“GEORGE BUSH COULDN’T sell pussy on a troop train!”
These were the first words of senatorial conversation I heard on the floor of the world’s greatest deliberative body on January 3, 1985. I don’t think it was a quote from the Federalist Papers.
It happened just after Ted Kennedy walked me onto the floor for the first time and introduced me to three or four colleagues engrossed in conversation about something the Reagan administration was trying to push through Congress. I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t what I heard.
Much about becoming a U.S. senator tended toward the surreal. Here I was, just forty-one years old, ninety-ninth in seniority—I would have been hundredth (dead last) had Paul Tsongas not generously offered to resign a day early so Governor Dukakis could swear me in before I departed Boston, thereby giving me the tiniest edge in an institution built on longevity. I had big shoes to fill. Cancer had cut Paul’s Senate service short, but in just six years he’d built a reputation for a willingness to break with liberal orthodoxy on occasion and as a smart and creative wonk on issues from entitlements to deficits.
Before Paul Tsongas from Lowell had served, there had been Ed Brooke, one of the last remaining African American Republicans from New England, a liberal, the first in his party to demand Nixon’s resignation in 1973. Stretching back before both Paul and Ed (and now me) was a veritable anthology of names seemingly ripped from the membership directory of the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Mayflower Society: Federalists and Whigs, then Republicans and the occasional Democrat, with names like Strong, Sedgwick, Dexter, Foster, Pickering, Rockwell, Hoar, Crane, Coolidge, Lodge and Saltonstall. I suppose, with my patchwork of heritage, I had a foot in both worlds, not entirely the product of either.
I happily accepted some small measure of weight from the history preceding me. It reflected the real story of America. I was proud to now share in it. I’d previously read a great story about then freshman senator Harry S. Truman sitting in the back of the Senate, ninety-ninth in seniority, same as me, writing letters home to his mother in Missouri. He described how he sat there one night and listened to the great debates of the day. He wrote that he could almost hear the voices of giants like Daniel Webster, and being impressed, he would look at his colleagues, pinch himself and ask, “How the hell did I get here?” Months went by. Again, he wrote to his mother: “It’s late at night in the Senate and once again I can hear the voices of the Senate giants from years past. I look out at my colleagues and I pinch myself and ask, ‘How the hell did they get here?’ ” I always laugh at that story, but there’s some hidden wisdom in it too, because it sums up the hypothetical expectations and real-life contradictions in the Senate, as well as the lessons you can learn from both of them.
In a tradition that’s both quaint and grand, Ted Kennedy—now my senior senator, but long ago the thirty-year-old candidate I’d interned for in 1962 and spent time with on the Mall in Washington in 1971 with the veterans—walked me down the aisle of the Senate like the father of a bride. In the well of the Senate I was ceremoniously sworn in as the twenty-eighth man to hold my seat, just the sixty-fifth citizen overall to hold the title “United States Senator from Massachusetts.”
The person dutifully performing the honors of swearing me in was the vice president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, Yale class of 1948. His father, Prescott Bush, was serving as the Republican senator from Connecticut the day I walked onto campus in New Haven. I shook Vice President Bush’s hand, reminded him of the kindness he had shown my eight-year-old daughter, Vanessa, that past July, sharing his popcorn with her at Harvard Stadium during the Chile versus Norway Olympic qualifying soccer game. Back then Vice President Bush had not allowed the politics of the Massachusetts Senate race to get in the way of relating to my family; little did either of us know then that a political collision awaited us.
I liked Bush very much. Aside from the ugly nature of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, I always found him decent and thoughtful, straight dealing in his interactions. I never doubted whether he was in politics for the right reasons. He loved the Navy as I did, and we talked about that at the soccer game at some length.
Minutes after I was sworn in, Teddy steered me around the Senate floor to meet my new colleagues. It was as we approached a huddle of veteran senators that I heard Alabama’s senior senator, Howell Heflin, cast the Republican vice president in a decidedly colorful light. So much for Senate formality. I can still hear Heflin’s courtly accent emphasizing each and every word before the group broke out in laughter. And so it was that I met my new colleagues. Senator Heflin was then the chairman of the Ethics Committee, a Marine awarded the Silver Star for service in the thick of the fighting in the Pacific in World War II, the onetime chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Back then the Senate was stocked with memorable characters. Majority Whip Alan Simpson from Wyoming was an Army veteran with a quick wit, a great debater who could cut you to pieces when he wasn’t promising to “stick it right in the old bazoo.” Russell Long from Louisiana, the Senate’s leading expert on the tax code, bore a striking resemblance to his famous father, the legendary Kingfish, Huey Long, who had inspired Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece All the King’s Men. I’d read that book by flashlight under the covers at St. Paul’s, when I was only vaguely aware of the icon on whom the book was based, the real-life, flesh-and-blood Huey Long, who was assassinated when Russell was just sixteen. What I knew of Huey Long came from black-and-white newsreel footage that occasionally flashed across a television screen. By the time I met Russell, the senator was, amazingly, in his final term, winding down thirty-eight years in the Senate. It was the only job he’d ever had since being elected at age twenty-nine, two days and two months before he met the thirty-year-old eligibility requirement of the Constitution. He’d outlasted Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, both of whom came to the Senate the same year—1948. Now he was enjoying his last years, still pulling the strings back home in Louisiana.
Another larger-than-life senator was Fritz Hollings, the former governor of South Carolina who courageously presided over the integration of the University of South Carolina. He had served in the Senate since 1966, the most senior junior senator in history, paired with the nonagenarian Strom Thurmond.
Fritz was a hoot. “I don’t want to rust out, I’d rather wear out,” he used to say. He possessed one of the great repertoires of colorful phrases. Diplomats, for example, were “striped-pants cookie pushers.” I never knew him to hold back, even when talking in less appetizing terms: “Letting y’all regulate yourselves is like delivering lettuce by way of a rabbit.” Fritz was a longtime friend of the Kennedys going back to President Kennedy’s campaign. Teddy once described Fritz as “the first non-English-speaking candidate for President,” but once I figured out how to translate Hollings’s deep, rich Charleston accent, we became close friends. He became a great mentor to me on the Commerce Committee and in the Senate. On one occasion he shared a surprisingly personal but invaluable piece of advice. It benefited me in those early days: when I was in hot pursuit of appropriations to bring home some money to Massachusetts and needed to make the case in person—to kiss some rings, in other words—Fritz was pretty clear to me which senators I shouldn’t go see after about 4:30 in the afternoon. His comment needed little explanation but nonetheless he added one with a sly smile: “Either the meetin’ won’t go well or, hell, he won’t remember it the next day. Either way, I’d go ask to see Orrin Hatch at that hour instead. Orrin’s a teetotaler and a deacon in the Mormon Temple.”
I had arrived at a Senate in transition, much as I had arrived twenty-three years earlier on a campus in transition.
Howell Heflin’s off-color language with his colleagues wasn’t unusual back in 1985. The Senate then was an institution that at times sounded a lot more like a bar or a locker room. There was a fair amount of drinking, and the aroma of cigars crept out of many of the senior members’ hideaway offices in the Capitol.
You didn’t have to look far to understand why that might have been the case: I had as many daughters as there were women in the U.S. Senate. Only two of my colleagues were women, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the junior senator from Kansas, and Paula Hawkins, a Republican from Florida who would soon be defeated by my friend Bob Graham in 1986. We were working in what at times felt like a hermetically sealed vault—a time capsule that had not kept up with social progress.
Years later, Teresa would tell me about her experience as the wife of a Republican senator, hosting a gathering for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which her husband, Jack Heinz, a senator from Pennsylvania, was chairing. As the evening wound down, she spotted Strom Thurmond charmingly filling his pockets with chicken wings and cookies to take home with him. She laughed and made him a little plate to take on his way. Strom then was a mere eighty-three. He was dapper in his own peculiar, very senior way: his orange hair was not a color found in nature, and he wore the heavy scent of his favorite cologne, which he stockpiled when he learned the company was going out of business. He thanked Teresa for the goody bag and gave her a hug. She suddenly found ol’ Strom’s hands digging into her sides: “Still maaghty firm, my dear, maaghty firm!” he bellowed. Some old dogs were not changing with the times. He was to cause some consternation a few years later when he similarly greeted Senator Patty Murray of Washington in an elevator and tried to excuse his behavior by explaining that he thought she was an intern.
It was a Senate overwhelmingly old and white and male, something I was reminded of on days when the eighty-four-year-old senior senator from Mississippi, the legendary John C. Stennis, who the year before had a leg amputated due to cancer, rolled by me in his wheelchair. Here he was, a man who had come to the Senate in 1947 when I was not quite four years old. When I was raising money at Yale to help support the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, Stennis had two good strong legs under him as he joined the Southern Caucus’s filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But you learn in the Senate that no matter the history, every vote still counts, and as long as people in a state have sent their choice to the Senate, you have to work together to get anything accomplished.
And Stennis had changed with the times, supporting voting rights legislation a couple years before I showed up in the Senate, a vote he once told Joe Biden had “cleansed his soul.” A year after that he’d campaigned for Mike Espy, the Mississippi Democrat who would become the first African American to represent the Magnolia State in Congress since Reconstruction. Stennis was nonetheless a voice from a distant era, a name I had probably first heard in 1971 when he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a pro–Vietnam War southern stalwart whom angry anti-war activists made a target of their anger. Now he was my colleague, an old man who had lived almost immeasurable amounts of American history, who described his legislative motto as “stay flexible” and who now surely knew, as Bob Dylan would write (an artist Stennis most likely had never listened to), “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” He was hanging on for dear life—literally.
Stennis wasn’t alone. The Arizona icon Barry Goldwater was in his last term in the Senate, the father of modern conservatism whose libertarian ways were chafing against the rising social conservatism of a new Republican Party, a sea change fast transforming his movement. Tom Eagleton of Missouri was in his last term as well. He was a gentle soul whom I had gotten to know in those intense days of the anti-war movement, a proudly liberal colleague who always looked out for me as a freshman senator. Tom took me under his wing and graciously ceded his seniority to me on the Foreign Relations Committee so I could lead a subcommittee, moving up one place from dead last on the dais. He personified collegiality.
For all the ways the Senate I entered was too homogeneous, it did have a certain, wonderful heterogeneity that has, tragically, been lost in recent decades in ways that have made governing in the United States infinitely more difficult. There was ideological diversity within the parties. Liberal Republicans who cared about the environment as passionately as many of us on the other side of the aisle still existed and still had clout: Jack Heinz from Pennsylvania, John Chafee from Rhode Island and Lowell Weicker from Connecticut were prime examples. There was also geographic diversity among the parties: two Democrats from Alabama, one from Mississippi, one from South Carolina, one from Arizona and two from Georgia. On the other side were two moderate Republicans from Pennsylvania, one from California and several from the Pacific Northwest. There were liberal Republicans further to the left of conservative Democrats, and vice versa.
The rightward turn of the Republican Party and the way in which the Deep South would become almost a wall of near-automatic Republican Senate seats pressured Democrats to do all we could to make sure that reliably blue states elected Democratic senators. Never recognized in the battle for Senate control was the downside of Democrats having to win Senate seats in places like Connecticut and Rhode Island: liberal Republicans were gone forever from those states and, with them, their often constructive voices in their caucus.
I lived through plenty of those early moments Harry Truman talked about: “How did I get here?” I was tempted to pinch myself when I looked to my right and realized that the soft-spoken, unassuming man sitting next to me in our weekly Democratic caucus luncheon was none other than John Glenn of Ohio, the legendary astronaut I had watched on a tiny black-and-white television set at St. Paul’s as America welcomed him home with a ticker tape parade in New York City after orbiting Earth three times. “Godspeed, John Glenn.” The words still gave me goose bumps, the memory was so indelible. Yet here he was. I knew little about him then beyond the heroism and plainspoken determination he had shown the world at NASA. The love of John’s life was his wife, Annie, as kind a person as I had ever met. She was quiet, almost shy, something that stemmed from her battle to conquer a lifelong stutter, but she was inseparable from John and lit up when you asked her a question. We often sat next to each other at Senate functions. She was especially nice—without even having to say a word—about pulling me into a conversation, since she realized I was in a slightly awkward position: separated from Julia, I didn’t have a spouse with me, where most senators did. My friendship with John Glenn deepened. He was my colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee, and as he opened up, we talked about everything from John’s enduring friendship with his wingman from Korea, the baseball legend Ted Williams, to family and kids and our shared love of flying. Imagine, me, a private pilot, talking flying with John Glenn.
John let me in on a little secret he counted on for good luck: he told me that before every mission, in the Marines and at NASA, before he’d go into harm’s way, he relied on a good luck charm he had picked up in Korea, a wooden “fat” Buddha. He’d give its round belly a rub for good luck before flying. It had never let him down. One day, after we made a journey to Vietnam together on the POW/MIA Committee, a gift from John arrived unexpectedly in my office: a wooden Buddha of my own, a gift from one pilot, one veteran, to another. I wasn’t going into space, but I rubbed that Buddha’s belly before a heavy or hard decision in the Senate.
Surrounded by these men who seemed like giants, many of them legends of a great generation, a nagging question kept recurring for me and my generation of senators: How would we make our mark in the Senate? Where did we fit?
The Senate runs on seniority. At number ninety-nine, I didn’t have to excel at math to know that I wasn’t going to be a committee chairman anytime soon. I had asked Minority Leader Robert Byrd for that seat on the Foreign Relations Committee and Byrd hadn’t hesitated; but in front of me in seniority were twenty senators. The same was true on the Commerce Committee. The only committee I might chair within a decade was the Senate Small Business Committee, which sounded more comprehensive than it was. Its jurisdiction was limited to oversight of the Small Business Administration, and it specifically was prohibited from touching the issue small business owners cared about most—taxes.
There were a handful of senators in their prime years who had the blessing of seniority. Joe Biden, having been elected at twenty-nine, was in his early forties wielding the gavel of the powerful Judiciary Committee, and he was right behind the aging Claiborne Pell on the Foreign Relations Committee. Ted Kennedy, just fifty-three, was the most senior Democrat on the Armed Services, the Judiciary and the Labor and Health committees.
Of course, both of my predecessors, Paul Tsongas and Ed Brooke, had gently warned me about Teddy. He was a subject they tap-danced around carefully. He was fun, charming, engaging, but he cast a big shadow. I never really worried about that because I grew up admiring the Kennedys enormously, from my speech at St. Paul’s on behalf of JFK, to my internship with Teddy’s Senate campaign, to the sad, wistful, shock-filled weekend in Long Beach knowing we had lost Robert Kennedy to yet another assassin’s bullet. But Ted was the Kennedy I had known in a different way—more personal and immediate and even intimate. He was the senator who campaigned for me in 1972 in Lowell and Lawrence, touching the heartstrings of the blue-collar Democratic voters who didn’t know me in the district where I’d planted my flag. I liked him. I imagined a big brother and mentor would await me in the Senate. Shortly after I was sworn in, Teddy sent me a black-and-white photo of the two of us at the corner of Constitution and Delaware Avenues on my first day as a senator headed to my first vote. On it, he had scribbled, “Like Humphrey Bogart said, here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Teddy was the master of the personal gesture, acts that came to him instinctively. He knew I was running back and forth on weekends to Boston, trying to be there for soccer games and time with my daughters, and that I was doing all I could to be in the places I wanted to be as well as the places I had to be. He could see it all took a toll, and one day that fall Ted noticed a hacking, deep, rattling cough was getting the best of me. The girls were away with their mom for the upcoming weekend. “John, you’re going down to Palm Beach this weekend to get well,” Teddy ordered. It wasn’t an invitation; it was a command. So I found myself for a Friday through Sunday not freezing up in Boston alone, but in the warmth and sun of Florida, staying in what had been President Kennedy’s Winter White House, which was a special home for the Kennedy family. It was a generous, personal gesture.
Ted was also great fun to be around. In the cloakroom sometimes, the roars of laughter were so loud they could be heard out on the Senate floor. One night, Teddy was holding forth behind the doors in the cloakroom and the presiding officer in the Senate chamber pounded the gavel and demanded, “There will be order in the Senate—and in the cloakroom.” Even his pranks were works of art and brilliant calculation. After a long series of night votes had pushed senators past time to catch commercial flights home to the Northeast, our colleague from New Jersey Frank Lautenberg, another World War II veteran and a self-made millionaire, arranged for a private plane to get to Massachusetts. It turned out that a number of senators needed to travel in that direction, and when Frank learned of it, he kindly offered a ride to Claiborne Pell, Ted and me. There was no discussion of sharing the cost. Everyone thought Frank was being very generous, but the next week, all of us were on the Senate floor for a vote when official-looking envelopes were delivered to us under Lautenberg’s signature, with exorbitant bills for the flight. Claiborne was a soft-spoken, genteel, flinty New Englander, as Brahmin as they came with his Newport accent and his sometimes threadbare, timeless suits; Claiborne never threw anything away. This evening, though, Clairborne Pell absolutely roared down the aisle, brandishing the bill. The sight of Claiborne roaring anywhere was itself notable. Back in Rhode Island when he first ran for office, the press nicknamed him “Stillborn Pell.” But this was the scene; something was afoot. Senator Lautenberg was red-faced, protesting he knew nothing about it, when out of the corner of my eye I spied Ted by his desk—Cheshire Cat grin—so pleased with himself. Mystery solved: Ted had commandeered a few sheets of Lautenberg’s stationery and sent false bills to each of us. I give him credit: he knew how to make even the monotony of a late-night Senate vote-a-rama a hell of a lot of fun.
This was my dilemma: I couldn’t imagine a rivalry or a tension-filled relationship with Ted, but I also couldn’t imagine quietly waiting and waiting and waiting until I was in my sixties to have a voice in the U.S. Senate. I had arrived in the Senate among a special class, at least as we saw it. In our own way, we thought of ourselves as agents of change. We all thought we were going to change the world—Tom Harkin, Al Gore, Jay Rockefeller, Paul Simon and a lone Republican from Kentucky named Mitch McConnell, who was the first of his party elected to the Senate from that state since Reconstruction. Tom Harkin had been in the House and, before that, a Hill staffer himself. Al Gore was the son of southern political royalty. Jay Rockefeller, in addition to having served as one of the youngest governors in the country before he had turned forty, had first come to West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer and fallen in love with Appalachia. He carried all the weight of being born with the name “John D. Rockefeller IV.” None of us intended to be seen and not heard. Moreover, in an age of competitive and increasingly expensive Senate races, of special interest groups issuing more and more scorecards of votes and legislation, and with C-SPAN cameras set to be installed covering the Senate floor a year after we arrived, our constituents would not allow us the liberty of waiting as quiet understudies, deferring any effort to make a mark. There was a pressure to produce now. Somehow, I had to make my moves, to breathe fresh air into my ideas, even in a Senate that rewards longevity, not new ideas, and with Ted Kennedy as my partner, not my rival. I had to find my own way.
• • •
ONE OF THE first Senate road maps I was offered came amid a rookie senator rite of passage: an audience with the Democratic leader and Senate minority leader, the legendary Robert C. Byrd. I didn’t know much then about this now venerated figure from West Virginia, other than that in 1971—just a few months before I’d testified against the war—he had seemingly come out of nowhere to unseat Ted Kennedy as the Senate Democratic whip, the number two position in leadership behind then Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana. He was well to the right of Kennedy and had cut a decidedly different profile on issues like civil rights that animated my generation; but the whip job was a nuts-and-bolts position requiring many hours just manning the Senate floor and the cloakroom, understanding all the nooks and crannies of Senate procedure and the sweeteners potentially required to win enough votes to turn bills and resolutions into laws.
Robert Byrd had mastered all the institutional minutiae of the Senate—much of it no doubt learned at the right hand of two mentors: his first, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and Rayburn’s disciple, whom Byrd backed for president in 1960, then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson. Senator Byrd skillfully parlayed his tutorials into the next step up the ladder. By 1984, at sixty-seven, he was the top Democrat in the Senate and an able foil to the Republican majority leader, Bob Dole.
We met in the leader’s ornate office in the Capitol. Still to this day, I remember Byrd well, his full head of perfectly coiffed hair, not yet completely white as it would turn over the next quarter century. He was resplendent in a robin’s-egg-blue suit and a tie a smidge wider than the narrower cut that was becoming popular at the time, as if he had no interest or intention of changing along with popular tastes. He had the big smile and courtly manner I’d expected, but I knew it belied a sophistication and a cunning that was by then already legendary among my colleagues.
We sat facing each other in upholstered wing chairs, not far from a framed copy of an album recorded several years before, Mountain Fiddler, a collection of his favorite tunes played on a fiddle and even sung by none other than Robert C. Byrd. Leaning in, pronouncing every word with his distinct baritone, Byrd was patient and solicitous of me as a freshman senator. He told me about his friendship with Ted Kennedy and his warm relationship with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts icon preparing one final hurrah in Congress.
From the moment we sat down, though, I sensed Byrd also had an agenda beyond the pleasantries: he was well known as a defender of the Senate’s institutions and traditions, but surely, he also understood that this class of freshman senators was determined to make a mark, and I think he wanted to meet us all halfway, to encourage us to spread our wings a bit, but to do so within the confines of the institution. He probably also wanted to ensure he had our backing in two years when he’d be running for reelection as leader—next time, perhaps, for majority and not minority leader.
When Tom Harkin, Al Gore and I compared notes on our initial individual meetings with Byrd, we all noted that he’d sprinkled in the same piece of wisdom he no doubt had shared with incoming senators for a long time: “A big man can make a small job important.” None of us had signed up for a small job, but Byrd hadn’t just thrown out a morsel of homespun wisdom; his words meant something much more interesting, much more compelling, and they got my attention. He explained to me that if you persistently worked an issue that your colleagues knew was critical for you, particularly if it mattered to you back home, or if it reflected your expertise, that if you exhausted the remedies available to you, mastered the procedures of the Senate and really took the time to understand the Senate’s rhythms, you could achieve something beyond your own seniority. “The rhythms of the Senate” became a magical phrase to me and others. What he meant was common sense. For example: as a Thursday late afternoon turned to Thursday evening and colleagues rushed to make flights so they could get home to campaign or meet with constituents, if there was “must-pass” legislation on the calendar, then, done correctly, within the system, applying the right amount of pressure at the right time might well open up accomplishments outstripping the power that mere seniority offered.
It was the first time I’d heard how procedure, working the process, could be the great equalizer among senators. A senator at one of these moments might call on the leader to be recognized, to offer an amendment or demand a recorded vote, to exercise a senator’s prerogatives, and that was a source of leverage. Maybe you wouldn’t get your amendment accepted right there and then, but you might unlock a guarantee of a hearing, or a vote on the next debate, or some important concession. Byrd offered a warning, though: it was a break-the-glass option to be held in reserve, after all the normal channels had been worked. It was a currency best spent cautiously and sparingly.
The rules were open to all senators to pursue to maximum effect, but the Senate ran on relationships and on an unspoken code of conduct that frowned on show horses and shortcuts. You didn’t surprise your colleagues—at least those in your caucus—at the eleventh hour.
I tucked these lessons away in the back of my mind. This man of the Senate, who had taught himself to read by candlelight growing up in coal country and carried a copy of the Constitution with him at all times, was sharing with me the rules that weren’t written down but were nonetheless essential to making progress in the Senate.
Byrd also shared with me two other lessons that hit home for different reasons. Perhaps not knowing that, while not yet divorced, I remained separated from Julia, he told me that one essential building block of being a good senator was maintaining a happy home. It came from the most personal place of all for Leader Byrd: orphaned at age one after his mother died, he’d been married to Erma Byrd since 1937—six years before I’d even come into this world. Byrd could count on two hands the number of nights he’d been away from home in the Virginia (not West Virginia) suburbs, even as he had been the Democratic leader, with all the demands of fund-raising and politics. Unspoken was the fact that he’d seen colleagues come and go, many succumbing to the long hours and lost weekends, too many who had come to the Senate with families, lost that connection to their wives and kids, and ended up unhappy in life or even ineffective as senators.
The leader couldn’t have imagined the juggling act I was engaged in, racing to be back in Massachusetts for the weekends, Julia and I trading off our time, the holidays no longer spent as a family under one roof, the lonely feeling when I came home to my empty Capitol Hill row house.
Although I wasn’t about to share with Senator Byrd the challenges and complications of my life at that time, I took his words to heart, knowing they were genuine, even if they stung more than a little bit and even if I didn’t have any good answers or remedies for the difficulties of the present moment.
The second lesson from our meeting came shortly after the now familiar buzzer sounded announcing a quorum call. As I shook Leader Byrd’s hand, preparing to let him get back to the pressing business of minority leader, he said, in his classic West Virginia drawl, “Wait. Before you go I have some pic monay for ya.” He walked over to his beautifully carved desk and reached into an elegant bowl.
Pic monay? I thought. What on earth is pic monay?
Byrd held an envelope toward me. “It is a crahm how expensive campaigns are getting, and I know yo’ah reelection begins faave minutes after yo’ah swoan in,” he said warmly, as he reached out and put the envelope in my hand.
It suddenly dawned on me that he was saying “PAC money.” He was giving me a check from his political action committee to help with my reelection. Byrd had no reason to know that I had run for the Senate by refusing PAC money of any kind and trying to make campaign finance reform an issue. An awkward moment ensued, at least on my end, as I mulled my options. Did I just pocket the check? Return it to one of the leader’s aides later? The clerk for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had briefed those of us new to the committee about the best way to navigate uncomfortable situations when traveling overseas and being offered traditional gifts by foreign leaders: we could accept them graciously, bring them to the Foreign Relations Committee upon our return, along with official paperwork denoting “accepted gift to avoid diplomatic offense,” and then have the gifts whisked away to some dusty Senate archive, never to be seen again, without ever insulting a gracious foreign minister or head of state.
There was no such office of protocol in the Senate to handle awkward moments like these between colleagues. “Mr. Leader,” I said, “that’s very generous of you, but you know I actually ran for the Senate without accepting any PAC money, and . . .” My voice trailed off a bit as I searched for an easy way to slide out of a tricky moment while still acknowledging the leader’s intended gift. I tried a smile. “Well, I don’t think the first thing I should do now that I’m elected is, um . . .” The moment felt like it lasted an eternity.
Senator Byrd let me off the hook: he looked at me quizzically, touched me on the shoulder and walked me to the door. He insisted that he himself hoped to see real campaign finance reform in the next Congress, and sure enough, just three years later as majority leader, he would allow the Senate to be all but shut down through a fifty-three-hour filibuster that revealed the Republicans’ determination not to enact anything resembling reform.
That day, however, my lesson had to do with the extent to which one’s best efforts to stake out a position in any campaign can look and feel quite different when faced with actual governing and the reality of relationships. I’d been sincere about refusing PAC money, and I was proud of the race I’d run and won without it. But now, here I was, face-to-face with the Senate minority leader, with whom I agreed on probably 90 percent of the issues, and I couldn’t accept his PAC check to help my reelection; but just fifteen feet outside his office, walking the halls, were paid lobbyists who could write a check to me as individuals. I wondered: Where’s the appropriate line to draw to make anything more than a rhetorical point?
The absurdity hit me: in earnestly trying to take a stand, I’d actually created an artificial distance between me and my new colleagues over a minimal difference. I realized the Senate would never be free of the impact of money—the truly corrosive kind, the kind that disconnected people from their government—until we actually insisted on greater public financing of campaigns and made the whole system fairer. The obstacle to making that happen wasn’t a campaign contribution from the Senate leader.
Instead we were trapped in a broken system. Ronald Reagan was president; we Democrats were in the minority; and it was time to let the distinguished minority leader get back to his real job, which didn’t include a long harangue on “pic monay.” Byrd put the envelope back in the bowl.
“Wait, I have something else for you,” he said. Since I’d already found a way to screw up the first gesture of goodwill between me and the minority leader, I wondered what it could possibly be. He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a book. His favorite analysis of the Constitution? I wondered. A treatise on the Senate? Either of these seemed likely from a man who was the institution’s resident historian. He placed the book in my hand, its plastic binding immediately recognizable, and tapped my hand: “Something for Mrs. Kerry,” he said with a smile. It was a copy of the Robert C. Byrd West Virginia cookbook.
My reelection might cost $10 million, but now at least I had a recipe book and a priceless tutorial on both senatorial courtesy and the Senate itself.
• • •
IF KENNEDY AND Byrd had helped me understand a new environment, something else was pulling me back toward the place I’d come from and probably still felt most comfortable: activism on issues of war and peace.
On Thursday, April 18, 1985, three months after we were sworn in as freshman senators, Iowa’s Tom Harkin and I boarded a plane to Managua, Nicaragua.
We were flying on TACA Airlines. We joked that with its safety record it probably stood for “Take A Chance Airlines,” but, politically, that’s also what we were doing. Tom and I were the most freshman of freshmen senators, but we both came to the Senate animated by our concern for American involvement in the wars in Central America. We wanted to see and understand for ourselves a Cold War proxy battle right in our own hemisphere that had echoes of the war that defined our formative years. President Reagan was seeking congressional approval to provide military assistance to the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist government. His secretary of state, George Shultz, had even written to Congress inviting all members to go to Nicaragua and see what was happening for themselves. This was invitation enough for Tom and me.
We came from different backgrounds. Tom had grown up in a small Iowa town built by Catholic immigrants. Years later, I would travel there as a presidential candidate and see for myself that the community’s pride in Tom still ran deep. It was similar to places in Massachusetts where whole neighborhoods stay forever connected, the kind of connection I’d missed out on because of my father’s nomadic diplomatic lifestyle. Tom didn’t have it easy. He lost his mother at age ten and watched the struggles of an older brother who was deaf in the days before America fully understood its responsibility to provide equal access to those of different abilities. An ROTC scholarship sent Tom to Iowa State, and he became a skilled Navy pilot.
In 1969, just as I was coming home from combat in Vietnam, Tom’s real confrontation with the war began. He was working for one of Iowa’s congressmen, Neal Smith. Tom traveled to Southeast Asia with other congressional staff to Con Son Island on a fact-finding mission. He was horrified to see the way our ally was brutally holding enemy prisoners captive in tiger cages. It was a moment of conscience. He saw in the South Vietnamese military a brutality not dissimilar from that of the Viet Cong. Tom took a series of photos and leaked them to Life magazine. He wanted the country to see what was happening. It could have cost Tom his job; instead, it created a groundswell of activism and helped Tom win a seat in Congress a few years later among the Watergate class of 1974. Ten years later, he was a senator.
Given the parallel paths we’d traveled, the different journeys we’d taken to similar conclusions, it made sense for our paths to converge. We both knew from experience the importance of not automatically swallowing official Washington’s version of events. We wanted to see for ourselves what was actually happening in a conflict tearing Nicaragua apart. We needed to better understand the ways in which the United States might get involved.
Some of the parallels to Vietnam were obvious. The United States had supported the Somoza government for decades as a bulwark against communism in our neighborhood. We had looked the other way as its paramilitary forces violated human rights with impunity. Within a large portion of the country, those forces were corrupt and unpopular, but so too were the insurgents who had sprung up and deposed them. Known as the Sandinistas and led by Daniel Ortega, they clearly modeled themselves on the Castros and any number of Marxist leaders of the era. As the Sandinistas forced their will on the Nicaraguan people, a counterrevolution grew in response. The opposition, known as the Contras, and including many former Somoza regime dead-enders, had launched a guerrilla war in an attempt to regain control. The Soviets, of course, were thrilled to have a client state—another one—right in our hemisphere.
From my vantage point, it was far from a simple black-and-white battle of good versus evil. Even then it felt much more like a classic choice between shades of gray. Were the Contras fighting the communists? Yes. On the other hand, many credible reports surfaced that the Contras had been committing violent human rights abuses. I worried that they were the kind of ally that would become a real liability in the long run. President Reagan argued the case in terms that hit a little too close to home, talking of a “domino theory” in our own hemisphere. It was the same talk that had led us down a tragic path before. Both Tom and I knew too many close friends whose names were on the granite Wall in Washington as a result of that thinking. Given the road we had both traveled, it was difficult, if not impossible, to accept anyone else’s word about what was really happening. We felt compelled to engage in our own reconnaissance and due diligence.
Our goal was not only to inform our vote, but also to explore whether there was a better policy to put in place. Rather than a false choice of either backing the Contras all out or doing nothing, there might be a different approach that could actually benefit Nicaragua and the hemisphere. Peace talks had been stalled for months. Could they resume?
Our first night in Managua, we attended a working dinner at Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto’s home. We suspected he was launching a charm offensive. As we discussed steps that could be taken to lay the groundwork for negotiation, I couldn’t help but notice the opulence with which the minister surrounded himself. I remember thinking, This guy is supposed to be leading a people’s revolution?
The next day we asked to meet with as many people as possible on both sides of the conflict. We engaged in dozens of conversations, many of which seemed to confirm our suspicion that the Contras had committed shocking atrocities. I will never forget meeting with a woman named Zoila Rosa Domínguez Espinoza. She was probably in her early fifties, I doubt even ten years older than I was. Fighting tears, she described how, three months earlier, the Contras had ambushed a civilian Jeep, murdering her daughter and three other young professors. She carried her daughter’s graduation picture in her hand, begging us to do anything we could to make the war stop. It reinforced the sense that Washington and Moscow were seeing this civil war purely through an ideological lens. It was just another proxy fight. Instead of listening to people on the ground who, first and foremost, wanted to live their lives without violence, both capitals were content to “proxy” onward.
The night before we returned to Washington, we had a five-hour dinner meeting with senior Sandinista officials, including, finally, President Daniel Ortega. He outlined his theory of a potential peace. For several hours, we kicked ideas back and forth, with Tom and me listening carefully for any hint of an approach that could actually fly in the United States. Late at night, Ortega determined he wanted us to take an idea back to President Reagan.
The next morning before we boarded our flight, we were handed a document at the airport that represented his formal proposal for negotiations. I was comfortable taking it to the administration. It was two and a half pages and basically boiled down to this: Ortega said he was prepared to enter into a cease-fire with the Contras, rein in his police state and kick out the Soviet and Cuban military advisors working with his military, hold elections and embrace a peace agreement, if, in return, the United States would drop its matériel support for the rebels.
I couldn’t vouch for the Sandinistas’ readiness to live by their own proposal, but given the steady descent of the region into greater violence, I thought the United States had a responsibility to test whether they were serious. I believed that unless you want to go to war, you don’t lose by trying for peace. If it leads to progress, that’s terrific, and if it doesn’t, then you’ve earned greater credibility with allies and neighbors. I thought the Reagan administration should treat this proposal as a first volley and at least make a counterproposal. But Tom and I weren’t negotiators. All we could do was convey Ortega’s message. Little did we know there was no appetite for that kind of diplomacy in the White House. Before Tom and I were even back in Washington, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the region, Elliott Abrams, was already calling around to Capitol Hill to pour cold water on the entire idea.
The day after we got back, the White House convened a meeting with Senate leaders to discuss the issue. Tom and I were told only one of us could have a spot in the meeting, so we flipped a coin. I won the coin toss, or maybe I lost, depending on what was to follow.
Sitting at the White House as a freshman senator was one of those moments you imagine will be important. I argued the case for exploring renewed peace talks. The Reagan administration officials followed with their case, which boiled down to one argument: it was naive to believe anything Ortega said. They saw no reason to talk to the regime at all. This was my introduction to some of the neoconservatives who would bring us the war in Iraq. They refused to accept what I believed, that negotiation isn’t based on trust; it’s a way of probing to find out if advances can be made. They didn’t want to stop the war; they wanted to widen it. The meeting was just window dressing. Minds were already made up. We were a couple of years away from President Reagan making “trust but verify” his mantra in dealing with the Soviets; but I wondered why on earth the United States could negotiate with the Soviet Union, the same power that had invaded Afghanistan and had nuclear warheads pointed at us, but couldn’t even explore talks with a tiny country in our neighborhood.
Days later, Speaker Tip O’Neill and the House of Representatives voted down a Reagan Contra aid proposal. I hoped that that vote might mean the administration would come back to the Senate with a new approach on peace talks and put Ortega to the test.
Instead, I learned a very different Washington lesson, a lesson about bare-knuckle politics in our nation’s capital. It was also a harbinger of a different kind of politics that would break the city itself as the years went by.
It started with Senator Barry Goldwater—someone I knew mainly by historical reputation for his 1964 hostile takeover of the Republican Party, which began the exile of the moderate Rockefeller Republicans. Goldwater had been my colleague for just a handful of months. We exchanged pleasantries but had never had a real conversation. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him.
Ted Kennedy had schooled me in Senate norms of civility, in which colleagues spoke privately to each other before they took aim at each other in the media. Two words I heard often from Leader Byrd were “senatorial courtesy.”
Clearly there was another rule book with which I wasn’t familiar. Without warning, Senator Goldwater blasted Tom Harkin and me to the media, accusing us of violating the Logan Act, an obscure federal law from the late eighteenth century that makes it a crime to negotiate with a foreign government without prior authorization.
Goldwater didn’t know us, but that didn’t stop him from employing an often-used tactic of the Far Right, accusing us of being traitors. We were two senators who had traveled through the auspices of the Foreign Relations Committee, abiding by all the regular protocols and procedures, doing what senators are supposed to do before they vote on issues of national security: we were gathering facts. The legislative branch is a coequal branch of government to the executive—something I’d have thought a veteran U.S. senator like Goldwater would have wanted to protect as an institutional prerogative.
The accusation was ludicrous. We had never entered into any negotiation, and Goldwater knew it. Leader Byrd told me not to take it seriously. The intention wasn’t to engage the legal system but to silence us. It was the political equivalent of a brushback. It created a media firestorm. Conservative pundits pounced. Washington had two newspapers—the Washington Post, which was serious and fair, and the Washington Times, a right-wing broadsheet not known for being “fair and balanced.” The Times wasn’t what we call a “paper of record,” but it could drive television coverage with its exaggerated headlines, and it surely did this time.
Tom and I were on the defensive. We huddled with Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd on the Senate floor. Chris slapped me on the back, smiling as he said, “Looks like you scared somebody.” Teddy was his usual upbeat self. “Never explain,” he warned us, repeating his mantra that in politics if you’re explaining, you’re losing. He didn’t believe in getting into a defensive crouch, and his own thick skin, developed over years of being a punching bag for the Right, had numbed him to their theatrics. There wasn’t a Republican flyer or direct-mail fund-raising letter in conservative politics that didn’t mention Ted. He had come to revel in being their bête noire. I wasn’t there yet.
In fact, I was seething. It felt as though facts didn’t matter. Senators who had taken dozens of overseas trips just like mine didn’t say a word in defense of the Senate’s prerogatives, let alone of two of their colleagues. The media reaction was just as Ted had predicted: rather than focusing on the absurdity of Goldwater’s attack, rather than noting its lack of substance, the reporting was about the political process and the atmospherics. The story was “Kerry on the Defensive.”
I kept asking myself: If this was all it took in Washington to torpedo debate about a serious issue, how were we ever going to get anything done? The right wing had a narrative and a playbook, and they were effective. We had facts and logic, and those two assets didn’t feed the political beast.
Within a couple of days, the right wing was handed a new talking point, courtesy of Ortega himself, who boarded a plane to Moscow to collect another $200 million from his Soviet sponsors. Ortega’s dance with the Soviets didn’t surprise me that much. He was a Marxist, and the Reagan administration hadn’t been interested in talking with him. But it was another kick in the teeth for Tom Harkin and me. The right wing could argue Ortega had proven that we were naive.
It was clear to me that the Senate was not going to break new ground on the war in Nicaragua. Most Democrats were content opposing a growing role for America in the war, and most Republicans were content doing the opposite. A diplomatic third way wasn’t going to be embraced in Washington. Other countries in the hemisphere were still looking for diplomacy, so I sent my foreign policy staffer, Dick McCall, to meet with Costa Rica’s president, Oscar Arias Sánchez, and advise him on the conversations Tom Harkin and I had shared on our trip. I wound up lending Dick to President Arias to work on the peace process. I suspected that in the right hands—not American or Russian—a peace plan that put hemispheric negotiations at the local level had a real chance for success. Arias was the right person for the job—so much so that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for being the principal force behind a regional peace plan signed by five Central American countries. Meanwhile, Washington was headed for an entirely different drama when it came to the Contras.
• • •
IF MY EXPERIENCE on the receiving end of a Washington partisan attack had chastened me about the limits of Senate collegiality, an unexpected experience renewed my faith that the institution really was special. Orientation for freshman senators teaches you the basics—how to hire a staff, how to manage an office budget, the parliamentary fundamentals—but just as Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy had shown me in the lessons and reflections they shared, the really important rules aren’t written down, nor do the most meaningful locations necessarily show up on a map.
As it turned out, there were two places in the Senate where politics really was put aside: the Senate gym and the private, weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast.
The gym was a place for senators to get away from the phones, the confrontational debates on the floor, the deluge of meetings and fund-raisers. Former senators had privileges at the gym for life, and some who had stayed in Washington after defeat or retirement would still come back, ostensibly to work out but more likely because they missed the camaraderie and sense of purpose. The man who had held my Senate seat before Paul Tsongas, Ed Brooke, was one of them. When we ended up together in the gym, he always asked how I was enjoying the Senate. He was wistful about a career interrupted by defeat in 1978. But by 1985, he was a man without a party and a senator without a seat. The gym was his refuge, much as it was for those still serving. Some senators chatted away an hour each day while restoring flexibility to tired old legs in the Jacuzzi; others went for a massage to stretch out muscles sore from long flights and long days. Some, like Ted Kennedy, who was haunted by a broken back from a 1965 plane crash, depended on those massages just to stand straight, although Teddy never complained. A few hit the showers to wash away hangovers from the night before. Some even exercised.
The weekly prayer breakfast, on the other hand, was a chance to exercise different muscles. At 7:00 a.m. every Wednesday, senators put aside policy and party and gathered in Room S-15 in the Capitol, under the quiet guidance of the Senate chaplain, to reflect on their journeys of faith.
I had grown up with the Latin Mass and the formality of the Catholic Church in the days before Vatican II aimed to create a more personal relationship between Catholics and their God. I spent a lot of time mastering my Latin responses and becoming the fastest reciter of the Our Father (Paternoster) in my class, but no one encouraged us to analyze the Bible. There was no wrestling with doctrinal texts.
So the prayer breakfast was new and different, and I began with a bit of reserve. It certainly wasn’t like anything I had experienced at home. Neither my Protestant mother nor my Catholic father was demonstrative about faith. They were believers, but they shared an abundance of New England restraint—private in their religious views. My mother dutifully accepted that her children would be raised Catholic and made sure we attended catechism class regularly, even as we shuttled between boarding schools. But we never had dinnertime conversations about the Bible, and the churches where I served as an altar boy were formal. No after-hours Bible study awaited adults, just children receiving Sunday school lessons—and I do mean “receiving.” These teachings were always one-way, with no back-and-forth, no examination of our hopes, fears and beliefs.
The Senate Prayer Breakfast gently challenged those traditions. It was focused on Scripture and charged senators with exploring the Bible itself to find meaning. The Senate chaplain was present, but the group was really led by two senators, one Democrat and one Republican, acting as conveners. Each week we would hear from senators or former senators, usually describing how a relationship with God helped them navigate the trials life had thrown their way. It was a view of my new colleagues that defied stereotypes, caricatures and the straitjacket of party labels. It was where I heard the Republican leader, Bob Dole, describe the ways in which his family’s church in Russell, Kansas, rallied around him after he came home from World War II in a full body cast with a withered arm, underscoring the virtue of Christian charity. I heard my classmate Mitch McConnell, 1984’s lone Republican freshman senator, talk about how his Baptist faith helped him overcome childhood polio and how he had come to believe that God had a plan for him. It was where I first heard from senators about missions they’d taken to Africa and Central America to share their faith and serve the poor.
It was, I realize now, the first and only place where I heard Ted Kennedy speak to the way faith had helped him overcome the death of his beloved family members. The world knew Ted as a keeper of Camelot and the champion of liberal ideals. I had gotten to know him as a colleague and a mentor, but until that moment I’d never known him as a quiet devotee of his Catholic faith who had found solace in our religion at his lowest moments.
Those of my generation remembered where we were the day President Kennedy was killed, and we remembered Ted’s eulogy to Bobby in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. Those memories represented indelible tragic tributes to icons lost rather than empathy with the brother who remained. Never had I heard Teddy talk in personal terms about the two brothers stolen from him by assassins’ bullets, or about his eldest brother, Joe, lost in a war, or his beloved sister, Kathleen, who died in a plane crash in her twenties.
Here in the privacy of a quiet room in the Capitol, as the sun came up slowly over Washington, I heard Ted talk about a knock on the door from a Navy chaplain with news that Joe’s plane had exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, and the way his mother poured her pain into the recitation of the Rosary. He talked about finding grace in the teachings of the Church. After that day, I thought differently about the pain Teddy carried with him, the suffering hidden behind that twinkle in his eyes.
For a long time, I felt far from ready to speak up much at the prayer breakfast. I had come to the Senate “in a hurry” in many ways. Whereas Ted Kennedy had waited more than a year to give his first Senate floor speech, just a couple of months into my tenure, I used my maiden speech to address military spending and the MX missile. I approached the prayer breakfast the opposite way. I was immediately fascinated by the Scripture lessons, intellectually engaged, but I wasn’t ready to use the Bible as a vehicle to talk about my own journey. In fact, in a room where many colleagues seemed to have such certainty about their faith, such deep conviction, I began to wrestle privately with nagging doubts that had followed me ever since the Navy.
My faith had experienced highs and lows, times of engagement and times when I pulled back or seemed to let it all go on autopilot. I’d felt deeply connected to the Church as an altar boy and even in high school at St. Paul’s, where through my relationship with Reverend Walker I felt a connection to the values side of religion, to the lessons of living out the Golden Rule.
By the time I went to Vietnam, though, I was the average parishioner, showing up for major days of obligation but going to church when it suited me. In between, especially in college, there had been a lot of Sundays when I slept in after a Saturday night spent chasing a different kind of salvation. The most urgent prayer usually was for God to make my head stop pounding.
I would rise and fall in my zeal—faithful, but not “faith full.” In combat, I wore a St. Christopher medal around my neck and asked God to protect me, but some of that was transactional and superficial. It translated to a plea of “Please, God, get me through this, and I promise I’ll be good.” But it wasn’t long before doubt crept in and I got angry at what I was seeing and doing. All the questions asked a million times by millions of people before came to mind—none brilliant or original, but all earnest, heartfelt and genuine. Some words of chaplains and priests rang hollow, especially when they were applied to the loss of my close friends. How can there be a merciful God who allows this carnage to take place? How does God choose between one child and the other as to who lives or dies or is maimed? Did they not pray enough? Did only the good die young? Were they heathens? Were they godless communists? Did they somehow deserve to die? The questions and the doubts became pointed and personal. I refused to believe that it was God’s will that Dick Pershing never made it home alive from the war to marry or that it was God’s will that Don Droz would never see his infant daughter grow up.
I thought back to my father’s anger over his father’s absence, his sister’s polio and, later, her cancer. I didn’t want to let my bitterness linger the way his had. But still, I was haunted by the killing I’d seen, and the losses I’d experienced had unsettled my own faith. When I came home from Vietnam, I lived with gratitude that every day was extra. I was thankful for surviving, but all the words about God’s will working in strange ways fell on deaf ears for me. Instead, I channeled my energy into service and activism and left much unreconciled about the foundations of my beliefs. I wanted my daughters raised Catholic because I was Catholic; but if they had asked me, I would have struggled to share with them much more than that. I hadn’t found satisfactory resolution to the biggest questions about what my faith really meant beyond the power of the sacraments and the comfort of the rituals.
The prayer breakfast implicitly pushed me to work through those unresolved questions. No one asked me to do it, but the weekly hold on my calendar was a reminder in itself. With Chaplain Halverson’s suggestions and my own memory of Sacred Studies at St. Paul’s, I began to read or reread Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on just and unjust war, and Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris. I started listening more carefully to the personal journeys of different senators and how they might inform my own.
That’s when I met and became friendly with a lay minister named Doug Coe. Doug was an evangelical Christian, not a Catholic, and his work was focused on the life of Jesus. He was a counselor to many of the Senate chaplains, which is how I was introduced to him, and he led the nonpartisan National Prayer Breakfast. Doug was close to sixty years old, and a group he led, the Fellowship, had long brought together policy makers and faith leaders in Washington. Because Doug had little appetite for publicity, some conspiracy theories easily attached themselves to his ministry and to the Cedars, an old mansion in Arlington that the Fellowship maintained for prayer groups and sometimes even off-the-grid diplomacy.
I was struck by Doug’s quiet, thoughtful presence. We shared a common belief that many organized religions spent far too much time and energy chewing over the interpretations of one faith or another, when the real essence of faith was the life and teachings of Jesus. Doug understood that Jesus’s ministry of just three years, culminating with his death on the cross, was the central teaching and meaning of Christianity. He started sending me articles and excerpts from Scripture to supplement what I was reading on my own.
The hardest and highest barrier for me to get over in reconciling my faith with my experiences remained the issue of human suffering. The shorthand about “God’s plan” didn’t sit well with me. If I watched a day of college football and listened to the postgame interviews, I heard again and again that God had a “plan” to help certain quarterbacks win upset victories. By the time the evening news rolled around, was I supposed to believe that God had no plan for kids starving in Ethiopia, children suffering with distended bellies, covered in flies? Or worse, was this God’s will? Sometimes in our rush to have God take sides in trivial things, we miss entirely the places where God might really be seen, or the reasons we might not see Him present at all. In my mind’s eye, I came back again and again to the faces of Persh and Don Droz, and I just refused to see God’s hand in their deaths.
What brought me a certain kind of peace about my faith finally arrived after reading and rereading, underlining entire paragraphs and scribbling notes in the margins of Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, which helps the faithful understand the concept of “salvific suffering.” It spoke to me, reminding me of the words of St. Paul, which I had heard so many times in catechism: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church.” John Paul II was remarkable: the pontiff had stood up to the Soviet Union, embraced children everywhere, survived a would-be assassin’s bullet and forgave the unstable shooter who had caused him so much suffering. In his letter to the faithful, Salvifici Doloris—the meaning of Christian suffering—written just three years after he was shot four times; his words brought clarity to issues that had caused me abundant confusion. Evil in the world was the cause of suffering, not God’s will. Evil was why innocents suffered, why people who desperately wanted children couldn’t have them, why there was illness and famine here on earth. His Holiness pointed to the Old Testament, where Job’s suffering was God’s punishment, and he contrasted that with the New Testament, where God didn’t save his only son from suffering but gave him eternal life to end the suffering, all in return for Jesus overcoming his doubts and putting his faith in the Father.
After multiple readings, it made a certain kind of sense. Something clicked in a way that hadn’t before. God didn’t make us suffer. Evil was what had taken Dick and Don. God hadn’t fired those rocket launchers into pilothouses on the Mekong Delta, and God wasn’t directing Tet when rocket fire stopped twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dick Pershing from searching for a fallen comrade. However, God had been there to bring Dick and Don home, to “deliver them from evil,” to bring their suffering to an end, as He had for His only son, whom He had given to the flesh.
I did pause and ask myself, If my daughters were suffering, could I be so understanding? Could I still imagine that in suffering there is the gift of being closer to Christ, who suffered on that cross? I hoped I’d never be tested in that way.
But at least now I had an intellectual, spiritual course correction: suffering brought us closer to understanding what Jesus himself endured on the cross, how extraordinary it was that even as he was slowly tortured to death, he prayed for his captors. Evil was all around us and it brought suffering, but rather than inflict it, God relieved suffering through eternal life, the mystery of which was the basis of faith itself.
I was ready to speak up at the Senate Prayer Breakfast. I brought my notes of writing and reflection and talked not about my certainty, but about my doubts, and about how I’d drawn closer to an understanding of something unknowable than I’d ever thought possible. I talked about my journey, one more meaningful to me because the path had been anything but straight.
Afterward, Alaska’s sometimes acerbic senator Ted Stevens, a Republican who wore Incredible Hulk neckties as an inside joke about his own volcanic temper, came up to me in the hallway. He’d been in the Senate since 1968, a champion of Arctic drilling, which Paul Tsongas and I had both vehemently opposed. Stevens and I were on different ends of the ideological spectrum. He touched my elbow and told me about his journey. He and his wife, Ann, had five children and lives filled with joy. But just ten years after he came to the Senate, it was all turned upside down. They were in a plane crash, and Ann suffered and died right there next to him. There was nothing he could do. He had spent years asking why God would have done this or let this happen. He told me he wished that someone had shared with him then what I had just talked about at breakfast.
I was speechless.
Ted Stevens, a private, buttoned-down older man who embodied Greatest Generation stoicism, had just opened up in ways I couldn’t have imagined doing with a near stranger. “Thank you,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder again and disappearing down the hall.
It was one of those moments I never would have predicted when I came to the Senate, or when I reluctantly came to my first prayer breakfast, but it was a lesson about life that stuck: to find the truth in people, sometimes you had to open up to the truth inside yourself. I never looked at Ted Stevens in the same way after that day. No matter which side of a debate we’d be on—and frequently it was the opposite side—because of the common ground we’d found together that morning, Ted was no longer just one of the Republican senators. He was a friend. My eyes saw a human being who loved and suffered, searched for meaning and was willing to share it. That’s a gift the Senate made possible, the gift of an unlikely moment with an unlikely friend.
I was beginning to feel more comfortable with my personal exploration of faith. But I was still wrestling. I was still looking for rational, linear answers to all my questions, questions asked for centuries. It was one thing for the actions of people to be cast as the struggle between good and evil. But where was God’s hand in a tsunami in Japan or a volcanic eruption in Hawaii? How could those horrors occur if a benevolent God was both omniscient and omnipotent? It was a debate between my mind and my heart—and everything in between. I kept looking for the rational exposé of truth when this truth wasn’t rational at all. That’s why we call it “a leap of faith.”
A couple of years later, I awoke from a vivid dream. It wasn’t like the nightmares that could still awaken me back then—my heart pounding, adrenaline coursing through my body, back on the rivers of the Mekong Delta. It was the opposite of that. I awoke feeling profound emotion and calm.
In the dream, I was walking in the mountains with a priest, listening to him. I knew him well, although I couldn’t figure out exactly who he was. He told me he was going to die. He had terminal cancer and only months to live, so he was putting his affairs in order.
I was completely undone. I couldn’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to this friend, and I couldn’t see the justice in this young man of God dying when he had so much to share with all of us, when he had given his life to God already. Where was the righteousness or common sense in that? I said to him, “How can God do this when you have so much more to give to all of us, to share and teach? This is so unfair.”
With amazing grace, and a calm acceptance in his voice, he turned to me and reassuringly said, “No, that is not the way to understand this. By accepting God’s design for me, by using this moment to share with you and my friends the faith I have in Him, I am teaching you and leaving you far more than I could in any other way. I accept this because I believe, and believing is my strength.”
“It’s hard to have faith in God when God is taking you from us,” I said.
“No, it’s precisely why you should have faith. My suffering opens the door for me to understand God’s will and share in the suffering of others, which is the greatest manifestation of love there is. This moment between us could not happen without my dying. That is His gift and, through me, my gift to you. Faith!”
From that moment forward I was clear: Faith is putting yourself totally into God’s hands without waiting for evidence sufficient to convince you. Faith is believing not because of a completely rational line of thought, or presuming to know God’s will in this life, but because your heart and your whole self—your being—is comfortable and contented believing. That revelation forever changed my relationship with my faith.
So many books have been written about why God would allow so much evil in a world He had total control over. None of them provides a completely convincing answer. The only answer in the end is faith.
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I STARTED TO find my footing in the Senate working in the areas where Ted Kennedy’s presence was less outsized, places where a good idea and patience—rather than seniority—might make the difference. Foreign policy was a logical place to start, and it mattered to me. My father sparked my interest in foreign policy, and his life in the Foreign Service had been my first window into a world shaped largely by the United States. Now that I was in the Senate, Pa still loomed large—including by occasionally sending faxes to my office, written in all caps, warning of the tendency of some policy makers to see the world almost entirely through the lens of our own policies and our own interests, casting aside the history of other peoples. Pa’s instruction that you had to study the other side if you were going to make good foreign policy had an impact on me. Inside the Senate, I was from a generation in a hurry, a generation disinclined to wait on protocol and tradition before speaking up, but overseas I wanted to listen and learn before I jumped to conclusions. As in so many chapters of my life, another branch of my family history had a funny way of colliding with the present. My grandfather’s cousin William Cameron Forbes had served a tour of duty as a diplomat. President Teddy Roosevelt had sent him to serve in the Philippines before he was even thirty-five. President Taft appointed him governor-general of the colony, and years later another Republican president—Harding—sent him back to the Philippines to help the United States decide whether the time had come for independence. When Cousin Cam, as we called him, first boarded a steamer for Asia, not long after the United States was handed the Philippines among the spoils of the Spanish-American War, I’m sure he couldn’t have imagined a more exciting destination than Manila.
When I met Cousin Cam as a kid, he was getting on in years, and struck this young kid as a little serious and formal. I was impressed that he had traveled the world and lived in the Philippines. But what I most remember was a photo of him—much younger, but only slightly less bald—alongside Teddy Roosevelt, with TR’s unmistakable bushy mustache much more memorable than my cousin. I was captivated by his tokens and trophies of service in a far-away place: he’d come home from the Philippines with a seemingly endless supply of beautiful mahogany wood baskets and cabinets, mottled, beeswing, and curly. Some found their way into the homes of family. We grew up with these exotic artifacts, and I would say to myself, “Wow, what an amazing place that must be. I want to go there someday.”
Cousin Cam died just shy of ninety and just a couple of weeks after I turned sixteen. He was a sepia-colored memory by the time it was my turn to go to Asia eight years later.
I wish I’d been old enough to ask Cousin Cam about that history back when I had the chance. Although his views weren’t as retrograde as the imperial-minded senators of his day, like Albert Beveridge, who saw the Filipinos as a lesser people permanently incapable of self-government, or President Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Elihu Root, who described them as “children,” Cousin Cam had helped cement these paternalistic attitudes. In 1921, the commission Warren Harding appointed him to lead determined the people of the Philippines were not ready for what they’d fought for against the Spanish and what they demanded under the United States: a democracy to call their own.
Sixty years later, not enough had changed. President Truman finally granted the island its independence on the auspicious date of July 4, 1946. But the Filipino people were hardly living out the benefits of democracy or freedom. President Ferdinand Marcos was a brutal but reliable Cold War ally—a strongman who had run the country for twenty years before I showed up in the Senate. Most of that time Marcos ruled under martial law. As was the case with Suharto in Indonesia and the revolving door of governments in South Vietnam, we tolerated a long litany of abuses that violated our ideals and hurt our credibility. Marcos was a central-casting tinhorn strongman. Incredible amounts of money, much of it siphoned off from American aid, lined his pockets while the country suffered in poverty. He was constantly held up by the human rights community as an exemplar of thugs wrongly supported in the name of Cold War realpolitik.
I doubt the human rights activists in Massachusetts had ever heard of my distant cousin Cameron. They just knew me as their new senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, and figured I might be sympathetic about the betrayal of American ideals under Marcos. Cory Aquino, the opposition leader in the Philippines whose husband, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, had been assassinated by Marcos for speaking out, had spent years living in exile in Newton, Massachusetts, so there was a beachhead of anti-Marcos activism back home. I was horrified by the photos the activists shared with me of dead bodies stacked like cordwood, victims of torture in Marcos’s police state, and stories of a free press silenced from reporting on a regime enriching itself while children suffered from malnutrition. The flashbacks to the South Vietnamese government were unmistakable: Marcos seemed at best like a cagier, savvier version of Ngo Dinh Diem. How could we export and encourage democracy around the world and urge it as an alternative to the Soviets when we looked the other way in a place like the Philippines?
I decided that my first trip to Asia as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee would be to the Philippines, to determine whether Marcos would change his behavior if he at least knew that Congress was watching.
I was determined to approach the trip armed with facts and with an open, if skeptical, mind. I didn’t want to rely merely on the reports from the human rights community. I wanted State Department briefings, intel community briefings, and even though I had been critical of Reagan policy in my campaign, Secretary of State George Shultz was always responsive to the Senate. He arranged a long phone call for me with our ambassador to Manila, Steve Bosworth. Bosworth was a terrific briefer. I asked him rapid-fire questions, and he pulled no punches. Was Marcos as brutal as the human rights community described? The answer was, more or less, yes. Was Marcos as corrupt as rumored? Certainly he lived a lifestyle beyond any other explanation, but, no, the administration didn’t have a smoking gun, and over the years there were arrangements with the CIA that had feathered Marcos’s nest. He warned me that I might want to be careful going down that rabbit hole. How would Marcos defend his hesitancy to hold elections? He’d describe all the opposition as communist revolutionaries doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. Were they communist? For the most part, no. Were they pro-American? For the most part, yes.
It would take about twenty hours to fly from Dulles International Airport to Manila. I couldn’t help but think of the incongruity of leaving an airport named after John Foster Dulles, father of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization that hardened Cold War alliances in the region, even if it meant looking the other way on democracy. Dulles, along with his brother, Allen, who was CIA director in that same era, had reversed the revolution in Iran and reinstalled the shah and toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala. And here I was: forty-two, having been part of the tip of the spear in the failed extension of that philosophy in Vietnam, now an elected senator off to the Philippines to tangle with exactly the kind of autocrat whom Dulles would have found quite useful. History is funny that way: I was taking my trip by air, but it was Cousin Cam who had taken the trip by ship and who would have likely found a soul mate in Dulles, though I know his conscience would have never tolerated Marcos.
I landed at Manila International Airport, the location where Ninoy Aquino had been assassinated less than three years before upon his return from exile. Dictators love to mark their territory with an exclamation point. Now, every visiting dignitary taking the ride to the Malacañang Palace would begin that transit disembarking from the place where Marcos had dispatched his leading political opponent once and for all.
Ambassador Bosworth greeted me at the gate. We rode together in an embassy car to my visit with Marcos, whose office had already informed the embassy he was running an hour late—a tactic I’ve since learned is somewhat comically relied on by autocrats around the world to shape the power dynamic. They love to stick it to you in little ways, like keeping you waiting, to remind you who is holding the cards in the relationship. We made our way down Lacson Avenue while Bosworth told me about its history. The road used to be called Governor Forbes Street.
If the onetime name of the road weren’t enough to evoke family history, the site of my meeting with President Marcos would have done it. Adobe on the outside, narra wood floor throughout on the inside, mahogany paneling everywhere—Cousin Cameron’s ghost could well have sauntered through the halls of the presidential palace.
As prepared as I was for the meeting, Marcos had hosted enough American delegations over the years to know what lines of argument would be effective. He complimented my family history in the Philippines, our friendship to his country dating back nearly a century, and expounded on the importance of the relationship with the United States, our close collaboration in the fight against communism. I looked down at my watch: Marcos had opened with a nearly forty-minute-long discourse on the progress the country was making and the importance of the Subic Bay Naval Base, which stood, he argued, as a symbol that Southeast Asia remained a bright beacon of hope against communism. Marcos even invoked his own service in World War II, fighting alongside the Americans—something Ambassador Bosworth would later tell me was fiction. It dawned on me: Why litigate a list of complaints that Marcos would deny when, instead, I could play to his false sense of strength?
Marcos was arguing that he alone reflected the will of the Filipino people. He said some in the population were like “children,” uneducated and easily transfixed by communist sympathizers like the Aquinos, but that in the end he—Marcos—was the real father of the country. I stressed that it would help the United States in the Cold War if he demonstrated progress on democracy. If he was so popular, couldn’t he embrace elections by a specific date? Marcos was condescending. He said he had nothing to fear from elections but that he knew his country best. He would never lecture me about Massachusetts, he intoned, so why should I suggest I knew what was best for Manila? I suspect he believed that if he outtalked me, I’d simply give up.
He was wrong.
After five hours alone with Ferdinand Marcos in the Malacañang Palace, I was convinced that the United States needed to change its policy toward the Philippines. So, on the long flight back to Washington, it wasn’t Cousin Cam on my mind, but Senator Robert C. Byrd. I remembered our conversation more than a year before: have an idea, be an expert, work your colleagues, work the process, and find your opening. That’s exactly what I set out to do.
I went to see Claiborne Pell, who was now chairman on the Foreign Relations Committee, and the senior Republican on the panel, Indiana’s Richard Lugar. I then met with the assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs at the State Department. I spoke to some of my fellow concerned senators who were on the Appropriations Committee, not just Robert Byrd but Vermont’s Pat Leahy, who believed that in the name of Cold War realism, we had too often ignored American values. I reported to them that President Reagan’s own ambassador didn’t dispute Marcos’s corruption. Word about my activities quickly reached the Marcos lobbyists, who were paid handsome retainers from stolen funds. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone regularly trotted out a gold-plated playbook on the Hill: Marcos was our resolute ally who must not be abandoned in the fight against the communists. But this time, the lobbyists were too late. I had done my homework and worked the process. The result was victory: the first amendment I ever passed as a freshman senator conditioned American foreign aid to the Philippines on free elections.
In Manila, Marcos figured he was going to show this young whippersnapper who was boss. He called a snap election in order to relegitimize himself, obviously believing that he would be reelected. Because I’d been so active on the issue, President Reagan had no choice but to put me on the official election-monitoring delegation from the United States, paired with Dick Lugar, who had kindly been my partner on the amendment. I will never forget arriving in Manila and seeing this unbelievable flood of people in the streets all decked out in their canary-yellow shirts and carrying banners of pro-democracy protest. Some of us knew at that time there were allegations of fraud. Initially, I was sent down to the southernmost island of Mindanao to observe the morning votes and then came back to Manila. I was sitting in the hotel there when a woman came up to me crying and said, “Senator, you must come with me to the cathedral. There are women there who fear for their lives. They have asked for you.” Thirteen courageous women had walked out of the computer center where votes were being tabulated and taken refuge in a church. I met with them at the cathedral, and they told the story of how they were putting into the computers legitimate and correct vote counts that gave Cory Aquino the victory, but coming out on the tote board were completely fictitious numbers showing votes for Marcos. These women blew the whistle on the dictator.
I knew the best way to protect these women and the results was for them to tell this story publicly as soon as possible. I gathered our team and the international media at the cathedral. The women stood by the altar, the klieg lights giving them the soft glow of a halo, and one by one they told the world that Marcos was cheating. Their courage and the courage of the Filipino people lit a spark that traveled around the world. It was hard to believe that just months after my insulting meeting with a smug Marcos, the very people in his own country, those he had sneered at and compared to children, had exposed the fraudulent election.
Marcos wouldn’t concede, but the handwriting was on the wall. Senator Lugar and I joined the rest of the election-monitoring delegation back in Washington for a meeting at the White House. Secretary Shultz presided, and soon White House chief of staff James Baker entered the room to announce that President Reagan himself would be joining us. It was a “pinch yourself” moment. Reagan, his hair ever dark brown even into his seventies, came in and sat down. He insisted that his administration stood on the side of freedom, even if he wasn’t crystal clear which side that was. He said they were deeply concerned about the election irregularities. A few minutes later, he slid a note to James Baker that read, in his elegant handwriting, “Can I leave now?”
Reagan was a savvy reader of international opinion. He had a natural flair for drama. Baker was a natural diplomatic poker player. The administration was not going to be dragged down with Marcos now that he’d been exposed as a fraud. Reagan sent his friend Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila to deliver the message to Marcos, who was quickly gone, living in exile in Hawaii. God only knows how much gold bullion and cash he had accumulated for his exile.
I was gratified and energized. Perhaps for the first time since I’d come to the Senate, I felt like I’d made a difference by taking what I knew (foreign policy) and the best of what I was learning (process, people and protocol) to set something in motion. More than that, I felt as if I had tapped into a synergy bigger than any one senator: when you can use the Senate to send a message, when you can point the United States toward its true north and when our values align with people who actually share them all over the world, you can make something happen. Just three years after her husband had died fighting for democracy, Cory Aquino defied the odds and rose to the presidency atop a wave of people. William Cameron Forbes could only have wished for such a development, and Robert C. Byrd didn’t have it in mind when he gave me a recipe for action, a PAC check and some great lessons about the Senate, but finally I was finding my way.