Now he was handicapped by working from a secure phone line five hundred miles away.
He paced the room as he held an impassioned conversation with Hillary Clinton. When they finished, he put down the phone and turned to us, exasperated.
“Goddammit,” he exclaimed, using us, as usual, as a sounding board to clarify his thoughts. “Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”
Beau and I downplayed his annoyance.
“What does he know, Dad?”
“He knows enough.” The phone rang again: Tony Blinken, Dad’s national security advisor. Dad put him on hold to take another call, from Senator John Kerry. Kerry informed Dad that McChrystal was working on Obama as they spoke.
“Goddammit!”
There would be brief lulls. Dad would explain for us everybody’s argument, what their interests were, which of them were purely political and which were forward-thinking and strategic. He’d talk about the implications for the Middle East and what it meant for the continuation of NATO.
It was almost like he’d picked up where we left off around the dinner table.
Then he’d get on another line and start an extended discussion with the prime minister of France, whom he knew well. Meanwhile, faxes (yes, there were still faxes) poured in as military aides darted in and out to ensure that the lines of communication with the White House were secure. It went on like that for hours and hours.
At one point, Beau and I insisted that Dad fly back to Washington so he could be in the scrum. He didn’t budge. We’d finally leave the room and take the kids into town, get everybody sandwiches. When we returned, Dad was still pacing, still on the phone, still working his case.
Obama ended up giving my dad his full ear. He eventually split the difference by temporarily calling up thirty thousand more troops and ordering a partial withdrawal within about a year. Dad had gone with his conscience and it had solidified his relationship with the president. It helped elevate his influence for the rest of that term and into the next one.
Beau and I were incredibly proud and, frankly, honored to watch the way he conducted himself while taking such a huge political risk, and also seeing how swiftly he’d adapted to his new role. It became clear to us during those five days on that little island off the coast of Massachusetts, despite Dad’s initial doubts, that he had made the right call in accepting Obama’s offer to be vice president.
Meanwhile, my world was upended.
By 2008, my firm was thriving. Kathleen and I had a $1.6 million house in a great Washington neighborhood and three kids at Sidwell.
I was sober.
Then Dad joined the Obama ticket and I had to find new work. Some Obama advisors vehemently opposed my lobbying and made it clear it would have to end. I scrambled to start a consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named after one of the Finger Lakes near my mommy’s hometown. It focused on advising small and midsized companies on opportunities to expand domestically and overseas. A year later, I agreed to advise in much the same way another private equity fund, Rosemont, run by Devon Archer, a self-made, supermotivated former college lacrosse player with a disarming charm who’d flown all over the world to raise money for his real estate investment firm, and his more risk-averse best friend from Yale, Chris Heinz, John Kerry’s stepson. That company merged the two enterprises’ names, Rosemont Seneca, though I continued to operate independently. A second private equity fund that Devon and Chris proposed was never started.
I was riding the escalator without an exit. I once again had huge expenses and no savings, and now I had to bust my ass to build another career from scratch. I’d take ten meetings with ten prospects to land one client—if I was lucky. That didn’t seem bad until I realized I needed ten clients to cover my monthly nut—a hundred pitches. I was on the road constantly.
One thing I’d learned about staying sober over the previous seven years is that you need to be as dedicated to sobriety as you were to drinking. Through practice, perseverance, and focus—as well as service and exercise and meditation—I was able to get the same sense of well-being that alcohol once provided, as well as quiet those seemingly ever-present anxieties.
But you can’t ease up.
Ever.
If you do, as I did in November of 2010, here’s what happens:
You find yourself flying home from a business trip in Madrid on the red-eye. Overworked, sleep-deprived, no exercise in three months, you’re grateful when a flight attendant stops by your seat and asks, as she has asked everyone around you, if you’d like a drink. Without hesitation—without really even thinking—you answer, as I answered, “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”
You’re off to the races.
You get home eight or nine hours later and you’re greeted, as I was, by your wife and your crazy-beautiful kids. They don’t know what you know: that you’ve been drinking. That prompts a whole new category of shame and guilt. It also prompts something more complicated: elation and relief. You have this revelation: I just drank and I feel a hell of a lot better. The world didn’t stop spinning. The plane didn’t drop out of the sky. My wife didn’t divorce me when I walked through the door.
The next day, you go to work. You don’t drink at all that day. Or the next. The day after that, however, if you’re me, you think: Well, a beer. You never liked beer much anyway, so that’s safe. Maybe you can at least sneak a couple of beers every once in a while because it’s hard to stop thinking about those three Bloody Marys you had on the plane and how fucking good they made you feel. It’s
