On
The Road: There were strains and stumbles in the Kerry camp, and the
president's daughters took the stage at the convention in New York.
Jonathan Torgovnik for Newsweek
The twins were hurt by their reviews
Newsweek
Nov.
15 issue - Looking back, as Kerry staggered in late summer and early
fall, some Democrats wondered if July 29 would be remembered as the
last truly happy night of the campaign. It was the last night of the
Democratic convention, and the Kerry-Heinz mansion on Beacon Hill was
noisy and aglow. When the nominee walked through his front door shortly
after midnight, he was enveloped in a gust of revelry. His guests,
intoxicated by the moment and Teresa's fine wines and champagnes,
lavished praise on Kerry's speech. Grinning, buoyant, the candidate
kept apologizing for having raced through the applause lines. "I just
had to get it done in time," he kept saying. He had not wanted to run
over the witching hour of 11 p.m., when the networks had threatened to
cut him off to return to their regular programming.
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Kerry's
extended family, generations of WASPy-looking Forbes and Winthrop
scions (Kerry had 32 first cousins on his mother's side), had marched
up Beacon Hill to attend the party in force. Later, repairing to one of
their ancestral haunts on Boston's North Shore, they observed how
relaxed and gracious Teresa seemed to be that evening. A few years
before, at her first family Thanksgiving with her proper Bostonian
in-laws, Teresa had recoiled at the Puritan simplicity of the affair.
Accustomed to the lavish and formal holiday celebrations of a
Pittsburgh heiress, Teresa had made clear that she was put off by
shabby gentility. But this night, in their grand house on Louisburg
Square, as the waiters bustled about with heaping silver trays, she was
in her element. To one of the Kerry cousins it really did seem like
Camelot redux, a brief and shining moment—all too brief, as it turned
out.
HOW BUSH DID IT
NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
The
Kerry for President "Sea to Shining Sea" tour left at 7 that morning,
its participants hung over and exhausted. The 3,500-mile bus-and-train
campaign tour was not a happy trip, certainly not for the candidate's
wife. With each passing day she made less effort to hide her
displeasure. Audiences were mystified when Teresa turned her back to
them at daylight rallies and wore dark sunglasses and a hat at night
(backstage, the candidate's wife complained of migraines and sore
eyes). In town after town, state after state, she would flit about the
stage, leaning in to make requests of her husband, sending him off on
small errands—to fetch bottled water or deliver a message to an aide
behind the scenes—while other people spoke. When she took the podium,
audiences seemed baffled, and some cringed. Speaking of everything from
clothes to her dead sister, she seemed to have a singular ability
(though matched at times by her husband's) for sobering and silencing a
cheering crowd.
The climax of the tour was
an hourlong "family vacation" hike in the Grand Canyon. The idea was to
watch Kerry's photogenic family appearing hale and vigorous on the way
to a picturesque overlook, where Kerry would hold a press conference to
castigate President Bush's environmental record. The imagery was not
subtle: the Kerry family loves nature; Bush wants to ruin it.
Vanessa
Kerry thought the whole thing was a little silly. Kerry's daughter,
like her older sister, Alexandra, had appeared lovely and poised during
their brief convention turn at the podium. But while Alex, an aspiring
filmmaker and actress, seemed to enjoy playing the part of candidate's
daughter, Vanessa was still having trouble saying goodbye to her
private life. She traveled under an assumed name and, in the early days
of the campaign, sometimes ran from well-wishers at airports. She had
dropped out of Harvard Medical School for the year, partly to avoid the
stares of her own teachers. Moving from her apartment in late June, she
had been accosted by a man who said, "Hey, you look just like that
Kerry girl." Lugging a bureau, dressed in a stained T shirt, Vanessa
replied, "You know, I get that all the time." "Don't worry about it,"
said the stranger. "She's not that bad-looking." (Kerry told
the story to her father. When he got over laughing, he teased her
mercilessly, repeating whenever she was cranky or sulky: "Don't worry
about it, you're not that bad-looking.")
Now,
as she hurried along a hiking path down the Grand Canyon, trying to get
ahead of the press gaggle and enjoy the scenery without feeling like a
TV prop, campaign handlers kept whispering, "You should hang back, walk
with the family." Vanessa was unhappily muttering to herself about the
absurdity of staged family vacations, but the reporters weren't
noticing. They were too busy watching Teresa.
On
the campaign bus, there had been constant talk of marital spats between
the candidate and his wife for the past several days: Teresa wasn't
speaking to her husband, she wanted to go home, she was driving the
Secret Service crazy with her chronic lateness, she was having perhaps
a glass of wine too many at night. Or so it appeared to the traveling
press corps and not a few of Kerry's own entourage. (Teresa's friends
scoffed at the suggestion that she overimbibed; they described her as a
European bon vivant who enjoyed a glass of wine or two.) That morning
at the Grand Canyon, the press corps was atwitter over the rumor
published in the Drudge Report that the night before in Flagstaff,
Ariz., Teresa had requested separate accommodations from Kerry, on the
other side of the Little America Hotel. ("It's wrong, they did not have
separate rooms," said Kerry aide Michael Meehan.) On the Grand Canyon
hike, Teresa was soon complaining of migraines and telling her husband
she couldn't walk anymore.
The
happy-family-vacation scenario was disintegrating in plain view. The
candidate tried to bravely soldier on, pulling along his sullen wife
and children to show them the magnificent condors flying overhead. It
was a losing battle; he was the only one who looked interested.
