From This Day Forward (2 page)

EARLY DAYS

COURTSHIP

We are often asked how we met, usually by young people who are still wondering about this marriage thing. When do you know you've found the right person? How can you tell? The problem is summed up by Steve's twin brother, Marc, who likes to put it this way: Choosing a mate is like being told to walk through a forest and pick up the biggest stick you can find. But you only get to pick up one stick and you never know when the forest will end. In our case it was even more complicated. Since Cokie is Catholic and Steve is Jewish, the
kind
of stick each of us chose was also an issue—to ourselves and to our families. But in another sense we were following a familiar pattern, meeting and marrying young. We both have brothers who married at twenty. Like us, Cokie's parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs, met in college, where they worked on the student newspaper together. Steve's father, Will, met his bride, Dorothy, on her seventeenth birthday. And he used to look around at gatherings of his children and grandchildren, when the tribe had reached eighteen, and
say with considerable pride, “See what happens when you walk a girl home from a birthday party?” Our story is not quite so romantic, but typical of our life—public and private threads woven together. Steve was nineteen, Cokie eighteen. It was the summer of 1962, between our sophomore and junior years in college, and we both were attending a student political conference at Ohio State.

 

CR: I saw Steven across the yard and he looked familiar to me because I knew his twin brother. And I kept thinking, Is that Marc Roberts? He doesn't quite look like Marc Roberts, but he looks a whole lot like Marc Roberts. And then I got up close to him and he had a name tag, so I said, “Are you Marc Roberts's brother?” And he said, “Yes, are you Barbara Boggs's sister?” And that's how we met.

 

SR: I had actually heard of Cokie all that summer. I had been recruited by one of my Harvard professors, Paul Sigmund, who was looking for student journalists to put out a newspaper at the World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland. I didn't know that our trip was financed by the CIA, or that Paul would later marry Cokie's sister, making us brothers-inlaw as well as co-conspirators. Another recruit was Bob Kaiser, then at Yale, an old friend of the Boggs family, and in Helsinki he kept telling me about this girl he knew at Wellesley, Cokie Boggs. But Bob made a critical mistake: he stayed in Europe. I went home early for the political meeting, and since I'd heard about her from Bob, I knew who she was when I met her.

 

CR: But he has this picture in his mind that I was wearing a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts and I have never in my life owned a pair of charcoal-gray Bermuda shorts. It was 1962. It might have been 1932 in terms of men and women. The fact that I actually spoke at this meeting was highly unusual.

 

SR: But I also found that intriguing. I think from the very beginning, the fact that Cokie was so independent-minded and so forceful appealed to me. I mean, she was not the secretary sitting at the back of the room taking notes.

 

CR: Although really, I took quite a few.

 

SR: We started flirting, writing notes to each other during these endless meetings, and Cokie has actually saved some of them all these years. On a long list of people who had been nominated for national office, I scribbled on the side, “You're so efficient it hurts.” She wrote back, “I'm the youngest child of an insane family—somebody had to be efficient, otherwise we'd starve!” I answered, “Be efficient, but Jeezus—don't ever get comfortable. It's such a deadly disease!” That statement probably defines the word “sophomoric,” but it also shows how little I knew about myself. I was actually looking for comfort and I think she might have known that. Her final word on the “deadly disease” question was, “Would that I could ever have the opportunity to catch it!”

 

CR: And then we went back to school. Our dorms were only twelve and a half miles apart, we later learned, but at first he didn't call me. So I think I called him and invited him to the Junior Show. Is that what happened?

 

SR: That would be typical. I remember sitting in the audience, watching her sing—a symbolic way to spend our first date. I remember afterward she was wearing a bright green dress, and we went to the Howard Johnson's down in the village for something to eat.

 

CR: And then I came home and I'd had such a good time, such a good time, I went dancing up the stairs singing “I Feel Pretty.” And then he never called.

 

SR: I didn't call because I was petrified. I had this rule that I didn't call a girl more than twice. I really liked her and I enjoyed the show, but I was unnerved. I was a typical guy. I was nineteen. But there were other guys from Harvard who went out to Wellesley regularly and I would hear from them, “Cokie Boggs asked after you.” So we had this long-distance communication. I knew where she was. I knew where to find her.

 

CR: And then in March of '63 my sister was putting on a big conference in Washington on creating a domestic peace corps. Most of the schools paid for their students to stay in hotels, but Harvard didn't, so Barbara had arranged for people to stay at our parents' house if they wanted to. We were expecting a whole crowd, but in the end, it was just me and Steven.

 

SR: We drove down to Washington together. I remember walking up to the car in Cambridge and seeing Cokie in the backseat of the car and saying to myself, “You made a mistake by not calling her.” Even before I got in the car, I knew there was something there. And the whole way down to Washington, we talked even though others were in the car.

 

CR: When we arrived at the house late that night, Steve had a terrible cold; he was coughing and hacking all through the night.

 

SR: I was staying in Cokie's girlhood room—later our daughter's room—and at some point I heard a knock on the door. Since this was 1963, I pretty much figured it wasn't Cokie. The door opened and there stood my future mother-in-law dressed in this flowing peach negligee—clouds of peach. I sat up in bed and my mouth just dropped to the floor. I had never met a woman like this in Bayonne, New Jersey. And she whispered, “Now, darling, you sound terrible, drink
this.” She didn't have to say “Open your mouth” because my mouth was already open! And it was some home brew, probably three-quarters bourbon, but it did the trick. The family joke is that I fell in love with my mother-in-law first and then got around to Cokie! And there's some truth to that.

We went to the conference the next day and a party that night. Bob Kaiser was there, and he was angling to take Cokie home, but since I was staying there, I had the inside track. We stayed up half the night talking in the den, and at some point Cokie made us scrambled eggs. In many ways we've been together since that night. It was clearly a turning point in terms of starting to feel connected to each other.

 

CR: Also during that trip, we went to visit my brother Tommy and sister-in-law Barbara's house. They were only twenty-two and twenty-three but they already had two children. Elizabeth was six months old and Hale was one and a half. We walked in and I said, “Hale, this is my friend Steve.” Hale immediately started chanting, “Bite, dump, bite, dump.” Steve was totally mystified and somewhat miffed because he didn't understand why everyone was laughing. Well, Hale had a Little Golden Book called
Steve the Steam Shovel,
and the steam shovel spent all day going, “Bite, dump, bite, dump.” You learned quickly that if you were going to have a relationship with me, you were going to have a relationship with all these other people.

 

SR: That's true. That first weekend certainly set a tone—meeting Cokie's mother, meeting Barbara and Tommy and those tykes who are now the parents of our grand-nieces and-nephews. And that was very much the way life was and continued to be; family always comes first.

 

CR: Then we drove home and we smooched all the way back even though there were other people in the car—but that part was embarrassing.

 

SR: That
was
embarrassing. But fun.

 

CR: So we had had this whole long night of talking, we had our embarrassing ride home, then we went out on a date and had a good time. Then you didn't call again.

 

SR: True enough—it took some sherry to push me over the edge. I lived in Eliot House, and our master, John Finley, regularly invited interesting people over for dinner. The guest one evening was a visiting professor of English named Mark Van Doren, and since I was taking his wonderful course that spring, I was the first one to sign up. Those dinners were among the few times that serving alcohol was officially sanctioned—we always heard that some rich alum had given a grant to supply the house with sherry. I had several drinks and was getting a buzz going and Van Doren was a marvelous speaker and the whole evening was just terrific. And I had to talk to somebody about it. I went back to my dorm room and I was bouncing off the walls and I called Cokie and started babbling.

Luckily I was supposed to speak on a panel at Radcliffe the next weekend. Harvard was a very sexist place—Master Finley used to say that his job was to keep his young men thinking about women 60 percent of the time instead of 80 percent—and girls were thought of as weekend dates, period. This never struck me as right, and I had been writing some articles in the
Crimson,
the student newspaper, about how women were not taken seriously enough in the community. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, was thrilled to discover this odd Harvard man who actually thought that women had brains. So she would trot me out at various events, and in my inebriated excitement, I told Cokie about my speech. And she said, “Well gee, I'd like to come hear it.”

 

CR: No dummy I!

 

SR: I started to say, “Great, come to the speech Saturday afternoon and we'll go out that night.” Somewhere in my deepest male soul I knew that I was crossing a line that I had never crossed before. This was breaking my rule of only dating a girl twice. It was so traumatic.

 

CR: Terrifying.

 

SR: So terrifying that I choked on the words. I actually had trouble getting them out, but eventually did. So she came to that event and we did go out that night.

 

CR: And then we went out all that spring. It was one of those years where the weather was gorgeous during the week and poured every weekend and our dating was pretty much confined to weekends because there were all these college rules. I had to be in the dorm at ten o'clock on a weeknight. Despite the rain, we had a very nice spring. We knew our religious differences could block any long-term relationship, so we kept saying, “Well, this is just because it's spring.”

 

SR: It later became something of a joke, as the seasons changed and we were still together, so we engraved “forever spring” into our wedding rings. But that spring did have a magic quality to it. I had always been uncomfortable and uptight on dates, but at some point I realized I could be at ease with this girl. That I could be myself with this girl. That I didn't have to worry about going to exactly the right restaurant or making sure we had the right movie tickets. If one thing didn't work out, something else would. It was the first time in my life I felt that way in the presence of a girl.

 

CR: On spring break we went to New York for the weekend. Steve was staying at home in New Jersey and I was staying at a friend's apartment in Manhattan. We went for a walk through Central Park, then to a movie, then to the Rus
sian Tea Room. We had apricots and plums and Steve said he liked those colors together, and from there on out I kept desperately trying to find apricot-and-plum combinations.

 

SR: I still plant flowerpots with those colors.

 

CR: And then we went back to my friend's and sat up all night talking and reading poetry, if you can believe it! Early Sunday morning I went to church and Steve got on a bus and went back to Bayonne.

 

SR: I walked into the house and my grandfather, who lived with us, was up already. He looked at me sternly because I had been out all night. He didn't say anything; he was a rather mild-mannered man. But I remember thinking, “Pop, if you knew the half of it. The girl I just left went straight to Mass.”

 

CR: We still told each other it was just a spring romance. And I certainly thought that was the safest thing to say. Anything more would have scared him off. But we were very happy and clearly in love. Then came summer and I went home to work for the government and Steve stayed in Cambridge to edit the student newspaper. But we did spend a few weekends in Washington together, and I went to visit Steve's parents in Bayonne for the first time.

 

SR: That was important because my parents were very uneasy about this relationship and we knew instinctively that the best way to deal with it was for them to get to know Cokie in a way that the Boggses were getting to know me. As a real person, not just a stereotype.

 

CR: But that summer Steve dated somebody else, which I found out about and didn't like a bit.

 

SR: I was still struggling with the whole commitment thing, and there were a lot of girls around who thought that the editors of the
Harvard Crimson
were pretty neat. At the end of that summer we went to another student political meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. I was flat-out mean to Cokie; that's the closest we ever came to breaking up.

 

CR: When we went back to school, it was tense.

 

SR: Slowly we started seeing each other again and we rediscovered there was something special between us. But it took a while to get over the resentments of the summer, and at one point she agreed to go to the Harvard–Yale game with somebody else.