Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (2 page)

In his first two years in office, Obama had passed more substantive legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. But when, in 2010, he lost the gaudy Democratic majorities he had helped sweep in, progress was hard to find. Washington was more bitterly divided and gridlocked than ever. And, now faced with an implacable Republican opposition in control of the House and numerous enough to tie up the Senate, Obama himself had taken on a more partisan edge. The White House operator called me a few weeks before the election and asked if I was available for the president. When Obama got on the line, I asked him if anyone ever said, “No, I’m not available for the president.” He laughed. “Only John Boehner,” he said. The president had once viewed Boehner as a prospective partner. “He reminds me of a lot of the guys I used to serve with in Springfield,” Obama said, recalling his days as a state senator, when he worked easily across party lines. But that proved to be wishful thinking; the two never found a groove. Boehner would be hemmed in by the Tea Party contingent (who helped propel him to the Speakership in 2011), antigovernment absolutists for whom compromise was tantamount to treason. And Obama, burned too many times, grew increasingly dark about the prospects for reconciliation in Washington.

By denying Obama the collaboration for which he had hoped, the Republican leaders had shrewdly forced him into a partisan corner if he wanted to get anything done. And while the slow recovery and continued economic anxieties presented a challenge to his reelection, the president’s failure to tame Washington and build bipartisan bridges was the most often-stated disappointment among the movable independent voters who had decisively tilted his way in 2008.

So 2012 had to be a different kind of campaign, more modest in its ambitions and more pointed in drawing out the deficiencies of our opponent. In 2008 we had built a once-in-a-generation movement for change. In 2012 we simply ran a very proficient political campaign.

As I stood together with my colleagues, and watched the president’s emotional closing argument in Des Moines, I was tearing up as well. I was proud of Obama and what we had accomplished. I knew this amazing band of ours would never be together again, and I was moved by the sea of people, many with kids on their shoulders, who had come out on this cool election eve.

Gazing at young kids on their parents’ shoulders, I was transported back in time. I knew that those kids were
me
, the wide-eyed little boy on the mailbox. And I felt the same excitement I had that fateful day in Stuyvesant Town more than half a century before.

For all the division, rancor, and tawdriness in our politics, the enduring ritual of Americans coming together to choose their leader and chart their course still moved me—as noble and inspiring to a weathered political warrior as it had been to a five-year-old child in New York City.

After a lifetime of the rough-and-tumble, I still believed: in politics as a calling; in campaigns as an opportunity to forge the future we imagine; in government as an instrument for that progress.

Throughout those years, I had seen our democracy at its best and its worst. I had represented great men and women who had made me proud of my chosen path, and some who had left me disappointed, appalled, and, worst of all, ashamed. My childhood idealism was more measured and mature, shaped by the realization that even great leaders are human and, therefore, imperfect. I had lived the life I imagined as a little boy. Now this period of it was over.

For just as the president had run his last race, I had run my own. Our decade-long partnership was an impossible act to follow. He was an incomparable client—not perfect by a long shot; but brilliant and honorable and motivated by the best intentions; a good friend and a fellow idealist. I had been spoiled. The thought of starting over with someone new—and almost certainly somebody who would fall short of Obama—was unappealing.

Moreover, after more than 150 campaigns, I had to acknowledge the physical and emotional toll they had taken. Campaigns are at once exhilarating and exhausting. For the campaign “guru” (the driver of the strategy), they require the projection of utter assurance, even as you constantly wrestle with uncertainty. They dominate your life and infiltrate your mind, even when you’re sleeping (which is rare). Wisdom and experience have their place, but campaigns demand the energy and mental acuity of youth.

I had spent a good deal of my life on the campaign trail, as a newspaper reporter and strategist, and two glorious but draining years working twenty feet from the Oval Office at a time of seemingly perpetual crisis. And while I had lived my dreams, my valiant wife, Susan, and our three children had paid a high price. I was often away, even when I was home; too frequently an absentee father, leaving Susan and the family to cope with the impact of our oldest child’s debilitating, lifelong battle with epilepsy.

It was enough. So I knew even before the 2012 campaign began that it would be my last. And I relished every moment—the combat, camaraderie, and satisfaction of, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, spending myself in a worthy cause.

Now, in Des Moines, as the president made his final, fervent appeal, I thought about the many colorful characters, famous and obscure, I had covered as a reporter and conspired with (and against) as a political operative for nearly four decades.

And I thought about Jessie Berry, the wonderful woman, now long gone, who looked after me as a child and took me to see John F. Kennedy that fateful October day. What would she have thought if she knew that the little boy she put on the mailbox to catch a glimpse of the next president would one day work twenty feet from the Oval Office? Twenty feet from the Oval Office where a black man sat as president of the United States.

In 1960, in South Carolina, where Jessie was born and raised, the Negro’s right to vote was still being contested by literacy tests and white-robed mobs. This was the withering reality from which she fled.

How would she have felt if she had stood with me now, watching President Barack Obama make his case for reelection?

The half century between the campaign rallies that bracket my life has been one of revolutionary change—changes in our society; changes in our politics and our campaigns, the way they are waged and the way they are covered; changes both in government and in public attitudes toward it, as the boundless faith of the postwar years has often surrendered to the cynicism and gridlock endemic to our politics today.

I’ve seen those changes from many vantage points—as a youthful campaigner in New York City in the tumultuous 1960s; as a Chicago newspaperman in the 1970s and ’80s, chronicling the waning days of America’s last great urban political machine and the emergence of a black independent political movement that laid the foundation for Barack Obama’s rise; as a political strategist for nearly three decades, working on campaigns rife with drama and change; and as a top aide to a trailblazing president facing epic challenges and impossible expectations. This book is the story of that journey, from my seat on the mailbox in more innocent times to the inner sanctums of historic campaigns and the White House.

O
N
J
ULY
6
,
2009
,
I
stood with an
A
merican delegation near
R
ed
S
quare as a
R
ussian military band struck up a stirring rendition of our national anthem.
W
herever
I
traveled with the president,
I
found this rite moving.
T
here was something about hearing “
T
he
S
tar-
S
pangled
B
anner” on foreign soil that caused my chest to swell with pride.
F
or me, that day in
M
oscow also triggered a lifetime of memories.

Ninety years earlier, my father, Joseph Axelrod, had fled eastern Europe with his family, routed from their small village by the pogroms, the officially sanctioned wave of mob violence targeting Jews. Now, on the eve of what would have been my dad’s ninety-ninth birthday, I arrived in Moscow as an honored guest, senior adviser to the president of the United States.

My dad didn’t share many memories of those difficult early years. Once, he told me about walking with his dad, Morris, through a street strewn with bodies, to try to buy some bread. Mostly, though, he stored those searing memories in some dark recess of his mind, too painful a burden to inflict on a child.

Only after Dad died did I learn more of the story, from a cousin, Jack Biederman, who had fled with the family.

They lived in a shtetl in the south of what was then Bessarabia, a region that has since been divided. Most of it formed what today is the Republic of Moldova, but the area from which my dad came is now a part of Ukraine. By 1921 the entire region was engulfed by anti-Semitic violence. My grandparents’ home was bombed, and the family was forced to flee. My dad, an only child, was eleven at the time. His cousins Jack and Jack’s brother, Don, were younger. The scene was chaotic, and the boys were separated from their parents, who, as a precaution, had given them a prearranged meeting point on the Black Sea. “We were so little,” Jack told me, sobbing, a few days after my father died. “But somehow, Joe got us there. I don’t know how he did it, but we got there and found our parents.”

The family sailed from the Black Sea, along with many other Jewish refugees. They settled briefly in Montreal, but within the year, when my dad was turning twelve, they’d crossed into America and settled in the Bronx. It wasn’t long before my father had adopted the great American pastime as an enduring passion. Lean and athletic, he quickly excelled at baseball. He spent his days playing sandlot games with neighborhood kids, including a tall, young slugger named Hank Greenberg, who would go on to become one of the game’s immortals.

Within a few years, my dad had become a noted schoolboy pitcher. A crumbling, yellowed clipping saved by my grandmother from a New York newspaper touted the pitching exploits of the “elongated” Joe Axelrod, which struck me as odd, as my father was no more than five foot ten. It was either a commentary on the diminutive stature of athletes at the time or, more likely, a clumsy effort at embellishment by a rewrite man half in the bag.

“Elongated” or not, Dad was good enough to win a scholarship to pitch for Long Island University. After college, he played for semipro teams around the New York City area, until he severely injured his pitching arm in a fall on an ice-skating rink.

For years after, he was a young man in search of direction. He attended art school, where he sketched a dark, haunting self-portrait that still sits on my desk. He studied philosophy for a time at Columbia University.

In keeping with this bohemian lifestyle, when Dad registered to vote at the height of the Depression, he listed his party affiliation as “Communist.” Years later, when a friend used my dad as a reference for a promotion in the military, Dad’s youthful act of defiance came up.

“They figured if I had really been a member of the Communist Party, I would have registered as a Republican, to throw everyone off the scent,” my dad told me, recounting the drama. And of course, they were right. Dad wasn’t much of a joiner, unless you count baseball teams.

Into his early thirties, Dad earned a living, or at least his keep, mostly by helping out at the little shoe store my grandfather had started under the elevated train tracks in Brooklyn. The family had, by then, moved from the Bronx to a small, second-floor apartment in a house at Sea Gate, an oceanfront community near Coney Island. Sea Gate was a summer destination for Jewish families looking for relief from the heat. The beaches were filled with young people, and there, my dad met Myril Davidson, a student ten years his junior, who was visiting with her family from Jersey City.

The two could not have been more different. If my dad was easygoing, without great ambition or direction, my mother was as driven as a freight train.

Her father, Louis, was an immigrant from Russia who worked as a butcher to put himself through dental school. Writhing in his dental chair as a kid, I often thought Grandpa had never quite shed the brutal techniques of his old vocation. Outside the office, though, he was a gentle soul, an Orthodox Jew who lived for his family and faith.

Mom’s mother, Gertrude, a first-generation American, was my grandfather’s cousin before she became his wife—not unusual in those days. Grandma was a cold, hard woman. When my mother was in grammar school, she came home one day and proudly presented a report card that included a grade of “Perfect” for penmanship. Grandma looked the report card over, grabbed my mom by the hand, and marched her back to the school. When they found my mother’s teacher, my grandmother insisted that she change the grade. “No one’s perfect,” she huffed.

My mother was the proverbial middle child. Her older brother, Bill, was a great student who ran track and field for New York University. My uncle went on to become a noted war correspondent for
Yank
, an award-winning magazine writer, and the author of thirteen books. He was the apple of his parents’ eyes. And little sister Sally was their baby, leaving my mother the odd child out, craving approval and determined to achieve.

I’ll never know what caused my parents to get together, the driven woman and the drifter. Willful as she was, perhaps Myril saw in this bright, gentle man someone she could mold. Maybe Joe saw in this ambitious, attractive woman someone who would bring needed ballast to his life. Whatever the source of the attraction, in 1942, they married.

By then, World War II was raging. Dad was drafted into the army, and the newlyweds shipped off to Omaha—the town in Nebraska, not the beach in France where D-day began—and then Florida. After the war, they returned to New York City, where my dad used the GI Bill to pursue a doctorate in psychology while my mother landed a coveted reporting job at
PM
, a short-lived but celebrated New York daily. The paper, funded by Chicago newspaper magnate Marshall Field III, had a decidedly leftist bent. To ensure its independence, it accepted no advertising, and its roster of writers was a veritable Who’s Who of progressive literati. I. F. Stone was the Washington correspondent. Dorothy Parker and Ben Hecht were contributors. Theodor Geisel, better known later in life as Dr. Seuss, was the paper’s cartoonist.

My mother wasn’t an ideologue, but
PM
was a great gig for an aspiring young reporter. In those days, women were scarce in the nation’s newsrooms, and those women who did get jobs were generally assigned to the society beat. Not Mom. She covered education and worked her way onto the City Desk. While at
PM
, she also was detailed to Stone to assist on a series of stories that became his 1946 classic,
Underground to Palestine
, which chronicles the harrowing journey of European refugees who defied a British blockade to return to the Jewish homeland. It was a great assignment, but not entirely won on the merits. Mom explained that she got it, in part, because Stone’s hearing was failing, and she had a high-pitched voice. “He could hear me,” she said.

In 1948,
PM
closed after less than a decade, buried under the weight of its unsustainable business model and growing pressures over its left-leaning editorial bent. My mother turned to freelance magazine writing. My father got his PhD and went to work at a Veterans Administration hospital in Westchester, New York. The couple, now contemplating a family, settled in Stuyvesant Town, the mammoth new housing development that hugged the East River and divided the Lower East Side from Midtown Manhattan.

My sister, Joan, was born in 1949. After my mother suffered a miscarriage, I came along on George Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1955. Everyone likes to believe they chart their own life’s course, but it’s hard to ignore my mother’s role in mine, considering that she gave me a name she said would “look good in a byline” and insisted on decking our apartment with red, white, and blue bunting on my birthdays. If I couldn’t be the next Walter Lippmann, she figured, maybe I could be a congressman or senator.

In 1956 my mother made the transition from journalism to the emerging field of qualitative research. She began with a few freelance projects for advertising agencies, interviewing consumers about their attitudes toward various products. Within a couple of years this led to full-time work conducting focus groups. The objective was to get small, homogenous groups of people together to explore their feelings about issues and products. And with the probing instincts of a reporter, my mother was a natural, eliciting valuable insights for ads and marketing campaigns. Within a decade, she became director of qualitative research and, later, a vice president for Young and Rubicam, one of the nation’s largest ad agencies. Mom was hardly a feminist, but in both journalism and advertising, she surely was a trailblazer.

As Mom’s career took off, my parents’ marriage crumbled. She was frustrated by my dad’s lack of ambition. He was content with a small psychotherapy practice and insisted on charging his patients modest fees. “These people have enough problems,” he would explain when she pushed. Never a great pairing, Mom and Dad now increasingly lived in different worlds. Many of their friends in the 1950s were psychologists and intellectuals. Always sensitive to slights, Mom felt they looked down on her and viewed the crassly commercial world of Madison Avenue with scorn. Now her circle included the martini-loving
Mad Men
crowd, with whom my dad had little in common. They separated, tried to reconcile, and by the time I was eight, split for good—though they didn’t get divorced for another five years. When we were all together, the tension was palpable and painful. My mother was as subtle as a sledgehammer. When she was unhappy, her face dissolved into what my dad would call her “hangdog look.” My sister often had to play mediator, and deal with Mom’s demanding moods.

The wounds of childhood never fully heal and often cut across generations. Driven by the ravenous need for the recognition and approval she seldom got growing up, my mother was so preoccupied by the demands of her career that she had little time or emotional space for me. Mom also saw her kids mostly as a reflection on her. When we did well in the eyes of others, she was thrilled. When we did not, she was horrified. “What did they say?” she would ask when talk turned to school or work or whatever venture I was involved in at the time. I never exactly knew who “they” were. They could be teachers, bosses, or, when I became more visible, elite commentators or the public. When I worked for popular candidates or causes, my mother bragged. When I worked for controversial or, God forbid, losing campaigns, she would keep it to herself like a dark family secret.

We think that we can escape the pathologies of our past, but too often that turns out not to be true. My mother was scarred by her upbringing, and without malice or the least trace of self-awareness, she passed the virus on to me. On the one hand, I credit much of my professional success to the drive and skills I drew from her. On the other, I have spent my life fighting off the same debilitating self-doubt, too often fretting over the very same questions that obsessed her: “What did
they
say? What did
they
think?” It’s painful to acknowledge that my own children also paid a price, often losing out to my career in the battle for my attention.

If my mother didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth for me, I have to confess that I also wasn’t the easiest child to parent. In the parlance of today, I was a “hyperactive kid,” filled with maddening, unfocused energy. My mother called me “the Monster,” only half in jest. I couldn’t sit still, and even when I was sitting, my legs would be pumping, shaking everything within a hundred-yard radius—a habit that rattles my family and friends to this day. My handwriting was as far from “perfect” as one could imagine. As for reading, I could rip through a newspaper but had a hard time concentrating on anything long enough to finish my homework. I was a handful, salvaged, in part, by a few extraordinary (and extraordinarily patient) public school teachers.

My dad, Joan, and Jessie, our caretaker, filled in the gap, providing the love and support I was missing. Stuyvesant Town also was a safe haven, yielding a community of loyal, lifelong friends. As kids, we would hang out at the playgrounds until it was too dark to see. Later, we shared the raptures and torments of adolescence in a wild 1960s New York City scene. With numerous temptations and very few limits, we hung together and guided one another through many storms. Maybe that’s why I have always found comfort in community. Whether in newsrooms, campaigns, or the White House, I have thrived in communal settings, finding emotional nourishment in the friendships and camaraderie of the team.

Mine was the first generation raised on TV, and John F. Kennedy was the first president truly of the television age. He was suave, handsome, cool, and witty, with a picture-perfect family and the aura of a war hero. When I could, I watched his televised news conferences. I watched his stirring speech calling for the Civil Rights Act. I followed the drama of the Cuban missile crisis, my interest aroused by the absurd duck-and-cover exercises we would routinely hold at school to prepare for a nuclear attack.