Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [7]
“Hawaii?” I asked, incredulous, but not too much so, since Ted Koppel was still within earshot. Hawaii was supposed to be a comfortable win.
I got back in the satellite chair at the hotel and put in my best effort until finally, at about 9:45 P.M., I was asked to do an interview with a local station in New Mexico. “When do the polls close there?” I asked.
“In fifteen minutes,” someone answered.
“What in the world do you want me to say? Wherever you are, run as quickly as possible to the polls and hope you get there before they lock the door.” It was the only time I didn’t do what I was asked to do. Instead, I took out my earpiece and went downstairs to my room. Cate and Emma Claire and Jack were there with my brother, Jay, my sister, Nancy, and their families, who had come to Boston to be with us for election night. The children talked excitedly about their trip to the New England Aquarium that day and laid out the souvenirs they had collected. After they left to get ready for bed, I told Cate, and then my brother and my sister, what I suspected would be confirmed by needle biopsy the next day. We sat together quietly for a while, overlooking the crowd in Copley Square, the television pundits calling states behind us.
Finally, around 10:00 P.M., John called. He had spent a long day in Florida and had just gotten to Boston. “It doesn’t look good,” I told him as he headed to our hotel. He’d had the same experience I had. When he left Florida, it appeared that their ticket had won, so he joked with the staff and the traveling press corps on the plane and slept lightly but easily, preparing for the night’s celebrations. When he got to Boston, it was another story.
John arrived at the hotel, and we had only a minute to ourselves before his staff—mostly people who had been with us for years—gathered in our suite. With a backdrop of music from Copley Square, John sat down with the pollster he respected and was told that it was going to come down to Ohio, and though we were down now, there was still a long shot. We wouldn’t know anything tonight. John called John Kerry, and I left him to talk while I got ready for bed. Although I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. John came in around 1 A.M. and told me the campaign had heard that George Bush was preparing to declare victory. They wanted John to go out and speak to the crowd in Copley Square—and the television audience—before Bush went on the air.
“Just you?” I asked.
“Just me,” he said. Senator Kerry was at his Boston home. He had also spent the day thinking he had won, and the night had been hard on him. John agreed to do it. Hundreds, maybe thousands of supporters still stood outside in Copley Square, where it was cold and raining, and they deserved to hear from the ticket.
Finally, around 2 A.M. Peter Scher and John’s other closest advisors came to our room with the speech someone in the campaign had written and the invisible “they” in some other room wanted John to deliver. I heard them in the next room. He couldn’t give that speech, John said. It was too close to a concession, making it easier, not harder, for George Bush to declare victory while there were votes yet to be counted in Ohio. I listened from my bed as they tried to rearrange the existing words into something accurate and strong. Finally, unencumbered by the suggested speech they were trying to edit, I yelled out from the bedroom: “We’ve waited this long. We can wait a little bit longer.”
John scribbled a note to himself, pulled up his tie, and headed out. I heard the roar from Copley Square as he came onstage ten floors below me. “We’ve waited this long,” he told the somber crowd. “We can wait a little bit longer.”
I woke up early the next morning. John and Cate and I had a few minutes alone to talk