A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [63]
The story itself was false. To our amazement, the Globe wouldn’t tell us why it thought we had defaulted or what proof it had, but we found ourselves having to prove the story was false to prevent it from running. The campaign was concerned. How do you prove something didn’t happen? It fell to Diane to do just that. She flew back home in a panic and sat down in the long back hall outside the dark closet where we kept old file cabinets and systematically unpacked box after box of canceled checks and dusty old statements. (Thankfully, she’s a pack rat). She eventually found the canceled check for the final payment as well as the final statement. She handed them over to the campaign, which gave them to the Globe. The story was killed.
But the episode pushed Diane to her limit. She told me then that the stress was getting to her, that she couldn’t be on call twenty-four hours a day to put out fires, that she had a job and a career that she couldn’t and wouldn’t sacrifice for my political ambitions. She couldn’t sleep and was tired and despondent. I promised I would try to protect her from the media queries, but I couldn’t protect her from the rumors. One alleged that I had used cocaine. How did that get started? Someone had heard that I was “involved with Coke,” referring to my time at Coca-Cola, and it took off from there. Even suggestions that were meant to be helpful were absurdly personal. At a public event in the Berkshires, Diane was approached by a woman who said she needed better “foundations”—not spiritual or moral, but undergarments. Diane was taken aback, and she later shared this story with a few others at a fundraiser in Boston. A woman she didn’t know soon approached her and said, “I hear you’re in the market for foundations. Well, I have a great guy.” The woman then unbuttoned her blouse. “Look how large I am,” she said. “You could use a good foundation too.”
Any politician will tell you that the hothouse of a close campaign can obliterate the fine line between your public and private lives. When you run for office, that’s what you sign up for. But in Diane’s case, I didn’t realize that that feeling—that sense of losing control of your own life, of the world closing in on you, of suffocating—was both familiar and haunting. It had happened in her first marriage, when Bill succeeded in redefining who she was. Now, it was the media and our political opponents who were redefining who I was and, indirectly, who she was. Diane has a clear image of herself as a mother, a lawyer, a volunteer, and a community activist, but now she was being cast solely as “Deval Patrick’s lovely wife, Diane,” or misidentified as my “lovely wife, Donna.” (Another time, she was “Shirley.”)
Even though Diane remained ambivalent about the campaign, she continued to campaign brilliantly—sometimes with me, sometimes on her own. Perhaps the very openness that had made her vulnerable to Bill’s abuse also allowed her to connect so well to others. She listens well and is genuinely empathic. People would draw her aside and say that they could tell I was a good man because she was “so real.” The reaction in African-American audiences was also relief. More than a few people whispered to her, “Honey, I’m so glad to see you are black!” So many educated and accomplished African-American men marry across racial lines that it was presumed I had, too. Perhaps because I was a newcomer to the political scene, perhaps because I was the first black Democratic nominee, perhaps because we were running a kind of insurgent campaign, I think voters needed to feel comfortable with me as their prospective governor, and Diane came to play an outsized role in the campaign. Quite honestly, I don’t know that I would have won without her.
The morning after the election, Diane awoke in a state of disbelief. Was this really happening? She was exhausted, and I can’t deny that she deserved