I didn’t fare much better at St. Edmond’s. I think I still hold the record for most demerits. In fifth grade, I once asked to be excused to go to the bathroom, where I met up with two friends. We started horsing around, throwing toilet paper at each other and standing on top of the stalls while we urinated. Mr. Fox, a teacher I couldn’t stand, walked in and hit the roof. I knew I’d be in big trouble at home, so I decided to run away.
I also knew Beau would be devastated if I left him. So I wrote him a letter that was as melodramatic as it was sincere.
Dear Beau, it began, I love you more than anything in the world but I can’t stay here anymore. I’ll come back and find you but now I have to go. Please don’t look for me.
I then hid under my bed. A little later I heard Beau crying, telling our mom between sobs that she was the reason I took off. Dad called and Mom told him that she and Beau were going out to search for me. After they left, I slinked outside and climbed a tree in the yard. I stayed up there even after Beau and Mom returned home. Beau was still devastated, which actually made me feel better, seeing how much my brother missed me. I was like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral.
Then my dad came home. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t hide in the tree all night. I finally clambered down and went inside, prepared for the worst. But everybody was just ecstatic to see me, safe and unharmed.
Also, it turned out, Mom told me that she wasn’t all that fond of Mr. Fox, either. I loved her for that.
I transferred back to Friends the next year.
Another kind of education took place most nights around our dinner table. It’s hard to think of anything of political significance over the course of my life that Dad wasn’t a part of. One result: we had a catbird seat to history from the perspective of one of its central players. When big issues were brought up while we ate—arms control with the Soviet Union, economic sanctions against South Africa—it was almost always in the context of, “What’s the plan, Dad? What are you going to do?”
Beau and I loved his elaborate talks about current events, usually beginning with historical backgrounding that could reach back centuries, then ending with the personalities and dynamics at play today.
The day-to-day politics of Washington—the battle lines drawn around the major policy and legislative fights—was a constant conversation because it had an impact on our father’s career, which was something that my brother and I became intimately involved in. We both wanted him to run for president every time he could. We’d give him a million reasons why he would win, which wasn’t always the most dispassionate advice: it was coming from sons who thought their father walked on water.
His primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1987, while we were teenagers, ended shortly after it began. We were devastated. He was accused of plagiarism when he loosely appropriated parts of a speech given by Neil Kinnock, the British Labour Party leader, without citing him. In fact, Dad had cited Kinnock in a dozen other speeches. It was a distorted political hit job that stuck in that pre-Clinton era when a single smear could sink a campaign. In today’s environment, it would hardly be a blip.
It was awful for Beau and me to watch the man we idolized be publicly humiliated on such a grand scale. I even tried to punch out some hecklers who taunted Dad at a Penn lightweight-football game that Beau was playing in until Beau’s buddies jumped in to break it up. While the campaign’s demise clearly weighed on him, Dad didn’t break a sweat, from what we could see. He dropped out that September, then did what he always does in the face of adversity: put his head down and went back to work.
We were senator’s sons yet staunchly middle-class. We had a beautiful house in Wilmington that had once been owned by a du Pont, but it needed a ton of work. Dad closed off half of it with drywall every winter because we couldn’t afford to heat the whole thing. He pulled on a hazmat suit to scrape asbestos off the basement pipes himself. Dad, Beau, and I painted one side of the house every summer; when I was younger, Dad dangled me by the ankles from the third-floor windows to slap paint under the eaves. By the time all four sides were finished, the front needed to be painted again and we started all over. We planted six-foot mature cypress trees around the four-acre yard for a hedge. If Beau and I didn’t finish cutting the lawn over the weekend, we’d come home late from school and see Dad on a riding mower, in the dark, lights on, rolling up and down until it was done.
I started working at age eleven mowing lawns in the neighborhood with Beau, and there wasn’t a summer we weren’t required to have a job. My first legal-age employment was at the Brandywine Zoo. I shoveled piles of llama manure as tall as I was and unclogged the drain in the otter pool, where I sometimes became part of the attraction as visitors watched through a glass window as the otters attacked me.
Beau and I also worked for a cold-storage company. We started out in the inspection room, where a USDA guy plucked six random boxes from a railcar filled with sixty-pound hunks of frozen beef shipped from Australia and New Zealand. We’d slice off a big slab with a table saw, wrap it in plastic, thaw it in a vat of near-boiling water, then lay it out
