All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  All this was also preparation for what I would eventually do — but not in the way I imagined. I assumed I would be a priest before I knew what it meant. That's what my father did, and my grandfather, and my godfather, and my uncle, and all their friends. When I recall summer barbecues, I see them lounging in plastic-webbed lawn chairs, highballs in hand, wearing the hot-weather uniform — short-sleeved black dress shirts with detachable cleric's collars that flopped to the side when the top button was unfastened. By night's end, even our backyard became a kind of church. Smoldering briquettes and burnt-orange cigar butts served up the social equivalent of candlelight and earthy incense as my dad and his buddies sipped Greek brandy and sang Byzantine hymns.

  As soon as I could talk, I knew how to answer the question of what I would be. At home, I would preside at play liturgies with a towel draped over my shoulders, or sneak through piles of books in my dad's office to suck on the sweet metallic stem of his pipe while tapping out a pretend sermon on his typewriter. When my father was finishing his doctorate in theology, I added a twist, telling dinner guests I would be “a priest and a theologian,” relishing the weight of the big word as it rolled off my seven-year-old tongue. Everyone smiled at my use of a word I didn't really understand, while I basked in the attention that was my reward for carrying on a family tradition.

  But sometimes an expectation nurtured through childhood can come undone in a single moment. In 1974, when I was thirteen, my final eighth-grade assignment was a paper on a potential career. As expected, I wrote on being a priest and brought home my A. But that autumn, after we moved from New York to Cleveland, I started high school, and it hit me. I was sitting in homeroom one morning shortly before eight, thinking about nothing in particular, when the idea that I wasn't meant to be a priest, that I wouldn't bear the family legacy into the next generation, revealed itself with an intensity others must feel when called to the priesthood. I hadn't lost my faith, just my vocation, but I knew the decision was final. I was growing up and growing away from the only future I had allowed myself to imagine. Now if only I could tell my father, and my grandfather. When asked about my future, I started to slip around the questions until they stopped. I didn't know yet what I wanted — just what I didn't want, and that whatever career I chose had to be worthy.

  I also felt a need to answer to my extended family. Greeks came to America from dozens of islands and hundreds of villages, but here they formed a single clan, united by heritage, language, and a need to achieve. Those of us in the second generation understood that honoring the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents — the laborers, cobblers, waiters, and cooks — meant getting a good education and putting it to good use — as doctors, lawyers, professors, and politicians. Assimilation for Greeks didn't mean blending in; it required standing out. If a Greek like Ike Pappas was on television, all of us watched; if another like Nick Gage wrote a book, all of us read it; when Congressman John Brademas missed his chance to be Speaker of the House, we all felt his loss; when Vice President Agnew resigned, we all felt ashamed — a disgrace lessened only by the grumbled observation that he got what he deserved for changing his name and leaving his church. The rules were so clear they didn't need to be said: Make your name, and don't change it. Make us proud, and don't forget where you came from. Drilled into me were two awkwardly compatible ambitions: public service and professional success. Priests serve; immigrants succeed. I would try to do both.

  But first I wanted to blend in. Here's where I'm my mother's son. As a boy, I would spend hours upstairs, lying on the floor with my feet pressed against the radiator, leafing through yearbooks to find pictures of my mom — a pretty girl with dark hair and a wide smile whose American friends called her Gloria instead of her Greek name. Her picture was everywhere: Gloria at the newspaper, Gloria in the glee club, Gloria behind the wheel of an old jalopy filled with friends.

  In high school, that's the life I wanted. I still served in the altar and studied enough to get good grades. But I wanted to be one of the guys. So I snuck onto the golf course next door, went to the track, and played poker on Friday nights with the money I earned on Saturdays as a caddie, dishwasher, and busboy. I noticed girls, but they didn't notice me.

  Politics didn't interest me. Instead, I poured myself into sports. I was a chubby kid, pretty well coordinated, decent at soccer and soft-ball, but no natural athlete. I was barely five feet tall, so instead of basketball, I tried out for wrestling. The first practice was murder. Afterward, I could barely drag myself to the car out front, where my mom was waiting for me. I got in and announced I was quitting. Then came a surprise. Usually my mom let me do what I wanted so long as I stayed out of trouble. This time she just said, “No. Stick it out.”

  I'm still grateful. Not that I became a champion, far from it. I lost my first match 19–2 and never caught up. I guess I never developed the killer instinct. Before a bout I would look up at the clock from the side of the mat and remind myself that win or lose, the ordeal would soon be over. You could pretty much sum up my high school wrestling career with an item from our local paper my sophomore year: “The agony of defeat is etched in the face of Orange High School's George Stephanopoulos,” read the caption beneath a picture of me getting pinned.

  Wrestling, in short, was more about what the sport did to me than what I did to my opponents. Cutting weight was an extreme exercise in self-control. I woke up extra early to run a mile or two before school; did sit-ups and push-ups while watching TV at night. I dieted on oranges and ran through the school hallways wrapped in plastic to sweat out that last pound. Even water had to be rationed in the hours before weigh-ins. To this day, when I put my mouth to a fountain I unconsciously count the sips. On Labor Day freshman year, I weighed 120 pounds. By November, I was wrestling at 98. My body showed me what it could take, which helped my mind turn around and instruct my body to take a little more. Though I wasn't a champion, what lingered for me was an addiction to exercise and a belief in the power of discipline.

  But for all my desire to be one of the guys, I still wanted to excel — and it wouldn't be as an athlete. Columbia University spoke to my ambition in a different way. It was in New York City. It offered a distinctive core curriculum based on the great books, music, and art of Western civilization, and no one from my high school had gone there in decades.

  I thrived at Columbia, and junior year I had my first taste of Washington life, as a summer intern for our congresswoman, a Democrat named Mary Rose Oakar. The big legislative debate that summer was about Reagan's budget. I helped write speeches explaining how it would hurt Oakar's constituents in the working-class ethnic enclaves of Cleveland. Before that experience, I had considered volunteering for George Bush in 1979 and voted for John Anderson in 1980. But working against Reagan's budget made me a Democrat. I didn't think supply-side economics would work, and I didn't believe it was fair. Perhaps it wouldn't have happened had I had a different summer job, but unlike the millions of Democrats whom Reagan inspired to vote Republican, I was a Republican he pushed the other way.

  By 1982, my senior year, I still didn't know what I would do with my life. Law school seemed like the natural choice: finishing school for ambitious liberal arts majors who didn't know exactly what they wanted to do. It would also meet the Greek standard for achievement. The only problem with law school was that when it was over I would be in real danger of becoming a lawyer.

  I almost leaped in a completely different direction. As a volunteer Big Brother whose major was international politics, I was drawn to the Peace Corps and applied one day on an impulse. Around eight the next morning, I got a call from the on-campus recruiter: “George, you're in. We've got a spot, but you have to say yes right now.” I did, and went back to sleep. An hour later, I made a pot of coffee and wondered what I had done. Teaching English in Tunisia seemed like good work, but it didn't speak to the part of me that wanted to play on a bigger stage, in a world where a single act could affect the lives of millions. It didn't satisfy my
drive for secular success. After my second cup, I called back and said no.

  I wanted to do good and do well. Returning to Washington offered the promise of both. At Columbia's work-study office, I saw an announcement for internships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and won a job where I wrote book reviews and helped draft speeches about nuclear arms control, the subject of my senior thesis. The only problem was that the stipend ran out after six months. Unless I found something else, I had promised my parents that I would spend the next six months as a paralegal in Cleveland before starting law school in the fall.

  I couldn't have planned what came next. Everyone needs a break or two to get ahead. Mine came the night Norman Mayer was shot.

  Norman Mayer was an older man with a deep tan who wandered the streets of Washington in a nylon windbreaker, sunglasses, and a golf cap, looking like the caddie master at a country club gone to seed. He too was working on disarmament, but in his own peculiar way. If he caught your eye on the street, he would hand over a pamphlet that promised ten thousand dollars to anyone who could actually prove that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear war — a pretty lucid point for a deranged person. Occasionally, Mayer walked into our offices off Dupont Circle to lobby for his proposal. Since I was the lowest person on the totem pole, he was my responsibility. I'd offer him a sandwich, and we'd chat uncomfortably until I could find a reason to excuse myself and usher him out the door. Not exactly what I had in mind when I imagined Washington power lunches, but Norman seemed harmless enough. Until December 8, 1982.

  When I returned from lunch, my boss was waiting for me with a weak smile. “Your friend is holding the Washington Monument hostage,” he said. “You'd better call the police.”

  Dressed in a homemade space suit, Norman Mayer had driven a van he said was loaded with dynamite up to the monument and threatened to blow it up unless he could broadcast his plan to prevent nuclear war. Washington was paralyzed, and the world was watching on live television. After I called the police, reporters started calling me.

  So began my first foray into a media feeding frenzy — one of those times when everyone in the country responsible for bringing “the news” to the rest of us focuses for a moment on a single event. TV bookers who fill the airwaves with talking heads work the phones to find anyone with even the most tangential connection to the event. That day, that someone was me: I was the guy who knew the guy who was holding Washington hostage. Nightline sent a limo. I actually said, “Well, Ted …” on national TV, before telling what little I knew about Norman. My parents made a video, and calls came in from friends all over the country. To top it all off, a newly elected congressman from Cleveland named Ed Feighan was watching — one day after I had applied for an entry-level position in his office.

  Feighan called the next day: “If you can get yourself on Night-line, maybe you can do some good for me.” The job title was legislative assistant, which meant I would draft letters, memos, and speeches on whatever the congressman was working on. The salary was more than double my intern's stipend — $14,500 a year.

  I was thrilled with my new job but spooked by how I got it. Norman Mayer had been bluffing. There was no dynamite in his truck. But the police couldn't know that, so they shot him down near midnight when he tried to drive off the Mall. It's not my fault Norman got shot. I didn't drive the van or pull the trigger. Why couldn't he just surrender after making his point? Besides, I would have gotten the job anyway. I'm qualified, I'm from Cleveland, I'll work hard. Still … No, it wasn't my fault Norman got shot, but I couldn't escape the fact that his fate was my good fortune.

  Around this time, one of my new friends, Eric Alterman, introduced me to his mentor, the legendary journalist I. F. Stone. Nearing eighty, Stone had spent the last fifty years covering Washington on his own in his own way, always exposing hypocrisy, always challenging power, never getting too close to it. Eric arranged for us to meet at the bagel bakery on Connecticut Avenue. I can still see Stone at a small table, picking at his late afternoon lunch of a toasted bagel, raisins, and a cup of tea. With his wispy curls and clear eyes, he looked like Yoda come to life in a fraying flannel suit.

  “You've covered Washington so long,” I asked, “weren't you ever tempted to go into politics yourself?”

  “Once,” he answered. Sixty-five years earlier, when Izzy was in high school, the political “boss” of his class had offered him a place on the editorial board of the school paper — his dream job — in return for campaign help. But whatever temptation Izzy felt was quickly overwhelmed by a wave of nausea and a vow never to approach active politics again.

  I respected that sentiment, envied it, felt slightly shamed by it, but didn't share it. My new work seemed too thrilling to renounce, and I was a natural at the game of politics: at knowing who knew what I needed to know, at absorbing the rhythms of legislative life by walking the halls, at preparing committee hearing questions for my boss that might get picked up by the press, at learning to anticipate his political needs and to use his position to advance my issues too, at succumbing to the lure of the closed room and the subtle power rush that comes from hearing words I wrote come out of someone else's mouth.

  A democracy needs people like Izzy on the outside to keep it honest, but it also needs people on the inside to make it work — people who will play the game for the sake of getting good things done. But you have to be careful. Your first deal is like your first scotch. It burns, might make you feel nauseous. If you're like Izzy, once is enough. If you're like me, you get to like it. Then to need it.

  In October 1983, two days after a terrorist attack on American marines in Beirut, President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada. To me it seemed like a transparent diversion: Invade a tiny country in the Caribbean in order to keep people's minds off a terrible tragedy in the Middle East. I rushed into work that morning to write a speech for Feighan lambasting the president. “The whole country will see through this,” I assured him, “and you should be leading the charge.”

  Feighan questioned the invasion from the floor of the House — and he never let me forget it. Few other members of Congress joined him, and the public loved the pictures of those rescued medical students kissing American soil. I had made a tactical error in allowing my personal views to cloud my political judgment. Even if I believed I was right on the merits, I was wrong about the politics. I should have known enough to warn my boss that the invasion would be popular even as I advised him to speak out against it.

  Would that have convinced him? Maybe not; maybe it was my passionate certainty that opposing the invasion was a political winner that made my case. Whatever the truth, I learned that day to separate what I thought was right from what I thought would work, a skill that would serve me well — at a price. Judging how the world will judge what you do — how a position will “play” — is an essential political skill. If you can't predict what will work, you can't survive in office. If you don't keep your job, you can't achieve what you think is right. The danger is when you stop caring about the difference between being right and being employed, or fail to notice that you don't know what the difference is anymore.

  That month I also applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, a second try after being rejected as a college senior. Studying at Oxford would give me the opportunity to spend more time thinking about what was right rather than what would work, and would reassure my parents about my future. Only half joking, my father asked, “When are you going to stop playing around in Washington and get a real job?” So I made a deal with him. If I got turned down again, I really would go to law school.

  The selection committee saved me from that, and the scholarship offered the professional security of law school without the drudgery. The Rhodes is a passport to the Establishment. While it may not assure success, it guarantees opportunities to interview for great jobs. And the romantic vision of Oxford life passed down from scholars perched in the corridors of power is that while you're there, you get to read what you want, absorb
the wisdom of brilliant tutors, argue into the night, and travel around the world. All this without a career penalty; it's an idyll off the fast track.

  Unburdened for a time by the need to prove myself by getting good grades or impressing the boss, I had the chance at Oxford to learn and explore on my own. That fall a famine broke out in the Sudan. I went to volunteer in the camps and see the famine for myself — to understand why it happens, what it does to people, and write about it if I could. Helping feed a few kids or keep the camps clean was worthwhile work, and the articles I intended to write might heighten awareness. But the return ticket zipped in my knapsack reminded me that I was no Albert Schweitzer. This trip was as much about adventure as altruism, and I knew it.

  While I was in Sudan, the general who'd ruled for a generation with CIA backing was overthrown. On the day of the coup, I found myself in the middle of a silent riot. Mobs were milling about, but the only sound you heard was the squeak of sneakers on pavement. Then the radio announced that the general was gone, and the crowds started to race through the streets with joyful screams.

  The rest of the day I wandered through Khartoum wondering if this was what a real revolution was like. The air was charged with happiness and hope, energized by the belief that everything would be better now that the bad guy was out and the new guys could govern. But I was struck by the sight of a dazed old woman who was observing the celebration from her cardboard home by the side of the road. What does she think of all this? Will her life be any better tomorrow than it is today? Or is some human misery beyond the reach of any revolution? Is it possible things will get worse?