Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [121]
CHAPTER 12
AMERICA, THE GENERAL ELECTION
In the Starting Blocks
WHEN JOHN KERRY called my husband in Washington to ask him to be on the Democratic ticket with him, I was in Raleigh, in my doctor’s office, lying on an examination table, dressed in a lovely blue cotton backless robe. It was 8:20 A.M. My doctor had agreed to see me earlier than the office usually opened, and my friend Ellan had gone with me to the appointment—we were planning to go out to breakfast afterward. I expected to take a late-morning flight back to Washington. As I was lying there, looking at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, I heard my cell phone ring in my purse across the room. At the same moment I heard Ellan scream from the waiting room, where she had been watching television.
The nurse handed me the phone. It was Emma Claire. Fifteen words: “Kerry picked Daddy, he just called Daddy. Here’s Jack. He wants to tell you, too.” Now it was Jack’s improbably deep voice. Mom. Yes, Jack. I swam all the way across the pool with my head out of the water. That’s what he wanted to tell me. To him, these two pieces of news were roughly equivalent.
There is prelude, of course. Aside from the eighteen months of prelude that were the primaries. The previous week we had been to Disney World with Cate, Emma Claire, and Jack. It had been like hundreds of thousands of Disney World trips taken by families before us. Although John was recognized every once in a while—once as we were celebrating my birthday early at Cinderella’s Royal Table—vacationers were mostly, and rightly, concerned with their children. It was relaxing. And then Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry’s campaign manager, called. Could John meet Kerry in Washington the next day? I’m with my family in Orlando, John said, I’ll be back on the next day, on the second; how about that? No, it had to be July 1st. They would send a plane to get him; he could leave Orlando after lunch, meet with Kerry in the early evening, and return late that night. Of course John said yes. He’d said yes to an earlier Kerry request to meet with John’s top financial supporters—a meeting where John Kerry was peppered with questions about whether he would choose John as his running mate. He’d said yes to a Kerry invitation to dinner at his lovely Georgetown home—fortunately before the press started staking out the house—where he and Kerry had excused themselves from Teresa and me at the table to talk privately about the vice presidential slot. He’d said yes to the vetting process, in which we had opened our tax returns, our records, our histories—again—to a team of lawyers and investigators. And so he said yes, he would go to Washington on July 1st. Cate and I would take the children to Toontown and Frontierland without him.
Thursday night when John came back from D.C., he was tired, but I was too curious to let him go to sleep before telling me what had happened. He related a positive but guarded meeting at Madeleine Albright’s house. There was no ask, there was no commitment, but John felt good about the meeting. We woke the next morning to our last day in Disney World—with our four- and six-year-olds, with Cate, and also with Andrew and Cheri Young from Raleigh, who had come with us to Orlando with their own two young children. Four children under six will take your mind off almost everything. But not everything.
The evening of July 2nd we were back in Washington, and Cate began packing to move to New York and a new job. The children were slowly coming down from a week of character breakfasts and amusement rides. And John and I were reading in the paper that Kerry had met with “his choice” at Madeleine Albright’s house Thursday night—and that the choice was Dick Gephardt, the only name in the perceived pool in town that night. Now, I could pretend that I was agnostic about this, that I did not care whether John was chosen, but I was not. I