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By Root 1054 0

bringing them to the formal announcement. This is one of the problems, of course, with the devolution of political campaigns into waves of assaults. Who, I had to wonder, would not bring their children to the announcement that their father was the vice presidential candidate? I imagined the conversation as years later the children looked at pictures of the event. “Where am I, Mom? Was I alive then?” “Yes, you were alive, but it was a little too important an event for you, so you were home with a babysitter.” A lot of people I met in the following months would reassure me about the children, but they needn’t have. The complaints rolled right off my back. Just like they did when there was a flap because Teresa tried to get Jack to take his thumb out of his mouth. He’d never done it before, but we were all doing things we had never done before. I didn’t notice the thumb go in, and I didn’t notice Teresa pull on his hand to get it out, but for goodness’ sake, if someone I know wants to wipe one of my children’s noses or tuck in a shirt or pull out a thumb, I am completely fine with that.

There were less happy times, of course, when we didn’t bring the children. They did not, for example, come with us to Faneuil Hall for the concession speech four months later. I did not think they would one day look back and say, “So why didn’t you bring us?”

I promise not to use the word whirlwind about shopping in twenty stores or spending two weeks touring Italy, but the next days campaigning were a whirlwind. Imagine that we had the national press corps and the international press corps traveling with us. The local press corps joined in wherever we landed. There were two families of children, young and not as young, and one of them, Alex Kerry, had her own film crew with her all the time. There were staff—John Kerry’s and Teresa’s established staffs plus John’s nascent staff and not really enough seats in the staff section of the Kerry plane for all of them. And then there were Secret Service details, and details, and details. Getting us anywhere was like tying a bow around Jell-O. And so it was to Cleveland, and Dayton, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

And then it was New York. There was a fund-raiser scheduled for Radio City Music Hall. We had been told that at the end of the event the families would come on stage to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with the entertainers John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, and Jon Bon Jovi. Everyone knows the first verse, but we were going to sing four verses. So that afternoon, as we sat in the hotel room, Cate and I pulled out the songbook and started to memorize the verses. After we had learned them, we dressed for the evening. We got in the elevator with John and the Kerrys, and Cate and I remarked how hard it was to learn all the verses quickly. Everyone looked at us blankly. You didn’t learn them? No, they hadn’t. Cate and I gave sidelong glances to each other. They were going to sing at Radio City Music Hall? And they hadn’t learned the words? Boy, were they going to be embarrassed. What dopes. I was going to have only one chance in my lifetime to do this, and I did not want to be stumbling over the words.

At the end of the entertainment, John Kerry got up and spoke. He asked Teresa to speak, and then John. By this time, I was pretty sure what was coming, and I was racking my brain about what to say. Usually I just introduced Teresa, but this was out of order. And, though I knew the words to “This Land Is My Land,” I had no speech prepared. So when John handed me the microphone, I didn’t give a speech. I just said thank you to the people who had given money to attend, and I said, maybe impolitely, that the election wasn’t about them. It was about the young boys from Harlem who had sung for us earlier. It was about the people who would come in after we were gone and clean up the hall. It was about the mothers who that night could not find sleep because of a son or daughter in Iraq. Less than a minute, I figured. When you are unprepared, I recommend sincerity and brevity. Within minutes after