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By Root 1028 0

to our house, and Cate and I went to our assigned motorcade vehicle and waited. Our driver didn’t really know where he was supposed to be or where my husband was. That should have been our first hint. We waited as the crowd dispersed, and then he drove around to the arena. No one was there. He apologized and drove out to the UPS terminal, where John had left the car, where Air Force One was sitting. Only by the time we got there, Air Force One was no longer there, and neither was our car. Only the UPS workers were there. The driver dropped us at the terminal nonetheless, and Cate and I stood by the gate to the UPS parking lot, waiting—for John, for another SUV, just waiting to go home. We tired of standing, so we sat on the curb by the gate. And then there was a shift change, so we moved away from the gate and sat farther away on the curb, still dressed in the outfits we had worn to meet the President, as fifty cars and trucks of UPS employees left and fifty more came into the parking lot. And then it started to rain. We had no coats, we had no umbrellas, we had no place to get out of the rain. Cate turned to me and said, “In the President’s motorcade one minute, in the rain on the curb outside UPS the next. Not much of a chance to get big-headed.” Whenever we are given a dose of humbling reality, we always say, “Just like UPS.” We were still laughing when a UPS worker came out to tell us that John, who thought he was meeting us at home, was on the phone. He came to get us, we went home and changed, and then we went out for our usual anniversary dinner—this was our anniversary, too—at Wendy’s.

My sister, Nancy, came to help with the campaign. She lived in Florida, and she did the books for a dental practice over her computer. So her office moved when her computer moved, and she moved it all to Raleigh to help with the campaign. It was not a little thing. She stayed in a hotel for months. She knew no one other than us and a few of our closest friends. And she had no experience in campaigns. She had never done anything like this before, and she was given no model from which to work, but she created a volunteer campaign in our biggest counties. Of the three children in our family, she is my father’s daughter. Once when we were all in Washington, she arranged a trip to Annapolis, her family and mine and Jay’s and my parents. It was after my father’s stroke, and Dad didn’t walk well, so we insisted he use his wheelchair, as we were going to be covering long distances. He was in the wheelchair when we visited the Hall of Fame. We found Dad’s picture as an All-American lacrosse player, and we showed Ty and Louis, Jay’s boys. There was a guided tour nearby of Japanese tourists. Nancy brought them over and pointed to the picture and then to my father. “That is this man,” she said. And they applauded him. We all pushed back tears, including my father, and I was so grateful for my sister, for the gift of her ability to reach out to strangers. It was a gift she put to great use in the campaign. If you didn’t want to work and work hard, you had better hope Nancy didn’t have your home number.

As the campaign moved into the fall, the Faircloth campaign used that Clinton visit. There were relentless attacks on John and his character, played over the radio and on television, including the televisions in the lunchroom at the high school Cate attended. When one commercial called John and Bill Clinton lying lawyers, with caricatures of both of them growing Pinocchio noses, all the students sitting around Cate turned to look for her reaction. Her reaction was that she had had enough.

“Can they just make anything up,” she asked us that night. “Yes,” we told her, “it doesn’t seem right, but they actually can make just about anything up. We just have to trust that people will see it for what it is.” We hoped we were right, but right or wrong, it didn’t make it any easier for a sixteen-year-old girl who had already lived through an assault on her family. But this was Cate, and she just dug in and started putting in even more hours at the campaign