All Too Human: A Political Education (2 page)

After racking my brain looking for trouble, I even told Webb about the night before I left for college, when I went out egging cars with my high school buddies one last time. Not much to report or worry about. Nothing in my background would keep me out of the White House.

I was born the second child of a solid Greek family in Fall River, Massachusetts, and baptized George after my grandfather, a missionary priest who left the Peloponnesian village of Neohorio in 1938 for Montana to minister to Greek immigrants scattered across America's west. His job was to make sure the members of the flock kept their faith as they sought their fortunes, to remind them of who they were and where they came from. More than a place of worship, the immigrant church was a piece of home. A year after his arrival, just before the war, my grandfather was joined by his family. The oldest was a five-year-old boy they called Lamby, Bobby, who would also grow up to be a priest — and my father.

A boy when he sailed from Patras in 1912, my mother's father worked on the railroads from Ellis Island to Salt Lake City before settling in Rochester, Minnesota, where he opened a shoe repair shop. Only after he made his start did he return to his village, Kalithea, to bring the teen bride chosen for him back to America. When he died in 1974, his business was the oldest in town, and his fellow merchants marched down Main Street in his memory. But he was most proud of the fact that all five of his children, including my mom, Nikolitsa, had attended college.

My parents met at a church youth convention in Minneapolis, where my mom was studying public relations at the University of Minnesota. Dad was on a field trip from seminary, and there was probably no better place to meet a woman willing to become a
presbytera
, literally “priest's wife” — a word that captures the idea that everybody in the family of a priest has a responsibility to the family of the church. The presbytera is a kind of first lady. She has an official role as hostess and helpmate but can't let people get the idea she's assuming authority that isn't hers. The daughters, like my sisters, Stacy and Marguarite, sing in the choir and teach Sunday school. The sons, like my brother, Andrew, and me, become altar boys.

I was only four when I first served. Going to the office with my dad meant going to church. He would slap a little Mennen on my cheeks after he shaved, and we would head to the place only men could go — the altar, an inner sanctum separated from the rest of the congregation by a screen of icons. Often it was just the two of us back there. I would watch him whisper prayers as he vested himself in satin robes. Then I would hold out my own robe for him to bless, and the service would begin.

My first job was carrying a candle, making sure to hold it straight without staring at the flame. Once a year an altar boy forgot, hypnotizing himself and fainting to the floor. Responsibilities increased with age and size: Bigger boys took lanterns, and the biggest carried the cross. My favorite job was tending the censer. After placing a pebble of incense on the charcoal in its gold bowl, I got to walk backward, waving the perfumed smoke in my father's path as he carried the bread and wine around the altar.

I soon became a reader as well. When I was six, the bishop came to my father's new parish in Rye, New York, and placed his stole on my head before clipping a bit of my hair to symbolize my servitude to the church. “
Axios
,” the bishop proclaimed. “He is worthy.”
Axios
echoed back from the pews — a word weighted with expectation, a word I would hear again if I were ordained. On Sundays after that I would read the Epistle or recite the creed, remembering to speak “loud and slow” — the instructions my dad silently mouthed to me before I faced the congregation. At nine, I appeared on my biggest stage yet. Archbishop Iakovos opened our church convention with a liturgy at Lincoln Center, and I was chosen to stand by his side and hold his staff. Monday's
New York Daily News
ran a picture of the bearded prelate in a tall gold crown next to a small boy with bangs and hands clasped in front of him. For a day, I was a star.

But most of my work was backstage. Maybe one reason I've never been queasy about the grubby work of politics, the mechanics of running campaigns and making laws, is that I spent so many of my early days behind the altar screen, where mystery is rooted in the mundane, where faith and duty are one, where my father's prayers were my cues.
Agios o Theos
. … Get the candles.
Wisdom, let us attend
. … Lanterns and cross for the Gospel.
No one who is bound by carnal desires is worthy to approach
. … Light up the censer and line up the other boys.
The doors, the doors
… Read the creed.
Our Father
… Heat the water for Holy Communion.
O Lord, who blesses those who bless thee
… Cut the bread.

Behind the screen, I learned to stay composed in the presence of power and was swayed by the illusion of indispensability. After all, the miracle of transubstantiation couldn't happen that Sunday if I forgot to boil water on the hot plate in the room off the altar. Altar boys are as much like young operatives as little monks. We serve the priest so he can save everyone else, doing the little things that need to be done. Sometimes I got lost in the details, lost sight of the spiritual essence of the service we were producing, but I hoped that doing the right things in the right place at the right time would help do some good and save some souls, including my own, even when I was just doing my job.

All this was also preparation for what I would eventually do — but not in the way I imagined. I assumed I would be a priest before I knew what it meant. That's what my father did, and my grandfather, and my godfather, and my uncle, and all their friends. When I recall summer barbecues, I see them lounging in plastic-webbed lawn chairs, highballs in hand, wearing the hot-weather uniform — short-sleeved black dress shirts with detachable cleric's collars that flopped to the side when the top button was unfastened. By night's end, even our backyard became a kind of church. Smoldering briquettes and burnt-orange cigar butts served up the social equivalent of candlelight and earthy incense as my dad and his buddies sipped Greek brandy and sang Byzantine hymns.

As soon as I could talk, I knew how to answer the question of what I would be. At home, I would preside at play liturgies with a towel draped over my shoulders, or sneak through piles of books in my dad's office to suck on the sweet metallic stem of his pipe while tapping out a pretend sermon on his typewriter. When my father was finishing his doctorate in theology, I added a twist, telling dinner guests I would be “a priest
and
a theologian,” relishing the weight of the big word as it rolled off my seven-year-old tongue. Everyone smiled at my use of a word I didn't really understand, while I basked in the attention that was my reward for carrying on a family tradition.

But sometimes an expectation nurtured through childhood can come undone in a single moment. In 1974, when I was thirteen, my final eighth-grade assignment was a paper on a potential career. As expected, I wrote on being a priest and brought home my A. But that autumn, after we moved from New York to Cleveland, I started high school, and it hit me. I was sitting in homeroom one morning shortly before eight, thinking about nothing in particular, when the idea that I wasn't
meant
to be a priest, that I wouldn't bear the family legacy into the next generation, revealed itself with an intensity others must feel when called
to
the priesthood. I hadn't lost my faith, just my vocation, but I knew the decision was final. I was growing up and growing away from the only future I had allowed myself to imagine. Now if only I could tell my father, and my grandfather. When asked about my future, I started to slip around the questions until they stopped. I didn't know yet what I wanted — just what I didn't want, and that whatever career I chose had to be worthy.

I also felt a need to answer to my extended family. Greeks came to America from dozens of islands and hundreds of villages, but here they formed a single clan, united by heritage, language, and a need to achieve. Those of us in the second generation understood that honoring the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents — the laborers, cobblers, waiters, and cooks — meant getting a good education and putting it to good use — as doctors, lawyers, professors, and politicians. Assimilation for Greeks didn't mean blending in; it required standing out. If a Greek like Ike Pappas was on television, all of us watched; if another like Nick Gage wrote a book, all of us read it; when Congressman John Brademas missed his chance to be Speaker of the House, we all felt his loss; when Vice President Agnew resigned, we all felt ashamed — a disgrace lessened only by the grumbled observation that he got what he deserved for changing his name and leaving his church. The rules were so clear they didn't need to be said: Make your name, and don't change it. Make us proud, and don't forget where you came from. Drilled into me were two awkwardly compatible ambitions: public service and professional success. Priests serve; immigrants succeed. I would try to do both.

But first I wanted to blend in. Here's where I'm my mother's son. As a boy, I would spend hours upstairs, lying on the floor with my feet pressed against the radiator, leafing through yearbooks to find pictures of my mom — a pretty girl with dark hair and a wide smile whose American friends called her Gloria instead of her Greek name. Her picture was everywhere: Gloria at the newspaper, Gloria in the glee club, Gloria behind the wheel of an old jalopy filled with friends.

In high school, that's the life I wanted. I still served in the altar and studied enough to get good grades. But I wanted to be one of the guys. So I snuck onto the golf course next door, went to the track, and played poker on Friday nights with the money I earned on Saturdays as a caddie, dishwasher, and busboy. I noticed girls, but they didn't notice me.

Politics didn't interest me. Instead, I poured myself into sports. I was a chubby kid, pretty well coordinated, decent at soccer and soft-ball, but no natural athlete. I was barely five feet tall, so instead of basketball, I tried out for wrestling. The first practice was murder. Afterward, I could barely drag myself to the car out front, where my mom was waiting for me. I got in and announced I was quitting. Then came a surprise. Usually my mom let me do what I wanted so long as I stayed out of trouble. This time she just said, “No. Stick it out.”

I'm still grateful. Not that I became a champion, far from it. I lost my first match 19–2 and never caught up. I guess I never developed the killer instinct. Before a bout I would look up at the clock from the side of the mat and remind myself that win or lose, the ordeal would soon be over. You could pretty much sum up my high school wrestling career with an item from our local paper my sophomore year: “The agony of defeat is etched in the face of Orange High School's George Stephanopoulos,” read the caption beneath a picture of me getting pinned.

Wrestling, in short, was more about what the sport did to me than what I did to my opponents. Cutting weight was an extreme exercise in self-control. I woke up extra early to run a mile or two before school; did sit-ups and push-ups while watching TV at night. I dieted on oranges and ran through the school hallways wrapped in plastic to sweat out that last pound. Even water had to be rationed in the hours before weigh-ins. To this day, when I put my mouth to a fountain I unconsciously count the sips. On Labor Day freshman year, I weighed 120 pounds. By November, I was wrestling at 98. My body showed me what it could take, which helped my mind turn around and instruct my body to take a little more. Though I wasn't a champion, what lingered for me was an addiction to exercise and a belief in the power of discipline.

But for all my desire to be one of the guys, I still wanted to excel — and it wouldn't be as an athlete. Columbia University spoke to my ambition in a different way. It was in New York City. It offered a distinctive core curriculum based on the great books, music, and art of Western civilization, and no one from my high school had gone there in decades.

I thrived at Columbia, and junior year I had my first taste of Washington life, as a summer intern for our congresswoman, a Democrat named Mary Rose Oakar. The big legislative debate that summer was about Reagan's budget. I helped write speeches explaining how it would hurt Oakar's constituents in the working-class ethnic enclaves of Cleveland. Before that experience, I had considered volunteering for George Bush in 1979 and voted for John Anderson in 1980. But working against Reagan's budget made me a Democrat. I didn't think supply-side economics would work, and I didn't believe it was fair. Perhaps it wouldn't have happened had I had a different summer job, but unlike the millions of Democrats whom Reagan inspired to vote Republican, I was a Republican he pushed the other way.

By 1982, my senior year, I still didn't know what I would do with my life. Law school seemed like the natural choice: finishing school for ambitious liberal arts majors who didn't know exactly what they wanted to do. It would also meet the Greek standard for achievement. The only problem with law school was that when it was over I would be in real danger of becoming a lawyer.

I almost leaped in a completely different direction. As a volunteer Big Brother whose major was international politics, I was drawn to the Peace Corps and applied one day on an impulse. Around eight the next morning, I got a call from the on-campus recruiter: “George, you're in. We've got a spot, but you have to say yes right now.” I did, and went back to sleep. An hour later, I made a pot of coffee and wondered what I had done. Teaching English in Tunisia seemed like good work, but it didn't speak to the part of me that wanted to play on a bigger stage, in a world where a single act could affect the lives of millions. It didn't satisfy my drive for secular success. After my second cup, I called back and said no.

I wanted to do good
and
do well. Returning to Washington offered the promise of both. At Columbia's work-study office, I saw an announcement for internships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and won a job where I wrote book reviews and helped draft speeches about nuclear arms control, the subject of my senior thesis. The only problem was that the stipend ran out after six months. Unless I found something else, I had promised my parents that I would spend the next six months as a paralegal in Cleveland before starting law school in the fall.