Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [85]
So we stayed put. We went up in January when he was sworn in, a swirl of festive activities and deferential treatment to which we were not accustomed. We had a lovely dinner at the Naval Observatory grounds with Vice President and Mrs. Gore, and after dinner we—along with the other new Democratic senators and their spouses—walked through the warm January night from the house to the observatory and looked through its great telescope at the rings of Saturn. Except for seeing Saturn, it was more like the evenings to which we were accustomed: a pleasant dinner with pleasant people.
The Senate spouses were very organized about welcoming new families to the Senate. There were sessions to explain the location and furnishing of offices, the role of the Capitol Police, where to get your ID card. And they gave each new spouse a “big sister” to show you around. Mine was Linda Bird Johnson Robb—no one could have a better big sister. The wife of the senator from Virginia, and of course the daughter of Lyndon Johnson, she had been in this Capitol since she was a child, and she knew every nook and cranny. With a constant flow of stories about what happened here or there, or when this or that painting had been hung, she marched me from one place to another.
Now, there are places in the Capitol that only senators can go—unless you are with someone like Linda Bird, who has been there longer than almost anyone. I saw much I would never have seen without her, such as the corridor behind the Senate president’s desk, but I also got shooed out of more places than any other new Senate spouse. I was constantly apologizing—“Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m leaving”—but that wasn’t Linda. “Yes, yes,” she would say, “but first I want to show her this desk.” I wouldn’t have traded her for the world.
Washington life didn’t feel like real life, not like we knew it. Certainly walking around with Linda Bird did not resemble any part of life as I had known it. And it wasn’t just seeing the flesh-and-blood faces that I had watched in the news; it was also the news itself. Reporters were everywhere, many trying to figure out who we were. I was talking to a reporter I did know when another new Senate wife, whose husband had been in politics for a while, intervened. “Don’t talk to them,” she warned, standing between us. I was shuttled back into an extraordinarily decorated Senate office and away from a perfectly nice conversation. Was life going to be like this? I wondered. Guarded conversations, perfect clothes? “People,” she told me, “will befriend you in order to use you, and the press are the very worst.” I decided that when we did move to Washington, I wasn’t going to live that way; I wasn’t going to assume that everyone was out to get me, out to use me. I couldn’t be looking at what everyone’s motives were. If I enjoyed them and they appeared to enjoy me, I was determined simply to accept that. I sure didn’t want to spend my time looking under everybody’s skirts, as my grandmother used to say. Being hustled away from a single conversation proved to me that it was a lousy way to live.
The flip side of being used, of course, is using—using every person or event as a political opportunity. Who is the most important or influential or visible or rich person in the room? Where is the camera? I don’t want to mislead here. Sometimes in political life you—the politician and the spouse—are looking for political opportunity, for press coverage, for financial support. But not every minute. We had dinner with Howard Fineman, the reporter, and our friend Harrison Hickman, who was John’s pollster in the Senate campaign. During the meal, Howard told me that a certain wife was the best political spouse he’d ever seen. Why? Because she took his business card and entered it into her Palm Pilot right at a dinner