Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [93]
The press, in a swarm, started staking out our house. Cameras lined the sidewalk across the street, and if we walked to the car, they would come up alongside us, snapping away, and we would have to close the door on a camera lens. But it wasn’t going to last long, we knew, because Gore announced that he would make his choice on Monday. On Friday, John went to North Carolina for Senate business for the day, and while he was being mobbed there, the children and I were stalked at the D.C. house. Mary Louise Oates and Ellen Bennett, two veterans of these kinds of things—and good company besides—came over to see about me and to see if I was ready. I had been out of maternity clothes for less than two months. I was not ready.
They took my closet apart. I had just had a baby, and at my age, I was not bouncing back into shape, yet here I was, standing in my underwear in front of women I had known for only a month, while they had me try on what they thought might be suitable, which, frankly, was not that much of my wardrobe. So distressed were they with my clothes that Ellen took off her designer jacket and gave it to me. “Try this,” she said. I declined. “I really can’t take your clothes.” She changed her tack. “Wear this,” she ordered. When they left, they had a small—very small—pile of what they thought might be acceptable, and they promised to be back. When John came back from North Carolina to my clothes thrown all over our bedroom, I didn’t even try to explain. Despite the cameras and the Attack of the Clothes Police, we still thought that John was the last choice, third now of three, but still last. After the day we had had, sleep came easily.
Saturday mornings were like Saturdays mornings in every house with a new baby and a two-year-old. Jack was crying, Emma Claire wanted breakfast, and—our new twist—there were seventy-five members of the press corps camped out in front of our house. About 9:30 A.M., the phone rang, John was changing Jack, and Emma Claire and I were eating breakfast. It was Bill Daly, Al Gore’s campaign manager. He told John that he had just had breakfast with the Vice President. And then he said it was between John and one other person. Oh, my gosh. He may have said more, but who heard anything for a minute? Then he said to John, “Now, I don’t know you, and I feel like I should know you because I’m going to have to help advise the Vice President, so I need to meet with you.” John asked where, and Daly suggested his apartment. John said, “That’s fine, but there are TV cameras out here, and they’re following me everywhere I go.” So they arranged a cloak-and-dagger drive-into-the-underground-Senate-parking-garage-and-change-carsand-drive-to-Daly’s-apartment plan. Which worked. John met with him for about an hour. Daly was very friendly and open. Everyone liked John, he said. Everyone was impressed. But he was still worried about the fact that John had not been in office long. They talked about it, and at the end, Daly told him that his family needed to be in place on Monday, all of us, because if John was chosen, the campaign would be sending a plane to take us all to Nashville, where Gore’s campaign headquarters were.
I don’t know whether Mary Louise was being careful, whether she was perceptive, or whether she had inside information from her husband, Bob Shrum, who was a top consultant in the Gore campaign. Whatever it was, she was back at the house that morning to dress me. Mary Louise didn’t hand me any of her clothes—she is a good six inches taller than I am. Instead she made plans for us to go shopping. When she picked me up, I was dressed in comfortable North Carolina clothes, and four hours