Taking one prize, then a bigger one {JOHN KERRY}
By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff, 6/19/2003
As he began his comeback in early 1982, John F. Kerry found a political landscape as changed as he was by events of the previous 10 years.
Gone was the rock star aura of the 1972 congressional candidate who had railed against the Vietnam War. In the buttoned-down Reagan era, Kerry was now Mr. Mainstream, a downtown lawyer with a wife, two kids, and an expensive home in prestigious Chestnut Hill.
Kerry's political goals had changed too, at least for the short term. His sights once set on Congress and the hothouse of Washington politics, Kerry was entering the race for lieutenant governor, a post with few prescribed duties.
In a crowded Democratic primary contest that was receiving scant public notice, Kerry tried to stand out, not only as a crime-fighting former prosecutor with progressive credentials, but also as a champion of a nuclear weapons freeze. For a candidate seeking a job with little influence over state policy, never mind global disarmament, the posturing was quite a stretch.
But the Vietnam War, Kerry's signature issue in the past, had long since ended. His antiwar constituency's new rallying cry was opposition to the arms buildup in the continuing Cold War. Kerry let them know he was an ally.
The freeze never caught on as an issue in the lieutenant governor's race, however. Instead, the campaign's core issues, as Kerry described them at the time, were "competency, experience, and vision." For a man who a decade earlier had debated the morality of a war, the thematic dropoff couldn't have been much steeper.
But this was the level at which Kerry could reenter politics after 10 years on the sidelines. And it was his first statewide outing.
Primary night was a nailbiter. Kerry didn't declare victory until 3:30 in the morning, after nosing past runnerup Evelyn Murphy in late returns. In the November election, he was paired on the ticket with Michael S. Dukakis, the gubernatorial nominee. They won easily.
Victory, however, came at a cost. Kerry won his first election and lost his first wife. By mid-campaign, his marriage to Julia had fallen apart. Struggling with depression since 1980, she felt abandoned and had tired of being, in her words, "a political wife."
Kerry's stay in the lieutenant governor's office would be brief.
On Jan. 12, 1984, a year into his four-year term, Kerry was in Germany's Black Forest on an acid rain fact-finding trip when he received stunning news of an announcement that would be made later that day back in Boston -- illness was forcing Paul E. Tsongas to give up his seat in the US Senate.
"I was woken up at 3 in the morning and told Paul Tsongas was not running," Kerry remembers.
An incredible opportunity was at hand. "But it was tricky," said Kerry.
As a candidate, he had said he was not seeking the lieutenant governor's job as a political stepping-stone. "I was concerned that it would be viewed as not having learned the lessons [of 1972] and that it was premature," he said.
"One year into the lieutenant governor's office, to stand up and say `Hey, I think I should be senator,' " Kerry said. "You know, it was ballsy.
"But it was the right place for me in terms of the things that were my passions," he recalled. "The issue of war and peace was on the table again."
Two weeks later, Kerry jumped into the race.
Not only did he have a legitimate platform to argue for a nuclear freeze, the issue would help propel him into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world -- the United States Senate.
Emerging from a crowd
Before making the leap to the Senate, Kerry had to deftly navigate the treacherous terrain of Democratic Party politics in Massachusetts, surviving two primaries -- for lieutenant governor in 1982 and for the Senate two years later -- that could have buried his Washington ambitions.
In 1982, the party had split along conservative-liberal lines for the grudge rematch between Governor Edward J. King and Dukakis, the man King had ousted from the corner office four years earlier. But at the endorsement convention in Springfield that May, the Kerry forces were ready for any outcome. In a crowd of Democrats straining for attention in the race for lieutenant governor, the Kerry camp offered delegates a choice of lapel buttons -- "King/Kerry" or "Dukakis/Kerry."
Because of his controversial past and recent stint as a commentator on WCVB-TV (Channel 5), Kerry enjoyed wider name recognition than his opponents. But he was not a favorite of the party apparatchiks. During a seven-hour, five-ballot endorsement scrum, Kerry barely qualified for the September ballot by winning 15 percent of the delegate votes.
But his floor troops artfully maneuvered delegates to help another candidate, former state legislator Lois Pines, reach that threshold on the second ballot. That meant that Kerry would face a primary field of two activist women, Pines and former state environmental secretary Evelyn Murphy, the convention's ultimate winner, and two male state legislators, Senator Samuel Rotondi and Representative Louis R. Nickinello.
In the shadow of the Dukakis-King slugfest, the race for the second spot on the ticket was little more than a sideshow.
Kerry cast himself as a progressive Democrat with urban appeal, a former prosecutor, and proponent of public infrastructure investment. He poured more than $100,000 of his own money into the campaign.
Then in private law practice, he received a huge publicity boost shortly before the primary when he and his law partner, Roanne Sragow, won freedom for George A. Reissfelder, who was 15 years into a life prison sentence for a murder he had always maintained he did not commit.
The low-key campaign was also noteworthy for the emergence in statewide politics of a young streetwise operative from Dorchester by the name of Michael Whouley, who ran Kerry's field operation. Whouley directed Kerry's impressive statewide organization in the `84 Senate quest and went on to become a prized operative in the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He now serves as an informal adviser to the Kerry presidential campaign.
The `82 primary race for lieutenant governor was a photo finish.
Joseph Baerlein, Murphy's campaign manager, recalls meeting Kerry on a pedestrian bridge over the Central Artery late on primary day. Kerry was glum, believing exit polls that showed him trailing Murphy in a very tight race, Baerlein remembers.
"I told him I thought it was going to be a long night," said Baerlein, now a lobbyist and consultant.
It was. With 29 percent of the vote, Kerry edged Murphy by fewer than 40,000 votes out of more than 1.1 million cast. He carried Boston, Worcester, Lowell, and several other key cities and rolled up more than half his victory margin in the old Fifth Congressional District, which had rejected him a decade earlier.
Publicly, Kerry was firing on all cylinders during the campaign, but it masked the turmoil of his private life. His marriage, troubled for some time, was in shambles. He and Julia had quietly separated in the summer of 1982. Julia maintained appearances, though, posing for photographs with Michael and Kitty Dukakis after John won the primary. She also attended the inauguration the following January.
But the marriage was beyond repair. "Politics became my husband's life," Julia wrote in "A Change of Heart," her 1996 book about divorce. "I tried to be happy for him, but after 14 years as a political wife I associated politics with anger, fear, and loneliness."
In an interview, she declined to elaborate on this period, except to say: "The dissolution of the marriage was my doing, not John's. I wanted something else."
After he took office, Kerry was romantically involved with Sragow for a few years, but Kerry said their relationship "had nothing to do with our marriage or breakup or anything." Sragow, now a state district court judge, declined to be interviewed.
As lieutenant governor, Kerry threw himself into his work and the excitement of returning to public life. When he took the oath in January, he stepped into a job with few responsibilities, except to serve as acting chief executive in the absence of the governor and chair meetings of the Executive Council, a vestige of colonial government whose primary function is to confirm or reject judicial nominations.
But Dukakis delegated tasks to Kerry, who seized the opportunity.
As he tried to make a mark, Kerry maintained a breakneck pace, squeezing in fatherly time with his two daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, who were living with Julia.
Kerry says his own experience, with long absences from his family while at boarding schools, helped him become "a better father . . . [and] make sure I was there" for his daughters. But he acknowledges the "juggling act" of public life took its toll.
Family time had to be shoehorned into his hectic schedule. For some events, Kerry's staff attended to details, including instructions in his daily schedule, such as this entry for Dec. 11, 1983, a Sunday.
"!!!HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!" (Kerry turned 40 that day.)
"2:30 p.m. Arrive Cabot Theater (in Beverly). Go to the box office and pick up the tickets (6). Note: There are no reserved seats. It's first come first serve -- This show is sold out.
"3 p.m. The Magic Show begins. After the show, you and the kids are to meet your mother at Friendly's Restaurant for a snack."
Kerry's public schedule was a blur of activity -- travel to conferences, endless political and ceremonial appearances, fund-raisers, and meetings.
He coordinated federal relations, with his office monitoring the budget, grant applications, and regulatory issues in Washington. Kerry was also vice chairman of Dukakis's Anti-Crime Council, helping to craft a computer crimes bill and pushing for a state racketeering law and victim-witness assistance program.
But he became known primarily as a national figure in the fight against acid rain. In 1983, Kerry's first year as lieutenant governor, his schedules show at least 23 trips out of state on official business, nearly half related to acid rain.
"John had a natural inclination to pursue environmental issues, and we hammered away on acid rain," recalled James S. Hoyte, who was Dukakis's environmental secretary from 1983 to 1988. "He threw his energy into it in a big way and gained a lot of visibility for the issue," said Hoyte, now at Harvard University as an assistant to the president and a lecturer.
Kerry's efforts culminated in a February 1984 resolution of the National Governors Association calling for cuts in sulfur dioxide emissions that were poisoning waterways in the Northeast. The resolution was a public relations coup but avoided the nettlesome issue of cost, which would have been borne mostly by the industrial Midwest.
boston.com
Continued...... |
