Every Day Is Extra

John Kerry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781471177354
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The Observer Book of the Year Every Day Is Extra is John Kerry's personal story. The title comes from a saying he and his buddies had in Vietnam. A child ofprivilege, Kerry went to private schools and Yale, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He commanded riverpatrols – swift boats – and was highly decorated, but he discovered that the truth about what was happening in Vietnam wasdifferent from what the government was reporting. He returned home disillusioned, became active against the war, and testifiedin Congress as a 27-year-old veteran who opposed the war. Kerry served as a prosecutor in Massachusetts, then as Massachusetts lieutenant governor, and was elected to the Senate in1984. His friendship with the Kennedy family gave him valuable contacts, but he earned his victory by campaigning hard. Hewould be re-elected four times. Kerry's service in the Senate was distinguished. Unlike most senators, who travel on foreign junkets for "fact-finding missions, "Kerry travelled to the Philippines and based on what he learned, helped to orchestrate the peaceful transition from FerdinandMarcos to the duly elected Corazon Aquino government. He played an active role in the BCCI and Iran-Contra matters. In 2004he ran for president against the incumbent, George W. Bush and came within one state – Ohio – of winning. In Every Day Is Extra he explains why he chose not to contest widespread voting irregularities in Ohio, fearing that after the 2000 election went to the U.S. Supreme Court, another challenge would undermine confidence in the voting system. Kerry returned to the Senate, endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008, and when Clinton resigned in 2012 to run forthe presidency, Kerry was confirmed as Secretary of State.In that position he tried – and like all his predecessors, failed – to find peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (he is critical of both sides but especially Prime Minister Netanyahu); dealt with the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS; negotiated theIran nuclear deal; and signed the Paris climate accord. This is a personal book, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, always moving. Secretary Kerry describes some of theremarkable events of his life, such as discovering that his paternal grandfather committed suicide – something his father nevertold him – and that this grandfather was Jewish, not Irish (he changed his name to Kerry from Kohn, and also converted toCatholicism). His account of his experiences in Vietnam is riveting. His failed first marriage left a wound that never completelyhealed, but his second marriage, to Teresa Heinz, widow of a Senate colleague, has been an anchor in his life. He tells wonderfulstories about the Kennedys and especially about Senate colleagues Ted Kennedy and John McCain. His story of his first realmeeting with John McCain, another Vietnam veteran, is one of the most moving stories in the book; his respect for McCain isgenuine and inspiring. Every Day Is Extra shows readers how arduous it is to run for president and how demanding the role ofsecretary of state is. Readers of this book, whatever their political persuasion, will come away grateful that we have public servants who are preparedto spend their lives in service to their country. They will also come away with a new appreciation of John Kerry, a man oftenportrayed as aloof and stiff, but as this book reveals, funny, warm, and dedicated.

CHAPTER 1

Childhood

“WONDERFUL,” MY FATHER said in a soft, hoarse but somehow satisfied whisper, his eyes closed, savoring a bite of the Swiss chocolate he and I both loved since we—decades apart—were young boys in Swiss boarding schools under very different circumstances, young boys who found that rich and sinful indulgence helped fill a void.

It was the last mouthful of chocolate Pa would ever taste.

For nine years, the cancer had been a constant aggressor, but now, in late July 2000, after doctors promised him he would die of something else and advised a “watch and wait” response to his prostate cancer, it had relentlessly, cruelly found its way into his bones. The pain was agonizing. All we could do was liberally pump palliative morphine into his body to bring some measure of comfort—or the next best thing: numbness.

My brother, Cameron, and my sisters, Peggy and Diana, and I were wandering through our childhoods as our father was slipping away, high in a tower of Massachusetts General Hospital, facing the Charles River and the playing fields of the park below. It was a warm, blue-sky July day. I could see a light breeze rippling the trees, while small sailboats dotted the Charles River basin in front of MIT. There was a part of me that yearned to be outdoors, feeling the summer warmth, far away from the reality that my father was about to die. But of course, reality has its harsh way of dragging you back to earth. Coincidentally, just days before, President Clinton had landed his helicopter in the fields below us during a visit to Boston. I had watched from the twenty-first floor while the world of the living, which had no inkling of the personal drama playing out in our lives, went on below. I was one of three finalists under consideration to be Al Gore’s running mate. It hit me that my father would never know the outcome of that decision. It was strange to juxtapose what I thought was important with the intimacy and finality of our world in that room.

Pa slipped deeper and deeper into sleep. His breathing became heavier and labored. Now we were just waiting—my sisters, brother and I sitting vigil at his bedside, the day after his eighty-fifth birthday. His breaths grew increasingly shallow. While we were cloistered, quietly and somberly, at Massachusetts General Hospital, our eighty-seven-year-old mother, his wife of more than sixty years, was resting at home, unable to wait with us the long hours for the inevitable. She had said her goodbye a day earlier—a painful bedside farewell in which her last words to him were “I’ll see you tomorrow.” All of us in the room knew she wouldn’t, and the tears in her eyes told us she knew it too. I wondered how you say goodbye like that to someone you’ve lived with for more than six decades, and I felt enormous pain for my mother, who was clearly overwhelmed by the moment.

I know I was lucky to have parents who lived as long as mine did, and grateful too for all of us to be able to be present to say our goodbyes, but I’ve learned over time that no matter how old one is, no matter how much longevity there is to celebrate, when a parent dies, we are all of us, no matter what age, still children. Mothers and fathers fall into different categories altogether. Age and illness reverse the role of caretaker. And so it was with us. It fell to the four of us—Richard and Rosemary’s adult children—to helplessly wait for our father to die. At one point, we asked one another: Were we really certain he wanted to go? Did he want us to do something, anything—take extra and more extreme steps, however futile they might be—to give him a few more days? Was he really ready to take his leave?

Suddenly, so uncertain were we about Pa’s wishes, we went to considerable lengths to wake him to ask what he wanted. “Pa, is there anything we can do? What do you want?” His eyes grew wide and clear. He abruptly sat up in bed and forcefully announced, “I want to die.” Those were the last words Pa ever spoke. He lay back on the pillow, closed his eyes once more, and with all of us surrounding him, holding his hands, touching his arms, we watched him slip away.

I suppose for us children trying hard to divine our father’s last wish, the certainty of that announcement lifted a burden. It was a relief, a comfort, but it was jarring nonetheless.

Now he was gone. Even after my last-ditch efforts to pull out of him some answers, not just about life’s mysteries but about the mysteries of his life, I realized the brief accounts that he had given left me full of more questions than Pa was ever able—or willing—to answer, not just so late in the day but also throughout his life. Some of his reticence to share more, I chalk up to the stoicism of those of the Greatest Generation. Even by that measure, however, Pa or Pop or “Popsicle,” as I sometimes teasingly called him, was still a complicated and perplexing man. What I hadn’t fully realized as I was growing up was any of the reasons for his emotional reserve.

I wonder to this day what a six-year-old Richard Kerry was like on Wednesday, November 23, 1921. Did he wake up at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, eat his breakfast, hug his parents goodbye, and innocently head off to school carrying a lunch pail? Was he looking forward to Thanksgiving the next day? Did he rush out the schoolhouse doors onto the playground after lunch, chase a ball or find friends to play boyish games, completely unaware that less than five miles away at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, his father, having filed a will eight days earlier leaving everything to my grandmother, was walking straight into the lavatory, pulling out a handgun and shooting himself in the head?

Before the school bell would have rung to call Richard Kerry and the other students back inside, this forty-eight-year-old man, my (unknown to me) grandfather, had died instantly, violently and horrifically.

When did my father learn this? Who told him? What did they tell him? Did someone pull him out of class and rush him home early to be with his mother and older brother in shock and sorrow? Was there a knock at the front door, a policeman and a priest standing stone-faced on the porch to break the bad news to my grandmother?

For years, I had no idea how my grandfather had died. My father had little to say about it. Whenever I asked about my grandfather—when he had died, where he had come from, what he did for a living—all the questions one could imagine—my father was a combination of tight-lipped and seemingly unknowing about his own father.

For a long time, I was simply told my grandfather had been ill. Later I would hear stories of depression, or a business downturn, or womanizing—and God knows it may have been a combination of many things. I think I was sixteen, certainly after my grandmother had died, when someone shared with me that his death had been a suicide, but that was all—no details, no circumstances, just a distant tragedy that was better left in the past. As I grew older I asked my parents and cousins what they knew of his suicide. No one seemed to know any of the details. It was a mystery and seemed destined to stay so. But one thing I do know with certainty: whatever Pa knew and felt, it was a source of pain and some bitterness that he carried with him every day of his life.

Sometime after the suicide my grandmother packed up my father and his older sister, Mildred, and departed for Vienna, where some Kerry family members lived. My father’s much older brother stayed behind to continue his own career. No doubt Granny, as we called her, wanted to get away from the swirl of mystery surrounding my grandfather’s death. However, as if the burden of the suicide and sudden transformation of life were not already enough, within a year of the trauma, when my father had turned seven, his sister, Auntie Milly, as I came to know her, was stricken with polio.

As my father wrote many years later: “In 1922, when I was 7 years old, my 13-year-old sister came down with a devastating case of infantile paralysis. She was flat on her back for six months and was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. We were in Europe at the time and spent the best part of the 1920s there.”

On top of my grandfather’s death, my aunt’s sickness was a monumental blow. It consumed my grandmother and clearly left my father grasping for meaning. As I explored my father’s beliefs about religion in many later conversations, I learned that his bitterness and profound sadness over the loss of his father and his sister’s sudden crippling by a terrible disease crushed whatever faith he had once had.

Though raised Catholic by a mother more than zealous in her faith, my father could never reconcile the tragedies that befell his family with the concept of a merciful God. It was my mother, the Brahmin Protestant, who actually tended to our religious upbringing as Catholics and made certain we learned our catechism, received First Communion, were confirmed, and attended Mass regularly.

Auntie Milly’s illness became the focus of all my grandmother’s energy. She embarked on a broad search for a cure (or at least improvement) that centered on spas in Europe, and when the family returned from Europe in 1930, their quest ultimately included a stay in the spa town of Warm Springs, Georgia.

It was there that the family met another polio patient by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Roosevelt was sworn in as president, my father was invited to the White House with other families of Warm Springs residents. He told me that after the inauguration ceremony, the first group the president met with was his fellow travelers from Warm Springs. My father, then seventeen, recalled with awe the image of curtains being pulled back and Roosevelt standing there in his braces, talking with his friends who shared the same understanding of a life changed instantly by a silent stalker.

Fortunately, first in Chicago and then in Boston, my grandfather had been a successful retail businessman—at least until the moment of his demise. He left enough money to enable my grandmother to live comfortably for the rest of her life. While the crash of ’29 had enough impact to curtail the European meanderings and bring the family back to the States, it did not destroy my grandmother’s ability to live a good life. She bought a home in Sarasota, Florida, where the weather helped provide comfort for Auntie Milly. She spent summers on Piney Point in Marion, Massachusetts, looking across Buzzards Bay to Naushon Island, which, thanks to my mother’s family, would play a large part in my life. She continued occasional travel to Europe and took advantage of her ability to send my father to schools in Switzerland and then Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University and Harvard Law School.

They were not wealthy, but they were certainly always comfortable. When my grandmother died, she provided enough money for my father to pursue his dream of building a sailboat and sailing across the ocean.

My father’s passions were introduced to me, his elder son, from the earliest age. He took me skiing for the first time in Davos, Switzerland, when I was eleven or twelve—a place that would become a frequent destination for me as the host city of the World Economic Forum. On my very first day on skis—the old wooden-tipped kind that strapped my cold leather lace-up boots into bear-trap bindings in which there was no margin of safety (fall, and your knee or leg took all the pressure of being locked into the binding)—up we went to the top of the mountain with my father casually saying, “No sweat. Just point your skis forward and down and off you go!”

What my father was thinking I will never know—I asked him many times—but on day one on skis he took me down the Davos Parsenn, not the hardest run but the longest on the mountain. I literally did it mostly on my rear end. My father was an avid fan of the eight-millimeter home movie camera, so I now have reels of humiliation for my grandchildren to laugh at. Despite the embarrassing evidence of my early adventures on the slopes, I remain eternally grateful for his introducing me to mountains and a soaring sport, both of which I love with an exuberance that to this day exhilarates and revitalizes me every time I’m on a snowy mountain.

I can say the same for sailing. For my father, being on the sea became an obsession; for me, sailing was the beginning of a special, unbreakable bond with the ocean.

I vividly recall my early introduction to the magic of wind and sail. It was my baptism of a different kind—holding the tiller and learning the rhythm of the waves, the prance of the bow with a gust of wind, the dipping of the gunwale into the water just enough to challenge gravity but never enough to capsize, the bob of the boat with the swirl of the ocean—feeling the wind and spray in my face. Sailing became a significant part of my life, but not with the same intensity as for my father. Indeed, from college on, there were often large gaps between my time on the water—time spent on one campaign trail or another, or traveling as secretary of state. Despite the intervals between times under sail, I always yearned for the freedom and tranquillity of being at sea. It pulled at me. Even the brief moments when I could get out on the water were peaceful and restorative. Just the memories would feel good.

• • •

PERHAPS THE SEA was in our blood—in the DNA of both Kerry and Forbes families. Not only did our passions always stay connected to the ocean, but the original journey by which we came to America by sea, nearly 250 years apart. My Kerry grandparents arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Königin Luise on May 18, 1905. The “Manifest of Alien Passengers for the U.S. Immigration Officer at the Port of Arrival” lists Frederick Kerry, thirty-two years old, male, married, merchant from Austria, last known address Vienna, destination unknown, passage paid by himself, in possession of more than $50, never before in the United States. Below his name was Ida Kerry, 28, female, married, and below hers, Erich Kerry, 4, male, single—single and noted at age 4, imagine that.

Frederick Kerry’s “destination unknown” quickly became Chicago, the first place he chose to make the new beginning. For whatever reasons, that did not last and he moved to Massachusetts, where he ran a shoe manufacturing business. He did very well, settling his family in a comfortable home at 10 Downing Road, Brookline. By all the normal measurements, this immigrant family appeared to be living the American dream. This is the world my father entered.

Ten years after they had docked in New York Harbor, on July 28, 1915, the family welcomed Richard John Kerry’s arrival. Sadly, because of my father’s distance, both in time and emotion, from his father’s experience, my brother and sisters and I—indeed our mother and extended family—never grew up with the narrative of this journey across the ocean to America. It was in every respect the great American narrative—coming to the New World for a new life, experiencing the glorious welcome of the Statue of Liberty, landing at Ellis Island, starting over—but it was lost in the gunshot to the head in the Copley Plaza and, I assume, in other parts of the past that I was not to learn of until I was running for president in 2003.

Later in life I learned the full story of my grandparents’ journey to America, and I have often wondered whether my father had inklings of more to their odyssey than met the eye. The line from the musical Hamilton comes to mind: “In New York you can be a new man,” except maybe you can’t completely. Something caught up to my grandfather—what it may have been I will never know for sure. I can only imagine the questions my father must have asked—certainly of himself, if not his brother or his mother—and I can only imagine if he did know more of the story, how that likely would have affected his life choices and outlook. What was clear to me, which became evident in my father’s parenting, was that not having a father role model himself had a profound impact on me and my siblings. Basically on his own, his life was privileged and somewhat lonely. His sister was paralyzed, demanding huge attention from my grandmother. His brother was absent, away pursuing his own career. His father had abandoned him in a selfish, violent moment that must have been incomprehensible to this young boy.

When his mother uprooted the family to Europe, hoping to find a cure for Aunt Milly’s disease, Pa was plunked down in school in Vienna, their first stop. Every day he would take the streetcar to a school where classes were in German. Later he was sent off to several boarding schools in Switzerland, one near St. Moritz and one near Rolle, on Lake Geneva. My father talked fondly of his time at those schools. I imagine they provided something of a family for him. He once showed me a small picture album he kept with photos of his friends at school, their names handwritten in the margin. I never asked him, but I am certain his good memories of that time contributed significantly to my parents’ decision to send Peggy, Cameron—Cam for short—and me to school in Switzerland.

After the wandering family returned to the States, Pa was enrolled as a sophomore in Phillips Andover Academy and, from there, Yale University, graduating in the class of 1937, which included, among other notables, Potter Stewart, who went on to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and Texas oil magnate Perry Bass. I found it interesting that the history of the class of 1937 is entitled “A Rendezvous with Destiny.”

That destiny seemed to manifest itself quickly. The summer of 1939, before my father’s senior year at Harvard Law, he traveled to Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a small, sleepy French seacoast town in Brittany. The Emerald Coast, as it was known, welcomed vacationers to its beautiful, rocky shore with its interspersed wide beaches during the grande marée—the great tides, when the moon’s pull is at its greatest. This phenomenon produces thirty feet of ocean rise and fall, stranding small sailing boats and fishing vessels on the harbor bottom and exposing miles of sand when the tide goes out. It is the same gravitational onslaught of ocean that sends the sea rushing in to the famous Mont Saint-Michel at the speed of a galloping horse. As kids, we would visit the Cluny Abbey. We would walk out on the sand as far as we were allowed because of the quicksand, and then we would race in as the tide came up, our own game of tag with a powerful force. Later in life, my cousins and I waited expectantly for every grande marée so we could dig in the sand, near the house my mother’s family had there, for small sand eels—lançon—and search for octopuses in the rocks. Nothing will ever adequately describe the sheer pleasure of bare feet curling into the still-wet tidal sand; the wind, warm and soothing, as we would dart among the newly exposed rocks and probe around in holes with long metal hooks, occasionally pulling a live octopus out and turning it inside out before beating it madly with a wooden hammer to soften the meat. Children can get lost for memorable hours in such activities.

Saint-Briac, France, and Europe more generally had been home for my mother’s extended family since 1912, when my maternal grandparents, James Grant Forbes and Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, moved from Boston. Grandpa was working as a partner at William Blair, where he was involved with Pietro Giannini in the founding of the Bank of America. This was the work that most immediately brought him to a life with one foot in England and one in France. In reality, though, I am convinced it was in his blood.

Grandpa was born in Shanghai, China, where his father was engaged in business together with a Chinese partner. The Forbes family had long been involved in the China trade, shipping furs, silver, manufactured goods, cloth, wood—whatever would sell in China in return for loads of tea, silk, porcelain and decorative furniture. It was a lucrative trade, though accompanied by dark references to opium as also being part of the cargo. Much of the history of Boston was built on the courage and tenacity of those who went to sea to find riches in far-off lands. Our family boasted many an adventurer who was part of that history.

Why my maternal grandparents chose to be such longtime expatriates has never been satisfactorily explained to me, and, regrettably, I never explored it as much as I now wish I had. Of course, the 1920s and ’30s were filled with the stories of Americans living a high life in Europe, and many a college student since has been affected by the films and books chronicling that period. Indeed, during my years at Yale, I ran with the bulls in Pamplona and attended many a bullfight in search of Hemingway.

What I do know is that Grandma embraced the full measure of aristocratic English country life. She had strong (and ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Chapter 1: Childhood
• Chapter 2: Bright College Years
• Chapter 3: Raising My Right Hand
• Chapter 4: War
• Chapter 5: The War at Home
• Chapter 6: Finding My Way
• Chapter 7: The Old Senate
• Chapter 8: Holding Washington Accountable
• Chapter 9: Making Peace
• Chapter 10: A Time of Transition
• Chapter 11: Cancer and Comebacks
• Chapter 12: Within a Whisper
• Chapter 13: Dusting Myself Off
• Chapter 14: New President, Broken Senate
• Chapter 15: Mr. Chairman
• Chapter 16: Diplomacy in a Dangerous World
• Chapter 17: Getting Caught Trying
• Chapter 18: Preventing a War 485
• Chapter 19: The Open Wound
• Chapter 20: Protecting the Planet
• Afterword
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Image Credits
• Copyright