'The
Interregnum': After the primaries, Kerry was cranky and his campaign
began to drift. The Bush war room wanted to 'define' him, and knew how
to get under his skin
Elise Amendola / AP
Kerry tried to forget the campaign
Newsweek
Nov.
15 issue - John Kerry was really ill. In November he had picked up a
cold, the ubiquitous campaign grippe, and by February he had walking
pneumonia. He had lost his voice. He looked even gaunter than usual;
Lincolnesque, maybe, but he was losing weight and he couldn't sleep. A
week after the New Hampshire primary, while campaigning in Kansas City,
Mo., he went back to the holding room after an event and lay on the
conference table. "I'm really sick," he said. He couldn't seem to get
up, making his staff very nervous. "I just want to lie here for a few
minutes," he croaked. But then he got up, as he always did. When Teresa
was on the road with Kerry, she fussed over her husband, recommending
various cures and soothing potions. "Sometimes my mom is very happy
when John is sick because she gets to brood over him," said Teresa's
son Chris Heinz. But Teresa did not like to campaign constantly with
her husband, and she had her own duties running the multimillion-dollar
Heinz Family Philanthropies.
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Campaigning
can energize a natural politician, like Bill Clinton, who feeds off
crowds and sucks up adulation. For the more solitary, shy Kerry,
campaigning—the day-in, day-out grind of meeting and greeting and
staying "on"—was always a labor, sometimes an ordeal. Kerry's best
friend from Yale, David Thorne, his former brother-in-law who had
stayed close even after Kerry's divorce from Julia Thorne in 1988,
worried about the toll on the candidate. The campaign was "depleting"
Kerry, Thorne believed. His old friend was stoic and dogged, and Kerry
rallied under pressure, but there was never enough time to truly
recover.
Kerry
could be cranky. He was not a petty tyrant, like some bosses. He could
be generous to his staff, who stayed loyal to him. But "he will whine
constantly," said one top aide, quoting Kerry's bouts of petulance: "
'I'm not getting enough exercise, I'm overscheduled, I didn't get the
speech on time'—on and on, ad nauseam." Kerry's campaign manager, Mary
Beth Cahill, didn't put up with much. "She cuts it off," said this
aide. "She'll say, 'It wasn't anybody's fault,' or 'Whose fault was
that?' " Kerry's personal aide, Marvin Nicholson, had to grin and bear
it. Kerry had met Nicholson, 33, at a windsurfing shop in Cambridge,
Mass., where Nicholson was working; he later caddied for Kerry at the
Nantucket Golf Club. Now the 6-foot-8 University of Western Ontario
grad was, in effect, his valet, serving his personal needs. The two men
were close friends, but Nicholson was still the servant.
The
morning after the Feb. 3 primaries, which vaulted Kerry into a
virtual-ly insurmountable lead, the candidate was fuming over his
missing hairbrush. He and his aides were riding in a van on the way to
a Time magazine cover-photo shoot. Nicholson had left the hairbrush
behind. "Sir, I don't have it," he said, after rummaging in the bags.
"Marvin, f---!" Kerry said. The press secretary, David Wade, offered
his brush. "I'm not using Wade's brush," the long-faced senator pouted.
"Marvin, f---, it's my Time photo shoot."
HOW BUSH DID IT
NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
Nicholson
was having a bad day. Breakfast had been late and rushed and not quite
right for the senator. In the van, Kerry was working his cell phone and
heard the beep signaling that the phone was running out of juice.
"Marvin, charger," he said without turning around. "Sorry, I don't have
it," said Nicholson, who was sitting in the rear of the van. Now Kerry
turned around. "I'm running this campaign myself," he said, looking at
Nicholson and the other aides. "I get myself breakfast. I get myself
hairbrushes. I get myself my cell-phone charger. It's pretty amazing."
In silent frustration, Nicholson helplessly punched the car seat.
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• Behind the Bush Win NEWSWEEK's Editor Mark Whitaker discusses how the Republicans got the better of John Kerry (Courtesy of CNN)
NEWSWEEK
The
headlines that winter were mostly good, as Kerry racked up one primary
victory after another. But there were some bumps and one near miss. On
Feb. 12 Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip columnist, reported that two
major news organizations were working on a story that Kerry had an
"intern problem" with a young female campaign worker. The story was
bogus, but in the post-Monica Lewinsky era, the Kerry campaign feared
it would break out of the cesspool of the lower tabloids and Drudge and
make it into the mainstream press, cause a distracting flap and
possibly open the door to a late Edwards challenge. Democratic members
of Congress, whose staffs read Drudge like everyone else in the
Washington journalist-politico world, were anxiously calling in to
Kerry headquarters. Kerry's staff had to feverishly work the phones to
newspaper reporters, imploring and bluffing and trying to play on what
little shame the press had left. "No one else is doing it. You'd be the
only one," the Kerry staffers would say to the reporters and pray that
they were telling the truth. The New York Post came closest to running
with the story but backed off. The damage was contained; it turned out
to be the usual confection of false rumors, possibly stirred up by
troublemaking staffers from rival camps.
