A Reason to Believe (18 page)

In the face of this public relations disaster, Hyatt did make some concessions. It offered positions to the housekeepers with the staffing organization that it uses for contract
labor. Hyatt said those who accepted the positions would be paid their full Hyatt wages through the end of 2010. Those who didn’t accept could opt for a “job preparedness and placement assistance program.” Each housekeeper also received an extension of Hyatt health care benefits.

But a mere half dozen of the housekeepers accepted the offer to work at the staffing agency. I wasn’t surprised. Those women were not so different from the ladies in the big hats of Cosmopolitan Community Church—compassionate and loving, yes, but also proud and resilient. Once you insult them, you can’t expect them to want to be in business with you, let alone scrub your bathrooms.

Whether it’s at my church, in my work, or in my daily life, I try not to wear my faith on my sleeve (the ladies of Cosmopolitan would show little patience for that) but to contribute where I can to the common good. It’s a struggle. I have a mean temper, my patience can wear thin, and I can be short with people who are short with me. I am definitely still working on “turning the other cheek.” But more often than not, I have learned that kindness to friend and foe alike moves me further forward and gives me more lasting satisfaction than any other way of being in the world. As Jesse Jackson once said in an elegant public apology, “God is not finished with me yet.”

I also believe that religious faith and social justice
are inextricably linked. If faith is expressed in what you do and how you do it, not in what you claim to believe, then surely we must acknowledge the needs and support the dreams of those around us, those of the meek not just the mighty, and act accordingly.

We Christians believe that Christ will return one day. I’ve thought about what form Christ will take when he does. I’m pretty sure he will not descend in flowing robes or amid spectral choruses. I think there’s a good chance he will be the guy in rags, in an out-of-the-way place somewhere, begging, wondering if anyone sees him.

I stink at standardized tests. I never had any real instruction in test-taking skills in the Chicago public schools, and even at Milton my exposure to standardized tests came only through the SATs. I got good scores, but far from the coveted “double 800s.” So when it came time for me to take the bar exam after law school, I was apprehensive.

To prepare, I took a bar exam prep course, at great expense, but found the mnemonic devices and instruction at calculated guessing gimmicky. I had been a strong law student, making minor (albeit worthless) history by simultaneously leading the Legal Aid Bureau and winning
the Ames moot court competition. I was a successful summer associate at three different, sought-after law firms and had offers to join each one after my clerkship. I was about to start clerking for a renowned federal appellate judge. I knew how to practice, I thought, at a high level. I just needed my license. Surely I could pass a silly old bar exam.

When I learned that I failed in the fall of 1982, I was embarrassed and devastated. I thought it would reflect poorly on the judge and make him and my fellow clerks question whether I was worthy of the job. Fortunately, everyone was encouraging. “The California Bar is the hardest in the country to pass,” they said. True, but it was small comfort. I worked doubly hard in the chambers to prove my value and vowed to redeem myself the next time.

I was deep into my clerkship when I took the exam again. I prepared extensively. I was truly invested. It was a matter of pride. I would not fall short.

But I failed again, and the result was a seismic shock, with self-doubt now creeping into my mind. What if I’m not up to this? What if I’d overestimated my abilities all along? Who wouldn’t think that? This time, the judge and my fellow clerks just acknowledged the outcome and kept their thoughts to themselves. I thought they were looking at me as they would someone with a deadly disease: with pity, as if they knew I was not long for their world. My sister, one of the few people in whom I confided, worried aloud right with me. “Are you going to be able to practice law?” she asked. I honestly didn’t know. In some respects,
it was the first time I had ever suffered rejection in an academic setting. Diane was unfailingly confident, which I appreciated, but I had learned that she could fake confidence pretty well if she wanted to.

There was nothing else to do but to try again—to prepare with greater urgency, to forgo Happy Hours and date nights, to invest even more time to meet the challenge. But my confidence remained badly shaken, and in the summer of 1983, when I walked into the convention center in Los Angeles with a couple of thousand other applicants for three full days of examination, I thought I might end up being a banker.

This time I passed, and the feeling was more relief than elation. I take comfort, to be sure, that my struggles with the bar exam were not a precursor to my legal career, which has had many highlights. But to get through my “California crucible” took the kind of concentration and resolve that I had not summoned since my time in Sudan. It was an act of will to quiet the doubt, to restore my faith in myself, and to get the work done.

I have experienced plenty of rejection, like everyone else. Not being picked for either side’s stickball team until the very end. Girls I admired and flirted with who would not give me the time of day. Jobs. Bank loans. Important motions in court I thought I should have won. Fancy people I wanted to get to know who ignored me, on more than one occasion by literally and conspicuously turning their backs. Diane and I were encouraged to apply for
membership in the Country Club, a venerable retreat in Brookline, Massachusetts, famous for its flawless golf course and its legacy of Brahmin members. I had visited a few times as a guest. But after garnering more “seconders,” or endorsements, than any applicant in the history of the club, we learned we were blackballed.

Most rejections were harmless. Some were more pernicious, like the apartments I tried to rent in west Los Angeles: They were available when I called, suddenly weren’t when I arrived to look at them, and then miraculously became available again when I called later. One night I had a meeting in the Oval Office with President Clinton. It ran late, and I could not get a cab to stop in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Taxis would glide right past me to the white guy down the block.

Growing up as I did, maneuvering through Milton and Harvard, and traveling as I had, I received many lessons about overcoming adversity, large and small. But nothing is as humbling or as insidious as political life.

When I first ran for governor, I certainly knew that I would be subjected to far more criticism than ever before, and if I won, the second-guessing, the carping, and even the personal attacks would become my daily fare. All of that did indeed happen. For the first time, I had not only my judgment assailed but my character impugned. Legitimate complaints should be heeded—no politician or political party has all the answers—but I tried to ignore
the crackling static of personal invective and the belittling impulse of our political culture. The same singular focus and concentration I had already learned was needed, I thought, to move our policy agenda forward.

In retrospect, I realize that my approach was a little too narrow. I did not fully consider the larger implications of a public life for my family and did not foresee how the glaring limelight would affect the woman at the center of my life—until it was far too late, until after the blows had been delivered and the wound lay bare and bleeding.

In January of 2005, I had just left my job at Coca-Cola in Atlanta in part because I was tired of the weekly commute from Boston. I’m sure Diane was hoping that my next job would be a little more … settled. She was entitled to a husband who was home more often than gone. In addition to running the house and participating in numerous charities, Diane continued her impressive legal career. Since the mid-1990s, she has been with Ropes & Gray in Boston, where she is a valued partner specializing in labor law.

I was eager to live and work closer to home again in Boston, but I was ready to take my career in a different direction. I told Diane that I wanted to run for governor, which stunned her. She asked if I wouldn’t consider running for Congress or another office that was a little less ambitious for a first run. But I said that I wanted to set the agenda, and I thought the governor’s role was the right one for the contributions I thought I could make. She
presumed, like everyone else, that I had little chance of winning, but she knew my track record of accomplishing what I set my mind to.

As always, she supported my decision, but reluctantly this time. We knew that a campaign would put us both in the spotlight, which would be taxing for someone as private as Diane. We knew political campaigns could get nasty, particularly when you throw race into the mix, but we thought we were ready.

In some ways, Diane was more ready than I: For all of her reticence, she was a frighteningly good campaigner—smart, articulate, a model of grace and charm. When we appeared jointly on the campaign trail, I would often hear, “Why isn’t
she
running?” And in truth, Diane was excited by the enthusiasm of the crowds, the hoopla and stagecraft of the modern campaign, and thoroughly gratified by the favorable response. But those events are the sheen of any campaign. Beneath the camera lights and confetti are the efforts to smear and undermine candidates, and they rise to the surface quickly.

Early in the primary race, there were attempts to embarrass us about a house we were building in western Massachusetts on land we had owned for many years. Aerial photographs of the construction appeared in the newspapers with exaggerated claims about the scope of the project and false charges that we had clear-cut a large swath of forested mountainside. One candidate called the house the “Taj Deval.” It was as if I had made some breach with the
public—as if Ted Kennedy or Mitt Romney or John Kerry could own a nice home, but not Deval Patrick. I considered what the fuss said about the state of politics and the character of my opponents, and said so. Diane found herself suddenly embarrassed about a project we had dreamt about and worked toward for decades.

That controversy passed, but others followed. My Republican opponent wanted to portray me as “soft on crime” because, while at the Legal Defense Fund, I had helped a man convicted of murdering a policeman appeal his death sentence. She ran an attack ad that asked, “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop-killers, do we really want one as our governor?” (I assume she meant, do we want “such a lawyer as our governor,” not a cop-killer.) In another matter, I had urged Massachusetts to conduct a DNA test on a convicted rapist whose guilt seemed in doubt. So another attack ad cast me as a friend of sexual predators and played into racist fears about black men and white women: The camera followed a woman walking through a dark garage, then viewers heard an interview with me in which I described the prisoner, with whom I had exchanged letters, as “thoughtful.” The voiceover said, “Have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist?” (For the record, the DNA test confirmed the man’s guilt.) I had a campaign staff and a cadre of energetic volunteers to help me with this nonsense, but it took its toll.

The most egregious ploy occurred three weeks before the general election, when the
Boston Herald
published a
story about my brother-in-law; thirteen years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting my sister. After serving a short jail sentence, the two reconciled and moved to Massachusetts with their children to be near us. They became deacons in their church, live a deeply religious life, work hard, bought and refurbished a home, and raised two wonderful children who are a constant presence in our lives. The article said that my brother-in-law had unlawfully failed to register with the state’s Sex Offender Registry Board, a fact that could have been published only if the Board had unlawfully disclosed that information to the newspaper. The claim was wrong regardless; as a court later confirmed, he did not have to register. But the article embarrassed my sister and brother-in-law publicly, exposed their children to information they had not known, and cost my brother-in-law his job and his family’s health benefits. For a time, it ruined their lives. As
USA Today
wrote about the episode, “How sick is this?”

I was often asked how I felt about these and other sordid political tactics and what impact they had on me. But I was never asked what impact they had on my wife. Political spouses are often forgotten. I worried about these ads politically, but Diane absorbed them personally. I knew the campaign was exacting a toll on her, but I did not appreciate how deeply. She was angry that my character had been called into question, that our privacy had been invaded unnecessarily, and that good people we loved had been damaged.

We were all under a lot of stress, and I assumed that this was typical in a campaign. But Diane’s frustrations came to a boil when she was on a business trip in California and she received word that the
Boston Globe
was going to publish a story alleging that years before we had defaulted on a mortgage. Diane wanted no part of this controversy, but in our household she keeps the financial records, so she was inevitably drawn into the defense.