From This Day Forward (3 page)

 

CR: But I broke that date, and then the day before the game Jack Kennedy was killed. Steve and I decided to go away for that weekend because I was too upset to stay in the dorm with everybody watching TV and crying. We stayed at a friend's house in New Hampshire and I remember driving to church that Sunday. By this time Steve's parents had given him a car for senior year, so that made a big difference, but it was a miserable car which did not have a heater. This was Boston. Trying to get to church that Sunday was terrifying because the weather was bad and the car didn't have a defroster. This little tiny church in this little town in New Hampshire had a catafalque in the middle of the aisle to represent Kennedy. It was so strange.

 

SR: But that was an important weekend. We decided that we wanted to be together. Our college careers were defined by Kennedy's presidency—he was elected in the fall of our freshman year—and killed in the fall of our senior year. He gave young people a sense that we could participate and make
a difference, and we fully shared that belief. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other.

 

CR: In some ways we missed a huge American pageant that weekend because we didn't have a TV. All of America was experiencing the same thing and we weren't.

 

SR: We were learning a lot about each other. But I was starting to write a senior thesis and working very hard and continuing to act out these silly male attitudes toward dates.

 

CR: He would call me on Saturday morning and break a date for that night, saying he had to work too hard. So I finally caught on and started going in to Cambridge early on Saturdays and studying in the stacks at the Harvard library so he couldn't reach me to break the date. I would just show up at the appointed hour.

 

SR: Many of our dates followed the same pattern. I was working for
The New York Times
as their campus correspondent. It was a great job because I got a chance to write stories for the paper and establish a relationship with them and make a few dollars as well. My typical Saturday assignment was to cover some Harvard sporting event, like a track meet, then write a brief story. I would have to send it to New York and I had two choices. One was a really old-fashioned Western Union office, where I would peck out a cable on a totally dilapidated typewriter. Or I would call a recording room at the
Times
and dictate the story and spell all the names, to make sure there were no mistakes. To this day Cokie remembers the spelling of the star sprinter, Chris Ohiri, who was Nigerian. I repeated his name so often because I was convinced the desk would put in an apostrophe and try to make him Irish. I would make a swift $5.00 for this effort, but there was a restaurant in Harvard Square named Cronin's that had a din
ner special for $1.98, so the $5.00 covered dinner for two, plus tip. After dinner, Cokie often sang with her a cappella group, the Wellesley Widows. On many Saturday evenings they would perform around Boston, at different clubs or events, and I would sit in the audience with the other groupies. As the head of the group, Cokie was the emcee, so not only did I learn the words to every one of their songs, I heard her jokes over and over again. I guess not much has changed.

 

CR: Then your thesis was done. It was spring break and you decided to break up with me.

 

SR: I did? What happened?

 

CR: I went to Jamaica to sing and I came back really tan, which was a good thing because you met me at the airport determined to break up with me. But I looked great. Thank goodness I wasn't worried about skin cancer and wrinkles in those days. You had been home seeing your parents and they were quizzing you because we were getting close to graduation and the real world was about to happen. You had essentially said to them, “Not to worry, this relationship is not going anywhere.” And then you met the tan me and we went to Princeton to see my sister, Barbara, and her husband, Paul, and had a really nice time. So you went back home the next day and said, “Well, actually, maybe it is going somewhere.” And that was the beginning of the conversations with your folks and what it meant for the future.

 

SR: They were very uneasy. Bayonne was a strange place; the Jewish community was completely self-contained. I had friends outside of the Jewish community because I played sports around town. And occasionally there were non-Jewish girls in my high-school class who I got to know. I went to a sweet-sixteen party at a Polish-American home and it was like
going to another country, because hardly any Jews dated non-Jews. Also many of the brightest Catholic kids went to Catholic high schools, so I had had a very unfortunate experience in high school—I knew relatively few smart Catholic kids. It was easy to absorb the prejudice that most smart people were Jewish. In Bayonne, the first question anyone asked was “What's your religion?” At Harvard it was the fifth or sixth question. It was a thoroughly different environment. But my parents still lived in a world where it was the first question you asked. I remember my father saying, “If you marry this girl, we'll be strangers in your house, and we won't know our grandchildren.” That understandably frightened him terribly. But that's why the time we spent getting to know each other's parents was very well invested. At some point my father admitted to me, “Well, it would be a lot easier to oppose this match if it weren't so obvious that she's the perfect girl for you.” When I counsel young people these days who are in a mixed religious relationship, I always tell them, the more time you spend with each other's families, the better.

 

CR: My mother actually thought I might be taking up with Steven in order to show the world that my parents weren't prejudiced. My sister, Barbara, had been engaged to Allard Lowenstein and my parents opposed the match. Barbara and I believed they objected because Al was Jewish, and we were hurt and upset because we thought they had raised us not to have any prejudices at all, except, as Barbara used to say, against “Republicans and senators.” This was flying in the face of everything they had taught us, and I told Daddy that when he was driving me to work one day. He said, “Cokie, I've gone around and around in my own mind about this and I swear to you that is not it.” If it were Hermie Kohlmeyer, he insisted, the son of a Jewish friend in New Orleans, he would be giving his blessing. But Al scared him. “I just don't think this guy will ever be there for her,” he said, which was fair
enough. He had really thought about it a long time, grappled with it in his own mind, and that conversation convinced me that it was not prejudice that caused their opposition. But a lot of other people thought it was.

 

SR: I think it made a big difference that Cokie's parents had fought through this issue before I came along and had confronted their own feelings. It also helped that many of Hale and Lindy's strongest political supporters and good friends in New Orleans were Jewish, so they had had a different life experience from my parents.

 

CR: But none of this was easy. We graduated from college in an era when everyone got married right out of college. We were going to a wedding a week. So that began a period of angst, not knowing if we could ever work it out.

 

SR: One of Cokie's roommates got married in the summer after junior year and moved to California, taking her wardrobe with her. Suddenly many of Cokie's best outfits disappeared. There was one in particular, a beige corduroy number, that I missed for years.

 

CR: So while many of our friends were getting married, we were still dating. But we both ended up in Washington after graduation, so that meant we continued to see each other often. I got a job through the college placement office, of all things, working for a television production company here.

 

SR: During the fall of senior year I had heard about an internship offered by James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times,
and after I wrote to him, he invited me to Washington for an interview. I came down on November 1, 1963—I remember the date because it was the day the Diem government fell in Vietnam, a huge news story.
Still, Reston spent hours with me. Then of course the Kennedy assassination happened three weeks later, and yet, when I was home for Christmas, Reston sent me a handwritten letter saying, “Here's another Christmas present, you have the job!”

 

CR: My mother wrote you a letter of recommendation.

 

SR: Is that right? I had forgotten that.

 

CR: He said you were recommended by everybody but Charles de Gaulle.

 

SR: It was a very good thing that I came to Washington. Cokie was living at home and I was living downtown, but I was at the Boggs house—now our house—all the time. I even got used to Tabasco sauce on my eggs and chicory in the coffee, a New Orleans specialty that is definitely not for everybody. The other thing that really made a difference that year was the example of Scotty Reston. When I worked for him he was the most influential person in American journalism. His column set the tone and rhythm of the city. Yet he cared very much about helping me and developing my writing and he always made time to answer questions. But he was even more important as a personal role model. He had a long wonderful marriage to his college sweetheart, Sally—“my gal Sal,” he called her—and his wife and three sons were absolutely central to his life. Just by living that way and setting those priorities, he communicated to me that being married and having a family were completely compatible with reaching the top of your profession. In addition, he was a relentless advocate for marriage. He knew Cokie. He liked Cokie. He knew her parents. He would storm into my office, trailing pipe ashes, and say, “When are you going to marry that girl?” It made a big difference.

 

CR: But they were agonizing years, they really were. Oh, I don't mean we didn't have fun. Of course we did, a lot of fun. I particularly loved a trip to Coney Island where you won a stuffed animal for me by shooting basketballs, and then I made you go on the parachute jump. After showing off with the baskets, you were so terrified on the parachute ride—I can still see that look of sheer horror on your face.

 

SR: I've never quite forgiven you for that.

 

CR: Too late for that. It was because we liked being together so much that we agonized. There were times when we absolutely thought that this was not going to work, because of religion. I remember at some point that you thought your parents would cut you off if we got married, and I thought that we could not live like that. Your family meant much too much to you. I was traveling a lot, producing TV shows in different cities, and I remember miserable phone conversations late at night in hotel rooms.

 

SR: In one sense caring so much about family and tradition made it all harder. We could not ignore who we were or what we'd been taught. Converting was never a possibility for either one of us and abandoning religion was also out of the question. But gradually we came to realize how much we shared. The labels were different but the values were the same. And since then, we've often reflected that Catholics and Jews make good matches. We're both really good at loyalty and guilt.

 

CR: My reaction to all this was to be inclusive, to try to learn as much about Judaism as possible. I was in Cincinnati over Rosh Hashanah and one of the oldest temples in Reform Judaism, the Plum Street Temple, is there. I had no idea that tickets were required for services, so I went up to the door
and the usher asked, “What do you want?” I said, “I want to come in. I want to go to services.” They guy said okay and he walked me down the aisle and said in this huge stage whisper so the entire congregation could hear, “Here's one that came without her boyfriend.” It was not a good moment.

 

SR: We both understood that if this was going to work, we had to be supportive of each other and had to learn about each other's background. During college Cokie once took me to visit the nuns at Newton College outside of Boston. They were from the same Sacred Heart order that taught her in grade school and high school, and seeing Cokie's love and loyalty toward these women made a big impact on me. One of the things that I always tell people is that it can't be one way. It has to be two ways. Often I find that Jewish partners in a mixed marriage think that the Christian should learn about the Jewish part but don't necessarily understand that the Jew has to learn about the Christian part. It's got to be mutual. And by going to temple—even without me there—Cokie was making an important gesture of respect that helped convince me this could work. Today everyone says that Cokie is the best Jew in the family, and it's true. Not long ago our daughter had to bring a special dish, called
haroset
, to a Passover Seder, and she called her Catholic mother for the recipe. Eventually I came to realize that if you're serious about one religion, you're serious about all of them. The real question is whether you care about faith and ritual or not. And Cokie certainly proves that.

 

CR: One year when I was dragging Steve off to temple on Rosh Hashanah, he joked, “My mother was right. I should have married a Jewish girl; she wouldn't have made me go to services.”

 

SR: Even though we were working this through, and even though Scotty was on my case, none of that could get me to
pop the question. After my year in Washington, the
Times
moved me to New York, and we were separated again.

 

CR: And I decided I was wasting the best years of my life. I was twenty-two and I was about to be an old maid! Steven began to get a sense of how fed up I was one day when we stopped at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike and decided to share a Danish pastry. I was raised to believe a woman always gave a man the best piece of everything, and Steven was raised to expect that. That day, when I ate the center out of the Danish and left him the crust, he knew I was truly ticked. I finally said, “I'm not doing this anymore, I'm going to California.” And I really meant it. To me it seemed more painful to stay together, not knowing if we would ever be married, than to just end it and hope to meet somebody else.