A Song in the Night (25 page)

Suffering of any kind is terrible, but needless suffering is worse, and deliberately inflicted suffering is a specially hideous
evil. The world abounds in deliberate, calculated cruelty wrought by rational persons on other persons. As the images rocketed past, my intellectual explanations and psychological defenses deflated and I felt only horror. John’s voice and mine intermingled, ringing like bell changes from a distant cathedral: “Are there any monsters in the world?” “Only human ones”—again and again, until I fell asleep.

F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, and the thousands of people who pulled together to build a new nation, woke every morning during this period and looked out at millions of people still boiling with deep historical grievances, reacting to current incidents of violence and gripped with fear that the future would only be worse.

How did they make progress? They designed a disciplined process and set clear expectations. Though their organizations had been enemies and were still in competition with each other, they found ways to work together. They promised that all the issues would be discussed until people around the country felt they had been heard. Accordingly, hundreds of groups pulled together in forums and debates and lecture halls and meeting rooms to announce their preferences. In retrospect, I can hardly believe how much time was spent talking. There were “national forums” on housing, on education, on a bill of rights, on a free press, on the role of the judiciary, which would sometimes draw in two or three hundred people for several days every few months. Everyone got the chance to speak,
and then to speak again, and to keep going, on and on, until people finally decided that the issue had been talked to extinction. This didn’t mean that every effort led to agreement, but it certainly meant that most people felt they had been given the chance to speak their minds.

As in the United States during our own revolutionary period, every political decision carried an attached theory. The natural tendency in political systems toward tyranny meant that there had to be checks and balances. Clarity of national purpose and efficiency of execution meant that there had to be a strong central government. Yet regional and ethnic differences needed to be acknowledged through smaller political boundaries, which Americans call states and South Africans decided to name provinces. The South Africans allowed their eyes to roam over the other constitutions of the world, and they adopted features from those of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. They worried about how to balance executive and judicial power. They debated for years about how to identify and preserve the individual rights of citizens.

Every morning I would rise from the bedroom that looked out over a piece of Table Mountain, descend to the kitchen, make a cup of coffee, and open the newspaper to read documents that reminded me of the Federalist Papers. In how many places in the world could one follow daily debates over fundamental constitutional issues at the moment of a nation’s birth on the front page, in the editorials, and even in the comics?

And in how many places in the world could one see an entire nation looking for a method that would enable the country
to mix justice with mercy? In most cases in which a war has taken place, especially a civil war, the victors expend their newfound power in hunting down and punishing the leaders of the other side as well as the perpetrators of the worst atrocities. The battles may no longer be military, but the sense of outrage and blame continues apace, with one side seeking openly to force the other to acknowledge their mistakes and pay the price.

South Africa had endured so many terrible acts over so many years, many of them in secret, that the truth, even after decades of efforts, thousands of prison sentences, and tens of millions in expenses, might still never be known. The need for justice in the most egregious cases was never doubted, but eventually the South Africans realized that an even deeper political and, more important,
human
need might be met through the creation of a commission that sought not punishment but truth, not vindication but understanding.

Thus the South Africans, borrowing from earlier experience in Chile, created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC. Cochaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and made up of leaders of all races and backgrounds, the TRC was given clear instructions. Anyone who had committed a crime could be freed from prosecution by stepping before the commission and offering a full and complete confession. If a person offered only part of the story, he or she could still be charged and punished by a prosecutor for the unnamed part. Only through a full explanation of what had happened would the hand of justice be stayed.

The process was only just being organized during 1993, and it was deeply controversial. It sounded to some like cheap forgiveness. Wiser heads pointed out that for a nation to begin anew, the secrecy needed to end. And the designers and participants understood a deeper truth: that in many cases, the families of victims wanted more than anything to know what had happened and why. Prosecution was only one tool to obtain that information. And now that South Africa was changing, many of the perpetrators were feeling troubled by their own decisions and actions. Over the months and years ahead, hundreds of men and women came forward to ask their questions, tell their stories, and bow, figuratively and literally, before the horror of what had happened. The testimony produced moments of excruciating human suffering and of remarkable courage. The process created the opportunity for those who had done something grotesquely wrong to ask their victims and their listeners, in all humility, for what they knew they did not deserve: forgiveness. It did not happen in every case, and perhaps it should not have happened in some, but when it did, it unleashed a healing power that took everyone by surprise and often left them in tears.

Though events continued to unfold at a blistering pace, with major decisions about the future of the country being made every day in the paper, our sojourn as a family drew to a close. I attended the memorial service for the assassinated South African Communist leader—and surprising peacemaker—
Chris Hani in Desmond Tutu’s cathedral in downtown Cape Town. After the service I joined an initially peaceful march that turned ugly as the police surrounded the central square with soldiers who carried military weapons loaded with live ammunition. I walked past burning cars and smashed shop windows into a huge rally, where I found myself caught between dancing, chanting, angry young African men and the white soldiers fingering the triggers on their machine guns. I realized uncomfortably that, unlike in the movies, there would be no background music to warn me when the shooting was about to start, and that I could there and then be killed by a bullet without ever being aware of what had hit me. I gradually withdrew and found my way back to my car. Eventually the protest ended without a massacre.

A few days later the negotiating parties took a major step and committed themselves to a firm date—April 1994—for the first countrywide elections to determine the future government and president. That move gave all the citizens a specific focus for their concerns and activism. The energy in the country shifted to making rules for the elections and analyzing the politics of various races. In the midst of all of this, Dana and I and the boys packed up and returned to the United States, at the end of June 1993. The weather in Cape Town was becoming cold and rainy as the region entered its dark winter period. Within a few weeks, however, we were sitting on the porch of an airy summer cottage in the Catskill Mountains, where we sometimes went for part of the summer. There was almost no news about South Africa, even in the
New York Times
. It was
as though we had awoken from a long, remote, and impossibly detailed dream.

The most surprising outcome of my extended stay in South Africa is that soon after I returned, I began to think about running for office myself. Up until that point I thought I had lived by a decision to work for change, but not through elective office. My experiences with Washington, with the Vietnam War, with Watergate, and even with my own short clash with the pharmaceutical industry had convinced me that politics was a corrupt, venal business, and that to step forward into political life was to risk both disappointment and contamination.

South Africa had changed this view. Of course there were huge complexities and unpleasant realities in that country, and the participants ran the gamut from virtuous to foul, with every intermediate blend. Yet it had been moving and exhilarating to watch a whole nation tackle its most basic problems, define its bedrock principles, and then put those into place. By flying practically around the world, I had come to a new appreciation for the democracy that had been born on our own soil here in America. When I returned to Massachusetts, two questions immediately presented themselves: Was I ready for politics, and was politics ready for me?

I assembled a group of close friends for a weekend and told them that I wanted their advice and spiritual scrutiny. That I felt a pull into politics was not in doubt; what needed to be answered, in personal terms, was more subtle: was this a temptation or a calling? Was I pursuing this purely as an act of
ego, or was there some deeper, more worthy motivation? My friends spent several days putting me through detailed questions, and I then spent months pondering the decision. Eventually I came away with a clear sense that I should try.

The decision to become a candidate did not automatically open a pathway within politics. In the fall of 1993 the state representative and state senate seats were solidly filled. The mayor of Somerville showed no signs of stepping down. To run for office, you need an office to run for. After examining the options carefully, I decided that there was only one: the office of lieutenant governor.

At first blush, this seemed to many like an absurdity. I was thirty-seven years old, I had no political network, no personal fortune, and no name recognition. I was not an athlete, a movie star, or an astronaut. Moreover, the lieutenant governor had an unclear role in politics and in government. I was often asked the same two contradictory questions by different reporters. First they would ask, “What makes you qualified for the second highest constitutional office in the state?” and second, often asked immediately on the heels of the first, “Why do you want this do-nothing job?”

My response was always the same: I wanted to reinvigorate democracy within both the Democratic Party and the state. I talked about all the things I had cared about for years—health care, social justice, jobs, poverty, and the excitement of directing our own future. To some, I undoubtedly seemed naive. Slowly my words began to seep out and affect people. People were tired of a political agenda that included nothing but anger and division, that talked only about crime, welfare, and taxes
(the three big topics that year), and they wanted to hear something and someone new.

I visited the chair of the Democratic Party, state senator Joan Menard, and asked her how many people were planning to run for lieutenant governor. She knew of only one, she said, a state representative. Is it possible that he would be the only person and might simply end up with the nomination? It could happen, she said. Did she know of anyone else who was thinking of running? No, she replied.