From This Day Forward (28 page)

 

SR: Fortunately, I was fairly well established at
The New York Times
by this point. So while Cokie was in a position of proving herself, I had a little more security and a little more control. I wasn't great about it, Lord knows, but being at different stages in our careers helped a bit, I think.

 

CR: Well, it helped and it hurt. As you started to see how hard the home/work juggling act was for me, you started picking up more of the balls. On the other hand, I was in the uncomfortable position of being a junior employee, which meant I only had a two-week vacation and I sometimes had to work on weekends, which was terribly disruptive to the family.

 

SR: The best example of my increased flexibility came when the accident happened at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. It was in early 1979, a little over a year after Cokie had been hired onto the NPR staff. There was a threat of an enormous nuclear disaster. That morning Cokie's editor sent her to Pennsylvania to cover the story and she was eager to go; it was one of her first really big stories. Just a few hours later my desk told me to go, too, and I said no. It might have been the only time that I ever said no to
The New York Times
. But I had no expertise, they were just looking for a warm body, and I didn't think it was fair for the kids to have both parents away, particularly when they were worried we might be in danger.

 

CR: And they were scared. It was big news here and they were old enough to understand.

 

SR: That was the first time in our marriage where your work took precedence over mine. Don't you think?

 

CR: Other than finishing up the paperwork for
Serendipity
back in California, yes. I had been away on stories before that and you had helped some at home. I traveled some during the '78 campaign, doing stories on gubernatorial and congressional elections. I had been determined not to cover politics and Congress. I thought that would mean totally enmeshing myself in my childhood. Not only was I back in my house, but I'd also be back in my second childhood home, the Capitol. NO! In truth, because of the stage of life I was in, I was more interested in stories about school and children. But when the '78 campaign heated up, my good friend Linda Wertheimer said to the editors at NPR, “Don't you think that Cokie, who was raised in a political boiler room, should do some of these stories?” So I did cover the campaign and liked it. I went out and talked to voters and found out what was important to people. In my view, that still didn't make me a full-time Washington type. I would help Linda out on Capitol Hill from time to time, but I was not assigned there. That happened after the '80 campaign. That year Linda and I divided up the coverage: she reported on candidates and I wrote about voters. After the election, public television started a program on Congress called
The Lawmakers,
and Linda, Paul Duke, and I were the anchors. In order to do that program well, I really did have to be on the Hill full-time.

 

SR: It was the same for me. I had been covering politics and the Hill part-time and I was having fun doing stories about other things. I had spent nine years running my own bureau, and one of the great things about covering a region of America or a foreign country is that you can write about anything. Culture, economics, sports, family life. To do your job right you had to cover the whole society, not just the government.
As much as I wanted to come back to Washington, it was hard to shift gears and write about a very small slice of the world, politics, and public policy.

But we learned something important during the '80 campaign, something many families with two working parents come to realize. What's important is not just the number of hours worked, but who decides the hours. I learned that controlling my schedule could make the difference between chaos and sanity. During the '80 campaign we both came to understand that if we were covering voters as opposed to politicians, it was a lot easier on the family. If a kid had a soccer game and I was covering Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Carter was in Iowa, I'd have to be in Iowa with him and miss the soccer game. But if I had to do a story on farmers in Iowa, I could stay for the game and then go to Iowa the next day. It was a small compromise but a critical one, and it gave me a measure of control over my life.

 

CR: We also preferred covering voters to candidates. The stories were more varied and it didn't involve sitting through the same speech six times a day, but occasionally we paid a price, in the sense that we saw each other less. There were times we traveled together, but obviously it was better for the kids if one parent was at home.

 

SR: Most of the time we would leapfrog. Cokie might do a story on Southern whites in Birmingham early in the week, then after she got home I'd go write about rubber workers in Akron. At other times we met up with each other on the road. We spent our fourteenth wedding anniversary together in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, covering George McGovern's 1980 Senate campaign.

 

CR: I had been in Texas and you were in Ohio or someplace. I got on your plane in St. Louis going to Sioux Falls. I knew
you were going to be on that flight, but you didn't know that I was getting on it, too. You had all your work spread out on the tray table and I said, “Excuse me, could I please get in there?” You were so irritated to be interrupted! Then you looked up and said, “It's you!”

At the end of the 1980 campaign we wrote a big Sunday
New York Times
magazine article together, pooling the anecdotes and observations we had collected during the fall. When the galleys came back for the final edit, the piece needed substantial cutting. Steve had the galleys physically in his possession at home in Washington. I was on the West Coast in a hotel room and he would read me a section and say, “Well, this could go.” And I would scream, “No, it can't, it's my section! I wrote that!” This was before faxes and e-mails, so just because he had possession of the actual piece of paper, he had too much say over the cutting of that piece.

 

SR: But it was an example of the evolution of our lives. This was a double byline. We had contributed equally, it was a totally joint effort. A lot of the things we had written earlier had not been. Cokie had done the research and I had done the writing. But now we were both full-time professionals, covering the same assignments, and the piece ran on the cover of the magazine the Sunday before the 1980 elections.

We enjoyed working on the same stories but we talked shop an awful lot. The kids would complain about it and say, “We've heard enough about politics for tonight, thank you very much!” Fortunately, we weren't direct competitors. Cokie was working for radio and I was working for print, so she was always going to get on the air first.

 

CR: I could be the world's most generous colleague, I had the earliest deadline in town. That was before twenty-four-hour channels and constant news on the Internet.

 

SR: We helped each other an enormous amount. Covering the Hill, you could never be all the places you needed to be at one time, so we constantly traded information.

 

CR: An added bonus to covering Congress was my mother. It was lovely to be able to just drop in and see her during the day.

 

SR: I'm sure I was the only reporter covering the Hill who lived in constant fear of being kissed by his mother-in-law. There I'd be, trying to act like a grown-up, interviewing somebody important, and she'd swoop down and nail me. But it was great to have family around, after so long away from home. Being with good friends for rituals and holidays and birthdays was always very important to us, and one of the things we missed most during our travels was the connection to our actual families and to very old friends. Now we were able to rebuild those connections.

 

CR: During our years away we missed being around our brothers' and sisters' kids, and it was a treat to become full-time uncles and aunts, really for the first time. We have a big family Christmas, with turkey and goose and all the fixings, and it was wonderful to be back celebrating it with everyone I truly cared about. Now that my job was settled and interesting, and the kids were happy, I realized Steven had been right to come home.

 

SR: And my parents in New Jersey weren't too far away. We always spent the long Thanksgiving weekend at their house with all of my siblings. One year we rented a van and organized a big family field trip to Philadelphia. It was the first time I realized I was now a member of the sandwich generation. My father and my nephew Zak, the oldest and youngest members of our group, got lost at the same time, and of course, those of us in the middle had to find them.

The family connections grew even tighter when my younger brother moved to Washington. When he had been living in San Francisco during our days in L.A., he had been a wonderful uncle to our children, and after a stint in Boston he'd decided to look for a job in Washington. He stayed with us for a while, which was great fun for all of us, especially the kids, and after he found work on Capitol Hill and a place to live, Cokie and her lady friends declared him prime marriage material. He was a single, funny, bright guy who had never been married and very much wanted to be. Men that sane are in short supply in Washington, so Cokie decided that he was not going to go to a stranger. She had a younger friend at NPR who also happened to be from New Orleans—a perfect fit! We had a big party at home for recently married friends and we invited the two of them. It was in the garden, a pretty spring night. I came through the buffet line last and the only open seat was next to the person we had picked out for my brother. He was sitting at another table and I thought, “What's wrong with him, hasn't he figured out he's supposed to meet this beautiful woman?” I sat down. She and I had a nice chat, and then I got up to help serve dessert. When I came back to the table, my brother was sitting in my chair. It happens that this table was only a few feet from the spot where we'd been married, in the same corner of the yard where our
chuppah
had been. They soon started dating and just over a year later got married on the exact same spot. It's practically sacred ground. Since then, there have been two more marriages right there—friends of ours who Cokie introduced and our daughter, Becca. And that doesn't begin to count all the parties related to weddings, from engagements to anniversaries to receptions, we've celebrated in that garden. More than a dozen in all. My brother always loved the idea that we'd all gotten married under the same old apple tree, and after the tree eventually died, the friends who had used that same spot for their wedding gave us a new one. It's growing nicely, almost ready for the next couple.

EQUAL WORK

In many ways, this was the married life we had always planned, back during that first spring in Boston when the possibility seemed so remote. Steve had his dream job, covering Congress for
The New York Times,
and Cokie had her dream house, the one she had grown up in. Our daughter slept in Cokie's girlhood room and Steve farmed her father's garden. As our circle of friends and relatives continued to expand, every passing year required new and creative ways to fit everybody in for Christmas and Passover, birthdays and book parties. What we didn't anticipate back in Boston—or in New York or Los Angeles or Athens for that matter—was that our jobs would be equal. In fact, that they would be the same. And that sameness had its drawbacks. If you're sitting up in bed at eleven o'clock discussing the intricacies of the federal budget, you're doing something wrong. But the pluses far outweighed the minuses. We walked in each other's shoes every day, faced the same problems, covered the same stories. One member of Congress even complained one day about “stereophonic Robertses” as we fired questions at him from different sides of the room. And there was one phrase neither one of us could ever say to the other, a phrase that has gnawed and nibbled away at the foundation of many good marriages—“you just don't understand, dear.”

 

SR: This new equality in our work situations required me to take more responsibility at home, particularly when Cokie started hosting her show on public television,
The Lawmakers
. It was broadcast live, on Thursday nights. And it happened that the wife of the other
New York Times
reporter, covering the Hill, Martin Tolchin, taught at George Washington on
Thursday nights. Marty and I had kids exactly the same ages and both of us were on duty the same time. I used to say, only half in jest, that you could pass by the
New York Times
booth on Capitol Hill and overhear the high-powered correspondents saying into the phone, “Now, dear, set the oven at three hundred and fifty degrees…”

 

CR: Which of course happens with women correspondents constantly.

 

SR: That's true. We had one friend, a female reporter with two little boys at home, who was so tired all the time that she actually fell asleep one day in the front row of the press gallery, her arms draped over the balcony. The kids and I worked out a routine that we all looked forward to. Lee was already interested in the law, and a show called
The Paper Chase,
set at Harvard Law School, was on just after Cokie's show. So we'd have supper, and then watch our two favorite programs.

 

CR: Then I would get home and we'd watch
Hill Street Blues
. It's the only time we've ever organized a family night around television. But I took on that job without any idea of how much work it would be. I had the family, NPR, and then
The Lawmakers,
and the schools didn't help much. Even in a neighborhood like ours, I was surprised how few mothers worked and how the schools were completely geared to at-home moms. I think it's still true. The schools don't take responsibility for the fact that the world has changed. At the first hint of a snowflake, they close at one o'clock in the afternoon and send children home to empty houses and there's no way for parents to know unless they've listened to the radio all day in the office. And how was a mother on a factory line supposed to get the information? For the few serious snowstorms we have in the Washington area, the
schools could come up with a better system of communication. I had long conversations with the principal and teachers and tried to be infinitely reasonable, but I never felt the people on the other end were equally reasonable. The teachers would always try to schedule conferences at one o'clock in the afternoon. I'd say, “Could we possibly have it at eight o'clock in the morning?” Well, no.