From This Day Forward (32 page)

 

CR: After a year in Chicago, Becca moved to Philadelphia and started working for a political consultant, so I regularly used her as a source! It was a treat to have her just a short train ride away.

 

SR: Lee was even closer. He went to law school here and then worked as a lawyer in Washington for three years. His apartment was just a few blocks from my office at
U.S. News
and on his way to work he would walk right past my parking lot. Some mornings I'd see him on the street and we'd stop and chat, but he was usually at work much earlier than me! He offered to give me a key to his apartment, saying I might like a place to drop by during the day. Cokie demanded, “What for?” and nixed that idea fast.

I had moved from
The New York Times
to
U.S. News
while the kids were in college. Our professional lives changed at the same time our personal ones did. During that period I came to understand why “midlife crisis” is such a common phenomenon. The kids left home, and like a lot of other people, I took stock of my career, wondering about the future. It all happens at once. I think of it as the forty-five-year-old disease, because that's when it happened to me, but people hit a crunch point at different ages.

 

CR: This midlife crisis stuff is much more a male thing—I haven't seen it happen to many women I know. I'll be curious to see how it evolves in future generations, but the expecta
tions of many women my age were so different from what our lives turned out to be, both for good and for bad. Since we grew up at a time when the ultimate goal in life was marrying well, most of us measured our success by whether in fact we had succeeded in doing that. What we're doing professionally is like icing on the cake. It never occurred to most of us that we'd be in this place at this age. Whereas the men we knew always had great expectations, unrealistic expectations. Half of them expected to be president or editors in chief of newspapers. Then they come face-to-face with life in their late forties, or early fifties. They realize what didn't happen and what's never going to happen and they have a tough adjustment to make. Whereas for women, of my age and acquaintance anyway, we look at what we're doing professionally with some surprise: “Hey, that's pretty cool.”

 

SR: Well, it was cool. As National Public Radio became more popular, so did Cokie. After
The Lawmakers
went off the air, she contributed pieces to
The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour
and then started making occasional appearances on
This Week with David Brinkley
. In 1988, when she signed a contract with ABC, she was better known and better paid than I was. I don't pretend the transition was an easy one, but from the beginning I don't think our core relationship ever depended on who made more money or appeared more often on television. That was still true even after the balance shifted, and I give Cokie a lot of the credit; she never tried to use her new position to change the relationship.

 

CR: Oh, please, what would I do?

 

SR: I think a lot of marriages founder on this. The person who makes more money, the person who is more visible, can easily use that as leverage. It happens all the time.

 

CR: I do remember saying to you, there were years and years and years when not only did you make more money than I did, but I made hardly any money at all, and you didn't resent that. I know there's a difference between attitudes about men and women on this question, I'm not stupid, but I think you heard me.

 

SR: Cokie's success in many ways has been liberating for me. I was able to make some decisions, like teaching college, not based on money because I was no longer the chief breadwinner.

 

CR: Which is a terrible burden. I had never really thought about it because I was a girl. We have this expectation of men that they are supposed to be out there making it right for the whole family and it's an unfair expectation.

 

SR: Things had come to a head for me at the
Times
. I had left the Hill to cover the last two years of the Reagan White House, but as the Bush Administration was coming in, a new bureau chief came in as well and decided to shift reporters' assignments. And I realized that I was running out of options for advancement.

 

CR: He had always talked about this problem, even when we were very young. He would say, a guy joins the
Times,
goes to New York, goes to Washington, goes abroad, and then he's thirty-six years old and where is he? Well, Steven was older than that, but still, the pyramid was narrow at the top and he could do one of three things: keep doing what he'd always done, become an editor, or leave.

 

SR: I had seen several generations of people above me go through that process and I knew it was inevitable. One of the options that the
Times
suggested was becoming an editor and
in some ways it made sense. I had always produced a lot of ideas and helped plan our political coverage and tried to be a mentor to young people in the bureau. But I had become a reporter because I loved being out every day and learning something new, and I feared that by coming inside I'd stop learning and deal only with recycled information. More important, I had to be honest with myself—would I be happy losing my visibility, my byline, at the same time that Cokie's career was taking off? When I asked that question the answer was no, I would not be happy, and in fact I thought it would be risky for our relationship. So I decided to accept an offer as a senior writer from
U.S. News and World Report,
where I would have a chance to move beyond straight reporting and establish myself as an analyst and commentator.

 

CR: I couldn't imagine him ever leaving the
Times,
and I worried that would put us in a bind at some point because his loyalty was so great. Look, I'm the beneficiary of his loyalty to me. I think it's wonderful. But I worried that his loyalty to the
Times
meant he could never leave. For many years, if you woke Steve up in the middle of the night and said, “Who are you?” he would say, “A
New York Times
reporter.”

 

SR: After I made the decision Cokie joked that it was a question of my leaving the
Times
or leaving her. A gross exaggeration, but the experience reminded me of that series I had done about divorce back in California. I remember one therapist saying to me, listen, marriages are forced to carry so many burdens. People want to change their lives, but there's not much they
can
actually change. They can't change the way they look, at least beyond a certain point. They can't change their skin color or ethnic origin or who their parents are. They can't even change their basic talents and abilities. What they can change is their spouse, and marriages can easily crack apart under that pressure. So I was much better off trading in a twenty-five-year job instead of a twenty-three-
year marriage. And I actually think that leaving the
Times
was very healthy for our relationship.

 

CR: Partly because that last year had grown so unpleasant. You were no fun. After you had been gone from the
Times
for a few months, the sunny you returned. I suddenly looked around one day and realized, “I've got my husband back.” Neither one of us was fully aware of how destructive that period had been until it was over.

Steven felt unappreciated at the
Times;
everything about that relationship had gone stale. So starting a new job where people wanted him and flattered him made him feel good as a person. We've been saying that in any marriage, it's important to appreciate each other and do the things that work for each other. We can't make bosses do that, no matter how hard we try. And no matter how hard we try to leave work problems at the office, they're bound to affect life at home as well.

 

SR: But even after I left the paper I had to come to terms with Cokie's growing celebrity. In those last months of turmoil at the
Times,
one possibility was returning to Capitol Hill. It probably was not a good idea anyway, but the bureau chief said no and appointed a woman to the job instead. At one point my frustrations came spurting out and I said to Cokie, “This woman only got the job because she was a woman.” I was hurt and angry about it, and my feelings spilled over onto Cokie. It was one of the few times that I expressed any resentment or rivalry toward her, and I didn't like the way I felt or sounded. At that point I decided that the only way to manage this was to stop being competitive. Our relationship was too important to put in jeopardy over professional jealousy.

 

CR: There were some fairly dramatic conversations where I would announce, “I'm quitting. This is not worth it.” There
has never been any question in my mind about what the priority is here. Let's make that clear.

 

SR: Every time you said that…

 

CR:…you always said, “That's crazy.”

 

SR: I never expected you or wanted you to give up your career. I knew what made you happy. This goes back to our first days in New York, with you parading around in your nightgown in the middle of the afternoon.

 

CR: I had a coat on.

 

SR: What made it easier is that I've always been Cokie's biggest supporter. People come up to me all the time and say, “I'm a great fan of your wife's,” and my answer is, “So am I.” I knew her talents long before the wider world did.

 

CR: And had confidence in me long before I did.

 

SR: But people don't always believe me. In fact, there was even a magazine piece written by a woman who was absolutely determined to portray me as this fragile male who simply could not handle being married to a famous woman.

 

CR: She didn't like you. That's all I can tell you. I don't know why, but she plain didn't like you.

 

SR: Apparently not. But it seems to me that the key to sanity is a sense of proportion. One day a TV interviewer asked Cokie to retape a conversation because she had talked a little too long and kept him from saying more. Here's a guy who appears on national TV all the time and he was bickering about a few seconds. The thought occurred to me: “How much is enough?” Somebody else will always be richer, better
looking, appear on TV more often. Since then, that phrase has become a maxim we say to each other when things are getting a little nutty. How much is enough?

That time we hit on something important on our own, but often we've needed someone looking in from outside to make us realize that there's some lesson we needed to learn. Familiarity is a great gift, but over a long period of time we've occasionally fallen into patterns of behavior where we've irritated each other and not listened. And sometimes it's valuable to have someone else point that out.

 

CR: I have a sense from my friends that good marriage counselors do that. They're voices from outside saying, “Listen to yourselves.” Steven had this experience after reading a book by the linguist Deborah Tannen.

 

SR: She's a shrewd observer of speech patterns and the way people relate to each other, and a few years ago I interviewed her for a program on public television. One thing that would drive me crazy about Cokie, and occasionally still does, is her tendency to interrupt me. It caused some real tensions. There were evenings after parties with very unhappy recriminations. But I had to study Deborah Tannen's work to do this TV show, and she says in one of her books that this is a common problem between men and women because they approach conversations differently. Men see them as competitions…

 

CR:…as speechmaking…

 

SR:…as occasions to score points…

 

CR:…to show off…

 

SR: Women see conversations as a more cooperative endeavor, and when women chime in, or interrupt, they think they're helping.

 

CR: That's the way we talk. And the truth is, when Steven listens to a conversation between women, he can't stand it. We're constantly interrupting and going off on a path and coming back. We all know what we're doing. It's a completely different language from the one men speak. I can't abide going to a meeting with men because they rattle on trying to impress someone, and who cares? I feel like they're wasting my time. I could be doing something important like folding the laundry! By and large, women don't behave like that. So when Steven read this book, it hit him in the face—hey, this is what we've been arguing about all these years. She's just acting like a girl.

 

SR: I can't say we've never had a disagreement on this subject since. But that insight sanded down a particularly sharp edge in our relationship. And even though it's true that the way women talk can be irritating, it's also true that I generally prefer the company of women to men. I don't go out and pal around with a lot of guys who are insensitive or uninterested in what women say. I find that by and large women talk about relationships and men talk about…

 

CR:…sports…

 

SR:…issues. I'm more interested in relationships. I like having conversations with women at parties. I've always liked listening to talk about people and families. I remember as a little boy sopping up the stories my grandfathers and grandmother used to tell. My father's father in particular fascinated me with tales of life as a youth in Eastern Europe, a place that seemed so strange and foreign to an American boy in the 1950s. As I grew older I wished I had some way to connect to those stories, but it never seemed possible—I always felt walled off from my past. Cokie's direct ancestor first landed in America in 1620, and there's a good record of her family
going back quite a long time. In some ways, I've always envied her that. For me, as for most American Jews, those records don't exist. Our ancestors often fled the old country in panic and fear and didn't want to look back. Whoever stayed behind was slaughtered during the Holocaust. And for most of us, our homelands were locked behind the Iron Curtain; we couldn't visit them even if we wanted to. And when those places did open up, after the fall of communism, there was no one left to preserve the records or the graves or the memories.