congress, then law school, then the move, then a new job, then more political decision-making—all combined to make us drift apart. I take the lion’s share of blame for this and always have. No matter where the discussions led—and there were lots of discussions, including with professional intervention—the damage was done. Julia was suffering from depression and I was, at first, sadly oblivious. She told me about it, but things got worse before I really understood. She had changed. She had come to detest public life, with its perceptible insincerities and incessant demands. There was no way to find happiness sharing her life and family with politics. In the end, this wonderful relationship—which had started at Yale and carried through Vietnam and the journey of twelve years of marriage—was broken. In midsummer of 1982, we agreed to separate after the election was over.
It was an agonizing decision. I knew our marriage was in trouble. Still, I hated beyond hate the idea of not tucking my kids into bed and being with them at home, no matter how much public life could get in the way of that ideal. I also hated the thought of missing Christmas or sharing it in some lawyer-agreed-upon schedule. I was filled with a sense of failure. It was harder than hell to get out of bed, go out and campaign, put a smile on, when you had just finished a deeply emotional, tugging argument. There were times when I felt like crawling into the fetal position and going into a great sleep like the reporter in All the King’s Men. The great sleep—sometimes I thought maybe I’d wake up out of the nightmare to find the great sleep resulted in the great repair. Not to be. So I entered this strange, dual world—one I lived in, campaigning on automatic, and only half lived in at home. It required all the focus I could summon.
I won the September primary, and on November 2, 1982, Michael Dukakis and I were elected together. I walked into his office shortly thereafter and told him Julia and I were separating. It was the kind of conversation I never anticipated having with the governor as his new lieutenant.
We were inaugurated in January 1983. It didn’t take long for me to conclude that Michael was probably going to run for president in due time. It wasn’t that he told me, but certain decisions he made about which duties would be performed by whom made it abundantly clear—or so I thought. One of the ideas I had put forward in the primary was the creation of a crime council that would unite all the law enforcement agencies by holding frequent meetings to coordinate our anti-crime efforts. After I won the primary, Michael agreed that I would chair the crime council, which is what I wanted to do; but very soon after the inauguration, I was called upstairs to meet with him and learned that he had decided to chair the council. When he told me and I reminded him of our earlier discussion, he acknowledged the change, but then said, “I need to do this.” Whether justified, I immediately interpreted the “need” to be the imperative to build a strong law enforcement profile. This was entirely his right and it was understandable why he would do it, but I left that meeting with a great lesson in the nature of lieutenant governors. You don’t live on your own politically in that job—not if you wish to have any job to do. You live with the blessing, or lack thereof, of the governor and his or her team. In principle, I knew that getting into the race, but the reality had an altogether different—and personal—impact.
In fact, Michael was a terrific governor and a great person to work with. He treated me throughout with decency and friendship. He brought intellect and integrity to the job and had a sense of public responsibility as deep as anyone I have ever met. My own father, who had never been involved at the grassroots level in politics, without even talking with me, had been one of Michael’s early delegates to his first state conventions.
As competent as Michael was, at times he could frustrate everyone with his insistence on doing something strictly by the book. He would never bend and everyone knew it. On one occasion, we were headed up to Concord, New Hampshire, for the funeral of Governor Hugh Gallen. By this time Michael’s presidential ambitions were publicly known. He had been asked to deliver one of the eulogies at the statehouse service. It was to be nationally televised—therefore an important moment for Michael on the national stage.
Michael and Kitty, the state’s First Lady, rode up with me to New Hampshire. They were in the back seat of my station wagon. We started out late, but within minutes of hitting Interstate 93 from Boston to Concord, Michael issued an edict to my driver, Chris Greeley: “Not over 60 mph. . . .” Chris and I looked at each other and knew we were never going to have the governor there on time. The minutes were ticking away, and every time Chris would inch above 60 mph, Michael would remind him: “Not over 60.” Finally, as we neared the New Hampshire border, when it was obvious we were dangerously late, I turned to Michael and basically said I was calling the New Hampshire State Police to get an escort or he would miss the funeral. Michael didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, Kitty was lighting yet another cigarette and seemed to be on my side. The New Hampshire State Police picked us up at the tollbooths, and we started following them at breakneck speed, pushing our Buick diesel engine to the absolute limit. I looked back to see Michael clearly unhappy but at least no longer fixated on the speed limit. We arrived at the statehouse, engine smoking, late but not so late that the governor missed speaking.
Michael very graciously asked his colleague governors if they would mind his lieutenant governor chairing a subcommittee of the National Governors Association. Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire and Governor Dick Celeste of Ohio agreed. I may well be the only lieutenant governor who has done so, but thanks to Michael’s delegated authority, I chaired the NGA’s committee on acid rain. John Sununu and Dick Celeste became key partners in developing an approach resulting in a market-based cap-and-trade system to deal with sulfur—the major emission of coal-burning power plants killing our lakes and streams. Here was this market-based method of reining in damaging emissions, dreamed up in several conservative think tanks, which we adopted and which later became federal law. It successfully eliminated the problem of acid rain.
My work on acid rain soon led me into a race for the U.S. Senate long before I might have considered it. In early 1983, I was on a fact-finding mission about atmospheric pollution for the NGA. I traveled first to Norway and Sweden to witness and try to understand what was happening to the lakes and rivers of Scandinavia. There I saw evidence of extraordinary damage from the high concentrations of sulfur in the rain. Lakes that had once teemed with fish were now completely dead. From the Scandinavian countries, I traveled to Germany’s famous Black Forest. It was beautiful but shocking. The ranger who escorted me into the forest pointed out frightening levels of disease in the trees.
That night I was sound asleep in my hotel when the phone rang. It was my second 3:00 a.m. phone call in politics. The voice at the other end belonged to Ron Rosenblith, one of my closest, most valued political advisors. He said, “Are you sitting down?” I laughed and said, “No—I’m lying down. I was sound asleep.” He apologized for waking me but immediately explained the reason for the call: Paul Tsongas had just announced he was not going to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate because he had cancer. I was stunned. He was only a few years older than me and he was in his first term. We had been through my battle and his in Lowell. Ron went on to say that two congressmen, Ed Markey and Jimmy Shannon, as well as Speaker of the Massachusetts House David Bartley had already announced they were in. Ron said I had about forty-eight hours to decide whether I was going to contest for this seat. I was floored but wide-awake.
There was no way I was going to decide in forty-eight hours. To the frustration of my team and those who wanted me to run, I said I would complete the trip and we would sit down when I got back to make a rational decision. Moreover, I clearly had a first stop—with the governor. I had been lieutenant governor for only one year, and if I ran, I’d need to start running full-time. I had to get a handle on my own feelings, then determine the politics.
Immediately on my return to Boston I was inundated with advice. The principal tension was the short span of time I had served as lieutenant governor versus my lifelong concern with issues of war and peace, as well as global environmental matters. I had always known what I wanted to do but I was chastened by my own impatience in 1972. I knew that if I ran and failed now, that would essentially be it for elective office. It was gut-check time. No one could make this decision for me.
I spent time with myself—just stood back, prayed for guidance and tried to plumb for what would make me comfortable with my decision. In the end, I was more than ready to go. It was 1983. Ronald Reagan was president. The war in Central America was raging. Drugs were rampant. President Reagan had come to office with a determination to significantly increase the defense budget during difficult economic times in the United States. Russia and the United States had absurd numbers of nuclear weapons pointed at each other.
In the first years of the administration there had been considerable rhetoric about potential use of nuclear weapons. At one point, Secretary of State Alexander Haig actually talked about the possibility of firing a “nuclear warning shot” in Europe. One of Reagan’s National Security Council team members asserted that there was a 40 percent chance of nuclear war, and the president himself had said at an October 1981 press conference that it was his opinion tactical nuclear weapons could be employed on certain battlefields without leading to an all-out nuclear war. There was talk and concern about the direction of the administration at that moment. Cold War proxy battles in El Salvador and neighboring Nicaragua, which had undergone a left-wing coup, flashed warning signs that the Reagan administration could take us into another quagmire.
Issues of war and peace were very much back on the front burner, the issues that had brought me into politics more than a decade before. I just couldn’t stomach sitting on the sidelines of a race that could potentially put me in a position to help decide such important issues. I also knew that this might be the only chance in my generation to run for the Senate, because it was sure as hell certain Ted Kennedy wasn’t going to vacate his seat. Something told me to run. Was I brimming with confidence that I would win no matter what? Absolutely not. Was I brimming with confidence at my ability to make this work because it was the right thing to do? Undeniably. I had to take the leap if I wanted to be involved with the issues that most motivated me. Suddenly, I was back out there asking the voters of Massachusetts to send me to Washington.
The fight for the nomination would be tough. Ed Markey and Jim Shannon were especially able competitors. But Markey, who is very smart, never found his stride and decided to run for reelection to the House instead. Shannon and I dueled to differentiate ourselves from each other. Our policy positions were almost inseparable. But in a debate late in the campaign, days before the primary, Jim inadvertently highlighted a real difference between us. I had brought up Jim’s change of heart on one of Reagan’s proposed military increases. Jim shot back—oddly—that people can change their mind and said that, for example, by the standard I’d set out, if I’d really been opposed to Vietnam, I shouldn’t have gone to the war. It was strange. I didn’t think much of it in the moment. But our campaign phones started ringing off the hook. Veterans were calling in from all over the state, angry that, to their ears, Shannon had called them stupid: they felt he had questioned their character by impugning the right of veterans to speak their conscience, right or wrong. I fired back at Shannon over the issue in the very next debate and demanded he apologize. “John, that dog won’t hunt,” he replied. Veterans booed Jim, and a group of vets followed him everywhere he went the next few days, drowning out his message. They called themselves “the Doghunters.” I won the primary, thanks to hard work and thanks to each of them. It was on to the general election.
My opponent was a self-funded businessman named Ray Shamie—a former John Birch Society conservative who lost to Ted Kennedy in 1982 and then won the Republican nomination against the more moderate Rockefeller Republican Elliot Richardson at the state convention. Shamie was out of touch with Massachusetts, but I took nothing for granted. I remembered the lesson of Lowell in 1972; I knew that certain social conservatives could play the wedge issues and ignite their bases of support. Reagan was cruising to a landslide reelection, and he was pulling Massachusetts into the Republican column again. I was not about to repeat what had happened the last time I’d been on the under ticket of a presidential ballot. A freshman congressman named John S. McCain parachuted into the state for a day to rally veterans for Shamie. He campaigned in South Boston. I didn’t meet him or know him—but I knew that this former POW could draw a crowd. I worked harder to organize veterans on our side, to make sure that the state knew me, not a cardboard cutout. It worked. On election night, I defied the Reagan tide that swept Massachusetts. Running as a “warrior for peace,” I was going to be a U.S. senator.