Yes. It never entered my mind. But people don’t understand the difference between ambition and a sense of purpose. I would drive down Interstate 93, get passed by all these foreign cars. I would sit in boardrooms and watch the country get overwhelmed.
A lot of it was just accepting the fact that I was cured. You go in every six months and have your checkup. In the beginning you did that with your heart in your throat. Even though you’re confident, just driving into the parking lot at Dana-Farber [the cancer clinic] was anxiety provoking.
Hardworking, very gentle. Nobody who ever met my father disliked him. [My mother] went in the hospital when I was a year and a half and she died when I was 7. She was not talked about. It was a verboten subject. My father remarried when I was 11. I did not know that she was born in New Hampshire until three months ago.
In the process of giving birth to myself and my sister she got tuberculosis. After a year and a half they put her in a sanitarium and she never left. I remember being in a place with the green buildings around and not knowing why I was there. She could not touch us. It eventually became just too painful for her and we just stopped going. I have no memory whatsoever of my mother. I see pictures but I don’t have the feel for a human being. Which is why when I got sick [when my youngest child was 21 it was so difficult for me. I could imagine what [my mother] went through and how excruciating that must have been-to look at your kids knowing you’re not going to survive and u can’t touch them.
The only thing I can think of was I used to work in the back where all the naphtha was. I don’t know what brought it about, but that’s what I think did it to me.
The person I feel strongest about is Anwar Sadat. Someone who did what was historically appropriate at the risk of his own life. I visited him-I happened to be over there in 1977. He’d just come back [from Israel]. I’ve never been in the presence of such utter serenity. I will never forget it. The picture hangs in my office. That is true courage. That is true generational morality. Obviously I went into the Peace Corps because of Jack Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy’s poster was on my wall when I was a city councilman-but if you ask me in almost a metaphysical sense who do I admire the most it would be him.
When I was in law school I was miserable. If you think Bill Clinton was confused you ought to have seen me. You spend two years in the Peace Corps and then you’re in the law library. They didn’t tell anybody there was a readjustment problem. I had all kinds of emotional problems. In my second year I decided to leave law school and look into the Green Berets.
I did. I used to go in the Yale library and read about guerrilla warfare in World War II behind the Japanese lines. That should give you some idea what the kid was going through.
I was an intern for this congressman and there was a party that Niki and her roommates put on. My wife likes to say it’s the only party I went to.
Yeah, it was-no, no, you don’t love someone from the first time you look at them but it was-you knew this could develop into something.
The first three weeks I was immobilized emotionally. There were a few times after that when I believed I was dying, There was one time when I was getting weaker and weaker and my stomach bloated out; I was losing weight. I was on this macrobiotic diet. At one point Niki just yelled at me: “You’ve got to get to the doctor. It’s not just you here, it’s us, too.” So I went to see the doctor, he took one look at me and pulled me in.
That people need to trust you. In the post-Nixon era when everything was cynicism and calculation, that honesty and candor and meaning what you say counts for something.
