Whenever I travel to a country for the first time, I try to visit the highest court in the land. They are monuments of a certain kind, built not just to house a courtroom but to convey a message. In New Delhi, for example, the Supreme Court of India is designed to symbolize the balancing scales of justice. In Jerusalem, Israel’s iconic Supreme Court building combines straight lines—which represent the immutable nature of the law—with curved walls and glass that represent the fluid nature of justice. These are buildings that speak.
The same can be said of the United States Supreme Court Building, which, to my mind, is the most beautiful of them all. Its architecture harks back to the earliest days of democracy, as though you are standing in front of a modern-day Parthenon. It is grand and commanding while also dignified and restrained. As you walk up the steps toward an extraordinary portico of Corinthian columns, you can see a nation’s founding aspirations in its architecture. It is there that the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW are engraved in stone. And it was that promise that brought me to the Supreme Court Building on March 26, 2013.
When I arrived, the building was admittedly not looking its finest. It was encased in scaffolding, part of an overdue repair effort after a large chunk of marble broke off and fell to the ground. To minimize the unsightly view, a life-size, high-resolution photograph of the facade had been printed on a scrim and draped across the entrance. It was about as realistic as one of those oversize beach T-shirts with a bikini body printed on the front. Even so, the majesty of the building was unmistakable.
I was escorted to my seat in the courtroom. Because the Supreme Court justices don’t allow photography or video inside, this is a place that most of the country never sees. I certainly hadn’t before that day. I gazed around in awe: the stunning pink marble; the vivid red draping and intricate ceiling; the imposing bench with its nine empty chairs. I kept thinking about all the history that had been made inside these walls. But unlike a museum or a place like Gettysburg, where history is preserved for posterity, the Supreme Court is a place where history is active and alive, where it continues to unfold with every decision.
A little after 10 a.m., we rose as the nine justices entered the courtroom and took their seats.
“We’ll hear argument this morning in Case 12-144, Hollingsworth v. Perry,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.
This was the case against Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that passed in 2008, prohibiting marriages for same-sex couples in the state. It had been a long time coming.
California may have a reputation as a bastion of liberalism, but in the year 2000, California voters approved a ballot initiative—Prop 22 (also known as the Knight Initiative, after its author, state senator William “Pete” Knight)—that required the state to define marriage as a union between people of the opposite sex. For years we fought it—in the streets, at the ballot box, and in the courts. Even my then school-aged niece, Meena, got in on the action; I remember one time going to pick her up at her high school and being told she was in a student meeting. When I got to the classroom, young Meena was in front, rallying her peers: “This isn’t a Knight Initiative—it’s a nightmare!”
During Valentine’s Day week in 2004, then–San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom decided to allow marriages for same-sex couples to proceed anyway.
I was on my way to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles, but I decided to pass by San Francisco City Hall before I left. There were throngs of people lined up around the block, waiting to get in. They were counting down the minutes before a government would finally recognize their right to marry whomever they loved. The joy and anticipation were palpable. Some of them had been waiting decades.
I got out of my car and walked up the steps of City Hall, where I bumped into a city official. “Kamala, come and help us,” she said, a glowing smile on her face. “We need more people to perform the marriages.” I was delighted to be a part of it.
I was quickly sworn in, along with numerous city officials. We stood together performing marriages in the hallway, crowded into every nook and cranny of City Hall. There was all this wonderful excitement building as we welcomed the throngs of loving couples, one by one, to be married then and there. It was unlike anything I had ever been a part of before. And it was beautiful.
But not long after, the marriages were invalidated. The couples who had been so happy and hopeful received letters telling them that their marriage licenses would not be recognized under the law. It was, for each and every one of them, a devastating setback.
In May 2008, the California Supreme Court came to the rescue. The court held that the same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, which paved the way for LGBTQ couples to realize the equal dignity they had always deserved. Ronald George, who had sworn me in as district attorney of San Francisco, wrote the majority opinion. And over the next six months, eighteen thousand same-sex couples exchanged wedding vows in California.
But in November 2008, on the same night that Barack Obama was elected president, the people of California narrowly voted to pass Prop 8, an amendment to the California Constitution that stripped same-sex couples of their right to marry. Because this was a constitutional amendment, it couldn’t be overturned by the legislature or the state court system. No new marriages could be performed. Couples who had already been married were placed in a cruel limbo.
There was one clear route left to justice: the federal courts. The American Foundation for Equal Rights, then led by Chad Griffin, decided that the best way to respond was to bring suit against the state of California, arguing that Prop 8 violated the protections granted to every citizen in the Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection and due process under the law. This was a matter of civil rights and civil justice, and Griffin and his team planned to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The organization hired the lawyers who had argued against each other in Bush v. Gore, then filed a lawsuit on behalf of two same-sex couples—Kris Perry and Sandy Stier; Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo—whose job was to represent in court the millions of people just like them, people who simply wanted to be accorded the human dignity of marrying the person they loved.
It would take eight months for the lawsuit to make its way to the first stage of the fight: the U.S. federal district court. Inside that courtroom, a judge would hear from witnesses, review evidence, and, based on the facts before him, decide whether Prop 8 had violated the civil rights of Kris, Sandy, Jeff, and Paul. On August 4, 2010, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled in their favor, concluding that Prop 8 was indeed unconstitutional and affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry. It was fantastic and important news. But, as is common practice, the judge decided he was going to wait to enforce the ruling until it was appealed to a higher court—a legal concept known as a stay.
I was in the middle of my race for attorney general when the ruling came down, and it quickly became a central issue in the campaign. The California attorney general had the right to appeal the decision. Jerry Brown, whom I was running to succeed, had refused to defend the measure in court. I, too, made clear that I had no intention of spending a penny of the attorney general’s office’s resources defending Prop 8. My opponent took the other view—a sharp distinction between us. I understood that it wasn’t just about principle; it was about practical outcomes. If California refused to appeal the ruling, the lower court judge could lift the stay and the state could start issuing marriage licenses again right away. If California did appeal the ruling, on the other hand, it would take years before marriages could begin.
When I won the election, my refusal to appeal the decision should have been the end of it. But proponents of Prop 8 were unwilling to give up the fight. In an unusual move, they joined together to appeal the ruling themselves. In my view, they had no basis for doing so. Your right to free speech doesn’t give you the right to intervene in a court proceeding. You don’t get to be a party in a lawsuit simply because you have strong feelings about something. In order to bring a case in court, you are required to have standing, which means, among other things, that you have suffered or might suffer an actual injury. (In more colloquial terms, I think of it as my New Jersey–raised husband might explain it: you have to be able to provide a concrete answer to the question “Whatsittoya?”)
Kris Perry had standing to sue the state when Prop 8 passed because it injured her; it stripped her of a civil right. We had a law on the books that treated one group of Americans differently from all other Americans, and fundamentally that was unfair. But when Prop 8 was invalidated in federal court, that decision gave protections to one group without taking away anything from anyone. The constitutional principle was clear. Those people who wanted to deny same-sex couples the benefits of equal protection and due process under the U.S. Constitution could not do so simply because they didn’t like the notion. They would always have their freedom of expression. But they did not have the power to deny other Americans their fundamental rights.
And yet the appeal proceeded. The ruling stayed on hold. It would take more than a year before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision. Each day of delay represented justice denied—and much, much more. Each day of delay was a day a devoted couple couldn’t consecrate their commitment. Each day of delay was a day a grandmother passed away before the wedding she would have loved to see. Each day of delay was a day a child was left wondering “Why can’t my parents get married, too?”
There was much to applaud in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. A three-judge panel affirmed the lower court’s decision that Prop 8 had deprived same-sex couples of their civil rights in California. But the court didn’t take issue with the Prop 8 proponents’ right to appeal. Instead, the court issued a stay in its ruling and allowed them to appeal once again—this time to the Supreme Court.
As I sat listening to the oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices homed in on the issue of standing. Justice Stephen Breyer questioned whether the Prop 8 proponents were “no more than a group of five people who feel really strongly.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know how the lower court’s ruling had caused the proponents an injury “separate from that of every other taxpayer to have laws enforced.” But when the arguments were over, there was really no way to tell what the decision would be.
As I left the Supreme Court, there were hundreds of people gathered, waving rainbow flags, holding signs, waiting anxiously for justice. It made me smile. They were why I had become a lawyer in the first place. It was in the courtroom, I believed, that you could translate that passion into action and precedent and law.
I looked out at their faces and imagined all the people who had stood in the same place for similar reasons: black parents with their children, fighting against segregation in schools; young women marching and shouting, holding signs that said KEEP ABORTION LEGAL; civil rights activists demonstrating against poll taxes and literacy tests and laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
In everyday life, they might have seemed like they had nothing in common. But on these steps, they shared something profound: in one form or another, they had faced treatment “directly subversive of the principle of equality,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren had once put it. And in one way or another, they believed the Constitution could set them free. They revered that document, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “not because it is old but because it is ever new, not in the worship of its past alone but in the faith of the living who keep it young, now and in the years to come.” So they marched. And they fought. And they waited.
I knew that nothing was certain. The Supreme Court had made some terrible decisions in its past. In 1889, it upheld a law—still not overturned—that specifically excluded Chinese people from immigrating to America. In 1896, it held that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution. In 1944, it held that there was nothing unconstitutional about the forced internment of Japanese Americans. In 1986, it held that gay relationships could be criminalized. In 2010, it ushered in an era of dark money in politics with its ruling in Citizens United. And on the day before we would hear the ruling in our case, the Court’s conservative justices invalidated—and gutted—a critical part of the Voting Rights Act. Nothing was certain.
But on the morning of June 26, 2013, we received wonderful news. The Supreme Court agreed that Prop 8 proponents had no standing to appeal, and dismissed the case in a 5–4 decision. That meant the lower court ruling would stand. And that meant marriage equality was the law again in California—finally.
I was in my Los Angeles office when the word came through. A spontaneous celebration broke out, with whoops and applause ricocheting through the hallways. After so many years of struggle and setback, love had finally conquered all.
I gathered my team to discuss a plan of action. I wanted the marriages to begin right away. But that couldn’t happen until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted its stay, and the appellate court said it would take weeks to do so. This was unacceptable to me.
As I headed to a press conference to discuss the victory, my staff cautioned against challenging the court to act. There was decorum around these things, and my publicly weighing in might offend. But this was no time for decorum. Our fellow Americans had been waiting far too long. And so I leaned into the microphone and called on the Ninth Circuit to lift the stay as quickly as possible.
Two days later, I was in my San Francisco office with my team for a Friday afternoon strategy meeting, where we were discussing transnational criminal organizations ranging from drug smugglers to human and weapons traffickers. We were deep in conversation about a recently opened investigation when my assistant Cortney Bright came in and passed me a note. “The Ninth Circuit made a decision.” I read the note to the team, and we lost all ability to focus on the work at hand. We needed to know the answer.
A short while later, Cortney was back. The Ninth Circuit had lifted the stay. The state could begin issuing marriage licenses right away. We erupted in cheers.
My phone rang, and it was Chad Griffin. He was with Kris Perry and Sandy Stier.
“Kamala, we’re coming to San Francisco. Sandy and Kris are going to be the first marriage, and we want you to perform the ceremony.”
“Of course! I would love to!” I told Chad. “Nothing would make me more proud.”
Normally, I had to travel by official car, but this time I insisted that we walk. As my team and I made our way to City Hall, I recalled the famous image of Thurgood Marshall striding purposefully with Autherine Lucy, who had been denied admission to the University of Alabama, one of the first tests of integration. Though we were the only ones in the street this time, it felt like we were leading our part of a parade—one that stretched through generations. We were following in the footsteps of giants, and widening the trail for our time.
When we reached City Hall, we made our way to the clerk’s office, where a crowd was already gathering in the hallway. Kris and Sandy arrived soon after, beaming and ready to go.
“Congratulations!” I exclaimed as I hugged them both. They had been through so much, for so long. We were laughing and chatting when a reporter and a cameraman came over to ask me a question. He’d heard there might be an appeal and wanted to know what I thought about it.
I just looked at him and smiled. “Wedding bells are about to ring!”
Meanwhile, news started to spread, and people started coming to City Hall by the hundreds. Some to celebrate. Some to get married. Some just to bear witness. We could hear the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, their voices soaring in the rotunda. As we filed into that confined space together, everyone experiencing pure joy, the feeling was magical.
We were preparing for the ceremony when somebody pulled me aside to say that the clerk in Los Angeles was refusing to issue marriage licenses until he heard from the state. He clearly needed direction. It was as simple as passing me the phone.
“This is Kamala Harris,” I said. “You must start the marriages immediately.”
“All right!” he responded, sounding relieved. “I will take that as our notice and we will issue the licenses now.”
I thanked him. “And enjoy it!” I added. “It’s going to be fun.”
A short time later, I took my spot on the balcony and watched Kris and Sandy, followed by their loved ones and friends, walk up the stairs of City Hall. They made an elegant pair, in matching beige and white. Sandy was holding a bouquet of white roses. Two days earlier, they had become living symbols of justice. Now, as they took their final steps toward me—through the same building in which Harvey Milk had lived and died defending the dignity of all people—I could feel history being made.
“Today we witness not only the joining of Kris and Sandy, but the realization of their dream—marriage. . . . By joining the case against Proposition 8, they represented thousands of couples like themselves in the fight for marriage equality. Through the ups and downs, the struggles and the triumphs, they came out victorious.”
Kris and Sandy exchanged their vows, and their son, Elliott, handed over the rings. I had the honor and privilege to say, “By virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the state of California, I now declare you spouses for life.”
There were hundreds of weddings that day, all across the state, each one of them an expression of love and justice and hope. San Francisco City Hall was lit in the colors of the rainbow—a beautiful tribute to the beautiful words “I do!”
When I got home that evening, I had a chance to reflect on the day. My thoughts turned to a man I wished could have been there to see it. Jim Rivaldo was a San Francisco political strategist, one of the co-founders of The National Lampoon, and a leading member of the gay community who had been a key player in getting Harvey Milk elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was truly brilliant, and when I first ran for district attorney, he was one of my most important advisers. My family and I loved him, especially my mother. In the years after my first election, we would see him often. He spent Thanksgiving with us the year before he died, in 2007. My mother cared for him at his bedside, trying to keep him comfortable in his final days.
I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to share the moment with him. But even in his absence, I knew exactly what he would have said: We’re not done yet.
It would take another two years before the Supreme Court recognized marriage equality in all fifty states. And today, it is still the case under federal law that an employer can fire an employee if they identify as LGBTQ. It is still the case, in statehouses across the country, that transgender rights are getting trampled. This is still very much an active civil rights battle.
What happened with Prop 8 was an important part of a longer journey, one that began before America was its own nation and one that will continue for decades to come. It is the story of people fighting for their humanity—for the simple idea that we should all be equal and free. It is the story of people fighting for the promise made to all future generations at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: that no government has the right to rob us of our life or our liberty or our humble pursuit of happiness.
In the years to come, what matters most is that we see ourselves in one another’s struggles. Whether we are fighting for transgender rights or for an end to racial bias, whether we are fighting against housing discrimination or insidious immigration laws, no matter who we are or how we look or how little it may seem we have in common, the truth is, in the battle for civil rights and economic justice, we are all the same. In the words of the great Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, “We are all one, and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”
A few months after Kris and Sandy got married, I was on my way to an event at a nonprofit organization called the California Endowment, run by my friend Robert K. Ross, a health philanthropist. The endowment is headquartered in a beautiful, modern space, and during my time as attorney general, we often used it to hold big events. On this particular day, the topic for discussion was one few might have expected to be on an attorney general’s agenda. I was there to talk about elementary school truancy, and to initiate a discussion about solutions.
When I first started as attorney general, I told my executive team that I wanted to make elementary school truancy a top priority for my office. Those who didn’t know me must have thought I was joking. Why would the state’s top law enforcement official want to focus on whether seven-year-olds are going to school or not? But those who had been with me for a while knew I wasn’t messing around. Indeed, instituting a statewide plan on truancy was part of the reason I’d run for the office in the first place.
When I was district attorney, much of the work I had done in crime prevention focused on interventions later in life. Back on Track, for example, was all about helping young adults avoid prison time and the consequences that flow from a felony conviction. But I was equally concerned about early interventions, about the kinds of steps we could take as a community—and a country—to keep children safe and on track to begin with. I wanted to identify key moments in a child’s life when my office could make a difference.
It was during that process that I started connecting a series of research-related dots. The first dot concerned the importance of third-grade reading proficiency. Studies show that the end of third grade is a critical milestone for students. Up until that point, the curriculum focuses on teaching students to learn to read. In fourth grade, there’s a shift, and students transition to reading in order to learn. If students can’t read, they can’t learn, and they fall further behind, month after month and year after year—which forces them onto a nearly inescapable path to poverty. The door of opportunity closes on them when they’re barely four feet tall. I believe it is tantamount to a crime when a child goes without an education.
At the same time, I was focused on a rash of homicides in the city and county of San Francisco. It was an issue for leaders across the area, in and out of government, so there was a lot of activity and concern about what we should do to address it. When we studied the data, we learned that more than 80 percent of prisoners were high school dropouts.
I went to see the school district superintendent, a wonderful woman named Arlene Ackerman, to ask her about the high school dropout rate. She told me that a significant percentage of their habitually truant high school students had missed their elementary school classes, too—for weeks, even months at a time. That, to me, was a call to action. The connections were so clear. You could map the path for children who started drifting away from the classroom when they were young. The truant child became the wanderer . . . who became the target for gang recruiters . . . who became the young drug courier . . . who became the perpetrator—or the victim—of violence. If we didn’t see that child in elementary school, where they belonged, chances were we’d see them later in prison, in the hospital, or dead.
Some of my political advisers worried that tackling truancy would not be a popular issue. Even today, others don’t appreciate the intention behind my approach; they assume that my motivation was to lock up parents, when of course that was never the goal. Our effort was designed to connect parents to resources that could help them get their kids back into school, where they belonged. We were trying to support parents, not punish them—and in the vast majority of cases, we succeeded.
Still, I was willing to be the bad guy if it meant highlighting an issue that otherwise would have received too little attention. Political capital doesn’t gain interest. You have to spend it to make a difference.
My office joined with the city and the school district, and we developed a truancy initiative. I’m proud to say that by 2009, we had reduced truancy among San Francisco’s elementary school children by 23 percent.
As we dug into the issue, what we found was quite different from what a number of my colleagues expected. Stereotypes held that a child becomes a chronically truant student because his or her parents don’t care about the child’s future. But the truth is different. The truth is that the vast majority of parents have a natural desire to parent their children well. They want to be good fathers and mothers. They just may not have the skills or the resources they need.
Imagine a single parent, working two minimum-wage shift jobs, six days a week, and still trapped below the poverty line. She gets paid hourly, with no vacation or sick leave. If her three-year-old daughter runs a fever, she can’t bring her to the day care she took a second job to pay for. There’s no money for a babysitter, but if she stays home, she’s not going to be able to afford diapers for the rest of the month. It’s already been hard enough saving money to buy new shoes for her eleven-year-old son, whose feet seem to grow a whole size every few months.
What amounts to a headache for those with means takes the form of desperation for those without. If a parent in that situation asks her son to stay home from school for a day in order to take care of his little sister, we can’t accuse her of loving her children any less. This is a matter of circumstance and condition, not of character. She wants to be the best parent she can.
The goal of our truancy prevention initiative was to step in and provide support. We wanted the schools to reach out to parents with information: not only about the links between high truancy, illiteracy, and high crime, but, importantly, about resources they might not have been aware of—support the city and school district offered to make it easier to get their kids to school.
When we were first putting the initiative together, the draft guidance to the school districts told them to notify the parent with whom the child lived in case there was a truancy issue. This was usually the mother.
“Wait a minute,” I asked. “What about the father?”
“Well, in a lot of these cases,” one of my staffers explained, “the kids don’t live with the father and the father isn’t paying child support.”
“So what?” I replied. “He may not be paying child support. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want his child to go to school every day.” And sure enough, in one of these cases, a young man found out that his daughter wasn’t going to school every day and ended up changing his schedule to take her there each morning. He even started volunteering in her classroom.
When I became attorney general, I wanted to use the power of my office to expose the truancy crisis across the state. I knew the cameras would show up for a lot of what I did, and I wanted to shine a spotlight on this issue and appeal to people’s self-interest. Like it or not, most people prioritize their own safety over the education of someone else’s child. I wanted to make them see that if we didn’t prioritize education now, it would be a public safety matter later.
Our first report, the results of which I was announcing that day at the California Endowment, estimated that we had approximately a million truant elementary school kids across the state. And in too many schools, nearly everyone was truant: one school had a truancy rate higher than 92 percent.
And so as I took the stage, what might have seemed like a tangential topic for the state’s attorney general became the heart of impassioned remarks, in which I called on educators and policy makers, inside the room and beyond it, to step up and acknowledge the severity of the crisis.
While I was speaking, I noticed that two of my staffers were whispering to each other while pointing to a man in the audience. I couldn’t hear them, but I knew exactly what they were saying: “Who’s that guy? Is that him?” And I knew they were saying it because that guy was Doug.
Six months earlier, I hadn’t known who that guy Doug was, either. I just knew that my best friend, Chrisette, was blowing up my phone. I was in the middle of a meeting, and my phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. I ignored her call the first several times, but then I started to get worried. Her children are my godchildren. Had something happened?
I stepped out and called her.
“What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, everything is great. You’re going on a date,” she said.
“I am?”
“You are,” she replied with total certainty. “I just met this guy. He’s cute and he’s the managing partner of his law firm and I think you’re going to really like him. He’s based in Los Angeles, but you’re always here for work anyway.”
Chrisette is like a sister to me, and I knew there was no use in arguing with her.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“His name is Doug Emhoff, but promise me you won’t Google him. Don’t overthink it. Just meet him. I already gave him your number. He’s going to reach out.”
Part of me groaned, but at the same time, I appreciated Chrisette’s take-charge approach. She was one of the only people to whom I could talk candidly about my personal life. As a single, professional woman in my forties, and very much in the public eye, dating wasn’t easy. I knew that if I brought a man with me to an event, people would immediately start to speculate about our relationship. I also knew that single women in politics are viewed differently than single men. We don’t get the same latitude when it comes to our social lives. I had no interest in inviting that kind of scrutiny unless I was close to sure I’d found “the One”—which meant that for years, I kept my personal life compartmentalized from my career.
A few nights later, I was on my way to an event when I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize. Doug was watching a basketball game with a friend, and he’d worked up the courage to send me an awkward text. “Hey! It’s Doug. Just saying hi! I’m at the Lakers game.” I wrote back to say hi, and we made plans to talk the following day. Then I punctuated it with my own bit of awkwardness—“Go Lakers!”—even though I’m really a Warriors fan.
The next morning, I was leaving the gym before work when I noticed that I had missed a call from Doug. Even though I had suggested we connect the following day, I hadn’t expected him to reach out that early. But I found it pretty endearing, I’ll admit. In fact, while I was writing this chapter, I sat down with Doug and asked him to explain what was going through his head when he made that call. This is what he said:
I got up early that morning. I had an early meeting. And as I was driving to work, I couldn’t get you off my mind. And I kept saying to myself, “It’s eight thirty a.m., it’s way too early to call her. That would be ridiculous. Don’t be that guy. Just don’t. Don’t call her. Don’t do it.” And then, “Oh no, I just rang her number,” and, “Oh no, it’s ringing.
The voicemail, which I still have saved to this day, was long and a little rambling. He sounded like a nice guy, though, and I was intrigued to learn more. Doug, on the other hand, was pretty sure that he had ruined his chances. The way he tells it, he thought his voicemail had been disastrous and that he’d likely never hear from me again. He had to restrain himself from calling again and leaving another long-winded message trying to explain away the first one.
But fate was smiling on us. As it happens, I own an apartment in San Francisco, and, after saving up for years to redo my kitchen, the work was finally about to start. That day, I was supposed to meet the contractor and his team to show them in and give them keys, but when I got to the apartment, I learned the contractor was running late, and I would have to wait.
In other words, I found myself with a free hour for lunch—something that almost never happened. So I decided I’d give Doug a call. Maybe he was on a lunch break, too.
He answered, and we ended up on the phone for the entire hour. It sounds corny, I know, but the conversation just flowed; and even though I’m sure that both of us were trying extra hard to seem witty and interesting, most of all I remember us cracking each other up, joking and laughing at ourselves and with each other, just the way we do now. By the time the contractor arrived, I was genuinely excited to meet this Doug guy in person. We made dinner plans for Saturday night in Los Angeles. I could hardly wait to fly down.
Doug suggested that we meet first at his place. I suggested that he pick me up instead. “Okay, but I just need you to know I’m not a really good driver,” he said. “Thanks for letting me know,” I replied with a chuckle. There was no pretense or posing with Doug, no arrogance or boasting. He seemed so genuinely comfortable with himself. It’s part of why I liked him immediately.
The morning after our first date, Doug emailed me with all of his available dates for the next couple of months. “I’m too old to play games or hide the ball,” the email read. “I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work.” In fact, he was eager to see me that Saturday, but I had a long-scheduled girls’ weekend on the calendar.
“That’s no problem,” he said. “I could come up and you and I could just sneak off on the margins.” I appreciated his enthusiasm, but I had to explain to him that, no, that’s not how a girls’ weekend works. We planned a second date for later that week instead.
For our third date, Doug decided that a grand gesture was in order. He flew to Sacramento to meet me for dinner. After that, we knew we had something special. We agreed to commit to each other for six months, and to reevaluate our relationship at the end of it. Attending a speech about the ills of truancy isn’t exactly what most people think of as a romantic date, but the event was Doug’s coming out—the first time I’d invited him to join me at a professional gathering. Hence the whispering and pointing among my team, who had heard rumors of his existence but hadn’t seen him with their own eyes. They would later refer to that era as A.D.—“After Doug.” They loved how much he made me laugh. I did, too.
Doug had been married once before, and he had two kids, Cole and Ella—named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. When Doug and I first started dating, Ella was in middle school and Cole was in high school; Doug shared custody with his first wife, Kerstin. I had—and have—tremendous admiration and respect for Kerstin. I could tell from the way Doug talked about his kids that she was a terrific mother—and in later months, as Kerstin and I got to know each other, we really hit it off ourselves and became friends. (We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.)
After our second date, Doug was ready to introduce me to Cole and Ella, and I was eager to meet them, too. But as a child of divorce, I knew how hard it can be when your parents start to date other people. So I slowed things down. Other than occasionally talking to the kids when Doug had me on speakerphone in the car, I wanted to make sure that Doug and I had something real and lasting before I waded into Cole’s and Ella’s lives.
Doug and I put a lot of thought into when and how that first meeting should transpire. We waited until about two months after we’d met, although in my memory it feels like we’d been together for a long time—maybe because the buildup was so great, or because, by the time the big day finally arrived, I felt like I’d loved Doug for years.
I woke up that morning feeling incredibly excited, but also with some butterflies in my stomach. Until that moment, I’d known Cole and Ella as gorgeous faces in Doug’s photographs, charming characters in his stories, the central figures in his heart. Now I was finally going to meet these two amazing young people. It was a momentous occasion.
On my way home from my LA office, I picked up a tin of cookies and tied a festive ribbon in a bow around it. I got rid of my suit, changed into jeans and my Chuck Taylors, took a few deep breaths, and got a ride to Doug’s house. On the way over, I tried to imagine how the first few minutes would go. I ran scenarios in my head and tried to land on the perfect things to say. The tin of cookies was sitting beside me on the seat, a silent witness to my rehearsing. Would the kids think the cookies were really nice or really weird? Maybe the ribbon was too much.
The ribbon was probably too much. But Cole and Ella could not have been more welcoming. They’d been wanting to meet me, too. We talked for a few minutes, then piled into Doug’s car for dinner together. Doug and I had decided the kids should choose where we ate, to make everything as comfortable as possible. They’d picked a place that had been a favorite since they were younger—a seafood hut off the Pacific Coast Highway called the Reel Inn. It was about an hour away in traffic, which gave us some quality car time to get to know one another. Cole, it turned out, was a music aficionado, and he was excited to share some of his latest discoveries with me.
“I just started listening to Roy Ayers,” he said. “Do you know him?”
I sang back: “Everybody loves the sunshine, sunshine, folks get down in the sunshine . . .”
“You know it!”
“Of course I know it!”
We put on the song, and then another and another. The four of us sang together with the windows rolled down as we drove up the coast to dinner.
The Reel Inn was casual and unpretentious. It was hard not to feel at ease. We waited in line with trays at a counter, the menu of fresh fish written on a blackboard on the wall. The cashier gave us numbers, much like at a deli, and when our order was called, we took our trays to some picnic tables with a view of the ocean, just as the sun was beginning to set. When we were done eating, Cole and Ella told us that they were going to head over to Cole’s school to see an art show where some of their friends’ work would be displayed. They wanted to know if we wanted to join them.
“Of course!” I said, as if this was a totally normal thing. It sounded great to me. Then Doug whispered to me, “They must like you. They never invite me to anything.” We went to the school together, and Ella—a gifted artist—expertly guided us through the exhibit. Lots of their friends were there, too, and we had fun mingling and making conversation with the students and their parents. Doug later joked that I got completely inundated with their lives that night, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I was hooked, and Cole and Ella reeled me in.
At the end of March 2014, I had two trips planned. One was to Mexico, where I was coordinating with senior officials in the fight against transnational criminal organizations and human traffickers. The other was to Italy, where Doug and I were looking forward to a romantic getaway. The respective itineraries were, in a word, different. At home, Doug and I stayed up late looking at pictures and guidebooks and planning our itinerary for Florence. At the office, I was working to put together and lead a bipartisan delegation of state attorneys general to join me in Mexico City.
Mexico-based transnational crime was—and is—a major threat, and California was a primary target. That March, my office had released a report that found, for example, that 70 percent of the U.S. supply of methamphetamine was coming through the San Diego port of entry on California’s southern border. The report also drew attention to ways in which Mexican-based drug trafficking was being amplified in the United States as cartels formed alliances with gangs on California streets and in California prisons.
The challenges posed to California law enforcement—and thereby the rest of the country—were significant, and I wanted to meet with Mexican officials to work through a joint plan to take on the cartels.
We spent three days in Mexico—four other state attorneys general and I—and were able to come away with a plan for concrete action. We signed a letter of intent with the National Banking and Securities Commission of Mexico to establish an anti-money-laundering enforcement effort. Money laundering fuels transnational criminal organizations, and by creating a communication and cooperation agreement with Mexico, we hoped to improve our ability to investigate and disrupt this financing.
On March 26, 2014, I arrived back at my apartment in San Francisco, feeling like the trip had been a real success. But it was late in the evening when I got home, and now I had a small problem: my trip with Doug was starting early the next morning, and I’d had no time to pack.
Shortly after I arrived at my apartment, Doug texted to say he was on his way from the airport. When he got to the apartment, I was in the middle of a frantic search. I couldn’t find my black pants, and I was intensely frustrated about it.
It was ridiculous, of course, but it was one of those moments when the balancing act caught up with me—a balancing act that many working women, and some men, know all too well. Just like my mother, I’ve internalized the idea that everything I do deserves 100 percent, but sometimes it feels like the numbers won’t work. There just isn’t enough of me to go around. This was one of those times. I had a hundred things racing through my mind in the aftermath of the Mexico trip, and a hundred more as I contemplated the work I’d missed while I was away. Meanwhile, I was trying to shift mental gears for a getaway with my sweetheart—but my packing list and my to-do list were competing hard for real estate in my brain. I was beating myself up for trying to do too much, even as I worried that I wasn’t doing quite enough, and all of this stress coalesced in the form of a search for my black pants.
Which I couldn’t find. My closet was a mess.
As a result, I was frazzled, and when Doug arrived he seemed out of sorts as well. He was acting strange—a little stiff, a little quiet.
“Do you mind if we get takeout instead of going out to eat?” I asked him. “I didn’t plan for this very well and I need time to pack.”
“Of course,” he said. “How about the Thai place we like?”
“Sounds great,” I replied. I rifled through a kitchen drawer and produced a tattered paper menu. “How about pad thai?”
Doug turned to me. “I want to spend my life with you.”
That was sweet, but he was always sweet like that. Truth be told, I didn’t register the significance of what he’d said at all. I didn’t even look up. My mind was still on the black pants.
“That’s nice, honey,” I said, rubbing his arm as I looked over the menu. “Should we have chicken or shrimp on the pad thai?”
“No, I want to spend my life with you,” he said again. When I looked up, he was getting down on one knee. He’d concocted an elaborate plan to propose to me in front of the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence. But once he had the ring, it was burning a hole in his pocket. He couldn’t keep it secret.
I looked at him there, on one knee, and burst into tears. Mind you, these were not graceful Hollywood tears streaming down a glistening cheek. No, I’m talking about snorting and grunting, with mascara smudging my face. Doug reached for my hand and I held my breath and smiled back. Then he asked me to marry him, and I bellowed a tear-soaked “Yes!”
Doug and I were married on Friday, August 22, 2014, in an intimate ceremony with the people we loved. Maya officiated; Meena read from Maya Angelou. In keeping with our respective Indian and Jewish heritage, I put a flower garland around Doug’s neck, and he stomped on a glass. And then it was done.
Cole, Ella, and I agreed that we didn’t like the term “stepmom.” Instead they call me their “Momala.”
One of my favorite routines is Sunday family dinner. This is a routine I instituted once Doug and I got engaged. When he and I first started dating, he was a single dad sharing custody with Kerstin. Family dinner had been Chinese takeout and plastic forks, which the kids spirited off to their bedrooms. I changed that. Now everyone knows that Sunday family dinner is nonnegotiable, that we come together, all of us around the table, relatives and friends always welcome, and I cook a meal for us to share. It’s really important to me.
Everyone quickly got into the routine and found their role to play. Cole sets the table, picks the music, and pitches in as sous chef in the kitchen. Ella makes restaurant-quality guacamole and exquisite desserts, including a gorgeous fresh fruit tart, where she folds the dough in magnificent ways, topped off with homemade whipped cream. Doug bought himself a pair of onion goggles, which he dons with great fanfare when it’s time to chop—and let me tell you, there is nothing more attractive than a man in onion goggles.
I make the main dish—maybe a rich pork stew or spaghetti Bolognese or an Indian biryani or chicken with feta cheese, lemon rind, and fresh oregano from the garden. Usually I’ll start cooking on Saturday, and sometimes even Friday, though if I’ve been on the road I’ll pull it all together quickly—something simpler, like fish tacos. It doesn’t always go as planned: sometimes the pizza dough doesn’t rise or the sauce won’t thicken or we’re missing a key ingredient and I have to improvise. That’s all okay. Sunday family dinner is about something more than the meal.
When dinner is finished, the kids do the dishes. I once told them the story of Uncle Freddy. Because he lived in a small basement apartment in Harlem with a tiny kitchen, Uncle Freddy would clean every single dish or utensil he used as soon as he was done using it. And in time, the kids turned “Uncle Freddy” into a verb. When it’s time to clean, they promise to “Uncle Freddy” the place. And they do a pretty good job!
I know that not everyone likes to cook, but it’s centering for me. And as long as I’m making Sunday family dinner, I know I’m in control of my life—doing something that matters for the people I love, so we can share that quality time together.
Early one morning in that busy summer of 2014, my phone rang at the side of my bed. I picked it up to find Eric Holder, then the U.S. attorney general, on the other end of the line. He told me he had a question.
“I’m going to be stepping down soon. Are you interested?”
It was, needless to say, a lot to take in. Did I want to be United States attorney general? Did I want to hold the office that Bobby Kennedy once held? Of course I did. This was the kind of job I used to daydream about during lectures in law school. And this wasn’t just any moment or any president. This was Barack Obama, my friend and my president, whose leadership I so admired and whom I had been so proud to support. To join his cabinet would have been the honor of my life.
And yet I wasn’t sure if I truly wanted the job. By the time Holder stepped down, there would be fewer than two years left in the administration. What kind of opportunity would I have to create a real agenda?
The next time Holder and I spoke, I brought up Back on Track. I said that if there was a budget at the Department of Justice to fund and create incentives for local reentry initiatives, then I would be interested in the job. I wanted to be able to create real reform at a national level, with an approach that prioritized prevention. Alas, as Holder explained, there wasn’t any existing budget for such an effort, and any new funding would have to be approved by Congress—which we both knew was not going to happen.
That was disheartening. But I still knew the job wasn’t something to be turned down lightly. Like every lawyer I know, I listed the pros and cons on a yellow pad. I batted the options back and forth with Doug and other members of the family. I did my best to argue both sides.
One day, one of my best friends suggested we take a hike in the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, near Palo Alto. She thought the outdoor air and beautiful rolling hilltops might refresh my state of mind—and she was right. Away from the office, the contours of my choice came into sharper relief. With every step, I saw more clearly what I wanted to do, and why.
Inevitably, there would be limitations that came with the job. I took that as a given. But as I talked with my friend, and she raised all the right questions, I realized the real reason behind my resistance to the offer: I already had a job I loved, and work I still wanted to do.
I thought about my first days as California attorney general, when I’d learned that we had a big backlog of rape kits. I thought about all the work we were putting in to reduce the backlog, about the innovations we deployed to triple the number of cases that could be handled. Earlier in 2014, my Rapid DNA Service team received an award from the Department of Justice for our achievements. I thought about our work on human trafficking, too, which had been an unseen problem for so long, and our efforts to combat the brutal criminal organizations and street gangs that traded in human lives.
I thought about the fight I’d been able to lead, first as district attorney and then as attorney general, to stop defendants in hate crimes from using what’s known as the “gay and trans panic defense.” In 2002, a seventeen-year-old woman, Gwen Araujo, had been brutally beaten and murdered in Newark, California. Her killers, two of whom had been involved with her sexually, had tried to justify their actions in court by claiming that they had panicked upon learning that Araujo was transgender, to the point of temporary insanity. It was ludicrous. As district attorney, I had organized a conference of prosecutors and law enforcement officials from across the country to push back against the idea that criminal conduct could be mitigated by prejudice. And as attorney general, in that summer of 2014, I was working with the governor and state legislature on what would be a successful effort to ban such a defense statewide. I thought about how much that meant to me.
I thought about the Bureau of Children’s Justice, a new initiative I was still developing with one of my special assistant attorneys general, Jill Habig, which would be entirely devoted to making sure the rights of all of California’s children were protected. There was a lot on that agenda, and I was eager to see it all through.
I thought about the work we were doing to prepare to open up state crime data to the public, a first-of-its-kind transparency initiative led by special assistant attorneys general Daniel Suvor and Justin Erlich, which we would call OpenJustice.
Likewise, we were taking Back on Track and my truancy initiative statewide.
And then there were the corporate predators who took advantage of students and veterans and homeowners and the poor. I loved being the voice and advocate for the people they mistreated. The lawyers on my team knew how serious I was about holding corporate predators accountable. They would joke that “Kamala” meant “Get more commas in that settlement price.”
And of course, the banks. The fight with them was still ongoing. We were still bringing lawsuits, and I had no plans of backing down.
By the time our hike was over, my friend and I both knew I’d made my decision. It wouldn’t be about the title or the perception of prestige. What mattered to me was the work. And when it came to the work that mattered most, I wasn’t finished yet.
Later that evening, I called Holder to let him know. Then Doug and I curled up on the couch with the kids and a big bowl of popcorn and, for the second time, watched Iron Man 2.