A Song in the Night (27 page)

O
n April 30, 1994, two days after the South African elections had finished, I stepped off an airplane from Johannesburg in New York. As I made my way through the hallways to the plane to Boston, I stopped at a newsstand to
pick up the
Boston Globe
. A few days before I had drafted an op-ed column for the
Globe
and faxed it in the middle of the night. I had no idea if it would run. Opening the newspaper to the editorial pages, I found my piece printed at the top. Titled “Where’s the Passion?” the piece contrasted what I had just witnessed in South Africa with the discontent in Massachusetts.

“In Massachusetts hundreds of thousands of adults have become so skeptical of public leaders that they neglect to register, refuse to sign nomination papers, or simply do not bother to vote,” I wrote. “We have allowed ourselves to be deterred by inconvenience. This apathy grows from watching one’s ideals repeatedly manipulated by others for their personal and political gain. However often we have been disappointed, we must not add to this cycle of cynicism by concluding that the right to vote means nothing.” Nowhere had ideals been more grossly betrayed than in South Africa, I pointed out, yet that had driven citizens not to despair but to the ballot box. Their actions raised a question for Massachusetts. “Are South Africans displaying only a rash and youthful hope in democracy,” I asked, “or have they shown us how far we have drifted from the enthusiasm and principles on which we built our commonwealth?”

Five weeks later I appeared at the Democratic Party’s state nominating convention and discovered that democracy was not completely dead in Massachusetts. In the five minutes I was allotted on the podium, I asked the delegates to give me enough votes to put me on the ballot for lieutenant governor.
To everyone’s surprise, I received not only the necessary 15 percent but a decisive 24 percent, even though I had, up to that point, been a complete political unknown. After almost a decade of analyzing, teaching, and writing about social change, as well as witnessing it firsthand on the most profound possible level in South Africa, I had set something important in motion—something that had seemed almost impossible, even foolish, when I began the campaign eight months before.

Over the next four months I rocketed around the state, meeting thousands of people, speaking on topics that moved me, learning the mechanics of elections, defending my views before editorial boards and on television, and working with an exceptional staff and team of volunteers. Eventually I teamed up with a particularly talented driver, Graham Wik, the son of my campaign manager, Lynda. The two of us spent weeks traveling from town to town to town, like two astronauts sent on a distant mission.

I still needed infusions for my hemophilia, so we occasionally had to pull over by the side of the road to do a quick intravenous injection, and we often speculated about how hard it would be to explain to a police officer why I was shooting up. Politically prominent people increasingly returned my calls, so I found myself talking to congressmen and senators and governors, active and retired, about strategy. On one occasion I picked up the phone and the callers were Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, with whom I had worked years before in New York City on a project for Habitat for Humanity.

“We just wanted you to know that we’re both thinking
of you. We believe that you are a wonderful candidate,” said Carter.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, watching the telephone poles fly by as Graham and I sped down the highway.

Politics is a strange and often wonderful business, I thought as I hung up.

As we moved out of the doldrums of summer, I built up steam. Even though my opponent, a hardworking state representative named Marc Draisen, had the official allegiance of 129 of the 130 Democratic state representatives in the State House, I continued to attract support. A month before the primary, a major feature story appeared in
Boston
magazine. Then the
Boston Globe
, the
Boston Herald
, and a host of other newspapers endorsed me. “I wonder if this is what momentum feels like?” I asked Evelyn Murphy, a former lieutenant governor, at one point.

“It is, Bob, it is,” she replied.

On primary day I had nothing to do but go to various polling places to greet people, and when even the workers from other campaigns, including Republican ones, wanted to shake my hand, I sensed that I was doing well. That night I won the primary with just under 53 percent of the vote. After fewer than ten months, starting from nowhere, I was now the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. I was immediately paired with the winner of the gubernatorial primary, Mark Roosevelt (great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), to form
the Democratic ticket against the incumbents, Governor Bill Weld and Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci.

Weld had no primary opposition and had raised millions of dollars, which he spent ridiculing Roosevelt. I was not even considered worthy of criticism. Weld, it turned out, had a secret agenda; he wanted to win by such a devastatingly large margin that he could take on U.S. senator John Kerry in 1996. To do that, he needed to crush the Roosevelt-Massie ticket.

The White House looked at the race and decided, probably correctly, that with only seven weeks left in the campaign, there was not much that could be done. Nonetheless, President Clinton flew to Massachusetts and spoke on behalf of all the Democratic candidates on a stage in Framingham. I remember arriving early on the stage and seeing pieces of tape on the floor identifying where we should stand. The piece that said “MASSIE” was about eight feet away from a piece of tape that said “POTUS.”

“Who’s Potus?” I asked a Secret Service man.

He looked at me as if I were a moron. “The
P
resident
O
f
T
he
U
nited
S
tates,” he said laconically.

I bounced around the state with national Democrats. I spoke from the same stage as Hillary Clinton in Springfield and was touched to discover that she had read my parents’ book
Journey
. I introduced Teddy Kennedy (who was running for reelection against political newcomer Mitt Romney). I learned how to whip up a crowd so that they would greet him with a huge roar as he came chugging up to the stage, with a broad smile and a great slap on the back for me. On one
occasion Teddy went out of his way to introduce me. Listening to his resonant baritone talking about this “remarkable young man,” I found myself staring at my shoes in disbelief. Finally, just before the election, Vice President Gore flew to Boston to speak at a major fund-raising lunch. This was a special act of friendship, going back to my grandmother’s strong support for his father, Al Gore, Sr., during his first Senate race in Tennessee. Though the White House political office counseled against it and Gore was on crutches after tearing an Achilles tendon while playing basketball, the vice president overruled his advisers and came anyway.

All this did not stem the tide, either locally or nationally. The Republican Party had seized on President Clinton’s efforts to establish national health insurance and attempted to tear him limb from limb. Newt Gingrich announced his solemn support of the “Contract for America” and got the Republican members of the House of Representatives to line up to sign it. I debated the incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, Paul Cellucci, and learned what it was like to have a political opponent lean within inches of my face when on television to bellow out his answers. Bill Weld kept up his on-air humiliation of Mark.

The night of the election was sobering. I knew that we were going to lose, so I spent a long time preparing my very brief concession speech. We met in the Copley Plaza Hotel, just down the hall from the ballroom where Teddy Kennedy was celebrating his election to a sixth term in the United States Senate. As the numbers rolled, it was clear that we had lost by a large margin: 40 points (70 percent to 30 percent).

To my immense surprise, Rosalynn Carter appeared in person to thank me for my race and to urge me to run again. John Kerry, a long-time friend, came to the room with Teresa Heinz and took me aside. His long face looked worried.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “You did a great job. But this was a super-tough year. The Republicans are winning across the country.”

“Did we lose the Senate?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said,
“and the House.”
That came as a profound surprise and far outweighed my own anticipated loss. He was describing the arrival of what became the 104th Congress, the first House of Representatives controlled by the Republican Party since the 1950s.

When it came time to speak, I delivered my carefully worded critique of the grotesque financial and media carpet-bombing that Bill Weld had inflicted on Mark Roosevelt.

“Just as there is no honor in a mercenary victory,” I said, “there is no shame in a principled defeat.”

The party ended and I went home.

Though I enjoyed myself greatly in politics, the previous few months had been marked by the shock of a completely unexpected action by Dana, to whom I had been married for nearly eleven years. In South Africa we had divided up our time and the care of the children so that we could each make research trips, and she had disappeared for many weekends. She worried more and more intensely that at any moment I would begin my inevitable slide toward AIDS and death. Every cold
or cough became in her mind a sign of impending doom. I later learned that at one point, when we both fell ill for several days with a bronchial infection, she was sending secret e-mail messages to my family and friends to say that I was failing and they should prepare for the worst.

We increasingly lived in two worlds, one in which I was happily pursuing my life with my family, whom I loved very much, and the other, in which Dana felt isolated and sorry for me that I was in denial about my fate. At the time there was little in the way of support services for spouses of people with HIV, and our rare efforts to talk about these different experiences of life failed. We stopped trying. I became more outgoing and energetic while she withdrew into a cocoon of loneliness and fear. Eventually she found others from whom she could find support, including someone she came to care about deeply. I knew nothing of all this.

One night in 1994, after my campaign had been well launched, Dana came to me and announced that she had made an irrevocable decision to divorce me. I had no idea that this was coming. My first thought was that somehow she was reacting to the campaign, and I offered to end it instantly, the next day if necessary. She made it clear at that moment and over the following weeks that the campaign had nothing to do with it. Indeed, she said bluntly, she didn’t want me around the house trying to persuade her to reconsider. Her decision was final, though she would wait until the campaign was over to announce it. Together we went through many hard months while I did everything I could think of to find another solution.
She listened, and she sometimes talked, but from the moment of her announcement she never showed a single sign of changing her mind.

She had been preparing for another life for years, and now she wanted to live it. Her emotional connection to me had been cauterized by my health problems. For years she felt that she had no one to talk to and no one who understood. Originally she had thought that our marriage would end with my death and that she would endure a period of widowhood before moving on. Now, given that I appeared to be so well, the only alternative in her mind was divorce. During the months after the campaign we moved toward this outcome, which finally took place in early 1996. A few weeks after our divorce became final, Dana married the South African professor and missionary whom she had known for more than twelve years.