An American Son: A Memoir (14 page)

At first, I assumed the separation would be another of our brief breakups, but after a few weeks I realized it was more serious than that. She seemed genuinely interested in exploring life without me. She didn’t appear angry. She didn’t treat me rudely. She just had an air about her of someone who was ready to move on with her life.

After weeks of unsuccessfully trying to repair the breach, I had a brilliant idea. I would show her how much better off I was without her. For the
next three months, I abandoned the regular pattern of my days—classes in the morning and studying in the evening—and threw myself headlong into Miami nightlife. I went clubbing, and I liked it.

It was an exciting time in South Florida nightlife, especially the South Beach social scene, where in the company of friends from high school I became a regular. We got to know all the doormen at all the clubs and never had to wait in line. The peak of the South Beach social season runs from early January to the end of April. I don’t think I missed many nights during the season in 1995. I was often exhausted by the time the weekend started.

I was having a grand old time, but I still knew this particular passage in my life was a temporary aberration. The curtain would soon fall and the rest of my life, my real life, would begin. I might have acted the life of the party, but I partied like someone who had something to lose.

In May, Jeanette started calling me again. She wanted to get back together. Now I demurred. Several times she warned me that if we didn’t get back together now, we never would. The breach would be permanent. I told her the breakup had been her idea, and she would have to live with the consequences. I was spiteful, prideful and filled with false bravado. And I was a fool.

One night, near the end of the South Beach season, my friends and I made plans to attend one of our favorite South Beach haunts for a “foam party,” where oceans of white foam are dropped from the ceiling and you find yourself dancing in it up to your waist. Jeanette told me if I went out that night, there would be no turning back. We would be over forever. I went out anyway. She had brought this on herself, I told myself. If we got back together, it would be on my terms, not hers.

That night, near midnight, I looked up and watched the foam descend from the ceiling. It was a sight to behold. Then my beeper buzzed. It was Jeanette’s number. I knew she was calling to see if I had gone out. If I called her back and told her where I was, our relationship would end. If I didn’t return her call, I would have to let her know the next day. I waded out of the foam to find a quieter place to consider my options. As I contemplated my predicament, I looked down at my shoes. They were perfectly white. They had been black when I arrived. The foam had somehow bleached the color out of my cheap and obviously fake leather shoes.

Maybe because I took it as a sign the life I was leading was phony and
unsustainable or just that I had suddenly found myself wearing white shoes, a South Beach fashion faux pas, I left the club and found the nearest pay phone. I called Jeanette and told her what I had done. She gave me another chance. Go home now or never see her again. Something told me I was facing an important decision in my life, maybe the most important decision. I hailed a cab and went home. It was the best decision I ever made.

Despite my nightlife adventures, I still managed to make good grades. I was on track to graduate with honors. That summer I worked as a legal intern in the local prosecutor’s office. I went to the courthouse every Monday morning and looked for a courtroom where a long line of people waited to be vetted for jury duty. Then I introduced myself to the lead prosecutor and offered to assist in the case. I worked on several felony prosecutions that summer, including a second-degree murder trial where the prosecutor allowed me to question one of the investigating detectives. During breaks in the trials, I would observe capital cases that were tried in one of the main courtrooms upstairs.

Every aspect of a trial intrigued me: selecting the jury, introducing your case, supporting with evidence and testimony every claim made in opening arguments, summarizing the case persuasively in closing arguments. Years later, I would employ in political campaigns and debates the organization and techniques of arguing a case before a jury. I introduce my hypothesis to my audience, and then use facts and figures to support it. I close by summarizing my argument in a style I hope is memorable and emotionally provocative. By the time my internship ended, I was certain I wanted to be a prosecutor. I loved the action of the courtroom, the drama of criminal cases and witnessing justice being served. The work seemed to suit me.

Florida Republicans were gearing up that fall for the 1996 presidential election. In November, the Florida GOP would host “Presidency 3,” or P3, a three-day state party convention culminating in a presidential preference straw poll. All the major Republican candidates were spending significant time and resources preparing for the event, signing up local volunteers as delegates. David Rivera, a young political operative I had met on the Diaz-Balart campaign, recruited me to the Bob Dole campaign. Despite his youth, David had already had an eventful career in Miami-Dade politics. He had been prominently involved in a factional fight over control of the
local Republican executive committee. The same warring factions would use the straw poll as a proxy battle. David had used his Washington connections to help him get an appointment to organize Dole’s P3 effort. His rivals joined the Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm campaigns. Dole won the straw poll and solidified his standing as the Republican front-runner, and we continued working for his campaign.

I spent as much time working on the Dole campaign that fall as I did on my law school classes. In early January, the campaign chartered a plane and flew some of us to Concord, New Hampshire, where we walked door to door, handing out Florida oranges to voters and asking them to support Senator Dole. I’m not sure how many voters we persuaded, but the trip went well enough and we had a lot of fun. A few of the younger volunteers stopped at a local liquor store and bought bottles of vodka. On the flight home, about ten of us celebrated our successful foray into New Hampshire politics by holding a vodka shot competition. I was one of the few still standing when the contest ended.

Halfway through the flight, I started to feel sick. I knew I had to get to one of the plane’s bathrooms before something unfortunate happened. I made my way to the front of the aircraft clutching a motion sickness bag when I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I was going to throw up in full view of some of the most prominent Republicans in Florida. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen sat to my right. To my left sat a well-known political operative who had volunteered on the campaign. I could either vomit on a congresswoman or on a fellow volunteer. I chose the latter. I tried to get as much of it into the bag as I could, but most of it ended up on his jacket. I ran to the bathroom, cleaned myself up as best I could and locked myself in there for the rest of the flight.

I was beyond embarrassed. I was convinced my brief career in Republican politics had just come to an abrupt and humiliating end thanks to my own immaturity. When a flight attendant knocked on the bathroom door and informed me the plane wouldn’t land until I took my seat, I refused. She persisted, and eventually I summoned all the courage I could muster and walked back to my seat covered in shame, literally and figuratively. John Thrasher, a future speaker of the Florida House, was on the plane and witnessed my humiliation, which he would playfully remind me of years later when he swore me in as a new member of the legislature.

The year 1996 would bring great changes to my life. I would graduate in the spring, and after I passed the bar exam I would practice law, preferably as a prosecutor in the state attorney’s office. I interviewed for a prosecutor’s job that spring. If all went according to plan, I intended to propose to Jeanette that Christmas. After Senator Dole wrapped up the nomination, David offered me the job of South Florida coordinator for the Dole campaign. I was interested, but I had also landed the prosecutor’s job. I explained my predicament to the state attorney’s office, and they agreed I could start after the November election.

I had skipped my commencement at Florida, but I had no intention of missing my graduation from law school. On Mother’s Day that year, my parents watched with pride as I accepted my diploma. All my life, they had exhausted themselves to give me every opportunity. Through all those years of ceaseless toil and sacrifice, they had made almost every decision with an eye to my future success. Now I had a juris doctor degree. It was the furthest anyone in my family, in the entire history of our family, had ever gone.

I visited Papá’s grave the next day. I remembered holding his hand as he slipped away. I remembered him squeezing mine as I swore to him I would work hard and make something of myself. Twelve years after his death, I had finally made good on my promise. It was the first time I experienced a feeling I would experience again in the years to come: my parents and grandfather living vicariously through me. They had given me their dreams—dreams they had once had for themselves. And with my every accomplishment, I was giving their lives purpose and meaning. I proved they had lived and loved and made sacrifices that were not in vain. Their lives had mattered. I felt my grandfather’s presence as I walked from his grave, and I feel it still.

I
SPENT THE SUMMER AFTER GRADUATION SETTING UP THE Dole campaign’s South Florida operations and studying for the bar exam. My job in the state attorney’s office was contingent on passing it the first time. I signed up for a review course and spent every free moment studying. I sat for the exam in August, and felt confident I had done well. Over 80 percent of people who take the exam pass it on their first attempt. Still, as I waited for the results, I had occasional bouts of panic that I was deluding myself and had failed.

Later that month, Jeanette and I flew to San Diego for the Republican National Convention. The campaign had asked me to work as a floor manager. In the old days of brokered conventions, the job of a floor manager had real authority. But in the modern era, when nominating conventions are coronations rather than contests, the job mainly entails making sure people cheer at the right time and hold up the right signs. Still, for someone new to the business, the convention was exciting and, for a brief moment, the center of the political universe.

When I came home the following week, I opened the Miami campaign office in Little Havana, renting space in a building that a few months earlier had been the studios of Radio Mambí, the leading anti-Castro Cuban exile station in Miami. Running a high-profile campaign in Miami had been a graveyard for the careers of more than a few aspiring Miami politicians.
Balancing the various political factions and pleasing the sensitive egos in local Republican politics was complicated work that had proven beyond the competence of many young operatives before me. My detractors, having failed to deny me the job, now relished the prospect that the rivalries and antagonisms in Miami politics would bring an abrupt end to my fledgling career. But, again, my naïveté spared me from recognizing their ill wishes and the possibility I might not be up to the job.

Senator Dole was a heavy underdog. During the primary season many of us supported him because he was the candidate most likely to win the nomination. But by the fall it had become increasingly difficult to build any excitement for the campaign. It was frustrating as well as difficult work, but on the whole a valuable experience. I became one of a tight circle of young, first-time operatives who remained loyal to Senator Dole’s campaign and worked doggedly for his election. We would remain closely associated for the next fifteen years.

David Rivera would serve as the rules committee chairman in the Florida House when I was speaker and now serves in Washington as a member of the Florida delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives. Alina Garcia would be my first legislative aide in the Florida legislature, before working for David in the same capacity in the legislature and later in Congress. She is also the godmother of my youngest child, Dominick, and her brother, Wilfredo, is a priest who baptized two of our four kids. Monica Rodríguez was another of my earliest legislative aides; her husband, Len Collins, served as my parliamentarian when I was speaker, and as legal counsel in my Senate office. Carlos Lopez-Cantera served with me in the Florida House, where he became an important committee chairman and later majority leader. Nelson Diaz was my legislative assistant in Tallahassee before going on to law school and a successful lobbying career. Jose Mallea worked for President Bush’s chief of staff Andy Card, and then as chief of staff to the mayor of Miami before managing my Senate campaign.

By late September, everyone knew Senator Dole would lose, and other than our small but dedicated group and a few loyal volunteers, it was hard to get anyone else to care about, much less work for, a losing campaign. In the end, I was never really in any danger of alienating prominent figures in Miami Republican politics. None of them wanted to be involved in the campaign.