An American Son: A Memoir (45 page)

The debate ended a few minutes later. The race was over and everyone in the room knew it. As I watched Crist leave the debate site, I felt, for the first time in a while, sympathy for him. I knew how great his disappointment must be to find himself involuntarily out of office, after enjoying such acclaim only a year before. And I felt for his parents who were in the audience that morning. They were surely as proud of him as my parents were of me.

The final debate occurred a few days later, moderated by David Gregory of NBC. Compared to the preceding debate, it was mostly uneventful. Kendrick looked tired, which he had every reason to be. I was exhausted, but I had the encouragement of knowing I was going to win. I don’t know how he kept walking his long, hard road, but he did. He saw it through to the end, and I respected him for it. Charlie seemed dispirited, as if finally resigned to losing. He took a few shots at me, but they were tamer now. I don’t think he wanted the last impression voters would have of him to be the image of an angry, negative politician. Charlie had always been a charmer, a likable and adept politician who loved what he did for a living. I respect that, too. And I think he wanted voters to remember him that way.

We had finished the last of six debates. Five of them had been very spirited affairs. I had been campaigning for a year and a half in a race that had more twists and turns than I could ever have imagined possible. I had experienced every emotion. I’d been discouraged and angry, thrilled and proud. I’d been defiant and embarrassed, saddened and overjoyed. And now I was tired and ready for it to be over.

The day after the last debate, we boarded our campaign bus for the final leg of a statewide tour. The crowds were even larger now, and their excitement greater. Anything could happen, I reminded myself, but it was hard to find anything to be discouraged about. The early voting and absentee turnout figures showed clear signs of a Republican wave. Our closing ads were receiving rave reviews. Our internal polls gave me a solid and stable lead. And at every stop we made, people brought up the heckler line. Even
the eternal pessimist Heath Thompson could find nothing to be pessimistic about.

I still hadn’t won anything, but at night, after the day’s events were over, I allowed myself to reflect a little on my journey. I reflected not just on the campaign that was nearing its end, but on my entire life and the family that had made my journey possible. In moments of triumph, we are advised to find humility. All worldly success is fleeting. I needed only recall my own family’s story to be reminded.

Five decades earlier, my parents had arrived in America with nothing. They were younger then than I was now, and had none of my advantages. They didn’t speak the language. They didn’t have a formal education. They didn’t have connections to help establish them in their strange new country.

My grandfather had an even harder life. He struggled to the very limit of his physical ability to feed his wife and daughters, and had to leave the country he loved so much and whose history he felt so personally.

I thought I had it rough when, early in my career, I had despaired over my finances and the fact that my family had to live month to month. For much of their lives, my parents had lived week to week. They lived with the constant worry that they would fail to give their children the chance to live better lives. My grandfather had lived day to day, uncertain he could afford his family’s next meal. They had once had dreams. All young people have dreams. But their lives weren’t the stuff of dreams. They worked to get by, and to keep their children safe and well provided for.

What adversity had I faced? Bad polls? Lackluster fund-raising? Embarrassing questions about my finances, my credit card, the sale of my house? My father had known the humiliation of failed business ventures. He had known the fear of suddenly losing a job. He had walked a picket line while his meager savings disappeared, and gone back to work to feed his children only to have me insult him for doing it. My grandfather knew the anguish of being refused work because he was disabled, and he had suffered losses I would never experience.

If I failed, I would lose an election. I would still earn a good living. I would still have a future. If my mother and father failed, the rent wouldn’t be paid. If my grandfather failed, his daughters wouldn’t eat. But the rent was always paid. And my mother and her sisters never went to bed hungry, even though her parents often had.

Two generations of my family had struggled, suffered and survived. They vowed their children and grandchildren would never have to make the choices they had made and have to acquiesce to a reality that refused their dreams. My parents didn’t have any specific ambitions for me. They wanted me to be happy, and do whatever my heart was set on doing. And now I had. I had taken the chance they had given me, and was on the cusp of winning an important public office. I would receive public acclaim for my success, but I knew who truly deserved the credit. I am the son of immigrants, exiles from a troubled country. They gave me everything it was in their power to give. And I am proof their lives mattered, their existence had a purpose.

In the last nights of a long campaign, I remembered where my journey began. It began long ago, in the hardships and struggles of ordinary people with extraordinary strength and courage and love, on an island I have never seen.

Why had my dreams come true? Because God had blessed me with a strong and stable family and parents who cherished my dreams more than their own, and with a wise and loving wife who supported me. And He blessed me with America, the only country in the world where dreams like mine would stand a chance of coming true.

T
HE WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION WERE A BLUR OF FRENETIC activity. I had to close my law firm, set up my Senate offices and organize my private affairs. I needed to step off the national stage for a while. So we held a press conference the day after the election, and then we went dark. I still did occasional interviews with the Florida press, but we decided to turn down all national media requests for several months.

Every organization I have ever been associated with develops a culture that reflects the personality and priorities of whoever is at the top of the organization. If I had started my Senate career by focusing my attention on press opportunities, my staff would conclude that our office’s highest priority was to keep me in the national spotlight. I didn’t want to make the wrong first impression on my new staff.

I had learned as speaker that the decisions you make in the early days often haunt your entire time in an office. I took extra care to make sure I made the right decisions. Our first priority was to emphasize constituent services, which involved getting our phone and mail operations up and running, setting up casework procedures and identifying staff we would keep and new staff we would hire for our Florida offices. I wanted our constituent services to be operational on my first day on the job.

I wanted a strong, experienced policy team in my Washington office that would help me identify emerging issues and engage in national debates
in a constructive way. I also wanted to leave room for younger, less experienced but eager staffers who would be part of a strong farm team system. As senior staff moved on in the coming years, I wanted to promote from within my organization.

The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were bittersweet that year. For almost two years, my campaign had been the central focus of our lives. Now I had an opportunity to relax and celebrate the holidays as something more than a brief distraction from the campaign. I played in two flag football tournaments, my team finishing first and second, respectively. I enjoyed the company of my family and friends, and spent more time with my kids than I had been able to in quite a while. I wasn’t the distant, preoccupied father they had become accustomed to—a blessing I was especially thankful for that holiday season.

But they were also the first holidays without my father. Every Thanksgiving, my father would make the same comment, “
A mí el pavo no me llama la atención
”—or, roughly translated, “I don’t really care for turkey that much.” It had become a running joke in the family, and I had often made the same comment to poke fun at him. No one joked about it that Thanksgiving. Christmas, too, recalled happier ones, when he had been with us. I remembered a Christmas years before, when Jeanette and I had been newlyweds. We had spent much of our savings on our wedding and honeymoon. We didn’t have money our first Christmas together to spend on a tree and decorations. But to our delight, our holiday was rescued one afternoon when my father pulled into our driveway in his little Toyota Corolla with a tree tied to the roof.

Before I knew it, it was time for us to go to Washington for my swearing in. Both Jeanette’s and my family made the trip with us the last week of December. We spent several days taking in the sights of the nation’s capital. One experience in particular stood out.

We toured Mount Vernon the second day of the new year. It was the first visit to George Washington’s home for all of us. Somewhere along the tour, I became separated from the group. I watched them from afar for a minute, laughing and talking in Spanish and English. My first thought was how different my family was, how different I was, from the men and women who had lived in this place, and from the Americans who had founded our nation. We came to this country or were brought here by our parents from
Cuba and Colombia. But on further reflection, I began to recognize the similarities in our stories.

Our language and customs were obviously different than the language and customs of America’s founding fathers. But we were dreamers, too, just like the Americans who had dreamed of a nation where all people would be considered equal, and willed it into existence. They had made a nation where you could be whatever your talents and industry allowed you to be, no matter the circumstances of your birth or whether or not your parents were socially and financially established. I looked at the little assembly of my family and friends, and observed there wasn’t a millionaire among them. There were no Ivy Leaguers present, no one who could trace their lineage to the
Mayflower
. In most societies in human history, a family like mine wouldn’t have had the opportunities we’ve had. We might have been employees at a national monument, but we wouldn’t have visited it while we were in town to see one of our own take his seat in the national legislature. But here we were. A collection of working-class immigrants from Latin America and their children, who enjoyed a standard of living our parents and grandparents had never known, with opportunities they might have dreamed of but never expected to have. We looked and sounded different from the descendants of George Washington’s generation. But we embodied everything America’s founding generation had hoped America would become.

I had the same feeling a few days later at the Capitol. At the appointed hour, I walked down the center aisle of the Senate and made my way to where the vice president of the United States was waiting to administer my oath of office. I looked up at the gallery to see Jeanette and the kids, but I couldn’t find them. So I glanced at the Senate’s ornate ceiling for a brief moment. I wondered how my father would have felt had he sat in the Senate gallery that day. Would he have remembered the exhausting late nights in his seventies, tending bar at a banquet and bragging to anyone who would listen that his son was going to be a lawyer? Would he have remarked to himself how far he had traveled from his destitute and lonely childhood? I hope so. And I hope he would have recognized that he was responsible for the honor his son received that day.

I wondered how my grandfather would have felt, too. Would he have felt he had helped make it possible by planting the seeds of my dreams in
those long afternoons on our porch in Las Vegas? Would he have realized I had kept the promise I made to him on his deathbed?

I looked down again and prepared to take the oath. I didn’t know whether or not my father and grandfather were watching me. Does God allow our loved ones in the afterlife to share in our successes? Can you see from heaven the triumphs and trials of the family you’ve left behind? I’ll have to wait to find out. In the meantime, I must act as if they are watching me always, and I am and always will be accountable to them.

The rest of the day was filled with festivities and fun. We restaged my swearing in with my wife and children at my side in the old Senate chamber so we could take a picture to remember it by. We had a reception in the Hart Senate Office Building for friends and supporters who had made the trip from Florida. The next day friends and family began leaving for home, and by that night only Jeanette and the kids and I were left. It was a reminder to us that our family was embarking on a new life, with new challenges and opportunities.