From This Day Forward (13 page)

 

CR: They had plenty of eighteen-year-olds, and it shows how unfair the system was. Not long after that the Selective Service changed to the lottery. In a town like Bayonne, where not many people went to college, the poor and less educated were snatched up instantly by the draft. People who had some money and the ability to get some education weren't. The poor died—the rich didn't. Even though I mightily disapproved of the way the draft worked, I was hypocritical
enough to be incredibly relieved that Steven had at least temporarily escaped. I was terrified of losing him. Not long after we were married, he had been assigned to cover the Newark riots. At about midnight he called me from the hospital where he was getting a casualty count and told me he'd be home in about forty-five minutes. Hours later, when he finally made it past all of the police checkpoints, he found me huddled on the floor inside the door of our apartment. I was so scared that he was dead. Like so many other young wives of the time, I saw Vietnam as a threat to my whole future, to all my hopes of happiness. Even if Steven had gone and come home safe, he would have had a life-altering experience that I would not have shared. I knew that there were certain disadvantages in meeting and marrying young, but I thought one of the real advantages would be a long shared history, which has turned out to be true. I hated the thought of him doing something so significant without me.

 

SR: But the Vietnam War was shadowing our lives in other ways. I was covering the student protests around the country and sympathizing with them. Cokie's father was the third-ranking leader in the House and a strong supporter of Lyndon Johnson. Religion had never really been an issue with my in-laws, but in that period politics sure was. There was one day when Cokie and her sister had lunch with their parents at a restaurant in New York, “21.”

 

CR: We got into a screaming, yelling fight about Vietnam, culminating in my sister and me walking out. Not a great display of maturity. The people in the restaurant clapped when we made our dramatic exit. I've been embarrassed about it ever since. It smoothed over quickly because nobody in the family was interested in having a fight last for any length of time, but it was a tense time for many families; lots of them were having those kinds of arguments.

 

SR: One family I wound up writing about was the Rudds. Mark was the leader of the Columbia student uprising in the spring of 1968, and his father was a military man, so it seemed like great material for a feature piece. The
Times
assigned me to do it, partly because Mark Rudd was a Jewish guy from northern New Jersey, just like me. I went out to his parents' house and rang the bell, but his mother wouldn't let me in. I turned on every ounce of charm and pulled out the names of all of these Jewish families I knew in their town, Maple-wood. She was dying to talk to me, but Mark told her over and over not to dare talk to anybody in the press. Finally, she gave in and let me in, because she wanted to tell me what a good son Mark was. To prove it, she told me that on Mother's Day, she'd made a casserole, driven to Columbia, and parked behind the building that Mark was occupying. He then snuck out the back way and ate the casserole in the car with his parents. You can imagine how humiliating that story was for this great radical when he read it in the newspaper. Then Mrs. Rudd showed me her garden, proudly telling me, “My son the revolutionary helped me plant this garden.” We spent a couple of hours talking, and finally, at the end of this interview, she looked at me and sighed: “Tell me, you seem like such a nice boy, have you ever done anything to upset your mother as much as Mark has upset me?” And I said, “Actually, Mrs. Rudd, I did. I married a
shiksa
” (a Yiddish word meaning a non-Jewish woman). At that point she gasped in horror: “My Markie would never do that!”

 

CR: Of course her son had turned the university and the city upside down. But a
shiksa
? Never!

 

SR: Also in this period I learned the drawbacks of marrying into a political family. The benefits were enormous—learning from inside the way political families have to deal with each other, and with their children. They have the same problems
everybody else does. Only someone who has sat around those kitchen tables, after the lights go out and the cameras leave, fully understands that. But I did a stupid thing. My father-inlaw was the chairman of the platform committee for the Democratic Convention and I heard from one of his aides there was going to be a negotiating session over the Vietnam plank, which was causing enormous divisiveness in the party. I wrote this modest little story about who was going to be at the meeting—there's this person and that person and Hale Boggs “representing the Southern point of view.” The next morning Cokie's mother called us in tears and said, “Why does Steve think Daddy is a racist?”

 

CR: This was a year when my father had voted for legislation outlawing racial discrimination in housing and came close to losing his own election over it.

 

SR: Of course, that wasn't the context at all. I was writing about Vietnam, not domestic policy. And there are few people in this world I admire more than my father-in-law. I always say to my own children, “If you want to understand what made your grandfather great, look at his stands on civil rights.” It was so shocking to me that Lindy would have that reaction, but it was a hard lesson in understanding that words have great power, particularly in dealing with a very public family. I have often said since then that it's very useful for any young journalist to be the subject of a story, preferably one that's a little unfair. Then you really understand what it feels like to be on the other side. And marrying into this family gave me that experience, at some pain, but a very important lesson.

 

CR: My parents were very forgiving, but the times stayed tense. We went to the Chicago convention, with Daddy running the platform committee and Steve covering the protes
tors outside. I was hugely pregnant and the protestors had thrown these stink bombs into the lobby of the Hilton and the smell was especially hard on a pregnant person. But my “condition” turned out to be a great advantage in the end because I was very thin and from the back you couldn't tell that I was pregnant. The cops, even in the convention hall, were so nervous that they would never let us stand still to talk. Everyone in the family had different credentials, so we'd meet in the hallways, plotting nefarious schemes like where to have dinner. A cop would invariably come along and prod one of us in the back with a nightstick: “Move on, move on, move on.” I finally learned to swing around in my full pregnant glory and declare, “Do it again and I'm going to have this baby right here, right now.” It worked! A very useful weapon.

 

SR: Exhausted after the excitement of the convention, we went to New Jersey to see my parents, who had moved from Bayonne to the pleasant town of Lakewood. After dinner on a particularly balmy night, Cokie and I decided to take a walk around their neighborhood. We had been walking for about twenty minutes when I spotted headlights behind us. The car seemed to be trailing us. “That's my mother,” I told Cokie. “Oh, no, it couldn't be!” she insisted. “Wanna bet?” I was right. We might think we were grown-ups and able to take care of ourselves. But my mother wasn't taking any chances with her first grandchild; heaven knew what evil might lurk in the night! Mom's had to put up with us teasing her about that for thirty years.

When summer ended we started baby classes. We had decided on natural childbirth, which was still pretty unusual in 1968, and it was difficult to find a hospital that would allow me in the delivery room. The only hospital we could find was Beth Israel, which was downtown on the East Side of Manhattan. We lived on the Upper West Side, so it was not
exactly a good choice, but it was the only one if we wanted to do this. We were convinced that if Cokie went into labor in the middle of the day and we tried to get a cab and go across town, we might not make it. But the teacher of the childbirth classes insisted it would be a long process. We had an appointment to go see the hospital on Sunday, October 20, just so we could get comfortable with the admissions procedure and see where everything was.

 

CR: My last day of work at Channel 5 was that Friday and the baby was due a week or two later. On Saturday, I asked Steven to screw on the little red-and-yellow knobs for the dresser I had painted bright blue, for the gender-neutral nursery of primary colors. Then I took a nap and woke up feeling lousy, but not in labor, according to all of the lessons. I cooked dinner but didn't eat it, and then, because I was bleeding, we eventually called the doctor. He was, thank God, a very conscientious soul and he said, “You better go to the hospital.” So we grabbed all the stuff they said to grab. I wasn't ready. The baby wasn't due. The bag I was supposed to breathe into came from the fish store. Bad choice. At about midnight we finally hailed a cab, and by this time I was very uncomfortable and scared either that this would last another twenty hours or that I'd get to the hospital and they'd send me home. That's what the classes had led me to believe. I kept saying to the cabdriver, “Don't worry, don't worry.” Because he was worrying! And he turned out to be right. When we got to the hospital, we didn't have a clue what door to go in, or what to do. Thank goodness the doctor found us and took us to a labor room. Then he did a swift exam and said, “Whoa! There's a baby coming here!” What a relief! No twenty hours, no going home, just labor and delivery to deal with!

 

SR: I had contracted with
Good Housekeeping
magazine to write an article about natural childbirth from the father's
viewpoint. The twelve-hundred-dollar fee paid for the whole delivery. So not only was I in the delivery room, I was there with my notebook. And in between gasps she looked up and demanded, “Is that notebook sterile?”

 

CR: In between gasps. The baby came soon. About two-thirty in the morning. My parents were staying in a hotel in New Orleans, and when I couldn't reach them I had left a message saying, “Cokie and Steve have left for the hospital to have the baby.” Then I called back a couple of hours later—I still have the messages—and said, “Tell them that Cokie has had the baby, a healthy boy, and they're both fine.” And the operator answered in that wonderful New Orleans accent, “Who is this?” I said, Cokie. She said, “Dawlin', you shouldn't be on the phone. What you doing on the phone?” My mother was my father's campaign manager, and because he was in the middle of one of the worst campaigns of his life, she couldn't hang out and wait for the baby. So she flew up that night, made a quick check to see that the baby and I were okay, bought out the infant department of Best and Company the next day, and then turned around and flew home, leaving an exhausted Steven reeling from all of this. Of course for me, it was nothing but a picnic.

 

SR: After her flying visit, Lindy left behind a shopping bag full of all of her notes and records for the entire campaign. She called me in a panic. I was lying on our bed, dozing, not having been to sleep in forty-eight hours. I heard my mother-in-law say, “Darlin', I've left behind my shopping bag with all of my notes for the campaign.” And I said, “Lindy, I've got it right here. I'll just pack it up and send it right to you.” The reply: “Oh, no, I don't have time for you to do that. You have to read it to me.” Well, there were dozens and dozens of little pieces of paper. Laundry slips. Envelopes. An
interesting way to organize a campaign, but it worked for Lindy. Remember, I hadn't had any sleep, and there I was reading these slips of paper. “Call Phyllis three o'clock Monday for fund-raiser.” And she says, “Why, darlin', you know Phyllis, she's married to Moise, and you know their kids….” Lindy somehow thought it was rude not to give me the full personal history of everyone she mentioned. Finally, I snapped, “I don't need to know everything! Just let me read it.” But she was incapable. She just had to tell me everything. At that moment I could've done with a little less darlin' and a lot more speed.

The next day I had to bring Cokie and the baby home from the hospital. So I went down to Beth Israel and packed them up in the car. I had put crepe paper and balloons all around the apartment to welcome them home. I got them settled and then went to work at the city room at
The New York Times
. Before I even sat down at my desk, the editor called me over. “I have something to tell you. We want to send you somewhere.” And I said, “Where? Washington?” Because all I wanted in the world was to go back to Washington. My great dream was to be a reporter in Washington. “No,” he answered, “Los Angeles.” Now I had been west of the Mississippi for one day in my entire life at that point, covering Ed Muskie's vice-presidential campaign a few weeks before. That's how carefully
The New York Times
picked an expert to cover California. But for the last year or so the youth culture had been exploding on the West Coast, and since all the
New York Times
reporters in California were in their fifties, they had completely missed the story. My editors looked around the newsroom, picked the youngest reporter they could find, and said, “You, go tell us what the hell is happening out there.” It was a great shock to me, and my first reaction was no. Where was Los Angeles? Fortunately, Cokie has always been a much more adventuresome person than me.

 

CR: Even though he wrote me that first note at the student convention saying never get comfortable, I was always the one saying, “Come on!”

 

SR: She immediately thought it was a good idea. That night I walked home up Broadway to our apartment and stopped at a bookstore and bought two books which symbolized our new life. One was
Dr. Spock's Child Care.
The other was
The Pump House Gang
by Tom Wolfe, an account of the youth culture of Southern California.